This “run” is the time when salmon migrate from the ocean and swim to the upper reaches of the rivers, where they spawn on gravel beds.

This event is an annual run where grizzly bears, bald eagles and sports fisherman all “feed” off the struggling salmon as it attempts to make it “upstream”. It is one of the natures more arduous journeys.

This set me thinking about the innovator within a company. They face the same “salmon run” or gauntlet when they try to bring to life a new innovation. The innovation equally has to swim “upstream” of validation, encountering all sort of obstacles along the way to get approval. Actually can we make a further parallel here?

You can replace the “grizzly bear” with the CFO, wanting to catch you out in your lack of hard, quantifiable numbers or not wanting to commit the level of investment into this project as it seems, in their opinion “very risky”. Then you have so many “bald eagles” swooping in to attack your idea as it disturbs their status quo, it challenges the existing business model or it would not fit within the current organization’s ways. They attack the idea for fear it “steals” from existing resources, it risks canabilizing the current product, it simply means more work for them. These “bald eagles” are constantly diving at you to pick your idea off. Then you get the “sports fisherman”, constantly casting his line wanting to snag or catch you, to reel you in and make your idea his or just simply being the one enjoying the “sport” of the catch, stopping you from moving further upriver with clever questions designed to impress others with his insights.

The innovator constantly has his “run”. He builds up his arguments and validations, he collects facts, trails and builds prototypes but then he has to go and sell the concept to management. This is my equivalent of an innovation salmon run.

If you regard the role of being the innovator as similar to a salmon struggling to get upstream to spawn, to undertake some hatching (in this case of ideas) then you often do have to face as the tortuous journey. They constantly face the “innovation run”, just like salmon, there are so many obstacles to their run.

Innovation is seen as counter-intuitive to the majority of the work undertaken in established businesses

The approach to Innovation is counter-intuitive to what we’ve been taught in business schools and undertake in daily organizations that have been taught and came up the ranks managing predictable businesses based on metrics. Most of the folks at the helm of organizations or working in them at senior level, starting with the MBAs or finance types, set about managing risk, seeking out greater productivity and efficiency as the ladder to progress

The innovator, on the other hand, is working in random, exploratory ways, exploring new thinking not relying on established practices.  We’ve thoughtfully designed the modern organization to produce predictable outcomes, increasing reliability and reducing risk. Innovation is an unnatural act within the current system and metrics-driven mantra. T

Understandably so, executives who take a “show me the numbers” approach to innovation see expensive experiments, lots of novelty, lack of planning and worst of all, no defensible numbers and set about wanting to disprove it. The antibodies that lie in weight for the innovator.

We know Innovators face significant barriers to get their ideas into realization.

These form many of the barriers to not achieving a successful innovation environment. Let’s list many of these. This handy list from Miriam Lourdes Filgueiras  Universidad Tecnológica de la Habana, José Antonio Echeverría shows how hard it is to “swim upstream” to hatch a new innovative idea.

Like Salmon, innovators must build up their body mass ready to take on the innovators run for approval. They must be ready to defend, validate, to prove the potential value of their new concept and its future value to the organization. They do not have the solid foundation of “repeating hard numbers” they have to build them through a series of steps, of validations, proof of concepts, customer engagements and shaping the original concept towards a commercial outcome.

Salmon, once they arrive to spawn have spent so much energy and physiological change to get to that point they die. The innovator certainly does have a greater chance to survive but we do see the turnover of the innovation manager in many cases is getting shorter and shorter, in many of our business organizations. Sometimes between 3 to 5 years and they move on or simply out. So the innovator does equally have as a innovators lifespan a short life. Is this because the innovation salmon run takes its toll on them, or have they simply become the next grizzly bear, bald eagle or sportsman challenging the next innovation run? Or perhaps, they learned something themselves about the innovation run to help clear the way for the next innovators salmon run?

The post Facing The Innovators Salmon Run first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When we ‘cast around’ we are looking for something; to try it out, to think about it, to search for connecting a vague idea with something more tangible. So let’s go innovation fishing.

The word ‘cast’ is around us in so many ways – anglers cast their line, we are cast adrift, we cast or drop anchor, we cast to put about, to tack, we cast our eyes upon the speaker, we cast light, we cast aspersions, we cast someone in a play, we cast a plan, we cast into a certain mould, are all just some of the many examples of how ‘cast’ is part of our everyday thinking.

