It is not just replacing energy sources; it is all about solution renewal end-to-end and that needs innovation
Within the energy transition, we must not lose sight of the final consumer. The final consumer of energy is going to be the ultimate arbitrator.

The post Solutions for Energy do need to be end-to-end and highly innovative first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Here in this post, I want to expand on my thinking around navigating a complex landscape that the Energy Transition demands.

I am looking at the Energy Transition from an evolving technology innovation perspective. In other words, what “forces” can be identified or promoted that can transform the existing energy system through the pursuit of the new invention, innovation, or technological advancement. Specifically, ones that will be needed over such an extended time and complexity of change that this Energy Transition will take, upwards of twenty to thirty years to give it an unstoppable momentum.

For this, we need to continually identify resources and capital by addressing the competencies, capabilities, and capacities to generate and accelerate change and consistently map these back to the realities of the landscape of change we are trying to traverse.

When you look through the lens of innovating at the Energy Transition, you are often questioning the fitness, or the reality to achieve something.

A risk of the energy transition is we give higher emphasis on the depth of knowledge in one area and fail to pull this together, to map it into the bigger picture of the practical, broader-based one. This “mapping back” gives our broader Society and non-expert groups needing to relate to the Energy transition gives them identification. It generates their need to change or support change and brings about more extensive (behavioral) change and awareness. Otherwise, they just accept the idea of advancement but equally block it if it does not fit their frame of thinking or how or why it is relevant to them.

We need to recognize that the energy world is “stacked” with Scientists, Engineers, and Researchers that have a real depth of expertise but so often can be lacking the required “T” shape skills that can actually be restrictive to making change.

These T-shaped skills that we need more of by having a combination of general skills and knowledge that support in-depth expertise in one area. They can bring broader validation and understanding of the relationships within any journey of change so often needs.  Often the scientist or researcher simply wants to hand over. There is a greater need for skills that can anchor a solution, advocate the reason for the change, and then provide the broader resolve and purpose to ensure delivery of the change.

There are plenty of (dense) reports projecting the Energy transition change and what is required, but they often fail to make the connections to the broader audience involved in this change. In my view, we need to explore and generate a better understanding of adaptive landscapes and provide a “sense of identity.”

The value of fitness landscapes as part of any Energy Transition awareness makes sense to bring identity and structure.

Let me explain this by keeping Hydrogen as the initial focus:

I have taken Hydrogen as my opening exploration to traverse this Energy landscape and have been providing the ongoing analysis over on my dedicated innovating4energy posting site by exploring different aspects of Hydrogen in a series of extended posts (one- believing in hydrogen, two- the gas too deliver, three- shades of and four- tensions and bottlenecks)

I need to begin to evaluate the value of knowing the real part of any hydrogen ‘fitness’ and what makes up its distinctive dynamic capabilities that moves it towards the solutions we need to have in place to contribute in significant ways to the energy transition that is underway. These solutions can be, but not limited to, Technology and Innovation, Scale and Adoption, Infrastructure and Market Conditions, Government Engagement and Involvement, Industry, and critically vital Public adoption.

Let me return to the earlier point on “T-shaped” people first.

This valuable post offers a useful descriptor on how different people have different skills and why the “T-shaped” combinations become so helpful. Managing such a change in Energy Systems requires multiplying skills.  The post ‘designates’ the differences and points out the need is to be continuously adaptive to varying demand.

In my view, knowing or anticipating that “varying demand” requires a building of the fitness in the capabilities, competences, and capabilities. This ability to enact change is my starting point for my thinking over the need to think about the Energy Transition Fitness Landscape.

We deploy expertise to overcome difficult challenges or have the space to innovate, and we need non-expert people to clear the pathway and provide the experts with the ‘right’ environment. Both approaches changing the existing, breaking down the ‘bottlenecks’ but in different ways.

