Part three– Technology will drive innovation change.

We are in need of a different sustaining capacity, one build around innovation as its continuous core; constantly evolving, adapting, learning and adjusting, in perpetual motion.

We are heading for transformational change

Digital technology and the cloud are offering us a radically different conduit to achieve a new engagement process within our organizations. Innovation is going to be very much caught up in this transformational change.
Technology and data will be innovation’s catalyst for change.

Digital technology is prompting us to find new methods and manners to shape our environments, these will alter much of what we do around innovation, in radically different ways.

We will be able to amplify far more of what is going on in real-time, we can capture and explore all the interactions to understand their potential value, we can discover greater individual needs, exchange and extrapolate better, simulate and experiment, all at a growing scale and speed.

The predictable, well-established ways of the past within our innovation processes will be inadequate to cope. We will require solutions moving towards this very different, constantly adjusting future; one of experimentation and exploitation, delivering solutions that meet changing market needs.

One that requires a greater alignment in the practices of innovation, constantly adapting, being fluid, flexible, nimble, agile and responsive. A far different, more dynamic environment too capitalize on this new way of working within our innovation activities.

Designing engagement platforms
Not only will we need a new innovation management system, we will need to build this on multiple engagement platforms. Our growing pressure is to find solutions that offer a cohesive and business-focused approach to the new socially enabled enterprise.

The need is to design these engagement platforms where we seek collaboration and sharing at scale, tapping into a multiple array of communities and advocates that have valuable data for organizations, so they can analyze and interpret this. In return the innovation outcome delivered back are value propositions that meet those needs and understanding.

This ‘marriage’ of digital and technology with the physical output of innovations will make it new growth core. Our need is to think through its process, structures and design, as it may have a real conflict if we don’t change our present thinking around the management of innovation.

Innovation sits outside the organizational ‘norm’ today

Innovation challenges much of what organizations believe they want: those repeatable systems, so that our organizations performance is well-oiled, highly structured and maximizing value by striving to be efficient and effective. Innovation often is in conflict with this.

Innovation requires increasing agility, and flexibility and allowing creativity to flourish. Innovation often stays outside the mainstream system structures, sometimes to it’s and the organization’s detriment, as it often does not fit the ‘norm’. This is today’s innovation problem

Innovation needs to be fluid, open, responsive; sometimes reliant on the instinct, hunch or powerful insight that is never ‘predictable’ but suddenly emerges from a collision of events, or random thoughts that lead to a new insight, a game-changing one. It is really hard to turn this ‘randomness’ or serendipity into a system but certainly not impossible.

We need to renew the organizational engagement.

Many, if not most of our existing systems, will need a radical redesign. Much has to change, be uprooted and completely revisited to begin to design a new digital and physical integration into the system.

Today, digital and physical work at really different speeds. How will they see different patterns and opportunities and try to fit these into a clear view of the world that ends in new innovation?  Can the innovation pipeline cope with even more business opportunities? The human mindset will need to re-orient to receive new digital information in ‘informing’ ways.

Innovation throughput will need different approaches than at present. The innovation pipeline today is very manual, it needs human intervention, in decisions, in inputs, in what is communicated, what is approved or dropped. Innovation gets often weighed down by much unnecessary human intervention.

We will need to transform much within our systems but more importantly to orientate our skills to receive, translate and diffuse new knowledge, in significantly different ways.

How can we connect, enable and deliver better innovative outcomes?
External insights and Intelligence will not become Enterprise knowledge that flows. without real, deep integration.

Receiving the knowledge alone will not turn these into higher scale, richer, more innovation business outcomes, that have real growth value, unless we realize this pending and massive ‘mismatch’ between digital flowing in and the physical process attempting to cope with this to respond with tangible outcomes.

Market trends are changing faster and becoming shorter, so opportunity windows are narrowing. Risks of missing out are constantly increasing for those who are not focusing intently on that critical ‘time to market’ and not constantly streaming their innovation system, looking to automate it where ever they can.

What happens when all this digital knowledge and insights start hitting our desks, having to work through an ongoing manual or semi-manual system, when we are seeking to capitalize on a ‘breaking’ opportunity? It will be a real choke point that will become a crisis – a real burning platform to be resolved.

We need to begin to really think through this as a complete redesign for innovation to cope.

It cannot be a simple ‘bolt-on’ job, it needs a radical redesign. We should grab this ‘moment of time’ to think what a new innovation system will need to achieve, fit for the post-digital age, how it should look, feel and operate like.

Organizations will be in their search for understanding what needs to change within their innovation systems, as soon as they realize that today’s design can’t cope.

What is needed depends on how organizations ‘embrace’ digital. It will need a real depth of understanding and working through.

The pressure for a new business core is building- what will change?
Combining technology and innovation will seriously challenge all of us differently:

• Our mental capacity and physical adroitness will continue to multiply through digital technologies and the need to be far more agile in responding.
• Yet equally our whole domain expertise we know today will eventually be stripped away and replaced by something else based on ‘collective’ knowledge.
• Somehow we will need systems that help us manage the physical world of innovation with the constantly changing and informing digital world that each of us will need to be ‘pulling’ together in different ways.
• We will need to blend intelligence and experience that we need to share  will need new ways of networking and exchanging around these ideas and insights into tangible values that fit with the organizations goals.
• As data flows in we will need to rationalize the risk decision-making in real-time, adjusting risk with opportunities on a constantly changing basis, as our intelligence and knowledge flow update us with more informed understandings..
• We can look to insights as possibly better predictions of success by lessening the risk factors of no knowledge being replaced by emerging knowledge based on the latest insights.
• We will be able to explore the ‘worlds’ trending on those topics relevant to our needs, knowledge and innovation thinking and bring these into our physical environment to adjust our development process.
• We will consistently discover the unexpected and the surprising and we need to be ready to adjust our thinking and capitalize on this quickly before others come across it. We need high levels of agility and responsiveness.
• Through constant validation we can consistently confirm or question the business case, we can test hypotheses and experimentation in real-time, in multiple scenarios and options.
• Having data, and creating a history you can equally be more backwards looking to judge success and failure to learn from these to intelligently improve going forward.

