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.

Each stage needs questioning and then answering to create specific phases of the journey. Ask yourself the following questions by creating a checklist to start building your own dynamic innovation capability and to understand your innovation fitness and landscape. 

1.Getting Started – understanding the needs & imperatives of innovation fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important.
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need and seeing the differences

2.The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet the strategic need.
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance?
• Knowing and aligning your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction takes courage and decisive leadership.

3.Getting Even More Specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognising the building of scale, change rates, and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognising that resources can stretch beyond the firm and then bringing these in successfully, in gradual steps. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving mutual dependencies to support; recognising the hindering ones
• Being aware of the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation allows for designing a flexible response capability.

4.Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognising the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps, and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly, and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change.’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity, and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages helps maintain momentum.
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why.’

5.The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and roadblocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6.The Hard Face of Soft(er) Factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognising that time, climate, and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter-department, inter projects, and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognising the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7.Entering into Competitive Battle – the dynamics of rivalry, the uniqueness of you

• Recognising, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding, and outmanoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how, and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8.Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to the team, to organisational learning, in measured steps
• Recognising the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment, and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organisational levels.

9.Keeping the Innovation Fitness Wheels Turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control, and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving the impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls, and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to strategy and approaches

The end result is looking to generate your innovation fitness landscape. If you need any coaching help, advice, or mentoring through this process, just get in touch with me here. 

The post A pathway towards building your dynamic innovation capabilities first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

• Addressing the issue of unfamiliar responsibilities – new and different ways of working, of understanding, of allowing innovation to take hold and flourish is often demanding on those to find those new ways of responding, to leading, to encouraging others. It becomes even harder when innovation is often added to increase a person’s responsibilities. This different way of thinking needs surfacing. Many holding leadership positions in our organizations are uncomfortable with innovation, it is too intangible,  it often seems to ‘sit’ outside the normal processes and structures. It is full of risk and uncertainty. It is raising the unfamiliar, yet it should become a great place to start this dialogue to bring innovation inside, in all that we do. Innovation needs to become a real consistent in all our thinking as it can advance our thinking beyond the “norm”

• Innovation demands new directions – making significant changes to the way the organization is run is very challenging, potentially disrupting and needs thinking through at the top-level well. To ‘hone’ an organization into a lean efficient and effective ‘machine’ is one thing, to allow diversity and conflicting signals to pervade and challenge this is extremely uncomfortable territory, so ring fencing often seems to this keep it at bay! Is this the right solution, are we facing different times to manage our organizations in 20th-century practices? If we are needing to become the 21st century in our thinking and practices how do we open up the dialogue Where does agility, flexibility, adaptive and exploratory come into our thinking, into our systems, into our culture?

• Inherited problems always surface – addressing countless and inherent problems is messy and requires dedicated resolution. Changing the culture to become more innovative can be a massive step in structure, organization, and policies. How do we manage such a revolution, what is needed, what is a culture and environment for innovation anyway? How do we manage our legacy, what should stay, what can go? How do we set about this?

• Problems within the organization’s makeup – inadequate experience and resistance to change, often surface when a person is not equipped to deal with it. Installing innovation capacity, capabilities and competencies needs figuring out. How long does this take, where can we turn too? How do we relate change to its positive contribution to the future and can innovation lead that change?

• High stakes of innovation – demanding ‘breakthrough innovation’ makes everyone feel increasingly vulnerable, increasingly visible and it is for leadership to take ownership and real responsibility to manage this demand and shape the risk and set of fears against the gain and return. They need to be ready to ‘positively react and encourage’ both in supporting winning solutions and extracting positive learning from failures. Can you run breakthroughs alongside incremental innovation activities, what is really different in how can we manage these?

• Scope and scale of innovation – Managing in scale and scope is demanding and requires well thought through systems and processes. To scope, innovation needs robust business case approaches, its flexibility in its management and then to scale this up requires well-established approaches and clear commitments to its engagement and execution. Are we really good at seizing ‘breaking’ opportunities and quickly scaling these up? Can we learn new approaches to this? How do we approach the issues of scale, scope, and speed for innovation?

