Firstly a narrative should be open-ended, there is no finite resolution yet to innovation understanding and secondly, it is for the intended audience to determine and relate, not the person presenting the narrative. For me, one light bulb went on.

The second light bulb moment came earlier this week. I was reading an article by Josh Bersin, called “the disruption of digital learning: ten things we have learned”. Josh is the founder of Bersin by Deloitte and this article was on one of his LinkedIn Pulse views. It actually stopped me in my tracks, it made me really think and recognize some of my recent shifts in my innovation focus was making real sense. The article alarmed me but it also ‘re-armed’ me.

Let me pull out a few ‘nuggets’ from this article by Josh Bersin, it has profound implications for all of us and how it triggered some questions for me. Perhaps the article will for you.

“Digital Learning does not mean learning on your phone, it means “bringing learning to where employees are.” It is a “way of learning” not a “type of learning.” It is more employee-centric in its design and needs to follow a employee’s journey at work.

My 1^st Question from this : How can I apply this way of learning to my innovation advisory work?

“As content grows in volume, it is falling into two categories: micro-learning and macro-learning”

One is what I call “micro-learning,” things we can quickly read, view, or consume and they only take 10 minutes or less

Macro-learning, on the other hand, is something we do when we want to truly learn a whole new domain.

To quote from the article: “Early in a role, we need “macro learning” to get started: understanding the job, the domain, the people, the systems. As we progress up the learning curve, we need continuous injections of new skills, information and connections, to proceed – until we become an expert”

“Then we tend to become the “coach” and we teach others, moving in a more horizontal way, until we reach the next level of proficiency, role, or promotion to energize our career. At that point we may need another “macro learning” intervention to go back up the learning curve, or if we fail we may actually get bored and leave”.

My 2^nd question: Am I designing what I convey to fit these two types of digital learning of micro and macro learning to help in these pathways of learning?

“Work Has Changed, Driving the Need for Continuous Learning, quite simply because the way we work has radically changed”.

In Deloittes research it has shown that in a given week, employees take less than 25 minutes of time to actually slow down and learn. Really? Wow!

My 3^rd Question: So how can I make my work relevant and fit innovation learning within this incredibly short time to learn?

“Research is also telling us we don’t learn well through “binge education” like a course. We learn by being exposed to new skills and ideas over time, with spacing and questioning in between”.

It is when we repeat information well, with timed intervals between, and we ask people questions (to force our brains to “retrieve” information), we actually create new learning pathways, just the same way we learn certain “on the job skills” through practice, repetition, and continuous questioning about why something didn’t work. We are entering the age of “spaced learning”: Repetition, Spacing, Questioning.

“Today learning is about “flow” not “instruction,” and helping bring learning to people throughout their digital experience”

My 4^th Question: What can I offer and how can I build this “flow” of learning?

It seems to me the need is to build personal learning pathways that build your narrative that is built on key topic training that can be specific to your “moment of innovating need” (micro-learning) or build an understanding of a whole “new domains of innovation knowledge” (macro-learning), so by combining these we can build a perpetual learning. One I can contribute into, that draws from my extensive resource repository built up over the last sixteen years of practice, research and knowledge building.

My 5^th question is to you, reading this: Do you have an innovation need? Can I help?

One clear message from this article by Josh was “We believe there are “Four E’s of learning” at work (education, experience, environment, and exposure). People at work must have time to learn, they must feel their new skills will be valued, we must take time for discussion and reflection, and managers must give people space and freedom to discuss mistakes, ask questions, and often experiment with new ideas”.

We do need to engage far more on innovation. It is the exchanges, the sharing and relating we build our knowledge and competencies. We can’t simply rely on stumbling across these or just have to find your own “type of learning,” we need outside stimulus and some structure in our “way of learning”.

Yet what is most troubling is today, we seem not to have any decent time to stop and learn. How do you respond to this time-starving for learning? I need my third light-bulb moment – any suggestions for my own ongoing pathway of learning?

