As we look to enter into 2016 what is top of mind for innovation to take hold and become the real core within our business organizations?

Some of my quick thoughts or repeating mantras, no apologies here:

• Innovation is not the preserve of the (selected) few but the domain of the community, it is encouraging our connections to actually connect and exchange mutual value and knowledge.
• Moving innovation from just being symbolic to essential. We must stop dipping our toes in the water, we need to just jump in and get wet. We need to get everyone involved and wanting to contribute engaged and  excited on where innovation can really take us
• Recognizing innovation is traversing functions, entities and boundaries faster than ever. Find ways to get out of the way to allow it to flow where the energy goes and then ‘attempt’ to capture it for the good of all.

• Keep opening the Enterprise to external knowledge. Keep breaking down those barriers of resistance to allow this openness to further take hold, expand and contribute into your everyday thinking. Make the “network effect” really mean something in results

• Collaboration is formed at the hip with Co-creation. Making sure you are extracting your fair share of value from all these exchanges.

• Design is increasing to the fore in many organizations. We don’t need to over work it or push it beyond its limit. We do need to blend it in and fuse it with other techniques, so to sort out where it fits within the innovation mix and valuing it for its ‘added’ worth to transform information into achieving tangible outcomes

• We need to explore, experiment, prototype, adapt, become more agile, keep it lean, pivot on new learning and anything else that helps us to speed up the process and keep learning and churning.

• The combining of great design and appropriate functionality is giving your customers what they need and feel good about, it is a powerful combination to achieve and never forget to aspire to achieve in all you offer.

• Platforms and ecosystems are emerging to manage complex innovation challenges and knowing where and how you can fit into these to extract more are essential but it is a learning game for most of us to explore. Do this with a real conscious effort to leverage its exciting promise.

• The bottom of the pyramid is a place we continue to forget and others learn to play in and master its needs. It is very relevant in today’s more cost-conscious market conditions and provides the emerging understanding of what helps resolve ‘jobs-to-be-done’ and deliver to different market needs.

• The power of social innovation and linking your product to societal needs Scaling becomes important to expand this out. We need to “reconnect to dominant economic activities of the larger society”, add a ‘higher’ purpose to our innovation activity.

• Reverse innovation and its ability to be re-scaled to adapt across different markets is equally a valuable source of growth within organizations. We do need to learn from not only others what is actually possible so a product can enter previously untapped markets but what we can do to reduce ‘’bloat and complexity within our own product offerings.

• We will continue to probe and search for a different organizational design, even further away from the linear process of cause and effect that has dominated much of the 20th-century thinking and how we can have a ‘dual’ thinking around exploitation and exploration. Innovation design needs both.

• Of course, the raw power of technology and all things digital with all the data flowing in continues to dominate much of our thinking presently, yet it continues to need a clear focus on its use and understanding, as well as having in place the systems and analytic capabilities we need internally to process these insights and extract the value.

Whatever is achieved to move the innovation needle in the year ahead, it is going to require focused leadership, a clear innovation alignment to the strategy being pursued, along with a climate and environment conducive to allowing the encouragement of ideas that can be translated into new commercial or social value, valued by customers or markets as solving their problems

We all need to ‘advance’ innovations position within our collective thinking, our growth and future well-being are increasingly reliant on it to deliver solutions to even more complex problems. or improve on the existing, ones in more imaginative and environmentally friendly ways.

Wishing you a cracking innovating time in 2016

Adapted from a post on LinkedIn on December 27th 2015.

The post Moving innovation even more in 2016 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

What must not be forgotten is that we must manage the innovation activities across all the three horizons of innovation and that adds even more complexity.

What is ensured from this complexity is that you can expect innovation does get very entangled in balancing out the resources that are available and needed, to handle all the conflicting, competing demands placed within the innovation system.

For the innovation teams involved in the multiple tasks, getting this balance right and also trying to justify further support to keep all the activities progressing on time, is tough.

We need to exploit and we need to explore and those often require different mindsets or structures.

Each of the innovation horizons can demand different management’s attention for allocation, response and focus.

Horizon one represents the company’s core businesses today, horizon two includes the rising stars of the company that will, over time, become new core businesses, whereas horizon three consists of nascent business ideas and opportunities that could be future growth engines.

This link takes you to a series of discussions on the three horizons http://tinyurl.com/d97bkhh for a deeper explanation.

Dual needs are often conflicting
How often do you face the real difficulties of striking the right balance between those dual needs of meeting what is important to service in today’s business for short-term performance and targets, with the other critical aspect of pushing the performance into the next horizons of innovation?

Those future horizons that offer the space for the new concepts and ideas that eventually lay down the expected foundations for your continued growth.

Managing across the different horizons really places a complexity for constantly juggling and balancing out different sets of high-yielding performances, often from the same team. To help we need to have a much clearer understanding on the aspects that make up innovation management.