• External pressures multiply – everyone has an opinion outside the organization, let alone inside. Balancing these different interfaces and the pressures from these as you explore innovation needs managing well. Avoid that trait of just keeping piling on the raising of expectations and then failing to back this up, by demonstrating progress or ensuring you are not actively working on this alignment. What does it take for the ability to deliver on the promise? What can we learn by listening to those outside, what can we take inside and apply, have we our core beliefs to check these opinions against to stay firm upon or adapt by these new insights?

• Influencing without full authority – key activities within innovation usually demand that you become reliant on others. You need to spend (seemingly) inordinate time explaining and gaining others to make their ‘buy-in’ and find ways for them to find their own identification with concepts. So by ‘growing identification’, you are able to move emerging innovation concepts along the pipeline. You also so often need to find often imaginative ways of attracting across the resources needed. This is especially hard for senior managers to adapt too, the need to attract across, instead of simply expect, demand and just take, today people want to be attracted and expect to learn from the experience and exposure. How can we learn new ways or different ways where collaboration becomes the norm and we can learn to borrow and exchange resources across functions more freely and then let them go to move on to the next challenge where their talent is most needed? To let go and watch talent soar.

• Work more with a listening and feedback culture – this can be totally different from the way business has been conducted up to today, through a more hierarchical structure. Flattening organizations to allow greater two-way flow sucks up time; it simply undoes or unpicks ‘command and control’ over time. It takes time to establish and gain confidence and momentum. You need to allow more for debate, it shifts and alters the hierarchy and structures and that is a big step into an unknown, yet it is necessary for organizational change, to allow innovation to truly flourish on a more sustainable basis. What needs to be put in place to listen and respond to our organizations and customers’ needs? How can the relationships within the organization re-calibrate and mutually respect each other’s position?

• The need to develop work group diversity – innovation asks for more diversity in opinion, it draws out more in thinking, in discipline, in alternative approaches and solution. This often leaves senior executives feeling they are less in control, reliant on other and that can feel scary and surface their own insecurities, buried increasingly as they moved up the organization and took on responsibility and accountability. It challenges often their very notion of management as they have known and experienced it. Innovation in its management does certainly challenge many past notions of managing, such as for productivity, yield and simply, extraction. How can we encourage a greater diversity of thought, of working, of judging performance that would help our organization’s absorption of different knowledge and approaches occurring all around us? How can we exploit and explore and know when to apply the differences in our thinking

To summarize

Each of these ten innovation challenges needs to be surfaced at the right time, usually as early as you can to provide a person handling innovation to gain the best and strongest foothold of their understanding.

Each one of these ‘intractable’ points can individually block innovation from advancing – we must find ways to bring them out, to surface opinions and find common solutions to resolving them. We need to build these into a common understanding to move innovation forward.

To send out a compelling message into our organizations we are wanting to tackle these intractable barriers, so as to give innovation its rightful place within all our thinking and activities. That we want to ’embrace’ it, as it far too important for our growth and future sustainability makes everyone want to become more innovative as they can see change taking place, as the organization begins to break down the barriers.

The post Surfacing the real barriers to innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

The coach’s role is to facilitate and collaborate.

You need to take care not to act like ‘the expert’ imposing a given view but you can explore options that the recipient draws their own conclusions and value from. Avoid imposing and provide different thinking and perspectives so it becomes a facilitated debate that the recipient draws into.

Coaching is made up of a series of interactions

The ability to create meaningful interactions that connect people with ideas allows them to clarify and connect on the more important principles and critical issues surrounding innovation. Having a real passion and depth of innovation knowledge becomes critical to navigating this often tricky road to discovery.

The value of a coach is he/she is both a catalyst and facilitator of individual development. The value is in looking to improve innovation performance within that person’s understanding so there is a distinct ROII (return on innovation investment).

Pause, learn and then move on with new innovation purpose and knowledge

By helping executives to firstly pause, then take stock of the significance of various innovation transitions, and help them determine the best way to proceed is invaluable. Of course, this support is determined by the commitment, engagement, the given skills, and scope as well as the person’s real interests in wanting to have a greater understanding of innovation. It all requires available time.

Innovation coaching has a valuable contribution to make, in the right hands and with the right person. It has a significant personal investment on all sides involved to achieve clarity, insight, and returns for innovation to flourish so others can equally benefit from this more intensive approach and emerging internal expertise that will eventually come from within.