The more you have the right environment to develop “T-shaped people, who go beyond one skill or expertise and engage in the joint identification, then the quicker you can accelerate change through collective understanding

We need to visualize and articulate change in connecting ways.I believe both the Three Horizon framework that I have deployed for years  (see this post for relating it to the energy transition) and the concept of knowing your fitness and the landscape have real value in the Energy Transition. Both allow for a greater collective identity and engagement of all the necessary expertise and generalists to come together. In a complex challenge like the Energy Transition, you need to create the identification and build the collaborative ecosystem to focus resources on the (shared) identified goals.

Taking Hydrogen as my point of reference, to understand the context, complexities, and creative tension.

By firstly, mapping out the hydrogen terrain to the task at hand enables us to understand and relate to what is needed – I call that the context for change. I have been investigating Hydrogen as a promising energy carrier to understand the barriers and obstacles to the energy transition we need to undertake. There are so many underlying “tensions” in this change from established fuels, infrastructure, and product delivery that Hydrogen needs to overcome.

Taking this fitness landscape thinking a little further here.

Any Energy Transition Fitness Landscapes identifies the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts- the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The higher the ‘fitness’ transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities into final tangible outcomes.

Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your hydrogen landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

Mapping out your capabilities, competencies, and capacities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. You begin to get fit for the journey ahead.

I took what I call a “Fitness Landscape Result Expectancies” approach.

Fitness Landscape Result Expectancies

My approach here is a work-in-progress; it will evolve and adapt depending on interest and demand.

These are my “first pass” of the expected results or points of investigation sought, by identifying the critical aspects of capability identification for the Hydrogen (or any energy transformation journey), to make it a significant contributor to the Future Energy Mix.

• A greater understanding of the obstacles and barriers to Hydrogen, becoming a significant energy carrier in the future energy mix is critical to understand. It “conveys” the fitness landscape journey.
• The understanding of what needs to be changed moves Hydrogen towards an energy transition that is sustainable and evolutionary built on technology investigation, validation, and ability to scale. Solutions gain world-wide. Recognition and adoption as the resulting outcomes and processes from discovery to realization.
• The journey generates a learning process for the identification of real and ‘false’ dynamic capabilities. Dynamic capabilities bring about change in the environment. As we frame, we can identify differences separating the more static ones that often just need reinforcement or retirement as not of lasting value.
• Pursuing limited or ‘selective’ development allows for restrictive exchanges within a network of specialization. These will not have the desired effect to accelerate solutions that can replace the existing ones unless the broader network effects are not accounted for.
• Any fitness landscape journey, where change is a significant level of requirement, requires a holistic view of the existing issues and the intent and goal of the journey by framing a clear strategic plan to mobilize the necessary forces.
• The solutions suggested will draw out internal discussions, growing recognition, and reality of the present and future needs in this area of resource allocation and capital allocation.
• Importance of linking capability across different activities or technology applications to become increasingly ‘dynamic’ for a more sustainable future.
• The ability to build out a clear capability portfolio knowing where resource needs to be applied and their likely timeframe from concept to fruition. These evaluations will also help identify synergies to bring new value and future impact options.
• We need to challenge long, well-established routines and processes to see how we can extend technology options. To discover and continue the existing can be valuable to place additional resources behind.
• Having clarity in the fitness landscape allows for regularly taking additional “adaptive walks” to learn and adjust current thinking and question alternatives more openly.
• Knowing your capabilities, competencies, and capabilities intensifies and solidifies the studies, investigation, and importance of innovation through greater engagement and a growing understanding. You have greater confidence in where to invest new capital and resources.
• Outcomes from these expected results raise dynamic capability and the importance of dynamism for more flexibility and fitness discovery. By identifying higher points of value, you accelerate the change process and plot different projects and their impact.

Looking for outcomes and outputs.

The reason I am building this into a workable model, is it firstly extends on my previous work in Innovation Fitness Landscapes. Within this adaptive approach to the Energy Transition, we can seek out and determine the Energy Fitness Landscape to then determine where the critical focal points are so the necessary resources, and capital can be applied.

I want to identify the necessary capacities, competencies, and capabilities to undergo this journey. Its ultimate aim is to identify outcomes that can become ones that give additional focus to knowing which are valuable. Also, which aspects need to extend the existing solutions and which have limited or no value and those resources and capital should be released to be redirected onto the ones that hold promise, impact, and value.

