For me innovation capabilities and competencies needs to be far more adaptive and aligned to the different emerging skills we should be bringing to bear, so we are able to find better innovating solutions for our collective futures.

The issue is this: if we do want to reshape much of what we are struggling with today – poor growth, diminishing futures, disconnected communities, stagnating economies or ones struggling to emerge from devastated and austerity measures inflicted upon them.

We do need to change our skill sets to reflect a more realistic and up to date need to navigate and transform knowledge to tackle these. Often our present skills are not equipped to manage in these more “disruptive” environments.

I wrote in a past post about “Learning to absorb new Knowledge for Innovation and the ability to understand Absorptive Capacity and how it works. Recently I followed that up with two recent posts about our pressing need that Jobs can be created but our skills do need very much adapting and refining, from where we are at present. One post was “Innovation Job Chasing- A Race Needed to Win” and the other was its precursor “The Present Innovation Jobless Era We Face.”

Our real need is to put in place those stronger adaptive skills  as our foundations so we can be better equipped to compete in the growing innovation race we all facing at personal, community and national levels. We need to equipped differently to meet the tougher global conditions that will be with us for our lifetimes, irrespective of our present age.

Competition won’t go away; it will only increase in its intensity.  To meet this we need to be far better equipped to be ‘innovation-ready’ in our skills. What forms a better ‘innovation ready’ skill set?

So what are those future skills we should be working towards to group around?

There was a report published in 2011 by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and sponsored by the University Of Phoenix Research Institute to understand the skills workers will need over the next decade in our changing world, based far more on technology and its continued advance.

The report “Future Work Skills 2020” looks initially at what it feels are the six drivers that are shaping our landscape and then the ten skills they see as emerging that need to be where we place our future focus upon. These are:

• Sense-making: the ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
• Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
• Novel & adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
• Cross -cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings
• Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
• New-media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
• Transdisciplinarity : literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
• Design mindset:  the ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes.
• Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
• Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team.

A call to action

As the report authors of Anna Davies, Devin Fidler, and Marina Gorbis suggest, the results have clear implications for individuals needing to learn these skills. They will be asking from where will these come? From the educational institutions that need to grapple with changes that are occurring fast. Also it is the actions both  in business and at government level on how they will encourage and develop the strategies and policies fast enough, so as to offer the incentives to drive the changes needed. It is how quickly we move towards any organized ‘grouped’ learning of new skills can we begin to build within these new groupings.

All institutions certainly do need to provide the leadership to embrace the shifts needed in a constantly changing set of lifelong learning. It is recognized increasingly that skill renewal is constant to meet tomorrow’s ever changing global challenges.  A place where skills are far more heavily reliant on technology and we are able to manage these constant changes effectively. So as the knowledge that is emerging gets translated into new values offering new opportunity, learning and growth. We discover, absorb and translate.

Teaching both hard and soft skills that reflect tomorrows needs

The underlying need is to teach skills that promote quickly in response to changing conditions that will include a higher emphasis on critical thinking, depth of insight and the analysis capabilities to ‘translate’ the information or data emerging from multiple sources.

Equally the soft skills, so often ignored as crucial become increasingly relevant. The ability to collaborate and network, to read social cues, not ignore them as not important to me and respond with this much higher level of adaptability. I wrote about “Recognition of better soft skill taxonomy for Innovation some time back that has a useful way of grouping soft skills.

My summary

Predictions can always be difficult but the impression I gained from looking at the suggested ten future skills suggested by IFTF is that they do seem to make for a solid basis for us to gather around.

What of course we need to do is to develop what ‘lies underneath these ten skills ‘to allow us all to become more ‘innovation ready’ in our skills needed to survive. These might give us that better chance to thrive in the future and find fresh innovating opportunities because we are better equipped in relevant skills.

The burning issue is that our window of time to change and incorporate these into our organized learning is shrinking at ever faster rates. We need to move from recognition of these skills into the setting about of building them far more systematically.

We need to build our future innovation capacities on more relevant skills that are based more on what we need to have within our ‘natural’ skill base based on today at least, and not ones still based on 20th century practices.

The post Navigating the future landscape by developing adaptive innovation skills first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Increasingly we are looking outside for new knowledge that needs internally managing.

As organizations seek increasingly outside their own walls, the appreciation of how they are managing knowledge, learning and interpreting this is becoming a critical aspect of open innovation to be successful.

