I wrote at the time we can have a surprisingly strong influence on impact, as we are in a highly connected world. It is through our organizing and influencing abilities we can all partly determine our innovation future.

I suggested we have nine impact points to consider:

1. What are the triggers to growth
2. How do we deal with our legacy issues
3. What will offer us improving performance
4. The place of tacit knowledge
5. Our ability to build platforms and road-maps to build engagement.
6. The absolute skill of execution
7. How we set about adapting to change
8. What is important to empower and provide trusting environments
9. How should we measure success in appropriate impact.

So let me take this one step further.

For me the book “The Medici Effect” written by Frans Johansson holds an important place in my thinking. “Our breakthrough insights are at the Intersections of ideas, concepts and cultures” and it is the potential of exploring these intersections comes our high points of impact.

Impact has to have reasons, it has to unite and it has to have understanding of what gives it that different ‘impact’.

Our leadership today has tended to forget “positive” impact within their chase of the short-term; they are contributing more “negative” impacts in the pursuit of immediate gain. We need to institute a change in thinking.

Recently a new book came out, called “Moments of Impact” written by Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon. It is a wonderful book in that it describes the pathway to how too “design strategic conversations that accelerate change”. It tackles the way to deliver complex questions in clear ways and brings back that critical understanding of “empathy” for broader groups to relate to, by listening, detecting patterns and then they can be deciphered in what needs changing.

So our ability to listen, to discern patterns and to seek out new impact points through more intersection points does offer for a real potential to really change the game. These can be at global, organizational, social, competitive and personal levels of impact.

Where do we start to deliver positive impact though?

Besides reading the two books mentioned above let me lay out the purpose in a group of ideas where one feeds off of the other, they mutually reinforce each other. The strength is in the combining forces.

There are a group of ideals I like to offer up as ones to ‘gather around’ for higher impact returns, to ‘enable’ our potential. These are:

• We need to connect new knowledge with increasing good emerging practice
• We need to foster increasingly the trust and identification needed to explore and exploit
• We need to strengthen our alignments and look to offer appreciation more
• We need to build within ourselves more responsiveness and agility
• We need to understand the impact of our actions and decisions and what these really mean to our business, the society and the people within it
• We have to reduce leakage- that constant knowledge loss that leads to depreciation within our performances, we need to constantly renew ourselves.
• We need to sharpen our minds and gain more confidence in the choices we are making, the avenues of our creation to lead towards a new wealth, growth and set of values.

Where I put my focus is on the intersections of combining four value building vectors

Firstly we have innovation

Innovation needs a sharper meaning and focus within our organizations, it needs to be ‘crafted’ far more, and it needs to have a greater alignment and validation. It needs increased facilitation and understanding. We need to change many of our existing innovation practices that we perform into ones that deliver this increasing impact.

We need to look simply beyond ‘just’ innovation in product and services, we have to link this more into our social needs, to design different business models that give opportunity for different organization design, agility and vitality.

We are far too often stuck in the incremental mode and must find ways to get out of this rut or we never achieve ‘real impact’ and move the growth needle to a stronger value point.

Secondly we need to seek out more value-based relationships.
These need to be broader, closer and allowed to be more imaginative in cooperation and outcomes. We need to seek out different ‘pools’ of knowledge and complementary expertise.

We should leverage for all it’s worth our collaborative, network, technology skills to explore and push boundaries for discovery.

We need to have in place some mechanisms that allow for a greater choreographing of specific events and growing knowledge understanding to be able to come together due to this value-based set of relationships so we provide for more moments of impact.

Third, we need to enhance economic value as our business goal

This comes through clarity of purpose, alignment and collaboration. We need to scan our markets, our competitors and the changes constantly happening in our market environments to gather increased insights. We need to hone our selection and design of new solutions by better scanning and investigating,

We need to think of impact in different ways, ways like containment, improvement, reduction, improvements and efficiency. We need to consciously seek strategies that DRIVE growth.

Lastly, we have the application of knowledge to learn and apply

We need to learn how to trade in the new economy, the one called the idea economy. This is the place where we learn, grow, seek out impact and grow. It is the intelligence within our broader capitals, those often called the intellectual capitals made up of social, human, structural, relationship and learning.

It is by finding new combinations within these different capitals we learn to combine resources, capabilities and competencies in new and different ways. To achieve a growing positive impact we need to develop problem-solving abilities, we need to be allowed to visualize far more and to explore these ‘concepts’ more freely.

We need to focus on the creation, exchanging and acquisition of new knowledge. We need to release all the ‘idle capital’ that lies all around us to bring it back into contributing value.

We need to combine these four intersections for seeking out the positive impact.
It is finding the future value-creating points where you can extract the hidden values waiting to be discovered.

