We need to increasingly deliver better end results; as more distinctive, bolder and creative, delivering greater value to our customers’ needs. Can we change our thinking to achieve this?

Let me offer some of my thoughts on why we need to reinvent our innovation management.

The power of technology, software and the use of the cloud is combining in new powerful ways. We are looking for greater data capture and analytics and this is offering us a very different set of options than in the past. The framing of the innovation potential has to be altered. Altered in different products. services and business models. But will it?

Yet many organisations still stay locked into their established ways, systems and structures. Many organisations are failing to renew themselves. Innovation seems to be trapped in the past, we need a new framing to break it out and make it more dynamic and adaptive to meeting constantly changing needs.

Innovation needs to become far more responsive and dynamic, to respond with imagination and intent of purpose.

To achieve this innovation requires a greater organisational engagement than ever before. It needs mobilising differently, in radically different ways; to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways.

Often we look at innovation through a single lens but it does need to accommodate different dimensions that can be exploratory or exploitive, we need to both widen the aperture of the lens and simultaneously change lens to view things differently.

We certainly need far more “mission-orientated” innovation, that is both converging and synergistic, strategically aligned, building on the back of past work and ‘sunk’ investment but equally, pushing out in new ways. Innovation should be constantly renewed and refreshed, it needs investments for its future.

Rapidly changing market conditions are challenging us more

Our portfolio of innovation offerings is facing different market conditions. Some of our products and services are in stable and predictable market conditions, others are being subjected to significant change, caused by technology, adapting to new emerging trends or changing demands and shifting regulations. All of these can challenge the existing business and we need to respond in different ways and at different speeds.

This also seems a time where there is increasing opportunity to shape industry evolutions through multiple ways and use of the many technology enablers, in exploring new relationships, investing in networks and platforms to collaborate and extend beyond our own restricted abilities. All of this requires a greater adaptive and shaping capability. For this, we need a far greater innovation translation canopy to explore. A new framework. Actually ‘multiple’ frameworks.

Applying The Strategy Palette to our Innovation Needs

Initially provided by BCG as a strategy palette, I have set about adopting this framework to innovation.

I initially wrote in “Shining a powerful innovation light into the Corporate board rooms” about the application and value of this frame differently. The difference is that mine is an Innovation Strategic Palette by applying its use in developing the innovation strategic content that  boardrooms need to build better, clearer and far more comprehensive innovation strategies.

We can apply this to change our innovation thinking, to make it more versatile to what we need from our innovation today. It can open up our thinking and allow us to gain a revised understanding of how innovation can be mobilised in different ways.

By applying this framework through four archetypes alternatives, you can  see emerging different design options to innovation. Choices that can provide the catalyst that can drive innovation’s renewal. It really can be used as a problem recognition diagnostic tool or a starting point for innovation opportunity dialogues .

We are in need of finding innovation frameworks that can guide, seize and respond to emerging opportunities quicker, at today’s new innovation speed in agile ways. Exploring this palette framework has to be valuable, to offer a new flexible approach to dealing with these multiple forces of upheaval and threat with clear intent and design in response.

Why this call for innovation renewal? Why do we need to re-think our approach to innovation?

Firstly the need for consistent renewal

We need to constantly renew within ourselves, that seem a constant today and our innovation efforts need a serious renewal for many reasons. We are facing unprecedented challenges, complexities and competition. We are mostly facing sluggish growth and find an increasing new competition from unexpected sources, looking to disrupt established markets, probing to change the game, innovation has an urgent need to adjust to a whole new set of different business dynamics.

Where and when do we invest, why and how? The need for different handling and thinking

Knowing when and where to invest in an innovation renewal and organising for it is a tough call. It tends to fly in the face of excepted practices, based on constantly attempting to improve the efficiencies and effectiveness of the processes. Often innovation discovery is unique, the pursuit of bringing innovation from discovery through to commercialization has many unknowns and inconsistencies of practices.

Innovation and its management are hard to align into much of the established practices and this is one of its toughest tests; to be treated differently not attempted to be drawn into other organizational activity by applying a mixture of routines and linear handoff, it needs mobilizing in different ways, to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways.

Innovation needs a different handling, more adaptive, more discovery-orientated, more exploratory, testing and probing to validate concepts and ideas.

Addressing the changing market conditions through different innovation design.

Why I think this BCG strategic palette has it ‘bang on’ is in the fact they recognize that business environments have three discernible dimensions: predictability and how you can forecast it, malleability and how you shape it, alone or in collaborative ways, and the harshness of the existing market conditions and how you set about surviving this. It is how you set about executing innovation outcomes within these three dimensions will give that greater distinctive need to the design and execution of your innovation solutions. Just thinking about the prevailing conditions can alter perceptions.

