The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

There is a lot changing in and around innovation, are we accounting for it as much as we should?

The shifts taking place around innovation are been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. How it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs.

It is forcing us to reconstruct our innovative thinking, so as to gain from all this transformation occurring all around us.

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period have come from a great explosion of Lean Management principles and practices and the incorporating of Design thinking into our work. Both of these are being rapidly embraced by our organizations, large and small.

How these are fully and successfully integrated remains a challenge for most to resolve today. New tools, methodologies, and frameworks are rapidly shaping our innovative thinking.

Then, the most prevailing change is our growing quest in the understanding of relating more to individual customer needs. The need in building new business models has been greatly encouraged by the real need to “get out of the building” and learn to pilot, experiment and build a growing system of prototyping on what we learn from these engagements and testing, many emerging from innovation labs, encouraging an intrapreneur spirit, set up on entrepreneurship principles.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around that are about to massively change the way we collaborate and build solutions that are more complex and require many parties to come together and attempt to solve greater challenges. The movement towards the different crowdsourcing techniques and all the variations (or derivations) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’ have changed the game.

Innovation is constantly opening up when you combined diverse thinking with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much.

The raw power of knowledge needs harnessing and translating

We are being pushed faster and faster in our need to acquire new knowledge. It is increasingly being pushed at us. We are equally constantly seeking it out. It is a constant 24 x 7 race to keep up to date and aware. We are creating our own pressures to keep knowledge updating. But why are we actually in this type of race?

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks that need deeper capture and translation, so as to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the construction of minimal viable products and rapid experiment and design to increase in focus, so as to accelerate innovation discovery and delivery. We must keep adapting and adopting.

We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before with our innovative concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well into the “how” from the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it certainly still seems. Speed is dominating at present then we all are in need to “Scale” and resolve the constant worries over the “Execution” of the new value proposition.

Where does all this frantic search for meaning leave us? More exhausted, more fearful, more determined to keep pushing. We are on a treadmill of change, sometimes it might be very useful to get off of it and allow our world from continually spinning.

There is this constant, pressing need, to absorb, synthesize, and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovative thinking. It becomes a constant task to manage just this new understanding, translating it and embedding new practices as difficult, time-consuming, and tough.

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This applies to a new product as much as it applies to ourselves and how we engage across society, organizations or in our teams. We actually have a set of daily impact points and we need to think about these, it can be positive and impressive, or it can be inappropriate and judged as weak. They can be proactive or just ‘set’ constantly in reactive mode.

Having a clear understanding of the different impact points can help you and those around you have a better meaning in helping to shape events and the future contributions that can make a positive difference and give you a greater sense of satisfaction.

How do we shift from that often subjective view to a more balanced one?
I’m a great believer in trying to shape events before they happen. This often requires a lot of pre-work and often some ‘spent energy’   but if I’m not prepared enough I often feel uncomfortable and not in command of myself, and my ability to explore and influence through my thoughts. This gives me that sense of insecurity and then I feel I have less of an impact on the discussions and caught up in other people’s agenda’s, often for the wrong reasons and not for the best outcomes

So what are the points of impact for innovation?

I think we need to break these down into different levels of impact. Arguably there are different boundaries of impact. For example we might have global, organizational, social, competitive and personal impact points. We can surprisingly have an influence in all of these in a highly connected world and through our organizing and influencing will partly determine your innovating future.

So I look at impact points in different ways but I tend to start at two points of impact.
1.       What are the triggers to growth?
Answering this question leads us out on the appropriate impact path. Are we, for example, in survival or in crisis mode? What is our needs for future growth (personal and organizational for instance), do we need to find an innovative response to a burning need, are we facing competitive pressures, are we seeking new market space?

Do we want regeneration in what we do? We need to discover, to explore new ideas, new learning opportunities and concepts. We need also to make some evaluation to any seen or even unseen threats to any growth approach.

2.       The second question relates to our legacy issues.
These are often ignored. We tend to layer onto what we have instead of taking a more radical approach to overhaul where we are. We often build up our innovation activity in set, established ways and don’t want to face the issue of re-engineering the innovation systems or process. I would argue we should. There are always natural tension points in any innovation process, we get caught up in inertia, the copying of other people’s best practices, the commodity trap, the extraction of ‘raw’ energy in the name of efficiency and the constant ‘quest’  to become more effective. We really do need to press the ‘reset’ button.

