So this is the reworked opening thought to record the idea to ‘capture’ it, so I can reflect later on, on how I should build on this further. I show a number of hyperlinks to help in pulling this together…..well for me anyway!

So this is a work-in-progress and should be taken as a thinking out loud at this stage.

Linking capability through interlocking platforms
We are in need of a different “sustaining” capacity build around innovation as its continuous core, constantly evolving, adapting, learning and adjusting, in perpetual motion.

How? Innovation has many ‘touch points, a myriad of dimensions that need to be aligned and integrated. How can we achieve this more holistic view, so innovation management can make a significant advancement on where we are today?

Making the business case for innovation to change is not easy but essential

Innovation management is today, mostly standing outside organizations operating structures. Due to this, innovation is often missing the critical line of sight from top management and it often suffers accordingly.

The numerous resource constraints, a lack of cohesion, alignment and seen creation value are becoming a real performance drag against rising expectations and needs.

Capabilities, capacity to innovate well, and the competencies are sub-optimal. We need to achieve a greater line-of-sight into the makeup of these for raising the potential of our innovation activities.

Innovation needs to be more central in core process thinking or we are in danger of staying with the same as it seems sort of comfortable. We actually do need much to shift, more radical thinking in our future innovation design, all getting possible through technology and the wonders of the cloud.

Do we grab this shift in incremental bits or push for a more radical redesign of the innovation process? I would argue we can grasp the opportunity to redesign it through our understandings of what we have learnt about innovation to date, bring in the solutions through technology that offers innovation so much and find solutions that can deliver innovation into the core of organizations, so it becomes seamless and the critical enabler or driving ‘engine’ of the business going forward.

One critical design thought I have is having three mutually supporting capability building platforms

Within an organizational setting, you need to have in place three supporting building platforms: 1) organizational support, 2) knowledge and competency gathering abilities and 3) a clear innovation process to channel themselves through, as final products or new services. All three need to be in place. They stack together.

If you have these three platforms in place you can begin to move from more of an ad hoc set of capabilities through to a more integrated, synergistic and interlocking set of capabilities. A complete picture where you can see and exploit differently when you are needing existing capabilities to be brought together differently and combined in unique constantly evolving new ways.

Well that’s the theory.

Organizational support platform is made of proving clear leadership and commitment to building capabilities, set in place an infrastructure that accesses, anchors and diffuses capacity so it not just flows but is constantly creating and exploiting for new economic and social value. You need to make sure the conditions for a trusting environment and climate are actively worked on and supported, and finally, provide the resources and ways to measure this to support and re-enforce the value of each corporate initiative. You should take a look at an earlier blog here: http://bit.ly/mV7zjP.

Knowledge & competency platform is where you permit time to discover and absorb what is being made available. The key absorptive capacities mentioned above. Deliberately allowing the time to explore both the external world and the internal world, and then setting about to capturing this ‘new’ knowledge through clear consolidation techniques and technology is vital. Knowledge should focus on a given core and context of what the organization is looking to achieve and want to learn from/about. You need to explore explicit and tacit knowledge. See my recent blog on the value of tacit knowledge: http://bit.ly/sthlG1)

Innovation Process platform lies at the heart of your innovation capability needs. This I have called the Innovation Business Architecture within work I completed with Jeffrey Phillips of OVO and can be viewed here http://bit.ly/ggKQCs . The process needs to have in place the capability to explore, to converge, to keep moving through the innovation pipeline a portfolio and be able to consistently consolidate and further exploit the ‘raw’ material of ideas and concepts by designing in some controls and risk management. Other thoughts for thinking through the innovation process are discussed here http://bit.ly/ikgR4f as well.

Moving from ad hoc to an integrated, synergistic and unique state
It is not just simply having in place the three platforms outlined above; each is a building block on top of one another, dependent for the ‘strength’ of the interlocking structure, to achieve an ongoing momentum that reduces many of today’s ad hoc capabilities, often hidden and undervalued into to this integrated state where the flow and connecting can enable a much higher level of performance through the greater line of sight and then applying more the appropriate resource inputs and training.

The need is to recognize that you do move, over time and dedicated effort, from ad hoc availability into a more formalised and recognized capability building process, it covers a more broad-based structure where the three-building platforms become tightly integrated to gain a more synergistic effect.

Then those that participate can see and learn from this growing innovation capacity feeding into the three platforms. Overtime will also provide increasing self-governance as it becomes visible to all.

