We have an ongoing need to create, extend and modify resources constantly and to achieve this we need to orchestrate and enable those resources to exploit and execute our innovations.

We need to ‘asset orchestrate’.

One of our blind spots is perhaps the focus on pursuing and organizing around innovation just within an organization and not being as aware of all that is externally going on around us.

There are continued and rapid shifts taking place outside the walls of our organizations, constantly occurring and changing, often it becomes a ‘race’ between spotting an opportunity and executing on it before your competitors do, or the market further moves on and it becomes a lost opportunity to have exploited.

There is an awful lot of dynamics to consider and are we not just capturing the dynamics of the constant changes but ‘fit’ enough within our organizations to read and react to these in more dynamic ways.

Much of what an organization does is simply perform through its established routines, managing the passages that lead from one ‘event’ to the next. These form much of the activities, yet these should never be seen as the end, only the prelude.

We need to fully appreciate the complexities of all the interactions needed to make innovation more dynamic. That’s constantly changing and evolving and like a piece of music, it needs this conducting to be thoughtfully managed through the whole piece, the routines and the new understandings and interpretations.

To manage and orchestrate means to lead, frame, conduct and set the tempo.

The clear intent of any orchestration is the need to extract the underlying value. The person responsible, our conductor, is responsible for managing and searching for new innovations and they need to determine the path.

They need to coordinate and integrate all the activities, they need to draw out new learning, new interpretations of the knowledge collectively gathered and reconfigure it all, to deliver something different, fresh and new to the world.

When we begin to want to orchestrate across external innovation networks we not only need to know ourselves extremely well, we also need to know what others can bring and what is missing.

Networks and relationships, interactions and knowledge flow needs to be dynamic, they need to be somehow captured and translated, transformed and often reconfigured

Picking up the baton we need to pull together the different fragments
Asset orchestration has potentially a real value to appreciate and manage.

There is limited academic research into this but it becomes significantly richer in its importance when you tie it into dynamic capabilities.

Also as we increasingly need to understand the value creation in building our networks and relationships, the need for asset orchestration increases so as to build a pathway through gathering knowledge and what you can learn that leads you towards new innovation.

As our organizations become increasingly dependent on the specialization the coordination task becomes far more complex and difficult. We constantly need to search, select and configure our resources and capabilities.

Work undertaken to frame this asset orchestration was in different research by Sirmon et al during 2007 and 2008 that focused on the different actions of the manager, or asset orchestrator. They suggest there are three primary stages of structuring, bundling and leveraging resources for the purpose of creating new value for customers and gaining competitive advantages, however temporary in today’s world.

It is why this needs to be dynamic, ever-evolving, to keep orchestrating your assets continually. These three primary stages can be broken down:

• Structuring involves acquiring, accumulating and divesting resources to form the organization’s resource portfolio.

• Bundling of integrating resources to form capabilities, that can stabilize or provide incremental improvements to existing capabilities, or that enrich and extend existing current capabilities and thirdly, pioneer, which creates new capabilities.

• Leveraging involves a sequence of processes to exploit the organization’s capabilities to take advantage of specific market opportunities.
• This leveraging includes mobilizing, offering a clear plan or vision of needed capabilities, coordinating for ways to integrate these necessary capabilities and finally, deploying to achieve a resource advantage (or gain) that promotes market opportunities and instils more entrepreneurial strategies to exploit new resource configurations

We are all facing these needs for greater asset synchronization or orchestration.

We need to learn also that innovation needs this growing orchestration, due to this increasing move from firm-centric to network-centric innovation. In my understanding an orchestrator, they need to manage the tempo, know where and when to cue in the different players (learning) and inject the intensity into the performance.

We are dealing with managing the tempo, interpreting the different passages and movements as interactions become distinct, providing fresh value to build upon.

We need to learn to identify, assimilate and exploit far more than ever, the value of knowing your innovation fitness, your dynamics and the terrain you wish to traverse in new innovation activity becomes even more critical.

To create and to extract does clearly need to understand the what, why, where, when and how it needs to go about this.

The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.
To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result.

I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network’ of these.

It still relies on how you purposefully build and conduct these capabilities and competencies. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts to deliver the right result.

Definitely, the dynamic view of orchestrating our assets is needed

Finally, orchestration has for me become very important to my ongoing work on the dynamic innovation capabilities for recognizing your innovation fitness landscape and the gaps.

These become even more of a challenge when different perspectives and competencies enter the mix, where we urgently need to understand the ‘dynamics of innovation’ even more.

We need to not just know the appropriate resources; we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate mostly our intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors.

Assets that deliver the new innovation needed, through attracting collaboration efforts and integrating these into your own evolving resources and turning into being dynamic in nature.

The post Asset Orchestration is Required for more Dynamic Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The simple fact that innovation has been thrown open and organizations and individuals can simply explore outside their existing paradigms is offering us something we have yet to fully grasp and leverage. This is a W-I-P for us all.

