I want to relate adoption back to business platforms and anchor it in the process.

Today business platform adoption is a struggle. It needs a clear revisiting of the theory of diffusion and adoption to extract the relevant points of necessary practice.

What is vitally needed is the recognition that deciding on adopting a business platform approach has five stages or decision points to go through.

So often, platform providers automatically go to the assumption that their platform will be adopted. It simply will not without working through and gaining confirmation the five stages of adoption are clarified.

The five stages for business platform adoption decision.

Each of these needs a definitive engagement process by the business platform provider. Passing through the five stages of adoption needs relevance, identification and building out the relationship to pass through all these as distinct cascading steps.

Awareness and Knowledge – refer to a customer’s acknowledgement of the presence or existence of the new business platform and where they form a general perception of what it might entail. The intersection of need recognition often drives it through consistent education and marketing communications to show client value, not the platform provider’s prowess. This is the point of being inspired to find out more.

Persuasion and Interest – this occurs when a client processes the available information associated with the platform and considers the product or service’s appeal on this and its relevant value or potential to them Here, the client actively seeks out information and details and begins engagement. The critical point for any platform provider to manage well.

Decision and Assessment – Considering the persuasion factors, the client will decide whether to adopt, delay any decision, or reject the platform. Their activity in seeking advice, gathering data and comparing or making different assessments happen clearly here and need the contacted platform provider to understand the level of assessment and the issues. Here, costs begin to kick in, considering the switching costs and fresh investment needs and weighing the advantages. This is the hardest stage to understand. The ability to build a solid business case at this point is essential. My recent post, “Exploring points of value in adopting business platforms,” has some relevancy here.

Implementation and Exploration – These are the series of activities to put the platform to use in exploring its (multiple) points of value and validating these. The client employs the platform to a varying learning degree. The usefulness, impacts, and costs are determined, and they may search for further support or relevance value about it. Here the business platform provider needs to be really “on the case” in strengthening the engagement and anchoring it into more of a forward-looking partnership but working in parallel on this learning path, as adoption is a gradual journey.

Confirmation and Adoption– is mostly concerned with post-adoption behaviour exhibited by the adopter, reinforced by the platform’s actual delivery against the relative advantage ‘claims,’ its complexity and compatibility on their understandings. The individual finalizes their decision to continue using it and makes that ultimate investment in forming an ongoing, long-term partnership for extending its use to its full potential.

Develop this five stages  process of engagement in any adoption of business platforms

Suppose these five stages are not followed in the business platform adoption process; there is a higher probability of poor engagement, lost time in chasing leads, being distracted, and not getting the end result intended or stated or being the offering of compelling value believed as the stages of adoption were not followed and anchored in these transition points of understanding.

So I would always recommend understanding the theory of diffusion and adoption offered by Everitt Rogers in his Diffusion and Adoption theories for innovation ; it is as relevant for Business Platform adoption today as when he offered this for “straightforward” innovation.

Platforms are the new meeting place for innovation to happen. They diffuse and adopt as their key value but getting clients to think this through needs these five decision stages

The post The difficulties of adoption for the business platform first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today we are still caught up in the validation and relevance of managing a business through platform thinking by making the business case of its value and impact. We should not be; it is time for you to hop onto the train.

The ability to present a compelling business case for the use and application of platforms is overwhelming. I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact and application.

For me, platforms are needed as we face a very different economic landscape.

We need to choose where to focus in the future, where to concentrate our resources and attempt to bridge the fragmentation that is occurring. The world of collaboration, where we can find partners to share and reinforce what we do, is leading to new dynamics of combining.

Platforms are more viable and relevant.

Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.

We are all being forced to make new Strategic Choices

As we look at where platforms fit within our business, we make strategic choices- are we looking for performance improvements, leveraging greater growth, tapping into a more distributed innovation capability or simply shaping new value strategies?

Today platforms are a key essential layer of infrastructure that scales participation differently.

They provide different options to improve performance and grow a new footprint in markets, products, and collaborations. Platforms can leverage assets and external capabilities you do not need to own or build; they provide fresh options to innovate, capture different and new value in insights and diversity of thinking, and allow for a higher pursuit of learning advantage.

We must consider the value of the combined effect of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios.

We can explore and exploit so much platform potential that fits with each individual company’s needs.

There are so many key questions to ask, to seek clarity too and how they can be positioned to reduce barriers to entry, commercialization and learning.

As we live in an unevenly distributed world, platforms can provide a better levelling effect, enable a way to thrive in a connected world and help offset eroding barriers we are all facing.

Let’s take FIVE underappreciated value points of business platforms.

1. Platforms are the new operation glue between end users, business developers, institutions, and manufacturing points. The ability to deploy digital software on machines enables the connecting, exchanging and talking to each other and managing a very different supply chain. Platforms are becoming the essential key layering point of infrastructure and operational management to orchestrate this through. They build out different assets, leverage the existing and optimise the potential within the existing ones to deliver a highly connected world to operate and manage within.

2. Platforms allow you to explore and experiment. Through the power of digitalization, you can re-imagine, capture, share and build from your imagination through a virtual world into the real world of realization. You have through platforms the process of honing discovery and collaboration, validating and extracting different designs, concepts or improvements on what you have

3 . Today, everything we build needs to be constantly reshaped, built upon in added ways, reshaped again and continually challenged and changed. We are in the world of circular design, and platforms rapidly become the exchange point for informing and transforming. Platforms are becoming the new flow centres that allow constant motion and offer disproportional potential, where numerous small moves can and do offer big things. It is how you influence this new set of connected dynamics that will determine

4. Platforms are the mechanism to resolve scale, broaden out the scope and enable a higher speed.  Collaboration and networks working through good business platforms can reduce barriers to entry by achieving access to technology advancements, having accessible tools and added infrastructure and enabling a more liberalization of one entity’s constraints in access to resources, learning and gaining from others.  In having available different financing options, scaling through 3rd parties and new avenues to talent and customers, different communities and sharing different and new practices all have a real combination effect.

5. Growing your business through Asymmetric Business thinking. What is your core? What will grow it in highly complementary ways? How can you cross traditional industries by leveraging what you have, combining it with technology and offering a higher value of what your core asset provides? Here we are dealing with the economics of compliments that depend on or require using another product.

So, where does Asymmetric thinking gain by being applied through platform thinking? Platforms provide you with new business model options.

Let me expand on this further as the Asymmetric Business Model opportunity requires a platform approach.