There are a host of significant changes about to occur, to build more of the dynamics of innovation into our management in radically different ways.

These will bring about radical changes in the ways of working innovation, so as to align and extract digital knowledge and ‘fuse’ this into the design process of the physical for final tangible outcomes.

The combinations of social, big data analytics, computing anywhere at any time, the cloud, collaborative platforms, and connecting the virtual world with the physical worlds will change how processes and whole industries will work.

It is how we blend the new business model of service with ‘adaptive’ technology, processes and people, both inside and outside our organizations will fuel success or speed up decline.

What surely is clear is that innovation simply cannot remain on the periphery, it simply has to become the new core of our organizations.

Today’s innovation engine is not fit for today’s or even tomorrow’s purpose. A time to change it

We are dealing with a completely different set of mind-sets, skills, procedures, governance, processes and responsibilities as we adjust to digital, social and technology advancements.

To gain from the digital evolution taking place we need a robust, comprehensive and radical overhaul of much of what is going on within our organizations in relationship to innovation and its management.

We need to not just adapt our processes and structures, but radically challenge them to grab this opportunity to change our innovation processes, so we can provide a more agile and fluid environment.

We should be thinking through our needs of the what, where and how we set about constructing this now.

A radical newly designed Enterprise-wide innovation process, that ‘sits’ in the cloud seems to hold the key, in my opinion, to embracing and adapting constantly to all we have been learning about how innovation works.

Then it is thinking about what technology, digital, networks, relationships and social streaming can bring that when combined and fully integrated within this redesign, is more reliant on technology and is enabled in the cloud. Do you agree?

****My Additional Note: Recently I provided some opening thoughts into a debate on what is missing for our future, here is a link into a part of the deck provided to prompt that part of the discussion.

*** revised on 28th March from the original post.

The post Moving innovation into our core – Part three first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Part two, recognizing the broken process we currently have that stops innovation from becoming a core.

The innovation process and the structures build into our organization certainly need to be changed.

I outline here different barriers that require a change to bring innovation more into the core of a business.

Today, we are needing to build greater agility and responsiveness into our innovative design to counter a more rapidly changing market, sensing changing conditions and ‘seize’ breaking opportunities. .

A new combination of speed, flexibility, networking and focusing on adapting and fusing the skills and capabilities needed, will require changes in our innovation work.

Our current structures and processes for innovation are holding us back and will continue to not deliver the expected results needed today or the future, giving real growth and sustainability. We do need a far more radical approach to a solution for managing innovation inside our organizations.

The poor collective leadership of innovation, functional design, slow decisions and innovation not being focused enough,  along with a lack of appropriate skills or decision empowerment, are some of the inhibitors around innovation today.

We need to develop more agile and flexible processes that work more on outcomes that ‘seize’ the opportunity seen in the marketplace, emerging from greater (big data) insight, seen as strategically aligned and ensuring processes that shorten the ‘reaction’ to delivery time.

Firstly we have the strategic – innovation breakdown

The primary reasons for the breakdown in the strategic planning process that fails to connect strategy with operations are:

• A disconnect exists between corporate strategic plans, which typically define the company’s targets for growth, and their day-to-day execution activities.
• The annual operating plans are quickly out of date due to constant changes in the market, product, technology and competitive situations.
• The connection between corporate plans and the innovation strategy for new product development and product innovation strategy doesn’t exist in most companies – this is one critical gap.
• The operational side of the organization frequently doesn’t understand the strategy or how its execution connects to business goals.

We forget to alter our ‘thinking’ across different opportunity horizons, to direct resources around those innovations that address 1) the burning needs to improve on the existing here and now, with those that can build into the 2) next and different winning positions and finally, those that 3) explore fundamental different premises that can (radically) alter your innovation landscape. Mapping across all three is often missing, we stay trapped in the ‘here and now’ mindset far too much.

To achieve consistent, sustainable long-term growth and profitability in your company, you must have systems and processes in place to close this gap and connect your corporate plans with innovation strategy and operational activities.

“Our planning sucks, how can we be more responsive”

There is the fashionable argument that you abandon annual plans and you seek fresh planning ways to create an organization ready to react to critical changes in the marketplace. That is great for the little fella, all nimble and lean but for the larger complex organization, they struggle.

Each of the different organizational parts has different reaction and response times, are governed in totally different ways. Plans are essential as the instrument of strategic design but how can these become more reflective and responsive, this is a real thorny problem to crack.

A recent report by Strategy& suggests being more agile requires a clear focus on two attributes of ‘strategic responsiveness’ and ‘organizational flexibility being built into the design of the larger organizations so they can move far quicker as conditions change.

A combination of ‘sensing new risk and opportunities to craft quick responses and also being able to “shift execution rapidly”, applying fast retooling and rework, applying this progressively over weeks and months.

For innovation to fit within these challenges much of the current process and structures need to be changed.

Any ‘rapid action’ requires very different skills and infrastructure to support it.  Organizations will need to encourage a higher level of experimentation, with even more of a constant focus on reducing all the unnecessary complexity.

Reducing all the different concepts going through the pipeline with more corporate-wide support to drive these through the system to meet these critical new opportunities that meet changing market needs or strategic goals. To do this alignment becomes essential.

