Often innovation succeeds or fails by the personal involvement and engagement of a ‘selected’ few. Recognizing the types of innovation leadership might help you manage the innovation work a little better.

So can you recognize the traits of your innovation leader?

Are they a front-end or back-end innovation leader? Here’s how you can begin to spot the difference.

Before we climb into this

I recall enjoying a book published a few years back, “Innovation Governance- how top management organizes and mobilizes for innovation”, written by Jean-Philippe Deschamps and Beebe Nelson. I can totally recommend it as it is so rich in thinking through much around innovation, placed within this governance framework. It lays out a clear improvement path for innovation to travel. I am drawing from this book on some thoughts about innovation leadership.

The author’s view argues that organizations are traditionally tribal and as innovation is a highly complex corporate activity, which crosses many boundaries both within and outside the organization, it needs clear governance and structures to manage these dynamics of often conflicting and differing goals, expertise and interests. Often each group possesses its own rules, its own judgment of what is important, and this ‘creates’ the absolute need to have a mechanism that ‘cuts’ across these potential barriers.

So can you recognize your innovation leader?

According to the authors of “Innovation Governance”, you need the right combination of front-end and back-end leaders, since the two types are complementary. An example of a front-end leader in pharmaceutical firms is typically found as heads of discovery, often under the leadership of the chief research officer. Whereas back-end leaders would tend to be in charge of clinical development, manufacturing, or marketing-driven activities.

The best way to identify these two types of leaders is often their functional orientation, possible background disciplines, and their general management interest and attitudes.

A good example of this ‘divide’ is between two really famous leaders that have propelled Apple to the top in innovation and sustained execution Steve Jobs and Tim Cook of Apple. Both have been highly visible and well cited in personality, backgrounds, and interests. As described well within the book this difference is best illustrated by this Apple leadership comparison.

The front-end leader.

Steve Jobs was clearly a front-end leader. He constantly sought out more radical creativity in design and end product results. Let’s make clear distinctions on what we think we know of the persons involved.

• He had a real passion for new ideas, exploring and combining different thinking and designs, searching for solutions to customers’ unarticulated needs to improve their product experience.
• He was constantly questioning the status quo and challenging (extremely hard) the team around him with constant how, what if, what else, why not type questions.
• He had a more entrepreneurial flair and more of a venture capital mentality regarding returns and risks; he kept focusing on ‘big win’ promises.
• He had this belief to constantly experiment, to open up new paths and different thinking and he looked to accept the risk and tolerate failure by moving through the ‘dwelling stage’ into the ‘learning from’ set of insights.
• He encouraged individuals to have a degree of freedom, he challenged them constantly, and he expected a climate of mental adventure and excitement to attract others into the organization but these were made up of a diversity of backgrounds. His own background was rich in diversity and inquiry.
• Finally, his tolerance levels were often ‘explosive’ but he generated the level of commitment to producing some of the stands out products of recent years.

The back-end innovation leader

It is often questioned why Tim Cook took over when Steve Jobs died. He is seemingly the archetypal back-end guy. He was credited with managing the Apple supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics, thus freeing up Jobs to focus on his front end pursuits. Tim Cook comes with more operational discipline.

• He focuses on getting products to market flawlessly in cost-effective ways, mastering all the complexity of putting in place the operational foundations necessary to go from concept to launch and roll-out.
• He has that insistence on achieving higher planning quality and expects the process discipline and standardization to make innovation replicable.
• He understands the demand for speed to market through a high level of cross-functional integration and a ‘first-time-right’ philosophy in implementation.
• Would have without doubt flexibility in execution decisions, based on detailed operational knowledge and pragmatic risk management.
• That ability to motivate staff for product battles and promotion of ‘launch and learn’ approach, leading to adapting quickly to improvements, re-launch cycles, and even recalls.

Balancing the respective innovation clout always needed.

If you have a front-end leader at the helm of your innovation activities then you need to find the balance of who manages the disciplined operational side, then if you have a back-end leader, who will defend an aggressive front-end agenda?

