The work of David Teece is hugely influential on exploring dynamic capabilities.  It was my reading of one of his early papers, published in 1997 (with Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen) that got me started down the dynamics path and my quest to identify the innovation landscape required by each organization to become innovation fit.

Teece’s concept of dynamic capabilities is a theory about the source of corporate agility: the capacity (1) to sense and shape opportunities and threats, (2) to seize opportunities by mobilizing your resources to capture new value from those opportunities, and (3) to maintain competitiveness through enhancing, combining, protecting, and, when necessary, reconfiguring the business enterprise’s intangible and tangible assets by transforming them for continuous renewal. This makes organizations potentially dynamic.

Recognizing and adapting to today’s and tomorrows challenges.

The challenge is how to position or reposition today’s resources for tomorrow.

I focus on the three horizon framework as this points an organization towards a ‘possible’ tomorrow and then they have to position their resources to ‘ready’ themselves.

Today organizations need to (radically) break free from copying and evaluating to markets in similar ways to their competitors. The difficulties to make this change in thinking is caught up in existing practice, organizations are often ‘wedded’ to best practice, want to stick with the learnt practices that have served them well in delivering particular outcomes in the past.

Best practices are ordinary practices, they dampen down the uniqueness and difficult to imitate ones that have the real dynamic potential to set the organization apart, give them a possible distinct advantage.

Shifting the “way we do things around here” is really hard

We need to think differently, we need to build into the culture of our organizations a more “evolutionary fitness,” so as market conditions change, the capabilities adjust and adapt accordingly. This comes back to David Teece’s “sensing, seizing and transforming” of the managerial activities to accomplish this.

Analysing changes taking place and linking these to then adapting the resources has not been as well ‘connected’ in organizations as they should. I have argued often if we don’t align innovation and strategy, how can we build our capabilities? We fail to make many internal connections and this is where knowing the dynamics within the system will significantly help.

Are we protecting our critical resources of building ongoing capabilities?

It often surprises me about the sheer amount of effort put into capturing and protecting intellectual property. Of course any IP needs protecting but it allows you a limited position, in time, in market opportunity yet often it sparks off a second round of innovation to circumnavigate this by your competitors.

Much of your success to hold your position or to take your IP further is totally dependent on building your capabilities (to innovate). You need to actively work at building your internal propriety aspect, your internal or ecosystem capabilities. To do this they must become dynamic, ever evolving and adapting to changing conditions.

You have to invest to understand how the underlying system works

Innovation is different, it challenges much of the existing routines and systems. To integrate innovation into your systems and structures you should firstly map what you have, recognize what you don’t and seek ways to bridge any gaps. But you have to know what you are trying to achieve strategically through innovation and most do not.

This requires a fair amount of work. To do this you need to map your existing capabilities for innovation, and then explore the evolving landscape you think ‘makes up your future landscape of opportunities and then integrate the understanding of the changes taking place with the capabilities you require. You need to bridge those gaps.

To do this you need to have a sound intellectual structure of your innovation system and this needs to be dynamic not locked up in outdated best practices, mimicking your competitors, these need to be unique and difficult to imitate, forward-looking and highly adaptive to the change going on all around you constantly.

Redesigning your routines for innovation is essential

Are yours locked in routines that focus exclusively on efficiency and being effective? If so, you will continue to struggle with finding innovation that sets you apart as the dynamics and their routines that are needed for innovation to succeed and be embedded are different and not built on ordinary capabilities or existing practices.

Your search is for emerging practices and capabilities that you require to add to achieve more radical innovation outcomes that go beyond the incremental achievements that can be copied very fast by others.

You need to build your reflexes and innovation muscle differently and that requires exploring an innovation fitness regime to map these out and bring innovation closer in its alignment to the strategic needs facing our organizations today.

Setting yourselves truly apart

To set your organization apart, to make it unique and ready to apply innovation in evolutionary ways, it needs to be more responsive to this constant change going on in markets and adapting to new customer needs.

An organization has to be constantly sensing and searching, and then ready to seize and transform and this requires a highly adaptive and dynamic responsive to constant change, though managing the capabilities to deliver on this the innovation required.

