Lets focus on the bigger picture here.

Developing our knowledge and then putting it to good use gives us the potential for securing a competitive position- that goes without saying, perhaps.

Living in Europe offers us enormous history, diversity and a constant respect for the make-up of its different cultures.

Europe is a very proud continent forged from this history of competitiveness but it is grappling with its place in the global world where others seem to have a greater present-day advantage.

For many, Europe seems stalled; in jobs, growth and its future space, it seems not so sure on what and where it can effectively compete in a complex and challenging world. There are so many competing voices within, draining vital energy, while others outside Europe are getting on with the job of equipping themselves for the changes taking place to effectively compete in today’s world.

The forging of the European Union needs more ‘heat’ to meld into the force that many want, yet every time it seems to be getting to that required temperature for effecting a real change, someone or something comes along and throws ‘cold water’ on it.

“Herding cats”

Perhaps that idiomatic saying of “herding cats” summarizes many of the discussions and debates that often occur all over Europe, offering up their part of the solution to what seems to me, increasingly an intractable problem. There is this ongoing attempt to control or organize what seems intent on staying uncontrollable or chaotic.

It just seems incredibly difficult to get the required direction or united determination to channel ‘our’ energies, perhaps impossible is a growing feeling that is fuelling even more the nationalistic pride built from centuries of disputes and disagreements in alternating alliances of the day.

Europe in whatever eventual union or collection of entities needs to stop focusing inward as that seems simply not to help. It needs to look outward and recognize the challenges it needs to go after and organize around, that shift the ground it competes on, so it can offer the foundations to build from for many of these individual voices to unite to move all those concerns that need clarity, work and a sense of clear direction. We are focusing on the right aspects to unite behind, to identify with and combine our unique resources.

At present we are all pulling in our own directions, to secure our own piece of the declining economic pie and that is undermining any ability for improved performance.

“Fiddling while Rome burns”

You do get this sense we enjoy “crisis and opportunity”. The institutions and bodies that are set up to lay out the broad direction within the EU, start with good intention and then occupy themselves with a host of unimportant or less important matters and neglect priorities during a crisis. They get lost in the details, determined to defend and spend the budgets and lose sight of the need for clear commercial or social outcomes.

The source of this “fiddling while Rome burns” is the story that Nero played the fiddle (violin) while Rome burned, during the great fire in AD 64. The flaw in this was there was no such instrument as the fiddle (violin) invented in first-century Rome. Equally the events of a fire have been constructed in all the rivalries and conflicting accounts that came after. I get a sense of this today within the EU, we are failing to orchestrate even the violin player, everyone is playing their own tune!

Europe stands at a real crossroads today, where it travels determines its future

It can stay locked up in conflicts, often chaotic decision-making, in its many disputes and simmering rivalries or it can learn from those events across its history and find a different path.

I doubt that path is integration of countries, even freedom of movement or common currencies or a given language. These are ideals suffering from imposition yet we can integrate and combine in ways that allow us as individuals to prosper and grow but also to unite in projects and across challenges that deliver a more promising future.

Grand challenges we can unite behind.
These come from the challenges that should be of the uttermost importance to our future well-being:
1. The long drawn out integrating the digital infrastructure across Europe to bring down the present barriers and allow less of a divide across Europe.
2. The ability to connect across a European energy grid that delivers on security, and is moving purposefully towards clean and efficient alternatives that are economically viable alternatives.
3. The formation of a scientific research community
4. The harmonization of intellectual property to accelerate invention not just protect it
5. The overhaul to our educational system to deliver the required skills we need for the future not based on the past.
6. Putting in place the roadmap to renewables that give investment confidence
7. Adding even more momentum towards key-enabling technologies
8. Having a reusable framework that reduces the ‘throw-away’ culture and mind-set
9. Tackle health and wellbeing in clear, coordinated and integrated ways across all.
10. Redoubling the efforts on food security, sustainable agriculture and land and sea management through a greater agricultural revolution.

I could add a few more but these are all ‘big bites’. We should possible go back to the approach to EU flagship programmes where the big agenda gets the required focus from politicians, bureaucrats, business and our institutions, at every level and engaging in meaningful ways with our broader society, then we are achieving more in ‘common cause’ and integration than where we have been heading recently.

We should push the EU agenda towards delivering integrated models to offer new value and opportunities, the innovation part, as central to achieving the need for new growth and jobs.