My innovating regards

Paul Hobcraft

The post A light-bulb moment in Innovation Learning first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Let me offer some further thoughts on its value to really capture and understand, so we can measure it within our organizations.

We have the three components; of physical capital, knowledge capital and human capital that are the innovation-related assets, these make-up Innovation Capital.

I have been arguing that innovation capital draws from the core of intellectual capital and its suggested (and broadly recognized) components of human, structural and relational capitals or social capital.

I have previously discussed this converging up, as the ‘nesting effect’
Innovation capital needs assessing and measuring so we can understand the relationship between these innovation capitals (and their present and future potential) and organization performance. We need to know the innovation capital ‘stock’.

Why, well ‘stock’ can be ‘static’ and we need to make this more ‘dynamic’ so innovation can ‘flow’ from this constant renewing of our capitals and be transformed into new value.

Let me explain the innovation capital stock in (my) five parts

• It is a bundle of the firm’s resources and assets that renders complementary services in the process of new knowledge (innovation) creation and commercialization

• Innovation capital as renewal capabilities of our organizations in the form of producing intellectual properties that offer value and extracting from our intangible assets

• Innovation capital possesses attributes that make it a ‘strategic’ asset with the key lies in specifying the nature and application of these assets in relation to the new knowledge ‘flowing’ into the organization, for generating and commercializing concepts and ideas, into new forms of innovation

• The innovation capital is made up of the ‘dynamic interactions between the intangibles employed and the ongoing development of these intangible assets.

• It is the ‘effective use’ of all the different kinds of intangibles that contribute to the activity into innovation capital.

For me it is these tangible and many intangible assets that fire innovation, they make innovation combustible, to ‘spark’ new value creation.

Innovation will continue to struggle if we don’t understand its capital make-up.

If we don’t understand where the innovation value resides, we will certainly struggle to continue to build innovation’s position in the organization.

Today innovation is still regarded as ‘expendable’, sacrificed on the altar of short-termism.

This creates a growing uncertainty, often reducing innovation down as that no real ‘sense of urgency’ and becomes ‘contained’ in discrete projects, failing to offer that real, substantial, ongoing value for the enterprise.

We simply don’t ‘unlock’ the real value of innovation. If we lack the understanding and abilities to build this sustaining operational capacity for innovation we have ongoing problems.

There is the need as its longer-term goal, to be simply fully embedded inside the organization that it ‘resides’ and simply becomes indistinguishable, it becomes the operating core, constantly aligned to the strategic needs and goals. Innovation’s benefits must be outstanding and well understood.

Innovation will remain tentative, always stuttering along, lacking this absolutely organization innovation rhythm if it is not fully understood in where it generates it capital from and what new capital and stock it provides.

Actually, most of our innovation capital is learning capital.

The more we strengthen our knowledge and value our people, the more we can generate new knowledge, build greater narratives, deepen discussions, make better connections and build our interactions across growing communities.

The more we discover, the more knowledge we gain does lead up to determining potentially better decision-making and value-creating potential.

This should, in theory, give greater confidence, both internally and externally, that our invested financial capital is in good hands.

The power lies in the linkages we can forge, in the acquisition, in assimilation and then into eventual transformation, that allows known knowledge to become new wealth-generating innovation.

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 new things or update their existing knowledge.

We need to learn how to articulate knowledge in its acquisition, assimilation and transformation and that comes back to understanding absorptive capacity.

Managing organizational learning and innovation, more ICT is needed.

To successfully manage innovation capital and understand the make-up of the intellectual assets, the new main role of ICT is pulling together Web 2.0/3.0, collaborative technologies, social networking tools, wikis, internal blogging and knowledge capture, so as to help people share this growing body of knowledge through common platforms and electronic storage.

As our social networks expand they become a vital source of intellectual capital and innovation understanding. These relationships and networks need to be fostered, constantly measured in their value and contribution, and structured in ways to communicate and interpret outcomes for ‘directing’ future value creation.