Pulling together the broken pieces and silos of knowledge will need different approaches

The operational areas in an organization have their own functional execution systems which are often not connected to planning and innovation systems and processes. They remain separated as there is no real depth in the integrating process, this needs addressing.

High degrees of resistance and communication breakdowns need real solutions.

I’ve written extensively on this lack of alignment (for example) and certainly believe there are far better ways to move forward in thoughtful, constructive ways that begin the movement to establish a clearer innovation management system.

Also we focus too much on cascading down organizations, I would argue the cascading effect of flowing back up, from the ‘grass roots’ needs a far more robust system, it provides for a deeper choice of better, connected decisions. It is this ‘cascading’ both up and down on where we often lack the real alignment and fail to incorporate it within our future plans.

Leadership constantly laments about ‘poor innovation’

Many organizations are failing to build and nurture any design toward the ‘innovation ecosystem.’ We are also not formulating and communicating where innovation links into strategy, we are not connecting all the different parts. Innovation stays often poorly articulated, lacking an understanding of what makes up a holistically designed innovation ecosystem.

Often innovation ‘appeals’ because we can build compelling stores. Organizations are poor at building a compelling narrative and lack the skills and communication methods that will engage us.  Innovation understanding is often left to others to interpret what it means to them to figure out their part, with a hope that their decisions will fit somehow.

Because there is often a lack of internal clarity, there is also a poor connection to the external environment where opportunities are never recognized for their internal value to develop. Leadership lacks much in addressing these issues.

We constantly fail  in building lasting client value

Equally, where the customer remains dissatisfied with the present offering, as one not meeting their explicit needs and where they often have to continue to compromise, they are ripe for change.

Often the very leadership of organizations has a less than adequate ‘grasp’ of all the necessary levers for clients’ innovation ‘need’ to not design this in a sustaining, repeatable process with constant customer engagement they keep this ad hoc, project-specific, they miss ongoing value building opportunities.

Innovation stays resolutely one-off, targeted and specialized and disconnected from planning out a series of solutions built through a well thought through a road map of evolving value that builds for the longer-term lasting client engagement. There are notable exceptions here, mostly based on technology solutions, constantly evolving, adding increased benefits over time.

There is such a disconnect going on in ‘talking and walking’ innovation.

The organization ‘demands’ innovation, the leadership presents innovation at every opportunity, often more as a ‘fig leaf’ for the embarrassment that eventually arrives, as innovation in the marketplace. We need to set up a real connection between rhetoric and real value, delivering substance, not just ‘promise’ or intent.

The leader needs to engage become the source or energy point to make valuable innovation really happen, no one else can. It cannot be simply delegated away.

Who wants a leader that simply delegates growth, new wealth creation and your future to others? The need to both ‘walk and talk’ innovation consistently not just in annual meetings or board reports but in their daily engagement and detailed understanding of what makes innovation happen..

We also need to become far more comfortable with our own emerging practices.
I just always feel uncomfortable with the reliance placed on copying others’ best practices. It is inherently wrong for your organization if it believes in its unique design and the offerings it can deliver upon.

If you want to simply copy then seek out best practices and enjoy your ‘race to the bottom’.  By all means, there are good practice solutions to learn from but if you are dependent on others’ best practices you need to kick the habit fast.

Your specific organizations needs its unique design to seed and cultivate innovation, otherwise, you fall into a  trap many constantly fall into. We need to work on our emerging practice as we learn through our own endeavours, far more than copying others. We need to capture these in our systems and processes as our stories and practices.

The constant switching on and off of our innovation activities.

Organizations constantly do this by switching on and off, believing by pressing the innovation button, it springs back into life and delivers on-demand.

We just can’t simply switch innovation ‘on or off’ to meet short-term needs, it is certainly not faddish, it provides future wealth and sustainability and needs sustaining and nurturing consistently.

We need a system that not just monitors the innovating health of the organization but its variances are as vigorously discussed as any operational variance.

Switch innovation ‘on and off at your eventual peril, as you will eventually short-circuit the organization and the source of your future will simply drain away. People leave when they see no future or are fed-up with all the constant change We need to make innovation our core to drive future organization performance and keep it burning bright for all to see and ‘fuel’ into to make it sustain.

An Enterprise-wide innovation process that provides transparency and visibility.

If the leadership of the organization fail to formally integrate innovation into the core of any strategic – management agenda, so that is ‘constantly running through’ the decision-making process of innovation, it will remain disappointing and frustrating in its impact and results.

With the increased disruptive competition and rapidly changing conditions in markets, technology and demands placed on organizations, innovation need to be more central in the design and its management.

The leadership need to close the gap between aspiration and execution of innovation, make it more central in their thinking and activities, delivering the explicit message for everyone up and down the organization to feel more confident that innovation is a core focus and needs development. Make it highly visible and central.

Our leaders need to explicitly lead and manage innovation

Leaders not only need to demand change to come from managing innovation, they need to create this case for change and must ‘make it happen’ by demanding all the connecting parts be understood, designed and delivered, in a more sustaining innovation process.

They need to see a solution that provides an Enterprise-wide innovation process built upon making all the connections for innovations complete understanding, not on selected parts.

One that can deliver organizational-wide visibility and transparency, designed for achieving the greater strategic responsiveness needed from the top and able to give back the organizational flexibility, and flexibility in adjusting resource commitments to meet changing needs.

A redesign that is not linear but adaptive and dynamically evolving, based on changing intelligence and knowledge, to bring greater agility and faster decision commitment into its design, something that our present systems do not have designed into them.

****My Additional Note: Recently I provided some opening thoughts into a debate on what is missing for our future, here is a link into a part of the deck provided to prompt that part of the discussion.**

The post Moving Innovation into our Core – Part Two first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Arguably this lack of being a core as the central need of providing sustainable growth holds the deeper understanding of innovation back.

