It might be the organization has a second quarterly drop in sales and profits or those layoffs simply keep cutting away until you are into the bone. Suddenly the ‘beating heart of innovation seems to slow and sometimes even stops completely. Innovation abruptly goes into intensive care.

We so often miss the ‘vital signs’ of healthy innovation as we get caught up in the issues of the day, in defending our corner or simply playing safe, hoping the ‘ill winds’ that constantly blow over us go away.

In the meantime we often fail to recognize what has ebbed away in creative energy or innovation initiatives until we are heading for the emergency ward, fighting for our competitive lives like others who we had been competitively jogging along with having stayed fit and healthy and simply ‘kept on innovating’ and pulled away. Where did our fitness actually go?

So how do we check our innovative vital signs?


I think there are many ways we can make constant checks and often when I’m visiting organizations you can begin to sense these vital signs and pick up on any warning signs from the conversations, from that ‘buzz’ that does or does not seem to be circulating around the building or the way the people simply talk to you about innovation.

They often don’t speak of innovation with pride but in whispers carefully checking that no one important is in hearing distance, often with implied innuendo of the things not right, more than the many good things that are actually healthy and good.

Many times I find it is simply what is not said that speaks volumes about the health of innovation within organizations.

So what do I use for part of my pulse check on my visits?
If you don’t hear about the plans around the business growth with a real sense of personal conviction and enthusiasm you need to become more alert.

It is how people convey their personal convictions about their innovation values, how they balance the realism of their role with all the multiple pressures simply gives you clues of a health warning or not.

Do they transmit energy or not? What likely ‘impact’ do they see these might have on their innovation future?

This engagement or not does give you an opening warning signal to examine this further within your conversations and explore what are the vital signs that feed into this present attitude. You are beginning your diagnosis through this ‘initial’ pulse.

Checking for different vital signs of a healthy innovation organization

• So often in conversations within organizations you never seem to get that unbridled, confident feeling that they are fostering imaginative business models, let alone knowing there are different ones they could pursue. They really struggle to articulate the innovation story and that is not healthy. A healthy mind is an enquiring mind.
• You also sometimes don’t get any real feeling of experimentation going on, as actively being pursued within the organization. You need to check how this essential element is encouraged or ignored, learnt or overlooked, testing constantly is the equivalent of having a series of warm-up ‘runs’ before being ready for the big one.
• Also, it is worth asking about the ways they seemingly manage risk and look to extract value? Is it left to a chosen few or supported and encouraged for all to learn? Often you simply get that shrug of the shoulders when you ask or its left hanging in the air as something we need to do but as yet have not got around to it. We are comfortable the way we are.
• You can hear of how “we are achieving X, Y & Z” but with some probing, you gather a fair amount of the success would not be coming about without the explicit help of the partners that are contributing to making this happen. Innovation needs partners, it is not a solitary pursuit, it needs to be open to collaboration and alliances, and it needs to flourish with a host of different inputs that provide diversity, provide fresh insights, different skills and rich new experiences. How often do you hear these collaborative stories with any pride or grateful acceptance? Checking how to open an organization is telling you much nowadays.
• The ‘mantra’ of disciplined innovation is heard often nowadays and how it can contribute to competitive outcomes but what is often not stated for innovation is what makes up that organizations sustainable process. Demonstrated outcomes and results are usually simply delegated to C-Level presentations in their quarterly reviews for shareholders?
• We should be checking the vital signs for what is sustaining the innovation process and that should be a source of ongoing pride known and spoken about by all each time they have the opportunity to talk about innovation. I’m looking to understand the ongoing fitness programme regime not the quarterly result.
• When you often join the organization you hear about all the positive energy, the commitments to you and the value of ‘its’ people and their contribution. When do you hear about the way innovation motivates people- the positives, what excites them and motivations them in the way it can engage? If innovation is the lifeblood of an organization I want to hear more on this to understand its real ‘life giving’ flow to everyday activity.
• I always seem to come back in any conversations to ‘context’. If I don’t understand this I simply can’t really give any decent opinion, let alone a qualified one that is often expected without much insight.  It still surprises me on how often context is simply forgotten or ignored and there is a real danger in that. It is piecing this part of the jigsaw together that gives us a thorough understanding and appreciation of the factors that were in play to get to a given point.
• If we don’t know these then we are often wasting our energies on the wrong part of any future innovation fitness and where to channel our efforts. Context gives me the ability to add additional content.
• It is through leadership we get the best sense of the beating ‘pulse’ of innovation in an organization. The leaders don’t have to be physically in the room but if you don’t hear the vision, the stretch in the goals set by them, the guidelines of how this is going to happen how do you know what to do to become fit?
• Leaders are coaches, they should inspire, encourage, cajole, be ready to support and ask you to try and achieve. They should assist the organization in all ways possible.  It is through this innovation regime you raise the pulse and push your performance. A good coach is deeply committed to improving your fitness and raising your game by equipping you with all that is necessary so you have the best chance to achieve any vision or goals.

