Achieving innovation fitness is a journey- to get there we often have to manage the switchbacks as we build our capabilities and capacities to innovate.

1. Getting Started – Understanding the Needs & Imperatives of Innovation Fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging  the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet strategic need
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance
• Knowing and aligning  your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing the building of scale, change rates and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation

4. Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognizing the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’

5. The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and road blocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6. The Hard Face of Soft(er) factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognizing time, climate and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter department, inter projects and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8. Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale.
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to team to organizational learning in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational levels.

9. Keeping the innovation fitness wheels turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to Strategy and Approaches

The end result is looking to generate your fitness landscape

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

The post 9 Stages for building innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Many innovators are simply happily working away with no specific guidelines, apart from the general remit of “we need to be more innovative”, it lies in the boardroom that is not communicating the board’s needs clearly enough down the organization.

Building up our capacity to innovate does need to understand and reflect the organization’s business activities, as innovators need to grasp the value creation aspects that will deliver the necessary capital-efficient and profitable growth, and then ‘go in pursuit’ to achieve their contribution to these goals.

Even the basic questions often remain unclear, those of how are we looking to grow revenue, save costs, reduce working capital or improve our fixed capital? Managing our innovation activities can help in all of these. Actually if you ask I expect the CFO would say “all of them” but each does have implications on understanding of the fit and eventual role of innovation’s contribution.

Then where equally does risk fit into the strategic equation for innovation?

Innovators often lack the clarity or governance guidelines to know if they can or can’t ‘push’ for groundbreaking innovation.

Risk is kept vague so we can often avoid the unknowns associated with any really different innovation, it becomes ‘the art of avoidance’ by the person who wants innovation but not the risks associated with it.

Innovation is not the usual

Recently in a PA Consulting report called “Innovation as Unusual” they were suggesting the innovation spend just in the UK alone, is flushing some £65 billion down the drain each year, as nearly half the organizations waste good ideas, are far to risk averse and fail to invest boldly around more ground-breaking ideas.

So we are still seeing the majority of organizations are struggling with innovation and in the process they are losing out financially, forgoing huge opportunities in not achieving future competitive positions or foregoing the chances to radically alter their market position. It seems innovation remains incoherent within many organizations still.

PA Consulting in this report were suggesting there are five innovation killers – fear, lack of focus, innovation engine failure, the wrong ROI and finally, a real reluctance to invest. Pretty bad I think?

In one of the outcomes of the report it asks “can we continue to allow 47% of senior executives to describe their innovation activity as a ‘costly failure’?”
Some things need to radically change and having ‘coherence in the innovation activity needs to be central to this needed change. So where do we start?

Maybe we should all start visualizing first.

Recently XPLANE, visualization thinkers who apply a design thinkers approach, produced two brilliant visualizations on the organization, one as the Cost of Confusion and the other as the Value of Clarity. (direct pdf links)
Xplane quite rightly suggests that a picture is worth a thousand words, well for me, these two visualizations I would regard are worth millions to any organization wanting to understanding why their strategy and innovation efforts go wrong and how to begin to put them right.

I would suggest you download them and circulate these around your organization, starting with all your board members and then you really can begin to enter that necessary set of discussions about coherence or a lack of it.

Leveraging the power of the three horizon methodology for innovation

I greatly favor the three horizon methodology to work through for achieving this coherence in understanding. The three horizons offer an excellent framing technique to bring this ‘coherence’ that we need from our ‘here and know’ activities and future innovation efforts. This coherence leads onto knowing what innovation capabilities are needed, what are missing and those really critical ones required to defend the core more effectively alongside (yet separately) needed to expand the potential in the future.

Dedicating time to knowing your innovation capability fitness

I have been constantly working away at what constitutes the dynamic capabilities for innovation and those, shall we say as more static and simply repetitive. It is identifying the difference, and then knowing how to apply these that are dynamic and highly valuable to obtain, against those that simply require a little dampening down.

We then ‘map’ these to the innovation needed to build a growing innovation capability set. This work has a dedicated website for the building up of the case for focusing on this under www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com.

Knowing what are the critical factors for innovation and their dependence for sustaining innovation success is becoming such a vital necessity to understand so an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them.

The question is, which are critical, which naturally occur when others begin to be put into place, which seems to have limited or no real effect on changing the dynamics of innovation?

Deciding that capabilities can be better leveraged requires a separation of exploit and explore.

The aligning of strategic direction (and importance) with any capability needs is in the understanding of what activities are diverging with the core and those converging.

