There is this consistent need or pressure to grow, yet that specific needle stays stubbornly stuck in low growth numbers, even with all this innovation talk and desire. Why is that? We know you simply grow a business by choosing a mix of investing in innovation, merger, and acquisitions or releasing your resources into more profitable activities. Innovation as a dedicated activity still sits uncomfortably within many organizations.

To try and catalyze growth, companies undergo perennial reorganizations, often to revitalize themselves. According to a Deloitte report, 50 percent of companies are undergoing an organizational transformation, yet only 11 percent think they will succeed. What’s worse, 70 percent of transformation programs do fail. In these failures, we only seem to continue to layer on complexity as a further stop-gap measure.

It is no wonder we’re growing increasingly pessimistic about making a positive change to a different transforming model within organizations. Without innovation taking a more leading transforming role, most of our established companies will continue to struggle to break out of their existing approach to business. Far too many are mired in a past business mindset.

One basic argument is that no matter what we do to undertake change, we seem stuck in the Industrial Age of the last century. We claim we are in the innovation age, one where a digital transformation will finally transform us, yet it remains elusive. I recently came across the below illustration of the struggles we seem to be having, in changing our companies from the industrial age to the innovation age. It depicts much of the constraints around how people are still working.

Source: www.swarmvision.com

What is holding this innovation age back?

To start, we face strong countervailing forces that restrict our abilities to break out of our past to move towards a new way of working. Pursuing old business paradigms of how a company should be run is not helping us.

Is it because of this traditional way of working, designed into the company, that we are all becoming disengaged and disenchanted with what we do? We’re often left feeling powerless to influence the type of change that we want to see, to release our creative juices and not simply to make those quarterly reporting numbers or get caught up in constant cutbacks when they don’t meet market expectations.

We are increasingly facing very different competitive pressures. This is a very “VUCA world” – the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of general conditions and situations we operate within. Pressures are not just external. We often bring them upon ourselves, as we were not anticipating, investing, and looking to build a different type of business. We fail to invest in foresight and insight, continually not adapting and adjusting our organizational skill set around a more agile, adaptive, highly responsive innovating and creative organization.

Every time we begin to call on innovation, we face negative forces. These are the ways we still wish to judge business – on its short-term results and its ability to limit risks. To give returns to shareholders that safeguard their investments. To achieve this, we look for maximizing efficiency and focus on the continued extraction of value from our core. We talk about investing in the future, in making adjacency moves, and in encouraging risk – but is that really the case?

For many, risk management has never been seen beyond the protection of the status quo. This attitude toward a risk-containment approach restricts innovation. It is actually limiting or even sacrificing the future by not investing in all the aspects of growth, especially bold explorations of new growth avenues. They fail to invest in a clear, distinctive capability of innovation capacities, that is fully integrated within their organization. Innovation stays outside the current core.

I am not proposing we abandon the need to protect our investments and to provide a reasonable return for investors. Instead, I’m suggesting more of a conscious shift where we focus on building more effectiveness, extracting more synergies, and exploring greater growth options.

Can you imagine having the same number of people involved in innovation growth as we have that manage the finances of a business? In most companies, we have small, dedicated innovation teams of five to 10 people trying to take on this Herculean task of growing a business through innovation. They are reliant on engaging others, focusing on their specialized areas to hand over their time to innovation. This is often above and beyond their daily job responsibilities.

Approaching innovation in this highly constrained way is simply not a recipe for success even though in recent years we have been trying to make the subject of innovation more attractive by tempting people to join in and participate in multiple ways.

Extracting innovation has become very complex

Let’s all agree that we live in a complicated world. We are continually witnessing growing threats all around us. Competitors are disrupting – even ones who were not around 12 to 24 months before. We see mergers, closures, or once great beacons of industry shrink before our eyes due to new alternatives. I have in mind here GE and the dramatic restructuring pain it is currently going through. We feel increasingly unsafe unless we happen to be one of those sitting in a technology-related business where growth has been extraordinary in recent years (e.g., Apple, Alibaba, Amazon).

But first, when you think of innovation, what comes to mind?

Source: European Commission

In “Opportunity Now: Europe’s Mission to Innovate,” a 2016 European Commission report (a mere 360 pages long), the author makes this point:

“Innovation is also more complex than ever. Complexity, chaos, and non-linearity have been seen since the 1970s as the defining features of our age. But still, our advanced societies find it hard to make robust policy for a complex innovation system.”

