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.

• I like the principles of “demonstrating, validating, sharing and discussing” as you ‘plug’ into each other so you can achieve active dialogue on ‘given’ subjects on a solid ‘give and take’ approach.
• Often we constrain ourselves in working out the prescribed agenda of needs before we get into any dialogue, I think this is a huge mistake. We should make conversations creative, a rich mix of development techniques that generate good interactions and create that growing bond and identification.
• We need to allow time to let discussions and exchanges grow and flow and sometimes they can move into unusual directions that lead to even better creative exchanges for value building.
• We need to seek a bias for action, by simply keeping on asking the basics of “for whom, why are we discussing this, how can we proceed, when and what issues stand in our way?”
• I like the idea to start off any potential innovation conversation with a belief of its change possibilities; it opens us up to what both parties can truly get out of the collaboration.

The need is for both sides to feel they are gaining from any collaborations

• We should always start with the belief that we need to gain mutually, and often just simply recognizing that you might ‘just’ simply gain personal knowledge and insights that could offer value somewhere ‘down the line’.
• Each side constantly needs to track back to a sense of worth and that comes from allowing time for feedback and open thinking. Take your time to really engage in mutual conversations, they prove to be increasingly valuable over time.
• By the use of design thinking techniques can certainly help in providing a greater dimension to provide ideas to flow, makes exchanges and creative moves towards solutions. Learn the techniques and then try it as an alternative way to work and create together.
• We need to practice “circles of conversation” where they loop around, move around the parties and you gain increasingly from the positive reinforcing loop of different conversation strands.
• Lastly, we all bond, sometimes not so much with the problem but far more with the person explaining the problem, so mixing up the expected problem statement with personal experience and your values makes for a far more positive atmosphere, leading to fruitful conversations you might not have initially expected.

Why is collaboration so important to our future?
As we engage, we learn.
We can’t imagine what we don’t often see; others open our minds to new possibilities. We can stay anchored in what we see and do, or if we are prepared to let go and have this ‘freedom’ to look for mutual exchange we can scale new heights. Conversations, exchanges and collaborations give us the experience to learn.
The huge value of collaborative exchanges is how it opens up our minds as we sometimes realise that we were ‘vested’ in selective thoughts that were less informed than we expected. Opinions can fall away as better ones replace them.
We need to let go, unlock the knowledge that comes from collaborations. Just remember outsiders are not insiders, they have different perspectives and do not expect to ‘shoe horn’ their opinions into the one size fits all.
I’d argue to remain as open as possible, so as to allow yourself to simply open up in a world of mutual collaboration, it can lead to some powerful innovation ideas. Build trust, value your own instincts and permit judgement calls to be pushed off until you have allowed the other party to explain their potential contribution, and then jointly work towards the solutions.
Make your collaborative efforts move just beyond open innovation into relationships that continue the learning process for all sides. Make all your collaborating endeavours stimulating, then you move into that higher creative, co-creating gear and it is a far more rewarding place to be.
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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. 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 Achieving a higher collaborative gear first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Well some of us do, but sadly most tend to become risk-avoiding because of the environment they are in or have been associated with for long periods, where avoidance rubs off, it seeps into the soul.

Many enjoy being simply ‘passive’, avoiding anything that smacks of being ‘proactive’; it is safer to be ‘reactive’. Innovation and heaven can equally wait.

Putting it simply most people and organizations are just afraid to take risks and this fear takes over and drives their choices. Innovation is certainly something that suffers from this fear of risk.

Organizations miss critical opportunities, individuals fail to speak out and argue for a given change or innovative idea. We can simply stop growing, to want to become something more, we take the easy option, we avoid risk.

Reducing innovation to the lowest common denominator.

How often have you felt all the risk mitigation has been taken out of the innovation concept you have been working upon, for it to emerge as a pale reflection of the original idea? Often I can hear.

We need to be reminded that innovation is the act (risk-taking) of introducing something new (creativity) that adds potential value. By reducing the risk we often do not produce something better, just simply an alternative to what is already out there.

Minimise the risk, strive for certainty, avoid the awkward questions, and just keep the head down and toe the line.

Our organizations talk about the need for risk but don’t walk the risk path.
The understanding of risk will always have associated with some fear, discomfort and resistance and that can be an uncomfortable place to go.

The whole ‘act’ of letting go is never easy. It is the ability to manage the risk that reduces its fear. It is through experimentation we gain our best learning, we actually are forward learning as we are accelerating our knowledge.

Surely the more we attempt something different, proving or disproving it makes for exciting work, we become motivated, curious and want more, providing there is an encouraging environment to experiment and explore.

As I have suggested before “shaping ideas, taking risks, allowing experimentation, providing tolerance (of failure or debate), exploring the unknowns, all should be an integral part of innovation”.