We should look at alignment to strategy, to challenging what we are doing in the name of our customers not just ourselves. We need to reconfigure and we need to simply challenge and let go of much of what we have built up. It is never easy but legacy resolutions release much for improving the impact.
Then we need to set about two further questions.

3.       Improving performance
The potential surrounding absorptive capacity is critical for creating the appropriate impact on innovation performance. Absorptive capacity (AC) is a critical dynamic capability in knowledge-based competition. It is the ability to recognize the value of external knowledge, assimilate it and apply it to new commercial ends. To learn how to target, absorb and deploy this external knowledge becomes critical to ‘feed’ the internal innovation process. Learning to do this and do this well, this can become a powerful source of competitive advantage, not easy for anyone else to copy.

This can become unique practice applicable to you, not best practice found across your industry. The work of Cohen & Levinthal is a great starting point, besides some of my own comments you can find on my site. It is this ‘outside in’ potential that feeds the process and raises the engagement.

4.       Tacit Knowledge
The more knowledge you require- not information or data- the more you have the potential for strategic advantage. Just look at places that knowledge is not moving as fast as its potential, collecting more knowledge or insights than others and focusing on the customer experience all the time raises knowledge, implied and explicit. Tie that back to absorptive capacity and you have powerful sources of potential impact.

My third set of impact points relate to building platforms, road-maps and in execution.

5.       Building platforms and road-maps

As we become more open within organizations and in ourselves we begin to develop a more connected sense. Separate ideas or points of knowledge need combining; they need greater collaborative efforts than before. We need to reach out to others; we need to recognize others have a greater specialised knowledge than we do so we need to learn to build more platforms that allow multiple parties to work together, each on their own parts.

It is this ability to leverage through a platform approach that yields the potential for greater impact, for more radical or breakthrough innovation through diversity yet working towards a common cause.
Innovation is complex, it needs sketching out, and it needs always a roadmap.

Innovation needs clarity; it needs a greater awareness of all the points of innovation fitness for you to navigate along as you traverse the terrain to your end point. I have a dedicated site on this area at www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com which is outlining the different aspects of dynamics needed for innovation impact understanding.

The aim is looking to improve the innovation performance engine within organizations and build fitter, more responsive and dynamic ones, around their needed innovation capacities.

6.       Execution is the last 5% of real effort.
The argument goes; ideas are ten a penny and simply it is through our execution we make impact. Execution is the tougher end of innovation not that fuzzy front end stuff. This execution end is the real point of innovation performance where you actually feel the impact of all your personal efforts. Do you meet the needs and wants of your customers?

Did you arrive with a clear winning proposition or felt you have compromised far too much within the organization that the final result was incremental at best and not what you are truly capable of. Execution is far more than ‘just’ 5%, because if you can’t execute then where is the lasting impact?

Then my last set of impact points are the ones that impact on you personally.

7.     Adapting to change.
We often struggle to adjust our thinking, to recognize that change is needed and invariably we leave it too late. It can become ‘disruptive’. We do need to combine the three e’s of evaluate, explore and exploit, we need to adapt them to changing circumstances. The value of combining these in different ways gives numerous, surprising diverse levels of impact points.

8.       Empowering and Trusting
We need greater engagement, we need powerful stories to motivate us more, and we need to seek out more meaning in what we do. The more we do this the more impact we can contribute back. This needs dedicated time in resourcing, supporting and investigating from others to support us. The more we trust each other, the more we form stronger relationships, to build better networks of understanding and place our growing trust into more effective collaborations, which have a growing impact for all to see.

9.       Measuring our success
There are many ways to measure success. There are the ones ‘handed down’ to us, there are ones we can measure ourselves against. I believe our own measures usually far exceed the ones handed down to us. If we can learn to adapt more and quicker, if we can utilise the technology around us more effectively, if we actively seek new learning and experiences, to respond to any threats in better ways, then we are really learning and making a constant improving impact within ourselves. If we can apply what we learn constantly with the aim of improving on the existing, we are then moving well beyond’ appropriate’ impact, we are building our competencies and capabilities that become visible for all to see the positive impact.