We should always start by recognizing innovation as a complex system. As the report defines, a complex system is a place where:

• no one can have a complete map of the actors and forces at play,
• the system’s behavior is not simply the sum of the behavior of those parts,
• feedback loops surprise us and change the behavior of the system,
• the system is “autopoietic”: behaving in a self-driven way and not just in ways we have yet to understand.

The report also questions, quite rightly, that having a pipeline theory as too simple. The author suggests innovation is not like a Roman aqueduct, designed to allow water to flow; instead, it’s a “muddy pond,” rich but obscure.

That is not a comfortable view for business leaders determined to limit risk, maximize resources and be consistent to extract efficiency and be fully effective. Innovation flies in the direct opposite to this need of corporate design. So, we have become highly creative for innovation to be allowed to operate under the same roof as these efficiency and extraction rules and regimes.

We have come up with multiple ways to exploit innovation. It can contribute to the business model, explore the margins, undertake core renovation work, experiment, and prototype, and be completely new to the world. But it always seems to be divided up in different parts of the business. I often feel innovation activities within companies are a continuing set of experiments, needed but not systemized, fragmented in its potential energy by this underlying need to keep it under control and to minimize risk and feel exposure.

Are we dissipating innovation resources or recognizing that one-size does not fit all?

We are fragmenting much within innovation. Is this good or bad for the longer-term? “The Ten Types of Corporate Innovation Programs,” an article was written by Jeremiah Owyang, founder of Catalyst Companies, provides a terrific list of possible types of innovative programs to consider. But by adopting too many, you fragment and possibly dissipate your innovation resources. Owyang offers a good description and examples that make this a highly useful reference point. Which do you undertake or are actively considering?

Many others are emerging beyond these ten types, where “open” sets the tone for building creative spaces, in lab designs or investment by different avenues of VC funding, internally and externally.

To begin with, these ten types of corporate innovation programs form a good starting point to consider what works for you. Which strategies can push innovation further down or out of the company and help move the growth needle for your innovation program? Check out Owyang’s description below.

The Ten Types of Strategy for Corporate Innovation Programs

 1. Dedicated Innovation Team

Corporations often start with staffing an innovation team within the company of full-time employees dedicated to developing the strategy, managing, and activating innovation programs. These leaders are experts at internal communications and are change agents.
Example: MasterCard, Hallmark, and BMW all have innovation teams dedicated to new business ideas, as does Nokia. Learn how Nokia’s innovation team works here.

2. Innovation Center of Excellence

Innovation can’t happen in a single group; without broader institutional digestion, new ideas will falter and fall. Some corporations are setting up cross-functional, multi-disciplinary groups to share knowledge throughout the company.
Example: Various retailers and consumer packaged goods companies enable this. Read: Creating the Physical Space for Innovation

3. Intrapreneur Program

Rather than rely solely on external programs, internal employees – dubbed “intrapreneurs” – are given a platform and resources to innovate. These programs invest in employees’ ideas and passions to unlock everything from customer experience improvements to product enhancements and full-blown internal startups that are then launched from within the company.
Example: Adobe’s Kickbox program is widely recognized as the leading program. Read: Exploring the Intrapreneurial Way in Large Organizations

4. Open Innovation: Hosted Accelerator or Corporate Incubator

Hosted inside a corporate office, large corporations invite startups to embed at their physical locations and provide them with funding, corporate support, and other perks. This brings innovative startups inside a large company for everything from overnight hackathons to long-term programs. Other variations include online open-innovation programs that request – and often reward –ideas from the crowd.
Example: Allianz Digital Labs in Munich hosts startups, and GE Garages enables startups to partner.

5. Innovation Tours

Frequently inspiration comes from outside, not within. Corporate leaders tour innovative organizations, companies, and regions to discover trends in various industries, learn from speakers, meet partners, and be inspired as they immerse themselves in innovation culture.
Example: European-based WDHB and Nexxworks tour executives in Silicon Valley and beyond. See an example of an innovation lab tour from the University of California San Diego here.

6. Innovation Outpost

A dedicated physical office, such as in Silicon Valley or wherever innovation happens in their market, staffed with corporate innovation professionals whose job is to sense what’s occurring in a market, connect with local startups, and integrate programs back into the corporate HQ. Some of them host partners, events, and startups, thereby spreading the function to Internal Accelerator programs. An Innovation Outpost is typically managed by employees – unlike an External Accelerator, which is run by a third party.
Example: Swisscom, Vodafone, and Nestle have opened Silicon Valley outposts. Read Evangelos Simoudis’ blog for insights.