Innovation is risk-taking so let’s embrace it, not just for the sake of taking risks where you can become addicted to the thrill but in constantly seeing the positive payoff within the risk, it needs to be appropriate and set against the ‘given’ situation and the learning in potential loss but recognizing the potential in gain.

The search is for meaningful contributions

There is so much negativity swirling around our organizations, a real detachment that is raising alarm bells.

Today’s workers are “neither empowered nor inspired to navigate the challenges faced by twenty-first-century organizations” according to a recent Deloitte report and commented upon here by Steve Denning .

As Steve observes in this article, as a result, creative, passionate workers simply don’t want to work in organizations with “clearly defined roles, organizational silos, and predictability”.

We are also in real need of better “inner working lives” and we need to look for ways to allow our people to become engaged, feeling part of something that allows for being more creative and passionate.

An environment offering somewhere that is seen as more productive, looking to build for future contribution and finding ways to be more collegial, working in teams on these experiments and explorations to learn and advance the innovation thinking. It allows us to grow from within.

We need to find ways for higher levels of risk tolerance. We push the ordinary back into the extraordinary and all of us what to be associated with those sorts of moments, those events that give meaning, purpose and pride to what we do. We need to allow risk in, so the risk can come and live with you.

Our leaders need to lead and guide.

When one hears that the leadership is in disagreement it tends to stop organizations from being adventurous until that issue or sticking point is resolved.

When it comes to innovation we do need to look to our management to manage option proliferation, resolve criteria disagreements, overcome stalled decisions, clarify rejections or discount new ideas before they are ‘fully’ formed

Those leaders assigned to lead innovation need to become more engaged, stop the limited participation and take the time innovation does require. Head nodding or ‘just’ talking innovation just does not cut it!

Commitment does matter, enormously, up and down the organization.
We need to recognize allowing risk is becoming the basis for a commitment to change

Wanting innovation requires the need to encourage the management of risk. Today we are in markets with slower growth, higher volatility and potential for disruption. Risk needs to be proactive, not reactive.

Equally the sentiment that we cannot disrupt our core needs some shifting in thinking as others are busy working on ways to do that to you at this very minute. Risk comes from not knowing.

We need to manage the ‘certainty of return’ by making the knowledge that comes from incremental steps of an experiment to validate an idea into a new innovation needs this consistently improving the business case.

That comes from steady ‘readiness-based decisions that prototypes or pilots put into the hands of the consumer or customer to explore around, will advance our knowledge, each time of the potential value and ‘seen’ worth of this concept over the existing ones in the market place.

Shifting our thinking can be gradual in learning

The effectiveness of risk assessments, capturing more and more external market data and attempting group prioritization certainly helps but in volatile markets this is not enough.

We need to develop those risk-mitigation steps to constantly increase confidence; we need to look more internally or with our partners at our capabilities to measure the controllable factors and events to keep innovation on track and we need to seek out individual stakeholders discussions to manage their unique concerns.

This is far more a shift to execution than relying on market attractiveness conditions alone.

Thinking about risk in those different and manageable ways to move forward and grow

We need to mitigate uncertainty by constantly reiterating known and unknown risks through these constant engagements in experimentation, prototyping, and piloting concepts. This needs to be in a more dynamic ‘management of the portfolio’ concept, from concept to commercialization process.

A place where risk-mitigation needs to be in-built all the way, to build knowledge as it ‘reveals’ itself. In innovation, mostly completely new to the world it is never apparent, you have to ‘tease ‘ it out on its value and contribution.

Everything simply cannot be available when you often just don’t know, you take small steps often to feel your way and build that knowledge up.

We need to understand our reach and ability to grasp

The ability to push on and find out, to stretch, to understand our reach and our grasp, does need some risk-taking but in thoughtful, measured steps.

Good innovation needs measured risk-taking and let’s learn the ways to allow our innovation to happen and get our passion and engagement back, flowing through the veins of our organizations.

We need a mantra of ‘build-test-feedback-revise’ iterations performing constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty. One that is far more agile, vibrant, dynamic, and flexible that applies a leaner, faster and more adaptive and risk-based approach.

The risk-contingency is about constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty.

We need to move forward with a degree of certainty but also perhaps a little fear.
How about this as an idea to explore?
How about approving some pilot projects and providing resources to have unfettered six-month periods with no rules and no reviews but at the end of this agreed period, ‘something’ has to be seen and tested by a customer.

Then you embed the learning and further scale
It encourages risk but in clear time frames and with a definitive result that advances knowledge and takes you closer to its future value.

You look for and encourage new perspectives. Is this that risky or is it perhaps allowing risk to be managed in new ways of learning?

We do need to rethink the management of risk for innovation.

New business growth is very different from business as usual but in all honesty, is there that much business as usual still around?

We do need to loosen up our thinking on risk when it comes to innovation, otherwise, our growth will remain limited, stuck in the fear of the unknowns?

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