The whole promising ‘wave’ of collective intelligence, social networking and building real useful communities of knowledge is a real challenge today to pull together. It is becoming a crucial factor and investing in the physical capital this needs, does allow for people to share knowledge through common platforms and strengthen the knowledge, with the human capital that innovation requires, to drive real growth.

For instance, EU investments in ICT’s are due to increase by about 25% under Horizon 2020 compared to FP7. This EU investment will support the whole chain from basic research to innovation that can deliver new business breakthroughs, often on the basis of emerging technologies.

We also need to recognize the work-to-be done, not work already done!

Work to be done is the need for our future growth and well-being to be derived through innovation activities. These so much made up of intangible parts will provide the new wealth of organizations in the knowledge sharing economy of today and the near future.

We need new forms of evaluation to measure the real asset wealth of the organization to understand the points of intensity, their connected dynamics and what is required to reconfigure the changing capabilities and capacities needed to grow in the future. There is a lot of work to be done out there.

Shifting our investments into today’s more valued capital- Innovation
It is how much we are able to adapt to fast-moving changes that will determine our success. It is the combination of the sum of our capital and knowing what factors and assets contribute to making our innovation capital that will determine the ‘health’ of our future.

I think it is essential going forward that we need significantly increase our innovation capital focus, so it can be fully unlocked, so as to release the true dynamics within the system and structures of our organizations to realize innovation’s potential.

For me, Innovation Capital and its make-up is where we need to focus, understand and invest. It drives our ability to create and sustain value creation.

The post Exploring the Value Of Your Innovation Capital first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When you pause and consider the make-up of Innovation Capital you realize it makes such an economic contribution and in a report from McKinsey & Co, they have set about identifying this to produce the above summary, covering 16 countries, to understand the real value of this Innovation Capital.

These numbers are big and still don’t fully capture everything associated with innovation as much remains ‘hidden’ or ‘attached’ to other activities as well.
We need to shift our thinking on what makes up Innovation Capital

The shift taking place in recognizing that our capital is well beyond ‘just’ financial is rapidly altering organization investment decisions. The McKinsey approach has set about capturing a broader understanding of innovation than R&D alone.

Innovation and its value creation goes well beyond just R&D, it is made up of a broad range of intangible assets that are firm-specific and due to this, they are being recognized as hard to replicate, providing a growing edge over competitors if they are identified and invested in correctly.

In this report they considered the broader aspects of Innovation Capital capturing software, design, market research, training and new business processes as well as spending by governments and through tertiary education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

The value of this inclusive approach

By taking this inclusive approach to innovation spending they were suggesting allowed them to document better the investments underlying innovation, to see the greater “innovation infrastructure”

We are clearly seeing the continued increase in the valuations given to certain organizations, up to 80% of the value is coming from the intangibles, with the vast majority of our business organizations are really slow in getting to grips with identifying what is making up this value in their premium.

The urgency for us all, each organization, is to identify the investments and the returns as the innovation impact offered by McKinsey’s report is delivering a significant business case for understanding and recognizing the strategic importance of identifying and developing all your innovation capital.

Just go back and re-look at the graphic above for investing in Innovation Capital for its impact and implications for each of us.

Recognizing Innovation Capital is really important

So the make-up of innovation capital is big, I mean really big, this might help generate a greater innovation wake-up call. In a report from McKinsey and Co, called “Innovation matters: Reviving the growth engine” and first presented at the G8 leaders Innovation Conference, in London on 14 June 2013.

This report quantifies the importance of innovation in driving productivity growth and sets out the actions that governments and societies can take to build “Innovation Capital.”

The paper offered is stimulating the need for building the “innovation infrastructure” for our growth and as a key capability for our organizations and countries.

Where to start in specifically identifying Innovation Capital?