Then we need to figure out the future core and start moving towards it. It is the two dynamics of exploitation and exploration we should be leveraging for our innovation and future growth.

Today we need to exploit and explore and our capabilities need to be built fit for one of these two purposes. Exploiting is today’s business need, to leverage and improve on the existing business and equally, in parallel, explore for tomorrow’s new business growth.

The need to diverge and converge

The diverging ones need to have a real emphasis on improving performance, how they are managed for cash or to eventually sell or dispose of. Then we have those that are converging onto the new ‘known’ core of the business to grow and expand.

So by recognizing these, and that is not easy in itself, you are beginning to know and identify the capabilities you need to have in place to fix today so as to make it as healthy as possible, alongside those new capabilities that will create a new winning set of growth and value propositions that give the ‘promise’ of what can come by applying different mindsets, resources and thinking.

We certainly need bolder investments in knowledge around the make-up of innovation capabilities

I certainly believe there is a real call for fresh and bolder investments in knowledge, in infrastructure that focus on activities that spur new approaches that lead to innovation. These are not just the traditional ones based on managing today’s core.

It is finding those innovations that provide new value, the new generation activity that is occurring from recognizing how we can build, yes build for further exploitation (extending the life) and exploration (new understanding) and manage each as separate risk evaluation exercises with different metrics of progress.

We also need a deeper innovation grounding of internal workings and alignment

What I feel we need is a deeper grounding in what is actually going on inside organizations within their innovation activities and how these align to the needs of strategy and what is clearly missing. We start here as it gives us all this clarity and coherence, missing in much of our existing understanding.

We have the real opportunity today, in finding new ways in combining the four emerging forces of knowledge, technology, entrepreneurship and innovation, which will drive the growth models of tomorrow. It is these that are forming the new innovations ‘black box.’

It is mastering this new ‘black box’ of actual innovation activities, exploring and exploiting the necessary innovation capabilities that are required to be ‘going on’ in organizations to achieve a closer coherence, one that can radically improve the innovation performance.

I have plenty of ideas, frames and methods built up to help you make innovation fit and be more coherent in its contribution.

The post Achieving Innovations Capability Coherence first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Achieving innovation fitness is a journey- to get there we often have to manage the switchbacks as we build our capabilities and capacities to innovate.

1. Getting Started – Understanding the Needs & Imperatives of Innovation Fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging  the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet strategic need
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance
• Knowing and aligning  your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing the building of scale, change rates and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation

4. Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognizing the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’

5. The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and road blocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6. The Hard Face of Soft(er) factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognizing time, climate and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter department, inter projects and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8. Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale.
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to team to organizational learning in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational levels.

9. Keeping the innovation fitness wheels turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to Strategy and Approaches

The end result is looking to generate your fitness landscape

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

The post 9 Stages for building innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We have an ongoing need to create, extend and modify resources constantly and to achieve this we need to orchestrate and enable those resources to exploit and execute our innovations.

We need to ‘asset orchestrate’.

One of our blind spots is perhaps the focus on pursuing and organizing around innovation just within an organization and not being as aware of all that is externally going on around us.

There are continued and rapid shifts taking place outside the walls of our organizations, constantly occurring and changing, often it becomes a ‘race’ between spotting an opportunity and executing on it before your competitors do, or the market further moves on and it becomes a lost opportunity to have exploited.

There is an awful lot of dynamics to consider and are we not just capturing the dynamics of the constant changes but ‘fit’ enough within our organizations to read and react to these in more dynamic ways.

Much of what an organization does is simply perform through its established routines, managing the passages that lead from one ‘event’ to the next. These form much of the activities, yet these should never be seen as the end, only the prelude.

We need to fully appreciate the complexities of all the interactions needed to make innovation more dynamic. That’s constantly changing and evolving and like a piece of music, it needs this conducting to be thoughtfully managed through the whole piece, the routines and the new understandings and interpretations.

To manage and orchestrate means to lead, frame, conduct and set the tempo.

The clear intent of any orchestration is the need to extract the underlying value. The person responsible, our conductor, is responsible for managing and searching for new innovations and they need to determine the path.

They need to coordinate and integrate all the activities, they need to draw out new learning, new interpretations of the knowledge collectively gathered and reconfigure it all, to deliver something different, fresh and new to the world.

When we begin to want to orchestrate across external innovation networks we not only need to know ourselves extremely well, we also need to know what others can bring and what is missing.

