What we should be all able to agree upon is that the environment for innovation houses many of the conditions that connect innovation in people’s minds.
The environment needs to be connected to the vision around innovation, it needs to be translated for each of us to relate to and want to contribute.

The environment provides the right growing conditions for your organization to foster its unique environment to prosper and grow.
Deny those growing conditions and any innovation initiative is going to struggle and eventually die from the lack of the essential feeding of its roots.

Whenever I return to thinking about the environment for innovation I go back to my own roots of my initial innovation studies. The very first part of my innovation dissertation for my Master’s degree began by thinking over the cultural and climate conditions an organization needs.

Creating within the right conditions

For me the environment we create for innovation offers the place, time and space to chase after those innovation challenges. It needs to create within you those conditions, passions, commitments, and identifications that will inspire you to tackle the challenge.

It should be offering an environment that will allow you to be stretched both in body and mind to seek out something worthwhile, valued by others as making a contribution of turning ideas into winning propositions.

Working on the conditions that will have a clear impact on the way people think and behave needs a fair amount of thinking through. The environment is made up of the climate, the culture, and the conditions to allow creativity to blossom and grow.

Visualizing the Innovation Environment needed

Whenever I get asked the question: “so what makes up this innovation environment”, I think of a tree and its roots and the required environment it needs to prosper and grow.

The end result we require from setting in place the right conditions of having a climate and culture to innovate, is we get a whole lot closer to creating the environment for Creativity, the generation of new ideas, and Innovation, the translation of those ideas into useful new products, services or business opportunities that gives us fresh growth.

It is providing the appropriate conditions for interactions to happen between the person and the idea or concept is to ‘fuse’ this in new ways, through all the enabling factors that encourage ‘it’ to develop and then emerge as a final commercial concept.

This provision of the right conditions and enabling factors becomes our innovation environment.

Setting about understanding the work environment for innovation will determine partly the eventual success and impact innovation will have on an organization’s performance.

We start with our understanding of what makes up the climate for innovation.

The commonly held view is this climate reflects in different ways to each of us, in people’s perceptions and beliefs about the environmental attributes, shaping expectations about outcomes, requirements and interactions.

The level of moderators each of us relates to is partly determined by the conditions and how we see our place within the innovation activity required.

For example, are these set in turbulent times, is there real competitive pressure forcing us to react and then what are those real internal pressures to perform?

Also what is the make-up of the job on hand we are asked to undertake? The level of creativity and idea generation required, the type of innovation expected, the stage of our job within the innovation process (early, mid, late), the amount of discretion we are given, the rewards for any creative performance, the team construction and what we feel is the make-up of our own personal level of satisfaction, all influence our thinking. Each contributes to the climate and the conditions to innovate.

Then we are faced with those enduring patterns and beliefs of what shapes our culture.

Culture has often been described as the ‘collective programming of the mind”, it distinguishes the members of one social group from another.

Culture is usually sought out to be stable, deep and constantly reinforced by a history of decisions, the use of power and learning strategies for answering and setting about how we tackle fundamental questions.

We constantly reinforce our habits, our routines and decision-making in repeating ways. We are far more comfortable when we can assimilate new experiences with existing patterns.

The earliest association of the word culture was the way people in particular took care of the soil, in our own way, and how they successfully worked the soil was influenced by a number of key factors, all aimed at producing the best yield possible from all the contributing conditions.

It is how we have chosen to deal with certain situations or confronted with similar repeating problems. Culture becomes engrained in us, it is very hard to undo, let go and reform into something different, without considerable recognition and hard work.

According to Edgar Shein, one of the most cited writers in the field of organizational culture we have three main sources that form our cultures that often need challenging. The first is the beliefs, values and assumptions held over from the past, are passed on, repeated and accepted.

Then we have the exposure to learning experiences for us to evolve and grow. Then thirdly, is from the infusion of new ideas, members, leaders and practices.

As culture is such a deep, stable, complex set of shared assumptions that has built up over relatively long periods of time within most organizations, it is not an easy task to suddenly expect a new one for innovation, if this has not been part of this ongoing culture.

It is the changing of the patterns of behaviour, attitudes and beliefs and these are often deeply ingrained in us, causing rejection before acceptance.

Change requires the classic “unfreeze – transition- refreeze” as the journey we often have to travel.

Climate and Culture are distinct

Finally, our climates are distinct from our culture as they are far more observable at a surface level and far more amenable to change and improvement efforts.

The more we can change our climate the more it will, over time, influence our culture. They do have a very ‘creative tension’ between them when you set about change.

There are so many, often opposing forces, at work within our organizations. To create an environment for innovation to suddenly have impact, to provide the conditions to think and behave differently is a challenging task.

A next step is really too understand your climate for creativity.