A core that could offer up the sustaining value and contribution innovation can make, to the growth and future well-being of organizations and having available the level of resources and commitments it needs. Today innovation seems to be falling short in delivering on its promise. Why?

A three-part series on rethinking the management of the innovation system.

Part one, building the business case of needed change in how we manage innovation.

This part is about those constant top-level concerns that needs finally to be addressed, if innovation ever can become core
So we all hear the constant ‘disappointment’ surrounding innovation. There are consistent concerns of a “lack of resources”, the “top management is not giving innovation enough attention” or “innovation lacks a clear alignment to the strategic direction”.

There are constant complaints around innovation and its lack of ‘impact’ on final delivery from different disappointed stakeholders. To give innovation a better ‘fighting’ chance we need to rethink how we manage it and we have to make it more central to our organization’s thinking, decision making and management in those systems and processes that give it this chance.

Today innovation tends to operate in discreet, often stand-alone applications, where the systems for innovation stay often clustered in specialized groups working on their part. This is partly by design but also by the restrictions we place on ourselves in organizational design or solutions being offered.

We have no solid, robust innovation management system in place that is Enterprise-wide to handle all that ‘makes up’ innovation, we all really do fail to deliver transforming innovation, apart from some notable exceptions based upon emerging technology applications, platforms and integrated designs.

We lack the dedicated organizational process to manage innovation

Innovation lacks an Enterprise-wide Innovation Process as this has not been tackled through any ERP system as yet, apart from some selected parts. Is innovation management too tough to capture as a total system? Can innovation be ‘captured’ fully and turned into a robust process?

I believe so, but it will take a different, more radical form to deliver enterprise-wide innovation that is adaptive, agile and fluid in much of its management.

The flows we need to imagine will be far more constant in change, more dynamic in what occurs and its impact and not that ‘static’ or well-defined inputs that much of the current ERP system requires. It will take a significant re-thinking.

Whenever the activities around innovation are required to be reviewed, much of this ‘selective/collective intelligence’ has to be constantly reworked, to allow it to be disseminated to a broader audience for their response and new input.

What we have today is relatively inefficient and certainly not well-connected to make a system dynamic and agile in its evolution, to parallel the often talked about ‘messy’ innovation system of today.

Innovation has changed significantly over the past ten to twenty years
Innovation has moved from ‘just’ being within the domain of research and development, so as to then be passed over to marketing to implement, it has grown in its complexity with the movement to become far more open and complex in the necessary ‘touch points’ it needs to cover.

A significant range of interested parties have become involved and needed to be drawn into the process of innovation and its development.

Open innovation has been changing the way we see and work with innovation. Ideas are constantly entering the organization as raw concepts or simply ‘weak signals,’ or intelligence, then translated into areas of investigation and then translated into potential opportunities to investigate and explore.

Idea Management is part of an integration puzzle.

Idea Management started as simply a ‘stand-alone’ system but has evolved over the years to continually improve and become the front end intelligent tool to increase engagement and quality of innovation activities.

Within this, it has continued to push out to map the strategic innovation areas and set the hunting grounds for innovation.

The best solutions strive to encourage and create a balanced roadmap of ideas, look at ways to improve cost savings, and encourage dialogues and exchanges. The push to speed up the discovery, development and implementation of ideas is driving much of the idea management software solutions. These systems are improving the ability to offer different levels of governance and reporting, to keep moving towards effective and efficient decision making.

The ability to push the software and the technologies so as to provide the appropriate platform for engaging the creative energies within organizations is a key battleground at present.

Continuous social features are being ‘released’ to improve the quality of ideas by encouraging idea development and bottom-up support with community graduation, narrowing the focus on the most promising and well-developed ideas.

There has been a visible improvement in the workflow set of concepts that aims to simplify the idea development path, and makes progress more transparent. There is this encouraging management engagement through community platforms. All good and very positive.

The core of any idea management system is to drive campaigns, collect and develop ideas and provide the ability and structures to evaluate these and move them through into a pipeline and portfolio management system to be managed accordingly. This has evolved significantly in recent years.

The enterprise portfolio systems are certainly attempting to manage the growing complexity

The providers of portfolio and pipeline management systems have been exploiting the choices of the portfolio management needed, be this managing investment, projects, resources, applications, products, and services.

They are designing them to be an end-to-end solution that constantly are planning the resources needed to achieve a better potential for integrating, deciding and executing around choices, driven by a focus on ‘finding and calculating the ‘hard numbers for the return on investments.

These platforms are providing the opportunity to have enterprise-wide visibility into the allocation and use of resources to deliver against this evolving demand.

Whereas capturing all ideas is at the heart of Idea Management, it is managing resources within the Portfolio.

The present push is towards a more holistic view across investments, the assets, resources and services required that work from capture, through the planning cycle and through to execution and looking to achieve a more flexible integration. Analytics and visualization, along with greater updating of performance management and time-to-realization are being provided.

Yet I feel we still lack all the integration that the parts being offered can provide, for achieving greater line-of-sight and alignment into organizations’ goals. Also in managing the competencies, capabilities and capacities that need to combine and deliver on the potential discoveries made or identified.

Any next ‘big step’ by existing software vendors will require significant new rounds of investment and innovative thinking, is this a step too far for many and does this hold back the evolution we really need?

Social media is being ‘plugged in’ for greater innovation

Both idea management and portfolio software solutions have been working hard to integrate into leading business applications, including IBM Connections, Yammer, SharePoint, and Jive and become a host in the cloud or on-premise.