Secondly innovation is simply getting faster, better is another story, but it is expected to move from idea or concept to final launch in ever decreasing compressed time

As they say ‘you can’t have one without the other’. Open innovation is potentially allowing for this compression of time but where we still ‘lag’ is within our organizations to reap the rewards. Why?

We are still stuck in the previous structures, systems and processes designed for internal developments that were designed for different times.

We need two really critical things really fast.

The speed of change needs agility. We need to learn to adapt, anticipate and lead change before change leads us. Building an agile company to manage the enormous unpredictability and creative destruction going on around us is an absolute must.

Secondly we need to recognise that the capabilities and skills needed to manage in this rapidly shifting world must be different from many we provide and train into our people today. We need more ‘dynamic capabilities’: the ability to understand what is needed and apply these capabilities to the challenges on hand.

The past has simply flashed before our eyes
When you stop and think, after you have captured your breath, just reflect on what has happened in the last thirty years of where we have placed our emphasis within innovation

Firstly we focused on efficiency through innovation, then we applied quality to the process, then we introduced flexibility (leaner supply chains, smarter product processes) and recently we have moved to a more open innovation.

This rapid movement or compression of innovation has been demanding, many simply have not kept up, or simply never changed and faded away

What is the future in any innovation focus?
We have skirted design innovation, we still attempt to link product and service, we are building more stand-alone business models and we are experimenting with social media that seems to become established as Social product innovation.

This social product innovation is the practice of leveraging Social Computing principles and technologies to support the product development process, innovation and business goals, programs and resources.

We are also striving to manage collaborative platforms, so as to manage projects that offer scale and market shifting paradigms. There is a giant mash up going on or mess up perhaps?

Disruptive, Radical and Volatile seems a reality

We seem to be heading into a real storm of change. The change brought on by overconsuming, disposing quickly and demanding even faster, better, more improved products at ever lowering prices.

This is not just a race to the bottom where commoditization lurks but where we simply will exhaust our resources, our planet and ourselves. We are facing some very unsettling times and we need to get equipped to deal with them fast in agile ways through new capabilities and competencies.

There is a race we are all in where eventually no one wins. We need to change the race.

We do need a ‘real’ paradigm shift.

The problem is nothing stops, it simply keeps moving at an ever-increasing pace. We can’t consolidate, we can’t experiment as much as we would like and we can’t wait and see.

We are all learning by doing and to do this we need to be highly agile, and amass new capabilities and competencies as we go- often on the fly, often by the seat of our pants.

Innovation has become our treadmill perhaps. Can we afford to get off? To make a real paradigm shift?

What would that be- any thoughts?

The post What are the new paradigms in innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Certainly, each of these has an important contributing part to play in building a coherency for innovation, but the ingredient that tops them all and is often forgotten or assigned as the afterthought is people. People making innovation work, all the rest are the enablers to help them.

The Australian Business Foundation published a report last year- the Hidden Human Dimensions of Innovation (http://www.abfoundation.com.au/research_knowledge) and in part of a speech given by its Chief Executive, Narelle Kennedy at an Innovation 2009 conference she spoke of this people factor.
Let me quote as her comments are really powerful and help encourage people to conceive that innovation is more of a social process first, and not a technical one so often a misconception of many.

–  “People are innovation’s active ingredient, the catalyst that turns novelty into real benefits for economies and communities. Benefits like jobs, wealth, productivity and life-changing progress”

–  “The role of people in innovation is a fact that remains hidden in plain sight. It is axiomatic – everyone says it and believes it, but few understand anything at all about the human factors in innovation”

– “It is the pivotal role of people as innovation carriers – their networks, collaborations, knowledge flows, interactions and tacit knowledge – and how innovation itself is a potent competitive force that drives productivity”

–  “People who innovate together capitalise on their tacit knowledge and informal know-how and on past strategic investments to “navigate the white-water risks” of innovation more successfully than their competitors.”

–  “It is tacit knowledge, accumulated experience and learning by doing result in a highly valuable intangible asset that boosts the innovation odds”
–  “(It is people who) form a community of practice with a clear intangible asset value in the form of intellectual capital and human capital”

–  “(People rely on) long term and sustained investments in strategic capacity-building and continuity of interpersonal innovation networks and gains in value by sharing and usage”.

Where I do feel Narelle Kennedy nicely sums up is a much-needed re-think for innovation for it to really work and be valued for what it can truly offer comes from this statement: “drawing on knowledge and creativity to add value in products and processes is an expansive view of innovation – new things or ways of working; knowledge and creativity; add value; products and processes – it is a dynamic view”

Everything else today that does not place people in the centre of the innovation equation offers a dangerous misconception about innovation and why it should work.  It is our people that make it happen and we need to make innovation the social process it needs to be.

The original post was submitted to http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/wordpress/2009/12/innovation-perspectives-hidden-human-dimensions/

The post The Hidden Human Dimension of Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.