I describe innovation as very much like a tropical rainforest, needing constant fresh attention, similar in its management,

There is my need to cut down certain trees, clear away a lot of the floor covering to allow the sunlight in and permit those ‘selected innovation trees’ to be allowed to grow stronger.

We all have those times where we need to choose, to pursue clearer pathways we believe are better for us. To be more selective in what we do, to be more focused and hopefully achieve a better, lasting result that hopefully offers a more satisfying set of outcomes, to both clients and to ourselves.

Within this comparison I am presently making of innovation being like a forest, I really began to see so much more of a connection in what is happening around innovation that it can be compared to understanding a tropical rainforest. There are many comparisons, let me outline some of these here.

The ecosystem within the rainforest is also needed for innovation to work effectively  

Firstly I would argue that innovation, to be managed well, needs to operate like an ecosystem, the same as a tropical rainforest. Ecosystems to flourish need to experience critical feeds, in the rainforest this is high average temperatures and significant rainfall.

Well, innovation to thrive needs equal attention; it needs a real focus, above average and significant attention to be well maintained.

We argue for diversity within our innovation teams, in our thinking, in our environment and that is no different from the high levels of biodiversity in tropical rainforests. We need this ‘richness’ of thinking, of approaches, of discovery.  We search constantly for ideas, we experiment, and we are subjected to change. We are always looking for that certain something still undiscovered.

Innovation is often under needless threat

I’d argue innovation within organizations is often ‘highly threatened’ due to conflicting pressures and in our rainforests, this is the large-scale fragmentation due to this constant human (failing) intervention and habitat destruction.

We make changes within our organizations to achieve short-term results not reflecting enough on the longer-term consequences. We force out our talented people and can cause a certain ‘extinction’ of the contribution they made to a more balanced vibrancy within the system.

Managing the different strata or layers always needs careful management

Rainforests are divided into different strata or layers with the vegetation organized into a vertical pattern from the canopy top to the soil. Each layer offers a unique biotic community containing different plants and animals adapted for life in that particular stratum. This is so much like our organizations, organised in hierarchies, each dependent but equally each independent to carry on.

We have the forest floor, most of our workforce occupies this position, yet this floor receives only 2% of the sunlight and needs to constantly adapt to survive. I think that does seem like many organizations in their ratio between top and bottom in pay, in understanding direction and contribution.

There is this focus on simply surviving ‘day-to-day’. There is always a certain decay taking place, not helped by the dense strata above. It is a place that is tough to thrive well but it is critical to all the above.

Then we have the understory, the middle managers that are between the canopy and the forest floor. It offers many shade-tolerant shrubs; it is the place that allows vines to climb into the trees to capture light.

To capture their light, this understory often evolves much larger leaves to capture more light (craving for recognition) and allows for the dropping of seedlings to the forest floor. I can relate to that for innovation and our organizations, can you? The understory or middle managers are crucial to the innovation ecosystem.

Then of course we have the rich canopy layer, which forms the roof, it supports the forest as it has the position to attract and support the diversity that is occurring. It determines this, it leads and others simply follow. In amongst this canopy is ‘the emergent layer’, which grows above the average but to meet this they need to be strong to withstand much.

So many of our rising stars get caught out by strong winds that suddenly blow in due to changes of sudden direction or misapplied  ‘habitat’ destruction (wrong decisions) and take a real tumble, unlikely to recover their former position.

All of these layers are reliant on the sun and the moisture within their soil for rainforests to thrive. Innovation equally needs feeding, by the leadership of our organizations engaging with its needs.

Innovation needs new resource minerals, new ideas, new discoveries, and new knowledge flows. If these do not remain fertile, trees are cleared, the soil gets exposed, leached, and it creates run-offs, exposing the erosion that changes the dynamics and vibrancy that innovation can provide.

Then we need to protect the native people of our innovation forest. Those specialized people who understand innovation are our hunter-gatherers that support others to reside and thrive. People, not technology, systems and processes make innovation work. They are the ones to give us the diversity to allow innovation to flourish.

There is always this need to understand our innovation experts, they can teach us much about the environment and what it needs. They can protect and nourish the plants, the birds, and the insects to thrive in a trusting climate; they can balance often conflicting demands.