The appointing of any innovation leader has significant implications, sometimes huge. This ‘style’ can determine what generates innovation and can determine the passion, commitment, and the emphasis points that your organization’s innovation will possibly give preference to and provide resources.

So you have to ask “what is our innovation leadership” model?

Is there a balance within the leadership team, how can this be managed smoothly?

Having a better understanding of leadership traits, achieving a ‘given’ balance to offer a more complementary top team, alongside having in place a ‘greater’ innovation governance structure will help avoid many of the pitfalls and dysfunctional aspects, that can be encountered that software alone simply can’t resolve. People with their personal beliefs, passions, and understandings is what makes innovation work, the software is the ‘great’ enabler, and governance “pulls it” all together.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Do you recognize your innovators leaders position? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Skies darken, clouds gather, often thunder and lightning combine, the wind picks up and the rain ‘announces’ its arrival in sheer torrents of heavy, drenching, wave-upon-wave of unrelenting force.

It is hard to stand upright or know what to do. Everything around you transforms. Dry, often parched land quickly turns to rivers of water, seeking out everything to shift and move along and eventually going everywhere to transform the landscape.

We are presently being told we are at the beginnings of a digital revolution; it has been likened to a tsunami in its eventual (devastating) effect on our organizations and by inference, the impact it will have on each of our lives.

I certainly agree, through technology our innovation activities will be potentially transformed, but as we often see technology is running ahead of our organizing to receive it, understand what it can provide, both in its real value to translate these ‘insights’ into powerful new business models, products and services.

Of course, the ‘hype’ is running ahead, just like the initial water flooding in, it is often just passing over the land and not being fully absorbed. Absorption takes time, it begins to sink in and its effect begins to ‘reveal’ themselves at different ‘rates of exchange’ for each of us.

Struggling with the effects of the digital economy

Digital matters, in its raw power and potential impact, I think it will be transformational.

The real opening questions all centre around our mindset, preparation and willingness to make the changes. Or will we be sucked up in the void, choked by data?

If it is likened to a “digital tsunami” then ‘all within its path’ can be potentially swept away or altered forever.

The human organizing aspects need to catch up. Will they build defences to warn of future ‘waves’ or take the opportunity to tear down much that has been left standing and rebuild, to take advantage and equip themselves in new ways?

The unique combination of the cloud, big data, social streaming, the internet of things, mobility, and the industrial internet, are all making this the time for new growth opportunities through this digital economy and the radical overhaul of the activities to realize the benefits.

Believe me, this is not going to be easy or a quick and painless change, it is going to radically alter much within our entities to receive, translate and transform this digital knowledge into impactful outcomes.

Three prospects that will come from transforming for digital.

1. The new prospects in Customer Experience
The immediate areas of new growth prospects and different engagement lie in changing the ‘Customer Experience’. Growing digital knowledge will enable greater customer understanding. We can begin to build new analytics-based market and customer segmentation; we can become more involved and informed about socially- influencing knowledge.

These can lead to new top-line growth, more targeted marketing and the potential for streamlining or altering the customer engagement process. We can expand the ‘touch-points’ in new services, cross-channel experiences and coherence and in providing greater self-service and ’empowerment’ for our customers.

2. The transformation of Operational Processes
The second one is Operational Processes. Digitization will radically alter the design of the processes and especially the flow of data, to information, to knowledge, to move informed opportunity. Will it improve processes or collide with already outdated systems, tightly integrated and create a build-up and eventual crash?

Unbundling the integrated systems and replacing these with more of distributed application environments is going to be a major challenge. Completely new features, new approaches and ways to draw down the ‘appropriate’ application needed, will require the use of the cloud, of modular systems, plenty of apps but still locked away in a secure environment of approved applications to be used.

Just stop and think about Apple’s app store, then apply this impact on our lives to business, drawing down from the same conceptual (business model) approach. There are going to be massively changed winners and losers for the race to unbundle, to one that will offer a more distributed environment where the user decided on what they need to use, to get the job done.