Networks and relationships, interactions and knowledge flow needs to be dynamic, they need to be somehow captured and translated, transformed and often reconfigured

Picking up the baton we need to pull together the different fragments
Asset orchestration has potentially a real value to appreciate and manage.

There is limited academic research into this but it becomes significantly richer in its importance when you tie it into dynamic capabilities.

Also as we increasingly need to understand the value creation in building our networks and relationships, the need for asset orchestration increases so as to build a pathway through gathering knowledge and what you can learn that leads you towards new innovation.

As our organizations become increasingly dependent on the specialization the coordination task becomes far more complex and difficult. We constantly need to search, select and configure our resources and capabilities.

Work undertaken to frame this asset orchestration was in different research by Sirmon et al during 2007 and 2008 that focused on the different actions of the manager, or asset orchestrator. They suggest there are three primary stages of structuring, bundling and leveraging resources for the purpose of creating new value for customers and gaining competitive advantages, however temporary in today’s world.

It is why this needs to be dynamic, ever-evolving, to keep orchestrating your assets continually. These three primary stages can be broken down:

• Structuring involves acquiring, accumulating and divesting resources to form the organization’s resource portfolio.

• Bundling of integrating resources to form capabilities, that can stabilize or provide incremental improvements to existing capabilities, or that enrich and extend existing current capabilities and thirdly, pioneer, which creates new capabilities.

• Leveraging involves a sequence of processes to exploit the organization’s capabilities to take advantage of specific market opportunities.
• This leveraging includes mobilizing, offering a clear plan or vision of needed capabilities, coordinating for ways to integrate these necessary capabilities and finally, deploying to achieve a resource advantage (or gain) that promotes market opportunities and instils more entrepreneurial strategies to exploit new resource configurations

We are all facing these needs for greater asset synchronization or orchestration.

We need to learn also that innovation needs this growing orchestration, due to this increasing move from firm-centric to network-centric innovation. In my understanding an orchestrator, they need to manage the tempo, know where and when to cue in the different players (learning) and inject the intensity into the performance.

We are dealing with managing the tempo, interpreting the different passages and movements as interactions become distinct, providing fresh value to build upon.

We need to learn to identify, assimilate and exploit far more than ever, the value of knowing your innovation fitness, your dynamics and the terrain you wish to traverse in new innovation activity becomes even more critical.

To create and to extract does clearly need to understand the what, why, where, when and how it needs to go about this.

The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.
To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result.

I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network’ of these.

It still relies on how you purposefully build and conduct these capabilities and competencies. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts to deliver the right result.

Definitely, the dynamic view of orchestrating our assets is needed

Finally, orchestration has for me become very important to my ongoing work on the dynamic innovation capabilities for recognizing your innovation fitness landscape and the gaps.

These become even more of a challenge when different perspectives and competencies enter the mix, where we urgently need to understand the ‘dynamics of innovation’ even more.

We need to not just know the appropriate resources; we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate mostly our intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors.

Assets that deliver the new innovation needed, through attracting collaboration efforts and integrating these into your own evolving resources and turning into being dynamic in nature.

The post Asset Orchestration is Required for more Dynamic Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This is my adopted approach to work through this in a systematic way.

No question, this is designed to make sure those involved take their time working through the different levels of understanding needed. A journey where you ‘transform’ your innovation capabilities is likely to be realistically over twelve months or more. So much does get in the way to deflect you, to block you, to divert you. This is the nature of organizations, any approach to making ‘transformational’ change, and this is what this is, needs to go at the right speed and deal with the obstacles and constraints in thoughtful, well designed and clear ways.

Why is this potentially a long journey?

Well to appreciate what you require you must firstly need to understand not only what you have but what it currently provides.

Then you need to construct a clear strategic position of where you want to go in your innovation activities and these are totally different and unique to each organization.

Any journey like this needs to be well thought through, considered for all its implications and potential impact and disruption to what is existing.

It is a journey you have to want to travel and your fitness levels need to be progressively built up.

So these steps may have ‘individual wrinkles’ to them but most probably follow the same innovation discovery pathway.

1. Getting Started – Understanding the Needs & Imperatives of Innovation Fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging  the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet strategic need
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance
• Knowing and aligning  your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing the building of scale, change rates and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation

4. Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognizing the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’

5. The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and road blocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6. The Hard Face of Soft(er) factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognizing time, climate and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter department, inter projects and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8. Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale.
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to team to organizational learning in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational levels.