The framing of our innovation does have serious strategic consequences.

Those that are honest enough to admit that what they have achieved to-date in innovation activity is just not going to ‘cut it’ for the future, will be making a  very ‘tough’ call but it might be one of the best ones they are about to make. It opens up the thinking to let alternatives in.

I think we all need to constantly look at a renewal of innovation as essential in our thinking, as the conditions we operate within are more volatile than ever before. Over shorter times many things have evolved, suddenly changed, altered and moved on. So by not constantly refreshing we have allowed systems and tools to stay stuck in the past, we stay ‘bound’ to innovation in a current format often far too long. We need to shake out the cobwebs and renew ourselves.

The innovation spirit needs rethinking by taking a more versatile and shaping approach

We fail to constantly refresh and challenge our understanding. We need not just to adjust to our goals but more importantly to adjust from our knowledge of understanding of how we are managing innovation. We simply do need new and different framing mechanisms to be applied constantly as we set about innovation design if we believe in growth and fresh value creation.

It takes a real innovation zeal to renew, thinking this through in different new ways. Renewing innovation needs recognition. Focusing on renewal offers much. Don’t just rip-up or simply dispose of what we have, think through what renewing can give us in improved solutions, often at much lower cost and customer acceptance but most critically to decide and balance the different speeds and challenges innovation development has. Innovation and its management need to be thought through afresh.

Framing our thinking towards our future needs of innovation relates to the conditions we face today and can possibly foresee coming towards us. These conditions of ‘being’ predictable and unpredictable’ begins to determine the type of innovation approach to take.

We need to be fluid, flexible and have different mindsets of thinking innovation.

The approach we take is offering up this mix of the classical, the visionary, the adaptive and shaping and from these first we need to decide the tools, frameworks, resources, structures and systems that best work in each case, the what is applicable to bring to fruition different ideas within each of these dimensions offered in the palette.

We also need to recognise that innovation is different each time, for each opportunity, where it needs resourcing and managing differently. This  BCG strategic palette approach can offer a framework that does offer us a broader variety of options in our innovation thinking.

We also need to recognise that innovation is different each time, for each opportunity, where it needs resourcing and managing differently. This  BCG strategic palette approach can offer a framework that does offer us a broader variety of options in our innovation thinking.

Shifting our thinking

We must move away from a one-size fit all mentality, one where all innovation ‘chugs’ along, within the same process and pipeline. At present this copnstraining approach is killing so much of the potential within innovation. How can all those distinctive, radical and breakthrough concepts, all trying to be measured, squeezed and determined by one processing lens of innovation, all being constrained by traditional thinking, never ever seeing the light of day, as commercial outcomes because we ‘kill them off’?

Exploring different framing mechanisms are necessary

We not only need to apply the three horizons thinking for building and allocating our innovation to different time horizons but I would suggest we need to apply this BCG palette approach for our innovation approaches.

We need to break out of this current mindset trap of one-dimensional thinking, into that dual one of wanting to be simultaneously exploring and exploiting, managing the known and seeking out answers to the unknowns, keeping a balance between today’s business and those concepts that can grow for our future and that will need constant renewal, questioning and evaluation.

We do need new framing mechanisms to be applied to our innovation design and I just feel this palette frame can make a useful contribution as we apply different thinking to redesigning innovation in need of this renewal.

The post Future Innovation demands a different approach first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This seems an appropriate time to begin to rethink and explain innovation, partly in this need to fight these “immune systems” in fresh ways and partly to redrawn, re-frame and renew the value of innovation; in how it can help organizations going forward in very volatile times.

So let’s shine some light on new ways or even recognized paths for innovation to re-enter the thinking within our corporate boardrooms, in different ways that might resonate more in these more ‘dynamic’ times.

I like this organizing framework shown above, it can  allow us to gain a revised understanding of how innovation can be mobilized in different ways, to give value in dealing with these different forces to help move you towards a growing level of renewal.

So I want to begin a series of posts around positioning innovation frameworks, tools or approaches that build the boardroom “innovation toolkit” to deal in both the predictive and unpredictive environments. The suggestions that will be offered are designed to help tackle the disruptive forces swirling around the business that are rising, increasing the uncertainties to future invest. It is attempting to address the concerns on how to organize the “forces of innovation” to combat them, to raise the confidence level in the boardroom to ’embrace’ innovation far more than seemingly the case today.

Firstly the background to this attempt to re-frame the innovation value proposition.

What prompts this has been a spate of recent reports raising concerns largely about innovation uncertainty in our boardrooms. This made me draw back and reflect, now it is time to re-frame and renew the message of innovation and its management..

