encouraging best practicies for innovation - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

The State of Innovation Management in 2015 Just Released

@paul4innovating — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 16:02:33 +0000

As we come closer to the year-end it’s good to look back, and make some dedicated time to take ‘stock’, in this case, on innovation’s progress.

In a just-released “The State of Innovation Management in 2015” that I have authored and kindly provided by HYPE for free, I believe you will find something of interest that you missed during a busy year, coming to a close.

I certainly hope you will find time to go through it.

You’ll gain a valuable and quick insight into critical aspects that innovation managers and CINOs should be aware of. It is in an easy format of thirty-plus pages and offers a reference resource that builds a solid understanding of innovation today regarding relevant factors that will stimulate and support your innovation activity.
http://i.hypeinnovation.com/the-state-of-innovation-2015-report

The Surge of innovation reports in 2015
I am sure you have experienced that in 2015 we have seen a significant surge in innovation reports, many of these coming from large consulting firms or innovation publishers. Each has been providing an updated view on where innovation presently ‘sits’, in its challenges and the needs to be addressed going forward.

I approached HYPE and suggested that there should be an attempt to pick out some of the interesting points within these reports, I was promptly given the challenge and they are providing this for free, a year-end bonus I feel.

Go to this link, which takes you to the landing page and simply register to obtain this free report provided by HYPE at the year-end. http://i.hypeinnovation.com/the-state-of-innovation-2015-report

Investing your time is always at a premium, I trust this report is worth it.
I decided this would be valuable to save you time or reconnect to some good reports that came out in 2015. Usually, we simply don’t have the dedicated time to wade through all these reports, they seem to come in waves or sometimes we even simply just miss them.

In this report now released I was highly conscious of saving your time and have tried to make as much of the reporting visual with as little text as necessary. Your need is to determine what is relevant to your situation and within the links provided you can explore these more if they have real relevance, I’d bet one or two really will.

The tough part was on deciding what to review, include or exclude. I took the view of just reviewing all the known (to me) reports coming out in 2015, with an exception or two going back to 2014 if it supported my thinking of what I think you might view as relevant as against just interesting. I was looking to achieve some “actionable relevancy”

I ‘housed those’ under a few important headings

These included leadership issues, concerns and needs, secondly the poor way we seem to be spending our innovation budgets, and thirdly some handy lists of the benefits of collaborating seen from both the large and small organizations’ perspectives.

Also an excellent benchmarking study full of really relevant tables that will get you comparing or constructing your own comparisons, some aspects of global R&D spending, a short view of some innovation leaders who gathered and debated three ‘choice’ topics of their top of mind concerns around innovation.

Finally I had to include one report on looking at the new innovation equation, a report I really felt was not well-distributed but full of interesting thoughts and relevant tables to compare where you are with their reported group.

I am hopeful it gives you a stimulating read over the coming festivities as we begin to move forward into 2016 with some helpful looking back from these selected 2015 reports. If you need any further interpretation or my further perspective you know where to find me.

Here is the landing page again, simply register for the report and then hopefully it offers you something of value to you.
http://i.hypeinnovation.com/the-state-of-innovation-2015-report

Again, if there are some given areas that trigger your need to explore these further, then HYPE and I can certainly help provide deeper connections and insights. This is part of my advisory bag to support you in your innovation advancement, I hope the report does just that..

Happy reading, a really great start to 2016. Innovation will continue to be at the forefront of our business needs

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Are you dependent on other’s best practices?

@paul4innovating — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 09:16:17 +0000

I often wonder if “best practice” is actually a hidden drug within our organizations that everyone simply craves to be taking.

Why do so many advisory organizations promote best practices? Simply because those in the organization constantly feel under pressure to demonstrate why they are falling behind or keeping ahead of their competitors.

They crave knowing best practices, but tell me what really is the best practice of others really achieving?

If you are behind, best practice informs you and you go into a frantic mode to try and catch up. By the time you have achieved the best practice, it is simply out of date as those practising this have most likely moved even further on.
If you are the ones attributed with a best practice it can usually create a level of complacency, while you sit back and bask in the afterglow, or you rack your brains to extend this ‘leadership’ position in even better ways, determined not to relinquish this recognition and start to ‘mess’ with these practices.

Often the result is you can lose sight of why you were a best practice as you upgrade to the next level of automation through technology, forgetting that part of the best practice might have been the personal touch and engagements you had with your customers, dealing individually with their specific problems, as you race to automate these, so you can keep ahead in practice.

