A pathway towards building your dynamic innovation capabilities

November 18, 2020Posted inCreation of Sustainable Value, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking
A pathway towards building your dynamic innovation capabilities

To build a pathway in order to enable more dynamic innovation capabilities one needs to go through Nine Stages.

These nine stages are, in my opinion, needed for developing an understanding of your innovation capabilities, so as to make them more dynamic and, as a result, to be at the top of your innovation game.

This “step process,” I believe, gets you to the point of understanding what innovation capabilities are a better ‘fit’ for the purpose, to deliver on your innovation needs on a consistent, repeatable, and evolving basis.

Building innovation capabilities take time; they are complex, highly structured, and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment. Any learning involves sensing, seizing, and then transforming.

We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustainable in the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and constantly adapted to meet the strategic need.

We are striving towards a true ‘innovation coherency premium’ in design, knowing what makes up your core dynamic components. The outcomes are to know where to invest, what to dampen down and what aspects can evolve naturally and be ‘taken along’ – as you focus upon the ones that are more dynamic and relevant to your innovation needs.

Surfacing the real barriers to innovation.

December 28, 2018Posted inFoster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking

Here I am suggesting that there are ten intractable challenges that need breaking down and addressing to allow innovation to begin to really take hold

I’d suggest this might be a great starting point. Considering the intractable in anything is hard. To recognize these firstly is terrific, as they are tough to manage but phenomenal if you can surface them.

Then having the capability of knowing how to set about tackling these, drawing in a growing consensus that these are the real blocks to the team becoming truly innovative.

If you could ask a series of question that might help unlock innovation blockages it would make such a difference to our innovation performance and engagement. I think this might need a good external facilitator as my recommendation, one who has deep innovation knowledge and expertise, able to manage the ‘dynamics’ within the room.

These are shaped as discussions to raise, explore and extract views and then to be pulled together into a collective position, that gives strength and identification to resolving issues surrounding innovation. Surfacing differences, finding common ground and developing a ‘collective’ way forward makes a significant contribution to building a common language and a common sense of identity. It underpins innovation engagement. It gives confidence to any innovation undertaking.

Innovation Coaching Has Real Value

December 1, 2018Posted inFoster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking

Although this seems to be expensive to undertake, one-on-one coaching offers a lasting value to connect innovation far more deeply in the way a person and their organization ‘sees it’. It provides the place of context, meaning and content if facilitated well.

The importance, like all behavioral change coaching, is to create a safe but challenging environment so the recipient can take risks and learn. You as the coach find the balance between challenging through inquiry and supporting different thinking to draw out possibilities to gain new understanding from.

All the work is usually based on the recipient’s agenda, through a set of opening discussions you need to balance both personal learning’s with organizational needs. These need consistent clarification and re-calibrating as you go.

Building Your Own Innovation Capital Lies Within Organizational Learning

November 18, 2018Posted inFoster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking

We need to know how to unlock the real value of innovation both personally and within the organization, we work for. If we do not fully understand where the innovation capital comes from, how new capital and stock can be provided, innovation will remain tentative, always stuttering along. It will lack that essential organization innovation rhythm, stay disconnected for many and will be frustrating your own evolution in understanding.

I’d like to offer a fresh view on building your own capital.

There are different building blocks and types of capital. Let’s start with the vast knowledge inside the organization, as this forms learning capital. We’re all expected to combine our existing internal knowledge with the external knowledge that flows into the company these days, mostly intangible, searching for its relevancy and context. The stock we build in our use of this fresh knowledge so we can combine these into new insights that eventually create different sets of advantages – ones that foster value creation.

The Value of Having A Curators Platform for Innovators

July 5, 2018Posted inCreation of Sustainable Value, Foster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking2 Comments

I would like to lay out some thoughts on why we should be considering a curation platform for innovation and the value it can bring to a broader innovation community.

These are some opening thoughts that I felt needed to just “hang out there” and see where they take me and clearly, you as a reader.

The issue I am reflecting upon is our growing concern that we all are living in a world heading towards digital overload, with the risk of it simply overwhelming us, perhaps we are becoming more isolated and detached within this.

We can’t simply rely on focusing around ‘all things’ digital, we need people to bring the insights and their experience together for the eventual innovation solutions. We need to provide a curators platform for innovation, to make all the essential connections.

Having A Curators Platform for Innovators

July 5, 2018Posted inFoster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking2 Comments

I would like to lay out some thoughts on why we should be considering a curation platform for innovation and the value it can bring to a broader innovation community.

These are some opening thoughts that I felt needed to just “hang out there” and see where they take me and clearly, you as a reader.

The issue I am reflecting upon is our growing concern that we all are living in a world heading towards digital overload, with the risk of it simply overwhelming us, perhaps we are becoming more isolated and detached within this.

We can’t simply rely on focusing on ‘all things digital, we need people to bring the insights and their experience together for the eventual innovation solutions. We need to provide a curator’s platform for innovation, to make all the essential connections.

Seeking out new Knowledge that Flows

July 2, 2018Posted inCreation of Sustainable Value, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking

I have been heavily influenced by the great work of John Hagel and Deloitte’s “Big Shift Index” as a frame to measure the forces of long-term change. What really holds my attention is “knowledge flows” and they are suggesting we are moving from a world of push to a world of pull.

The world is increasingly uncertain and to steer through this we need new ways to access, attract and accumulate understanding.

Knowledge is highly intangible. Today it is less to do with the “stocks” of knowledge we have the ability to keep refreshing and that means increased participation in the relevant “flows” of knowledge.

Putting the coordinates into your innovation World

June 27, 2018Posted inFoster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

Innovation can be fairly complex in what needs to be pulled together, as often it ‘flies’ in contradiction to the normal organizations ways and wishes to work in structured, efficient ways. Innovation can often be rather chaotic and discovery driven.

One of the useful ideas of using an external resource is to put additional coordinates into your innovation world, they see contradictions in a different way and can assist in working through the conflicting signals, so as to help align innovation in helpful and thoughtful ways. Certainly the innovators role is not an easy one inside the structured world of larger business entities.

I like practical advice with evidence, it helps bridge misunderstanding. This can come through a variety of methods:  benchmarking, validating, frameworks and interpreting how innovation can fit with your current or future needs. Often the outside advice can place innovation into a greater context that can accelerate the outcomes you need to gain understanding and achieve increasing identification.

The Value in Personal Innovation Learning Journeys

June 25, 2018Posted inFoster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

If you don’t have time, how can you learn? We are in need increasingly, of faster understanding, to quickly learn or resolve an immediate need, or we have this determination or essential requirement within our innovation role to deepen our knowledge and understanding of innovation. These are usually split into two parts, called are “micro or macro learning opportunities”.

The value of having an innovation guide, mentor or coach helps you accelerate through both these needs and learning opportunities. I see four points of value, my value proposition, if you like, for you to achieve personal innovation growth:

Fitting understanding into the innovation puzzle

June 22, 2018Posted inAdvancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

Formalizing a new Innovation learning-as-a-service is complicated, far more than I originally thought. Still, a certain course has been set and it is now working through much of its structure, learning much myself on the way to fit this within the innovation puzzle we all have.

When I was thinking through this concept I fell back onto one of my most valuable techniques to work through, clustering a set of questions and capturing all the different thinking through the use of Mind Mapping techniques. Such a valuable tool.

A selection of maps that included: what a curator can do in innovation, of painting a picture of a strong advocacy practice, of working through a guiding approach, the need to reflect on the whole facilitation process, etc., and each brainstorm takes a time to work through, build and formalize. The end result becomes a much richer landscape of what I can offer and what equally might be needed.