The need for external inputs is essential

Building the internal capabilities happens by the way it ‘embraces’ the world. The more you seek, the more you gain, and the more you are able to see new possibilities. Seeking knowledge externally clearly comes from the encouragement of exploring networks, and building relationships – accessing the external capacities through scanning, scouting and collaborating openly.

Finally, market-learning capabilities feed into this cascading need

The real strength of appropriate innovation is designing in the right tension points – see my blog post http://bit.ly/tUQBml on this. Appropriateness has to be designed in.

Set within these platforms you need to build in new (ongoing) capabilities for Co-creation orientation, Customer Knowledge Acquisition, Customer Sharing Dialogues and Information Interpretation.

This knowledge becomes your collective memory where capabilities learn and grow from these customer conversations, actively sought. Not only will you learn, but you have to unlearn here. Having a reflective market-learning outcome part enables new learning opportunities to be embedded and often triggers behavioural change.

For me, I feel the “cascading effects” are underappreciated and I have suggested in an earlier post the cascading frame and possible outcome benefits of approaching this.

A short ‘call to action’ summary

I would argue strongly the need to focus on the value of having a clear innovation capability platform structure needs to be a ongoing transforming one pushing the organization into a perpetual learning one, that draws in from each of these different platforms to be combined up to meet and address the tasks and challenges it faces. These are unique to each environment.

We need to bring innovation into organization alignment and make it more central to its organization core and that I have suggested a work mat alignment framework to help in this.

This growing capability for increased innovation maturity can offer much.
I need to thing about what makes up each of these platforms and know the points where they interlock and feed into each other. That is another stage of thinking to be undertaken to validate what seems a ‘good idea’ into something that will work.

If you want to find out more, keep tuned in or simply track me down. These are some of my early thoughts so as I said previously stated, as a work-in-progress.

I keep looking to find the ways and the means for building innovation capabilities and capacities. It is my passion and focuses on what I like to do in my innovation activities.

What triggered this thought was based on an academic paper from H E Essmann & N D du Preez advancing the view of maturity application and innovation models.

The post Building Innovation Capability Through Three Interlocking Platforms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The emphasis needs to be placed upon building distinct capabilities for innovation success.

“the dynamics within the existing capabilities need to be fully understood and then you need to design the new capabilities on clear understanding of the direction, vision and mission required from innovation to be more successful in meeting the strategic needs”.

Irrespective, there are big, consistent growing questions still nag away in the CEO’s mind on innovation

Q: “What and where do I place my limited (and scarce) resources to maximise the impact of our innovation efforts and how can I be sure?”

“What are those capabilities that generate differential advantage?” How can the CEO or CIO identify the links and connections they want to make their innovation activity align more with the overall capabilities system they have in place? Where does the CEO place his ‘bets’ to get the limited resources he has available aligned to gain this better return on the investments in innovation?

Can we identify a common set of critical innovation capabilities?

Yes, I believe we can.

Something that is not as it is presently a systematic in approach yet it can be by reducing the scattered and piecemeal approach today in building ad hoc innovation capabilities. To build distinct, consistent and well-defined tailored capabilities to the innovation challenges at hand is what the CEO wants to achieve and those responsible need to deliver.

If the organization is knowing the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy and then in this awareness of what and where to place the organizations innovation fitness programme so they can set about building them.

A fitness regime designed to improve, focus and execute upon these distinct capabilities needed in a highly focused manner  – sound too good to be true? I don’t think so, why not talk to me to understand this better. It has real value if you can constantly ‘orchestrate’ and build innovation capabilities to meet the challenges constantly emerging.

The post Establishing Distinct Capabilities for Innovation Success first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The important point though is successful innovation has core elements and processes regardless of industry, form, or type of innovation, we are pursuing.  Much of the difference though is in its varying degree’s based on these core elements.

Our search must be to find those core elements that make up the dynamic capabilities within our innovation activities to leverage and strengthen them. We need to build an organizations ability to innovation continuously, making it a sustaining competence.

We, in our organizations strive to achieve distinct competitive advantage, and innovation is one of those real contribution points this can do this. Achieving competitive advantage is increasingly transient.The need is to make the innovation capabilities and capacities a distinctive, not easy to copy, unique set that continues to be challenged and refreshed to meet the constant changing conditions we find in today’s market .

These capabilities and capacities are shaped by the context and content of innovation and this constantly change by the shifts taking place within the organizations position (market, price, competitive stance) and its choice of evolutionary paths it has decided to take or needs to take.