9. Keeping the innovation fitness wheels turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to Strategy and Approaches

The end result is looking to generate your fitness landscape

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

Looking for a clear end result

Any learning involves sensing, seizing and then transforming. We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustaining into the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and constantly adapted to meet the strategic need.

We are striving towards a true ‘innovation coherency premium’ in design, knowing what makes up your core dynamic components. The outcomes are to know where to invest, what to dampen down and what aspects can evolve naturally and be ‘taken along’ as you focus upon the ones that are more dynamic and relevant to your innovation needs.

No journey is without pitfalls.

Finding the dynamic capabilities of innovation that ‘fit’ with the strategic needs of each organization will be different based on their own respective challenges and position. We need to stop simply copying others and create our own ‘dynamics’ to strengthen our own unique advantage points for sustaining our future. Do you want to become innovation fit?

The post Nine steps leading to understanding your dynamic innovation capabilities first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Innovation capability building is my 100% focus from my work point of view.

I’m comfortable in much of the understanding of what makes up innovation, totally restless in so much more that is out there to explore and work through – I believe we need to significantly improve potential solutions, through experimentation and prototyping until they become recognized as relevant and applicable and become deeply embedded within our organizations as the accepted approach to innovation design and management.

Investigating, researching and reading all required a significant amount of time, all alongside needing to practice innovation, working to clients’ needs or pushing for their attention to changes taking place within the field of innovation management and what they needed to do about it.

Dynamic capability applied to innovation keeps gaining my increased attention

One area that caught my attention many years back, was the notion of “dynamic capability”, the organizations capacity to change its operation and adapt them to the environmental requirements in systematic and fruitful ways. Academic papers by Teece, Pisano and Shuen, by Eisenhardt and Martin and finally for me, Zollo and Winter, all fueled my thinking at that time.

Winter suggested that organization change happens in two ways; the first is ad-hoc problem driven in our searches or the second is through the action of “stable patterns of activity aimed at creating or changing operating routines in pursuit of enhanced organizational effectiveness” offering the initial definition of dynamic capabilities. I’m up for the second, most organizations still often practice and treat innovation in ad-hoc ways.

What are dynamic capabilities?

These are the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors. Enterprises with strong dynamic capabilities are intensely entrepreneurial, they adapt around business ecosystems, and they shape them through innovation, collaboration, learning and deep involvement.

I am really hooked on this. This started me on my hardest journey that began in 2008 around my pursuit of building a way to understand what makes up innovation capability and capacities within organizations. I needed to find a way to build, to integrate and configure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments.

Much as Teece, et all, had outlined some years early the notion of this, there continues to lack decent, coherent solutions. Any suggestions I researched were often a little thin on the ground, in practical application but some of the concepts had a richness about them to sustain real interest in my continued pursuit to find a practical, enduring commercial solution to managing the dynamics within innovation. So this became part of my challenge and growing interest.

Moving from intent to cognizance and then application

So I was looking for designing something that gave a sustaining competitive in innovation advantage, that was shaped by the individual organizations specific asset position and where it needed to go and develop to get it to that stated strategic goal they required. This hinged on identifying the value points where resource configurations needed advancing once the gaps could be identified.

This journey has taken me all over the place. I have studied increasingly dynamic capabilities, innovation landscapes, absorptive capacity, where open innovation fits and then increasingly in this more open environment the need for collaboration, for networking, for orchestrating innovation to deliver what is needed, into the markets advancing on existing offerings.

My often interrupted journey was partly by design but also by lacking essential parts.

Since  the 2008 and 2009 period, where I had an incredible burst of energy into this whole area, I found I had to leave it, put it to one side for eighteen months or so. Sometimes you have to stop your searches and reflect a little. Any journey you do need decent resting and reflecting periods.

In 2011 I took up this quest again, yes quest is the right word, as it has both been long and a difficult search. I designed a framework, the innovation fitness landscape model and set up a dedicated web site for managing this at innovation fitness dynamics. This has bubbled along but was not the platform I expected or able to launch in the ways I’d ideally like. Something was still missing.

In this time I’d concluded that to identify the “dynamics” needed for innovation I’d need at least two levels of evaluation – the internal one where it seemed nine descriptors gave the necessary ‘thrusts’ to find the critical internal related aspects and the external one – more as the level of ‘degree’s’ of engagement for evolving the external related need. I was happier with the internal part, not so much with the external one. I’ve completed some limited testing but by no means feeling I’m yet ready to really push out on this so a short period of digestion and thinking led to another hiatus until a few weeks ago.