Within the McKinsey report they break down Innovation Capital into three components. These are:

Physical Capital is formed by investments in information and communication equipment (ICT) and across the countries analysed it represents 16 per cent of the Innovation Capital.

Knowledge Capital is formed by investments that build firms’ intellectual property and brand equity, including investments in computerized information, R&D and marketing investments, as well as relevant research in universities. It represents 60 per cent of Innovation Capital across the countries McKinsey analyzed.

Human Capital is formed by investments in building individual or organizational skills that drive productivity growth. This includes public and private investments in tertiary STEM education, employer-based training programmes and investments to develop organizational efficiencies (e.g., redesign of business processes or review of business models more broadly). Across countries analysed it represents 24 per cent of Innovation Capital.

It is important to recognize that McKinsey has captured and measured these to produce the impressive impact that innovation capital has. Is your organization identifying these for assessing their innovation capital? Most probably not.

Finding our innovation uniqueness

The make-up of our Innovation Capital are unique to each organization and highly valuable, I’d argue the report by McKinsey on its contribution is still significantly understated but a terrific step forward in attempting to quantify it.

It is the pivotal role of people as innovation carriers – their networks, collaborations, knowledge flows, interactions and tacit knowledge – and how innovation itself is a potent competitive force that drives productivity.

All this is often hidden in plain sight as our people are innovation’s active ingredient, the catalyst that turns novelty into real benefits.
Innovation capital is a big win if we can harness it well.

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I wrote at the time we can have a surprisingly strong influence on impact, as we are in a highly connected world. It is through our organizing and influencing abilities we can all partly determine our innovation future.

I suggested we have nine impact points to consider:

1. What are the triggers to growth
2. How do we deal with our legacy issues
3. What will offer us improving performance
4. The place of tacit knowledge
5. Our ability to build platforms and road-maps to build engagement.
6. The absolute skill of execution
7. How we set about adapting to change
8. What is important to empower and provide trusting environments
9. How should we measure success in appropriate impact.

So let me take this one step further.

For me the book “The Medici Effect” written by Frans Johansson holds an important place in my thinking. “Our breakthrough insights are at the Intersections of ideas, concepts and cultures” and it is the potential of exploring these intersections comes our high points of impact.

Impact has to have reasons, it has to unite and it has to have understanding of what gives it that different ‘impact’.

Our leadership today has tended to forget “positive” impact within their chase of the short-term; they are contributing more “negative” impacts in the pursuit of immediate gain. We need to institute a change in thinking.

Recently a new book came out, called “Moments of Impact” written by Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon. It is a wonderful book in that it describes the pathway to how too “design strategic conversations that accelerate change”. It tackles the way to deliver complex questions in clear ways and brings back that critical understanding of “empathy” for broader groups to relate to, by listening, detecting patterns and then they can be deciphered in what needs changing.

So our ability to listen, to discern patterns and to seek out new impact points through more intersection points does offer for a real potential to really change the game. These can be at global, organizational, social, competitive and personal levels of impact.

Where do we start to deliver positive impact though?

Besides reading the two books mentioned above let me lay out the purpose in a group of ideas where one feeds off of the other, they mutually reinforce each other. The strength is in the combining forces.

There are a group of ideals I like to offer up as ones to ‘gather around’ for higher impact returns, to ‘enable’ our potential. These are:

• We need to connect new knowledge with increasing good emerging practice
• We need to foster increasingly the trust and identification needed to explore and exploit
• We need to strengthen our alignments and look to offer appreciation more
• We need to build within ourselves more responsiveness and agility
• We need to understand the impact of our actions and decisions and what these really mean to our business, the society and the people within it
• We have to reduce leakage- that constant knowledge loss that leads to depreciation within our performances, we need to constantly renew ourselves.
• We need to sharpen our minds and gain more confidence in the choices we are making, the avenues of our creation to lead towards a new wealth, growth and set of values.