The post Innovation Coaching Has Real Value first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

Then we have the opportunity to build Innovation Capital.

Key elements of innovation capital also, equally consist of mostly non-technological intangibles embodied in the organizational routines and employees’ mindset.  So, it is important also to understand the make-up of innovation capital, in its “stock” and these, can be clarified in the following ways:

• Innovation capital as renewal capabilities of our organizations in the form of producing intellectual properties that offer value and are increasingly being extracted from our intangible assets.
• Innovation capital possesses attributes that make it a “strategic” asset. The key to success lies in specifying the nature and application of these assets in relation to the new knowledge flowing into the organization. This generates and commercializes concepts and ideas into new forms of innovation value.
• Innovation capital is made up of the ongoing “dynamic interactions” between intangibles and tangibles. Built up from experience over time, they develop into mostly intangible assets, and eventually into valuable outcomes.
• It is the effective use of different kinds of intangibles that contribute to innovation capital. Only a few of them can be formally captured as they are built on interactions, relationships, applied experience, generally accepted understanding and based on pattern recognition and meaningfulness.
• As we grow our networks and relationships, we increase knowledge sharing. This promotes our understanding and provides increased intangibles inside the organization. As we deepen our knowledge, we gain experience and achieve higher “pattern recognition” and insight.

When we look around we are able to spot the enablers for innovation stock to grow, as they contribute into your experiences and exposure to general principles of understanding. See how you can learn from these:

These elements can be described as follows:

• Innovation strategy relates to strategic choices a firm makes regarding its innovation
• The selection of the type of innovation that fits best to the firm’s objectives and the allocation of resources to different types of innovations
• Innovation culture is a mixture of employees’ innovation-related attitudes, experiences, beliefs, and values
• The integrating function of environment, culture, and climates that stimulate innovation activities
• Innovation structures that are formed to make up the innovation process
• The approach to organization and the way employees engage in innovation are grouped
• The employees’ knowledge (technological and non-technological) engaged in the innovation process
• The stock of knowledge can be increased by an organization’s internal and external learning

“Internal learning” refers to the creation of new knowledge within the enterprise, while “external learning” pertains to the integration of knowledge from outside. We can model innovation capital and apply different capital needs to different innovation challenges to leverage them in more dynamic ways.

The more we strengthen our knowledge and appreciate the value within our people, the more we can generate new knowledge, build greater narratives, deepen discussions, and establish better connections and interactions across growing communities. In this way, we can turn innovation capital into a highly dynamic and valuable asset, just as we treat financial capital today.

The more we discover, the more knowledge we gain.

This enables better decision-making and fosters our value-creating potential. This will, in theory, give us greater confidence, both internally and externally, that today, our invested financial capital is in good hands. We are effectively applying innovation capital to value creation.

Our learning capital needs to emerge and dominate future discussions in improving its quality and value contribution. We need to increase incentives for organizations and their people to learn or update their existing knowledge.

The power lies in the linkages we can forge, in the acquisition, in assimilation, and eventually in a transformation that allows known and new knowledge to fuel our wealth-generating innovation pipeline.

The post Building Your Own Innovation Capital Lies Within Organizational Learning first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

Knowledge is becoming even more of our competitive edge. It is making this incoming knowledge tacit, relevant to us and this comes increasingly from our connections into networks and who and what we want to search out and connect with.

Broad observations of Knowledge include:
• Knowledge is intangible
• Knowledge arises from information and thus from the interpretation of data
• Knowledge has some, but not all, of the characteristics, we associate with capital
• Knowledge can be instantiated in various ways
• Knowledge derives value from its use in human activity
• Knowledge cannot easily be aggregated
• Knowledge evolves
• Knowledge is created and exploited through networks
• The distribution of knowledge is as important as its ‘quantity’

We need to treat knowledge as passing through hindsight, through foresight into insight. It is when you combine tacit knowledge where experience matters and it is in the new connections you advance your thinking.

John Hagel writes on his edgeperspectives posting site often some great insights and in one of his posts, he discussed “Defining the Big Shift” – measuring the forces of change.

Let me, here, summarize key aspects relating to knowledge, quoting John, and how it is shifting to flow.

From knowledge stocks to knowledge flows. We are moving from the world where the source of strategic advantage was in protecting and efficiently extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks – what we know at any point-in-time.