These big challenges give us our future, they break down the barriers, they open up our minds to what is the real borders to protect, to push out towards in different ways If we can unlock the barriers and ring-fencing on many of these that are the blocks today, we are laying in the foundation for growth and jobs.

There is nothing new in this appeal but the speed of change occurring outside Europe requires us to shift internal disputes and channel this energy into resolving the big challenges.

Europe needs to shoot for a different moon.

Structural issues are longstanding, we are attempting to protect far too much, we are falling to move towards a ‘creative destruction’ where innovation-lead solutions provide the better alternative in growth and challenge We link to these common causes as they benefit the individual, as well as the communities we are in (national, local, scientific, educational etc).

The push for a common market of ideas and knowledge that are allowed to flow

I detect some positive movement in seizing some of these outstanding big challenges in the way the European Commission is being set up and structured. The new commission structure is pointing to big issues; it is veering away from past integration mantras, wanting to deliver on some of these challenges suggested above.

I just hope it does not extend the list too much or we go down the path of dilution, spreading and stretching our capabilities and resources too thin and ending up with the usual past compromises, all wrought out in eleventh hour late-night deals. Of course this is perhaps wishful thinking and certainly early days.

Can we move out of our fiscal consolidation mind-set? We must

As we continue to have fiscal consolidation, we get rising Euroscepticism. We nibble away not so much at the edges we are actually attacking our core and this is where we are facing the defence of knowledge assets and finding ways to promote by, perhaps, uniting behind our bigger EU challenges.

So where does innovation fit, I’d say front and centre. Every conversation in every boardroom, in every political meeting, at each EU summit and discussion, it is the outcomes we await to hear. These need to be far more centred around innovation in the outcome, not just in nice declarations with little behind them but in cohesive plans that move us towards this agenda of tackling the ‘Big Challenge Agenda’

Scaling and building innovation waves

We need to scale and create the positive waves through innovation. Reality is not in what is going on inside Europe, it is what is happening elsewhere. It is the organization of those knowledge assets to scale and develop the waves of innovation that Asia and America are clustering around in better ways than in Europe.

These can be seen in numerous ways as geographical regions all look for ways to become the dominant force for innovation. Asia, especially China is testing that existing dominance and Europe and others in the West need to embrace that challenge, not attempt to defend against it in legislative efforts but in this necessary knowledge asset re-equipping.

Keeping innovation high on the EU agenda but in new bigger ways
Innovation features higher in national policy than ever before in many parts of the world. Let us all hope Europe does not drop the innovation ball, but cutting its commitments to what has already been hard-fought over, delivered in the Horizon 2020 programme.

Equally let’s not dilute its effort and whittle away its value in thousands of small, perhaps meaningless gestures built on political threat and fragmented thinking.

Getting Europe moving again will need a much bolder vision and then stay focused on funding it if it links into these grand challenges in clear or valuable (experimental) ways that can be a catalyst for others to pick up and run with over the next mile, as innovation is not a sprint, it is a marathon to run, at this big challenge level.

Who is that knocking on my door?
* China has set itself some ambitious innovation targets, in its production of patents, in producing more PhD’s in science and engineering than US institutions or European ones and twice as many undergraduates in these fields than the US.
* China is going about outpacing the US in investments in research and development, it is growing R&D expenditure by 15 to 20% per year, not just to catch up but to drive innovation into its future.
* Asia and America invest more than Europe in R&D at the ratio of 3:3:2. The technology-intensive activity in the Asian region is fast approaching that of North America and Western Europe.
* China’s invention initiatives are producing rapid results as the government seeks increasing actively in cooperation’s with its Asian competitors. Asian countries are mutually fuelling one another’s innovative success
* The precise impact of Asia’s IP expansion is impossible to predict. But its transformative potential is obvious as the commissioners of the patent offices of Japan, South Korea, China and, to a lesser extent, Singapore and Taiwan meet increasingly to define and coordinate their intellectual property (IP) policies although a number of territorial disputes and political divides do often get in the way.

Each of these examples is building future knowledge assets to unlock innovation potential.

* America equally continues to work through a clearer innovation framework than I feel we in Europe seem not to have, or it seems incapable of delivering in our current fragmented view of innovation understanding. We want to spread innovation either too thinly or distort its value and meaning. We need a clear overarching innovation message.
* Take the reports from the “NII Innovate America Council on Competitiveness” or the White House view on “A Strategy for American Innovation” as debate documents or guidance indicators that offer an overarching view of how innovation needs to work and on what is needed to achieve and maintain a competitive position for America, written by both Business leaders and Government officials.