Where I put my focus is on the intersections of combining four value building vectors

Firstly we have innovation

Innovation needs a sharper meaning and focus within our organizations, it needs to be ‘crafted’ far more, and it needs to have a greater alignment and validation. It needs increased facilitation and understanding. We need to change many of our existing innovation practices that we perform into ones that deliver this increasing impact.

We need to look simply beyond ‘just’ innovation in product and services, we have to link this more into our social needs, to design different business models that give opportunity for different organization design, agility and vitality.

We are far too often stuck in the incremental mode and must find ways to get out of this rut or we never achieve ‘real impact’ and move the growth needle to a stronger value point.

Secondly we need to seek out more value-based relationships.
These need to be broader, closer and allowed to be more imaginative in cooperation and outcomes. We need to seek out different ‘pools’ of knowledge and complementary expertise.

We should leverage for all it’s worth our collaborative, network, technology skills to explore and push boundaries for discovery.

We need to have in place some mechanisms that allow for a greater choreographing of specific events and growing knowledge understanding to be able to come together due to this value-based set of relationships so we provide for more moments of impact.

Third, we need to enhance economic value as our business goal

This comes through clarity of purpose, alignment and collaboration. We need to scan our markets, our competitors and the changes constantly happening in our market environments to gather increased insights. We need to hone our selection and design of new solutions by better scanning and investigating,

We need to think of impact in different ways, ways like containment, improvement, reduction, improvements and efficiency. We need to consciously seek strategies that DRIVE growth.

Lastly, we have the application of knowledge to learn and apply

We need to learn how to trade in the new economy, the one called the idea economy. This is the place where we learn, grow, seek out impact and grow. It is the intelligence within our broader capitals, those often called the intellectual capitals made up of social, human, structural, relationship and learning.

It is by finding new combinations within these different capitals we learn to combine resources, capabilities and competencies in new and different ways. To achieve a growing positive impact we need to develop problem-solving abilities, we need to be allowed to visualize far more and to explore these ‘concepts’ more freely.

We need to focus on the creation, exchanging and acquisition of new knowledge. We need to release all the ‘idle capital’ that lies all around us to bring it back into contributing value.

We need to combine these four intersections for seeking out the positive impact.
It is finding the future value-creating points where you can extract the hidden values waiting to be discovered.

We need to promote the “thinking experience” and develop in us all the three parts, firstly of inductive thinking through direct observation, then the use of deductive thinking from analysis and logic and finally, the abductive thinking of determining what could be possible and valuable

We need to relearn how we work, how we think and how we search to combine. Our knowledge learning capacities provide the solutions to the delivery of high impact areas where we all gain in growth and wealth creation.

A time to re-equip ourselves in new ways is way overdue.

It is time we learn how to combine these intersections within our organizations. It is partly a rediscovery but it is far more a growing discovery of what is simply all around us, waiting for the right way for it to be found.

This comes from a ‘greater’ combining of different ideas, seeking out new combination, exploring different intersections that can lead to new insights for breakthroughs for innovation to happen, and then delivering these higher-value impact points we need to prosper and thrive.

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To achieve a faster response we certainly need to educate the organization more than ever.
We need to absorb more, we need to encourage learning more especially to pursue innovation.

We need to actively set up learning ways within our organizations to establish their abilities to recognize the value of new, external information (knowledge), assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends.

Innovation within the organization needs not just greater recognition of its vital parts, but also of its status as a value-enhancing and organizational life-changing event that we need to move towards increasingly in more organized ways.

Innovation needs to be recognized as a clear discipline, new expertise that is as powerful as Marketing became some decades ago.
Seeking out knowledge that feeds our innovations
The more we embrace change and recognize innovation demands more of our time, the more we seek out knowledge that ‘feeds’ innovation.

The more we ‘push’ for learning, the greater chance we have of thriving in a challenging world.

The expectation ‘bar’ needs to be raised from those practising innovation, I feel the constant need is for those working within innovation they have this real need to raise their game significantly. Innovation needs organizing but it also needs a better understanding of its contributing parts.