The energy complexities do need understanding, explaining, and mapping. The knowledge of how the traversing will be undertaken to get to the end goal of a clean energy system as soon as we can, needs often different articulation? Fitness landscapes help make the journey a lot easier to determine what is needed to undertake it.

The post Why I like the idea of Energy Fitness Landscapes first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Hydrogen is undoubtedly becoming the big agenda ticket within any Energy Transition. It is the promise of being a central pillar for many parts of the world to achieve their targets of zero carbon by mid-century.

Hydrogen seems to holds, it seems, such a promise, but it is nearly all to do. There is so much to validate, prove, and certainly scale. We have some exciting pilots, even some full commercial-scale projects. Still, these are not connected up as we do not yet have a Hydrogen infrastructure, market, or overarching policies to build into a movement that shifts the energy needle. Lots of desire and willingness, but we do need to really make “hydrogen happen.”

I needed to step back and reframe my thinking on Hydrogen and also to help me understand the bigger “beast” of the Energy Transition. There was so much “hype” and future promise I was not getting a real sense of order.

So I sort of came to a screeching halt on researching further. I needed to get back into my ‘comfort’ zone of evaluating all the hype. So I wanted to go back to a comfortable place to ground my thinking. I have been wondering, have we the right focus to this? Are we often missing the real context of the need for the energy transition? Are we building the capabilities, competencies, and capacity to scale Hydrogen? In my view, we lack a specific focus. Opinions are varied, diverse, and in many cases, merely opportunistic. We need to a different level of strategic fitness

Applying Fitness Landscapes to the Energy Transition. Here in this post, I want to briefly introduce some thinking around navigating a complex landscape that the Energy Transition demands. I have taken Hydrogen as my opening exploration to traverse this landscape.

The more you investigate Hydrogen, the more you realize the complexity of what needs to be achieved to deliver what has been suggested; that Hydrogen could meet 24% of the world’s final energy demands by 2050. Today it provides around 1%. I find it hard to imagine the change our energy systems need. To move them from a reliance on Oil, Gas, and Coal and make these Systems based on renewables of Solar, Wind and, Water- suggested at a level of real global magnitude, I find it hard to imagine. I always need to see the bigger picture.

Enter My Energy Transition Fitness Landscape thinking

I decided I should attempt to sort out the “chaff from the wheat,” try to separate all the hype surrounding Hydrogen, and attempt to ground it in different realities.

I mentioned in a recent post here that states, “My Energy Journey is being navigated across three-time and opportunity related horizons,” where I introduced the Three Horizon framing to help me navigate the Energy Transition.

I always need to anchor my investigations and research.

So as I investigate, build and explore the Energy transition by taking Hydrogen as the first one to explore through the three horizons approach, I get a high-level sense of the different phases that we need to pass through, moving from the present to the future. It helps map out the terrain. So much of what I am reading is pushing personal agendas.

This post is explaining my structures to attempt to understand the Energy Transition and bring us all to a specific fitness to make the journey of realization that Hydrogen is central to our climate goals.

So as I am investigating the Energy transition deeper, it needed another layering of understanding to put order into my thinking.

Navigating the Energy Transition Fitness Landscape

This grabbing of the three horizons framework is still not enough. The other thing was to revert back to another piece of work I have been deploying for some years and applying it here; Navigating the fitness landscape required to bring Hydrogen to fruition as the alternative energy source.

The value of fitness landscapes as part of any Energy Transition awareness makes sense. Let me explain this by keeping Hydrogen as the focus:

To attempt to “distill” all the thoughts about how Hydrogen is going to become the Energy Fuel of the future, I, for one, need to work through this logically.

I need to begin to evaluate the value of knowing the real part of any hydrogen ‘fitness’ and what makes up its distinctive dynamic capabilities that moves it towards the solutions we need to have. These can be, but not limited to Technology and Innovation, Scale and Adoption, Infrastructure and Market Conditions, Government Engagement and Involvement, Industry, and critically important, Public adoption.

I wrote a post, “Recognizing a Unique Part of the Hydrogen Ecosystem,” it gives more context if you care to read it. The Energy Transition can only work in an Ecosystem thinking approach.