So what’s next?
The European Union has consistently failed to exploit its potential for innovation-based growth. Europe remains less inter-connected in critical areas due to political grandstanding and catering to vested domestic interests.

Does Europe lack the capacity for change as we constantly fail to convert much that seems promising, we are often not commercializing on all our hard work? Others pick up the baton and make the ‘risk’ investments off of the work and initial investments in Europe.

We constantly get caught up in the politics of the day, that seem to continue to divide and rule in old fashion ways, yet technology, science, and innovation are moving at a force and speed we are often guilty of not appreciating its impact or wealth-creating prospective. Innovation does not respect borders, it seamlessly moves across them but we need to forge the infrastructure to allow it to flow in more efficient and effective ways.

It is high time we did understand the real value of innovation, it ‘touches’ us all, we can all ‘feed off it’. We need to mobile around innovation and find the right ways to release our knowledge assets that are residing across Europe in a myriad of guises, waiting for the organizing forces and challenges to unite behind and solve.

We have the latent capability clearly.

**Note : A really useful source of knowledge is this overview of the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 highlights some major developments in international and U.S. science and engineering (S&E) that explores many useful indicators in the race of Science, Research and Technology. It’s worth a read.

The post The Real Race is to Invest in Knowledge Assets and Grand Innovation Challenges first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’ve been evaluating if it has the same relevance in my mind in our more connected world, where speed, knowledge and exchanges are measured in microseconds.

This reminded me of a suggestion I made some time back and I thought I’d ‘air’ this again for engaging with others.

We constantly fall into the trap of not providing our listeners enough of a reason to ‘buy into’ our thoughts. We forget to either pitch it to their mental framework or we do not provide a set of compelling arguments that allows our idea a mutual recognition of its value or structure, to take it forward and transform it into something tangible and valuable.

I think using Rogers’s rate of diffusion principles you can end up offering a fairly powerful positioning statement.
You can also offer a simple framework in this five-point plan the chance to break down differences you might both hold, to build on the ‘evidence’ from a mutual recognition in the discussion on what your idea holds as a potential promise. It can be transformational as a way to approach engagement.

The five steps in engagement to map your conversations.

To get anyone out of their own thinking trap we need to associate our thinking with what would be valued by them, we have to make the value connections .

We can offer a uniform pathway based on Everett Rogers five steps principle:

What we must always offer in any conversation is a clear relative advantage to what is presently available, so we can gain their permission and identification. Then we can set about to explore these better alternatives, to clarify their progress and gain general ongoing acceptance or questioning.

Either way, it becomes a mutual engagement. Stressing the advantage of the idea by making a comparison, does allow for the chance of engaging in a worthwhile conversation.

Timing, circumstances and its value to the other person always need considering here. “Relative” becomes the critical word here.

• If we can offer compatibility with our own and other people’s existing values, and explore a migration path from their past experiences we might get more space to experiment. We need to draw others in and so we have to align ourselves to their experiences to frame it to their thinking bias.
• This becomes a job-to-be-done on unearthing unmet needs or the needs that can be improved upon. The job-to-be-done thinking is a great practice methodology to achieve adoption.
• The new tools, methods and different techniques becoming increasingly available to us, can certainly help us to explain complexity to reduce the perceived difficulties of adopting new practices. The whole gambit of gaming, the canvas techniques, visual mapping, design thinking all help considerably here.
• Any argument, discussion or position needs to simplify complexity as the one listening quickly ‘tunes out’ if we load the conversation with “too much detail” or jargon.
• We then can offer new ways for trialability to experiment in safe and limited risk ways. Lay out a clear path of experimentation and result milestones to manage expectancies and gain increasing support commitment.
• Steve Blank’s contention of “getting out of the building” and his customer development process offers one of many ways to learn, pivot and progress in bite-sized steps.
• Finally, we can provide observability, so others can see the results we can make progress. By keeping this open, it can be clearly challenged and blocked in many ways but openness and transparency does eventually reduce resistance.

If we can clarify change and our progress in learning we give others understanding. It is when we fail to communicate what they need to hear, that we are more likely to be blocked or our project cancelled. We need to ‘demonstrate’ progress and show its value.

Everett Rogers, five steps might offer up a possible pathway to unlock much within innovation and reduce our different personal biases that can trap our ideas to not allow them to be seen in their real value to move forward, and be supported by others, as they gain their essential engagement and buy-in.

What do you think?