The three previous posts that reflected this ‘dark period’ for innovation come out of different reports. My posts are here, here, and here. I did got fairly emotional in firstly reading the reports, and then in these three reviews – my dark period but rightly so, I believe.

The story so far if you have not read my previous three posts

The case has been made that our boards are risk-adverse, experimentally shy and digitally inept. They are struggling to adjust to the disruptive forces attacking the core of their businesses.Can that be challenged and certainly changed?

Boards feel their organizations are slow to respond, far from agile and flexible, delivering up a series of poor levels of innovation performance in the solutions to grow the business. Our boards are equally not encouraged to change the business models and offer a new way forward, to get these significant threats ‘contained’ in different ways.  In many ways innovation is moving backwards due to a risk-adverse approach, missing numerous opportunities, or just not wanting to learn from past mistakes.

You might feel this has a level of abdication and quiet acceptance to it, that the inevitable is coming towards them at higher speeds and complexity than they can ever imagine. This has left them poorly equipped to manage this growing set of disrupting forces in ways they have been used too, it is creating a high level of uncertainty and uneven attempts to undertake the changes necessary. Increasingly this management rigidity within the present management style, continues to favor efficiency and effectiveness through repeating practices, processes and highly structured systems. Those are designed to extract the maximum from constantly reducing the minimum needed to get the job done.

Well you are right, many of our boards are simply incapable to think beyond their past management experiences, one that is focusing on leveraging a return for each quarter to yield ever-improving short-term results, pushing  ‘incentives’ that everyone is encouraged to sign up too, for supporting this approach and their participation gets rewarded. Yet it can be also so different, perhaps liberating if they took a different tack.

Heading towards a promised land through innovation is certainly possible

Can we lead them out of this ‘dead end’ they seem to have found themselves in, a cul-de-sac,one they continue to drive along as this cost-driven, short-term road? Yet it can be very different, pursuing a more open freeway or highway seeking out growth, if you allow imagination, beliefs, determination and character to find that alternative pathway by having that real desire to make all the changes necessary, and there are many, let’s be clear upfront.

It is a journey not for the weak-willed or one undertaken half-halfheartedly but with real innovation intent and purpose.Each journey is unique but full of commonalities and these need to be revisited or explored in fresh ways. Embracing innovation fully can propel you forward, in often many unexpected ways but also in some bold and thoughtful ones.

So where do we start?

So in a series of blog-posts, I want to “shine innovation into the corporate boardrooms,” I am hopefully offering a way forward for those time-starved or presently not as well-equipped to pull this innovation structure together into a more cohesive ‘whole’ that can raise their confidence in innovation and grow in their engagement to this emerging discipline.

The framework here, I will be breaking down in my own innovative way, as my approach to strategic innovation thinking. This is different from the way that BCG is suggesting using this framework although their title “Your strategy needs a strategy” certainly brought me to their Strategy Palette as my framing concept.

The difference is that mine is an Innovation Strategic Palette by applying its use in developing the innovation strategic content that  boardrooms require to build better, clearer and far more comprehensive innovation strategies. So I am adapting it specifically to innovation and the outcome is through these four archetypes that is leading to ‘arriving’ at renewal, for a greater chance of survival in today’s more disruptive world.

This frame will determine most of the content of the posts going forward.

The management of innovation needs organizing.

The intent of applying this innovation palette is to encourage, through the proper management of innovation, to provide and convince the boards’ they can develop a greater appetite for growth, even in increasingly disruptive times. Innovation should have a very high strategic importance on the board’s agenda, I am hopefully this contribution can help.

We need to change the thinking around the present attitudes to innovation engagement at boardroom level, in changing the risk profiles and tolerance of failure. The options to innovation should be made up of a healthy mix of extending the existing business, strengthening and extracting from this core, to find the time and resources so as to provide a greater strategic intent to find more distinctive innovations, that give a confidence in the future, as well as be fully supportive, provide encouragement and determined commitment to explore the future, where more radical and breakthrough innovation potential ‘resides.’

From what I have seen and read there seems a clear need to address the skill-set at board level to handle innovation, to equate to digital disruption and technology differently. The real urgency is to encourage board members to act far more proactively through managing innovation, to evolve and utilize a Boardroom innovation toolkit that can be built.

The business world is far more risky today, far more complex, we are becoming more failure tolerant or ultra defensive. Innovation thrives in the unknown and undiscovered innovation territory, waiting to be explored and exploited.

Noble aim, willing intent. Lets see if I can make a dent in the innovation universe for corporate leaders.

It is being equipped with the right toolkit of innovation management that  perhaps board members can then start seeing themselves as new business development leaders, that has innovation at the heart of their future decisions.

The post Shining a powerful innovation light into the Corporate Boardrooms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.