I have further applied a Landscape thinking to the Hydrogen challenges.

I propose it is necessary to map out the hydrogen terrain.

What I have been working through is the thinking here to put the Hydrogen story along a clear pathway for me to understand. I would like to attempt to explain the rationale behind this.

Turn away now if you are not up to a theoretical outline, but it is the best way to explain its value in helping us in figuring out the Energy Transition as a journey. Once you grasp the principles, you can “map, travel, and traverse.”

I am hopeful it might help your understanding of the process we all need to work through, to relate to the ‘Hydrogen story and its potential.’

It goes like this:

By firstly, mapping out the hydrogen terrain to the task at hand enables us to understand and relate to what is needed – I call that the context for change.

Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your hydrogen landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs.

The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, those challenges and peaks, the tougher the energy transition becomes for hydrogen to traverse. The harder these are, also determines the higher fitness for the rate of change needed.

The height of the peaks in these landscapes, in technology solutions, in Government support, in delivering research and development that can take ‘promising’ technologies or concepts, the greater value should be placed upon them.

As you identify how intense the transition challenge is, and as you determine, the number of critical peaks needed to be surmounted shows how diverse and awkward the whole terrain is, to get to any realization.

The more you can identify all the Hydrogen challenges, in this case, then you can scope out and recognize the appropriate resources this will need in Global coordination.

Presently Hydrogen is in exploratory phasing.

The search for validation of a concept, to show it has some pathway to scaling up gives us the path and ability to identify the emerging patterns and scope. From these pilots and initial investments provides the need to further act and invest, We are making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed.

Understanding these will enable you to move you to the higher fitness points where the viability of Hydrogen is enhanced and needed to be to resolve the challenges to be faced as they multiply and need phased resolution.

You need to experiment, to take the exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential, and learn how to scale accordingly. Many on this journey at present for understanding where and how Hydrogen fits. We need to build capabilities, capacities, and competencies so they become essential to even begin to enter this race to a Hydrogen future.

As you begin to think of your capabilities and capacities to instigate change, it raises critical questions. These are around “are we focusing on the right ones to deliver on the challenges we are facing?” “what can we do differently?” and “how can we identify those critical ones?”

Mapping out your capabilities, competencies, and capacities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. You begin to get fit for the journey ahead.

Any Energy Transition Fitness Landscapes identifies the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts- the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater the ‘fitness’ transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities into final tangible outcomes.

The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks. These adaptive walks move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability and visibility is enhanced and needed to be identified, then resolved to be fitter for the challenges being faced.

Higher 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.

Why Fitness Landscapes?

“The greater the fitness to evolve and innovate will equate to more value creation potential.”

The pressing need for any complex system of change is to integrate, build, and reconfigure it in a structured way.

Fitness landscapes provide an understanding of the existing position and ‘point’ to where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity through understanding the dynamics of ALL the parts to know where you are heading.

If we are not aware, fit, or ready to navigate the terrain and do not have a clear understanding of where we are heading, just a vague idea of “achieving zero-carbon by 2050,” we are likely to get lost.

Hydrogen is far too over-hyped at present; let’s get it grounded in reality and build it accordingly.

We all need to get energy fit.  If Hydrogen is our decarbonization solution, we really do need to stop the ‘hype’ and get the rhetoric clear to provide the pathway of understanding. We need to get fit quick to enable hydrogen to exert its (rightful) place in any Energy Transition.

We must make sure that the journey has to be far better explained to allow ‘many’ to navigate the Energy Transition Landscape.

Understanding the value creation potential of fitness landscapes

The greater awareness of your fitness and the terrain and goal you want to achieve equates to more value creation potential.

The ability to take Hydrogen beyond much of today’s hype and “future promise” is to ground our understanding in realities, in knowing the landscape and terrain we have to navigate, if we want to emerge successfully on the other side of the energy transition. Knowing the possible terrain makes us all better prepared. Let’s treat any Energy Transition as a long journey that we all need to measure ourselves again, in progress, in fitness, and in moving towards the ultimates goals we have set ourselves.