7. External Accelerator

Corporations partner with third-party accelerators to provide sponsorship and/or funding in exchange for relationships with startups and integration opportunities. Corporate innovation professionals often embed themselves in Accelerator offices, fostering relationships with local startups. These External Accelerators are run by third parties – unlike Innovation Outposts, which are managed by employees.
Example: Plug and Play, Singularity University, Rocketspace, Runway, 500 Startups, Betaworks, and more.

8. Technology Education, University Partnership

Corporations can tap into new graduates, early-stage projects and companies, and the network of an established educational institution. In addition to traditional universities, there are new private versions opening up that are dedicated solely to technology training, like Galvanize and General Assembly.
Example: General Assembly, Galvanize, and most tech- or business-focused universities.

9. Investment

Many corporations place bets among the startup ecosystem, with both small amounts for early-stage startups and larger amounts of corporate funding that yields market data, creates opportunities for follow-on investments, and blocks competitors.
Example: Intel Capital is a leader in direct corporate investments.

10. Acquisition

Rather than build innovation from the inside, many corporations acquire successful startups and then integrate. While often expensive, the startup is often already successful, and the acquisition can help the startup scale further.
Example: As one example, Dollar Shave Club was purchased by Unilever for a reported $1B.

Source: Jeremiah Owyang. Some additional links also applied where relevant.

Are we fragmenting our innovation activities or applying a solution to a specific problem?

We do have to guard against “simply” adopting one type of innovation over another. It needs a deeper understanding of what we want to achieve, and then we seek out the tools, methodologies, and solutions. Diving in and experimenting has some value, but some clarity in what you want to build in innovation capacity makes sense first.

If we apply one approach, we are in danger of “shoehorning” innovation to fit a program. Maybe we are then not allowing the idea or innovation we had in mind to evolve in its own way – in its natural path. Perhaps we are only responding to a top-down pressure of fitting initiatives into that same pattern of seeking efficiencies that fit within an organizational design that will eventually choke innovation.

We need a new call for change based on a focused innovation mindset

For the majority today, we are at this countervailing point where innovation is in need of breaking the impasse. We need a different, more holistic set of solutions to manage innovation.

What I want to look at in a series of articles in the coming months is how we can manage risk from innovation differently. How can we build and accelerate different corporate innovation programs? How can we begin to re-equip our talent to build their capabilities and capacities and to recognize that we can design innovation differently to engage in innovation in more transparent, more structured, and more open ways? How can we design our programs more purposefully?

There is a call for finding more methods and approaches that are open and scale well. We need to reset the baseline of innovation through knowledge, collaborations, and building capabilities. We need to build networks and systems designed for this explicit innovation purpose. Let us finally separate “extraction” from “exploration” in the design of companies. We need to strip away complexity within the way we practice innovation today and connect “it” all up in a new innovative design.

***This post was originally provided for Hype and has been republished here

The post Why Are We Making Innovation So Complex? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation is often under needless threat

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

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

Managing the different strata or layers always needs careful management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rainforests have different soil types, so does innovation

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

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

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

Rainforests can be dense and impenetrable, so can innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m talking here more about the larger, more established organizations confusions on approaching business model innovation, not the start-ups or the younger businesses. We struggle to get an established well defined approach to approaching business models in these more established organizations. I think there are multiple reasons and I’ve touched on some in past posts.

Is help on the way or are we about to layer on more confusion?

I know there are plans on there way where the combined minds and efforts of Henry Chesbrough, Steve Blank and Alexander Osterwalder are entering the fray even more, in a new educational offering at UC Berkley in late October. I think there is ‘stand-alone’ modules as well in their respective works, especially over at Strategyzer, Alex’s mix of tools, software, academy and on- line resource around the BMI.

Their focus at this Berkley short course will be on developing new sources of growth, by helping companies figure out ways to drive the development of new business models within their company.

They are acknowledging that this isn’t the same thing as a crafting a business model for a brand new start-up, working with a clean sheet of paper.  http://executive.berkeley.edu/programs/corporate-business-model-innovation. Instead, they will examine how to get the most out of the parent company, while avoiding the traps that “help” from the parent company can entail.

The plan is to be introduced to new concepts in business model innovation, open innovation strategies, and applying start-up models in a corporate context. The program will guide participants to reshape their thinking, assumptions and business strategies, to create and restructure teams to inspire innovation.

