An opening CSF for innovation
A brief overview of critical success factors for innovation to check against. The organization: structure of innovation processes to be explicit by treating innovation as a systematic process and continued…
All organizations talk about innovation, but so what?
All organizations talk about innovation and its growing importance but few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale. So what does inhibit innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to have so innovative growth can be achieved?
Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities? There are countless questions that need asking but more importantly answering.
Innovation is complex and demanding
The difficulty for many is that innovation is a complex process that has many intangibles within the total mix to manage. Management today is far happier managing the ‘harder’ aspects of business, the more established, the more traditional ones that can be managed in efficient and effective ways to reduce complexity.
The Vital Attributes for an Innovation Organization
Understanding what is needed for innovation- unlocking the mysteries * Innovation organizations tend to be more decentralized, more informal, minimally stratified or layered and more generalist than specialized. * They…
Adapting fitness landscapes with your innovation objectives
There are a number of aspects we can look at initially.
This is helping us to shape the journey, to place it in context. It lays out the theory to the journey we are about to undertake.
Our Challenge is the need to build diverse innovation capability
Knowing what are the critical factors and there dependences for sustaining innovation success is vital to understand so an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them. The question is, which are critical, which naturally occur when others begin to be put into place, which seem to have limited or no real effect on changing the dynamics of innovation?
Knowing these and having these clearer shown as a ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII) has real business value. Today, we lack a clear system model that brings the critical innovation factors out and gives them their appropriate values, and then can equally provide the ability to model different future states and conceive future scenarios through different impact-investments.
So what are the challenges of the knowledge-driven economy that innovation needs to drive?
Moving Up the Path Towards Innovation Fitness
So how do we become innovation fit?
Can you imagine standing on top of a mountain, looking out across a vast expanse of nothing but mountains and valleys stretching out before you. If you squint hard enough you can just make out that somewhere in the hazy distance, the end point of your travels, towards that much needed innovation understanding, made up of many different dynamics that make you and your organization that much fitter to compete in today’s challenging world.
Clearly while you are on top of this mountain you feel exhilarated to have even got up to this point. To even get to this point you have already made a decision that you and your organization would become an innovation one and needs to look beyond what you have to what is possible.
Orchestrating the new dynamics of innovation fitness
In my work investigating different aspects of innovation activity, one thought tends to dominate my thinking and that is orchestrating the dynamics within innovation: “How do we achieve a better understanding of the dynamics of innovation within our capabilities to be more successful?”
I’ve already written in previous blogs about the need of “constantly checking for the pulse of innovation” ( http://bit.ly/c3G0Ta) and suggesting the way to “open up your thinking to dynamic capabilities for innovation success” ( http://bit.ly/bxTeYO).
I’d like to take this one step further in this blog and outline my thinking on innovative fitness landscapes and why they are essential to understand.
Each organization needs to know its Innovation Fitness Landscape- why?
There is a pressing need for a firm is to consistently build and reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities to address rapidly changing environments.
It is the mastering of this ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in rapid changing market conditions that will enable certain organizations to emerge as the winners of the innovation race.
This view requires a more ‘dynamic’ set of capabilities. Often the question becomes one of “which are the critical ones to focus upon to improve the chance of greater success?
Thinking over dynamic capabilities for innovation success
As someone who runs a small, independent consulting and research business that is 100% focused on innovation, the focus has to be on capabilities so I am always grateful for the continued involvement of the bigger consulting companies in producing sound, relevant and topical research issues on innovation and the building out greater, well-researched understanding.
Large consulting organizations ‘stoke the innovation fire within’, they confirm what you felt you knew but needed it to be validated. These great sources include McKinsey, Bain & Co, Booz & Co, Monitor, BCG, ADL and to a lesser degree Accenture for innovation research.
There are others but the ability to have access to C-Level thinking is this groups real strength and so they come more immediate to mind.
The emphasis is on distinct capabilities for innovation success.
The Pathway Curve of Innovation Understanding
The pathway curve methodology is a well structured way to move up in innovation understanding.