Google and Facebook are attention-based models that discover feed and generate the revenue that business pays through their portfolio of Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook. Google has a search engine for users to find anything, and businesses and publishers gain keywords to build their content around. If you take the creation of software app development drives the demand for core products, home printers depend on ink cartridges, so they each can complement and reinforce.

The economics of compliments you find on a platform will allow you to diversify, connect and grow your business.  A digital platform offers software applications, access to sophisticated tools, technology, expertise, and learning. It builds out (your) functionality and brings different levels of flexibility that can sit on top of what you have already achieved.

I have taken five different aspects of platforms here.

The combination effect of what a business platform can achieve for you is actually endless in its applications. As I mentioned earlier, I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact, combination and application that can be explored, adapted and combined.

Platforms provide you with new business model options that allow you to move across different industrial sectors that were not possible without all the economics of complementaries.

Ecosystems and Platforms are the new collaborative business need.

By applying different platform business thinking, you can consider commoditising different aspects of your business value to strengthen your core assets in new value-added ways. Most importantly, you have the (equal) chance of bundling complementaries with your core from software and digital offerings and combining AI & Human intelligence to effectively compete and differentiate yourself with leverage that gives added value to your customers..

For instance, you can own and control less but share and partner more as you shift from a given asset into a collective intelligent one, leveraging all the essential parts that having access to a technology platform can provide.

Platforms are about organizing and resolving complex structures, they offer a new network business model that needs to be deployed to meet a new economic landscape. They can be a fundamental building block to finding new ways of business value creation, offering that base to a new model of collaboration and competition.

I have outlined a case for change in a recent article, “thinking out the evolution of platforms and ecosystems.” if you have the opportunity and time

I would argue platforms are your future business journey.

They are highly relevant for growth and diversification and offer a sustainable pathway. You build more dynamic capabilities to sense and seize opportunities quicker in your highly connected world.

The post Exploring points of value in adopting Business Platforms. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Value creation is highly dynamic, it is going on all the time and can increase, decrease or transform, in different ways, when you exploit your different capitals that will be in constant change and adjusting to reflect your organization’s business activities and eventual outputs.

This is when you can begin to see the value created by the use of deploying all the capitals to build new growth and what I call “stock” that along with “flow”.

Robin Sloan does a brilliant job of explaining this. I loved this explanation of the two:

“There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy – too easy.”

“Flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein. And the real magic trick is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. It’s the hybrid strategy.”

Value is not just from within, it is the links our organizations are constantly making with others, in the interactions, relationships and the combining of the activities. The important need is to manage the stocks and flows of the capitals

The role of all the capitals is crucial to understand, they create or destroy value. It is the constant flow between all the capitals deployed that makes up the value creation process.

Our management within our organizations needs to know where this real value creation resides.

Understanding all the makeup of capitals needs to be approached in practical ways.

The place to focus is on recognizing the material components of what is making up the specific value creation aspects that will provide benefits that have been captured, understood, maintained and then enhanced for the additional value creation

Longer-term value creation

Clearly, the ultimate objective is to enhance the organization’s abilities in the longer-term to appreciate the growth strategy. The more we know as outsiders of the value creation process the more likely this will attract greater investment. Often this is determined by the final product, service or business model outcome.

Today we lack the measures to judge longer-term adequately, that this is enough in organizations. We are judging them on their innovation activity going through the immediate pipeline and that judgment often lacks the real makeup of the application of the different capitals, invested in the knowledge that can provide the sustaining growth- today we are far too geared on immediate expectations and those are locked up in the short-term.

It is becoming critical to understand our sources of knowledge, it gives us the unique capital that differentiates one enterprise from another. The intangibles today are up to 80% of the value assigned to the (market value) worth. Managing these intangibles is critical to our future. Yet, we still have a very poor grasp of how to capture these and drive this knowledge capital. That needs to change.

It is the knowledge that feeds innovation

It is the Knowledge and Innovation combined that make the firm competitive. There is a positive correlation between these two. One amplifies the other, one deepens the other in the connected understanding. The basis for this comes from both human and artificial intelligence.

As we learn to capture from both we build our capital base and strengthen our future potential. We make ourselves more sustainable as well as increasingly adaptive.

The greater the stock of knowledge understanding will increase the potential flows of innovation and this “powers” the future value creation.

Greater engagement or not?

We can leave this knowledge building to the management, just sit back as investors or consumers and simply expect increased dividends and new products. We actually need to dig a little deeper and push management to inform us we will not enjoy any of those nasty surprises when the results fail to materialize.

The argument is that the investors, the stakeholders within a business, need to understand the business logic far more, to make a more informed decision to continue to invest or partner with a particular organization. That logic comes partly from the ability to create value

Knowing the successful generation of all the intangible values and their transformation into tangible forms and how this is systematically being harnessed tends to confirm the realization of the business goals or what the possible risks are.

Gaining better visibility for the process of value creation is necessary.

Organizations are certainly fairly reluctant to discuss these except behind closed doors to selected investment parties in their investor’s briefings. Making these more visible leads to greater accountability and to be ‘accountable’ you need to understand the makeup of your capitals.

The present incentive for business organizations to become more vocal in explaining their business models, their process for value creation and offering more insight on all their capitals is their need to grow and that comes from investors wanting to invest and customers wanting to buy something that has a sustaining future!

Explaining value creation is essential, it builds the connections.

taken partly from previous value creation work

The post So what is value creation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I always find it interesting when different though-strands seem to collide. You can put that down to serendipity, fate, luck or just being in the right spot at that time. I have always been a fan of the book “The Medici Effect; breakthrough insights at the intersections of ideas, concepts and culture” by Frans Johansson.

I like to think I am often colliding at the innovation intersections where I keep finding lots of synergies that feed my research and innovative curiosity to support others.

For the past six or so weeks I have been looking into Ecosystems and one of those (famous) strands took me to “Natural Language Understanding” and I read an article by Mark Seall, Head of Digital Communications at Siemens called “How AI is shaping the future of marketing communications” and it got me curious.

Now I am part of Siemen’s SIEx community (link to some published work from the community) that has a group of “savvy” individuals offering outside-in thinking trying to influence and shape different conversations taking place in and about Siemens. In this group are different voices bringing in their expertise and insights. We look to engage in issues and challenges that give value and impact, sometimes it works, other times less so!

