Can these be valuable and be associated to the portfolio situation within an organization’s need, in seeking different viewpoints of product or service change?

Opening up our thinking to change can drive our business offerings very differently.

Often within these drivers, we do need to explore what is the underlying force behind them, it allows us to pause and think. As you think through what these different change drivers on what it might mean to extend your new product or service developments, these can prompt radically different and imaginative solutions to consider..

Using the different drivers can give you new insights into your innovation activities plus also can prompt significant changes to freshen up your innovation portfolio.

They are certainly a good place to start to get the creative juices flowing even more.

It is worth constantly working around different drivers of innovation change.

Periodically I would suggest you work through each of these and see if this changes your thinking or approach and you can then see a different angle or opportunity that might emerge that changes the thinking.

So let me share my opening nine identified drivers for innovation change:• Emotional Drivers – as we learn, dream, create and get into a ‘free’ spirit, it often opens up our thinking. I sometimes associate heroes and champions or relate to recognized mentors and facilitators and look for what makes the emotional connection, then I ask: “can I use this or be inspired by them” to drive something within my innovation activities or not? What triggers different sentiments, warmth, excitement or feeling?

• Social Drivers – The more we seek interactions, they become (or should become) meaningful and enduring. These connections allow us to think and relate, deepen the association.

As we also seek out others’ accomplishments, can this trigger ideas, principles or actions that we can apply in what we are doing. What can we offer that meets different desires, and aspirations, prompts dialogues and might reflect for instance, a more caring and sharing viewpoint. Drivers that make us more socially relevant and connected.

• Technology Drivers – These tend to be better leveraged and understood, in collaborative methods and techniques, ones where we can demonstrate, and connect the physical and virtual world, that moves us to better, clearer, even faster transactions. Technology is a really powerful enabler of innovation if you tune into the four fast-moving disruptive forces of social, mobile, cloud and analytics that are all driven by an explosion of data and fuelling a new era of innovation for many.

Imagine if you can harness technologies application and ‘raw’ power, there becomes a higher chance of finding the needle of useful innovation insights that lie within in the binary haystack. As you learn to analyse and sort these technology drivers, can give you new insights into different trends, patterns and needs, that might even radically alter the meaning within your business and how and what you offer, with even new business models emerging from the evaluations.

• Environment Drivers – these become critical. The more we encourage the right environment the more we create a culture that others can relate to. A climate that encourages, and underlines the determination of bringing in diversity, collaborative and distinctly different behavioural patterns that encourage even more to join in, relate and participate in generating ideas and solutions. By providing a welcoming environment you can drive growing awareness, trust and shared understanding that builds a very powerful set of innovation drivers if the Environment thinking is right and tuned in to the world of what needs to be reflected within your products and services..

• Measurement Drivers – We are all familiar with the classic input, process, outputs and outcomes we strive to find measures for, good or bad. I tend to look for measurement in the knowledge that is being driven through an organization in its absorptive capacities of accessing, anchoring and eventual diffusion. If we measure actual utilization or assimilation then can we explore these in deeper ways to draw out the aspects that make up both tacit and explicit outcomes.

We also need to keep focused on time-related activities, speed of innovation to market as well as project deliverables and make different connections on what this might possibly mean. Measures can drive change if they are well thought through and connected, both to the business need and more importantly, to the individual’s own understanding of its relevancy. Make your measurements more dynamic, less static by ‘seeing them differently’

• Marketplace Drivers – Today it is all about speed and pace, accessing the changing conditions and pressures coming from the marketplace. The a constant need in understanding the rate of change dynamics to work out your fit in new innovation offerings.

We need to become far more tuned into pattern recognition, contexts of the forces at work. We need to appreciate the rivalry and competitive hunger. Above all it is figuring out the customer’s unmet needs and non-stated ones, so all these market force complexities can be worked through in your mind and ongoing evaluations.

Tuning in to the market forces gives an abundance of new thinking to work into your products and services.

