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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Making it more dynamic in its nature

• Greater fitness equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter‐couple landscape entities, to constantly combine the different capabilities in different often unique ways and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and does improve repeatable cycle times from this constant recreation potential.

• The key  is to know what these capability points are- by dynamic linking those that are important and ignoring those that are not.

• By learning from these experiments or adaptive walks you can quickly operationalize routines that can be quickly absorbed across the organization and so reduce uncertainties and strengthen the capabilities.

• The ability to create ‘natural tensions’ from this fitness learning triggers the need to further explore and search out different combinations, this adds even further to your dynamics of innovation understanding.

• Clear distinctive capabilities emerge; these are your dynamic points for innovation.

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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

Getting a thorough understanding of what it takes to move up what I call this Innovation curve, does takes time, and growing a deeper understanding of how one step is followed by another in experience and understanding needs working upon. This is rarely understood and practiced in this structured way and that lack of understanding often creates the disappointment and frustrations that an organization is not achieving that innovation success they desire. The more you move steadily up this curve the more you can explore the different types of innovation with growing confidence and success.

The five different curves to travel along

There are five separate curves of learning- 1) dealing systematically with obstacles, 2) building capability and capacity to move methodically up this curve, 3) the building and understanding of different approaches to innovation for growth building, 4) recognizing the organizational impact and knowledge needed and finally, 5) a discovery and transformation curve.

Let me illustrate one of these five learning curves to provide a little more of an understanding by taking the aspects of needed learning for organizational impact, gaining improved return (ROI), controlling of costs and increased visibility.

Recognizing and working upon the five learning curves together is important

You need to be very structured in this approach, it may look like a slow build but in any ‘fitness’ requirement you build in a methodical way. What is it to achieve, is it incremental, distinctive, radical, disruptive and how do you manage this in a clear way to support any initiative.

Understanding your fitness, landscape and dynamics for innovation is essential to travel along these five pathways

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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.

By using a template structuring according to different needs (technical, learning, business, organizational and human/value based capabilities etc.,) this is then classified, tested and presented back with ranking and recommendations.

Ranking could be 1) revolutionary (riskier but needed to make change) 2) differentiating (distinctive for seen advantage and core need) 3) critical enabling (necessary to be industry ‘fit’) and 4) supporting (essential to have). This has to be fully decided on how best to apply in the actual engagement.

The management classify existing conditions (more static) and desired future capabilities (more dynamic) in their needs. Then these are further prioritized by the dimensions of “sustainability” and “importance to strategic objectives” for identifying sustainable, core-capability-type of capabilities.

We are looking to model mutual dependencies, how the innovation ‘system’ behaves, and how it should do in the future. This focuses on its impact factors (weak and strong) and what should be considered in the ‘best’ innovation environment or emergent one on a suggested step discovery approach.

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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.

Internal Evaluation

The internal evaluation template will classify these into nine descriptor capability ‘thrusts’ for the more critical internal related aspects:

1) Vision, Leadership & Strategy. 2) Competency Base.  3) Creativity & Idea Management.  4) Intelligence. 5) Organization & Process 6) Culture & Climate, 7) People & Skills, 8) External & 9) Measures and Metrics with the key elements of competence needed within each classified with their degree of importance.

External Evaluation

Then a second template that considers the external aspects required to achieve a improved innovation fitness capacity and will also  classify these into nine descriptor capability ‘degrees’ for the more critical external related aspects:

1)      Market Orientation. 2) Customer Orientation 3) Open Innovation Collaboration.  4) Competitor Orientation. 5) Structure and classification of External Knowledge 6) Social Capital & Network Domain Management, 7) Market Environment, 8) Risk, Opportunity, Reward Evaluation & 9) Cross Industry Comparisons with the key enablers of direction needed within each classified with their degree of importance and relevance.

The external evaluation only follows the internal classification and is presently in an earlier stage of development. The external orientation comes from the platform of knowing the internal dynamics and will be seen to be more ‘open’ in classification .Modelling the potential sources of competitive innovative advantage that is appropriate to that firm  is the end goal.

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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.

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

If you don’t hear about the plans around the business growth with a real sense of personal conviction and enthusiasm you need to become more alert. It is how people convey their personal convictions about their innovation values, how they balance realism of their role with all the multiple pressures simply gives you clues of a health warning or not. Do they transmit energy or not? What likely ‘impact’ do they see these might have on their innovation future? This engagement or not does give you an opening warning signal to examine this further within your conversations and explore what are the vital signs that feed into this present attitude. You are beginning your diagnosis through this ‘initial’ pulse.