So I approached Mark Seall and we had an initial discussion on the use of AI and this natural language tool they have been using. Siemens has a collaboration with Storyroom.ai. Storyroom provides a set of unique datasets and AI to meaningfully connect concepts, ideas or thoughts, to drive awareness and engagement.  Storyroom is a venture-backed AI startup, based in California.

Mark offered me an opportunity to “play with the AI tool” and I initially did some knowledge understanding around the topic of “Digital Factories” which provided an interesting set of keywords and different visuals or possible conversation maps.

I have provided some feedback on this to his team and hopefully, as this tool is in Beta it will give them some helpful points to improve their next round in developing the tool.

What I decided to do was go a whole lot deeper and apply my topic expertise in “Ecosystems”

Now comes the second Serendipity recently. I am a great admirer of the work that Itonics offers around Innovation Management. Recently they have also been exploring AI-Driven Innovation and in a very recent post “Why AI-Driven Innovation Should Be On Your Radar”  they are highlighting a recent Hype Cycle graph for Innovation Management Techniques,2021.

That got my interest up as I show here in this adopted visual of the Hype Cycle for Innovation Management

It seems the current peak of expectation and the emerging innovation trigger are in my present research focus. Now that I liked!

According to Gartner, “AI-driven innovation refers to the use of artificial intelligence technologies in the process of innovation.”

” AI-driven innovation is positioned on the rise of an innovation trigger, Gartner believes, AI-driven innovation is considered to hold potentially transformative means to “drive high-impact innovation at scale through the discovery of new ideas and rapid progress through the innovation pipeline”.

Gartner says, “this suggests that the innovation management technique will enable new ways of doing business across industries, resulting in significant shifts in industry dynamics.”.  “AI-driven innovation could either be in the form of new inventions like new drugs or material discovery in specific domains or could be used to boost agility and efficiency in an end-to-end innovation process pipeline across use cases and industries.”  

Back to the AI tool and my “Ecosystem” work 

So my work, at the beginning of applying AI has been to interrogate this tool on the following aspects of “Ecosystems”. I generated different results for:

• Ecosystems
• Innovation Ecosystems
• Business Ecosystems
• Sustaining Ecosystems, and recently back to
• Ecosystem Management.

Initial output for “Ecosystems”

I found the general use of “Ecosystems” narrowing down the searches to more Ecosystem-related or orientated to Business are still providing interesting triggers like “Novel Ecosystems”, “Ecosystem Models”, “Ecosystem Service”, “Ecosystem Thinking” and “Ecosystem Design”

In my early rounds, I decided in taking out “Sustainability”, “Circular Economy”, “Life-Cycle Assessment,” to gain a better amplification of the points above. These different searches have given some good food for thought on future approaches to “Ecosystems” Both outputs or rounds offer different approaches to Ecosystems.

Then investigating the Outputs for “Innovation Ecosystems”

As for “Innovation Ecosystems” that yielded a veritable host of strands of associated thinking. These included “Value Networks”, “Transferring Knowledge”, “Diffusions of Innovation”, “Network Design and Theory”, “Co-creation, “Platform Design”, “Competitive Positioning,” “Dynamics of Innovation” and “Innovation Impact” among some others that have taken my thinking in new directions. More on those in the weeks ahead.

Then I found comparing “Innovation Ecosystems” with “Business Ecosystems” really separated the two in some unique ways.

What I did find was that much as “Innovation Ecosystems” was certainly a rich data set, the “Business Ecosystems” one was much richer. I will discuss this in a further post over at my Ecosystems4innovating posting site in the coming days.

A time to absorb and reflect on what I am learning here

I am still absorbing each search and revision, so as to understand changes and potential value points for part of my Ecosystem work ahead.

I have found applying this “natural language generation” technique as helpful, it has accelerated and streamlined my research, making any analysis faster, it has been sometimes puzzling but I feel you are gaining from “real-time” data and keyword associations that provide new insights. The end results will certainly help shape my thinking into the future of Ecosystem Management.

AI can enhance value and provide signals to emergent trends

I do think Siemens, in pioneering this technique, does give them a very interesting edge in the marketing communication area, which they have been applying this tool to.

There are many future possibilities they can explore and it is giving me a whole different level of understanding of Ecosystems and what has a positioning, value. It is giving me greater confidence in what makes up the different Ecosystems I have so far investigated, and applied this tool.

In the work, so far, I have undertaken I have found growing insights and triggers. Applying this learning and converting this into “future understanding” is my next step.

The next steps get interesting………..

In my second post on AI-driven innovation, I looked closer at the differences for building an Innovation Ecosystem against focusing on a Business Ecosystem. One seems on the first investigation “richer” than the other. The link to the post is here

The post Innovation Ecosystem Understanding through an AI-driven approach first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The critical interplay among innovation, business models and change

Jeffrey Phillips and I have collaborated over a number of years and I have always felt these have been highly productive, original in thinking and truly valuable.

One such collaboration was around the interplay of innovation with business models and change.

I wanted to extract part of this white paper”Critical Interplay Innovation Business Models Change 6-2“(goes to PDF), in this post, as it offers all involved in innovation a structure to break down innovation into its different models of application. It describes some important observations we often forget when innovating.

The dynamics of innovation and change

As we described above, many corporations haven’t carefully defined the scope of innovation activities and don’t recognize the impact of innovation and its incumbent requirement for change.  We’ve defined the three constituents that are impacted by change:  customers, competitors or market, and the innovator itself.  Let’s now describe three tiers or scope of impact an innovation can create:

• Incremental: Making changes to existing products and services with little change to an industry or market. Customers may need to change to some degree to adopt or adapt to a new product.  Competitors and markets will ignore or quickly match the new capabilities or features.
• Breakthrough: Making changes to the existing industry or business model. A company may discover innovations that impact the industry’s operations, structure or business model, in effect forcing change on its customers, its industry and by extension, itself.   A breakthrough innovation extends or changes an existing technology, capability or market in such a way that customers and competitors must change to some degree.
• Disruptive: Innovating to create a new market or industry, or innovating in an existing adjacent industry. An innovator may identify or discover needs that allow it to create a completely new market, segment or industry, or enter an existing market, segment or industry and change it or disrupt the adjacent market.  Disruptive innovation requires change on the part of the customer and creates such drastic change that competitors are forced to change or remove themselves from the market.

What’s important to understand is that every innovation creates change, and the amount and impact of change that occurs is different across these three distinct types of innovation.

