Innovation fitness - Smart Agility Intelligence

Outcomes from Innovation Impact

What outcomes can you expect to create particular advantages for a firm that is trying to compete in today’s economy:

Strengthen the innovation knowledge management within a firm.
Foster creativity as a key ingredient in the innovation process.
Increase ability of the business to react quickly to change, without a big impact on efficiency.
Promote human resource management as a strategic area within the business.
Improve the gathering of updated and valuable market information.
Promote co-operation and teamwork, build diverse capability and competency.
Foster networking and the construction of external support systems.
Take advantage of the internet and other social media communications technologies.
Emphasize a global-oriented approach (internationalization), highly outwardly looking.
Accelerate and shorten the time-to-market in innovation projects as a constant need.
Encourage entrepreneurial initiatives and its spirit.
Integrate science, technology and market understanding in fluent adaptive systems.
Increase efficiency using more advanced information technologies that give improved knowledge.

Working through some of the theory

Let’s mix the theory of fitness landscapes with your innovation objectives

By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed- we call that the context for innovation. Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory: you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determine the greater fitness for the rate of innovation. The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to provide the appropriate resources.

The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced. You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.

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the Pathway Curve Methodology

By taking a more systematic approach to any innovation you achieve a greater understanding over time of what is involved.

Firstly you have to ask what you are trying to achieve, is it incremental innovation, distinctive, disruptive or even radical white space innovation? Do you approach innovation differently for each of these? I would argue you need to learn and build from one to another as you learn on the way, this is my going up a curve that increases in complexity and its scope/ outcome.

How do we embed innovation in all its forms needs what I feel is a unique approach that I have called the Pathway Curve Methodology

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How do you evolve?

How do you as a business evolve — The two needs to evolve a business

Practical Approaches to Fitness Assessments

Finding practical capability identification requires a given approach:

Initially a more path dependency one is explored, searching for existing routines, capabilities and knowledge (more backward looking) for factors that seem to have affected the past success. This then allows us to explore:

Identification and classification of existing capabilities
Identification and classification of required future capabilities
Then, prioritization of these capabilities in light of the core capability criteria and strategic goals.
The Gap analysis (self assessment and external clarification/ comparison)

This is achieved in a mix of interviews to find the Strengths & Weaknesses and the nature of required future core capabilities felt necessary.

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The Fitness Evaluations

Achieving fitness you firstly have to know where you are and then what you want to achieve. Within our assessment to attain an understanding of your fitness for innovation we take two points of time, the present fitness and the type of fitness you want to achieve in the future. We have a structured method to make these assessments but we frame the ‘fitness’ around the different dynamics making up innovation.

These are both internal and external, they are seperate test and the internal one only can be undertaken. The external can always come later but as we move from a closed to a more open innovation organization, the external assessment has an increasing relevance but knowing your internal fitness has got to be the starting point first.

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Checking your pulse for innovation vital signs

So how do we check our innovation vital signs?

I think there are many ways we can make constant checks and often when I’m visiting organizations you can begin to sense these vital signs and pick up on many warning signs from the conversations. These can come from that ‘buzz’ that does or does not seem to be circulating around the building, or the way the people simply talk to you about innovation. They often don’t speak of innovation with pride but in whispers carefully checking that no one important is in hearing distance, often with implied innuendo of the things not right, more than the many good things that are actually healthy and good. Many times I find it is simply what is not said that speaks volumes about the health of innovation within organizations.

Pulse of innovation 4 — The search for a strong innovation pulse

So what do I use for part of my pulse check on my visits?

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Opening Outline of Dynamic Capabilities

Introduction to dynamic capabilities

The study of dynamic capabilities, the organization’s capacity to change its operations and adapt them to the environmental requirements, has taken centre stage in the debate on strategic management as well as organization theory (Teece, Pisano and Shuen 1997, Eisenhardt and Martin 2000, Zollo and Winter 2002, Winter 2003) in recent times. The notion, which has received several, and only partially aligned, definitions, lies at the heart of of the organization’s ability to enact change in a systematic and fruitful way.

Winter (2003) clarifies that organizational change happens in one of two ways: the first with ad-hoc problem driven search, and the second through the action of “stable patterns of activity aimed at creating or changing operating routines in pursuit of enhanced organizational effectiveness”, the definition of dynamic capabilities in Zollo and Winter (2002).

The different dynamics IFD — The two points for dynamics in innovation

What is Dynamic Capabilities?

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Explaining Fitness Landscapes

Firstly what are Fitness Landscapes?

In any competitive situation, the survival of the fittest dominates (Darwinian). Knowing your innovation fitness is essential in this race. The question often raised is where do I focus my limited resource to achieve a better fitness to be successful at innovation?

Mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. Innovation Fitness Landscapes identify the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts- the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater the ‘fitness’ transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities into final tangible outcomes.

These critical factors give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged’ the landscape can also determine the greater fitness for the rate of innovation. The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse it potentially is.

Continue reading “Explaining Fitness Landscapes”

The Outcomes Expected from this Work

All I can share are the result outcomes I would like to achieve from this work with you:

Expected results I am seeking out of this work for you will lead too:

A framework that moves towards a company-wide development program that gains identification and the target of company-wide improvement of routines and different skills required for innovation to succeed/ improve and be distinctive.
Pursuing limited or ‘selective’ development will not have the desired effect, it is not just a human resource department exercise or individual division or team level exercise, but provide a framework that offers the real answer to innovation and why it does require a ‘holistic’ view of innovation development to manage.
Be in a position to challenges long-established organizational capabilities and routines that are taking place by knowing where (and why) they reside and are often more ‘static’ in reality than understood. Often many of these ‘static’ capabilities are simply not valuable to further invest in, the waste of precious funds just for the sake of it, as other areas identified offer a more dynamic aspect closer to achieving the strategic results set within the corporate strategy for innovation return.
Importance of linking capability to become dynamic with the strategy gives greater alignment and potential and can offer a clear capability portfolio where resource needs to be applied to bring new value and alignment to the organizations goals.
The internal dialogue generates a self-reflection process for identification of true and ‘false’ dynamic capabilities and identifies the more static ones that often just need reinforcement. The solutions draw out internal discussions for a recognition and reality of the present and future needs in this area of innovation resource allocation.
It provides the means to achieve additional resource allocation and raising the importance of these to support the strategic intent of the company and it intensifies and solidifies the studies and importance of innovation within the framework of the organization as an area of specialised knowledge.
Results achieved from this raises the need to understand dynamic innovation capability. Knowing the importance and effect of dynamism for the growing need of greater flexibility and agility in changing, challenging times becomes a clear focus. Then through seeking routines and knowing the diversity within these choices, one can identify the basis of sound differentiation to meet different innovation challenges.