There is a growing need to absorb, integrate and apply this in new and novel ways for accelerating innovation performance.

The more we seek, the more the knowledge increases in complexity as markets are rapidly changing. The more we are relying on knowledge flowing into the organization the more we have to strengthen our inter-dependence and collaboration efforts to extract the knowledge we are acquiring for it potential value.

Are organizations recognizing the value of structuring their knowledge flows? Do they have the right learning mechanisms to accelerate and exploit new potentials from this knowledge?

Organizations tend to be set up for incremental learning.

Often the markets we operate within are volatile and suddenly change. Our capacity to change is often governed by the new knowledge we are provided. To make a change beyond incremental learning we need a different path of learning, we need often new capabilities to learn.

We all tend to place what is being said to us as highly situational and we often interpretive it in the way that we know, we reject alternatives to see things differently and as such we do not spot the innovation opportunity that was actually in front of us.

We look for what we know. This is sometimes called being locked within your own ‘competency trap’. To move away from this risk we need stronger learning mechanisms, a change in the path of learning.

Understanding Absorptive Capacity and how it works

“Absorptive capacity” is a term introduced through some academic research by Cohen & Levinthal, back in 1990 to describe an organizations “ability to recognize the value of new, external information (knowledge), assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends”.

Since then there has been significant academic contributions for exploring and validating this, in order to improve innovation performance and competitive advantage yet it is still not well integrated into our innovation process.

What we do need is to improve our HR management systems to build a more efficient transfer of knowledge throughout the organization to leverage it.

This is part of applying the principles of absorptive capacity as we increasingly use more networks, and external partners and collaborate with others we are accessing wider skills, inputs and competencies and we need to learn what this provides to aid the innovation process.

The theory goes that the more we understand, the more the innovative behaviour and capability go up in potential, and then the more we have richer innovation choices.

The Model of Absorptive Capacity explores potential and realized knowledge.

The need for a distributed organization innovation knowledge system

In some studies by Van den Bosch et all (2003) they suggested the need for three combined capabilities to manage and absorb the flow of knowledge coming into the organization

1. System capabilities that are used to integrate explicit knowledge
2. Co-ordination capabilities that build upon teams that establish the routines for structuring communications
3. Socialization capabilities that begin to share a ‘certain’ ideology, understand the potential of new paradigms and work towards interpretation tacit information for the good of the community.

When organizations are acquiring new insights, new knowledge that is not as closely related to their existing knowledge base there needs to be a very active set of efforts to manage this new incoming flow so as to extract all its potential value, absorb it and disseminate it across the relevant parties within the organization.

Having the three capability parts structured clear helps establish different areas of capability focus and embed it more fully.

Can you imagine the need for rapid learning of leading-edge knowledge that is required to be absorbed within the company, these require dedicated structured learning, and these cannot be left to individuals or ad hoc measures.

When you are learning anew you are searching for cognitive structure, managing implicit, often un-codified knowledge (tacit) that is difficult to transfer and also increased complexity, where you need to absorb a greater range of ‘components’ and apply new‘ architectural’ knowledge.

The difficulties multiply if you do not recognize the needs to structure knowledge but to explore it in more open unbiased ways.

The ability to use external knowledge has three sequential processes.

A)     Exploratory Learning– recognizing and understanding the potential value of the new knowledge that lies outside the organization

B)      Transformative learning– dispersing and assimilating the valuable new knowledge

C)      Exploitative learning– using the assimilated knowledge to create something different in knowledge or product and seeking to exploit this in commercial ways.

The more open Absorptive Capacity Process leads to understanding and outcomes

The call for managing the effective use of knowledge

One of the central drivers of the competitiveness of organizations is the effective use of knowledge. It is the generation, acquisition, integration and application of (new) knowledge that need managers manage to learn.

Knowledge underpins innovation, the more it changes, the more it becomes complex to discover, and the more we have of this real need to upgrade how we experience, experiment and absorb learning.

This needs structuring. As we absorb more external knowledge from our collaborators the need is to organise this well. Absorptive capacity needs to go beyond good theories into the increased application.

Absorptive capacity is an integral part of an organization’s innovation capabilities and its healthy development is a real significant dimension of innovation management that we all need to consider well.

The post Learning to absorb new knowledge for innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.