I argue you have to be very careful with best practice

Firstly organizations need to move well beyond their lazy reliance on best practice comparison and they need to find better ways to explore emerging practices. But that takes many into the realm of increasing uncertainties, and most people and organizations are not trained for this exploration and experimentation, yet it is the place for gaining leading practice.

It is just so easy to copy, yet how often do we fail to recognize all the contextual factors that went into making a specific set of (best) practices in one organization as those another organization simply believes it can blindly copy?

Other organizations good practice is their practice, in their circumstances and in adapting the practices to suit their market conditions and I guarantee these are not yours!

Your practices are all that matter to your customer, so keep focusing there

Of course, best practice has its comparative use to gather intelligence, to gain competitive understanding of where they are in their development. But these are their practices and to simply set about to adopt these as your way forward is just a huge, expensive mistake in many cases.

I believe if you are focusing on the good and emerging practices within your own organization as the area to focus upon, to leverage and understand.

Then to measure these with what your customer expects, your market is telling you or your ability to engineer real growth or not. Those become your practices for learning and wanting to improve into those that make your organization really work effectively in its context.

Then applying, experimenting and learning from novel practices that provide growing confidence in creative thinking.

Also give some thought for next practice, those practices that prompt reinvention. They start such totally fresh thinking; they challenge existing paradigms and move you towards considering new business models.

The Cynefin Framework
One framework I strongly relate to is provided by www.cognitive-edge.com with their Cynefin framework. It places ‘practices’ in their appropriate domain.

The Cynefin framework has five major domains

The first four domains are our most relevant for seeking out the appropriate practice:

Simple, recently renamed the Obvious space, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense – Categorise – Respond and where we can apply best practice as it is more for incremental, the space where you are working with more of the ‘established’ routines, extracting the efficiencies and repeating established practice.

Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.

Complex, this is the domain, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act – Sense – Respond and we can discover novel practice.

The fifth domain- The fifth domain is Disorder, which is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, simply unaware of what you need to do and in which state you should apply. Often people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision adding more complexity to the disorder.

In full use, the Cynefin framework has sub-domains, and the boundary between simple and chaotic is seen as a catastrophic one: complacency leads to failure and tumbles into chaos.

Dealing with different types of innovation really works in this framework

For incremental innovation, constant reoccurring stuff, the ‘simple’ domain applies and best practice pushes down on efficiencies and effectiveness, on being consistent with standard processes and clear structures. Always be conscious of the limitations within best practice.

For a more distinctive innovation, you tend to move more towards the complicated domain, where experts ‘kick-in’ to help and offer plausible outcomes based on known experiences. You need to listen to conflicting advice and watch out for entrenched thinking so it can be challenged.

If you are pushing for more radical innovation then it has a higher complexity and risk and falls into the complex domain. The range of options sometimes seems infinite where we explore more through the lens of perspectives and judgement.

The outcomes are never easy to predict upfront and you need to keep looking for patterns to emerge and ‘inform’ your decisions. The use of experimentation, gamification, allows greater interactions and a place you encourage dissent and finally be patient and allow time for reflection.

This type of innovation can change the game.

Then we have the chaotic domain, where disruptive innovation tends to sit. You lack any clear ‘cause and effect’ as it is entering more of the unknowns. The key is deciding to act, not from knowing the practice but recognizing it is novel, as you search for what will work, attempt to take back control and provide clear and direct interventions to firstly stabilize, understand and learn from and then further respond to bring it back into some order that allows you to participate.

The appropriate framework of practices and approach are really valuable
This framework offers a perspective that has enormous value as it offers managers a guide in placing different thoughts with different actions.

The Cynefin framework offers a typology of contexts to help you sort out a variety of situations in which you might need to make different decisions and then provide what actions to take from the recognition.

The framework looks to place the appropriate actions and decisions into the right context. The framework emerged from complexity theory and innovation falls into this.

I would suggest focusing on and developing your own practices is so much better than attempting to ‘adopt’ others’ best practices.

When you next think of best practice as your answer, come back and reflect on this first, to place the appropriate innovation into the right practice that meets your needs, not someone else’s.

*****

Publishing note: This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. 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.

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New report: Improving returns on your innovation investment

@paul4innovating — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 11:12:20 +0000

I highly value the studies that are undertaken by larger consulting firms. They have the C-level access and geographical reach to give us some critical insights into the progress of innovation.

Recently Arthur D Little provided their latest innovation excellence study, its 8th Global Innovation Excellence Study, into what companies can do to achieve a better return on their investment in innovation management. The report can be downloaded or viewed here and outlines in their opinion what really works in terms of managing the innovation process.

