We have an ongoing need to create, extend and modify resources constantly and to achieve this we need to orchestrate and enable those resources to exploit and execute our innovations.

We need to ‘asset orchestrate’.

One of our blind spots is perhaps the focus on pursuing and organizing around innovation just within an organization and not being as aware of all that is externally going on around us.

There are continued and rapid shifts taking place outside the walls of our organizations, constantly occurring and changing, often it becomes a ‘race’ between spotting an opportunity and executing on it before your competitors do, or the market further moves on and it becomes a lost opportunity to have exploited.

There is an awful lot of dynamics to consider and are we not just capturing the dynamics of the constant changes but ‘fit’ enough within our organizations to read and react to these in more dynamic ways.

Much of what an organization does is simply perform through its established routines, managing the passages that lead from one ‘event’ to the next. These form much of the activities, yet these should never be seen as the end, only the prelude.

We need to fully appreciate the complexities of all the interactions needed to make innovation more dynamic. That’s constantly changing and evolving and like a piece of music, it needs this conducting to be thoughtfully managed through the whole piece, the routines and the new understandings and interpretations.

To manage and orchestrate means to lead, frame, conduct and set the tempo.

The clear intent of any orchestration is the need to extract the underlying value. The person responsible, our conductor, is responsible for managing and searching for new innovations and they need to determine the path.

They need to coordinate and integrate all the activities, they need to draw out new learning, new interpretations of the knowledge collectively gathered and reconfigure it all, to deliver something different, fresh and new to the world.

When we begin to want to orchestrate across external innovation networks we not only need to know ourselves extremely well, we also need to know what others can bring and what is missing.

Networks and relationships, interactions and knowledge flow needs to be dynamic, they need to be somehow captured and translated, transformed and often reconfigured

Picking up the baton we need to pull together the different fragments
Asset orchestration has potentially a real value to appreciate and manage.

There is limited academic research into this but it becomes significantly richer in its importance when you tie it into dynamic capabilities.

Also as we increasingly need to understand the value creation in building our networks and relationships, the need for asset orchestration increases so as to build a pathway through gathering knowledge and what you can learn that leads you towards new innovation.

As our organizations become increasingly dependent on the specialization the coordination task becomes far more complex and difficult. We constantly need to search, select and configure our resources and capabilities.

Work undertaken to frame this asset orchestration was in different research by Sirmon et al during 2007 and 2008 that focused on the different actions of the manager, or asset orchestrator. They suggest there are three primary stages of structuring, bundling and leveraging resources for the purpose of creating new value for customers and gaining competitive advantages, however temporary in today’s world.

It is why this needs to be dynamic, ever-evolving, to keep orchestrating your assets continually. These three primary stages can be broken down:

• Structuring involves acquiring, accumulating and divesting resources to form the organization’s resource portfolio.

• Bundling of integrating resources to form capabilities, that can stabilize or provide incremental improvements to existing capabilities, or that enrich and extend existing current capabilities and thirdly, pioneer, which creates new capabilities.

• Leveraging involves a sequence of processes to exploit the organization’s capabilities to take advantage of specific market opportunities.
• This leveraging includes mobilizing, offering a clear plan or vision of needed capabilities, coordinating for ways to integrate these necessary capabilities and finally, deploying to achieve a resource advantage (or gain) that promotes market opportunities and instils more entrepreneurial strategies to exploit new resource configurations

We are all facing these needs for greater asset synchronization or orchestration.

We need to learn also that innovation needs this growing orchestration, due to this increasing move from firm-centric to network-centric innovation. In my understanding an orchestrator, they need to manage the tempo, know where and when to cue in the different players (learning) and inject the intensity into the performance.

We are dealing with managing the tempo, interpreting the different passages and movements as interactions become distinct, providing fresh value to build upon.

We need to learn to identify, assimilate and exploit far more than ever, the value of knowing your innovation fitness, your dynamics and the terrain you wish to traverse in new innovation activity becomes even more critical.

To create and to extract does clearly need to understand the what, why, where, when and how it needs to go about this.

The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.
To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result.

I have reconfigured my thinking around what will influence the evolution leading from internal innovation capabilities to a whole ‘network’ of these.

It still relies on how you purposefully build and conduct these capabilities and competencies. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts to deliver the right result.

Definitely, the dynamic view of orchestrating our assets is needed

Finally, orchestration has for me become very important to my ongoing work on the dynamic innovation capabilities for recognizing your innovation fitness landscape and the gaps.

These become even more of a challenge when different perspectives and competencies enter the mix, where we urgently need to understand the ‘dynamics of innovation’ even more.

We need to not just know the appropriate resources; we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate mostly our intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors.

Assets that deliver the new innovation needed, through attracting collaboration efforts and integrating these into your own evolving resources and turning into being dynamic in nature.

The post Asset Orchestration is Required for more Dynamic Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Presently in many of our economies, particularly in the West, we are struggling to find real growth; we are limited in our wealth-creating possibilities.

Why is that? Our structures seem to be weak, not strong.

We are certainly relying far too much on ‘selected’ pockets of economic activity to keep us going. Technology is clearly one of these.

Yet our longer-term forces for sustaining growth remain ‘fragile’, our structures remain wickedly out of kilter and we need to find stronger connecting frameworks that reinforce each other, so we can build further upon these to manage our business activities in new ways.

In most of our economic activities technology is playing a significant part in altering our habits, routines and thinking but it alone is not enough.

For technology to really give benefit it needs to be driven by our ability to generate wealth-creating activity and that comes from integrating knowledge, gaining experience and being able to articulate this in better ways.