Learning and Education should always start at home.

The earlier we learn, have open interactions and form linkages, the more we will be ready to advance innovation into what it must become: a discipline highly valued for what it contributes with in terms of wealth and growth potential.

We need to find the determination to underpin the capacity for innovation, lying within us all, and that comes from knowledge and education through collaborative learning. So what is your capacity for innovation really like within your organization?

Is the learning required for innovation set up in structured ways or left to individual learning and experimentation?

Do either structured or informal ways feed back into the organizational learning system to benefit others? Or is the knowledge gained just left ‘resident’ in the person, not being put to that greater use?

Knowledge exchange is the way forward but we need to avoid the easy paths.
Organizations need to move well beyond their lazy reliance on best practice comparison and they need to find better ways to explore emerging practices.

But that takes many into the realm of increasing uncertainties, and most people and organizations are not trained for this exploration and experimentation.

It is easy to copy but we often fail to recognize all the contextual factors that went into making it that one specific organizations good practice, and I guarantee these are not yours!

Best practice has their comparable uses but it is your focusing on the good and emerging practices within your own organization is the area to focus, for learning and wanting to improve into those that make your practices really work. Then applying, experimenting and learning from novel practices that provide growing confidence in creative thinking.

Also give some thought for next practice, those practices that prompt reinvention. They start such totally fresh thinking, they challenge existing paradigms and move you towards considering new business models.

Organizations constantly anticipate risk by reducing all the variables within risk and play safe with just being incremental. Is that wrong? No, as long as we have our reward systems geared to short-term performance, while we measure leadership success the way we presently do, and the shareholder just expects consistent dividends as their part of the equation and is quickly mobilized to force change if it does not meet this immediate aim, we head down the wrong path.

We are not sustaining our organization and we are not advancing ourselves either, we are destroying much in our current approaches. We do need to focus more on the competence-enhancing not competence-destroying aspects.

We need to re-balance the “risk and opportunity” to push our use of new knowledge into fresh innovation that ‘advances’ on the existing.

To recognize the difference we need to encourage knowledge to be ‘freely’ exchanged, and then provide the environment to encourage a re-educating on ‘seeing and exploring’ new possibilities that allow us to grow.

Shifting the knowledge needle takes real commitment

Can we recognize that choosing the tougher pathway of building our own distinct capabilities, learning block by learning block, is the right one to follow.

This allows us to build capacities that are ours, seeking out the knowledge to build the absorptive capacity that acquires, assimilates, transforms and exploits, so as to give us greater chances of finding new innovation that is valued and allows us all to grow and gain from this dedicated learning.

I can’t change our prevailing system but I can point to alternatives and suggest we have other options, ones pursued by the few, which are more visionary and brave and often disrupt the accepted.

These are building on novel and unique practices, extracted not from others’ best practices but from emerging practices learn by deliberate design and our own personal experiences, formed within our organization’s unique view of the take on their place in the world.

Finding our own way relies mostly on us to find the answers. We grow by seeking out knowledge as it feeds our minds to find unique ways to contribute and share.

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Innovation happens all around us, same as with our places where we live- it is determined by many factors but given a choice we want to live somewhere nice, safe and hopefully going up in value!

The same with innovation we want it to be good, attractive, useful and valued by many, hopefully, willing to part with their money because it fulfils their need.

Innovation should always start of by being placed in its appropriate context otherwise it will lose its initial connection, dilute in the eventual value and arrive as less desirable because we somehow and somewhere went off track

We lost the context because we never really established the real ‘sense of purpose’ for that specific innovation or given direction to explore.

Why do I believe context is the king when it comes to innovation?

The power of context shifts everything and then gives it ‘shape’. It provides the conditions and the circumstances of time and place and why we need to find and deliver something different. It provides the innovation marching orders.