• Design Drivers – approaching issues and challenges with more of a design thinking hat can help identify a number of hidden drivers. The more we experience and experiment, the more we tune into the power of stories, narratives and experiences. This heightens our awareness the more we practice looking ahead.

Equally looking back it can reveal much more in our designs and what made up our thinking (at that time). Fashions and traditions, how we work today, how we worked in the past – and how different in the future – will influence much in our innovative thinking. We need to open up to experiences far more.

We need to look for improving flows and reducing barriers, making different combinations of potential richness and innovation promise, we need to focus on function and form far more, that more human-centred need and always look for improving the degrees of freedom and ease of purchase. For example, working towards the ‘one-click away’ concept for our customers in making their transactions easier.

• Rational Drivers – Organizations survive by their rational drivers, be this strategic architecture, management systems and innovation processes. Those processes and procedures are where you are always looking to achieve and drive execution and results through improving productivity and creativity as well as working constantly at clarifying the interventions, controls and monitoring.

The rational drivers, if well set up, can make such a difference to being ‘in control of all the innovation activities or not and should constantly be challenged for redundancy or improving upon. Innovation Governance is a classic place for constantly working through the rational drivers and keeping faith in the decisions made and guidance given.

Having a rational opinion within your team has great value in keeping random thoughts more ‘grounded’ to the task at hand.

• Intelligence Drivers – The whole focus is on knowledge generation and recognition, in awareness, competencies needed and seeking diversity of interpretation.

The underlying collection of intellectual capital, our intangible source, needs to keep feeding in the knowledge stock to allow ideas, concepts and outcomes to flow. Ones that drive to transform intelligence into tangible outcomes are so important to yield fresh value and lead to improved commercial outcomes.

Sadly it is often under-appreciated and not allowed ‘it’s’ right amount of digesting time to allow all the connections to be made to piece together something completely different and potentially valuable in new innovations. Listening to different people’s views values intelligence.

Looking around these drivers of change can yield very different thinking, prompt different actions and produce different innovation results. Get your team to discuss each of these change drivers to unearth new innovation possibilities.

Why not go and give these a ‘team test drive’ in exploring, focusing on each of these individually. Ask what can they do to alter your current thinking on your approach to your products and services.

By getting into this regular habit of working around these different drivers of change will keep your innovation engine in much better shape, more in-tune to accelerate away with better innovation outcomes. These can be designed to stimulate and really trigger the imaginations, often with the result of you making some unexpected connections.

Finding new spaces that differentiate your product or service offerings as radically differently perhaps, that improve on the ones that are presently within your existing portfolio and development process. The end result is a significant improvement in both the quality as most important and also the number of your options, so new concepts can emerge from this exploration of the different drivers of change.

Perhaps you just even simply ‘drive away’ leaving everyone else just watching you pull away in new competitive ways, with you knowing where and why you are making real change within your innovation activities and what prompted this. Recognizing the need for different innovation evolution is a big part of the ongoing battle we are all needing to discover..

******

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and has been significantly revised. With their permission, I have republished this original concept by deepening the thinking on this within this post here.

I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Exploring the Drivers of Innovation Change first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Part one –  an opener to innovation change

How do we advance the learning needed for innovation? In my last article I wrote about the need to prepare ourselves for some forthcoming standards for innovation.

In a number of  earlier articles, I have also written on a range of contributing factors that will advance innovation in its learning and adoption. In this series I want to go deeper – an emerging treaty for innovation advancement.

I have to be clear here, I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the seemingly lack of advancement in our understanding of innovation. Today we have a real challenge, all of us, in boosting our capacity for innovation.

We need to achieve this ‘boost’ as the outcomes we can gain and are required are both economic and social in the potential value. We need to move beyond the existing and tackle the blockages to the preferred, when it comes to innovation achievements.

We face many challenges within a highly competitive world
As we seek out fresh opportunities, locally and globally, we are becoming increasingly challenged. The world is highly competitive.