The need to increasingly connect to all the social media tools to attempt the capture of ideas and manage resources and portfolio decisions is requiring far more ‘real-time’ engagement that is needed to bring into any final decisions on ideas or portfolio management decisions.

Stand-alone or adjoining systems are not providing the full answer we are needing today.

These ‘stand-alone’ systems aim is working hard at trying to create sustainable engagement, encouraging ever-increasingly scale in handling increasingly larger volumes of dialogues, information and data, as well as span global enterprise deployments.

Many software solution providers are working towards focusing on capturing ideas that are Customer need-driven and utilize far more of the cloud-based potential.

By focusing on determining the Ideas and possible solutions to then work through the needed resource, identify gaps and then deliver a Work Management set of solutions, to move ideas through to eventual execution but we still have numerous ‘disconnects’ across the innovation process.

Yet we are still lacking a complete mindset for managing innovation
Historically this split between idea management software and the enterprise portfolio systems might have previously made sense but I think it is possibly holding the integration of innovation back for today and the future.

We need to make a greater connection between what is available, what is possible and what a broad innovation management understanding requires to finally deliver ‘the’ innovation solution and technology is advancing the possibilities here.

I worry over this ‘fixation’ on this front end of idea management as we are in a ‘race’ to provide and improve in a marketplace of 50 plus providers of idea management software. Equally the fragmenting within the messages and value within the portfolio and pipeline providers is possibly a cause for ‘holding back’ by a number of possible clients.

Solutions that don’t seem to align with the organization stay outside and forever stand-alone, not yielding the potential value for all concerned.

Those that can ‘see beyond’ just managing in this one or selected spaces of innovation around idea management or portfolio planning, would radically alter the innovation management game.

Providers may make claims they are achieving this complete innovation management system but I am not yet convinced by what I see. We need a more holistic and integrated approach.

We need to go to the next step – providers of a holistic Enterprise-wide Innovation Process 

We still are falling short in managing the total innovation process. The present software solutions, even if they capture radical ideas seem to ‘boil these down’ and ‘dilute these’ as they have to meet the criteria set within the portfolio management system and stage-gating decision process so as to actually work in delivering clear often predetermined outcomes .

The end result so often it seems is re-affirming the incremental cycle of repeating, predictable, known decisions, based on hard numbers alone and known facts, so as to be able to achieve some ‘given’ set of outcomes, both sold in the value of the software solution and believed as wanted by the management.

So many of our innovations we should be dealing with deals are so often in the unknown, unpredictable, in their uniqueness and today our systems simply can’t cope with these. We still struggle in dealing with a more radical innovation need, where unpredictable consequences can occur both in defining the right inputs, forecasting the process or outcome predictability.

Our present software systems are falling short to manage this fluidness and need for constant agility and adapting.

This is where we need to find a better solution, to find a way, a system and its process, that keeps moving innovation towards the broader strategic core, having a consistent ‘line of top management sight.’ As well as achieving consistent commitment to managing innovation far more dynamically, and in agile and fluid ways,

Even in this uncertainty, we all face today, the full scope of innovation activity has much uncertainty and risk built into it that our present software solutions are finding difficult to manage or capture.

It conflicts as they continue to build linear or parallel systems and not systems that adapt and respond as needed, ones that constantly ‘loopback, re-feeding the understanding to drive greater, broader, ever-increasing innovation performance.

Part two follows in the next post

****My Additional Note: Recently I provided some opening thoughts into a debate on what is missing for our future, here is a link to a part of the deck provided to prompt that part of the discussion.**

The post Moving innovation into our Core- Part One first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The first thing is you need to have a solid, thoughtful conversation around the type of strategic emphasis you wish to achieve from your innovation activity, and how will it support the organization’s strategic direction.

These can be aligned to general strategic needs such as growing market share, differentiation and disrupting adjacent markets, serving the consistent changing and demanding customer needs, or by honing the delivery process, by spotting those and then exploiting them rapidly and effectively. All these become alignment conversations.

Creating clear goals and linking/aligning innovation to those, gives a more agile top-level strategy dialogue as a vital step before you get into the actual innovation concept – delivery stage. Senior executives must establish the manner in which innovation fits within the strategic context established by goals, vision and strategies.

If you just simply are diving into innovations with no alignment structure you risk growing disappointments. Setting about having a series of strategic conversations of where innovation ‘fits’ can change the goalposts, alter the perspective and can give the innovation a more focused framing to build far better value propositions around.

Constructing an innovative conversation framework is never easy, we all come at it in different ways and those strategic conversations can begin to fray at the edges and slip more into tactical, the more we talk and this needs to be watched!

What I am suggesting here is an innovative conversation framework

One where we can approach different strategic value propositions, and where we might need to debate these across the organization, as the points of impact and resource need, so we can make a move towards a higher degree of innovation alignment from all involved.

If we take just the three ‘classic’ strategic thrusts of product leadership, operational excellence or customer intimacy, then we need to make clear the potentially different emphasis points within any suggested innovation approach that we should take.

We must, within any innovation approach, be clear on what and where we should be placing our primary focus.

Aligning innovation within a strategic conversation framework
This framing can be most useful to remind people who are involved that there are significant points of difference depending on the route approach to market.

There is a need to agree and align on what we are driving towards – and support any selected strategic direction. This framework can really open up the discussion. It can begin to show the possible implications and challenges ahead.

I would really doubt you could achieve a combination of all three if you just consider some of the aspects I’ve laid out within this framework above.

If it is still demanded, and some leaders can be just that, demanding – wanting to cover all the bases without knowing why they should be really focusing down on one of these.

The direction you go requires the organizational focus to build the type of capabilities, resources and processes to match this and these are critically different, depending on the approach you take.