I want to focus more specifically on the climate for creativity and innovation in a separate post but I would suggest there is no greater place to start to make change than to create the possibilities for individuals to have the power to experiment, to create, to develop and to test, simply to learn to innovate as a natural state.

This natural state can be encouraged and followed up constantly, not enforced but expected as part of everyday learning by all people, at all levels, all contributing to solving organizational problems, to inventing, designing new methods, approaches and contributing to new strategic thought.

Building the innovation environment certainly takes dedicated time

Building the environment for innovation take time, a dedicated understanding of its makeup and parts that influence or constrain it. It is working on the creative climate as this supports the new generation, consideration, assimilation of new working approaches, practices and concepts.

All I suggest is that this needs to be deliberate and well-led from the top, otherwise, it does not create this new innovative environmental condition for our tree, shown above, or its roots, to grow and spread and give a stronger foundation to weather changing conditions and rise to the innovation challenges.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. 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 Changing the workplace environment for innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We don’t make all the connections we should; we are too caught up in our little world, beating our existing drum, drowned out by its own noise, to step back and appreciate something new is really happening.

Recently I was investigating one strand of thought and then bingo! Something else leads to something else and the rest, so to speak, becomes history.

I’ve been reflecting on the new era of innovation and opening myself up to exploring alternatives, different thoughts, discussions and viewpoints.

Underlying this is a growing sense of my convictions, still partly forming, malleable but trying to drive certain ‘stakes’ into the ground to keep testing and improving on a hypothesis or two; that innovation and its management definitely have to change, and fast!

Of course the cloud figures in this as a whole new different way to orchestrate innovation. More on that at another time as I need to get into some more robust discussions with one or two others on this and expand on my own position a lot more.

My recent ‘bingo’ moment was as I was listening to a round-table discussion within GE and its lighting division with a panel of outside thinkers. Beth Comstock, Senior Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer was chairing the discussion, so it will always stay lively and stimulating and it did not disappoint on that. Her throwaway line at the end of the panel session was “Perhaps the headline here is the Big Data Mash-Up”.

Mash-up?  So am I missing a certain beat here? Or does it fit into my thinking

This started me off – Mash Ups, Ecosystems, Platforms, Big Data so how about the Big Mash-Up to help the necessary Smash up?

So off I go on one of my walkabouts, needing to plug into mash-ups a little more.

Business jargon is drawing more and more from our software and computer worlds. We have seen lean, agility, scrum and a host of others entering into our business practices in broader ways than the original application; the principles are being extended out.

So what is a mashup?

In web development, it uses content from more than one source to create a single new service, displayed in a single graphical interface. It works if it is fast, easy to integrate and has clear application interfaces that allow this to happen.

The original term of mashup, according to dear old Wikipedia, comes from British – West Indies slang, meaning to be intoxicated or a description for something or someone not functioning as intended.

I like this as it is the way many of our companies are reeling from all the disruptive changes swirling around them. Also within music, it is used when we remix and combine different aspects of music or song from one vocal track to another.

Thereby ‘mashing them’ together to create something new.

So why do I feel the innovation mashup is coming?

The main characteristics of a mashup are combination, visualization and aggregation so as to make ‘it’ (whatever it is) into something more useful, for personal or professional (or organizational) use.

We have a fair number of mash-ups going on already; in business, mash-ups to reveal actionable information, consumer mash-ups that can come through our browser interfaces (maps and info) and data mash-ups that provide new, more distinctive web services.

I’m not going to get into all the technical stuff on this, let alone the challenges but as you read about the taxonomy structures I start thinking innovation taxonomy. Don’t ask me why but I do.

Let’s smoke a little more here (I’m kidding) and think the Internet of Innovation

We have been digesting the internet of things, the internet of everybody so we need to push this a little more and ask “can a comprehensive vision of how this set of events around digital, data etc., alongside our physical needs, be translated into returns for a business wanting to engaged in greater, more valuable innovation”. These will come from platforms and connect everyone.

I hold one additional thought here “virtualizing the core business” and extending this beyond the core, to deliver innovation faster and better by orchestrating its parts to architect the future, based on responding to real needs and extending those existing deliverables that continue to provide value.

We need to manage innovation in more real-time, we need to dramatically improve the process, we need to pull together often the disparate knowledge, we need to inform better, we need to place what we are doing into a greater context and we need greater predictive decision-making.

What we have working the innovation activity is ripe for disruption. Innovation and its management is mostly operating with the 20th-century model.

The move towards digital-physical mashups

Darrell Rigby of Bains & Co., wrote a recent article in the September 2014 Harvard Business Review entitled the “digital-physical mashup”. You could imagine that got my attention in my walkabout.

His view is we are in a period of upheaval, do we see technologies as a threat or a new pathway. The growing reality is digital has the real potential to destroy our existing positions in existing markets.