So in mid 2013 I have taken up my innovation journey again, relating to innovation dynamics and fitness landscapes. There was a realization I was missing something. The innovation system I had been focusing upon was simply made up for the single organization and although I was consciously working on the external environment and recognizing their degree of importance, I was not  actually reflecting the really big changes going on in innovation today and in the near future, as I should have been. The changes taking place through more open, collaborative innovation. I was writing about it but not taking it fully into this dynamic framework of mine.

So this innovation journey continues, often in ‘fits and starts’.

The post Continuing the Innovation Journey- connecting the points first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When we begin to want to orchestrate across external innovation networks we not only need to know ourselves extremely well, we also need to know what others can bring and what is missing. Networks are dynamic, the flow of knowledge, of capabilities and competencies all need somehow capturing. Recognizing this shift in my thinking, allowed me to pick up the baton again and begin to conduct all the different fragments and pull them together, into a different result.

I learnt also that innovation needs this growing orchestration, due to this increasing move from firm-centric to network-centric innovation. In my understanding of a orchestrator, he needs to manage the tempo, knowing where and when to cue in the different players (learning) and to inject the intensity into the performance. I was back on my journey recognizing the different passages and movements I’d been on, where all contributing into a final result. “Something” was coming together and I need to work through the new ‘score’ being played out.

We need to learn to identify, assimilate and exploit far more than ever, the value of knowing your innovation fitness, your dynamics and the terrain you wish to traverse in new innovation activity becomes even more critical. To create and to extract does clearly need to understand the what, why, where, when and how it needs to go about this.

The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.

To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result. I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network’ of these. It still lies in how you purposefully build these capabilities and competencies up. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts.

The four dimensions for building capability to innovate are at the individual level, within teams, within the organization and within the dynamic set of networks needed at given times to solve innovation challenges. These capabilities need to possess mobility, appropriability, certain stability and the willingness to learn and build on the existing dynamics. Internal capabilities still need building but we also must work to identify those complementary capabilities across a fluid set of stakeholders to deliver a more complex innovation challenge.

Orchestration has for me become very important to my ongoing work on the dynamic innovation capabilities for recognizing your innovation fitness landscape and the gaps. These become even more of a challenge when different perspectives and competencies enter the mix.

We urgently need to understand the ‘dynamics of innovation’ even more. What is the local maximum, what can we work upon in transition, what we need to bring in for any future co-creation and what needs working upon within specific networks within the innovation capabilities and capacities needed to be applied.

The dynamic view of orchestrating is needed

The orchestrating of open innovation challenges is dynamic and we increasingly need to know the critical factors and their dependencies for delivering a collaborative innovation success. We need to not just know the appropriate resources, we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors, that delivers the new innovation needed through collaboration efforts.

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If we really want to innovate well, we need to know our ‘innovation stock’. This is where the largest part of our wealth generating capital lies and where it’s potential can be best put to use. We are today increasingly valuing the knowledge perspective far more and with this we are increasingly recognizing the importance of the intellectual capital that makes up the organization.

I, and many others, would argue that we certainly need to re-think many of the old world value delivery systems to assess organizations and make much more of a concerted effort to make innovation that renders different, unique value outcomes, that keep pushing the boundaries of strategic advantage within any business.

What is increasingly becoming a strategic imperative is our need to ‘master’ our understanding of the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate innovation. This is needed increasingly with our needs to participate in more complex open collaboration efforts. To achieve this, we do firstly need to know ourselves and our capability to innovate, both the strengths and weaknesses.

So I’ve been busy mapping out a pathway to Innovation Fitness

Knowing your innovation fitness capabilities does provide a good understanding of your existing position and can, through a structured approach and program, ‘point’ you towards the ones that you need to have that put you into that place of leveraging unique strengths, that clearly improve your innovation capabilities. These are the ones that are far more valuable and potentially dynamic.

The issue is today, do we know what are the critical capabilities to focus upon to improve the chances of greater innovation success? Each organization has limited resources to offer and it is becoming increasingly important to know where and with what these resources to maximize the capability to deliver a better set of innovation outcomes.

Each organization does needs to know its innovation fitness to thrive in the future

We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustaining into the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and constantly adapted to meet the strategic need.

We are striving towards a true ‘innovation coherency premium’ in design, knowing what makes up your core dynamic components. The outcomes are to know where to invest, what to dampen down and what aspects can evolve naturally and be ‘taken along’ as you focus upon the ones that are more dynamic and relevant to your innovation needs.