Innovation needs to be a constant evolutionary path, nothing stands still, it is constantly changing.

Innovation and all its ‘make-up’ is dynamic, it requires this constant evolving. This is an area of serious under-development at present, when you compare this with the continued focus on investing in physical assets or the consistent building of many other skills required within organizations. Yet innovation, the source of fresh growth remains significantly under-invested in, within the majority of organizations. This needs changing.

We need to know what makes up our innovation competencies, capabilities and capacities that give us today’s performance and then we need to decide and focus upon those that will give us a different, more dynamic performance for our future. We can’t stand still, we must look to evolve but lets do this in thoughtful, systematic ways, not in those knee-jerking ways so often seen. We need to know all of what makes up our core.

The post Knowing your innovation core first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The struggle to date is that innovation remains hard to manage well; we strive to systematize it and then attempt to replicate any success we then have achieved. Often this does not work as the variables that make up innovation can be different for each innovation event or activity.

The make-up of innovation

I think we all recognize that innovation is made up of both tangible and intangible assets. It is the marriage of these two that makes innovation a unique capability to manage in well-structured ways. It is the people engaged in innovation activity that make it work.

Everything else, the process, structures, technologies and management systems are just the contributing enablers.
The important point though is successful innovation has core elements and processes regardless of industry, form, or type of innovation, we are pursuing.  Much of the difference though is in its varying degree’s based on these core elements.

Our search must be to find those core elements that make up the dynamic capabilities within our innovation activities to leverage and strengthen them. We need to build an organizations ability to innovation continuously, making it a sustaining competence.

We as organizations strive to achieve distinct competitive advantage, and innovation is one of those real contribution points this can do this. The need is to make the innovation capabilities and capacities a distinctive, not easy to copy, unique set.

These are shaped by the context and content of innovation, the organizations position and its choice of evolutionary paths it has decided to take or needs to take.

This is an area of serious under-development at present, when you compare this with the continued focus on investing in physical assets or the consistent building of many other skills required within organizations.

Yet innovation, the source of fresh growth remains significantly under-invested in, within the majority of organizations. This needs changing. Let me put forward my suggestions on why:

Shifting away from the accepted norm

Innovation understanding and building strength in competencies and capabilities takes an organization beyond the accepted norm of managing efficiency, just quality, being responsive and reacting with speed, all challenging within themselves.

Innovation represents today’s competitive advantage statement that should be supported by these other requirements, they become subservient to allow new concepts to meet market needs and exceed customer expectancies.

Within any transition we must avoid dysfunctional consequences and think through why the existing systems and structures do have to ‘fold into’ new innovation based ones.

We need to plan how to do this. Innovation cannot be buried in the established ways of doing things, it needs to lead and drive the engine for new growth and wealth creation. It can’t continue to take a back seat, it needs to take over the wheel.

Organizations need to shift from the one often still found today, of a higher focus on stability, efficiency and effectiveness, looking simply to maximize the short-term for profitability.

This locks then into their current preoccupation with performing routines and formalised structures, as they strive to cut risk and manage the fear of the unknown.

The world is dealing with increasing complexity

The challenge though in today’s world is so different. It is so volatile, potentially disruptive and full of risk. Organizations are simply struggling to shed their clothes of the 20^th century and find a way to smoothly manage into becoming more adaptable and agile in form.

They are adjusting to offer consistent responses to instability in the most effective ways, to keep adapting to the consistent market challenges,and in so doing profiting from meeting that latest challenge or disruptive opportunity.

The problem is you simply can’t manage this smoothly, it will be highly disruptive as the organization re-equips itself and learns, often in the hardest way possible, through failure .

Innovation in itself is also a force of instability and we need to find ways to embrace much of its uncertainties by understanding its dynamics. We need to have a major shift in our organizational thinking, needed to find the appropriate new balance within those dual ‘tensions’ of ‘stability’ through efficiency, with its opposite, ‘change’ driven by innovation.

It is these dynamic forces within the world we work that require us to respond by building that capacity for managing those ‘dynamic’ innovation capabilities, that today’s markets are requiring and organizations are needing to master.

The emphasis needs to point more to building dynamic innovation capabilities

Dynamic capabilities emphasise management capabilities and the inimitable (unique) combinations of resources that are constantly at work across all functions to make them distinctive and valuable.