I have to be honest here; I’m a little nervous that this might just be adding more confusion but let’s wait and see if this does the job. I hope it does not rehash what is already available. A two-day course can be incredibly constraining or equally done well, I mean really well, then it is just the opposite, liberating and defining.

Business Models should be about explicit choices.

Before we get into thinking about new business models, there is a lot of essential links or decoupling to be thought through within large organizations. Do you ever have blank canvases in large organizations? Maybe but the majority of decisions based on new business models might come with some form of organizational baggage.

My blank canvas moments in large organizations always held some constraints. These come in many different guises: there are both clear strategies (or should be) and much conflicting interpretations at each level within organizations, there are significant heritage and legacy issues to evaluate, there is a current set of operating models that might conflict or compliment any new business model design and then we can never ignore the detailed organizational design itself.

Here I’m talking about the make-up of IT, structure options available or achievable, the processes, governance, metrics, cultural, talent available and the organization-wide clarity on its priorities. Many of these actually ‘hold the business to ransom’ and if the CEO or board are not totally comfortable and have not thoroughly discussed it, new business models have a very hard time to work within the constraints known as well as hidden.

Then you have the outside forces at work, the ones that are most probably forcing the re-think or need for a new business model. These are the forces at work, have the context of markets changes or likely too, what are our present or emerging competitors doing differently than we are, what new capabilities and competencies are coming to bear and the whole context thing (macro, trends and technologies).

So the CEO or board are central to BMI’s to get off the ground and this must be the primary focal spot for discussing and educating around the Business Model. The vital message here is designing the pre-work to BM’s is the ‘sweet spot’ to get well designed and recognized, then more into the actual BM constructs and what is needed.

So what motivates change by considering new business models?

IBM conducted a survey some time back of the CEO’s ranking for exploring new business models. These were four ‘stand out’ ones of 1) Cost Reduction, 2) Strategic Flexibility, 3) Focus and Specialization, and 4) Rapidly Exploiting New Market or Product Opportunities. There were two more but these were the big four. These four certainly have huge scope behind when you think about them and can start any business model development discussions.

One way to explore these four ‘stand outs’ regarded by the CEO as the most important

If one takes a concept from a A D Little report on their view on business models I like their idea of their archetypes approach.  A launching point within any business model discussions within large organizations is to apply these ‘archetypes’ to the above four CEO needs.

The five outlined in A D Little’s report were asking open questions to see potential or not:

• Share the cake differently (novel ways, challenging traditional approaches, partnering)
• Supplant someone (they suggested the middleman in the report)
• Shift the cost curve structurally (deploying different asset bases)
• Redefine the customer experience (exploiting uniqueness and new values)
• Convert product into service or combine them.

Now I think  possibly working through the four needs of CEO’s and the five archetypes you really can get into exploring new business models in meaningful productive ways. A 4 x 5 matrix perhaps. The emphasis points within these discussions changes and the depth of conversation determines next steps.

Getting the framing right is the best argument for change

CEO’s and boards I believe always listen to well-argued cases where you can pin point failure or lost opportunity or new sources of potential revenue and growth. Getting this framing right in the first place, knowing what and why you believe you need a new business model becomes more valuable, a real catalyst to change and this is the powerful enabler to unite behind.

Surely this going back to getting the ‘need for’ is far more valuable initially to lay in the foundation than working through the principles and typical pros and cons of one design or approach over another. I think we can get caught up with this rush to justify and validate one specific business model or another? Is this the ‘cart before the horse?’ Or just enterprise kicking in?

Sell the compelling reason for making change by identifying a real need, work through if this can or cannot be completed through an existing design, and then throw yourself into all the ‘delights’ of  what makes up the components of business model design.

Are we starting in the right place or diving in by layering on more BM design?

Just a bit of a Monday morning reaction perhaps, but reading the different activity going on within cracking the business model code for adoption within large organizations that seems to be buzzing within the Business Model Community at present. I would suggest there needs to be some great care, otherwise we kills the goose, not fatten it up by building the right thinking and value proposition for what it could really offer large organizations!

Are we stepping back far enough and giving this the ‘helicopter’ treatment before we launch into further solutions, courses and seminars, maybe just fitting the existing frameworks into something  without the real stepping back this might need?

The post Are you a business model innovator? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’m undertaking a rather exciting approach to describing innovation, within a collaboration venture, that gets more exhilarating and inspiring as we explore, clarify and document. Regretfully I can’t share this here at present but I certainly will when it gets to that point of ‘release’.