This will give a significant workforce enablement that wants to work anywhere and at different more flexible times, expecting high levels of response in what they use, to do the job on hand and enable them to build and communicate into ever-changing and evolving knowledge-sharing communities.

Knowing what, where and how, will be distributed down to the individual. These changes will be far more data-driven in insights and decision-making techniques, many unknown but necessary to allow performance to be timely, relevant and transparent.

3. The third area is the era of the new Business Model.
We have been ‘grappling’ with the concept of business model designing for some time. To a large degree, the economic situations in Europe and America have held this back to be fully embraced in large organizations.

They focused on ‘risk containment’, extracting the final juices out of effectiveness and efficiencies but that ‘well’ of opportunity is finally running dry and extracted.

Business needs to grow, it needs to stop hankering down, it needs to come out and explore the rapidly changing landscape in new and different ways.

Facing a digitally modified business landscape will need very different business models. The shift of resources, the transitioning and blending of the physical with the digital, the way digital will shape the structures, provide the ‘driving forces and insights,’ all will demand changing the business model.

We will see multiple business models that combine and blend product and service in very different ways, more tailored to new customer understanding and their demand and need.

What digital products will move alongside physical products and different services and how will that set of radical organization redesigns alter existing organization boundaries or established turf?

Agility and adaptability will be essential

The enterprise integration will need to be constantly evolving, adapting and becoming highly agile, it will totally redistributed, decision authority will move more rapidly towards evolving business models and distributive decision-making, to seize breaking opportunities quickly.

Those that quickly go through piloting, pivoting through digital and physical learning into scalable models to capitalize on rapidly shifting trends, disrupting the existing.

Business models will not stand alone, they will interlock in intelligent ways, to benefit from scale that essential need of a greater appreciation of sharing services,  that will open up different partnerships, opportunities for shared cost of new channel developments, separate value propositions are driven through common back-office services and increasing platform management, to manage this

The key to unlocking this new promise of growth is digital capabilities.
This is the ‘rub’. The human mediation of ‘going for it’ or ‘giving it lip service’ will determine a new class of winners and losers. Those that get it, embrace all of what it means and then choose to make radical changes and those at the other end of the spectrum, trying to keep it at bay, perhaps in denial.

Those who will be playing with selected parts and not recognizing the eventual strategic decay that slowly trickles in, to undermine performance and shift customer perception away, into that different landscape of ‘digital engagement.’

We need to unlock our minds. The analytical capabilities are going to be the human roadblock. Algorithms are promising to partially unlock this and help us absorb this ‘torrent’ of data to make them ‘meaningful’ and ‘insightful’.

Then we have the difficult choice of solution delivery, of the new integration of IT and the business of where authority will lie as well as that real need of ‘simply’ letting go, does need to be worked through will lead to some uncomfortable times.

The whole attempt to unify data, and processes, reconcile both business and customer needs and deliver the process capabilities to enable the translation of data into insights, into business outcomes that have real growth potential will be a wicked challenge.

The immediate ‘getting organized’ challenge

The engagement within this needs real top management attention. Digital has the potential to destroy or change your organization. The existing landscape of business will change forever as this digital deluge or tsunami will alter our structures significantly.

Industry and Social competitive landscapes will be redefined, in many ways unknown today but all around us, we have those ‘weak signals’ that require us to manage this transformation along with the three horizon methodology I often espouse.

There are four opening steps within the digital challenge. We each within our organizations need to: 1) frame the digital challenge, 2) mobilize the organization, 3) focus on investments and 4) sustain the digital transformation in multiple ways.

None is easy; all are hard as much is still  in the unknown and this is a real-time of leadership to be stepping up to the plate and showing its potential for making the winning hits or striking out.

There are so many roadblocks

Today organizations lack critical technology, tools and required skills, many existing systems still lack any form of real integration to allow data to flow across the organization, the business practices will mostly have to be rapidly relearned, senior leadership has the real, urgent need to get on the ‘same page’ and finally, this (radical) change will require reliance on managers that might lack the transforming skills, schooled in ‘containing and risk reduction’ and lacking real risk assessment and decision-making capabilities.