Distinguishing innovation capabilities that are relevant are based on the type of knowledge they contain. Functional capabilities allow development of technical, practical knowledge. Integrative capabilities allow firms to absorb knowledge from external sources and this is where absorptive capacity and its structure comes into our required thinking. Innovation requires us to constantly learn, develop, mould and manage from multiple situations and challenges.

This requires the integration of critical capabilities to successfully stimulate innovation for effective and improving performance.

Many of the identified resources in capabilities have some level of complementary, improving one triggers improvement in another. Equally ignoring one can impact negatively on others.

So each component, on their own, have limited effect, it is the combination effect that generates the improving performance. Equally, the needs do change over time and you have to constantly ‘refresh, challenge and stimulate’ these, otherwise you can have core rigidly set in.

Integrating back or making anew

To this end I have produced a conceptual model of what I believe is the ‘make up’ for providing an ongoing innovation performance engine – the innovation fitness landscape and the dynamics of core capabilities.

I felt it needed a dedicated website to be the ‘go to’ source of reference. It is a work-in-progress so please recognize this when you visit it here: http://bit.ly/wX5q8R

The need for all of us is to recognize and embrace the need to build an organization-wide innovation capability, that should pervade all aspects of the organization’s existence, forming its new core innovation value.

The post Building a Core into the Capabilities of Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The critical design is of three mutually supporting capability building platforms do need to be put into place.

Within an organizational setting, you need to have in place three supporting capability building platforms; organizational supporting, knowledge and competency gathering, and a clear innovation process to channel new capacity through as final products or new services. All three need to be in place and integrated.

If you have these three platforms in place you can begin to move from more of an ad hoc set of capabilities through to a more integrated, synergistic and unique innovation capability framework to grow from.

Organizational support platform is made of proving clear leadership and commitment to building capabilities by setting in place an infrastructure that accesses, anchors and diffuses capacity, so it not just flows but is constantly creating and exploiting for new economic and social value.

You need to ensure the conditions for a trusting environment and climate are actively worked on and supported and finally provide the resources and ways to measure this to support and re-enforce the value of this corporate initiative. You should take a look at a previous blog here:  http://bit.ly/mV7zjP.

Knowledge & competency platform is where you permit time to discover and absorb what is being made available. The key absorptive capacities mentioned above. Deliberately allowing the time to explore both the external world and the internal world, and then setting about to capturing this ‘new’ knowledge through clear consolidation techniques and technology is vital.

Knowledge should focus on a given core and context of what the organization is looking to achieve and want to learn from/about. You need to explore explicit and tacit knowledge. See my recent blog on tacit knowledge:  http://bit.ly/sthlG1)

Innovation Process platform lies at the heart of your innovation capability needs. This I have called the Innovation Business Architecture within work I completed with Jeffrey Phillips of OVO, and can be viewed here http://bit.ly/ggKQCs .

The process needs to have in place the capability to explore, to converge, to keep moving through the innovation pipeline, a portfolio of concepts and be able to consistently consolidate and further exploit the ‘raw’ material of these ideas and concepts, by designing in some controls and risk management.

Other thoughts for thinking through the innovation process are discussed here  http://bit.ly/tUQBml and here  http://bit.ly/ikgR4f as well.

Moving from ad hoc to an integrated, synergistic and unique state

It is not just simply having in place the three platforms outlined above; each is a building block on top of one another, dependent for the ‘strength’ of the structure and to achieve a momentum from have ad hoc capabilities to call upon, usually scarce and over stretched, to this integrated state.

The need is to recognize that you do move, over time and dedicated effort, from ad hoc availability through a more formalised and recognized capability building process into a more broad based structure with deepening capacity to innovate.

This is where the three building platforms become tightly integrated to gain a more synergistic effect for all that that participate to learn from and this growing innovation capacity provide increasing self-governance.

The need for external inputs is essential

Building the internal capabilities happens largely by the way it ‘embraces’ the world. The more you seek, the more you gain, and the more you are able to see new possibilities. Seeking knowledge externally clearly comes from the encouragement of exploring networks, and building relationships- accessing the external capacities through scanning, scouting and collaborating openly.

Finally, market-learning capabilities feed into this cascading platform
The real strength of appropriate innovation is designing in the right tension points- see my blog http://bit.ly/tUQBml  on this. “Appropriateness has to be designed in“. Set within these platforms you need to build in new (ongoing) capabilities for Co-creation orientation, Customer Knowledge Acquisition, Customer Sharing Dialogues and Information Interpretation.