The innovation pulse can often lead to a need for a deeper fitness examination

Whichever way you read the ‘pulse’ of innovation, the above suggestions can begin to lead you to a better understanding of the health of innovation within organizations.

Exploring expectations, checking these against realities and by gaining that ‘feel’ for the environment does give you more of the readiness, state, purpose and critical aspects that need working upon to raise the innovation fitness and avoid the risk of having a period of stay in the intensive care.

If we don’t train daily for innovation fitness and understand the value of all the enablers around us, we can miss a number of vital signs and then miss the real healthy beat of innovation success.

Have you taken your innovation pulse lately? Perhaps you need to see your doctor and have an assessment.

The post Are we constantly checking for the pulse of innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

As someone who runs a small, independent consulting and research business that is 100% focused on innovation, the focus has to be on capabilities so  I am always grateful for the continued involvement of the bigger consulting companies in producing sound, relevant and topical research issues on innovation and the building out greater, well-researched understanding.

Large consulting organizations ‘stoke the innovation fire within’, they confirm what you felt you knew but needed it to be validated. These great sources include McKinsey, Bain & Co, Booz & Co, Monitor, BCG, ADL and to a lesser degree Accenture for innovation research.

There are others but the ability to have access to C-Level thinking is this groups real strength and so they come more immediate to mind.

The emphasis is on distinct capabilities for innovation success.
Recently we had the release of the annual Global Innovation 1000 from Booz & Co (now Strategy&), updated under “global innovation” and there was an increased emphasis on distinct capabilities that each company has in talent, knowledge, team structures, tools and processes that are put together to enable their innovation efforts. Booz calls this the “coherence premium”.

I regard these as “the dynamics within the capabilities that need to be fully understood and needed to be focused upon to be more successful in innovation”.
Irrespective, those big, consistent growing questions still nag away in the CEO’s mind on innovation.

“What and where do I place my limited (and scarce) resources to maximize the impact of our innovation efforts and how can I be sure?”

“What are those capabilities that generate differential advantage?” How can the CEO or CIO identify the links and connections they want to make their innovation activity align more with the overall capabilities system they have in place? Where does the CEO place his ‘bets’ to get the limited resources he has available aligned to gain this better return on the investments in innovation?

Can we identify a common set of critical innovation capabilities?

I believe we can. Something that is not as it is presently, scattershot in building innovation capabilities but distinct to what the CEO wants to achieve, knowing the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy and then in his awareness of the organizations innovation fitness learn how to improve, focus and execute these distinct capabilities needed in a highly focused manner- sound too good to be true? I don’t think so.

My work on dynamic capabilities for innovation

Over a period of the last eighteen months or so, I have been studying and researching this whole area. I have some hypotheses that need testing but the outcome of this effort to date has got me closer to believing we can achieve greater identification with those distinct capabilities to support EACH unique position.

Firstly you have to keep in mind the big four issues to think around 1) the Environment Complexity, 2) The Existing Asset Base, 3) the Value Creation Mechanisms established, and lastly 4) the Organizing Context of what innovation needs to achieve for the organization. Context for me is really important and often lacking.

The objectives behind this work are to show present and future impact of innovation.

Simply put it is to provide a robust model that understands the critical aspects that impact innovation, that can show the critical dependencies to focus upon and understand there need, so these can lead to which ones are more likely to deliver ‘greater’ growth through a more focused approach and provide longer‐term sustainability in innovation activity.

Background of why this model is potentially important to provide.
All companies talk about innovation and its growing importance but few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale. What inhibits innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to have so innovative growth can be achieved? Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities?

