Tag: innovation survival

The Real Need Is Achieving Innovation Fitness

So how do we achieve a greater innovation fitness?

This begins to show you the way www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com is new and perhaps your possible innovative workout gym.

Firstly stop and survey our world from a new advantage point

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 endpoint of your travels.

The distance you have to travel towards that much-needed innovation understanding, that is made up of so many different dynamics that make you and your organization that much fitter to compete in today’s challenging world seems really far off, or actually is it?

Exhilaration can quickly turn to reality.

Clearly, while you are on top of this mountain you feel exhilarated to have even got up to this point. To even get there you have already made a decision that you and your organization need to become more innovative.

One that needs to look beyond what you have, to what is possible, you are curious to explore this further, you have to, innovation is a strategic imperative for, adding value, growth and improved wealth creation.

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The Really Pressing Need of Innovation

IFD Critical

Let me firstly outline the REAL challenge I see with innovation.

Knowing what are the critical factors and their dependences for sustaining innovation success is vital to understand so that an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them. The questions are: 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 answers and having these clearer to achieve a higher ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII) has a real business value.

Today, we lack a clear system model that brings the critical innovation factors out and gives them their appropriate values of importance so resources can be allocated accordingly. Also if this can further be extended to provide the ability to model different future states and conceived future scenarios through different impact-investment simulations, this would certainly provide a strong relational tool, for assessing business and innovation allocation, with the appropriate resources. to achieve a greater ‘fitness and impact’ in innovation to focus upon within their capability build.

Approaching innovation in the this more dynamic, fitness orientated way we are suggesting on this site, does lead to greater understanding, a cohesion and a clear direction and purpose. The end result is raising your organizations fitness to innovate to do the jobs the strategic goals call for. You align innovation to these strategic goals. Your fitness to innovate is designed to produce the results wanted.

Achieving Business Relevance

IFD Relevance

The real need is for improving the business relevance of anything that is new.

To quantify this, in general this should include to enhance, reduce, eliminate or improve:

  • Increasing flexibility and efficiency.
  • Managing knowledge effectively through the adaptive capacity framework.
  • Increasing productivity and reducing time to market.
  • Facilitating teamwork.
  • Enabling on-line gathering of marketing information and strengthening customer dialogues.
  • Improving relationships with suppliers, partners and those within your extended network.
  • Integrating differing sources of customer information though social media designs.
  • Making client relationships more effective and engaged in two way flows.
  • Eliminating redundant processes and legacy systems on a consistent manner.
  • Reducing costs by implementing IT-based solutions that integrate and are highly visable.
  • Reducing bureaucratic tasks (those that did not add value).
  • Using e-learning to improve capabiities, investing the necessary discovery time.
  • Exploring through participating on platforms, external relationships to gain alternative opinions to challenge your own.
  • Increasing the market range of goods and services in consistent ways that deliever value to the customer to achieve the job they are wanting to be resolved.
  • Improving relationships with employees by deepening the trust, openness and recognizing the value contribution they are making.

Any selection must consistently focus upon what is going to increase the competitiveness and uniqueness and improve the value and investments made for higher returns.

Outcomes from Innovation Impact

IFD Tick

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

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

Working through some of the theory

IFD Theory

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

  • By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed- we call that the context for innovation. Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.
  • Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determine the greater fitness for the rate of innovation. The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to provide the appropriate resources.
  • The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced. You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.

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the Pathway Curve Methodology

IFD Pathway Curve 1

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

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

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

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How do you evolve?

The two needs to evolve a business

Practical Approaches to Fitness Assessments

Finding practical capability identification requires a given approach:

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

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

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

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The Fitness Evaluations

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

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

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Checking your pulse for innovation vital signs

IFD Vital Signs

So how do we check our innovation vital signs?

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

Pulse of innovation 4
The search for a strong innovation pulse

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

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