It’s worth a try to build your own engagement stories around the five principles suggested. Give it a try the next time you want to bring others onto your side and look to construct a mutual engagement.

The post Gaining idea engagement can be a five step process. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’d like to go a little deeper with a suggested way to surface these deeper personal hidden blockages that you do find in working with innovation, that the work mat brings out. It is surprising as they often have real commonality once surfaced and then you need to find the dedicated time to allow them to be fully discussed, as they are critical to unlock.

Often in innovation adoption there are so many hidden barriers that need drawing out and resolving. Take a read of Jeffrey’s observations, as they clearly triggered my own approach of how to deal with them which I thought I’d share here.

As Jeffrey states there are “very different perspectives, different goals and even different definitions between and among members of many executive teams.” The key is to surface these.

We both totally share this point that Jeffrey raises, that “sustained innovation can only occur when there is clarity about goals, alignment within the executive team to the goals, deep commitments to appropriate staffing and resource allocation, and the willingness to lead into risky or uncertain initiatives.  When these factors are present, innovation can flourish.”

To get to this point we need to draw out those real hidden concerns that inhibit innovations adoption at executive level. We need to trigger ‘collective’ discussions so the team can relate and share their concerns and offer up solutions that breaks through those barriers.
Surfacing hidden barriers is hard work

To surface hidden barriers that might be blocking innovation does needs a conscious effort, a consistent questioning, validating and exploring to “peel away” and get at the root of the problem.

Often it is simply the fear of moving from the current established practices into new ways and that stepping over is very hard and often very personal.

When it comes to getting an executive team to recognize this and then make a collective team move is extremely hard, it needs a lot of debate, facts and recognition, that this behavioral change- as that is what it is- needs to be taken if they believe in innovation.

This is one of the real value points of having an external adviser as the facilitator and where the value of the Executive Work Mat starts kicking in.

It is very hard for a member of a team, including the CEO, to instigate a change of the magnitude needed for innovation to really be embraced and adopted without specialized help.

Innovation requires concerted, dedicated efforts to take hold, to become fully embedded and run through the veins of the organization as the new blood type. Those famous antibodies kick in from all sides to protect the status quo, keep doing “business as usual.” The external adviser has the tough job of grappling all those objections to the floor, hence why we call it a work mat.

Stimulating the innovation carriers

I’ve outlined previously about the issues surrounding the hidden human dimension of innovation: “It is the pivotal role of people as innovation carriers – their networks, collaborations, knowledge flows, interactions and tacit knowledge – and how innovation itself is a potent competitive force that drives productivity”. To allow innovation to flow within organizations requires the senior executives to address their own potential inhibitions so they then become the innovation carriers and allow the true force of innovation to be unleashed.

It is through engagement that allows innovation to happen. We need to make innovation the social process it needs to be but this starts from the top, leaders have to come together and decide to lea.

They need to surface their own hidden barriers to innovation otherwise many others within the organization simply stumble along in their own interpretations of how innovation fits within the grand scheme of things. Or they simply “wait” or never change as they don’t see the direction coming from the top of the organization.

Leadership is required for innovation to really make that transformational hold.

We need to re-frame innovation as a series of challenges
Let me explain part of the power of the Executive Innovation Work Mat. I think it is important to offer any change deriving from the work coming out of the work mat as innovation challenges that need addressing, as necessary issues to be aligned and clarified. The work mat can only trigger, its outcomes need resolution and commitment.

For me managers relate to challenges, they are trained to respond, to investigate, to surface the issues and find ways to tackle the problems. Innovation management is no different. Part of the design of the work mat is to surface the gaps that exist that requires executive resolution so to allow innovation to be fully integrated within organizations and aligned with strategic goals and objectives.

Also the work mat although stemming from initial work at the Executive and Senior levels of organizations needs to have a “cascading effect.” The work mat outcomes need articulating, communicating and eventually becoming the adopted common language framework of the organization to gather around so alignment can potentially happen.

Addressing hidden barriers and personal blockages through ten challenges
So for each executive to address innovation I believe lies ten challenges they need to question within themselves so as to answer and then collectively discuss. These allow a clear framing dialogue to unblock innovation and bring together clarity of where innovation needs to fit within the organization going forward.

The ten challenges can actually have a vital part to play in cascading this down the organization, for everyone to reflect upon and address. They become part of the communication mechanism to form a common language for innovation. Different views can surface for the challenges but they all need addressing.