The post Exploring the Energy Transition Fitness Landscapes – opening thoughts on Hydrogen first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The challenges of managing in today’s worlds are tough, very tough and demanding. It is so volatile, potentially disruptive and full of risk. Organizations are simply struggling to shed their clothes in the 20^th century and find a way to smoothly manage to become more adaptable and agile in form. They are adjusting to offer consistent responses to instability in the most effective ways, to keep adapting to the consistent market challenges, and in so doing profiting from meeting that latest challenge or disruptive opportunity.

The problem is you simply can’t manage this smoothly, it will be highly disruptive as the organization re-equips themselves and learns, often in the hardest way possible, through failure, through experimentation, through risk-taking. Innovation is increasingly seen as the pathway forward in capturing growth and grabbing any advantage, even if these are increasingly transient. Yet as we look towards building our innovation capabilities we need to work in totally different ways and see ‘things’ in new ways.

Innovation in itself is also a force of instability and we need to find ways to embrace much of its uncertainties by understanding its dynamics. We need to have a major shift in our organizational thinking, needed to find the appropriate new balance within those dual ‘tensions’ of ‘stability’ through efficiency, with its opposite, ‘change’ driven by innovation. It is these dynamic forces within the world we work that need us to respond by building that capacity for managing those ‘dynamic’ innovation capabilities, that today’s markets are requiring and organizations are needing to master.

The emphasis needs to point more to building dynamic innovation capabilities

Dynamic capabilities emphasize management capabilities and the inimitable (unique) combinations of resources that are constantly at work across all functions to make them distinctive and valuable.

Distinguishing innovation capabilities that are relevant are based on the type of knowledge they contain. Functional capabilities allow development of technical, practical knowledge. Integrative capabilities allow firms to absorb knowledge from external sources and this is where absorptive capacity and its structure comes into our required thinking. Innovation requires us to constantly learn, develop, mold and manage multiple situations and challenges. This requires the integration of critical capabilities to successfully stimulate innovation for effective and improving performance.

Many of the identified resources in capabilities have some level of complementary, improving one triggers improvement in another. Equally ignoring one can impact negatively on others. So each component, on their own, have limited effect, it is the combined effect that generates the improving performance. Equally, the needs do change over time and you have to constantly ‘refresh, challenge and stimulate’ these, otherwise, you can have core rigidly set in.

Integrating back or making anew

To this end, I have produced a conceptual model of what I believe is the ‘make up’ for providing an ongoing innovation performance engine – the innovation fitness landscape and the dynamics of core capabilities. I felt it needed a dedicated website and this is where you have ended up to be the ‘go to’ source of reference. It is a work-in-progress so please recognize this when you find the time to explore it. The incentive to do this ‘exploring’ is quite simple, you are dealing in increasingly complex environments and you need to know your capabilities and capacities to innovate. If you don’t you will simply get lost and perhaps forgotten. Innovation offers relevancy and a path towards a sustainable future but it needs fresh approaches. I believe I can offer some insights to help.

The need for all of us is recognize and embrace the need to build an organization-wide innovation capability that should pervade all aspects of the organization’s existence, forming its new core innovation value.

The post The world is working within increased complexity, are you? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The aim is to relate these to where your organization is in their existing capabilities, where they need to go, in identifying and clarifying the necessary capabilities they need to have, so as to achieve certain strategic goals and then, “we”, together, collectively prioritize the critical ones as ‘must have’ and then set about filling the gaps.

This is the innovative fitness journey needed to be travelled.

The building of those more ‘dynamic’ capabilities and competencies are the ones you need so as to provide for a more dynamic innovation environment and deliver unique capacity for your ongoing strategic goals.

This work is covered off partly on this website but does have its own dedicated site where the articles, post and thinking have been building up over a fairly lengthy period. Go and visit it at www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com.

So let me tell you what this is all about and I will describe this with heavy referencing from Geoffrey Moore’s book “Dealing with Darwin”. Without doubt one of my favourite books in how it helped me piece together a large part of my dynamic innovation fitness puzzle.

First you have the internal view.