The post Do you know your innovation stock and its capital potential? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

What we do need to do is constantly evolve our innovation capabilities to perform in more dynamic and flexible ways. We need to acquire that consistent aim of achieving a more adaptable and adjusting approach to innovation in all its parts.

We need to meet the changing circumstances and challenges we are all facing to regain the real growth needed from our economies and organizations, making what we do at the same time, more sustainable. Delivering better innovation outcomes is central to this task.

Are we in a more Darwinian world perhaps?

I’d suggest that today innovation is caught up in the survival race, where the bolder ones are more innovative fit. We need many more organizations to get out of this survival trap and exploit innovation in bolder ways.

So much of what we do is ‘static’ work, activities that are simply repeating what we have done time and again and gaining us little new knowledge. These activities on their own keep us happily ‘treading water’ and does the job of locking us comfortably into the efficient and effective clan mindset that most business organizations like to be constantly working in.

The harsh reality is this is becoming a very crowded, increasing uncomfortable place to be, as we reduce our capabilities to take risk, too invest, to take those decisions that create more radical innovation.

The more we play ‘safe’ the more we run the risk of being disrupted. We are failing to leverage much of the liberating power within innovation. Is our business world today is it so predictable?  No, it is well and truly ‘dynamic’ and evolving.

There is an awful lot of creative destruction going on and I’ve also written previously about the Innovation Era: Creative Destruction or Destructive Creation where the replacement rate is constantly speeding up, we are facing more uncertainly and incoherence than ever.

We need to place the emphasis back on the “creative” innovation part and not the ‘destructive’ nature we have been moving towards recently. To achieve this we need to understand innovation far better than we currently do. This is partly where my exploring the dynamics of innovation through fitness landscapes comes in.

Knowing your innovation ‘stock’ and  ‘capital’ potential

We need to know our ‘innovation stock’, a large part of our wealth generating capital and where it can be best put to use. We are valuing the knowledge perspective far more and with this we are increasingly recognizing the importance of the intellectual capital that makes up the organization.

We certainly need to re-think many of the old world value delivery systems to assess organizations and make much more of a concerted effort to make innovation that renders different, unique value outcomes, that keep pushing the boundaries of strategic advantage within any business.

We need to ‘master’ our understanding of the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate innovation as this is increasingly needed for participating in more complex open collaboration efforts. To achieve this, we first need to know ourselves and our capability to innovate, both the strengths and weaknesses.

So I’ve been busy mapping out a pathway to Innovation Fitness

Knowing your innovation fitness capabilities does provide a good understanding of your existing position and can, through a structured approach and programme, ‘point’ you towards the ones that you need to have that put you into that place of leveraging unique strengths, that clearly improve your innovation capability. These are the ones that are far more valuable and potentially dynamic.

The issue is today, do we know what are the critical capabilities to focus upon to improve the chances of greater innovation success? Each organization has limited resources to offer and it is becoming increasingly important to know where and with what these resources to maximise the capability to deliver a better set of innovation outcomes.

So within my own innovation ‘walkabout’ I made a significant step forward.

Sometime ago in one of my research phases, exploring around this subject, I came across a book written by Kim Warren on “Competitive Strategic Dynamics.”

Although I struggled on much within the content of the book, I did find the chapter headers as a useful ‘engagement approach’ for what I wanted to describe in my approach to identifying and working through the dynamics of innovation.

So after some adjustments and reworking of the activities within my ‘engagement approach,’  I came to nine steps within this process. These might change as I progress and learn but do lay out a process towards explaining, engaging and exploring how an organization can achieve an innovation fitness.

Included is a working through of the methodology to navigate and focus upon the appropriate capability points needed within each specific organization.

This step process I believe gets you to the point of understanding what innovation capabilities  are a better ‘fit’ for purpose, to deliver on your innovation needs on a consistent, repeatable and evolving basis.

The Nine Steps needed for developing an understanding of your innovation capabilities to make them more dynamic.

1. Getting Started – Understanding the Needs & Imperatives of Innovation Fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging  the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need

2. The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet strategic need
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance
• Knowing and aligning  your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing the building of scale, change rates and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation

4. Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognizing the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’

5. The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and road blocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6. The Hard Face of Soft(er) factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognizing time, climate and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter department, inter projects and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8. Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale.
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to team to organizational learning in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational levels.

9. Keeping the innovative fitness wheels turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving the impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to Strategy and Approaches

The end result is looking to generate your fitness landscape

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one. The parts within the structure might change, depending on circumstances and experiences. It is one that is more than likely an organizational wide applicable one. This might alter after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation.

Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

Any learning involves sensing, seizing and then transforming. This is for me, still a work-in-progress, and what I outline here is not the ‘done’ deal but more a “beta” framework approach. What we do need to do certainly is to push innovation beyond the existing as innovation is today, as it is falling to live up to its promise.

Knowing the critical dependencies for establishing a sustaining, successful innovation performance is somewhere we should strive towards in its understanding. I’m certainly moving down a decent pathway here I feel.

Each organization does needs to know its innovation fitness to thrive in the future

We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustaining into the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and constantly adapted to meet the strategic need.

We are striving towards a true ‘innovation coherency premium’ in design, knowing what makes up your core dynamic components.

The outcomes are to know where to invest, what to dampen down and what aspects can evolve naturally and be ‘taken along’ as you focus upon the ones that are more dynamic and relevant to your innovation needs.

No journey is without pitfalls.

Finding the dynamic capabilities of innovation that ‘fit’ with the strategic needs of each organization will be different based on their own respective challenges and position.

We need to stop simply copying others and create our own ‘dynamics’ to strengthen our own unique advantage points for sustaining our future. Do you want to become innovative fit?

The post Approaching innovation through fitness dynamics needs a structured approach. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

My personal innovation journey started way back in 2001 when I got ‘hooked’ on innovation and what it could deliver in its impact on a business.

I believe it is for greater engagement within the organization and increased identification through their people, with the potential for learning and improving their capabilities.

Progressively I learnt about innovation, studied it as part of my Master’s degree and began to practice the parts others were prepared to pay me for, either to listen to, or offer advice.

This innovation journey took on a shape that eventually became 100% of my focus within my advisory practices at Agility Innovation Specialists and Hoca Consulting by systematically building my understanding of innovation and providing this knowledge to others through advisory, coaching, writing and mentoring services.

It still is a long continuous journey twelve plus years later.

I’m constantly learning, reading, absorbing and interpreting what I understand and then attempting to provide my thoughts to others, those willing to listen!

I’m comfortable in much, totally restless in so much more out there to explore and work through, so as to achieve potential solutions, through experimentation and prototyping until they become recognized as relevant and applicable.

Investigating, researching and reading all required a significant amount of time, all alongside needing to practice innovation, working to clients’ needs or pushing for their attention to changes taking place within the field of innovation management and what they needed to do about it.

Dynamic capability applied to innovation gained my increased attention

One area that caught my attention, many years back was the notion of “dynamic capability”, the organizations capacity to change its operation and adapt them to the environmental requirements in systematic and fruitful ways. Academic papers by Teece, Pisano and Shuen, by Eisenhardt and Martin and finally for me, Zollo and Winter, all fuelled my thinking at that time.

Winter suggested that organization change happens in two ways; the first is ad-hoc problem driven in our searches or the second is through the action of “stable patterns of activity aimed at creating or changing operating routines in pursuit of enhanced organizational effectiveness” offering the initial definition of dynamic capabilities. I’m up for the second, most organizations still often practice and treat innovation in ad-hoc ways.

What are dynamic capabilities?

These are the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors. Enterprises with strong dynamic capabilities are intensely entrepreneurial, they adapt around business ecosystems, and they shape them through innovation, collaboration, learning and deep involvement.

I was really hooked. This started me on my hardest journey that began in 2008 around my pursuit of building a way to understand what makes up innovation capability and capacities within organizations. I needed to find a way to build, to integrate and configure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments.

Much as Teece, et all, had outlined some years early the notion of this, there continues to lack decent, coherent solutions. Any suggestions I researched were often a little thin on the ground, in practical application but some of the concepts had a richness about them to sustain real interest in my continued pursuit to find a practical, enduring commercial solution to managing the dynamics within innovation. So this became part of my challenge and growing interest.

Moving from intent to cognizance and then application

So I was looking for designing something that gave a sustaining competitive in innovation advantage, that was shaped by the individual organizations specific asset position and where it needed to go and develop to get it to that stated strategic goal they required. This hinged on identifying the value points where resource configurations needed advancing once the gaps could be identified.

This journey has taken me all over the place. I have studied increasingly dynamic capabilities, innovation landscapes, absorptive capacity, where open innovation fits and then increasingly in this more open environment the need for collaboration, for networking, for orchestrating innovation to deliver what is needed, into the markets advancing on existing offerings.

My often interrupted journey was partly by design but also by lacking essential parts.