To achieve this, the business structures that we have in the past relied upon are in need of changing. They need different pillars to build upon.

Welcome to my four pillar room……..with a view

One such room I see has four pillars; firstly a value creation one, then one that prompts a change in our thinking around the value and creation of constantly evolving business models, a third one based on understanding our intellectual capital base, where our knowledge resides and can be harnessed, and then the final pillar of the innovation capital that can be generated from this to create wealth-generating opportunities.

Why are these four pillars important as our structure within our ‘wealth-creating’ room?

Pillar one – For me we lack the ability to articulate the value creation narrative.

We need always the wealth-generating perspective to get behind. We want to feel this is ‘dynamic’ and can offer all those involved that feeling of identification, so we can find individual ways to apply them, where there are the combining and transforming possibilities for us to, investigate, explore and exploit. We are searching to manifest fresh, new outcomes to create new wealth-creating potential.

To have the ability to articulate the value, what potentials can make up the possibilities to develop and deliver the future promise? Developing a good value creation narrative is essential, it requires critical components and for us all to identify through a common language.

Value creation and its potential can be created through the Business Model. It is identifying the inputs from the different capitals and the ways we can transform these through business activities and interactions. Our ability to articulate where the value creation potential lies requires our ‘narrative’ to be broken down, often called the value proposition.

Pillar two – The Business model is becoming even more critical today

The whole movement towards creating the business model through a canvas approach allows us to articulate our ‘potential’ value generating story. As we learn to work with all the components that make up a business model we are responding, capturing, creating and delivering a constant flow of new value generating opportunities.

The more we can express ourselves through narratives and the emerging business model canvas we are offering disclosures, we are setting in train discussions so others can contribute and add to these emerging business model concepts.

To sketch out our business model canvas, we do need to constantly work the BM canvas for the integrated design. What we must try to develop within our narrative and canvas is the underlying dynamics that capture the process of change and why this combination provides the value creation.

Underlying any Business Model is knowledge, experiences and insight. These come from combing all our capitals and the ones often described under our ‘intellectual capital assets’ become essential.

Pillar three – Re-framing the debate around our intellectual capital assets
It seems today our business environment is highly diverse, far more dynamic and subject to rapid change. We need to constantly survey the landscape to adapt and adjust, acquiring what is needed. The increasing value is to know all the potentials within the ‘interactions’ of the parts and how to renew and recombine them on a constant basis.

Often intellectual capital is grouped into three or sometimes more categories. The capitals commonly used to describe ICA are human, structural and relationship capitals. In summary:

a) human capital have at its core the competences we build, our intellectual agility and attitudes to form potential synergies for new value creation. Our outcomes are governed by our motivations to want to produce fresh knowledge creation or simply absorb what is ‘out’ there.

b) The structural capital provides ‘the skeleton and glue’ of the organization in its philosophies, processes, routines, infrastructures, culture etc., for permitting and building knowledge. It builds the mechanisms and architecture.

c) Our relationship capital, is our third ICA, which represents our abilities to make connections, to network so as to absorb, exploit and explore new knowledge, it is this new understanding that feeds and influences organizations life, to renew, to rejuvenate, and to offer longevity.

We need to move beyond often just that academic debate around intellectual capital and their asset value, moving well beyond simply infer the value of our intellectual capital, we need to really understand its make-up.

It is the interactions of these intellectual capitals that is becoming essential to understand, they make up our innovation capital. Knowledge alone has limited value, it is the knowing how to apply it through innovation that will offer us the potential for wealth generation.

Pillar four – Innovation capital is the essential strategic asset to strive for.

Innovation is made up of a collection of ‘stock’ and our abilities to allow this stock to ‘flow’. We mostly acknowledge and recognize innovation is essential for business growth and our future wealth generation potential.

Innovation is for me a real wealth generating capital, it is future orientated; it needs consistent learning, experimentation, exploration and reconfiguring. The innovation capital is the ‘core sum’ of the abilities we can combine from our intellectual capitals.

I believe we need a new innovation capital valuation model. It needs to capture the dynamic interactions of our capitals contributing and ‘render’ these into different productive outcomes. This model needs to find and then separate the ‘dynamic’ from the ‘static’ innovation capabilities, the ones that offer new potential not ones simply repeating the process.

To achieve this we need to unbundle resources, assets, renewables, competencies and capabilities and describe these outcomes in , in my view, a fitness landscape that provides a visual of what you have, what you might need and highlight where the critical gaps lie.

We are needing to understand how our organizations can integrate, reconfigure, renew and recreate its resources and capabilities to build different value creation propositions and business models.

Recognizing the combining effect of the four pillars

For me, it is recognizing the ‘combining effects’ of these four pillars; of value creation (vc), business models (bm), intellectual capital assets (ica) and innovation capital (ic). It is the dynamics within the multiple combinations that will generate the future wealth creation we need.

We are in need of having a better understanding of the integrated value focal points of these four pillars combining, they need connecting so we can build the supporting structures and place the roof of need, our wealth creating one, to give us a new potential of harnessing our innate abilities to be creative.

These four pillars offer perhaps a new core, a new transforming power, they make our activities connected and dynamic.

Unlocking all our potential is the job needing to be delivered upon

Our job today is to unlock the potentials from knowledge, harnessing our capitals to focus more on releasing our resources to work on their dynamic capabilities that combine vc + bm + ica + ic to make this a ‘room’ that gives us the potential to reside and generate new wealth potential.

A transforming one, where the make-up of value creation, articulated through business model designs by knowing the capitals that ‘feed into’ and build our stocks and flows for new innovation that does have the greater potential for wealth creation to occur.

The post Building upon four key wealth creating pillars first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.