Rainforests have different soil types, so does innovation

Soil types in rainforests are highly variable and it is the combination of several variables such as climate, vegetation, position, material and soil age that make up the different characteristics we can find. Innovation is no different – we have incremental, radical, breakthrough as well as focus on different types of innovation approach – for service, for business models, from a research-based or technology. Just take a look at the nine different ones I have suggested in the past and described in this collaborative effort some time back.

Rainforests are also reliant on nutrient recycling, so should innovation in our learning, in our evaluation of understanding our success and failures. What inhibited, what released, what accelerated, what aided our innovation efforts? Understanding what allowed us to perform provides for this recycling for sustaining and fueling future innovation efforts.

Then we have always the need for our buttress roots. These are like the buttress roots, my innovation button and threads that create a network for gathering, sharing and translating new knowledge. Today we require and increasingly rely on our networks to give us the sufficient and efficient uptake of innovation nutrients. The more we encourage these buttress roots we avoid erosion and maximize this new innovation nutrient we need within our organizations.

Rainforests can be dense and impenetrable, so can innovation

Understanding all that makes up innovation is like this dense tropical rainforest. When you reflect on the term a jungle or rainforest it has much ambiguity in the application of the term, so tell me doesn’t innovation suffer the same?

Is innovation unruly, it is certainly less advanced than many other functional activities we undertake in organizations. This is slowly changing as we understand it more, all its connected parts. We have allowed innovation to be overgrown with tangled vegetation, often too dense to hinder clear movements or progress?

I have suggested innovation needs to be dynamic; we need to become fit and look fully across the innovation landscape. It is our growing understanding of the richness within the innovation diversity that is both exciting to understand and challenging to navigate.

It is good to sometimes cut down some trees, clear away the undergrowth, allows the potential for greater growth and it does allow the sunlight in.

Sometimes, if you are not careful or selective, you can undermine that broader growth but we do have to increasingly manage within a complex ecosystem to strengthen the whole system.

Often we are needing to make ‘tough’ choices but these can prompt a sudden burst of new energy and then supports new growth activity.

So I’m making my own attempt at managing my own innovation ecosystem as I mentioned within my introduction of seeing “the wood for the trees,” attempting to strengthen certain aspects, methodologies or practices to grow what is more valuable, discarding what might be holding me back.

Let’s see if it allows for an even stronger set of outcomes.

The post Innovation is like a tropical rainforest constantly needing attention first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today, when markets are especially tough, looking long and hard at what you have and jettisoning what you don’t need becomes essential to reposition yourself as leaner and more flexible, far more agile.

Looking to be capable in incremental innovation is simply not enough, we need to be at the same time achieving more distinctive and breakthrough innovation.

This is the higher demand point that is expected from the innovation system within organizations,  and regretfully this is not happening as much as it should.

There are many pressing needs why organizations have to ‘shape up’ and make some adjustments to their innovation activities.

One of these is simply don’t ignore the need for looking to explore a re-engineering of the innovation process. It can really make a lasting difference to the fortunes of the organization.

Herein this second part of the case for re-engineering are some thoughts to offer and support this call for a more in-depth look at redesigning your innovation process.
What is valuable, what is not?

What does give you real value within the existing process? What are really non-added value activities that have been implemented over time to defend, to protect, to layer on the existing?

Perhaps having a fresh perspective, driven by changing market conditions, you can challenge many present activities as work that might be unnecessary, as you make a greater focus on optimization and speeding up, consolidating activities, as part of your needs to adjust and meet this market change that is happening at present.

The need for focusing on new responsive outcomes not just task or unit inputs and process outputs does need radical rethinking.

To be more responsive you might need to place into the innovation system a higher sense of urgency, of reducing time to market, of delaying certain decision points closer to the end.

You need to be more adaptive to these changing market conditions and this might need some radical rethinking by challenging existing practices and norms.

Firstly what is achievable within the existing system?

What is possible with leveraging different technologies, collaborative platforms, more flexible structures and exploring synergies across the whole innovation system?

If you were able to cut across existing boundaries, changing existing controls and constraints presently imposed and challenge the existing structures, what would that achieve?

Of course you begin to challenges sensitivities, threaten personal silo’s and comfortable routines built up and nicely established, you challenge existing attitudes.  All of this has increasing ramifications on existing structures so you have to move cautiously and in thoughtful ways.

Focus on those that might be effected most, that can block and challenge, then set about to offer them a clear alternative. One that they can see a different potential and ‘richer’ promise than often just the protect and defend of the daily grind.