Let me first outline the challenge I see.

Knowing what are the critical factors and their dependencies for sustaining innovation success is vital to understand so that an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them. The questions are: 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 answers and having these clearer to achieve a higher ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII) has a real business value.

Today, we lack a clear system model that brings the critical innovation factors out and gives them their appropriate values of importance so resources can be allocated accordingly.

Also if this can further be extended to provide the ability to model different future states and conceived future scenarios through different impact-investment simulations, this would certainly provide a strong relational tool for assessing business and innovation allocation with the appropriate resources to achieve a greater ‘fitness and impact’ in innovation to focus upon within their capability build.

Today’s challenges lie with understanding Dynamics Capabilities and the organization’s fitness to innovate.

Firm resources are scarce; we still don’t understand the ‘dynamics’ of innovation, the interdependency of the parts, this framework I’m presently working upon sets out to achieve this. 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 I want 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, and 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 each company needs to know its Fitness Landscapes
The pressing need for a firm is to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities to address rapidly changing environments and it is the ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in rapid changing market conditions that will emerge as the winners of the innovation race.

This calls for more ‘dynamic capability” to be achieved. The basic question that needs to be addressed is “what are our dynamic capabilities?” More importantly “which critical ones should we focus upon to improve our capabilities and competences to innovate?” Fitness landscapes provide the understanding of the existing position and then point to where to place your resource so as to improve your innovative capacity through understanding the dynamics of ALL the parts and selecting the ones that are the critically important ones for the organization to achieve their goals.

Jumping to the end result of what I want to achieve.

Progressively within this blog I can outline this concept further as I continue. Now is not the time as my work is still a significant work-in-progress, and I am searching for ways to take this forward quickly through a collaborative format where the potential partner can support and develop this further. Do you have any collaborative  suggests?

All I can do at present is share the result outcomes I would like to achieve from this work:
Expected results I am seeking out of this work will lead too:

1. A framework that moves towards a company-wide development program that gains identification and the target of company-wide improvement of routines and different skills required for innovation to succeed/ improve and be distinctive.
2. Pursuing limited or ‘selective’ development will not have the desired effect, it is not just a human resource department exercise or individual division or team level exercise, but provide a framework that offers the real answer to innovation and why it does require a ‘holistic’ view of innovation development to manage.
3. Be in a position to challenges long-established organizational capabilities and routines that are taking place by knowing where (and why) they reside and are often more ‘static’ in reality than understood. Often many of these ‘static’ capabilities are simply not valuable to further invest in, the waste of precious funds just for the sake of it, as other areas identified offer a more dynamic aspect closer to achieving the strategic results set within the corporate strategy for innovation return.
4. Importance of linking capability to become dynamic with the strategy gives greater alignment and potential and can offer a clear capability portfolio where resource needs to be applied to bring new value and alignment to the organizations goals.
5. The internal dialogue generates a self-reflection process for identification of true and ‘false’ dynamic capabilities and identifies the more static ones that often just need reinforcement. The solutions draw out internal discussions for a recognition and reality of the present and future needs in this area of innovation resource allocation.
6. It provides the means to achieve additional resource allocation and raising the importance of these to support the strategic intent of the company and it intensifies and solidifies the studies and importance of innovation within the framework of the organization as an area of specialized knowledge.
7. Results achieved from this raises the need to understand dynamic innovation capability. Knowing the importance and effect of dynamism for the growing need of greater flexibility and agility in changing, challenging times becomes a clear focus. Then through seeking routines and knowing the diversity within these choices, one can identify the basis of sound differentiation to meet different innovation challenges.

My closing thoughts here.

Can I achieve this framework; I stated that I think so. Clearly there are many variables or factors for innovation success and far too often organizations suffer from the inability to sustain innovation over time. There is a failure to fully appreciate or recognize that there are many inter-dependencies that surround innovation.

We must break out of selecting innovation activities that simply appeal or are the current vogue. To generate sustaining, distinctive innovation does not have to be elusive, it is through a more comprehensive, holistic approach and recognition of the dynamics within innovation capabilities that are needed to solve your objectives.

I’m working on the components that make up dynamic innovation, as we do need to provide a more comprehensive framework for knowing which capabilities are the important ones to focus upon and which are not.

The post Thinking over dynamic capabilities for innovation success first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.