We need to promote the “thinking experience” and develop in us all the three parts, firstly of inductive thinking through direct observation, then the use of deductive thinking from analysis and logic and finally, the abductive thinking of determining what could be possible and valuable

We need to relearn how we work, how we think and how we search to combine. Our knowledge learning capacities provide the solutions to the delivery of high impact areas where we all gain in growth and wealth creation.

A time to re-equip ourselves in new ways is way overdue.

It is time we learn how to combine these intersections within our organizations. It is partly a rediscovery but it is far more a growing discovery of what is simply all around us, waiting for the right way for it to be found.

This comes from a ‘greater’ combining of different ideas, seeking out new combination, exploring different intersections that can lead to new insights for breakthroughs for innovation to happen, and then delivering these higher-value impact points we need to prosper and thrive.

The post Combining the higher-value impact points for innovation intersection. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The top line news is how companies are seeing innovation transforming their businesses and their need to take a more sophisticated approach to innovation, so as to achieve the growth plans they are setting for the next five years.

PwC are suggesting there is an innovation transformation under-way: “Companies are changing the way they innovate“. They further state that “innovation is becoming a competitive necessity, if it’s not, then executives need to be asking themselves what they could do to improve their innovation process.”

All I am providing here are my initial takeaways from a report I would recommend does provide really good value in working through. It seems innovation is becoming far more the central driver of the organization’s agenda than in the past, where geographical expansion along with mergers and acquisitions were more dominating.

It seems the future focus is far more on leveraging organic growth as organizations view the increasing dynamic and volatile business environment will  intensify and be even more risky but to achieve their growth objectives they will be needing to look beyond the traditional options they have explored so far to-date, through their innovation activity.

Firstly the transforming taking place around innovation

The five key transforming aspects with leading innovators taking a more advanced approach to innovation:

1. Seventy nine per cent of the most innovative companies in their study have well-defined innovation strategies,
2. Top innovators treat innovation just like any other business or management process that can be disciplined and successfully scaled.
3. The leading companies are targeting a higher proportion of breakthrough and radical innovations, particularly around products, services, technology and business models.
4. They are planning a wider range of innovation operating models.
5. They collaborate more than their less innovative peers.

The factors setting the innovation leaders apart

Within the report findings, PwC are suggesting what clearly is setting the leaders apart can be summarized as they:

• innovate with purpose,
• have a well-defined innovation strategy,
• take a more formal and structured approach to innovation,
• are concentrating on a greater proportion of breakthrough and radical innovations,
• are planning a broader range of business model innovation,
• are exploring a wider range of innovation operating models,
• are planning to collaborate much more to generate a greater proportion of revenue from new products and services

The close of the report asks seven great key questions in the role executives do need to play in supporting  the innovation efforts.

1. Are you paying enough attention to innovation? Innovation is quickly moving up the agenda for all businesses, becoming a competitive necessity and the main driver for growth. When was the last time that innovation was discussed at your management board?
2. Do you have an innovation strategy? Innovation needs to be thought of as process which can be disciplined. A coherent innovation strategy aligns all elements of an organisation to its corporate goals. How do you plan to harness innovation to accelerate growth?
3. Is your innovation portfolio right? Innovation portfolios are evolving, including a greater proportion of breakthrough, radical, and non-product innovation and a much broader range of areas to innovate. How well-balanced is your portfolio and where are you prioritising your innovation resources and investments?
4. What is your innovation timespan? Companies too focused on the short-term never challenge existing thinking, while those too focused on the long-term overlook immediate delivery. A balanced perspective is needed. Are you creating the business of tomorrow while running the business of today?
5. Is innovation an integral part of the executive and organisational mindset? Are operational efficiency and innovation metrics part of all management meetings?Are the resources, investments,processes, organisation and governance sufficient to provide the space for innovation to thrive?
6. Do you know how to explore and find the really great innovations that drive unprecedented levels of growth? Is exploration something that people are incentivised to do?Do the innovation processes use leading practices to ensure high speed prototyping, exploration,and learning?
7. Are you an innovation blocker or enabler? Executives too comfortable with the status-quo are one of the greatest barriers to greater innovation. Do you have the mechanisms in place to commercialize and scale your innovations? The last mile of turning innovations into significant revenue growth is often the hardest.

For me, this has been a report well worth working through, so thank you PwC for providing these valuable sets of insights. They offer encouraging news for innovation and its critical role within the current thinking within leading innovating organizations and the changing treatment that innovation is receiving.

This is certainly good news from any innovators perspective and a more than valuable report to put under the noses of the leaders of the organizations that are more within the ‘innovation laggard’ camp.

Those ‘ innovation laggards’ that are  failing to appreciate the changes  that are taking place within innovation practice and recognizing how they can leverage their future growth in broader and significantly different ways. Exploring different, more radical innovation practices, that have the potential for offering a real impact on their future growth potential, far more than the existing ones they are presently undertaking and supporting.

www.pwc.com/innovationsurvey © 2013 PwC. All rights reserved.

The post PwC’s report on breakthrough innovation and growth first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.