You need to paint an inspiring vision and some details of the journey and outcomes expected. Get them involved, excited and wanting to change, those that don’t, well it just simply will get harder for them to block real progress if you can gain real momentum and early success is quickly seen and felt.

A more radical rethink needs a reason

When we are evaluating the existing business processes, there will always have a certain structure and measured set of activities within it. These are designed to produce existing acceptable results from a set of particular outcomes that might have worked, but I expect, really expect, you were not really happy with the results, it seemed to give a certain disappointment.

If you are truly dissatisfied with your innovation outcomes then you need to see these existing systems and structures as an obstacle and barrier to a different innovation path.

It is when the dynamics change, then you need to be alert and ready.

What if you needed from your innovation process, the shift to a real need for building in agility and higher market responsiveness for example?

Changing the existing process is unlikely to work it needs re-engineering.

You certainly don’t just change just for the sake of it, this does not make sense but changing it for a new strategic purpose does. If you markets are changing, if we are moving towards more volatile trading conditions this provides the strategic intent and motivation to change.

Are you ready when the CEO enters your office and expects different innovation?

In the coming months and over the next few years CEO’s will be finding their way to your executive office, more and more. Or equally to the marketing teams office or R&D centres, demanding far more from innovation.

As responsible for managing within the innovation system do you have you a complete ‘handle’, an in-depth understanding, of what is truly possible to respond to this increasing demand from the CEO?

Not just knowing your existing innovation system and structure but what are the possible options and ways to rise up and respond to a new set of challenges?

I would suggest that you should be already working on it because the way we are all doing business today, is certainly about to change, if it is not already under-way.

It happened to me some years back

I recall one event many years ago when it was expected to improve productivity within the system by 15 to 20% in the organization I was working for.  Admittedly not the innovation system but the whole organizational system.

I had to go out and deliver this as my area of responsibility across a global operation. Equally, there was a further demand to reduce operating costs by 15% and standardise the process so it could be understood and totally visible to the CEO.

The outcome delivered was 25% improvement in productivity and 25% saving in operating costs to channel differently. Both outcomes allowed for increasing throughput desperately needed and holding operating costs so as this allowed us to channel much of this to different new value-adding activities to raise performance even further and drive through more volume.

It took a significant amount of time, commitment and resolve to alter structures, systems, processes and the mindset across a global organization that had been very defensive in its local organizations.

What it did do is radically altered the market competitive position of the total organization and gave the customer more of what they wanted, guaranteed delivery to his desired needs when it was expected.

Why can’t these types of results be applied to the innovation system you have?
Don’t be dismissive simply because my example is a business process re-engineering one, what do you think innovation has become?

It is a business process, with its entire supporting infrastructure, systems, management structures, processes, controls, culture and practices.

Recognize the beast that lurks across your organization called innovation in all its forms, it can make or break you, it is that important to your future.
Innovation needs to find slack, it needs to utilize technology, it needs to find new ways to combine and explore.

To achieve this you need to engineer time, to save on your existing costs, to improve on your existing process and to allow for experimentation, fresh generation of ideas and concepts and allow for the three ’S’ needs.

You need to stretch, to scope and too scale differently on your innovation activity if you want more real distinctive innovation breakthroughs that truly accelerate growth.

What are my three big imperatives (BHAG’s) that push you towards re-engineering innovation?

1. We need to improve the operations around innovation. We need to improve the formal and informal aspects of managing within the innovation system. We have to adapt our organizational structures to improve the balance between local and global responsiveness. We need to capitalise on all the information systems, communication technologies and infrastructures we have introduced progressively over the years and not harmonized or integrated fully. We need to account more for open innovation. Finally we need to look harder at what adds real value and what doesn’t and rebalance the two
2. The scope of the operations is increasingly complex and we need to reduce this. We need to build more scale where it matters to outperform competitors and outperform in (deteriorating) market conditions. We need to add flexibility, we need to maintain standardization in approach, we need to add a higher risk profile into our innovations.  We need to share in a more inclusive innovation strategy and we need to maximise our global processes to help deliver in reducing time frames. We need to make innovation life simpler.
3. The chance to build fresh capabilities into your innovation systems. When you need to reconsider innovation beyond the existing incremental you have delivered you need to find compelling value propositions. To achieve this everyone involved needs to lift their heads up and find some solid, decent time to be allowed to think through this challenge. Knowing the (changing) innovation strategy and the need, being more included in this dialogue, adding their personal insights built on solid market understanding and not just through reliance on other people’s focus reports. Having a growing sense of trust that the outcomes of any re-engineering will release them.