The pursuit of this digitization will ‘suck up’ an awful lot of funding, much of it constantly being thrown away as organizations transition from the existing to the preferred for it to be accelerated in being written off as part of the transition, alongside all those legacy systems sitting on today’s balance sheets. Are the ‘healthy’ financials for this in place in many of our organizations?

Organizations will scrabble to employ integration specialists, digital business architects, risk professionals and those critical analytical scientists. By 2018 Gartner predicts “digital business will require 50% less business process workers and 500% more digital business jobs. Attracting the right talent is the key to digital leadership”.

Finally, this is not going to be easy in presenting a business case that has a ‘hard’ return on investments; it will be made up of what is known and can be quantified with a real leap of faith, a steady hand and real belief that transformation does actually mean that,  a total transformation. I’m not sure there are going to be many ‘halfway houses’ on this digital journey. It is promising to be a real evolution.

Some compelling numbers that “speak of a massive change

Let me raise a few arguments of this change hurtling towards us. Gartner offers some compelling numbers, “consider this, since 2013, 650 million new physical objects have come online; 3D printers became a billion-dollar market; 10% of automobiles became connected, the number of Chief Data Officers and Chief Digital Officer positions have doubled”.

Yet fasten your seat belts, in 2015 alone, Gartner predicts these things will double again! Digital seems to have a certain compelling power to climb on board, fast.

Gartner also reckons the meshing of digital and physical and the rise of the Internet of Things, enterprises in 2014 will spend $40 billion designing, implementing and operating IoT.

The whole of IT is projected to pass $3.9 trillion in 2015 and all the spending will be driven by the digital economy needs.

Just a few more predicted facts

So are you beginning to build that compelling case for change? By 2015, more than half of traditional consumer products will have native digital extensions and by 2017, 50% of consumer product investments will be directed to customer experience innovations, as the key to lasting brand loyalty.

The dark side of Gartner’s predictions lie in this “by year-end 2016, 50% of digital transformation activities will be unmanageable due to a lack of portfolio management skills, with high levels of operational risk and the whole discipline of risk management will simply not be able to keep up.

Then Accenture believes big data analytics, seen as essential for competitive growth that are needed for the Industrial Internet are projecting this will be worth $500 billion in worldwide spending by 2020, taking into account hardware, software and service sales.

Already certain early leaders in this industrial internet race are placing 20% of their overall technology budgets into Big Data analytics. Just take a few minutes to look at the really big bet that GE are making on the industrial internet and the power of big data, investing already a billion dollars and still significantly investing. They plan to lead.

Going for the big prize being dangled in front of us.

The big prize that digitization offers is gaining market share on those that do not quickly follow, many unable to ever catch up or recover if they leave it too late and then one of the consequences is that the talent will move to those that ‘get it’ leaving those competitors that don’t even more vulnerable.

Over time investors begin to alter their investment portfolio, attempting to predict the winners and putting space between them and who they see as eventual losers.

I think the digital monsoon has arrived; you can watch in fascination, pick up and run for your lives, as the torrent of data rains down on you or attempt to prepare for all the uncertainty it brings.

It will alter much in tough choices and challenges and a landscape that will be very different when this ‘torrent’ of change subsides.

*****

Acknowledgement: I want to thank the MIT Center for Digital Business and Capgemini Consulting, Gartner, Accenture, GE and numerous others that are exploring and explaining the impact of the digital economy, so as to help me in my own recognition of such a ‘force of change’ coming towards us.

The post The Arrival of the Digital Monsoon for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When you look at all the (broken) parts within innovation it takes some time to figure out how you can piece it all together to make it a better whole  improving on what you had

Innovation and its management is just this place this needs to be pieced together. It often cries out for it.

Most people that work in our business organizations are spending their increasing time in piecing their part of the innovation equation together to make innovation work and trying to improve on the existing conditions to deliver new products and services.

People are spending a greater part of their time have to work on fixing the system and its many faulty parts, let alone finding time to work on any new concept or learn differently. Is it not about time we stepped back and really thought through the design of innovation and its managing? Why is this so hard to do?