Critically, you need to take a fresh look at your internal dynamics, at what happens when core competencies cease to differentiate, how resources must be shifted to new areas, how deeply threatening such changes can be, how protective inertia emerges as the enemy of destabilizing innovation, and finally, what kinds of management responses can best deal with inertia and redirect its energy towards fresh innovation.

This is the inward-facing dilemma that needs to be addressed.

Then you have the External viewpoint

It is about creating a competitive advantage in an increasingly commoditizing world. To lead that effort, you must continually reappraise what role your company is playing in the market ecosystem, how the market landscape of competition is changing and understand where your competitive advantage has come from in the past and where it is likely to come from in the future and with what kinds of differentiation will be most rewarded, and what kinds of innovation are most required.

This is the outward-facing portion of the story.

Then you have that growing sense of observations

Innovation and inertia: we often get stuck in particular types of innovation, promote given skills to the detriment of others, equally necessary but ignored or not understood fully.

We fail to adapt to market changes, we fund to much of one type of innovation to the exclusion of others and in the process create internal traffic jams of sorts, frustrations and tempers to match.

We squander our scarce resources of time, talent and management attention on initiatives that fail to give us a competitive advantage and get constantly impeded by these forces of inertia all around us. Indeed, the more successful we have been in the past, the stronger the resistance to any subsequent change in the innovation course.

Then you have those real-world worries

So what does keep management up at night about their performance on innovation? The rising anxieties stem from that worry that perhaps we are losing our ability to innovate, can our people still compete? Do we really get it? And even if we do, can we still get it to the market place at the right time and feed that need? Can we actually see the light of day?

Then Evolutions can happen

Evolution proceeds more gradually but in times of crisis we are forced to make choices that enable you to step back and reflect. I would argue we are all increasingly facing our own types of crisis in today’s volatile world.

If you were able to achieve an understanding that is based on more informed choice, so you can extract yourself from one path that makes you increasingly vulnerable and provides support to commit to a new core focus, one that offers you a more sustainable competitive position on which to compete through innovation. Would you take this different pathway?

Your task, challenges and keys to unlock your dilemma lie here.

1. The task is to develop a suite of core innovation competencies with proven capability to create (unique) competitive advantage.
2. The challenge for management teams is to choose the type of innovation appropriate to their situation and to exploit it deeply enough to create definitive separation from their direct competitors. This can be completed in different ways but a thorough analysis is recommended
3. The key is to identify and then extract (scarce) resources from (existing) context and re-channel this into the new core that will differentiate you through the new emerging innovation competencies and systemic approach.
4. A real need is to reposition resources and provide focus on the ‘right’ capabilities to meet new challenges knowing your “Innovation Fitness & the Dynamics in the Landscape”

“The sooner you start, the sooner you will be able to extract yourself from the commitments that make you vulnerable and establish those commitments that will strengthen your new position“- Geoffrey A. Moore

Survival of the fittest dominates irrespective.

• We are all caught in this Darwinian race- all of us it seems.
• So where do you want to focus your limited resources? The ‘natural selection’ choice to increase your abilities to innovate linked to your needs.
• Start by mapping out your innovation direction to the tasks and capabilities on hand and those needed or required to get you to certain predefined goals.
• Chose the path that will leverage and expand your knowledge, capabilities and capacities and start the journey.
• Start recognizing the opportunity spaces and gaps when you think you should be heading but feel you might have constraints in moving towards.
• The greater you can identify the need for improving your ‘innovation fitness’ allows you to get closer to accelerating towards the seen and yet unseen opportunities.
• The greater ‘innovation fitness’ equates to more value creation potential.
• As you learn to recognize the difference between managing the existing routines and building the new capabilities, the quicker you can absorb these new learnings within the organization, so they can become the new dynamic routines that are needed.
• You then begin to reduce uncertainties and strengthen the true innovation capabilities you need to thrive and survive in this Darwinian world.

Interested to learn more?

Then simply contact me. I am happy to discuss this and how this can be applied to your organization and what it means in engagement and commitments.

You build progressively the Innovation capabilities and competencies levels to become dynamic and fitter to compete and succeed.

