The Nine Stages that are needed for developing an understanding of your innovation capabilities, so as to make them more dynamic and as a result to be at the top of your innovation game.
This “step process” I believe gets you to the point of understanding what innovation capabilities are a better ‘fit’ for the purpose, to deliver on your innovation needs on a consistent, repeatable and evolving basis.
Building innovation capabilities take time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment. Any learning involves sensing, seizing and then transforming.
We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustainable into the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and constantly adapted to meet the strategic need. Continue reading “Understanding your innovation capabilities to make them more dynamic”
To deliver innovation, sustaining innovation, it needs to be built on dynamic skills, then you have to learn how you can orchestrate the capabilities you have, with those you have to bring in.
Building on those that give the necessary dynamic result you are looking for; to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the required result.
I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from building ‘just’ internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network effect’ from these.
This work just gets more exciting as it evolves.
It relies on how you purposefully build and construct these capabilities and competencies. The orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts to deliver the right result. We need to orchestrate, to build and then conduct and deliver the right results, to the innovation goals we seek.
Innovation often fails to align with the strategic needs. This is often not the fault of the innovator happily working away with no specific guidelines, apart from the general remit of “we need to be more innovative”, it lies in the boardroom not communicating the board’s needs clearly enough down the organization.
Building up our capacity to innovation does need to understand and reflect the organization’s business activities but it is grasping the value creation aspects that will deliver the necessary capital-efficient and profitable growth.
Even the basic questions often remain unclear, those of are we looking to grow revenue, reduce costs, reduce working capital or improve our fixed capital? I expect the CFO would say “all of them” but each does have implications on the understanding of the fit and eventual role of innovation. Then where does risk fit into the strategic equation for innovation, it lacks often the clarity it needs.
Deciding that capabilities can be better leveraged requires a separation of exploit and explore.
The aligning of strategic direction (and importance) with any capability needs is in the understanding of what activities are diverging with core and those converging, then figuring out the future core. It is the two dynamics of exploitation and exploration we should be leveraging for our innovation and future growth
Today we need to exploit and explore and our capabilities need to be built fit for one of these two purposes. Exploiting is today’s business need, to leverage and improve the existing business and equally, in parallel, explore for tomorrow’s new business growth.
Then we also need to diverge and converge
The diverging ones need to have a real emphasis on improving performance, how they are managed for cash or to eventually sell or dispose of along with those converging on the new ‘known’ core of the business to grow and expand. So by recognizing these and that is not easy in itself, you are beginning to know and identify the capabilities you need to have in place to fix today and make it as healthy as possible, alongside those new capabilities that will create a new winning set of growth and value propositions.
We certainly need bolder investments in knowledge around the make-up of innovation capabilities
I certainly believe there is a real call for fresh and bolder investments in knowledge, in infrastructure that focuses on activities that spur new approaches that lead to innovation. These are not just the traditional ones based on managing today’s core but on finding those innovations that provide new value, the new generation activity that is occurring from recognizing how we can build, yes build for further exploitation (extending the life) and exploration (new understanding) and manage each as separate risk evaluation exercises with different metrics of progress.
We also need a deeper innovation grounding of internal workings and alignment
What I feel we need is a deeper grounding in what is actually going on inside organizations within their innovation activities and how these align with the needs of strategy and what is clearly missing. We start here as it gives us all this clarity and coherence, missing in much of our existing understanding.
We have the real opportunity today, in finding new ways of combining the four emerging forces of knowledge, technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation, which will drive the growth models of tomorrow. It is these that are forming the new innovations ‘black box.’
It is mastering this new ‘black box’ of actual innovation activities, exploring and exploiting the necessary innovation capabilities that are required to be ‘going on’ in organizations to achieve a closer coherence we need to radically improve the innovation performance.
I have plenty of ideas, frames and methods built up to help you make innovation fit and be more coherent in its contribution. Why not find out?
The basic questions that need to be addressed are:
“what are our dynamic capabilities that will deliver innovation impact?
More importantly: “which ones should we focus upon to improve our capabilities and competencies over the longer-term?
We recognize resources are scarce as our starting point
Yet we fail to understand the makeup of innovation. We still don’t understand the parts that contributes to the ‘dynamics’ of innovation or how they combine for the interdependency of the parts we so often need. Continue reading “Do you REALLY want to know how to innovate?”
All companies talk about innovation and its growing importance but it seems to me very few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale.
So have you ever asked 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?
Have you ever evaluated your capabilities, competencies, and capacities to innovation in light of a changing landscape?
One where competitors have gained new ground or you have been confronted with a more disruptive product that threatens your established position or has even the potential to threaten your very existence? Your ability to respond to changing positions are often determined by knowing which capabilities and capacities you can call upon and leverage for finding new solutions that accelerate and innovate your position to respond and stay competitive.
There is a really pressing need in Innovation to tackle and resolve and that’s our capabilities to innovate.
Yet do we know which are the critical factors for sustaining innovation success? What capabilities are needed to be built? What are not so necessary and will occur more naturally due to us finding these dynamic ones? Also, what capabilities that are in place we can stop investing money into on the mistaken belief they contribute to innovation.
It is becoming increasingly vital to understand those critical innovation capabilities for an organisation to have in place, so as to deliver on the goals and vision required to grow the business and maintain its health for it to prosper and thrive. Continue reading “One pressing need in Innovation understanding.”
To deliver innovation, sustaining innovation, it needs to be built on dynamic skills, then you have to learn how you can orchestrate the capabilities you have, with those you have to bring in.
Building on those that give the necessary dynamic result you are looking for; to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the required result.
I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from building ‘just’ internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network effect’ from these.
This work just gets more exciting as it evolves.
It relies on how you purposefully build and construct these capabilities and competencies. The orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts to deliver the right result. We need to orchestrate, to build and then conduct and deliver the right results, to the innovation goals we seek.
Have you ever studied a map in a hilly or mountainous terrain? When you are studying the terrain, you have to survey the landscape and then decide how to cross. You need to be aware of what to avoid and what will help you map out a successful pathway. You need to optimize, evaluate and determine your best options.
Determining future innovation outcomes requires a greater understanding of what capabilities are more useful to develop, those that offer a more dynamic capacity. Do you know yours?
Can you separate these from the many you have that fail to give innovation impact?
We never start from a blank innovation canvas.
None of us has a ‘blank’ innovation canvas, we have developed a present position; one that is built on a legacy of past work and from our needs built up from our innovation activity, also in the past. As these develop we make choices, we sometimes become locked into certain structures, systems and processes, so we find it often highly difficult on how we are going to change, to move from one position to a different one – traversing the landscape to achieve better solutions to meet different goals that meet the present or future needs. Continue reading “The dynamic points of innovation understanding”
There was a report written back in 2013 entitled and under, “The New Normal: Competitive advantage in the digital economy” written for the Big Innovation Centre, an initiative of The Work Foundation and Lancaster University that I would recommend your time to read.
I often go back to this as it provides a real source of understanding of the shifts being undertaken within our organizations, to make the fundamental shifts in their thinking to understand where today’s and our future value creation will come from; something that is mostly due to this increasing importance of the digital changes occurring all around us.
I have been reviewing my work on innovation fitness landscapes, in the designing and understanding of the dynamic capabilities organizations constantly need to find, evolve and establish for sustaining successful innovation. Those that are more essential to manage the growing complexity in moving towards achieving successful and sustaining innovation outcomes.
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?
The Nine Stages that are needed for developing an understanding of your innovation capabilities, so as to make them more dynamic and as a result to be at the top of your innovation game.