Some of the different areas or themes I’ve been investigating have flowed from one set of enquiries that have taken me into another and then yet another.

These simply get my innovation juices flowing and really are allowing me to make so many new connections. Here is just a few of these in this last week that have emerged from some of my research that provide a host of thoughts:

Leaders & Laggards
In this group of investigations, I started in trying to gain a better perspective of the discussion of leaders and laggards and what differentiates them. Timely to these investigations has been some recent studies by Capgemini Consulting and IESE Business School with a recent leadership study “Managing Innovation: An Insider’s Perspective”
I’d suggest the slideshare presentation is well worth taking some time out to view and understand as it covers views from those leading and managing innovation in their organizations and how they think about the innovation function http://tinyurl.com/c9o7cuw

Then I have been reminded of the continued great work of Chris Zook and James Allen, both partners at the consulting firm, Bain & Company, in their article “The Great Repeatable Business Model” http://tinyurl.com/d483eqq
The message of differentiation and the level of focus on clear specific areas of innovation and its management makes a real difference for separating leaders and laggards.

Those that endure and adapt

In the article by Chris Zook and James Allen they speak of differentiation that tends to wear with age and often the real problem is internal. It is complexity and in this a complex organization forgets what it is good at, it proliferates, it losses key people, it moves away from its core business, it losses focus and it begins to have that ‘great disconnect’ between upper management and the front-line employees. It seems to me the organization just simply begins to break down and lags even more in performance and returns.

They go on and suggest a lack of consistency begins to kill the economies of scale and equally retards the organizations ability to learn that adds up to them struggling with increasing complexity and fading differentiation.

I was looking for some of the enduring points of what needs to be put into place. This was offered “When a company internalizes a set of principles, the message no longer gets garbled. A shared point of view, core beliefs, and a common vocabulary improve everyone’s ability to communicate and foster self-organization.”

They go on and suggest “this increases the speed of business, you capture more growth opportunities ahead of competitors and accomplish more per unit of time.”

I also liked one comment they made that “up and down the organization, information slows and grows distorted.” I would suggest without a clear knowledge capturing and dispersing structure for information this is not the only thing that gets distorted, often it is the real values of the innovation activities themselves.

Those products or concepts that emerge eventually as completely out of shape from what was intended initially, due to this complexity within the decision and approval process, become totally different before something eventually gets ‘out of the door’ in finished design. So much gets lost or ‘distorted’ along the way and the end result becomes far too compromised on the customer need it was intended to resolve.

Innovation effort may not be worth it

Equally I always enjoy the thinking of Vijay Govindarajan and in a recent article along with Manish Tangri entitled “Why that innovation effort may not be worth it” http://tinyurl.com/847ah4c they discuss two key factors of motivation and competence and how you can put your organization and its leaders to the test.

They ask two great questions “How hungry are you for innovation?” and “Is the initiative set up for success”. I did like the point made of “a leader provides direction under ambiguity” and how many of our leaders would be truly comfortable in doing this?

Looping back we need to ask  how far are you from your core?

We come back to increasing complexity, straying from our core, communicating mixed messages, showing a clear lack of decisiveness.  If your innovation message is not sharp and convincing up and down your organization, or even understood by your customers you eventually lose out, you become even more of a laggard and allow others to slip away into clear leaders.

Part of our need in organizations is to stop breaking down the parts, layering on that increased complexity. We should be designing the innovation framework and system to clarify and inspire more. We need to reinforce more on where the key differentiation points are. We need to be sharper in our understanding of true differentiation and stick to this.

The key here is the real need to simplify and focus down within organizations.  Also we need to seek consistency wherever we can, in communications, in our strategic intent and in our dialogues to clarify. We tend to do the opposite, we make it too complex and this is killing innovation, killing growth, killing organizations.

Above all we need to work up and down the organization with some clear, compelling messages that give clarity, allows for the necessary linkages and make sure the parts reinforce one another.

The last part of my walkabout in my research was “Creative Destruction”.

I recently wrote a blog “The Innovating Era: Creative Destruction or Destructive Creation?” http://tinyurl.com/dyy964s and in particular the destructive creation part and how this was destroying more than what was coming in its place.

I finished with this comment: “All I hope is it will let us make sure we put the emphasis back far more on the “creative” innovation part and not the ‘destructive’ nature we have moved towards recently”.

Chris Zook has just written on this “When Creative Destruction Destroys More than it Creates” in the last week in an HBR blog http://tinyurl.com/7pe8qvf and makes an important point (in my mind) that “the extinction of once-great innovators is less often caused by technological or market evolution, and more often by self-inflicted wounds and slow cycles of decision and adaptation.”