From knowledge transfer to knowledge creation. The greatest economic value will come from finding ways to connecting relevant yet diverse people, both within the firm and outside it, to create new knowledge.

From explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge. Just at the time when more and more information is becoming available about more things, the most valuable knowledge is the knowledge that is in the early stages of emergence and this is generally the most difficult to express.

From transactions to relationships. The transactional mindset undermines the ability to build long-term, trust based relationships and in the absence of those relationships it becomes almost impossible to effectively participate in the knowledge flows that matter the most.

From zero-sum to positive sum mindsets. With a zero-sum mindset, your gain is my loss, we undermine building the long-term relationships. Yet if we adopt a positive sum mindset – through increasing collaborations we build trust relationships. This becomes a virtuous cycle that builds on itself.

From push programs to pull programs. Push tends to impose routines and predictability and is good at extracting ‘stock’, whereas scalable pull programs effectively access and attract resources that are attracted to support and improve performance to enable knowledge to flow.

From institutions driven by scalable efficiency to institutions driven by scalable peer learning.  Institutions often become the barriers to effective participation. in knowledge flows. Fostering scalable peer learning can create learning landscapes that encourage individuals to develop their talent in collective, sharing pools.

From stable environments to dynamic environments. We are moving from relatively stable business environments to ones of rapid change with ever more disruptions, uncertainty, and unpredictability. The management practices need to address these shifts that turn instability and uncertainty into opportunity and reactions.

Fusion, Flow, and Fluidity are needed in our management practices

We need to build the foundations of knowledge that builds stock but then allows it to flow and have a greater impact. We are in a world of constant learning, recognizing predictability is falling away constantly.

We need to focus on scalable learning, not scalable efficiency and that needs this shift from “stock” to “flow” to accelerate learning rather than focus on the narrow path of just simply expanding data known.

We need to go out to seek diverse flows of knowledge, from adjacent and even seemingly unrelated domains and constantly ask that age-old question “not knowing what it is you don’t know” and actively seek out knowledge flows that offer new understanding. Being open to a constant knowledge flow

Being open to a constant knowledge flow allows small ideas, concepts or seeds of value to be set in motion to bigger things that lead to greater innovation and personal growth. Moving from stock to flow is absolutely essential in today’s world to keep exploring it and what it can and does offer.

Save

Save

Save

The post Seeking out new Knowledge that Flows first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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:

1. Gaining knowledge gives you growth, impact and return. Others seek you out to understand
2. Translating knowledge into value deepens your value, increases your worth and gaining respect
3. If you are able to put the co-ordinates into your innovation world you have a clear compass to proceed
4. The External Innovation Catalyst prompts your thinking, accelerates your understanding and guides you on this personal learning journey of innovation understanding.

The key aspects of working with an expert in innovation are numerous. Let me provide a few:

• That person can provide you an objective view
• They introduce a fresh perspective, they shift your thinking forward
• They can help bring concepts to life
• They can solve potential gaps in your thinking or knowledge understanding
• They become your personal advisor to work with as you go.
• They can offer validation points along your journey
• As external providers, they can spot and even amplify the trends for your learning curve
• They offer a different ‘angle’ on your challenges and objectives
• They can map parts of the innovation puzzle to the whole.
• They can simply show the way or point you in ‘given’ directions
• They can advocate, guide and inform on a variety of innovation needs and your questions
• Gives navigation and feedback
• They are independent and can be detached from internal barriers to help “bunker bust” and accelerate innovation awareness

Irrespective on how you see and value an external innovation expert who can guide, advise and mentor they can take you through three steps

1. Help you discover and explore relevant innovation approaches
   
2. Enable you to generate and convert innovation understanding faster
3. They can exploit and leverage a ‘collective’ knowledge and wisdom built up over time and experience.

There is a real need to accelerate innovation understanding. The best person to deliver the innovation message is the one that is well equipped to see its value, purpose, and potential to transform “where you are” into “where you could possibly be” through the pursuit of an innovation growth strategy.

It is all about the translation points in innovation guidance and finding the time to engage with the external catalyst of innovation understanding. It can potentially offer an exponential return to you, your team and your organization’s innovation activity if you have the desire to build your innovation capabilities.

Want to find out more? Have you the time, it might be really worth it?