We see this with digital platforms, those who lean on physical assets to attack the incumbents, take Airbnb for example in its mattress and B&B challenge to hotels or Kickstarter for alternative funding. Value creation is being rethought in totally different ways and business models and being staged on platforms.

Now, what happens when you combine digital and physical? As Darrell comments, there is a growing ‘weaving’ of digital and physical worlds to come tightly together. He cites Nike+ that is giving more than 30 million customers tracking, sharing of runs, workouts and setting fitness goals as the shoe has a built-in sensor and can work with your iPod to see data on time, distance, calories burned and can all be synced back, compared for charting your progress.

Here we see digital sport emerging, the ones not embracing technology will suddenly have their market position erode (and fast)

Then we come back to GE and Beth Comstock’s throwaway line “the big data mashup”

GE when they decide to move into something, tend to do it big time. They make “big bets on big things” according to their CEO and Chair Jeff Immelt. Big Data Analytics is one of these exploding for them. They have housed this under “Industrial Internet” and GE Predictivity TM for asset and operations optimization.

This will come from these analytic insights, through the use of sensors and other technologies in aviation, rail, oil & gas, power generation, wind, power distribution, healthcare, mining, water and process technologies, lighting and manufacturing from machines that are self-aware interacting with other machines and their human operators.

The collecting of data is impossible to manually analyse but if this can be translated into insights through analytics and big data management techniques, visualization and dashboards techniques, that can manage complex machines, save labour, downtime, direct resources and reduce costs it certainly opens up the thinking.

GE’s estimates could be as much as $20 billion in wasted deficiencies per year. Further opportunities will simply occur as this gets understood more as it gets rolled out.

Wikibon analysts believe the analytics market will be worth more than $47 billion by 2017 and Gartner reckons the rise of the Internet of Things will propel the global IT industry past the $3.8 trillion mark by the end of this year.

I can certainly see this as a valuable and seemingly ‘big bet’ sandbox to go and play in and GE is doing this on a strong execution platform. They already have scale, they are just scaling this more into a different business model and value propositions.

Big Data is coming of age, can we handle it?

Big Data is going to certainly drive IT spending in the next few years, yet it is its translation that promises to be within the value extracted, on how we interpret this through analytics, insights and what it then yields in improved productivity, new product designs and service offerings. It all signals a very healthy set of new innovation activities in new products, services and through new business model designs. The fusing of digital and physical for new opportunities is upon us.

So are we seeing the groundwork for a new industrial age where innovation will increasingly play even more of a part, one that needs us to focus on the data, our people and the whole architecture, where the ability to collaborate, exchange, network and decipher what is coming towards you in meaningful ways to turn insight into commercial opportunity seems beckoning?

So is our current innovation systems fit for purpose?

So real-time comes up against old-time innovation processes – something will have to give.

So there is a whole new world of possibilities, a mash-up of the cloud, data, analytics, digital/physical combinations, and real-time activities all crowding into the existing innovation pipeline, manually being cranked along. No, something needs to change. We need to really begin to dump these legacy systems for manual innovation and really step back here.

The BHAG for innovation is needed here
We need to take a very different perspective on the innovation process. We need a greater visual control across our organizations; we need to build a completely new end-to-end innovation management system on a platform approach.

We need to collect and aggregate more knowledge, information and data than ever, the complexity will simply grow as we connect more the digital and physical worlds and innovation is being expected from this fusion.

Fusing the parts, forming the bigger picture

We need to give up on ‘hard end of line’ measures and metrics (so anti-empathy) and go into analytics far more, for driving innovation along its new process constantly at its point of need (note that), embrace data, seek and design new deployment models like cloud and mobility, merge the architecture design of the innovation process onto a visualization platform, seek out those that can contribute both inside and outside the organization.

We need to orchestrate, and provide stunningly different user interfaces (beyond the Excel spreadsheet please) that can come into you wherever you are, tailored to the individual’s role within the innovation development process.

We need to make it highly adaptive, so at a particular time to make it flexible as an on-demand need, drag and drop knowledge into your space to make it hugely dynamic full of interactions, modular and capable of being extended within our more elastic (flexible) enterprises.

A future full of collaboration built on real-time and valuable insight

The future will be collaborative, full of mash-ups to make innovation happen. Innovation management needs to be in the driving seat of changing in response to the next revolution of digital and physical that is ushering in the next era of innovation.

Who is going to take up this grand challenge or is innovation just going to be lagging behind again as efficiency and effectiveness remain as the big brothers dominating the organization’s thinking ‘block’?

We do need a whooping big innovation mashup. By all indications, what is coming towards us we certainly will need some big innovation mashups.

The post Opening Ourselves Up to the Innovation Mashup first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.