The key driver to meet these ‘twin’ challenges is innovation, not just for the short-term results businesses are so obsessed about but the critically important need to simply find the pathway to sustainable development through re-occurring innovation activities.
Sadly today we still marginalized innovation, we rely on incremental activities to pull us through the short-term and seemingly just keep putting off the longer-term.

Much of management within organizations is mortgaging the future for today’s immediate gains. I loved this thought, although it may not contain much original thinking but it does offer what I felt reflects on this point: “we are simply kicking the innovation can down the road.”  T

his needs desperately changing for these economic and social reasons that are increasingly looming down that same road. Innovation needs to be better understood in what constitutes it and all the different ways it can be applied.

We do need to understanding it better for its significant contribution potential to what we need to solve as social and economic problems.

 The role of education and learning for innovation
The role of people within innovation can never be overstated. They make it happen, everything else is their enablers.

We do need to understand what makes innovation truly work through increasing the comprehension of “combining” its many myriad parts. Innovation skills need an innovation friendly environment and we need to reform much of our existing approaches to innovation as practiced today.

Actually we need to really speed up our reforms and we need to achieve a clear consensus of what better frameworks and activities can deliver this. Of course I would offer a shameless plug of the Executive Innovation Work Mat to be part of this, why not?

I do believe it is part of the emerging solution. In my opinion the work mat helps educate, frame and to learn from in it’s combining the critical aspects, so as to improve on our existing performance and build from this.

It is increasing recognized we are all in need to follow the lifelong learning track, as organizations are increasingly insisting on increasing human performance yet constantly reducing the ‘bodies’ to assist in this.

We need to keep relevant or we also become caught up in this marginalization if we don’t and have a poorer potential in our future.

Technology can’t stand alone, it needs actively working.

Organizations are presently mistaking the promise of technology alone and this will not work; it needs people, their knowledge and experiences to apply the technology.

Far too often we are not finding the time as increasing complexity is layered onto dwindling human resources. We are adding more pressure into the system by taking out the very solution we need to keep in place and utilize far more, that is our people.

We are pushed to keep up and to stay relevant; we have to bury often our personal grievances because if we surface them, then we might get singled out in the next round of often mindless people cuts.

We do need to reverse this board room mentality and cutting out the diversity of opinion that should be valued not thrown away. We need to make our performance potential to be stretched even more, encouraging and sustaining these different opinions.

We must find ways to break into this ‘boom or bust’ mentality in board rooms by reducing the very friction that stimulates greater innovation thinking.

So how can we achieve this? Openness, trust, partnership, valuing diversity is ones that readily spring to mind here. But more importantly we need to build an innovation road-map to scope out the innovation landscape and the dynamics.

Building real education into an innovation road-map

One place to start is to design a more comprehensive road-map of innovation made up of its integral parts. The more innovation is seen and the people that enacted this are recognized, not buried in plain sight, the more it will be valued.

The more we see ‘it’ and what it contributes the more people become essential to their place within this mutual value proposition we need between the organization and its employees. The overarching plank of offering education on innovation is the real ‘glue’ as this is where the value of knowledge is central, in my view, to the way forward.

Knowledge, innovation knowledge, is made up of an awful lot of different things and this is where the real education comes in, front and center in developing new practices, in training, in educating, in translating this knowledge into lasting value.

The more people are valued, the more they become ‘sticky’ and the more they use their knowledge, then it becomes mutually re-enforcing as their organizations grow to appreciate their worth. We need a new social contract between organizations and the people they employ and that should be on mutual appreciation of the ability to translate knowledge into new value-generating outcomes together.

The more we identify the educational parts, the more we appreciate innovations complexity but then we can equally see the rich potential in the rewards that become achievable in taking this new route. Education leads, it provides the appropriate focus and this we can derive the training and knowledge to be applied, so we can improve results and innovation outcomes.

Knowledge Exchanging is our way forward.

Organizations need to move well beyond their rather lazy reliance on best practice comparison as they actually need to explore emerging practices far more but that takes many into a different realm, the realm of increasing uncertainties, and most people and organizations are not trained for this.