We need to build  new competencies and capabilities into our innovation system, so as our people engaged in innovation can be able to contribute to improving more helpful processes for them to do their job and, feel engaged in a more compelling work experience.

A place where their contribution is truly valued and seen, feeling included and able to ‘freely’ reach out across internal and external networks. Placing real trust and investing in the skills will open up individuals to want to take on new experiences and challenges. They can see they are making a real difference.

So any first step is to see and then respond.
So what do we really need to do to seize emerging opportunities quicker, at tomorrow’s new innovation speed?

Six simple opening steps to begin to think through

1. Redefine our need from innovation
2. Sketch out an opening road map of how to tackle any re-engineering of innovation
3. Identify some opening improvement opportunities that can really galvanize change and significant for the organization can get behind.
4. Take a hard look on what you need to achieve for any change like this and what it means in efforts and resources. Often not as much as you initially think.
5. Begin to organize and draw in a team that can undertake the redesign and can share in this. This calls for expertise but seek out a real diversity of opinion but can all come together as a united team once the debating has run its course and results come in.
6. Seek a growing commitment from those around you, determine the appropriate approach and be ready to clear the decks and take the initiative out of your office into the heart of the organization.

So, concluding my opening case for re-engineering innovation.

As I suggested in my opening remarks in part one of this, innovation, as we know it today, is grinding to a halt for many. The existing treatment and values we offer in innovation’s name are tired, overworked, often over-engineered and under-delivered into the marketplace to make real difference.

We need to radically re-engineer the innovation systems and structures to offer a better value from all the innovation activity that is going on within organizations.

In  not recognizing the crisis within, is not providing the opportunities to explore & extract the best opportunities we can deliver to meet our customers needs and what markets are looking for in growth and stimulus today.

We have available more means at our disposal to move from the existing to the preferred than ever before. Innovation needs to go back to being the real option for significant growth by offering something that ‘wow’s’ the consumer and creates fresh new markets, found by tapping into the unknown needs and jobs-to-be-done that our consumers are trying to achieve with the existing products and services but failing.

We are in volatile times or heading towards them. The markets and consumers requirements are changing, much is by being forced into making change and they, our consumers, don’t like that.

So we have to find different ways to meet these changing conditions with radically altered approaches within our innovation management to respond and be more agile, to draw the consumer back in.

Without question we do need to put back the ‘wow’ factor back into innovation if we want to first survive and then begin to thrive in more compelling ways and in tougher times.

There is a time for this need to re-engineer what we do in the name of innovation and this might actually be that time

The post The Case for Re-engineering Your Innovation Process (part two) first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When are we going to recognize that innovation, as we have it organized within many organizations today, is failing to deliver on its promise of providing the growth expected and so often talked about by the CEO?

Larger organizations, let’s face it,  are so caught up in the incremental trap. Risk mitigation rules at every level of the management of innovation, as it ‘churns’ slowly through the complex innovation process, built up over the years.

If an organization is totally happy with spending all its knowledge and internal resource on providing incremental products to its customers and gets away with it, then fair enough but does it have to be so?
Alternatively, if shareholders, customers and competitors sense there should be far more, then the organization is travelling a road that indicates the pathway to decline.

The worry becomes simply, can it reverse this mind-set of incrementalism and risk mitigation in driving its innovation? There is a different pathway on offer but to travel down it, you have to think about some serious form of radically altering your existing innovation structure and processes.

Much has happened in innovation in the past ten years.

Often you wonder if any new understanding really has permeated through the outer skin of some organizations, perhaps with the notable exception of open innovation.

We have greater technology, software, and understanding of systems, people, and structures than ten years ago. We are better at measuring innovation in inputs, throughputs, outputs and outcomes or have the potential to do this. Of course, that is, if we chose too.

The real issue for me is that much of this potential, these potential advancements are often seemingly being ignored, or certainly not fully leveraged. We just keep adding more and more on top of the existing systems, instead of stepping back and looking for a more radical redesign, one that can change the innovation dynamics.

The one that transforms and goes well beyond our existing slow growth reality, seen today based on present performance of so many. The extra margins of profit today are more likely to come from reducing not enhancing.