Applying the three horizon framework to innovation and change

To explain the impacts of innovation and the change it creates, we’ll use an accepted framework (the Three Horizons) to consider the impact innovation has on change capabilities and business models.  Here we introduce the three horizon concept to better understand the range of innovation outcomes and the potential change requirements.

The three horizons framework provides distinct horizons, requiring different outcomes and approaching the scope of innovation in mindsets. Usually, it is represented by a typical XY plane, whereas Y is the amount of scope/need/value/change over x, the time each takes/seen/needed

What’s important to understand is that every innovation creates change, and the amount and impact of change scales out across each of these three horizons.  For greater clarity, let’s examine each of the three horizons in a bit more detail.

Defining Horizon One – Operating in the Now

Horizon One defines the portion of the potential innovation space that is most similar to existing services or solutions.  The typical innovation focus in Horizon One is on improving efficiency or cutting costs.

Innovators working within this space are typically creating small but useful changes to existing products and services, offering new solutions to existing customers and prospects.  The anticipated outcome is “incremental” change, easily adopted by existing customers and no real threat to the market, competitors or the industry.  This innovation is based on existing capabilities with the intent of maintaining or growing existing shares in the existing markets.  It relies on existing capabilities and emphasizes excellent operational execution, with less focus on new needs or expanding the competitive market space.

The internal change focus is on improving execution and increasing efficiency.  There’s little change required for external constituents.  Consumers are already familiar with the products and have some expectation of improvements or modifications.  Competitors and the industry at large aren’t significantly impacted by the innovation.

The vast majority of innovation activity is “incremental” innovation because the risks are low, and market knowledge is relatively high. 

Defining Horizon Two – Looking ahead, anticipating change

Horizon Two is the portion of the potential innovation space that focuses on extending existing capabilities into new markets or introducing new capabilities into existing markets.  Horizon Two is the mid-point between “incremental’ change in Horizon One and “disruptive” change in Horizon Three.

Companies innovating with this horizon anticipate “breakthrough” innovation, usually extending a known technology into a new market, or introducing new technologies or capabilities into the existing marketplace.  Breakthrough innovation often requires extending to new capabilities as well as building on existing capabilities, with the intent of expanding markets and the competitive space.

The innovation arising from the 2^nd horizon requires more experimenting than Horizon One innovation and often leads to some change for all three constituents.  Internal change in this horizon is focused on experimenting and extending capabilities. Consumers may experience change due to the introduction of new technologies or capabilities.  Competitors will experience change due to the broadening of industry definitions or modifications to industry or technology conventions.

Operating in Horizon Two the innovator begins to stretch its horizons, using either new technologies, extending or establishing new practices or capabilities as they explore and enter new markets or shape existing ones differently.

Defining Horizon Three- The future, defining change and transforming

Horizon three is the portion of the potential innovation space that seeks the most significant innovation change as the innovator seeks to create new markets or dramatically change or disrupt existing markets, or create completely new technologies or capabilities. 

When companies conduct “disruptive” innovation the anticipated result is market or technology disruption, creating new market dominance by upending existing products, technologies, capabilities or markets or creating entirely new products or markets.  Innovating in Horizon Three requires significant discovery and learning while building and adapting new capabilities.  Successful innovation will create disruption for all three constituents.  This is the space where the most change will occur.

Consumers will find a completely new, novel and valuable solution to an existing problem or challenge, and must change their actions or behaviour to adopt it.  Disruption of industry expectations and norms will force competitors to react and may cause so much change that they cannot respond to the speed and scope of the change.

The innovator themselves must change, in order to provide all of the features and capabilities the disruptive innovation requires in order to be adopted by consumers.  These internal changes will be based on exploring new technologies, evolving business models and expanding the definition of the market or solution.

Those attempting Horizon Three innovation are creating entirely new capabilities or technologies, creating new segments or markets, or both

Relating innovation and change within the three horizons

As we define each of the three horizons and the anticipated innovation outcome, we can begin to document the differences among the potential outcomes, in terms of approach, the leverage of new or existing capabilities, intent and strategy, and many other factors.

Understanding the decision making, strategy, intent and emphasis required for each horizon helps delineate the commitment, resources and effort involved, and begins to signal the scope and impact of potential innovation and the change the innovation can create, for customers, markets and the innovator.

These ideas culminate in a rather interesting conclusion, which is that any innovation, especially in horizon two or horizon three, regardless of its intended outcome (product, service, channel or business model) is also by definition a need to reflect on a business model innovation change.

Will the innovation significantly change the existing business model or distort or disrupt the model?  This means that innovators internal to the industry will be constantly evolving the model from within, questioning it, evaluating changes, and new entrants and disrupters will seek to change and challenge existing models from their external perspective.

Both of these facts lead us to the conclusion that good innovators must excel at sustained change and business model evaluation.

Most corporations don’t understand how much change is created by innovation. 

This naïve assumption is dangerous and almost always wrong. 

Innovation in almost any form may require that the customer or market change.  It’s very likely that these innovations will require that the innovator change as well. We simply cannot expect to create change in the marketplace or in the customer base without also being expected to change as innovators.

**Taken from the white paper Critical Interplay Innovation Business Models Change 6-2

The post The critical interplay among innovation, business models and change first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

It is so hard to let go! It is so often harder to carry on, but determination prevails!

I have been working away, call it my labour of love, with plenty of frustrating moments but have “pushed on” through sheer determination, on my thinking through the ‘harnessing’ of the dynamics within innovation.

The journey has forced me into terrain that presented diverse challenges to achieve fresh insights and traversed many a rugged landscape to get closer to my goal of offering organizations their innovation fitness and future landscape design, one designed to alter their present capabilities and capacity to innovate radically.

The aim is to relate these to where your organization is in its existing capabilities to avoid the Darwin Effect and its impact on a business. Where should an organization need to identify and clarify the necessary dynamic innovation capabilities they need to have to achieve specific strategic goals. Once understood then, “we”, together, collectively prioritize the critical ones as ‘must have’ and then set about filling the gaps and getting the organization innovation fit. We then were at the point of being equipped for the innovative fitness journey necessary to travel.

Building those more ‘dynamic’ capabilities and competencies is the ones you need to provide for a more dynamic innovation environment and deliver unique capacity for your ongoing strategic goals.

This work is covered partly on this website but has a dedicated site where the articles, posts and thinking have been building up over a reasonably lengthy period.