Really do try to establish some key strategic principles

I would suggest you really do need, even more, a framework to remind you of the critical differences and what aspects need clear focus to deliver to the distinct value proposition parts. Each strategic value proposition has significant implications to plan and work through.

This framework can help you to contribute to achieving a greater alignment between the strategic direction (product leadership, operational excellence or customer intimacy) and the key innovation aspects that help to align to this which the organization will need to think about and work through.

******

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Seeking strategic and innovation alignment conversations first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In a new book written by Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School in New York and one of the world’s leading experts on strategy, she has been exploring the changes rapidly taking place called  “ The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business”

 “Strategy (in the past) was all about finding a favourable position in a well-defined industry and then exploiting a long-term competitive advantage. Innovation was about creating new businesses and was seen as something separate from the business’s core set of activities.” “Sustainable competitive is not just ineffective, it’s actually counterproductive” says Professor McGrath.

She rightly states:“Think about it: the presumption of stability creates all the wrong reflexes. It allows for inertia and power to build up along the lines of an existing business model. It allows people to fall into routines and habits of mind. It creates the conditions for turf wars and organizational rigidity. It inhibits innovation.

It tends to foster the denial reaction rather than proactive design of a strategic next step… A preference for equilibrium and stability means that many shifts in the marketplace are met by business leaders denying that these shifts mean anything negative for them.”

Innovation needs to finally emerge in a new form.

Innovation cannot be separated from implementing an effective strategy, actually it is becoming far more central. Yet our leaders are constantly failing to recognize their essential role they must play to allow innovation to realize its place within the goals and needs of the strategy.

They will be in denial by failing to build the innovators organization to manage this  new transient advantage. One that is highly flexible, agile, built around a constellation of emerging business principles that builds upon the ethos of imagination, exploration, experimentation, discovery and collaboration (Steve Denning).

A new structure that has as part of it one that promotes independence, diverse thinking and seeking out individual contributions. To achieve this innovation needs to be fully embraced as a clear competency that does need to be professionally built and certainly well-managed; it needs leadership’s total engagement for establishing new principles, practices, attitudes, values and beliefs that become central to the new way forward to deal with this new transient advantage suggested by Professor McGrath.

Today the rhetoric outweighs the reality for innovation and we need change!

Survey after survey of our leadership within organizations talks up innovation

• * Over 70% of CEO’s surveyed constantly named innovation as within their top three strategic priorities
• * 93% of surveyed executives said the long-term success of their organization’s strategy depends on their ability to innovate
• * For almost 90 percent of CEO’s, generating organic growth through innovation has become essential for success in their industry.
• * Also over 70% of the top executives identified themselves as the primary driver of innovation

Yet innovation is failing, reality is constantly hitting home in poor results.

• * Despite increased business investment in innovation, only 18% of executives believe their company’s innovation efforts deliver a competitive advantage.  Source: a new Accenture study (May 2013)
• * The “absence of a well-articulated innovation strategy” was identified as the most important constraint hampering organizations from reaching their innovation targets, in a study published by Capgemini Consulting in April 2012
• * Almost 60% of firms surveyed admitted that they have no explicit innovation strategy ( a joint Cap Gemini and IESE study)
• * Only one-third of the executives report innovation is fully integrated in corporate-level strategies (McKinsey Quarterly, 2012)

Then you go deeper into organizations current position on innovation

The formal management of innovation is largely overlooked and to quote these statistics from an Innovation Leadership Study in March 2012:

• *Only 30% of respondents agree they have an effective organization structure for innovation
• *45% do not have a well-defined governance structure for innovation
• *40% lack clear roles and responsibilities for innovation
• *39% state they do not have an effective decision-making process for innovation
• *49% are not having a well-defined process to prioritize and allocate time and funding to innovation projects
• * 54% of those surveyed indicate they do not have a formal KPI system for promoting innovation

Innovation comes to a screeching halt because it is not totally integrated and fully supported from the top and embedded into the core of organizations. Innovation is failing to deliver on its potential. Can you imagine all that invested time in innovation, on tasks, products, concepts, ideas that fail? There is real waste  if innovation is not fully aligned to the strategy.

If these constantly don’t align to corporate strategies, someone somewhere should be concerned, I mean really concerned. Perhaps as “mad as hell” and we are not going to take it any more. Something has to change or many of these organizations will not exist in the future .

The great disconnect at the top of organizations for innovation is in plain sight for all to see.

So we must see there is a huge gap that does exists between what executives want, and what the business believes and is knowing what is actually going on.  Innovation for its needs actually lie in the senior executive own hands:

• Executives need to demonstrate that they want and need innovation
• They must become more engaged and outline (in some detail) their expectations
• They must create a framework or structure to ensure it exists

Innovation success starts and stops with senior executives. 

They want innovation success but they consistently fail to understand their part within the innovation need-to-succeed. Only senior executives can:

• Communicate and develop the innovation vision and work towards actively reducing the barriers it faces within their corporation
• They need to bridge the existing culture with one that promotes innovation, where both short-term need and long-term sustainability are equally encourages and worked upon
• Influence and encourage the breadth of skills and capabilities needed in innovation to be given the appropriate focus for its organization to successfully innovate
• Establish the environment and then create and support the incentives where innovation can flourish effectively.
• Work constantly at ensuring the conditions for success is well-communicated and the clear goals and expectations are articulated.
• The top executives must understand the investment required for innovation and provide the adequate resources and funding along with clear directions
• Actively seek alignment of the innovation activities into the strategic needs they see as critical to work towards
• They need to set the innovation strategic agenda and provide a robust and clear integrated innovation framework like the Executive Innovation Work Mat, for example.

The sad, sad truth is that many of our leaders still cannot get comfortable with innovation.