They anticipate risk by reducing all the variables within risk and play safe with just being incremental. Is that wrong? No, while we have our reward systems geared to short-term performance, while we measure leadership success the way we presently do, while the shareholder just expects consistent dividends as their part of the equation, and is quickly mobilized to force change if it does not meet this immediate aim we head down the wrong path.

We are not sustaining, we are destroying. We need to focus on competence-enhancing not competence-destroying. To know the differences we need educating on recognizing what makes up the difference.

I can’t change our prevailing system but I can point to alternatives and suggest we have other options, pursued by the few, which are more visionary and brave and often disrupting the accepted.

We need to start by reducing ambiguity.

One real key for the few seems to be the ability to reduce ambiguity, in the concepts, in their visions, in their focus. This reducing of ambiguity improves the chances of a successful outcome that everyone involved can understand the challenges, relate to the possibilities and constantly tracking back to this vision to obtain and advance the evidence of its possibilities and potential with a meaningful contribution. They do this mostly through knowledge exchange.

I’ll discuss this and what this means in the next article, then we will delve deeper into how knowledge is ‘made up’ and can be delivered to achieve a greater openness, convergence and capacity for innovation to take hold and thrive through its mutual dependencies.

I’ll cover the ‘coupling’ within the innovation system, convergence and the dangers lurking in innovation. I’ll delve even further into where absorptive capacity builds our knowledge capacity and a pathway to apply fresh learning so we can all innovate better.

Finally I’ll explore further on how we need to recognize the layers within innovation that do need to shear against each other to generate positive innovation tension and ways to find the space to allow innovation to grow differently through an innovation learning process.

The post What is your capacity for innovation really like? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Sometimes they are, of course in plain sight, but when you alter your thinking lens you might see innovation opportunities in different ways.

We might miss sizable opportunities in not exploring all the different drivers that are around to drive innovation and provide us opportunities. So why not take the time to ‘reflect’ a little bit more on all the different potential drivers of innovation available to you?

So what can and does drive innovation?

I’ve been recently looking at the different drivers that can be explored for innovation. They seem to be many and it can be confusing. I feel there are eight that merit thinking through in a more structured way. Working through these can significantly improve the agility and options of the organization to generate new opportunities and give you a ‘rich’ potential to explore.

My identified eight drivers of innovation

Innovation can be unique, it is complex, it needs careful design and facilitation to extract the most from the rich choices we have on offer to us. Working through these eight can open up our thinking.

• Intelligence drivers– so much today is swirling around, often unsettling and changing. We don’t have long periods of stability anymore and to offset this we need to revert to often artificial intelligence to ‘read, sense and be more interpretative’ of these constant shifting patterns. We need ways to make sense of often disparate flows that piece together in different ways, difficult to initially see, so as to provide insights that can open up our thinking to new innovation. Cognition refers to a faculty for the processing of information, applying knowledge, and changing preferences that allows for development into concepts; individual minds, groups, and organizations need to pick up and explore this driver far more for innovation.

• Technology drivers– The world of external collaboration, leveraging our personal and group networks and the different ways to interacting, are challenging organizations significantly. We all need to open up in areas where internal intellectual property, heavily guarded in the past, is being exposed to a different scrutiny. Technology  needs revisiting to accommodate a new diversity of opinion that extracts value in new more open ways. Also the management of physical and virtual relationships is also needing dramatic change in our behaviours and trust. We need fresh frameworks and designing these into our technology solutions for allowing open thinking. Much of this will come from the management of technology and the new understanding of the needs to capture, translate and extract in new ways. Getting the technology balance right and you open up to innovation in such an unparallel way than in the past. Technology understanding will influence innovation and drive it in some dramatic ways in the future.