They offer some good pointers and understanding of what differentiates top innovators within and across industries. It also suggests that it provides new insights into what companies can do to achieve a better return on their investment in innovation management. I think it does fall a little short on a depth to support and validate these claims in my opinion, but it does still provides sound insight.

They specifically attempt to focus on understanding what differentiates top innovators from other companies in different industries. Drawing on over 650 responses, the study sheds new light on the basic key question: what innovation management techniques are most important in achieving a better return on innovation investment? The results they suggest are important for any company that wishes to stay competitive.
Overall the report highlights six key insights:

1. There is strong evidence that excellence in innovation management based on Arthur D. Little’s model leads to higher innovation performance.

It is such a pity they lead off with this ‘claim’ adopting their best practices helps to achieve innovation success. I would strongly argue adopting any good, coherent framework will contribute to improving performance, providing you give this the dedicated focus, resources and top management commitment. I think they have put the “cart before the horse” by leading with this.

2. Top quartile innovation performers obtain on average 13% points more profit from new products and services than average performers, and 30% shorter time-to-break-even, although the gap is narrowing.

They argue the gap in best and worst performers has narrowed in recent years and past under-performers can and do catch up and maintaining a lead in innovation performance is getting harder. I’d have liked to have this observation explained or validated some more.

3. Innovation performance achieved has decreased on average since 2010, yet satisfaction with this level of performance has nearly doubled

This is the really interesting point for me. Comparing 2010 and 2012 results, they found a significant overall decrease of up to 25% in innovation performance across a range of industries and suggest this may be driven by the tough market conditions of recent years which have forced companies to focus on short term performance, as well as issues specific to certain industries.

In contrast, they found that overall satisfaction with innovation performance increased significantly from 25% to 42%, although the majority of respondents are still dissatisfied. They conclude on this point that this might also reflect recognition that innovation success is getting harder to achieve.

4. There is a clear correlation between capability in innovation measurement and innovation success, yet less than 20% of companies believe they have a good innovation measurement capability.

What they found as more surprising is that less than 20% of companies believe they are better than average in innovation measurement capabilities and indicates the level of dissatisfaction with their efforts to measure innovation performance.
They offer the view this underlines both the inherent difficulty of effective measurement of innovation, and the significant potential for companies to improve their capabilities in this area.

5. Certain innovation management practices have a particularly strong impact on innovation performance

Top innovation performers invest relatively more in radical improvements to products, services and business models, as opposed to incremental improvements. They suggest there are four basic practices but the key, for me, is the one of mobilizing the whole organization to develop new ideas. I would argue mobilization across all that innovation covers is critical, not just new ideas but ideas to commercialization.

6. Top innovators do much better in adopting best practices in accelerating growth

The study found that top innovators are better at identifying unmet needs, fostering an entrepreneurial culture and leveraging existing key competencies.

Another really important point for me that is often understated.
They pick up on it is the organizations ability to overcome important internal challenges such as getting top-management support, enabling fast decision-making and establishing productive cross-functional relationships that gives them innovation leadership.

The conclusion of the study.

The study concludes with the two important insights: there is a strong correlation between adoption of new business growth practices and achieving innovation success and top innovators are more effective at dealing with internal barriers.

I think the study gives encouragement that having a focused, disciplined approach to innovation does make a difference. By tackling the internal barriers successfully will change innovation performance. It is not a ground breaking study but it does offer some helpful focal points to improve organizations performance.

The real disappointment for me?

I still feel disappointed they started off with promoting their own model as blatantly as the reference point to success. I am not a lover of generalizing around “best practice”. I’m of the school arguing for “emerging practice or novel practice”.

I also wonder if they have not fallen into this old trap of perhaps practice leader’s self-justification for this study, hard as it might seem as a comment. This tends to be for me the older consulting practice approach of self-promotion that I believe actually constrains your perceived value to clients. Today a more detached view seems to offer greater consulting judgement even in best practice observations.

I quote from www.sourceforconsulting.com in a recent article “Consulting firms need to re-think their approach to thought leadership from scratch. Less money should be frittered away by people writing whatever they want and more invested in centrally co-ordinated thought leadership. Some seriously innovative thinking needs to go into developing a game-changing approach to content or publication”

I would apply this observation also to this Arthur D Little study. To quote again from the above www.sourceforconsulting.com article “Research is a good example: liberally distributing the results of an expensive survey in your publications used to be a differentiator but even the smallest firms do this now; primary research has to be either very clever or very big to stand out”

My final thoughts
I think the Arthur D Little innovation practice does make a really sound contribution to innovation practices without doubt. I think they can do a whole lot more actually. I really do think translating their observations from benchmarking and best practice observations can be significantly lifted up in being real value differentiators by extending their existing toolkit at www.adl.com/InnovationExcellence into something more dynamic as a “must go to” source.