Please go and visit it at www.innovationfitnessdynamics.wordpress.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 a 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. Question 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. Finally, what kinds of management responses can best deal with inertia to stimulate and redirect its “untapped” 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. Then from this analysis, determine what kinds of differentiation will be most rewarded and what types 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 that 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 too 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 they are losing their ability to innovate. Can our people still compete? Do we really get what innovating is all about? And even if we do, can we still get it to the marketplace at the right time and feed that need? Can we actually see the light of day? Are we lacking speed, scale or sense of purpose?

Then Evolutions can happen.

Evolution proceeds more gradually but in times of crisis, we are forced to make choices that enable us 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 through 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 need to evolve.
• So, where do you want to focus your limited resources when it comes to innovation?
• The ‘natural selection’ choice to increase your abilities to innovate is 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 effective 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.

Why do I believe in Innovation Fitness Landscapes?

There are so many pressing needs for a firm to integrate and align all their resources

Firms need to build and constantly reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities

If we want to address rapidly changing environments and step up to these challenges, the firm’s ability to achieve new, more innovative forms of business models, products and engagements within the markets they operate and seek out new customer segments and positioning, innovation becomes increasingly essential.

This requires a more dynamic set of capabilities to innovate but what are these? What determines a critical capability, competence or capacity to improve innovation and raise chances to be more successful?

For me and my work, fitness landscapes provide an emerging understanding of the existing position, the essential audit, and point towards where you need to go to build your limited resources to improve your overall innovation capacity.

The understanding of the future needs enables that effective understanding of not just direction but what, where, why and how you set about innovation capacity building.

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.

Certainly by delving into the” open work” housed on my dedicated site www.innovationfitnessdynamics.wordpress.com.there are plenty of reference points to trigger your thinking. Each journey might start at the same point “I want to innovate more effectively” but travel in uniquely designed ways.

Your result is to build progressively the Innovation capabilities and competencies levels to become dynamic and fitter to compete and succeed.

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

After a series of conversations around the Executive Innovation work mat, Jeffrey Phillips and I decided there was a need to add one more to the series, one that makes the business case for the work mat, one that is more from the leaders perspective.

In this video conversation of around 13 minutes, we explore why the leadership of organizations needs to get deeply involved in the innovation activity.

The reason top leadership needs to be fully involved

How many of our organizations are not looking to search for new ways for organic growth, improve their profit margins and create differentiation? This makes innovation central to this CORE need.

Leaders need to close the gap between aspiration and execution, and it is through building a robust, comprehensive innovation capability that gives them that chance to turn rhetoric into proof.

In many ways, their success requires innovation; it is wrapped up in their destiny. How often are they missing the strategic mark due to their inability to find that innovative pathway?

Leaders are constantly worrying over what is valued in the market, what products and services are essential to defend, those they need to promote and improve. This understanding does not come out of “thin air”. It comes out of having an organization that is market aware and innovative in responding.

One of the most critical aspects for a leadership team is to achieve a greater sense of identification and involvement from all within the organization. Innovation is one of those creative, forward-looking needs to build as central. Central needs to be sustaining and systematic, giving this ability to grow and ensure ongoing involvement and providing a consistency of purpose for all involved.

The work mat provides real value.

Firstly the work mat offers an open design that gives a framework for a comprehensive dialogue of what is central to the make-up of innovation.

Today we are in far more open organizations that need to connect and form new entities with others.

The rise of Ecosystems and platforms requires a more effective innovation mechanism, a more holistic, whole innovation system that can transform.

Handled well, the work mat gives focus, engagement and passion. It allows you to compare with others you want to form a deeper relationship with within any ecosystem design.

By pursuing innovation, you constantly have the opportunity to build a fresh dynamic “stock” for innovative ideas to feed off.

You draw out differences to either narrow the gaps between innovation approaches or find new ways to combine, to improve what each, as individual entities currently have.

You require a dialoguing framework to relate, build-out and constantly update and validate. The Executive Innovation work mat needs to be a living, dynamic framing tool to work around and through.

I believe there is a real utility of purpose in this open design.

For me, the work mat is more relevant today than when we, Jeffrey and I, worked it through together ten years ago. It addresses the core fundamentals and roots of innovation that are needed, today so much more to understand and bring together.

We need to build innovation capability broader and deeper, in competencies to innovate and find the capacities far more today than previously Why?

As I mentioned earlier, if growth is essential to achieve, then you need to constantly search and find new profit opportunities (profit pools) you need to design clear differentiation in product and services, then, innovation must be CORE to what you need to have running through the very fabric of your organization.

Ignoring innovation or designating it down the organization is abdicating the leadership role, it can limit your success and your tenure becomes shorter as you avoided risk, searching for holding on to what your have

If you are not seeking out a different, more disruptive or new business design, then you are eventually serving your shareholders poorly.

The leadership of an organization are the only one that has this mandate to decide the course to be taken, and then the market decides.

The CEO who takes the safe route to squeeze every bit of efficiency and productivity out of the very marrow of what gives vibrance and creativity to an organization is handing over a “reducing shell of an enterprise.” It is harder to revive or effectively compete in today’s highly competitive global world.

If you reduce your capacity to innovate you eventually have no sustainable future, without destructive forces needing to be applied, often when it is too late.

Innovation is fraught with risk, it is messy and unpredictable in discovery to design to execution, but it gives massive opportunity.

To help, you need to apply a living, evolving and dynamic framework to bring a commitment throughout the whole organisation to innovate.

We would argue, the Innovation Executive Work Mat gives alignment and creates a central tenant to a growing sense of pride, identification and belief, that the organization has a future understanding of purpose by its engagement in innovation.

Constant innovation compels movement, generates momentum through shared understanding and dynamism, in evolving the work mat constantly.

Making contact with us

Both Jeffrey and myself would be pleased to discuss the value of the Executive Innovation Work Mat with you at any time or stage you are at in your innovation journey.

The five dialogues on selected parts of the Innovation Work Mat

If you wish to view the five elements of the conversations we had recently, here are the links. These have covered

Convergence & Divergence– The opening outline of our discussion to the series seeking the need for alignment through the Executive Innovation Work Mat.

Strategy – we discuss the relationship between corporate design and innovation.

Governance – we examine how to govern an innovation project and why this work requires different governance models from other projects.

Function/Structure/Design – we examine how innovation should “work” – design and processes – and why it is vital to focus on an innovation capacity.

