An opening CSF for innovation
A brief overview of critical success factors for innovation to check against. The organization: structure of innovation processes to be explicit by treating innovation as a systematic process and continued…
All organizations talk about innovation, but so what?
All organizations talk about innovation and its growing importance but few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale. So what does inhibit innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to have so innovative growth can be achieved?
Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities? There are countless questions that need asking but more importantly answering.
Innovation is complex and demanding
The difficulty for many is that innovation is a complex process that has many intangibles within the total mix to manage. Management today is far happier managing the ‘harder’ aspects of business, the more established, the more traditional ones that can be managed in efficient and effective ways to reduce complexity.
The Vital Attributes for an Innovation Organization
Understanding what is needed for innovation- unlocking the mysteries * Innovation organizations tend to be more decentralized, more informal, minimally stratified or layered and more generalist than specialized. * They…
Adapting fitness landscapes with your innovation objectives
There are a number of aspects we can look at initially.
This is helping us to shape the journey, to place it in context. It lays out the theory to the journey we are about to undertake.
Our Challenge is the need to build diverse innovation capability
Knowing what are the critical factors and there dependences for sustaining innovation success is vital 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 seem to have limited or no real effect on changing the dynamics of innovation?
Knowing these and having these clearer shown as a ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII) has real business value. Today, we lack a clear system model that brings the critical innovation factors out and gives them their appropriate values, and then can equally provide the ability to model different future states and conceive future scenarios through different impact-investments.
So what are the challenges of the knowledge-driven economy that innovation needs to drive?
Moving Up the Path Towards Innovation Fitness
So how do we become innovation fit?
Can you imagine standing on top of a mountain, looking out across a vast expanse of nothing but mountains and valleys stretching out before you. If you squint hard enough you can just make out that somewhere in the hazy distance, the end point of your travels, towards that much needed innovation understanding, made up of many different dynamics that make you and your organization that much fitter to compete in today’s challenging world.
Clearly while you are on top of this mountain you feel exhilarated to have even got up to this point. To even get to this point you have already made a decision that you and your organization would become an innovation one and needs to look beyond what you have to what is possible.
Walking that narrow innovation pathway.
Walking that narrow innovation pathway needs some rethinking.
“Innovation is the pathway to travel and seek out our future”
Today there is as much of a gap between the aspiration to innovate and the ability to deliver on this.
We still continue to ignore the constant suggestion that innovation should be systematic so the organization can provide some degree of reliability to innovate in a continuous fashion.
We often allow the concept of ‘holistic’ to simply float over us and ignore the intimate connection between strategic thinking, innovation and their alignment. It is still sad we seem not to go beyond a certain point in our innovation thinking, it continues along a narrow path of limited understanding. Will it ever change?
I appreciate the statement, I think made by John Kao: “Strategy is useless without innovation, innovation is directionless without strategy”. Innovation can be a strategy catalyst but is it still? I really do believe we need a new sense of the scale and scope of innovation; we do need to get a firmer grip on its complexities.
The Pathway Curve of Innovation Understanding
The pathway curve methodology is a well structured way to move up in innovation understanding.