Knowing your innovation fitness dynamics is critical within this.

The post Understanding the dynamics within your innovation system 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.

The post Orchestration is required for dynamic Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

You plan to beat a path to the promised land where you have heard it is full of milk and honey from the occasional traveller that was passing through and telling you wonderful stories.

So you begin: you chop, you clear, your slash and you burn. At the end of the day you feel proud of what you have cleared, you put your machete away for another day. Tomorrow you will again attack the undergrowth that holds you back from innovation, the promised land.

Sadly when you awake in the morning, you wake up with an aching back, tired muscles and a realization that for all your hard work, you seem to have made such little progress.

You look around and you feel a little inadequate with all that hard work you had thought you had put in, yet it seems so little in achievement.

You certainly spent a lot of energy but seemingly for such a little return or so it seems, one little cleared patch still in the same forest you have lived in for years.

You face a critical decision.

Do I go on, with yet another day, upon seemingly day of equally hard work, of back-breaking endeavour in the belief that this ‘promised land’ is going to be worth all this effort, or do I return to the present existence that has got me to this point so far?
Innovation it seems is just hard work. Simply awfully hard work. We can all stay where we are, working the existing land, extracting out the very best the land can offer, knowing each year the yield gets smaller and smaller that is really pushing off the day where you get no yield at all.

Equally, you can ‘acquire’ and be forced to move to another part of our woods with some minimum disruption to sustain your present existence.

Not a bad option, just some minimum inconveniences, some need for some simple adjustments but you can quickly go back to ‘business as usual’. But, what of this alternative that seems so far away?

The alternative, told to us by strangers from a promised land and nicely described in an article by@ovoinnovation : bit.ly/JXIyTw is learning to begin to  speak and operate in new worlds.

Do I really want to travel to that new world, it does seem like so much hard work and set about to learn a new language, practice different customs and maybe have to work under new laws and ways of doing things?

It is such an easy decision, lets stay a little longer. Only when it is often too late we suddenly realize the world we know has changed, the land is barren, it yields no more and we are in crisis.

Many don’t survive, we heard of that strange illness that inflicted itself on others, even though they worked and worked, they just simply got weaker and weaker as the others from this foreign land invaded and destroyed.

They were not equipped to fend for themselves as their tools were out of date, fashioned for a previous period and the invaders seemed better equipped.

The alternative, hard as it seem, like it or not, we are forced or just simply decide to go while we can, while we have still have some force and opportunity to gather our resources. We expend it all in that back-breaking energy to attack that undergrowth that has grown up around us. So we can begin a tough, exhausting journey where that promised land we think lies.

It means massive commitment.

Do we trust those strangers, do we believe there are places that will give us a better future or do we return to tilling our existing ground?

It is never an easy decision to make, to rip up much of the ways you have been producing but when you have spent some weeks, some months cutting away the jungle, you look back and you can see the distance you have already travelled. You realize you are gaining another perspective, you see things differently.

Amazingly some of your neighbours joined in and now you have ten, sometimes twenty machete’s cutting away at the undergrowth.

You can already hear a different roar, a different sense of purpose and you can sense  in a new set of sounds, of people excited, that they have equally decided in undertaking this venture. It is still far away but they feel that new excitement and you redouble your efforts to  push on.

Innovation is a journey when you make fresh steps full of uncertainty as it is made up of a type of energy that raises fear but it also raises your pulse, gives you fresh impetus. It is how you channel this, where you direct it, will make it worthwhile or not.

The simple message is if we don’t start the journey we will never experience the ‘rush’ and achievement of recognizing the decision was the only right one.

Are you hacking away at your jungle, moving towards places that seem to offer more? Does the sounds of innovation heard in the stories of others, make you want to seek them out?

I hope so, listen not just to the strangers but venture forth with more confidence and listen to your own heart and head that the innovation pathway does simply makes sense.

Innovation is the land of milk and honey, who knows until you explore it. There are no guarantees but perhaps it is far better than the thinning gruel on offer if you stay ignoring the value of innovation and stay caught up in fewer options to manage in this challenging world.

The post Hacking away in the undergrowth, moving towards innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.