The post Dealing with Your Darwin Effect through Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The challenges of managing in today’s worlds are tough, very tough and demanding. It is so volatile, potentially disruptive and full of risk. Organizations are simply struggling to shed their clothes of the 20^th century and find a way to smoothly manage into becoming more adaptable and agile in form. They are adjusting to offer consistent responses to instability in the most effective ways, to keep adapting to the consistent market challenges,and in so doing profiting from meeting that latest challenge or disruptive opportunity.

The problem is you simply can’t manage this smoothly, it will be highly disruptive as the organization re-equips themselves and learns, often in the hardest way possible, through failure, through experimentation, through risk-taking . Innovation is increasingly seen as the pathway forward in capturing growth and grabbing any advantage, even if these are increasingly transient. Yet as we look towards building our innovation capabilities we need to work in totally different ways and see ‘things’ in new ways.

Innovation in itself is also a force of instability and we need to find ways to embrace much of its uncertainties by understanding its dynamics. We need to have a major shift in our organizational thinking, needed to find the appropriate new balance within those dual ‘tensions’ of ‘stability’ through efficiency, with its opposite, ‘change’ driven by innovation. It is these dynamic forces within the world we work that require us to respond by building that capacity for managing those ‘dynamic’ innovation capabilities, that today’s markets are requiring and organizations are needing to master.

The emphasis needs to point more to building dynamic innovation capabilities

Dynamic capabilities emphasize management capabilities and the inimitable (unique) combinations of resources that are constantly at work across all functions to make them distinctive and valuable.

Distinguishing innovation capabilities that are relevant are based on the type of knowledge they contain. Functional capabilities allow development of technical, practical knowledge. Integrative capabilities allow firms to absorb knowledge from external sources and this is where absorptive capacity and its structure comes into our required thinking. Innovation requires us to constantly learn, develop, mould and manage from multiple situations and challenges. This requires the integration of critical capabilities to successfully stimulate innovation for effective and improving performance.

Many of the identified resources in capabilities have some level of complementary, improving one triggers improvement in another. Equally ignoring one can impact negatively on others. So each component, on their own, have limited effect, it is the combination effect that generates the improving performance. Equally, the needs do change over time and you have to constantly ‘refresh, challenge and stimulate’ these, otherwise you can have core rigidly set in.

Integrating back or making anew

To this end I have produced a conceptual model of what I believe is the ‘make up’ for providing an ongoing innovation performance engine – the innovation fitness landscape and the dynamics of core capabilities. I felt it needed a dedicated website and this is where you have ended up to be the ‘go to’ source of reference. It is a work-in-progress so please recognize this when you find the time to explore it. The incentive to do this ‘exploring’ is quite simple, you are dealing in increasingly complex environments and you need to know your capabilities and capacities to innovate. If you don’t you will simply get lost and perhaps forgotten. Innovation offers relevancy and a path towards a sustaining future but it needs fresh approaches. I believe I can offer some insights to help.

The need for all of us is recognize and embrace the need to build an organization-wide innovation capability that should pervade all aspects of the organizations existence, forming its new core innovation value.

The post The world is working within increased complexity, are you? 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, 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@agilityinnovation.com

The post Understanding the value creation potential of fitness landscapes first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

These dynamics are made up of the capabilities and competencies that reveal and clarify what is required as the relevant traversing points needed to achieve improving innovation success, to move you more effectively towards your strategic innovation goals and build a fitter, more responsive and dynamic organization around its needed innovation capacities.

The lead explorer to walk you across this innovation terrain is Paul Hobcraft

By exploring and modelling the mutual dependencies you get to see how the existing and alternative future innovation system  will behave as you begin to map out and recognize the different emphasis points that make up your innovation system. You can begin to identify what are the more important dynamic ones that require a more dedicated focus and placing more of your resources behind, while others can evolve at their own pace or simply improve as they are far more dependent on the dynamic ones than you realized initially. These can get simply get ‘pulled along’ and rise equally in their performance.

There is a complementary set of forces; improving one often triggers improvement in another. What you have to guard against is possibly ignoring one might equally impact negatively on others. Recognizing dependencies is critical and their triggering effect makes innovation evolution even more dynamic.