So why do I argue we need some radical re-thinking of how we manage innovation?

Well most of the economies are flat on their back; the money in the pocket of the consumer is dwindling and less certain than in recent years. Many of our larger organizations continue on in their juggernaut fashion, believing they are that irresistible force that is indestructible and that they can keep on going offering increasing extensions to existing products, passing on higher prices expecting those higher sales. Will this last? I doubt it.

They are busy chasing higher revenue, not so much in existing markets but more by expansion into new markets. Much of the existing market activity is quickly negated by competitors, which stalk every move and cover off any short-term advantage to try to regain the status quo. Layoffs, reductions across the board just continue to eat into the very fabric of the organization to extract profit, often at the price of real innovative growth.

Organizations are increasing their complexity by the very nature of the business model they are pursuing.  They are reducing decision-making away from the markets and the field and centralizing this, therefore requiring the building up of the necessary controls to make sure there is compliance and fulfilment of these decisions.

They are increasingly remote and losing the very trust of many of their employees by this ‘drip by drip’ set of actions.

Complexity comes with a growing cost.
It is slowing everything down. More people are spending all of their working days coordinating and justifying more than ever. The productive person, seen before to be the one producing something new or different is today plainly different.

They are more likely seen as dynamic by the way they respond to requests, the way they communicate and coordinate, the way they chase and monitor.

They shut down more in creativity by their need to satisfy growing demands placed on them.  Organizations are employing hundreds, if not thousands caught up in feeding the machine not driving the value-adding process.

We spend increasingly more time in seeking out efficiency and being more effective but effective at what? Certainly not on working with great innovation in the majority of cases!

The need to shift from efficiency to agility for innovation
Our focus is on efficiency and control, delivering more and more incremental better products, trying to stay one step ahead of competitors.

By being in increasing control by planning and knowing your outcomes well ahead of the real need you are running your process to minimise risk and variation.

The need is to have constant visibility and anticipate obstacles by employing the means to make this happen, being in total control, taking out uncertainty, taking out experimentation and replacing it with certainty. Six sigma enthusiasts must be delighted.

What if we changed this?

We want to bring in agility, the ability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions, to lead market change that increasingly shows signs of volatility and uncertainty. Would our existing ruthless grinding execution machines be up to the different challenge?

Challenges like building in accelerating effective exception handling, separating the prevailing present business and application logic to be driven by different innovation logic of rapid, more radical, responsive product and service offerings that provide solutions that get closer to meeting some often radically changing customer needs.

We need to be looking to take greater variation and turn it into a market winning advantage.

To achieve greater agility we need to cut rework, we need to seek faster problem resolution and reduce cycle times way down, reduce downtime involved in waiting for escalating decision-making of the past, minimise any backlogs and combine current innovation into bigger big bang solutions that can cut through market uncertainties to maintain your share of wallet, mouth or bandwidth.

We need the principles of Six Sigma but with distinct differences. A corporate culture dominated by Six Sigma management theory will be primarily inclined toward inwardly focused, continuous improvement types of innovation activity — process, customer service, systems, operations, and so on. The aim is small, incremental innovations that really can add up but only can go so far!

Seeking a more entrepreneurial environment
A culture that fosters disruptive or encourages distinctive innovation is going to be more entrepreneurial, more outwardly focused on new markets, technologies, and business models. The goal is to find big new growth platforms that add significant chunks of revenue and profit.

Innovation is uncertain, unsure territory and requires sometimes a significant level of unstructured thinking to spot the emerging patterns and opportunities; the innovation system needs to build this in as slack.

We need to ask the underlying question is whether the discipline of process management will fertilize or strangle those new ideas that come from light-bulb moments of brilliance”

The need is for a different orientation

We cannot make money without innovating for growth, and we cannot save money by not having efficient processes. W

hat we need is to strike a new balance from what we know that works and what we know is questionable if the activity does not have a real value add component to it.

The task would be to re-invent how we work to carry out this. We need to focus on the fundamentals within our existing processes and even be ready to tear down many of the current ways of managing innovation within the business.

We need to seek solutions from a fresh perspective. When you begin to question you begin to re-engineer.

Part two, published tomorrow, will delve further into this case for re-engineering innovation.

The post The Case for Re-engineering Your Innovation Process (part one) first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Yet we still keep these organizational needs locked into those old structures, systems and processes that have been layered one on top of the other as we learnt about innovation over the years.

