Innovation & their dynamics - Smart Agility Intelligence

Knowing your innovation fitness is critical

Each organization needs to know its Innovation Fitness Landscape- why?

There is a pressing need for a firm is to consistently build and reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities to address rapidly changing environments. It is the mastering of this ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in rapid changing market conditions that will enable certain organizations to emerge as the winners of the innovation race.

This view requires a more ‘dynamic’ set of capabilities. Often the question becomes one of “which are the critical ones to focus upon to improve the chance of greater success?

Knowing your fitness landscape does provide a good understanding of your existing position and set of capabilities and can ‘point’ you towards the ones that you need to have to move towards to have in place to improve your innovation capacity and achieve closer to your goals.

Survival of the fittest dominates

Each organization has limited resources, it is to know where to focus your limited resources to maximise your abilities to deliver better innovation. The key is to map out those current innovation capabilities to the tasks (and aspirations) at hand and identify the opportunity spaces and gaps that need to be filled to match aspiration with abilities, so as to deliver against the stated strategic need. It does seem Darwin seemingly raises his head in much of what we do to simply keep up and adapt. So we do need to understand innovation in more of its entirety not only to survive but to thrive.

So what are Innovation Fitness Landscapes?

“The greater the fitness to innovate will equate to more value creation potential.”

I believe we do need to provide a solution to this understanding the innovation challenge by constructing a more comprehensive framework. Part of my present work is to find a working model to achieve this, I’m getting close.

It is this critical need of any business organization or country for wealth creation through (new) growth and successful innovation lies in understanding the path to achieving this. But what are the factors, the enablers to support this? It is by identifying the more dynamic capabilities and then plotting these to understand your existing ‘fitness’. There is still today far too much of a ‘piecemeal’ approach in evaluating the inter-related dynamics needed for innovation still going on, both at Government and Organizational level. We need to see this differently, to tackle it in a more comprehensive manner.

Innovation Fitness Dynamics 3 — Innovation fitness terrian to travel

If you can imagine that you are looking out over a range of mountains and valleys and you need to determine your journey to get from one point to another as your goal. You need to understand your fitness and in this case your innovation fitness of what is needed to achieve your goals with the resources you have available or understanding what will bridge those gaps and transverse the challenges you face.

I will explain this some more in later blogs.

Act effectively amid uncertainty

There is a consistent need to keep looking around us; on what is going on, what has happened in the past, what is alongside us, what might be ahead and the people and resources we have available. This is taught to anyone who wants to be well equipped in any mountainous area. We need to be prepared as best we can in business and be ready to anticipate different scenarios and predictions- to be ready to be more adaptive and agile. Innovation requires that.

It is knowing this so called innovation terrain, understanding the opportunities or possibilities around us along with appreciating the time pressures, positions both internally and externally in the market that provide us much of the context of why we need to innovate in a certain way. Knowing the intensity of your innovation challenge gives you a better appreciation of what is needed to resolve these challenges- your innovation fitness.

In our understanding of the often ‘diverse’ set of challenges you have to overcome and knowing what is available to you and what you need to find to bridge any gaps becomes essential. The obtaining of insights for innovation enables you to relocate or locate the resources that are capable to be combined to traverse the landscape (or challenge) and innovate better.

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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 ongoing process
Keep innovation separate from daily work routine, remove barriers, give accoutability
Set ambitious goals and a vision and combine these with small attainable steps
Focus on results, doing things for clear results, satisfying evaluation criteria
Learn from the innovation process for courage, acknowledge mistakes, continuous
Create a climate for creativity- trust, openness
Foster values that enhance innovation- core ideology, values, diversity
Break patterns, abandon accepeted truths and historical myths, contrarian thinking
Motivate personnel- good ideas, risks and achievements rewarded and recognised
Make people central to it all- the real power of innovation
Communicate about innovation- positive signals, setting example, commitment, faith.
Involve the top directly- word and deed, setting the example, protective shield
Search for and make use of opportunities- systematic inside and outside
Be customer-orientated- use as a source, the ‘burning platform’
The use and involvement of multiple stakeholders- open and flowing
Define the context, the clarity and prespective of the problem faced
Search to obtain the experience with the subject on hand
Pursue a range of paths and solutions
Evaluate problems, trigger ideas and access success
Commit sufficient resources, time and space.

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.

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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 have cultures that value independent thinking, risk taking and ongoing learning.

* They are tolerant of failure and they value diversity.

* Open communication is reinforced and there is a high degree of trust and respect between individuals that collaborate.

These attributes should include, but not limited too:

Organizations have a clear vision
Innovative organizations change because they see a better way and not because they have to change
Innovation organizations are always on the lookout for new products, new markets and new ways of doing things
Innovation organizations value substance over form- putting the ideas to work
They build creatively and innovation into the fabric of the company
They have organizational structures that are more often team-based than hierarchical
Innovation organizations tend to operate through open communications rather than through formal processes
Innovation organisations do not personalize conflict
Innovation organizations focus on who you know as well as on what you know
Innovation organizations appreciate individuality and diversity
Innovation organizations encourage fun at work- engaged, enlivened, fully participative and empowered
They reward curiosity and working smarter
Innovation organizations do not believe in the answer and allows space for wondering, thinking and reflection and numerous ways to get to a solution
Innovation organizations encourage people to bend the rules, being different and having pride if they emerge with adding new value to the organization.
Innovation organizations tolerate errors and avoid punishment where creativity is appreciated
Innovation organizations finally encourage behaviours that allow for thought, time for incubation, openness to wonder and sometimes irreverence that can elicit different, creative reasoning that wants to be measured on creativity and innovativeness.

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.

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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?

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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.

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