We are looking for the ‘combination’ effect of a dynamic set of capabilities and competencies that generates improved performance. The issue is to know what and which ones?

The combination effect to gain a greater innovation fitness effect comes from managing this over four stages shown in the above visual of the journey of innovation fitness dynamics.

The four stages will be described in more detail in future blogs but briefly are:

1. The goal within these stage is to identify the key dependencies relevant for improved innovation within your organization to discover
2. what are the mutual dependencies that will have a more dynamic impact on your innovation system so you understand
3. what consequences come from this and how the changing environment will behave so as to consider the effect, that then leads to
4. what recognition and implications this has so as to put in place an ongoing, evolving set of innovation dynamics that keep you fit to perform innovation on a sustaining higher performance basis.

Again I want to emphasis here, this is an evolving journey but the critical recognition here is, for innovation to continue to be the driver of future growth and wealth, it clearly does need to have a greater understanding and recognition of its management potential within organizations.

This site www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com is determined to push beyond today’s accepted, often ‘lagging’ performance from innovation activity, and raise the innovation performance engine up within organizations. I feel we do have this critical need to have in place a growing clarity of the factors needed to consistently deliver a more ‘leading’ position of knowing what does actually have real dynamic impact, both on an organizations innovation performance and the individual contributions that contribute towards the required strategic goals and objectives.

This I feel states our journey and how we are planning this out to traverse across the terrain towards better innovation solutions, that make up the dynamics of innovation and provide a ‘fitness’ solution that is unique to your needs. Care to share and join the journey?

Paul Hobcraft

Mail to : paul*AT*agilityinnovation.com

www.paul4innovating.com

www.agilityinnovation.com

The post Moving along the path to innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The question is how do you see the journey to achieve innovation fitness through two different ‘cloud’ maps

Or do you see this journey totally differently, not what it needs to cover but the route and challenges it will need to work out?

Irrespective the terrain can look rugged and challenging. Are you ready to begin your journey?

The post How do you see your innovation journey? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Firstly what we are trying to achieve so we get a rough idea of what we want to achieve, in strategic objective, in our innovation goals and in aligning them. Secondly we require knowledge, a clear working knowledge of how innovation can work for us.

We learn by exploring, the more peaks we cover we improve our knowledge and experience. We build our knowledge landscape. The more we understand each other, the more we can collectively climb and scale our innovation fitness. The more we learn and scale the more we can explore sub peaks on smaller, experimental levels, all contributing to our growing knowledge and fitness to innovate.

Exploring the rugged terrain early helps.

The terrain is identifying the opportunities or possibilities a ‘field’ holds for us. The more we can survey, the more we pick up patterns, insights and understanding. As we begin to map these out we begin to appreciate the height of the efforts (in this case our mountains) to clarify the intensity and ruggedness of the terrain we have to traverse and manage to get to that peak. The number of peaks we wish to scale or need to can tell us how diverse a challenge this might become. The more we can map these out, the more we can identify what we need in making this happen. Knowing the correct innovation type, the capabilities and capacities to build and deliver certainly helps makes us more effective, especially when resources are scarce.

The more we have insights for innovation the more we can build the right fitness models or regimes. Equally the more we survey, the more our competitors come into clearer focus, the better we can predict what they are doing themselves.

This adds up progressively to a fitness map to innovate

All of this adds up to identifying the fitness to innovate. The level of appropriate capabilities and capacities needed to support this venture. We help identify the correct type and number of activities that are appropriate through different protocols, workshops and techniques

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- the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater the ‘fitness’ transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities into tangible outcomes.

Higher value potential and rate of intensity determines need.

These critical factors give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged’ the landscape can also determine the greater fitness for the rate of innovation. The height 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.

The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive walks, so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be 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.

Fitness landscapes provide increased understanding of not just your existing position but ‘point’ to where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity. Mapping these clearly and knowing the innovation rugged terrain you have to travel provides the appropriate focus and intensity you require closing the gap and achieving peak performance.

The post Mapping out a rugged innovation terrain first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.