In innovation, cast can become a fairly dominating action – we can cast about or around for ideas, to devise a plan, we can equally cast off those ideas or concepts we reject or simply cast out, or finally, we can agree to cast one’s lot into a plan or concept to take forward as a united team.

For me casting around is a most important part of how I work through innovation coaching.

‘Casting around’ in coaching is trying to understand and see the possible ways to get someone from point A to a new point B. This needs to be in a safe environment, so as to tackle any blockages or misunderstandings and were established patterns might need challenging can be discreetly explored so we cast around initially to explore the different triggering points. Also by having a ‘neutral’ environment but having a clarity of why we are coaching permits for a growing receptivity based on specifics. This allows for being more specific in changing and shifting perceptions that can eventually lead to better innovation understandings and outcomes. Casting is actually essential and becomes a significant part of the solidification process within coaching.

Good casting needs a clear routine, method and structure.

So why is casting important to innovation? Casting objects has been around for thousands of years. The better your experience in ‘casting’ the more likelihood you arrive at something that is useful and valuable (and highly appreciated) from the efforts put in.

When we think through building the capabilities for more open innovation, it is the finding and developing good ideas that innovation is all about. To get to this end-result of delivering upon the idea into tangible innovations it is often thanks to having in place the process to find, capture and commercialize and providing the corporate culture that promotes and protects these processes, to allow for trust but to execute rigorously against clear criteria and (emerging) objectives measured against specific goals. This becomes the art of casting open innovation.

It is this art of casting around we can increase discovery, we can capture and act on that discovery or set of connections to generate our future innovation activity. The more we establish a set of patterns, perhaps to have a casting process, the more we can evolve ideas and move them along the innovation process. We gain confidence if we know where we are going but we do need a ‘casting plan’.

What is important when we set about casting we do need that certain ‘something’ that gives the process a good structure and a given clarity. I think as we cast we need to work through five stages of casting :Discovery, Generation, Conversion, Diffusion and Acceptance. We raise our abilities if we cast in a prescribed way.

The virtues of openness are like casting a wider innovation net for better return.

Open innovation gives us all considerable benefits from looking outside our existing organizational boundaries for different concepts and ideas. We can also draw in outside help and partly to confirm those ideas in our growing connections with the final consumer. We need to cast more often today in a world where we have to work at being the smartest.

It is reckoned that an organization that has strong and robust open innovation capabilities are seven times more effective than firms with weak capabilities and is twice as effective as those with moderate capabilities, in terms of generating returns on their overall R&D project investment portfolios (source Booz & Co research)

Innovation needs casting practice in knowing where to ‘fish’.

If we keep practising casting, we will be making longer and longer casts as we gain in open innovation experience. Just like in fishing you gradually loosen up the control until you get confident in where, what and why you want to cast (around).

Remember when you are searching for innovation, no different from fishing,  always reel in enough line after you cast to make enough tension, so you can begin to ‘feel’ the response and gain that feel this is worth ‘reeling in’.

The real key to innovation casting though is back-casting.

As you might know, I have consistently argued about having a clear understanding of where you want to go (a vision and awareness) and in particular why I think the mapping across the three horizons is a more than valuable technique for knowing where and why you are ‘casting’ in specific areas. If you have some clarity on the future, those multiple horizons you need to explore, then your efforts of landing from your ‘casting around’ increase significantly.

You can ‘cast’ simultaneously and more accurately for those multiple needs. Those immediate ‘burning needs’ required for improving on today’s products and then you can open-up possible areas for those future ‘winning needs’. But more importantly this back-casting allows you to ‘look across’ new horizons, explore and take a greater time to ‘feel’ out and explore new areas of discovery to take you then through the five stage loop suggested above.

Having three different mindsets of the ‘here and now,’ more entrepreneurial, and more futuristic, based on this vision and awareness and then back-cast, allows for throwing open the innovation net for catching ‘greater’ possibilities.

No, casting is absolutely critical to innovation.

If we can learn the technique of ‘casting forward’ and ‘casting back’ we are gaining insights into ‘casting around.’ We have a much clearer plan of where and why we are looking for something because it has become more specific. Then we can try it; explore its possibilities, to think about it, to search for the connections that turn a vague idea into something more tangible. Open innovation becomes highly focused and well-cast! It becomes aligned.

Casting correctly can lead to greater promise, perhaps the innovation ‘catch of the decade’.

The post Casting-around with a wider innovation net. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.