As we look to enter into 2016 what is top of mind for innovation to take hold and become the real core within our business organizations?

Some of my quick thoughts or repeating mantras, no apologies here:

• Innovation is not the preserve of the (selected) few but the domain of the community, it is encouraging our connections to actually connect and exchange mutual value and knowledge.
• Moving innovation from just being symbolic to essential. We must stop dipping our toes in the water, we need to just jump in and get wet. We need to get everyone involved and wanting to contribute engaged and  excited on where innovation can really take us
• Recognizing innovation is traversing functions, entities and boundaries faster than ever. Find ways to get out of the way to allow it to flow where the energy goes and then ‘attempt’ to capture it for the good of all.

• Keep opening the Enterprise to external knowledge. Keep breaking down those barriers of resistance to allow this openness to further take hold, expand and contribute into your everyday thinking. Make the “network effect” really mean something in results

• Collaboration is formed at the hip with Co-creation. Making sure you are extracting your fair share of value from all these exchanges.

• Design is increasing to the fore in many organizations. We don’t need to over work it or push it beyond its limit. We do need to blend it in and fuse it with other techniques, so to sort out where it fits within the innovation mix and valuing it for its ‘added’ worth to transform information into achieving tangible outcomes

• We need to explore, experiment, prototype, adapt, become more agile, keep it lean, pivot on new learning and anything else that helps us to speed up the process and keep learning and churning.

• The combining of great design and appropriate functionality is giving your customers what they need and feel good about, it is a powerful combination to achieve and never forget to aspire to achieve in all you offer.

• Platforms and ecosystems are emerging to manage complex innovation challenges and knowing where and how you can fit into these to extract more are essential but it is a learning game for most of us to explore. Do this with a real conscious effort to leverage its exciting promise.

• The bottom of the pyramid is a place we continue to forget and others learn to play in and master its needs. It is very relevant in today’s more cost-conscious market conditions and provides the emerging understanding of what helps resolve ‘jobs-to-be-done’ and deliver to different market needs.

• The power of social innovation and linking your product to societal needs Scaling becomes important to expand this out. We need to “reconnect to dominant economic activities of the larger society”, add a ‘higher’ purpose to our innovation activity.

• Reverse innovation and its ability to be re-scaled to adapt across different markets is equally a valuable source of growth within organizations. We do need to learn from not only others what is actually possible so a product can enter previously untapped markets but what we can do to reduce ‘’bloat and complexity within our own product offerings.

• We will continue to probe and search for a different organizational design, even further away from the linear process of cause and effect that has dominated much of the 20th-century thinking and how we can have a ‘dual’ thinking around exploitation and exploration. Innovation design needs both.

• Of course, the raw power of technology and all things digital with all the data flowing in continues to dominate much of our thinking presently, yet it continues to need a clear focus on its use and understanding, as well as having in place the systems and analytic capabilities we need internally to process these insights and extract the value.

Whatever is achieved to move the innovation needle in the year ahead, it is going to require focused leadership, a clear innovation alignment to the strategy being pursued, along with a climate and environment conducive to allowing the encouragement of ideas that can be translated into new commercial or social value, valued by customers or markets as solving their problems

We all need to ‘advance’ innovations position within our collective thinking, our growth and future well-being are increasingly reliant on it to deliver solutions to even more complex problems. or improve on the existing, ones in more imaginative and environmentally friendly ways.

Wishing you a cracking innovating time in 2016

Adapted from a post on LinkedIn on December 27th 2015.

The post Moving innovation even more in 2016 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Reading through the latest global survey results from McKinsey entitled ‘Innovation & Commercialization, 2010’ at http://fwd4.me/cRK and you must wonder with all the activity (and hype) surrounding innovation why we do not make the type of positive progress you should expect in innovation management.

There are very positive signs innovation is emerging stronger than ever from the recent bout of economic ‘flu’ we all have been going through. The report starts on a high note “84% of all executives say innovation is extremely or very important to their companies’ growth strategy”- yippee!

The darker side is the ‘but’- “little has changed in the way they generate ideas and turn them into products and services plus many other challenges remain remarkably consistent”- oh dear!

Do we ever learn?
The core barriers to successful innovation have not changed according to this survey. What will make the connection if innovation is so important yet not changing in the way we manage it? The answer does lie in the reports tentative suggestion “formalize processes” but that does need a more detailed grasp of what makes up innovation management and much of corporate management does not seemingly have the willingness or commitment to learn this.

How can we change this lack of progress in learning?
I’ve been working on this in different ways that include some detailed researching, collaborating with like minded people and exploring the different aspects that do connect the multiple strands that make up innovation.
McKinsey’s report does confirm (thankfully) that the biggest challenge is organization and suggests “improvement in understanding in this area would make the most profound difference in innovation performance.” So I and my collaborating partners are on to something here.

I have been amazed at the different attributes needed to make the multiple types of innovation work, be this open innovation, business model innovation, design-led, needs driven, operational, service excellence innovation, technology focused or research & development innovation.

Add in simply ‘management innovation’ and you really begin to see the complexity to grasp for improving the chances of a sustaining success in innovation as more likely. No wonder it becomes difficult for CEO’s, HR Managers to structure and organise their innovation efforts in better ways but you can.

More on this emerging work will be outlined later in future blogs. For this blog let me suggest simply:

Steps to help  improve the innovation process include:

• Recognizing, allocating and aligning the talent to the required task and training them in the required attributes needed to be in place for the ‘type’ of innovation needed
• Ensure leadership is clear in its needs to achieve and which options within the innovation types available can best be applied to realise this.
• Have a process that is well thought through and tightly managed so as to reduce the ad hoc parts right down so the necessary ‘resource energy’ is channelled appropriately to meet the strategic needs.
• Keep constantly attentive to the relationships that go within and beyond the company walls and focus on the techniques that reduce ‘destructive tension’ and replace this with ‘constructive tension’
• Simply recognizing innovation does require a formalized process and the appropriate attention and efforts are constantly at ‘top of mind’ and clearly understood within the organization to align strategic- innovation priorities and this ‘need’ is paramount to succeed.

If innovation is a real priority then management within organizations does need to invest and learn about it more. They do need to have this necessary fuller understanding of the process from beginning to the end and what makes it tick repeatedly, and work effectively and efficiently, otherwise the next survey will be telling us the same repeating story, that little has changed in innovation understanding in a world of arguably constant change.

It is strange if this lack of learning continues on the required understanding of what does need organizing and recognizing in structuring the required innovation management. I, for one, would like to change this.

The post Will we ever learn to manage innovation to make progress? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.