The negative cost of rework.

When you don’t understand the parts that make up the complete system, you end up with an awful lot of rework that really should not have been necessary. This rework is different from experimenting and learning, where you gain positive insight that improves the innovation activity you are working on. No, this is the negative stuff, the attempts to ‘keep the show on the road’, to keep the momentum and commitment focused and so often this requires a lot of messy, fiddling and fudging of the parts to keep it functioning.

Why is it we often forget not just the innovation project we are working on, needs goals and a clear picture of where we are going although this is heavily influences by what we are learning and absorbing on the way, yet the innovation system never gets this constant, focused attention?

Have you ever completed a 2,500 piece puzzle?

Try completing a 2,500 piece puzzle without knowing the finished picture (or objective). In the jigsaw puzzle we always have the corners and as we spend time looking at each of the pieces we see the unique way they fit together. It is by this dedicated focus we can piece together the final puzzle. The point is, if we have a clear picture to help up, we can piece it together a whole lot quicker. Innovation management needs that final picture, the one where we can constantly refer too, to put together all the pieces and complete the puzzle. Its strategic and it needs to be provided by the leadership of the organization for each of us to work within.

The problem we often face is deciding on the type of innovation puzzle itself.

Innovation and its management does need to always figure out is what it is trying to achieve early on. If you don’t have this clear strategic picture how can you set about delivery of innovation that fits in? If we don’t have clear alignment of innovation to strategic objectives and goals, we end up with thousands of pieces of innovation effort all designed to fit but not pieced together to make the complete design as they lack this overarching picture.

I was checking out on Wikepedia on the puzzle and you can apply some of the attraction that innovators have with solving their puzzles. The entry within Wikipedia suggests you should treat puzzles a little more seriously. “Solutions to puzzles may require recognizing patterns and creating a particular order. People with a high inductive reasoning aptitude may be better at solving these puzzles than others. Puzzles based on the process of inquiry and discovery to complete may be solved faster by those with good deduction skills.”

Can you see managing innovation in this puzzle analogy?

We need to design innovation and its management in purposeful, well designed ways. Often we never seem to know what types of innovation are really needed, we lack alignment to the strategic goals, so we settle on less risk and more incremental solutions, smaller puzzles we can quickly resolve and get a ‘notional’ pat on the back for but fail to really move the innovation needle for real growth.

The other thought is how we love to treat innovation as a mystery.

 Tim Kastelle wrote a great article on both the puzzle and the mystery called are you solving a puzzle or a mystery. He rightly suggests that the problems that lead to disruptive innovations are often mysteries. This means that we need a different toolkit to solve these problems than we use when we solve puzzles.

Tim’s article is based on reviewing the book by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie pick up on this distinction in their outstanding book Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers.

He provided this “designing for growth” visual, which I think is great, it is not an aside, it can help in this ‘puzzle’ thinking.

Tim goes onto argue in his article: “We are strongly drawn to puzzles because of how clear-cut they are. Unfortunately, many of the big problems that we face are not puzzles, but rather mysteries. Mysteries are messy, and the methods that solve puzzles don’t work for mysteries, and they might actually make them worse”. This is a great insight that I am sure is built on Tim’s own personal experiences constantly tackling both mystery and puzzles on many occasions.

We are messy in mysteries and equally in solving puzzles

How do we set about designing innovation management systems? Tim provides a great starting point “when the parameters are basically known”. We just need to find the right information to develop the innovation parameters that will guide and frame the problem.

So what makes up the parameters within innovation system design?

The sad fact is that most organizations never bother to fully understand the multiple levels that make up the parameters needed in designing an innovation management system. They just seem to just love the rework, all that negative stuff!  Surprising when there is so much talk on the emphasis on driving out inefficiencies. Perhaps innovation falls outside the mainstream comfort zone for applying efficient design?

I just think we can design the innovation system, structures, process and their governance so much better to allow those working with their innovation puzzle a better chance to piece it together as they can understand the end goal, of fitting their innovation into the bigger frame of the organization’s strategic growth goals.