This knowledge becomes your collective memory where capabilities learn and grow from these customer conversations, actively sought out and nurtured. Not only will you learn, but you have to unlearn here as well.

Having a reflective market-learning outcome part built in enables new learning opportunities to be embedded and often triggering those critival behavioural changes often needed to align to market opinion and sentiment.

A short ‘call to action’ summary

I would argue strongly for this need to focus on the value of having a clear innovation capability platform structure as it has the real potential to transform the organization into a perpetual learning one, unique to your environment, and capable of lifting innovation delivery significantly.

This dedication grows your capability maturity and can offer much.

If you want to find out more, keep tuned in or simply track me down. This is my passion and focus within what I like and want to do- advancing innovation capabilities and capacities for those that want to see their innovation efforts thrive.

Based from an academic paper from H E Essmann & N D du Preez advancing the view of maturity application and innovation models.

The post Building an Integrated Innovation Capability Framework first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

As uncertainty constantly arises as we discover more, and expend more energy, the very nature of our original starting point set down in a well-thought-out, and well-crafted strategy actually begins to suddenly have a realization that needs a radical change in direction..

Then we are left with more ‘open-ended’ questions than answers. Welcome to real innovation where faith and belief play an important part.

There often seems to be constantly arising critical unknowns and sometimes all you are left with as your innovation emerges is just actually and simply a new starting point.

A new starting point as the concept is so different to cause you to rethink dramatically. Innovation and its journey of discovery take you into so many new areas you never expected when you first thought of the idea or concept.

What do you do? Do you abandon this or press on? What helps us maintain a commitment and a course?

The increasing demands made by innovation

Innovation demands increasingly from us.  So you have to be far more ready to adapt, to be agile, and to be ready to experiment, explore and learn. This makes innovation even harder to get right. You are often caught in a fog of possibilities. Everything simply hangs off a given hypothesis and needs to be proven in its delivery.

When innovation is at the heart of your strategy, you need to zero in to the best possible execution strategy, a clear business model and constantly review this as the innovation iteration is taking place to align the idea/ concept to what you understand the market needs, not what you do, what they want.

This is a constant re-iteration process that needs to take place, unrelenting. Seek clarification and validation becomes a mantra.

The ability to move an idea to implementation- with increasing agility– is what will distinguish the successful organization from the less successful.

The ability to execute well remains a critical gap of performance. Innovation requires a deeply embedded set of capabilities. Innovation is high maintenance but also offers high reward so are we equipping ourselves to extract the best from the best?

With the increasing complexity within markets, the global pressures of greater breakthrough or disruptive innovation, and the increased emphasis on business models, are causing increased problems that we need to grapple with.

Complexity at every stage of the innovation process calls for a higher level of getting organized, keeping discipline and executing effectively than ever before but also staying real agile.

Consistent questioning is required

You have to question constantly on the best way to deliver your innovation. This is why constantly evaluating your existing business model is becoming more critical today than ever.

You need to evaluate the best approaches to the market not rely just on the existing ones if you want to maximise your innovation returns. If you compromise anywhere along the innovation value building chain you need to be absolutely sure you know why.

Embedded innovation capabilities are essential- no question

Innovation today requires a deeply embedded set of capabilities. It needs to rise above the something we presently have, into a key organizational capability.

The mindset for many executives today is wedded to an outmoded view of innovation that it is synonymous with everything ‘creative’, in other words invention. It is not, it is applying those ideas on a sustaining basis.

This is where many seem to fall downtime and time again. Successful implementation across the whole innovation process demands institutional capability- leadership, infrastructure and processes- that need to be sustained constantly in an encouraging climate of trust.

High maintenance but high rewards

Today innovation needs to be recognised as something that is high maintenance but also offers high rewards to the ones that get this right. The ability to move an idea to implementation- with real agility and constant adaptation – is what will distinguish the successful organization from the less successful.

The ability to execute innovation across the whole innovation process remains a critical gap of performance and we need to move beyond this failure within organizations.

We have to recognize that innovation is mission-critical. Your innovation promise needs to be highly ‘tuned’ in the best possible ways to extract the value.

Innovation cannot be devolved down the organization and expected to work; it has to be well orchestrated.

It needs more than a life jacket thrown over the side, we need to develop and hone the skills needed to swim in these rougher times.

The post Innovation is swimming in uncertain waters first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.