Many of our present leadership of organizations are actually uncomfortable with innovation; they want to keep it on the periphery of their thinking.  It disturbs much of what they have worked all their careers upon, honing a highly efficient and effective organisation that minimises the risks, reduces the surprises and works away in a highly predictable and steady way.

They often lack any real depth in innovation experience and training. They are fixated on the short-term, often to the detriment of the longer-term opportunities due to tenure and their incentive metrics.

Today the senior executive loves to get fully involved in the urgent needs of the day, moving constantly from one operational oversight meeting into another, spending decreasing time on the important.

The pressures and demands placed on them to respond, to react, to comment on day-to-day events, are growing in priority to be seen as ‘being on top of these’  but are they losing the longer-term perspectives and detachments needed for designing organizations differently?

To meet rapidly changing challenges and actively working upon new organization designs to give a new fitness and intent? Often these seem rushed and reactive to threats or poor results.

The larger the organization, also the greater the disconnect is happening between themselves and their employees and this is creating increasing growing barriers to understand the pulse of the business or stay tuned to market shifts.

Organizations are losing any competitive advantage as they are failing to see a huge change taking place before their eyes as they remain rigid and fixed, locked in the past. Internally alignment is becoming harder. Advantage is only short-lived, yet our organizations are totally encumbered by out of date designs and structures.

Organizations are being challenged far more today and their relevancy needs radical redesigns and stepping back and designing these is becoming critical. The core of our organizations needs to shift towards more agile, adaptive and innovative designs.

The need for a real alignment of strategy and innovation

Innovation stands in service to strategic goals such as growing market share, differentiation and disrupting adjacent markets, serving the consistent changing and demanding customer needs by spotting these and then exploiting them rapidly and effectively.

Creating clear goals and linking/aligning innovation to those more agile strategies is a vital role for CEO’s and senior executives.  Senior executives must establish the manner in which innovation fits within the strategic context established by goals, vision and strategies.They cannot abdicate this role. Change is hard, so is innovation.

However, even when executives understand the linkage, they may fail to understand how to ensure linkages between corporate strategy and innovation actually does lie with them to be communicated throughout the organization.

When executives simply request innovation and delegate the decisions and definitions to business line leaders or executives outside the boardroom they are delegating the growth and future of the organization to others. They are killing the true potential of innovation as it remains unaligned. This cannot continue, we need to bring innovation into the boardroom as core.

If we are in a world of transient advantage as Rita Gunther McGrath suggests, she also clearly states: “Innovation needs to be a continuous, core, well-managed process rather than the episodic and tentative process it is in many companies”.

Identification comes from the top and from our customers

This new innovation core can only be led and fully integrated from the top, aligned fully into the strategies, organizational design and the goals. In rapidly changing market conditions where advantage is transient then we certainly need very different designs within our organizations to respond.

It is absolutely time that innovation comes fully into the board room and driven from the top. Innovation needs to be recognized fully as the key to more prosperity, more growth and added value – achieving that is the mandate of the board and this requires an explicit integrated innovation framework, no less that reflects the changing reality of the era we are in.

Then others can simply get on with the job of responding by delivering the innovation outcomes that are constantly aligned to the needs within the changing landscape and demands placed on all, to read, react and respond differently and this needs total integration from top to bottom through an overarching set of integrated frameworks.

A different alignment is required.

Alignment is just not the internal need any more; it is having clear external alignments as well; in knowing the customers needs and reacting to these faster and with clear competitive intent, aligning with others on different platforms and collaborations.

Having an innovation geared organization that has clear goals, principles, values and attitudes that is working towards a consistent range of organizational possibilities. One that is ready to capitalize on breaking opportunities, aligned to exploit these. Then having in place the capabilities to build rapidly out on these to exploit these through new learning, new insights and growing connections so extending the possibilities even further.

A constant evolving strategy perhaps, one that will give the organization a new more demanding competitive advantage, that is built on anticipating and managing constant change, never standing still, always evolving, being in perpetual transition.

A different ‘sustaining’ capacity built around innovation as the continuous core, constantly evolving, adapting, learning and adjusting. In perpetual innovation motion.

The post Figuring out a different strategic alignment with innovation being central. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Each part has a vital part to play in being combined for innovation, so it can function but these are not the core. Our identification with innovation is that core.

The core lies in the scope and definitions, the context that innovation is set and the identification with these. How often do organizations fail because they rushed into innovation, along those classic lines of: “let’s experiment and learn as we go” as their mentality.

We fail because we don’t take the necessary time to examine the significant differences in innovation terminology, in the different ways or types of innovation, in gaining from ‘evidence based’ research and experimentation.

What we expect to see from our day-to-day work seems not to apply to our innovation selection criteria. We experiment indiscriminately, poking a stick around the opportunity haystack looking for that elusive ‘golden’ needle.
Random selection and discarding practices
Organizations have been randomly selecting, then discarding practices constantly, in a never-ending search of more of other organizations best practices, without understanding what these truly entail, or what this truly requires in commitment. No wonder innovation continues to receive a bad ‘rap’ when you often have the innovation blind, leading the blind.

There are so many facets within innovation that need a much deeper, extensive understanding that is so often lacking. We love to collect or synthesise and then quickly dismiss what doesn’t work, dispensing with some valuable utility on the way, as we move onto the next ‘complete’ package.

Then the cycle repeats itself, perhaps not immediately but in its quiet eroding way that throws innovation even more into question and doubt.

Lost identities, lost opportunities

We have lost our identification, yet this one word strikes at the core of innovation as the essential to have. Everything we do should have an overly binding context to it. If we don’t place innovation within its appropriate framework we fail to contextualize our activities, the intended fit, which offers the real relationship we need.