Common Language/Communication – we look at the importance of having common definitions, common language and regularly communicating about innovation.

We trust you find the time to listen or equally real each of the posts I have written to support these in the last few weeks. Just put into search “work mat dialogue.”

We feel the Executive Innovation Work Mat makes a compelling case to be deployed and widely used.

The post Building the use of the innovation work mat as a compelling business case first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Central to any organizational innovation building, the enormous value of having a consistent common language is paramount; it is essential to gain identification and understanding that all can relate to; it provides the backbone to a clear, united “sense of purpose”.

Building upon this common language gives a greater chance of effective communication to place the innovation activities into their appropriate context.

In the fifth of a series, I am working with Jeffrey Phillips, a long-term collaborator on “all things concerning innovation” we have been discussing the different domains of the Executive Innovation Work Mat we propose as a framework to provide a great chance to bring all the various aspects of innovation together.

We explore why each factor is essential to innovation in the videos we’ve created. These have covered

Convergence & Divergence– The opening outline of our discussion to the series seeking the need for alignment through the Executive Innovation Work Mat.

Strategy – we discuss the relationship between corporate strategy and innovation.

Governance – we examine how to govern an innovation project and why this work requires different governance models from other projects.

Function/Structure/Design – we examine how innovation should “work” – design and processes – and why it is vital to focus on an innovation capacity.

Common Language/Communication – we look at the importance of having common definitions, common language and regularly communicating about innovation. This post discusses and builds on this.

I think the videos allow us to explore each of these. I think you’ll find them helpful if you are starting to build an innovation capacity or improve your innovation activities or outcomes. (Jeffrey Phillips Innovate on Purpose posting site)

Common Language, Communications and Context- the focus here.

So we have just had the fifth conversation, found here and below. It is about 16 minutes long, discussing Common Language, Communications and Context.

Within our Work Mat, you can see where this fits, as it is the glue that hangs the activities together in the middle of the mat.

The strength of the middle holds all the parts together

I firmly believe placing common language, communications, and the context in the centre f the Work Mat provides the glue and enables flow.

The flow here means as we talk, communicate and set objectives, this needs to “cascade “across to the other domains and up and down the organization.

A comprehensive, coherent and consistent innovation message resonates and connects all the others involved.

The various stakeholders can determine their role and contribution if it is well understood (common language), communicated well and placed in the context of what is being attempted to be achieved. In my view, it aligns the parts and forms the whole.

Why is Common Language, Communication and Context important?

Innovation is grossly inefficient if it has to start again and again, and new designs, processes, and cultures must be built, hopefully on some established practices or approaches. The ideal is we should create a common, repeatable, scalable approach to innovation. Management wants this.

Equally, those involved in innovation wish to have clear guidelines, rails and frames that allow consistent measuring. We need to reduce the variables that help provide consistency and pull in knowledge gained to be put to regular use.

Today we talk of ecosystems, platforms, network effects, openness, transparency and sustainability.

Having this work mat in place and central to it the common language, communication and context, you achieve a more robust platform; you avoid many fragmented pieces.

You can also gain those network multiplication effects by establishing the common ground and project spanning criteria.

This builds connectivity and connections, giving greater scope for partners, as they can see and relate to your language, communicating style and context clarification.

This can also determine a simple “in or out” and determination of what additional value can they bring. It opens up for greater transformation built on a more transparent understanding.

Having an excellent communicating set of mechanisms raises confidence, offers certain reliability and the exchanges of comparability.

If the environment for a group of dynamic, ongoing exchanges can be achieved, you feel that “hands-on”, interactive and immersing sense where good ideas can emerge, build and flow.

Innovation is a role where you need to raise confidence constantly, encourage reliability, encourage an ongoing shift from vested interests into advocacy, identificatîon and not self-protection but shared purpose.

We all recognize that the nature of innovation is messy and how we organize it is critical. The more we engage with others, across borders or departments, gaining consensus takes a long time.

We need to avoid mental traps or fixed mindsets that confuse, frustrate and provide misunderstanding.

Achieving a good common language, strong, regular communication, and a constant reinforcing of the context you can operate and work within helps bring these tensions down.

How we can reduce individual interpretations and variances in definition needs a common place to come too. Again the work mat can be that very place to resolve those consistent issues.

It is called a work mat for a reason, as you can wrestle issues, debate, discuss, push up and down the organization in a way that frames differences and the mechanism to find the solutions to them- that wrestle to the mat.

Why we see Common Language, Communication and Context as important

It aims to do away with pockets of confusion and inefficiencies; It attempts to reduce that fragmented energy in differences and understanding.

A work mat approach strives to minimize unproductive capital and resources allocation. Also, it can tackle and reduce down the need for different standards and narrow variabilities within innovation management. The aim is to attempt to stop the inordinate reinventing and duplication, if not set up well.

The T-Skill thinking in the design

Leaders need to take the lead in this part of the worn mat driving their vision and needs into the organization to react and respond, most through a new activity, including innovation. The leader in this communicating work needs to frame, communicate, and build the corporate innovation identity and provide the belief in innovation into its context and needs.

For me, this is a necessary T-Shaped Skill Senior Executives need to develop for innovation. Executives should be good communicators.

Executives have the big picture in mind and the intent and vision of where they want the organization to go. Executives are responsible for explaining this so this understanding can be put to good innovation use by driving their commitment down and throughout the organization.

There is no better segment of the work mat for the Senior Executive to engage with than in shaping and focusing on the need to build a common identity. Gaining identification across the company comes from communications and building that shared language for common purpose. An innovative common language needs to emerge and the communicating of ambitions for others to identify with.

In this communication, a level of clarity needs conveying. Putting ambitions into the context of what, where, why and often how they see innovation making a contribution gives it meaning, that context for others to relate to and form around. That could encourage risk, exploration, and looking for distinctive, game-changing or new business model alternatives conveys the “where to focus.”

Common language is shared.

The organization’s leaders do not need to own this part of the work mat, but by being highly visible and active, they can encourage it as the “melting pot” for a flow or cascade mechanism, from the top-down and bottom-up.

To do this, they need to be highly active, constantly looking to engage and shape innovation into the future needed in highly visible ways. They can provide depth and breadth to where innovation fits. Executives can drive the “sense of purpose.”

The need must be recognized that leadership does look for a repeatable, scalable, and commonplace innovation to thrive and respond, and the opportunity to reinforce this comes through good communicating and being given a common identity and language.