There is a self always in relationship to others.
How others see you and what sort of person are you matters. If you care for making an impact there are many ways. How do you want others to see you? It is all in alignment, how you absorb and translate knowledge and where you wish to take it.

Improving your circle of influence comes from knowing, from seeking out new knowledge, staying throughout life in that endless curiosity. As Harold Jarche (http://www.jarche.com) does put it so really nicely: “Life in perpetual Beta”

We all need a virtuous cycle, something that reinforces the good. We can make deliberate steps to change our behaviour, to make increasing contributions. How you are viewed, in turn, changes the way you are treated.

This reinforces change. The more you can contribute in positive effect, the more impact you can have. You choose the impact you want to make and you will be surprised that in today’s world you can influence far  more than you often can image, and then perhaps bring a brighter colour into your and others lives through your positive impact.

You can choose the appropriate impact points you wish, what you do need is a strategy, knowing where you can shape and what you can influence.

It is the path to improving your recognition and value and that is not such a bad point in these difficult times.

The post Making the appropriate impact first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to push them a lot harder. We need to move away from business-only innovation into a society based.

The shifts taking place

Society has shifted, is shifting; the consumer is becoming the supplier of content, meaning, of their taste preferences, their emotions and the goods and services they will buy. Mass consumption, the model honed in the 20^th century doesn’t work anymore.

Customers are actually saying “less choice, more say” and seeking deeper self-determination. This personalising of preference can seem more complex for organizations but there are many ways to manage this it requires real change in organizations, oriented to society more, serving them more.

The marketing thinking is in need of adaptation also.
Consumers are searching for better well-being: through health and wellness, connectedness, personal growth and identity and control. Everything is coming more into a ‘context’ economy that places value on customization, adaptability and transformation with the overriding value statement of “what we will value as against what we consume”.

Social innovation becomes increasingly important within communities
Facing a fairly long period of economic restructuring in most developed economies, the consistent globalisation of local jobs, rapid technology change, and polarization of opinions we seemingly are all facing a world of great uncertainty and increasing complexity.

Our governments are searching for solutions. The premium seems to be centred on new knowledge acquisition to add jobs and promote new solutions to tackle unfamiliar or persistent problems within society.

We seemingly can’t afford or tolerate in capital markets anything that seems inefficient, applying unsustainable practices or not innovating well.
Innovation- based on social problems- offers a real meaningful solution for us all.

If we can harness the best ideas for emergent problems, and explore these in a timely fashion we can move beyond our existing crisis. We all searching for personal meaning and society does offer this really.

The four main areas that Social Innovation can address and are all near you!!

1. Resolving the problems around our growing physical needs and limited resources (age, health, education)
2. The increasing need for a different type of skill and capability set that innovation seems to require and often we are not taught- in school, business or society
3. A major shift in care and service- serving the needs of others, communities and those actually close to us
4. Psychic needs- the recognition, increased understanding and care that cuts across our societies in so many different, often in bewildering ways.

Innovation is social, social is the new innovation
Social and interpersonal aspects (social media, networks, relationships) are aspects of innovation that are increasingly being recognised and understood to be critical to the innovation process.

The realisation of innovation needs people, everything else is enablers.

People hold the key role in the innovation process as the creators and carriers of knowledge. They develop it, they translate it, and they consume it.

The increased art of collaboration and co-creation

Collaboration and co-creation is emerging that have the potential to provide those value creation points society requires.

We need to learn how to cooperate. I was reading a book recently by Gaurave Bhalla called “Collaboration and Co-creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation” and he offers a simple but powerful framework- Listen- Engage- Respond.

A society that can be mobilized links the economic, social and environmental spheres; it can have a cumulative dynamic effect if we can harness it.

Pushing society to solve its growing problems needs to happen
We simply do have the capacity to solve our problems but it needs the combination of private, public, voluntary sectors, philanthropists, foundations and society to come together in different ways than we have seen in the past.

That is why we are entering the era of societal innovation and we need to get business even more tuned in than ever.

We need to develop a greater social and cultural lens to translate our concerns, fears and insecurities into beliefs, values and aspirations that offer a vibrant future.

Innovation is now needed in all walks of life- this is our societal challenge.

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