We need to fit our work to the strategic goals.  If this is simply missing then innovation is likely misfiring, or not hitting the targets because it is scatter-gun in approach and its interpretation.

Innovation cries out for an integrated innovation framework.

Offering an integrated innovation framework is the place where we can gain the necessary identification. It is central to what we should be doing; it establishes the boundaries within which innovation should take place.

This is the one essential place for leadership engagement. If innovation is never placed in its context, then how do we expect the results often asked for by the CEO? Innovation is adrift, it is actually unsupported, and we don’t achieve that precious identification.

If we don’t  have provided that innovation framework, we leap into innovation, often in good faith, as asked, so we become often hyper-active as we all find our own ways forward. Eventually we stumble along and finally work out our own language and understanding of what innovation means, different to even the persons sitting at the next desk.

Just take a look at all the different definitions of innovation you will find, just in one large organization alone. This lack of a clear context is so harmful we add further unnecessary complexity and over time frustrate the organization and confuse the majority.

People disconnect because they lack what is needed to connect! They continue to work hard, often very hard, but sometimes never truly understanding how their tasks and roles contribute to the strategic direction.

We need to make sure each person makes their specific connections to an integrated approach for themselves. To achieve these connections you need a shared understanding, a common framework and a common language, to reduce the mental traps and misunderstandings of what innovation is individually meaning. We need everyone to try to get onto the same page.

Educating formulates the understanding

Educating, informing, clarifying constantly simply helps formulate understanding and aids execution. We need to find ways to communicate a common language, a common way to frame the needs expected from innovation.

That needs to come from the top of organizations and then built up by a growing contribution from all as they become engaged. If you can achieve this, you can move to a growing consensus but this takes time.

You can eventually achieve a common identity that begins to move ‘mountains’ through collective achievement, that is both distinctive and unique to your organization. A uniqueness that can never be copied, perhaps just admired or envied.

CEO’s that are seen to be successful achieve connections, what is often called that emotional connection through describing the context, setting the values and vision driven criteria and by often pushing the organization towards ‘impossible goals’.

It is amazing how this brings alignment as long as it is consistent, constant in its messages and widely shared and understood. Then the leadership makes it their business to position individuals and the decisions over what, where, when and how in the context of this, to allow them to make their decisions, as individuals and within their teams. Innovation activity becomes ‘orchestrated’ not micro-managed.

The value of the middle makes for the new connectors we need.
Middle managers tasks should be increasingly become more those of connectors and facilitators, not the guardians and gatekeepers for the decision makers.

Their work should include the encouragement that everyone is engaged in innovation work, for each person to constantly go back and check against this integrated innovation framework to work out their place to relate to this and become aligned. The middle manager carries through connection and identification.

Through this new work they achieve this ‘shared understanding’ or set about correcting any areas of concern through their own dialogues with senior managers of where any shifts have taken place or seem in conflict with the understanding.

This is identification again, for it lies at the core of innovation. Making sure everyone has a ‘sight-line’ and identification into this innovation framework so they stay well-connected. Communication and relationships becomes the key.

Today we are living in a world of knowledge-intensive innovation
To build distinctive competences for sustaining those often elusive competitive advantages, is very much context specific. We need to provide learning events as competence is actually firmly embedded in the specific context in which it is created.

If an organization lacks that context of innovation then how can it acquire the appropriate knowledge to give it any advantage? If the CEO and his leadership team can’t articulate the context, then they can’t expect winning at the innovation game. It is not their people failing to deliver innovation, it is them, as leaders, failing to deliver this integrated innovation framework where context sits and identification is gained to seek out knowledge-specifics needed.

Until the CEO identifies with his core role in innovation, the organization remains rudderless.  If he can’t supply what is expected, then it is more than likely the corporate strategy will be ignored, as it has not been placed in its appropriate context.  It fails because it is not communicate in ways that can be understood, it lacks personal identification.

Without the appropriate identification of the opportunities seen for growth not communicated then how can the right innovation be applied? Innovation stays disconnected to strategy. It is arbitrary based on interpretation and choice designated down the organization hoping it aligns.

Context set in a clear framework for innovation changes that. It gives innovation a real chance to contribute.

Boundaries and Freedom

How we harness our innovation activity does not need the advocating of tighter controls, it needs articulating the potential and releasing people by underpinning how that will be managed through innovations organization.

Ideally this can come through having a clear governance structure and providing the right environment that is needed, so as to allow others to do the work that needs to get done and see how they contribute in meaningful ways. Management’s dictates or rules should not stand in the way, they should be swept aside.

What should be put in that critical space is a common set of agreed organization definitions, a real clarity made up of what connects and why and then ensuring the resources are made available to achieve the innovation ‘called for’.

This calls for a focused yet adaptive and flexible leadership, that constantly looks to engage and provides the clarity necessary within a corporate  innovation framework that can cascade down the organization.

Leaders need to actively ensure through clear designation that everything is in place for all the appropriate conversations, and is equally ready and listening to the new ‘pulse’ of innovation, they are generating from this new intensity of focus.

Identification becomes the core to innovation
Eventually with enough of this leadership engagement, constantly being articulated and framed for the challenges identified, there emerges a common consensus and organizational language around innovation and its intent.

It connects and gains both organization and personal identification and this ‘identification’ sits at the core of innovation.

We get closer to achieving a consistent, more vibrant innovation as it becomes more routine and embedded, for it becomes increasingly linked to everyone’s goals, a certain oneness and because of this, it is sustaining.

We identify as we understand what our contribution will be, then the leadership has done its primary job, its aligned innovation purpose to the goals, by laying out the parameters to achieve this.

The post Identification sits at the core of innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.