We often simply kept  adapting these (often badly) into the existing way we were managing innovation. Isn’t it time we addressed this growing issue of adapting, stopped the compromising and started redesigning our innovation systems from afresh with present-day leading innovation practice thinking?

Managing innovation as a system is no different from managing IT for example. You get to a given point where the costs of running innovations through your existing systems continue to rise. You begin to diminish your innovation performance.

Speed to market seems never to improve the way you want it too, and more importantly delivery against the identified market opportunity seemingly gets more and more compromised.

The risks of cutting corners seemingly grows every day, and you under-deliver on the opportunity first seen.  No wonder eventually leaders begin to question and lose confidence in their innovation abilities.

The results increasingly become suboptimal.
Is there an alternative?
I believe we need to re-engineer innovation differently and more radically.

Without doubt, we have all learnt enormously from the evolution of innovation and its management but there is a time to rethink the whole rationale behind innovation, its systems, structure and process.

Increasingly organizations are appreciating their unique but surprisingly precious few distinctive innovation capabilities that (can) set them apart. Understanding these does start giving the strategic perspective of what is core and to be protected and developed, that meet the strategic priorities, against what needs to be increasingly outsourced or relegated in management attention and support.

We need to challenge what we have in place and understand what needs renewing and what needs ‘letting go’. I have already written about a twelve step process for innovation renewal in an earlier blog (December 2010-  http://bit.ly/gvomnr) that offers a renewal step-by-step process.

Companies have hundreds of layered capabilities built-up within innovation.

What any review should account for is the capabilities that really matter, the ones that are or should be distinctive, that can set you apart in innovation. Not just those than simply keeping the innovation business engine running but the ones that extract the maximum toque out of innovation, from idea to implementation and delivery into the market.

We do need to totally redesign the innovation engine.

The best thing possible to do though is sitting down and totally redesigning a new innovation engine that few others can emulate, based on the capabilities identified as needed and core, mapped to strategic priorities. Out of this you will begin to identify your legacy systems, the layers of obsolesce within the system to innovate that should be challenged and replaced irrespective, and updated whatever way you eventually decide to approach your innovation renewal.

A tip here is those distinctive capabilities that do or can set you apart also need to be coherent across your whole organization. Everyone needs to contribute into changing those older habits and systems as a top priority for all functions, as the identified distinctive capabilities are providing the ways to distinguish you from others. T

hese might be based on speed and insight- to respond rapidly to changing consumer needs, translation of customer insight by meeting these specific need and ensuring delivery from idea to market is better than anyone else’s. Any redesign needs corporate backing and organisation identification.

Innovation is really the only game in town for value potential
Can we afford to keep our existing innovation ‘systems’ in place? How much longer can we keep denying to ourselves and admit that we do not have the best innovation systems in place?

Isn’t it time to retire older practices built up around innovation as they emerged in different ad hoc ways over the last few years and really redesign the innovation system, process and structures from top to bottom based on leading or emerging innovation practice?

Of course, there will be most certainly regular course directions based on changing innovation understanding and their seen value (eg, value of networks, collaborative enterprises etc).

So if they are based on rigorous value understanding, risk and market assessment of what is valued in innovation activity then consistent renewal is built into this work from the beginning, so ‘legacy drag’ is minimised.

It would be ideal if this was driven by a core group within an innovation unit. See my blog partly on this http://bit.ly/fQW6Jq

The need is for a high level of judgement and understanding of innovation.

Of course, any innovation redesign will need a high level of judgement.  There is a time when management not only should be demanding more speed, agility and effective delivery of innovation but must equally be prepared to provide the guidance and direction, so as to enable those distinct innovation capabilities to be well designed and optimized for the future delivery of the organization’s innovation needs.

Leadership needs to raise its own innovation bar, be prepared to junk the legacy that is built up around much of the existing practices around innovation today within the innovation systems and support and enable the organization to be able to deliver on speed, agility, effectively and on time on its core capabilities identified and agreed as critical.

There is certainly a right time to deal with the legacies within our innovation system.

Approaching this through more of an optimal fresher designing approach that builds around those distinct core innovation capabilities should become a necessary strategic requirement.

This is earlier than later, so organizations can match strategic desire with the ability to deliver on it through the latest practices, not old ones built on past habits and out of date understanding.

The post Writing off legacy within your innovation systems first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.