• People drivers– “Our people make innovation work, they drive it”. This is heard increasingly yet our actions run contrary to this so many times.  We need to look at what drives people to rise to new heights and performances within themselves? It is getting the mix right- in creativity, in talent, through diversity of opinion, exploring dialogues and having a constant focus on building relationships; it is providing them something in return for ‘driving’ innovation. Keeping people and not shedding them when it suites immediate needs and the bottom line must become a thing of the past. We must treat people as an increasing valuable asset that needs to be prized very highly not in ways that fitted 20th centure practices when supply was plentiful. Keeping experience within organizations is a growing challenge. We also need to value our middle managers more, give them empowerment not more restrictions.  You throw away an incredible investment when you lose people, not just their experiences but often their relationships. Can we afford to keep managing in this way? No, I don’t think so, people drive innovation, we must truly value them as nothing else can make up for their loss in managing innovation for a successful conclusion.

• Customer drivers– Marketing needs to do a significant ‘reset’ as customers shift from price, lower volume demand and seek increased value and personal engagement. Getting into the mind of your customer, understanding their unmet needs and then interpret these into new innovation solutions is tougher than ever. As organizations expand globally there is going to be a need for far more reverse engineering innovation to match need with product or service in these times of diminishing income. Customers are driving innovation more than ever and organizations are presently struggling to catch up and master the new dynamics of the customer and the economics of the markets. Innovation for and with less is very relevant today. Same as knowing customers real needs.

• Rational drivers– Innovation needs greater process and rational innovation thinking. This will come from a greater focus on innovations strategic architecture, the management of the systems to ‘drive’ innovation through to commercialisation, the innovation process designed on shrinking the time line, increased productivity and interventions so  to enable successful movement towards this commercialisation. We need to advance execution and results from this activity and that needs us to approach innovation in a more rational way to get consistent results.

• Social drivers– How we are engaging in the world around us are one of the challenges we need to resolve. Interactions that can transmit genuine desire for the good, which are seen as enduring and meaningful to the lives of people, are going to be valued. Thinking these through, then implementing these in careful, thoughtful ways is going to be critical to growing innovation in social responsible ways that are meaningful for the communities and on a personal level will provide a completely new avenue to innovation activity.

• Emotional drivers– We need to gain permission to enter people’s lives. We need to learn, create, and to explore people’s dreams, desires and hopes. Exploring the eight fundamental human emotional drivers of 1) connection and sense of self, 2) maintaining security over our lives, 3) wanting more diversity, seeking variety, 4) achieving recognition and significance to grow beyond the present, 5) having a sense of achievement and progress, 6) opportunities for challenges and personal growth, 7) achieving self-satisfaction and pride in what we do and finally 8) the wish to contribute and be responsible. Mastering this set of emotional drivers through different innovation activities can be very powerful.

• Environment drivers– the culture and climates provided that we operate within can allow or deny innovation. There is a growing need to increase cooperation between the diverse aspects of innovation activity and other organisations on third party platforms so as to involve as diverse a group as possible. We need to consider the organizations complete value chain and its diverse networks across the whole organization, than in the present silo form of present open innovation thinking (just R&D departments for instance). There is a difficult choice to make between quick results, always needed, and longer term structures to ensure sustaining innovation on a broader platform. Innovation is increasingly driving sustainable society in new products, processes and organization designs. Environment has to date seldom been an explicit targeted comprehensive process for many in innovation activity. It has been experimental. Increased attention to understanding the broader environment we operate within, how finite and sometimes fragile it is, will play a greater role for innovation development. The effectiveness in addressing environment problems will drive innovation significantly in the years ahead.

Within each of these eight drivers for innovation activity is a bountiful harvest of innovation opportunities to explore. Understanding what can drive innovation opens up significant possibilities.

The central meaning of innovation relates to a quest for renewal. For this renewal to take place it is necessary for people to change the way they make decisions, to see things, they must choose to do things differently, make choices outside of their norm.

Schumpeter stated that innovation changes the values onto which the system is based. So when people change their value (system) they ‘drive’ the old (economic) system to make room for the new one.

When that happens innovation has occurred.

Understanding the options within the drivers of innovation is important. Knowing the options of what can drive innovation can help you choose multiple paths to explore and then grow from.

The post Reflecting on the drivers for innovation we have choices? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.