The work mat is a powerful framing mechanism to make that happen sustainably, dynamic and never static.

Finally, here I provide a prompter for placing language, communication and context into the value, potential triggers and outcomes.

Concluding the series

So we have concluded the five-part series, and those can be viewed independently or in association with these posts All videos and written follow ups gave been provided on this posting site. These have been written over the past few weeks, so they are easy to find.

One separate discussion video session will discuss the leadership role and why they should be the owners of the work mat.

Together these videos and posts give richness to the Executive Innovation Work Mat concept- it has a great value to explore.

You are welcome to get in touch if you want to take this framework into our organization, more than happy to help.

The post Providing the glue in the common language, communications, and context needed for successful innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In the fourth conversation between Jeffrey Phillips and myself, around parts of the Executive Innovation Work Mat, we took on several different issues around the design, function, structure and process needs for innovation.

The conversation lasted nineteen minutes, and for some reason, I lost sound briefly at my end a few times, which was a pity. So I hope I can help fill those gaps and explore the what, why and how of having a dynamic functioning design and structured process to meet today’s demanding and highly energetic world of constant change.

This specific conversation (LINK here) is about 19 minutes. It is all about the fit of innovation and the tensions between the design, function, structure, and process needs to manage innovation management. We relate this specifically within our Executive Innovation Work Mat.

It is always our intention to offer some different thrôughts about the balancing of function, design, process, and structure and giving it equally the creative dynamic attention it needs

If you would like to listen to the three previous conversations, these are here in the links that take you to youtube.com. The first was setting the scene for these conversations on the “fundamental building blocks for innovation success” (LINK) and then the second into “the essential alignment of innovation to strategy” (LINK). The third (LINK) was on “managing governance within innovation”.

I have written supporting posts to these conversations, more to flesh out many different pointers to add more value and awareness of the importance of having a clear, integrated solution for innovation in the solution we offer, the Executive Innovation Work Mat.

I would start by saying innovation should always be in “creative tension”, and as we operate and manage innovation, this tension should also apply within any design. It should have a specific “bedrock” or foundation of needed stages or steps. Still, its need is to be far more fluid, adaptive and agile in what it processes and manages, especially in today’s challenging world, adapting to today’s challenges and working towards the future.

The ability to manage innovation  design, function, structure and process

Starting with a simple definition of D, F, S & P. what you do needs to cover the entire “end to end” process of innovation, its workflows and all the associated roles required to achieve successful outcomes

As a word of caution, it does not start at the idea. The idea needs to “form, from observation, listening, engaging and data insights. This not just comes from the research and development lab but far more to listening and observing customers, the market shifts and trends, to having customer conversations, gaining insights into potential gaps or opportunities in the marketplace or through those that have this market-facing role inside the organization.

We gain from building the inside-out perspective and drawing in the outside-in one.

Today working in more open, highly collaborative environments, we are building ecosystems, networks and a rich diversity of partners who all can bring ideas, knowledge, diversity of opinion, different expertise and insights.

We need to remain “open” to what and how we process this. Having rigid structure or processes and many good observations or concepts can be screened out far too quickly due to “imposed” metrics or a defined idea of how “anything” gets captured and evaluated.

By having some basic building blocks, you can accommodate.

By having some level of operating mechanisms, you can establish a business process. Yet, it is how flexible its design and function can allow a more prosperous environment to draw in, work through and evolve into final proposals that can make a huge (competitive) difference.

The importance of a “dual” perspective of thinking

We need both informal mechanisms and formal ones. For instance, some opening prompters.

What we know today

There is an increasing and radical redesign call of the function, process and structures. Innovators are being more challenged with the rising demands for more innovation. The dynamics are coping with the pressures coming from the top, demanding more growth and impact, controlling the risk, ROI’s and resources in ways that often seem at odds with the needs to grow a business.

This pressure from the top often conflicts with the bottom-up, who struggle in pushing for recognition of ideas, concepts, resources or support. The importance of good governance and the proper functioning structure and the process can help absorb and translate these tensions.

Often you see or hear the lingering fears of wanting more radical innovation but the worries of the upheaval this brings. The “we want predictable innovation but radical enough to make sure we grow”. Often to accommodate conflicting issues needs this strong innovation practice, one that is connected, well defined and worked through.

The Executive Innovation Work Mat can contribute to that.

Achieving a well-designed design, function, structure, and process is utterly dependent on the organization to translate the innovation needs and aims, define the workflow that ‘this will follow and how and where this will occur. Then it needs full support and resourcing.

Today we need to think about innovation outcomes differently.

The higher demand from innovation requires the system to respond quickly to breaking opportunities.

Innovation needs to have a system that is constantly adaptive and flexible. Most of the rigidity needs to be designed out.

Organizations require structures and processes that are far more agile and nimble, constantly recognizing speed as the essence of today’s competitive world.

The challenge to address is replacing a linear system with a spiral one. You constantly loop back to refit your innovation understanding into the idea-to-launch system from the new knowledge you are gaining. The design needs resetting around shorter bursts of high-intensity activity that factor in risk-based contingency, are encouraged to keep exploring and adapting.

To have the capabilities of resetting needs a core design to meet different challenges and demands. Different innovation activity that can range from incremental to distinctive to radical through to entirely new business models needs adapting and adjusting, yet ALL innovation flows through basic designs and flows across the organization.

Innovation should NEVER and ONLY come from ONE originating source; it emerges everywhere. This emergence from everywhere is why innovation needs to be core. It is all within an organization aware, having innovation as part of their job.  ready to recognize innovation potential, pursue it and know where to go for help, finding those who can help them work through the idea into a concept into an outcome.

The balance and creative tension

In a world where agile, adaptive and accelerated innovation is “demanded, we get frustrated that our process and structure are too linear, too rigid and far too planned and managed. Finding the balance in evolving the function, design, process consistently, and structure will always have this Creative Tension.

It is not easy to design a suitable model, but it is wrong to apply one alone, rigid and tightly controlled as one. Sustaining innovation, having repeatable elements does require a defined structure and the broader connecting into the whole innovation function.

Try the work mat; it enables and brings a greater cohesion to innovation in needs and design.

Further resources can be found here in this posting site, in the insights-thinking pages, where you will find the original White Papers, Booklets of previous posts and articles. Equally, you can contact Jeffrey or me directly.