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

The post The Value in Personal Innovation Learning Journeys first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

For instance a lack of resources, an overcrowded portfolio of ideas, a lack of dedicated people, treating innovation as a one-off, keeping it isolated and apart from mainstream activities.

Yet many are simply hidden and need surfacing and require often an outside perspective.

Here are ten really important barriers, that can hold innovation back.

• Addressing the issue of unfamiliar responsibilities – new and different ways of working, of understanding, of allowing innovation to take hold and flourish is often demanding. It becomes even harder when innovation is often added simply increasing a person’s responsibilities. It is often raising the unfamiliar yet it should become a great place to start this dialogue to bring innovation inside on what we currently do to change the perspective.

• Innovation demands new directions – making significant changes to the way the organization is run is very challenging, potentially disrupting and needs thinking through at the top-level well. We are needing to become 21st century in our thinking and practices how do we open up the dialogue Where does agility, flexibility, adaptive and exploratory come into our thinking, into our systems, into our culture?

• Inherited problems always surface – addressing countless and inherent problems is messy and requires dedicated resolution. Changing a culture to become more innovative can be a massive step in structure, organization, and policies. How do we manage such a revolution, what is needed, what is a culture and environment for innovation anyway? How do we manage our legacy, what should stay, what can go? How do we set about this?

• Problems within the organization’s makeup – inadequate experience and resistance to change especially surface when a person is not equipped to deal with it. Installing innovation capacity, capabilities and competencies need figuring out. How long does this take, where can we turn too? How do we relate change to its positive contribution to the future and can innovation lead that change?

• High stakes of innovation – demanding ‘breakthrough innovation’ makes everyone feel increasing vulnerable, increasingly visible and it is for leadership to take ownership and real responsibility to manage this demand and shape the risk and set of fears against the gain and return. Can you run breakthroughs alongside incremental innovation activities, what is really different in how can we manage these, building a ‘dual’ mentality?

• Scope, speed, and scale of innovation – Managing at speed, scale and scope are demanding and requires well thought through systems and processes. To scope, innovation needs robust business case approaches, its flexibility in its management and then to scale this up requires well-established approaches and clear commitments to its engagement and execution. Are we really good at seizing ‘breaking’ opportunities and quickly scaling these up? Can we learn new approaches to this? How do we approach to scale, scope and speed for innovation?

• External pressures multiply – everyone has an opinion outside the organization, let alone inside. Balancing these different interfaces and the pressures from these as you explore innovation needs managing well. Avoid that mistake of just piling on the raising of expectations and then failing to back this up. What can we learn by listening to those outside, what can we take inside and apply? Do we have we our core beliefs to check these opinions against to stay firm upon or adapt by these new insights?

• Influencing without full authority – key activities within innovation usually demand that you become reliant on others. You need to spend increasing time on the ‘buy in’ for others to gain their own identification with concepts. You often need to find often imaginative ways of attracting across the resources needed. Today people want to be attracted and expect to learn from the experience and exposure and then be released to move on to the next challenge where their talent is most needed.

•  Work more with a listening and feedback culture – this can be totally different from the way business has been conducted up to today, flattening organizations aim to allow greater two-way flow but this sucks up time. It takes a time to establish and gain the confidence and momentum as you need to allow more time for debate, so as to allow innovation to truly flourish on a more sustaining basis. What needs to be re-calibrated?

• The need to develop work group diversity – innovation asks for more diversity in opinion, it draws out more in thinking through alternative approaches to solutions. It can challenge often their very notion of management as many have known and experienced it. How can we encourage a greater diversity of thought, of working, of judging, applying the differences in our ‘collective’ thinking?

To summarize

Each of these ten innovation barriers needs to be surfaced at the right time. To bring them out might need an experienced external facilitator of innovation, to let them probe, prompt and push to find the emerging answers to often these hidden and often ‘intractable’ challenges.

If we can confront these challenges, we can unlock them and make them the basis of the future building blocks and not barriers to greater innovation.

** This list has been inspired by “creating learning experiences without changing jobs” by Cynthia McCauley at the CCL in 2006.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

The post Solving root causes of innovation blockage first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?

I believe we have eight needs to achieve.

Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.

Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning

So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly Part one is here:

Exploring the second four below ( the first four are here )

Translating Knowledge into Value

• We need to understand absorptive capacity
• How do we set about accessing capacity?
• What do we need to anchor capacity?
• What means do we diverse capacity?
• How do we determine and translate the richer insights?
• What does transformation mean to you?
• How does transformation become real and insightful?
• What ways will you amplöify the signals of innovation opportunity?

The Art and Science of Exploiting and Exploring

• Understanding different organizational design
• The meaning of an ambidextrous organization
• Setting about the creation of value
• How we think and act to generate different needs
• What skills are different to manage this dual design?
• How do you shift thinking mindsets, ensure successful handovers
• The ability to differentiate innovation strategy to work in this design
• Gap identification and how to resolve this

Creating Sustaining Value

• Building the vision, values and required culture
• Knowing and recognizing value creation
• Making those value propositions as the everyday occurrence
• Building the Innovation Business Model Alternatives
• Recognizing Asset Orchestration- structuring, bundling and leveraging
• How to re-energise and build a powerful innovation engine
• Equipping all with the necessary skills and behaviors to innovate
• Building the ability to connect, exploit and explore the blank spaces

Placing it all into Context is essential to resolve

• The power of context shifts everything and then gives it ‘shape’.
• Context provides the innovation marching orders.
• Placing innovation in context allows for understanding as innovation is often inherently messy.
• Context gives us certain guard rails or borders to help gain a more united focus.
• The ‘setting it in context’ allows for dialogue, adding more value to the thinking.
• Knowing the context allows us to engage.
• Context needs to also become, increasingly the arbitrator of success.
• Context gives knowledge into the hands of others to go and work on finding possible solutions.
• Knowing the context gives us something highly relevant to judge eventual outcomes on.
• Of course, context is going to be fluid, we constantly adapt to new insights
• Context must lead, functionality and capability then flows from this and will follow as we gain new understanding
• Context in the eventual design and outcome needs constant recalibrating.
• Context gives our innovation activity its meaning and sense of purpose.
• the real innovation lesson is in the value of the Power of Context.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

The post Differentiating Yourself Part Two first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?

I believe we have eight needs to achieve.

Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.

Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning

So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly Part one is here:

Exploring the second four below ( the first four are here )

Translating Knowledge into Value

• We need to understand the absorptive capacity
• How do we set about accessing capacity?
• What do we need to anchor capacity?
• What means do we have diverse capacity?
• How do we determine and translate the richer insights?
• What does transformation mean to you?
• How does transformation become real and insightful?
• In what ways will you amplify the signals of innovation opportunity?

The Art and Science of Exploiting and Exploring

• Understanding different organizational design
• The meaning of an ambidextrous organization
• Setting about the creation of value
• How we think and act to generate different needs
• What skills are different to manage this dual design?
• How do you shift thinking mindsets, ensure successful handovers
• The ability to differentiate innovation strategies to work in this design
• Gap identification and how to resolve this

Creating Sustaining Value

• Building the vision, values and required culture
• Knowing and recognizing value creation
• Making those value propositions the everyday occurrence
• Building the Innovation Business Model Alternatives
• Recognizing Asset Orchestration- structuring, bundling and leveraging
• How to re-energise and build a powerful innovation engine
• Equipping all with the necessary skills and behaviours to innovate
• Building the ability to connect, exploit and explore the blank spaces

Placing it all into Context is essential to resolve

• The power of context shifts everything and then gives it ‘shape’.
• Context provides the innovation of marching orders.
• Placing innovation in context allows for understanding as innovation is often inherently messy.
• Context gives us certain guard rails or borders to help gain a more united focus.
• The ‘setting it in context’ allows for dialogue, adding more value to the thinking.
• Knowing the context allows us to engage.
• Context needs to also become, increasingly the arbitrator of success.
• Context gives knowledge into the hands of others to go and work on finding possible solutions.
• Knowing the context gives us something highly relevant to judging eventual outcomes.
• Of course, context is going to be fluid, we constantly adapt to new insights
• The context must lead, functionality and capability then flows from this and will follow as we gain new understanding
• The context in the eventual design and outcome needs constant recalibrating.
• Context gives our innovation activity its meaning and sense of purpose.
• the real innovation lesson is in the value of the Power of Context.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

The post Differentiating Yourself in Innovation Part Two first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.