The ten innovation change challenges

Addressing the issue of unfamiliar responsibilities – new and different ways of working, of understanding, of allowing innovation to take hold and flourish is often demanding new ways of responding, often adding to increasing responsibilities. This needs surfacing

Innovation demands new directions – making significant changes to the way the organization is run is very challenging, potentially disrupting and needs thinking through at the top level well.

Inherited problems always surface – addressing countless and inherent problems is messy and requires dedicated resolution. Changing a culture to become more innovative can be a massive step in structure, organization and policies.

Problems within the organizations make up – inadequate experience and resistance to change especially surface when a person is not equipped to deal with it. Installing innovation capacity, capabilities and competencies needs figuring out

High stakes of innovation – demanding breakthrough innovation makes everyone feel increasing vulnerable, increasingly visible and leadership has a real responsibility to manage this risk and set of fears. They need to be ready to ‘positively react and encourage’ both in supporting winning solutions and extracting positive learning from failures.

Scope and scale of innovation – Managing in scale and scope is demanding and requires well thought through systems and processes. To scope innovation needs robust business case approaches, its flexibility in its management and then to scale this up requires well established approaches and clear commitments to its engagement and execution.

External pressures multiply – everyone has an opinion outside the organization, let alone inside. Balancing these different interfaces and the pressures from these as you explore innovation needs managing well. Avoid that trait of just keeping raising expectations and actively work at the alignment for the ability to deliver on the promise.

Influencing without full authority – key activities within innovation usually demand that you become reliant on others. You need to spend (seemingly) inordinate time explaining and gaining others buy in and their own identification with concepts so as to move emerging innovation concepts along the pipeline. You need to find often imaginative ways of attracting across the resources needed. This is especially hard for senior managers to adapt too, the need to attract across, instead of simply expect, demand and simply take.

Work more with a listening and feedback culture – this can be totally different from the way business has been conducted today, through a more hierarchical structure. Flattening organizations to allow greater two way flow sucks up time; it simply undoes or unpicks command and control over time. It takes time to establish and gain the confidence and momentum. You need to allow more for debate, it shifts and alters the hierarchy and structures and that is a big step into an unknown, yet it is necessary for organization change, to allow innovation to truly flourish on a more sustaining basis.

The need to develop work group diversity – innovation asks for more diversity in opinion, it draws out more in thinking, in discipline, in alternative approaches and solution. This often leaves senior executives feeling they are less in control, reliant on other and that can feel scary and surface their own insecurities, buried increasingly as they moved up the organization and took on responsibility and accountability. It challenges often their very notion of management as they have known and experienced it.

Innovation in its management challenges many past notions of how to manage it differently.

To summarize
Each of these ten innovation challenges needs to be surfaced at the right time within any executive work mat discussion. Each one, individually can block innovation from advancing. Finding the right moment is not easy to draw these out but it is certainly necessary, otherwise, those hidden barriers never come to the surface and get resolved.

The real barriers to allowing innovation into organizations to flourish are these blockages. The job of the work mat and within the sessions is not just to align the seven parts of the work mat as simply an academic exercise itself but to really wrestle and grapple with those tough questions, that leadership engagement for innovation and what it really means to deliver a cohesive framework that the organization can work from with growing confidence.

Reducing concerns, addressing risks and making considered decisions are what senior executives are trained and schooled to be good at. To allow innovation to take hold, the key is to work hard at surfacing the known and hidden dimensions blocking innovation. These ten challenges can ‘break open’ the road blocks.

Clearly any innovation journey, if seriously undertaken, needs some really dedicated work. The Executive Innovation work mat facilities this as the central gathering point and that is why Jeffrey and I really believe in its value to innovation’s future within organizations.

We have to often remember senior managers are used to being successful by competing. The genuine change in their mindsets and understandings they need to often undertake for innovation is sometimes difficult to adapt too and sustain, as they are often on a steep and unexpected learning curve themselves.

Like all aspects of change, this is only achieved through engaging them to practice, to use the work mat as the communicating mechanism for positive reinforcement as the strategic innovation framework, where all involved can learn and benefit.

This calls for a collective and real collaborative effort but the return is worth it, they are making a decisive contribution to establishing a sustaining innovation within their organization. They are beginning to change the way the organization needs to work.

The original list of the ten challenges has been adapted from “creating learning experiences without changing jobs” by Cynthia McCauley at the CCL in 2006. I’ve  applied it for a way for surfacing innovation issues and personal concerns at executive and organization levels.

The post Surfacing the challenges and road blocks to innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.