If we place innovation in a certain set of contexts, then those setting about the task are more sensitive to the needs and understanding, they can relate or can reject this. It can allow them to work more clearly and effectively, not necessarily efficiently as innovation is inherently messy.

Context gives us certain guard rails or borders to help gain a more united focus. Where we go after that, by pushing those borders will depend on those involved by seeing a greater value in an evolving context of mutual understanding. The ‘setting it in context’ allows for dialogue, adding more value to the thinking.

If we don’t know why we are doing something in our innovation activities, there is a good chance we will just stop innovating and switch to auto-pilot. We become disinclined to be creative as we don’t understand the “what for”. Knowing the context allows us to engage.

Context needs to also become, increasingly the arbitrator of success. Around this, you form your community that seeks out the possible solutions to this. 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.

Context must lead, functionality and capability then follow

There is a flow for improving innovation performance. If we don’t frame the business context how can we compare and contrast?  How do we know what we are missing or what it is meant to be achieving? When we go about seeking out opportunities we need to understand the context these are placed in, the avenue of competitive advantage the new solution is attempting to address.

This requires a ‘decent’ vision, often beyond a product brief that might be adjusted as we learn more, it needs to fit into the context of our business strategy and goals, our ambitions of what we want innovation to achieve. We need to have something we can measure ‘it’ against with all the commitment of time and resource.

We need to give our search for innovation some function and form. We begin to reveal our ‘gaps’ when we have a ‘reasonable clue of where we are heading.

Then we each have of our personal contexts that form our identity and motivations to help in delivering the innovation, these will lead us into our performance and contribution. Here by knowing the context does helps us assess if we have the capabilities in knowledge, skills, experience and expertise to deliver on the context or not.

Knowing the context actually empowers us, it gives us the reference points of our engagement. It allows us to work towards plugging those gaps to lead to improved functionality and capabilities gained.

We can apply our capacities to absorb and learn.

We can become adaptive. We can set about acquiring, assimilating, transforming and exploiting knowledge far better if we know the context it is needed to be applied. I wrote an article on absorptive capacity recently where I stated “The value of absorptive capacity is that when organizations have some prior knowledge they are more receptive to adding new understandings and new ideas”

The lessons of placing ‘it’ in context are powerful. We are more than sensitive to change; it can be a negative or positive experience. If we place great attention to context always, in our conversations, in our goal setting, in our innovation work it becomes one of the powerful enablers of bringing about change.

Context does not just ‘set’ but it ‘allows’ innovation to happen.

You are putting knowledge into the hands of the people willing to make it happen. Allow them to invent, to brainstorm, and to generate concepts, prototypes because alongside the mantra of “context, context, and context” you place equally “people, people, people” as innovation only happens through people.

You give each person the explicit encouragement, by laying these in the right context, then you can simple ‘get out of the way’ and let them go to work in delivering innovative solutions to that context. You are all working off of the same, often ‘dynamic’ page, as the innovation evolves, so does the context get refreshed. Innovation takes on a distinct identity for all involved.

Of course context is going to be fluid

It is going to be needed to be adaptive as we learn but it will be placed in ‘certain bounds’. If we start from a much clearer starting base then the learning and discovery allows people to want to find solutions as they gain increased knowledge and provide fresh inputs, they begin to strongly relate.

The innovation activity becomes eventually a thriving community working in the innovation context where new beliefs can be practised, expressed and nurtured.  As Malcolm Gladwell put it in his book “The Tipping Point :How little things can make a big difference”, the lesson is in the value of the Power of Context.

Context sets us the dancing music, the ‘one-step, two-step’ of learning and knowing, searching and discovering. As we ‘tune in’ we begin to move and respond, it sets the conditions to build the rhythm needed for innovation.

It allows for the further steps, the pivotal ones, those that lead you to a better chance of producing winning innovation simply by knowing the critical aspect of “it’s”context.

Context gives our innovation activity its meaning and sense of purpose.

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