Grouping the necessary activities

Here I’ve attempted to group into what I feel are the four critical focal attributes and their activities that are needed to be managed, planned out and pursue across the innovation horizon mix to deliver on the innovation expected . These need a fairly advanced organisational structure to be managed effectively.

I feel there are four critical activities to balance out across the three innovation time horizons.

1. Strategic planning, portfolio management to manage the growth management pressures
2. Project productivity, execution and disciplines to drive the system
3. Managing relationships, increasing more external through open innovation and emerging new platform management techniques and collaborations to accelerate activities
4. Securing, anchoring and developing the talent to deliver the innovation needed.

These are not so easy to work on simultaneously, it needs some deeper thinking through and management skills to balance the many conflicting pressures found within the innovation system. Here I just discuss the concepts and activities within each.

These need to be thought through individually by each organization to balance out which is not an easy task, often not as well-considered by external observers or advisors as they should be.

• Strategic planning, portfolio management

The balances here are focused more on evaluating emerging opportunities; ensuring portfolio consistency and demonstrating where the portfolio returns lie.

Then strategically and tactically working to exploit and combine any cross-over projects, updating on a constant on-going prioritization the impact of the different growth platforms, and finally monitoring the activities that are working themselves through the innovation system for communicating their changing value.

• Project productivity and execution

Here the focus is far more on the disciplines within the system. The optimization and appropriate allocation of the necessary resources for embedding project management disciplines, demonstrating constantly the validity of what you are doing, reducing rework, demonstrating the value of the activity to meet the required end result going through the innovation pipeline.

There is a growing need is to build up clear prototyping and scaling techniques, plan to ‘inject’ dedicated specialists into projects to drive and offer appropriate advice where needed and be constantly ready to show viability from the work progressing through the pipeline .

Finally, here, there is the need to find the right balance between customization and standardization techniques to provide the optimum yield from these activities.

• Management across external and internal relationships is complex.

More and more open innovation seen as accelerating the innovation activities is placing a real increase on the demands for exploiting and promoting different collaborations platforms.

As there is an increasing need to attract different partners for working across often very diverse platforms this is placing increasing demand in the management of a complex set of dynamics across new and ever-changing relationships with outside parties.

There is a need to explore different techniques here that involve discovery syndicates, venture networks, deploy absorption teams and seeking out a range of idea and technology sourcing networks to feed into the internal organizations process and systems. Each plays its part in providing focus and exploring new yields to accelerate innovation activities.

• Managing the talent needed for innovation

Firstly securing, then anchoring and developing the diverse range of skills required to manage in a complex innovation system is increasing hard to complete.

Not only do you have to map out workforce supply and demand, analyse and account for many different career preferences to meet personal circumstances, you have to leverage the skills across different needs and these three horizons. T

he growing importance of sharing knowledge, both tacit and explicit, that can be fully absorbed and exploited requires an absorptive capacity structure http://tinyurl.com/crtdv86 needs consistent attention and re-fuelling.

Four aspects that offer increasing value are, developing up a system for assessing the impact analysis of where resources can offer the best return, exploring where you can work to improving faster cycle times, building technology and knowledge libraries, and finally exploring different portfolio scenarios, all need to be simultaneously developed and exploited.

Lastly, the structuring of effective teams always needs that consistent attention. The ability to constantly build up the competencies and capacity for more ‘responsive’ and depth in skills.

These are increasingly required to meet the changing innovation activities that are expected over the complete innovation development life cycle, where fresh discoveries are always occurring and you can reposition resources to capitalize on these ‘breaking’ opportunities.

How are you managing across these four?

Each of these four critical attributes is certainly placing increased demand on those that are managing within the innovation system. It requires for some advanced planning and attention within the management of innovation. Of course this grows in complexity by the size of organizations innovation activities and need.

Recognizing each of these four and being able to balance the often conflicting demands across different innovation horizons and competing for scarce resources within organizations is far from easy. It needs dedicated focus within innovation management.

How are you tackling this complex need for different high-yielding management within innovation? This is not an easy task and sometimes we external commentators forget when we keep layering on more ’timely’ advice and poking around with our innovation sticks.

It is always very different when you are in the ‘eye of the storm’ than being the observer.

Certainly a ‘tip of the hat’ to those that manage within this complexity, it is not easy to balance out all the competing, often relentless demands placed on innovation’s exploitation needed across the three different horizons.

Thanks to the Research & Technology Executive Council for their past benchmarking in these areas.

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I have recently been in some different discussions about the merits and balances required for the separation to manage incremental and radical innovation. Partly this is in preparation for a workshop later this month but partly from a conversation, I am having with a sizable, well-respected organization, with its head office based here in Europe.

In the conversation within the organization, we were discussing the breakdown in their treatment of incremental and radical and they suggested this was being managed within an “ambidextrous structure” yet I was not convinced. I have to point out this was only a part of a broader story on the difficulties of managing conflicting innovation demands that they were having.