For each of us to achieve that, it needs both the puzzle and mystery to be taken out of the innovation system and this is where leadership plays its part. It is by designing and communicating this in an innovative strategic way, may I suggest through the Executive Innovation Work Mat.

The work mat offers the framework for the design by providing its distinct edges for the pieces to be put together and offering a completed picture to work within, it starts to set the parameters needed.

The post Piecing innovation together first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The top line was only 26% of those surveyed believed their current organization’s leaders encourage the practices that foster innovation. This indicates a major shift really is needed in the organizational mindset to give innovation the chance to thrive.

The implications are nicely summarized by this statement from Deloitte’s Global CEO. “Innovation at the institutional level is needed to sufficiently shift an organization’s mindset to allow new ideas to truly emerge and thrive,”

The Deloitte Global CEO Barry Salzberg went on to say: “While our current business leaders can debate how and where to innovate, it’s clear how much importance our future leaders place on innovation—not just as a driver of business growth but also as a catalyst for solving society’s most pressing problems.”
DTTL surveyed close to 5,000 Millennials from 18 countries. When gauging the perception among future leaders about innovation and its impact on society, 84 per cent say business innovations have a positive impact on society, and 65 per cent feel their own company’s activities benefit society in some way.

For more information and to view the survey results, visit: www.deloitte.com/millennialsurvey

The critical message – can we wait or shift leaders aside who don’t get it?

“A generational shift is taking place in business as baby boomers, many of whom may have been wedded to the ‘old way’ of doing business, begin to step down from their leadership roles to retire,” said Salzberg. “Real opportunity exists for organizations to step up and create the conditions and commitment needed to encourage and foster innovation in their work environments. And there’s a tremendous upside if we get this right: we can better retain talent, remain more competitive into the future, and more positively impact society.”

The report provides a nice infographic here: http://tinyurl.com/autexyn

So what really catches my eye?
The one chart that stands out for me is the one that outlines the required provisions of innovation conditions and the present delivery “gap” in creating these to foster innovation.
Taking this as the make-up of many of the essential conditions it is worth listing them here

1. Encourage & reward idea generation and creativity
2. Provide employees with “free” time that can be dedicated to learning
3. That leadership encourages idea-sharing regardless of seniority
4. To promote openness and the freedom to challenge
5. Provide a commitment to successfully advance innovation ideas
6. Provide strong and inspirational (innovation) leadership
7. Have a clear vision of the future
8. Have a (better) understanding of the Millennial generation
9. Improve or expand use of internal social and informal learning (methods)
10. Encourage both formal and informal learning
11. Have a (real) commitment to a sustainable business
12. Provide (the conditions) and commitment to continued development
13. Provide (consistent) improvement to internal processes
14. Commitment to (consistent) and continual product and service improvements
15. The (vexing issue) of a lack of hierarchy

The ones highlighted in bold gained the highest responding as needed but this is a fairly valuable list to work from in fostering the ‘right’ innovation conditions.

The Millennials felt the purpose of business was to improve society, generate profit and to drive innovation. They overwhelmingly believe innovation is essential for business growth. They feel it is acceptable for business to profit from social innovation and those organisations that are (clearly) seen to be innovative will attract the talent

According to DTTL the findings endorse the importance of leadership and innovation and the impact business can have on society. This creates opportunities for business leaders – both individually and collectively – and for the long-term success of their businesses.

My initial thoughts triggered by this survey

Today’s leaders need to think very differently about their role and the expectations of business, if we are to capitalize on the opportunities that innovation can provide, simply by allowing these opportunities to be shaped more by the Millennial generation, sitting inside or collaborating outside their organizations.

For me, this survey simply strengthens my view that today’s leaders just don’t get innovation in the multiple ways they should: to enhance their business and to regain growth.

The generations coming up into leadership positions are not just aware of innovation’s importance but are being exposed and trained in all the different facets but frustrated those above “simply don’t get it”.

The issue is “can we really wait?” I don’t believe so.

The post Millennials see innovation differently from today’s leaders. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.