The post Balancing Function, Design, Process and Structure for Creative Tension first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I am working with Jeffrey Phillips, a long-term collaborator on “all things concerning innovation.” We have just had our third short conversation of a five-part series on Innovation Governance.

This specific conversation is all about the fit of innovation governance within our Executive Innovation Work Mat. This is the link on Innovation Governance to the conversation, just under 14 minutes to listen to. Hope it gives a different set of insights to this area of innovation alignment.

If you would like to listen to the two previous conversations then these are here in the links that take you to youtube.com  The first was setting the scene for these conversations on the “fundamental building blocks for innovation success” (LINK) and then the second into “the essential alignment of innovation to strategy” (LINK).

I have written supporting posts to these conversations, more to flesh out a number of different pointers to add more value and awareness of the importance of having a clear integrated solution for innovation in the solution we offer, the Executive Innovation Work Mat.

Link to the first post “Getting back to the future about innovation”

Link to the second post  “Innovation linkages to Strategy is vitally important”

This builds out conversations Jeffrey and I are having on a series of discussions around the value and necessary alignment through the Executive Innovation Work Mat that we feel offers a good solution as the dialoguing and assessing framework for innovation to have a more comprehensive approach.

Listening in to the conversation on Governance

The link to this third conversation is here, it is about 14 minutes and looks at one of the most important aspects of why innovation governance

Often innovation governance gets caught up in the (life-threatening) aspects of governance’s need to have reporting, metrics, reporting and accountability dominating. For me, that often the heavier structure and process needs can, over time, take over and dominate. That can so often drain energy and life out of the creative needs of innovation, it becomes more “rote and uninspiring”. Innovation should never be dull or lack fuel for the inquiring mind.

Jeffrey and I believe we need to get the “lighter touches” into Governance that reflect what innovation needs to be. A Governance environment is not heavily regulated but encouraged and given the freedom to explore but aligned in achieving innovation that relates to the organization’s needs and vision.

I want to attempt to answer three critical questions here to add more value to the need for  Innovation Governance

1. Why we should focus on Innovation Governance?
2. What can a good Governance model resolve?
3. What should a Governance frame (?) deal with?

Why we should focus on Innovation Governance?

The conversation Jeffrey and I had was basically around this first question and most of our discussion covers this. I  encourage you to go and spend that valuable 14 minutes listening to this. Here I am adding to our thoughts and exchanges.

Governance for innovation needs to recognize its unique positioning.

-Innovation is about risk– if it is not dealing in riskier ideas or concepts then you are unlikely to be undertaking innovation, that builds and drives towards new growth and impact potential or reinvigorating the business.

-You always face many unknowns and uncertainties within innovation as it is about discovery, exploration and figuring out something that is different and exciting as it builds on what we have got or know.

-Often our innovation activity is hard to defend, as it is often entering uncharted territory or we lack “hard” quantifiable data to seek more money, additional resources and justify it. In any prototyping or learning stage we can move knowledge understanding along but to keep believing and pushing is simply hard. Having those rules of the road or guiding principles really helps.

-Any governance design needs to be clean, robust, open and transparent, not opaque and closed to a selected few as this opens up to criticism, cynicism or favouritism.  Good governance is seen and valued.

-Governance always has guidelines and measurements, I would argue these need to be sensible and adaptive, not just restrictive and prescriptive. Having flexible, realistic measurements might sometimes “open the door” for different interpretations but pushing the “famous envelope” brings out the greater potential for compelling innovation.

-Lastly here, organizations have “given mindsets” for quantifying returns and you can’t avoid two aspects that need a deeper clarification of what they mean to innovation.  ROI dominates, Time dictates. Innovation spans different time and returns horizons and these need clarification and being fluid within any Innovation Governance and how these will be handled. Look for fewer justified exceptions, build more common approaches into approaching innovation across different horizons,  through emerging, evolving practice and growing acceptance.

What can a good Governance Model resolve?

Let me provide a list here to trigger what it needs to recognize and attempt to resolve

• Resolves conflicts that constantly come upon innovation
• Allocation clarification of resources
• Be the warning point of change- be that in scope, markets, delays or changes.
• The meeting point for ambition- the organizations understanding “flows” through this Governance function
• The central place that alerts and informs a focal point and required passing through point for  everything around innovation
• Has and provides a clear line of sight
• Being the point that constantly positions innovation- bringing it to ALL stakeholders and parties for awareness, status and knowledge.

What should a good Governance function deal with?

For brevity sake let me keep to a list. It is not a definitive one but provides the important aspects of its function

• It is at the centre of funding and managing the risk portfolio
• It shapes the scope and success, it fills out vision and ambition
• It establishes targets and priorities
• It clarifies the time frame approaches needed or recognized
• It offers flexible, realistic measurement settings to give clear coordination, and clarity to innovation activities often over a diverse environment of different innovation needs
• It encourages agility, adapting, being fluid and dynamic in the way to undergo innovation
• It provides good reporting that conveys innovations importance and impact
• Constantly establishes a set of evaluation metrics that reflect different challenges, stages and maturity of what innovation is providing
• A resource centre that can call upon, build and enhance capabilities, capacity and competencies that can be deployed or identified as needed.
• A primary role is to stimulate, not dictate and take or encourage action, it needs to orchestrate and lead.
• It offers project empowerment, leveraging and steering ideas, concepts and ambition.

Being bold, ambitious and determined to build the best Innovation Governance is worth the effort.

Having a comprehensive framework to help top management develop the overarching values, policies and initiatives needed for a corporate innovation need, so as to always build out innovation governance. It is a place that reflects, defends and pushes the innovation activity.

I do recommend a really excellent book, brought out in 2014 that provides a really detailed look at Innovation Governance. It is called “Innovation Governance: How Top Management Organizes and Mobilizes for Innovation” written by Jean-Philippe Deschamps & Beebe Nelson.  Jean-Philippe Deschamps is emeritus Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at IMD in Lausanne (Switzerland) and a large part of his work focuses his research, teaching and consulting activities on the management and governance of innovation.

I wrote a post some time back on “The role of Governance needed in Innovation”I feel it adds to this post here.

Governance of innovation in a comprehensive manner, that is well-designed is essential for innovation today. This functions as the nerve centre for innovation to thrive, contribute and have its rightful place within the core of any organization.

We are in a more complex and demanding world being faced in our organizations and the ability to have a clear, dynamic innovation governance reflects where innovation sits within the business on managing their innovation activities.

The post Why we should focus on Innovation Governance first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.