One key constraint in their thinking I felt was not having distinct units as they were trying to manage incremental and radical through the same process and that, for me, is a basic mistake.

I feel to truly claim an ambidextrous organization you have to be working towards the conceptual model offered by Reilly and Tushman on the “Ambidextrous Organization”

Reilly and Tushman’s argument was to truly flourish, not only do you need to maintain a variety of innovation efforts but  it does need more of a recognition of the full organization to manage these differently, not in isolation or selected parts of your organization.

You need to consciously address the differences and build those into the twin process of managing incremental and radical. Let me offer my take on this.

Simultaneous the need is to manage the differences in Exploration & Exploitation.

I love how two words have such potential in their meaning and approach. It is the same as ‘divergence or convergence’. They clarify distinct differences, you don’t merge them, and you treat them as one leading into the other (divergence into convergence) or running in parallel (exploration & exploitation) for good reason.

Exploring and exploiting do need separation, at least in our thinking or applying. In organizations that practice ambidextrous design, they separate the new, exploratory units from their more traditional, exploitative ones, allowing for different processes, structures and cultures to emerge but it is at the senior management level they maintain tight links.

This way you can pioneer more breakthrough or even disruptive innovation while allowing the incremental gains to be focused, and optimized without this consistent set of  distractions of trying to balance the two within the same resource pool or trying to squeeze it through the same assessment and timeline process.

It is very different when you have to go on exploratory expeditions which are harder to determine and the last thing is having the constant pressure of balancing for time and between types of innovation. Exploration & Exploitation approaches need really different measuring metrics also.

It is at the senior leadership level any conflicts are managed not within the unit or organization department or even by a head of the unit if the organization does not manage in this ‘ambidextrous’ way. If you attempt to manage these together I think you don’t extract the full benefits you can gain from having this more dedicated focus, working on distinctly different innovation needs.

What does radical mean to you?

The other issue I have is the use of ‘radical’ within the discussion. This can create such different meaning for each of us and can certainly be preconceived, so it already becomes hard to let go or change.

Also ‘radical’ is often felt in larger organizations as something that simply does not fit as they are not a radical organization but a careful, often too cautious one.

So ‘breakthrough’ seems to be a more natural fit and sits opposite of ‘incremental’ far more in my mind and it seems most others, worried over the ‘radical’ label.

For incremental you exploit  through upgrading, adding more choice or building on what you presently offer, whereas you explore far more for breakthrough projects.

You can rightly point out there are numerous different type approaches and I recently wrote on what is the appropriate design within our organization (http://bit.ly/zdUhKp ) using radical I know. Your type is partly determined by your structure and its degree of optimization of its potential flexibility and what you need to achieve.

So what are differences to be recognized for Exploring and Exploiting?
The understanding has to come back to alignment, the alignment to strategic intent (of the innovation need) and the recognition of distinct differences in critical tasks.

It is defining the differences is the role of the leader, who is either managing incremental or breakthrough innovation,as they should focus on different competences, controls, rewards and the environment you are expected to work within, to deliver these as effectively as possible. It is difficult to ‘flip’ between the two as they call for distinct mindsets.

Again it is the power of the difference in thinking about these. Using the comparison of exploitative versus exploratory in this two-word comparison that I love, does give you the real differences in the focus that needs to be recognized and undertaken.

I’m sure you can extend this list even more but the point is that the difference in mindset is significantly opposite. Can you apply these within the same business group or unit? I seriously doubt it.

Eating from the same innovation stew pot everyday might not be the best solution.

As we think of innovation we have to be careful not to limit ourselves, not just in approach or types but in the way we set about and manage this.

Trying to bring all aspects of innovation activity into one ‘pot’ means you end up with an often underwhelming stew. It simply fails to really deliver, as you failed to do the necessary separating and distinctive preparations that all the parts needed to be achieved as your end result, to meet the different market needs that are around.

You need to separate, the innovation that sets about protecting the core, building and strengthening it and that that pushes and extends the business beyond.  These really require really different mindsets in approaching and managing across the organization.  Not just in  isolated pockets struggling to balance the different demands being placed on them.

Within these ‘collective’ silo’s they can’t differentiate distinctly enough and until this is fully understood it constrains and adds unnecessary pressures.

Unless you address this  it is never fully appreciated across the organization on what is needed to be going on and how you should support and measure it’s results. Bundled up it all becomes a compromise.

There needs to be this realization that incremental and breakthrough are so different in activities, processes, structure, cultures and metrics to attempt to achieve the optimized effect, you need this ‘dual effect’.

Having a clear separation in managing incremental and breakthrough innovations is more effective and efficient but please don’t tip them in in the same pot, but distinct and separate innovation ‘cooking’ mediums, to achieve a more outstanding and differentiated set of results where compromise was not down to being mixed into the same general approach.
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