I felt it was time to make a restatement.

Let me restate what I am focusing upon here, in this work and why it has a separate, dedicated website to allow me to evolve and share in this discovery and thinking through journey.

So my hypothesis, hopefully covered off in this initial explanation is made on the basis of growing research and evidence, as an investigative point for further work-to-be-done in thinking and constructing around the plotting or mapping out specific innovation landscapes that deliver the innovation capabilities needed.

This work is now at a point it needs additional help to take this out further in a testing and experimental environment and I am looking for one or more ‘willing’ organizations to be the pilot for this to validate and further improve from the learning.

The Challenge I’m trying to Solve

Knowing what are the critical factors for innovation and their dependence for sustaining innovation success are becoming a vital necessity 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.

We need to recognize Resources are scarce and need constant renewal

We still don’t understand the ‘dynamics’ of innovation, the interdependency of the parts. Which parts have greater impact, which are not so important? Innovation is still not treated company-wide in a holistic way as recognition of the dependencies is poorly understood. This is what needs to change.

What and where do you place your resources to gain greater impact? What is important to recognize as needing additional ‘weight and focus’, what capability and competencies need to have a stronger emphasis and why? How can we identify these, make the innovation process more dynamic yet these embed constantly as routines? What would happen if we ignore certain innovation aspects, what would give greater impact to our business?

Why do I think Fitness Landscapes will help?

The pressing need for a firm is to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies/ capabilities to address rapidly changing environments and its ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in market position.

This calls for more ‘dynamic capability” to be achieved, to be available and constantly being built up as they are in flux and change. The basic question that needs to be addressed is “what is our dynamic capabilities and more importantly which critical ones should we focus upon to improve our capabilities and competences to innovate?”

The solution I am looking for offers Innovation Fitness landscapes by provide the understanding of the existing position and ‘point towards’ where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity to adjust and deliver the capabilities and capacities to meet the challenges on hand. Equally to project and forecast the gaps needing solutions to bridge.

Fitness Landscapes as a solution has its roots in Darwin.

In any competitive situation, the survival of the fittest dominates (Darwinian). Knowing your innovation fitness is essential in this race. The question often raised is where do we focus our limited resource to achieve a better fitness to be successful at innovation?

Mapping out innovation capabilities and capacities

Mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. Innovation Fitness Landscapes identify the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain and move towards greater and more successful innovation outcomes. The greater the ‘fitness’ and peaks obtained transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities and increasing tangible outcomes.

These critical factors that are identified give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged or diverse’ the landscape can also determine the greater fitness needed for a higher rate of innovation. The strength of the peaks in these landscapes illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse it potentially is to have resolved as contributing factors.
The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, you begin to make adaptive walks, so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and understanding is needed to be in place so as to resolve the challenges faced. Greater fitness equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter-couple landscape entities and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and improve repeatable cycle times and provides for increasing options to explore.

Moving towards a solution

I want to take this (pioneering) work out for testing and experimenting, to calibrate its framework so it delivers a strong rigor and validation to take out and scale further.  This is why I believe I am at a point of needing some invested time by a client or two to work on this with me in this testing, validation environment.

The solution is a framework that shows promise but it needs to go further from theory into practice. What are the mutual dependencies, how the innovation ‘system’ behaves, what are its more important impact factors which are weaker and what should be considered in the ‘best’ innovation environment?

The key is to know what are those capability points that are dynamic and highly relevant to the delivery of innovation, and dampening down the ones that are less so. A greater innovation fitness equates to more value creation potential as clear distinctive capabilities emerge as points of greater value, these are the dynamic points of your innovation need.

The post Restating the Value Proposition of Innovation Fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Let me share the part that works really well for me. This relates to approaching social media but it equally applies to building innovation capital, it is recognizing and then building the stock and the flows around innovation.

Robin Sloan does a brilliant job of explaining this:

“One of the biggest takeaways was the concept of stock and flow. Do you know about this? Couldn’t be simpler, and really, it’s not even that much of an a-ha.

There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy – too easy.

But I actually think stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean:

• Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
• Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril.
I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

But I’m not saying you should ignore flow! No: this is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after long months or years with your perfectly-polished opus. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisitely-carved marble statue of Boba Fett is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (here it is!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find them all again next time you emerge from your cave.

You can tell that I want you to stop and think about stock here. I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast. But flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein. And the real magic trick in 2010 is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. It’s the hybrid strategy.

Anyway: this is not a huge insight, I know. Mostly I just wanted to share the lingo, because it’s been echoing in my head since my first microeconomics course. Today, whenever I put my hands on the keyboard, I’m asking myself: Is this stock? Is this flow? How’s my mix? Do I have enough of both?”

Source: Robin Sloan http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890

He also added “You’re totally right about the interplay; when everything’s working together, stock leads to flow leads to stock”. “Building bridges between stock and flow”

The post Building bridges between stocks and flows first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The greater fitness you achieve equates to more value creation potential.

The ability to inter‐couple landscape entities, to constantly combine the different capabilities in different often unique ways and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and does improve repeatable cycle times from this constant recreation potential.

The key is to know what these capability points are – by dynamic linking those that are important and ignoring those that are not.

By learning from these experiments or adaptive walks you can quickly operationalize routines that can be quickly absorbed across the organization and so reduce uncertainties and strengthen the capabilities.

The ability to create ‘natural tensions’ from this fitness learning triggers the need to further explore and search out different combinations, this adds even further to your dynamics of innovation understanding.

Tensions can be healthy if channeled correctly, these are the ‘value insight’ moments where diverse knowledge suddenly combines into new potential innovation activity.

We need to search for clear distinctive capabilities so they can emerge and combine in new ways; these are your dynamic points for innovation.

* These are unique to you, they make you distinctive.

* They lead you to new growth, new creations, and new opportunities to innovate.

* You evolve. You constantly look to combine in different ways to stay ‘dynamic’ and sustaining.

If you would like to learn more then please contact me and we can set up a ‘decent’ conversation or meeting to talk through this specifically. Contact paul*AT*agilityinnovation.com

Of course there is a terrific amount of good material on this website to explore and to help you. I encourage you to do just that, to go on your own ‘walkabout’ of this site, take the appropriate time and then we can begin the expedition this is more ‘fit for purpose’ for you and your organization’s specific needs.

The post Greater fitness in innovation offers more value creation potential first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.