They need this deeper thinking through of thought leadership, aligning their innovation practice and the growing knowledge coming into them to provide a distinctive set of offerings . There are surely, far more imaginative ways to offer us all more value from their studies, from their engagement and practice involvement than simply leading with “strong evidence suggests our model leads to higher innovation performance” and you read on with that growing feeling they are simply working backwards to this opening validation, as you read more of the report.

I think they can do better, they have the capability but not yet the right application and end goal. Innovation and its management needs broader engagement by the larger consultants.

There is a real leading innovation practice space to fill and this goes way beyond existing approaches made by the bigger consultancy firms or the ones exclusively focusing on innovation. A large diverse innovation practice can fill this space but it needs so much more. Will anyone step up to the plate I wonder, it needs it.

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Millennials see innovation differently from today’s leaders.

@paul4innovating — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 13:54:24 +0000

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) has provided a set of interesting results from a survey of the world’s future leaders and what they think about innovation released for the World Economic Forum, January 2003

The top line was only 26% of those surveyed believed their current organization’s leaders encourage the practices that foster innovation. This indicates a major shift really is needed in the organizational mindset to give innovation the chance to thrive.

The implications are nicely summarized by this statement from Deloitte’s Global CEO. “Innovation at the institutional level is needed to sufficiently shift an organization’s mindset to allow new ideas to truly emerge and thrive,”

The Deloitte Global CEO Barry Salzberg went on to say: “While our current business leaders can debate how and where to innovate, it’s clear how much importance our future leaders place on innovation—not just as a driver of business growth but also as a catalyst for solving society’s most pressing problems.”
DTTL surveyed close to 5,000 Millennials from 18 countries. When gauging the perception among future leaders about innovation and its impact on society, 84 per cent say business innovations have a positive impact on society, and 65 per cent feel their own company’s activities benefit society in some way.

For more information and to view the survey results, visit: www.deloitte.com/millennialsurvey

The critical message – can we wait or shift leaders aside who don’t get it?

“A generational shift is taking place in business as baby boomers, many of whom may have been wedded to the ‘old way’ of doing business, begin to step down from their leadership roles to retire,” said Salzberg. “Real opportunity exists for organizations to step up and create the conditions and commitment needed to encourage and foster innovation in their work environments. And there’s a tremendous upside if we get this right: we can better retain talent, remain more competitive into the future, and more positively impact society.”

The report provides a nice infographic here: http://tinyurl.com/autexyn

So what really catches my eye?
The one chart that stands out for me is the one that outlines the required provisions of innovation conditions and the present delivery “gap” in creating these to foster innovation.
Taking this as the make-up of many of the essential conditions it is worth listing them here

Encourage & reward idea generation and creativity
Provide employees with “free” time that can be dedicated to learning
That leadership encourages idea-sharing regardless of seniority
To promote openness and the freedom to challenge
Provide a commitment to successfully advance innovation ideas
Provide strong and inspirational (innovation) leadership
Have a clear vision of the future
Have a (better) understanding of the Millennial generation
Improve or expand use of internal social and informal learning (methods)
Encourage both formal and informal learning
Have a (real) commitment to a sustainable business
Provide (the conditions) and commitment to continued development
Provide (consistent) improvement to internal processes
Commitment to (consistent) and continual product and service improvements
The (vexing issue) of a lack of hierarchy

The ones highlighted in bold gained the highest responding as needed but this is a fairly valuable list to work from in fostering the ‘right’ innovation conditions.

The Millennials felt the purpose of business was to improve society, generate profit and to drive innovation. They overwhelmingly believe innovation is essential for business growth. They feel it is acceptable for business to profit from social innovation and those organisations that are (clearly) seen to be innovative will attract the talent

According to DTTL the findings endorse the importance of leadership and innovation and the impact business can have on society. This creates opportunities for business leaders – both individually and collectively – and for the long-term success of their businesses.

My initial thoughts triggered by this survey

Today’s leaders need to think very differently about their role and the expectations of business, if we are to capitalize on the opportunities that innovation can provide, simply by allowing these opportunities to be shaped more by the Millennial generation, sitting inside or collaborating outside their organizations.

For me, this survey simply strengthens my view that today’s leaders just don’t get innovation in the multiple ways they should: to enhance their business and to regain growth.

The generations coming up into leadership positions are not just aware of innovation’s importance but are being exposed and trained in all the different facets but frustrated those above “simply don’t get it”.

The issue is “can we really wait?” I don’t believe so.

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