Checking for different vital signs of a healthy innovation organization

• So often in conversations within organizations you never seem to get that unbridled, confident feeling that they are fostering imaginative business models, let alone knowing there are different ones they could pursue. They really struggle to articulate the innovation story and that is not healthy. A healthy mind is an inquiring mind.
• You also sometimes don’t get any real feeling of experimentation going on, as actively being pursued within the organization.
• You need to check how this essential element is encouraged or ignored, learnt or overlooked, testing constantly is the equivalent of having a series of warm up ‘runs’ before being ready for the big one. Also it is worth asking about the ways they seemingly manage risk and look to extract value? Is it left to a chosen few or supported and encouraged for all to learn. Often you simply get that shrug of the shoulders when you ask or its left hanging in the air as something we need to do but as yet have not got around to it. We are comfortable the way we are.
• You can hear of how “we are achieving X, Y & Z” but with some probing you gather a fair amount of the success would not be coming about without the explicit help of the partners that are contributing to make this happen. Innovation needs partners, it is not a solitary pursuit, it needs to be open to collaboration and alliances, and it needs to flourish with a host of different inputs that provide diversity, provide fresh insights, different skills and rich new experiences. How often do you hear these collaborative stories with any pride or grateful acceptance? Checking how open an organization is tells you much now days.
• The ‘mantra’ of disciplined innovation is heard often nowadays and how it can contribute to competitive outcomes but what is often not stated for innovation is what makes up that organizations sustainable process. Demonstrated outcomes and results are usually simply delegated to C-Level presentations in their quarterly reviews for shareholders? We should be checking the vital signs for what is sustaining the innovation process and that should be a source of ongoing pride known and spoken about by all each time they have the opportunity to talk about innovation. I’m looking to understand the ongoing fitness programme regime not the quarterly result.
• When you often join the organization you hear about all the positive energy, the commitments to you and the value of ‘its’ people and their contribution. When do you hear about the way innovation motivates people- the positives, what excites them and motivations them in the way it can engage? If innovation is the lifeblood of an organization I want to hear more on this to understand its real ‘life giving’ flow to everyday activity.
• I always seem to come back in any conversations to ‘context’. If I don’t understand this I simply can’t really give any decent opinion, let alone a qualified one that is often expected without much insight.  It still surprises me on how often context is simply forgotten or ignored and there is a real danger in that. It is piecing this part of the jigsaw together that gives us a thorough understanding and appreciation of the factors that were in play to get to a given point. If we don’t know these then we are often wasting our energies on the wrong part of any future innovation fitness and where to channel our efforts. Context gives me the ability to add additional content.
• Lastly, it is through the leadership we get the best sense of the beating ‘pulse’ of innovation in an organization. The leaders don’t have to be physically in the room but if you don’t hear the vision, the stretch in the goals set by them, the guide lines of how this is going to happen how do you know what to do to become fit? Leaders are coaches, they should inspire, encourage, cajole, be ready to support and ask you to try and achieve. They should assist the organization in all ways possible.  It is through this innovation regime you raise the pulse and push your performance. A good coach is deeply committed to improving your fitness and raising your game by equipping you with all that is necessary so you have the best chance to achieve any vision or goals.

The innovation pulse can often lead to a need for a deeper fitness examination

Whichever way you read the ‘pulse’ of innovation, the above suggestions can begin to lead you into a better understanding of the health of innovation within organizations. Exploring expectations, checking these against realities and by gaining that ‘feel’ for the environment does gives you more of the readiness, state, purpose and critical aspects that need working upon to raise the innovation fitness and avoid the risk of having a period of stay in the intensive care.

If we don’t train daily for innovation fitness and understand the value of all the enablers around us, we can miss a number of vital signs and then miss the real healthy beat of innovation success. Have you taken your innovation pulse lately? Perhaps you need to see your doctor and have an assessment.

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The study of dynamic capabilities, the organization’s capacity to change its operations and adapt them to the environmental requirements, has taken centre stage in the debate on strategic management as well as organization theory (Teece, Pisano and Shuen 1997, Eisenhardt and Martin 2000, Zollo and Winter 2002, Winter 2003) in recent times.  The notion, which has received several, and only partially aligned, definitions, lies at the heart of of the organization’s ability to enact change in a systematic and fruitful way.

Winter (2003) clarifies that organizational change happens in one of two ways: the first with ad-hoc problem driven search, and the second through the action of “stable patterns of activity aimed at creating or changing operating routines in pursuit of enhanced organizational effectiveness”, the definition of dynamic capabilities in Zollo and Winter (2002).

What is Dynamic Capabilities?

The concept of dynamic capabilities defined by David Teece- “These are the skills, processes, routines, organizational structures, and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ, and orchestrate intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs, and which cannot be readily replicated by competitors. Enterprises with strong dynamic capabilities are intensely entrepreneurial. They not only adapt to business ecosystems; they also shape them through innovation, collaboration, learning, and involvement”.

Dynamic capabilities , is also another way of addressing change in organizations, and it has the particularity of bringing together the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ dimensions of organization: in the presence of “rapidly changing environments”, firms integrate, build, and constantly need to reconfigure their resources to meet these new more ‘dynamic’ challenges.

Dynamic Innovation Capabilities need to advance knowledge creation and absorption, extend and integrate, then modify constantly the way we operate, reconfigure and redeploy. This involves dynamic sensing, seizing and transforming (Teece et.all) at the three interdependent levels of the individual, firm and network to coordinate/ integrate, learn and transform constantly to reflect constant change.

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