Since  the 2008 and 2009 period, where I had an incredible burst of energy into this whole area, I found I had to leave it, put it to one side for eighteen months or so. Sometimes you have to stop your searches and reflect a little. Any journey you do need decent resting and reflecting periods.

In 2011 I took up this quest again, yes quest is the right word, as it has both been long and a difficult search. I designed a framework, the innovation fitness landscape model and set up a dedicated web site for managing this at innovation fitness dynamics. This has bubbled along but was not the platform I expected or able to launch in the ways I’d ideally like. Something was still missing.

In this time I’d concluded that to identify the “dynamics” needed for innovation I’d need at least two levels of evaluation – the internal one where it seemed nine descriptors gave the necessary ‘thrusts’ to find the critical internal related aspects and the external one – more as the level of ‘degree’s’ of engagement for evolving the external related need. I was happier with the internal part, not so much with the external one.

I’ve completed some limited testing but by no means feeling I’m yet ready to really push out on this so a short period of digestion and thinking led to another hiatus until a few weeks ago.

So in mid 2013 I have taken up my innovation journey again, relating to innovation dynamics and fitness landscapes. There was a realization I was missing something.

The innovation system I had been focusing upon was simply made up for the single organization and although I was consciously working on the external environment and recognizing their degree of importance, I was not  actually reflecting the really big changes going on in innovation today and in the near future, as I should have been.

The changes taking place through more open, collaborative innovation. I was writing about it but not taking it fully into this dynamic framework of mine.

My recent ‘trigger’ has been the one word of “Orchestration”

I had not recognized the incredible power of “orchestration” needed in innovation. Of course it was there but it was not as ‘loud and clear’ in my thinking as it should have been.

The blind spot had been my focus on pursuing this continual need to organize around innovation within an organization. Although this is as essential today there has been continued and rapid shifts taking place outside the walls and I was not capturing the dynamics of this well enough .

When we begin to want to orchestrate across external innovation networks we not only need to know ourselves extremely well, we also need to know what others can bring and what is missing.

Networks are dynamic, the flow of knowledge, of capabilities and competencies all need somehow capturing. Recognizing this shift in my thinking, allowed me to pick up the baton again and begin to conduct all the different fragments and pull them together, into a different result.

I learnt also that innovation needs this growing orchestration, due to this increasing move from firm-centric to network-centric innovation. In my understanding of a orchestrator, he needs to manage the tempo, knowing where and when to cue in the different players (learning) and to inject the intensity into the performance.

I was back on my journey recognizing the different passages and movements I’d been on, where all contributing into a final result. “Something” was coming together and I need to work through the new ‘score’ being played out.

We need to learn to identify, assimilate and exploit far more than ever, the value of knowing your innovation fitness, your dynamics and the terrain you wish to traverse in new innovation activity becomes even more critical. To create and to extract does clearly need to understand the what, why, where, when and how it needs to go about this.

The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.

To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result. I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network’ of these. It still lies in how you purposefully build these capabilities and competencies up. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts.

The four dimensions for building capability to innovate are at the individual level, within teams, within the organization and within the dynamic set of networks needed at given times to solve innovation challenges.

These capabilities need to possess mobility, appropriability, certain stability and the willingness to learn and build on the existing dynamics. Internal capabilities still need building but we also must work to identify those complementary capabilities across a fluid set of stakeholders to deliver a more complex innovation challenge.

Orchestration has for me become very important to my ongoing work on the dynamic innovation capabilities for recognizing your innovation fitness landscape and the gaps. These become even more of a challenge when different perspectives and competencies enter the mix.

We urgently need to understand the ‘dynamics of innovation’ even more. What is the local maximum, what can we work upon in transition, what we need to bring in for any future co-creation and what needs working upon within specific networks within the innovation capabilities and capacities needed to be applied.

The dynamic view of orchestrating is needed

The orchestrating of open innovation challenges is dynamic and we increasingly need to know the critical factors and their dependencies for delivering a collaborative innovation success.

We need to not just know the appropriate resources, we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors, that delivers the new innovation needed through collaboration efforts.

My journey continues and I plan to outline in two separate and future posts, my journey approach for organizations to build dynamic innovation capabilities and a deeper outline of the growing importance of orchestration within managing innovation today and the future.

Then I need to re-test my innovation fitness landscape framework to see if it does deliver the ‘dynamics’ in capabilities needed to extract better innovation outcomes.

At least I see an end in sight or is it a false ‘peak’ hiding the further journey I have to travel? Let’s see.

The post The Innovation Journeyman first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.