He brings us back to the point “it is internal complexity that turns companies into lumbering dinosaurs.” The suggestion is, if we can’t keep ourselves clear on simplicity and focus and really tackle complexity as this is the “silent killer of profitable growth,” and “the greatest inhibitor of adaptability”.

Leading the way does falls to leaders.

My last extraction was from another lead and laggard viewpoint:  “A leader doesn’t tell people what to do. A leader helps people understand what needs to be done and brings the people and resources together to make it happen”

We need to focus on our greatest strengths but to do this we do need to understand them. It seems to me, so many leaders surprisingly don’t have a clue on how and where innovation can contribute in lasting differentiation, where the growth should be coming from or how to galvanise the organization to be simply on the same page to make sure it can happen.

We need some consistency in how we set about innovation.  Sometimes what simply scares me is that this basic task is often missed off the leader’s agenda to actually make sure it is happening, often because they have not been fully involved or understood their role in this.

The post Making those increasing connections first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’ve already written in previous blogs about the need of “constantly checking for the pulse of innovation” ( http://bit.ly/c3G0Ta) and suggesting the way to “open up your thinking to dynamic capabilities for innovation success” (   http://bit.ly/bxTeYO).

I’d like to take this one step further in this blog and outline my thinking on innovative fitness landscapes and why they are essential to understand.

Each organization needs to know its Innovation Fitness Landscape- why?

There is a pressing need for a firm is to consistently build and reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities to address rapidly changing environments.

It is the mastering of this ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in rapid changing market conditions that will enable certain organizations to emerge as the winners of the innovation race.

This view requires a more ‘dynamic’ set of capabilities. Often the question becomes one of “which are the critical ones to focus upon to improve the chance of greater success?
Knowing your fitness landscape does provide a good understanding of your existing position and set of capabilities and can ‘point’ you towards the ones that you need to have to move towards to have in place to improve your innovation capacity and achieve closer to your goals.

Survival of the fittest dominates

Each organization has limited resources, it is to know where to focus your limited resources to maximise your abilities to deliver better innovation.

The key is to map out those current innovation capabilities to the tasks (and aspirations) at hand and identify the opportunity spaces and gaps that need to be filled to match aspiration with abilities, so as to deliver against the stated strategic need.

It does seem Darwin seemingly raises his head in much of what we do to simply keep up and adapt. So we do need to understand innovation in more of its entirety not only to survive but to thrive.

So what are Innovation Fitness Landscapes?

“The greater the fitness to innovate will equate to more value creation potential.”

I believe we do need to provide a solution to this understanding the innovation challenge by constructing a more comprehensive framework.

Part of my present work is to find a working model to achieve this, I’m getting close.

It is this critical need of any business organization or country for wealth creation through (new) growth and successful innovation lies in understanding the path to achieving this. But what are the factors, the enablers to support this? It is by identifying the more dynamic capabilities and then plotting these to understand your existing ‘fitness’.

There is still today far too much of a ‘piecemeal’ approach in evaluating the inter-related dynamics needed for innovation still going on, both at Government and Organizational level. We need to see this differently, to tackle it in a more comprehensive manner.

If you can imagine that you are looking out over a range of mountains and valleys and you need to determine your journey to get from one point to another as your goal.

You need to understand your fitness and in this case your innovation fitness of what is needed to achieve your goals with the resources you have available or understanding what will bridge those gaps and transverse the challenges you face.

Let me explain this a little more.

Let’s mix the theory of fitness landscapes with your innovation objectives

• By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed- we call that the context for innovation.
• Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.
• Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determine the greater fitness for the rate of innovation.
• The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to provide the appropriate resources.
• The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced. You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.
• Greater fitness equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter‐couple landscape entities, to constantly combine the different capabilities in different often unique ways and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and does improve repeatable cycle times from this constant recreation potential.
• The key  is to know what these capability points are- by dynamic linking those that are important and ignoring those that are not.
• By learning from these experiments or adaptive walks you can quickly operationalize routines that can be quickly absorbed across the organization and so reduce uncertainties and strengthen the capabilities.
• The ability to create ‘natural tensions’ from this fitness learning triggers the need to further explore and search out different combinations, this adds even further to your dynamics of innovation understanding.
• Clear distinctive capabilities emerge; these are your dynamic points for innovation.

Act effectively amid uncertainty
There is a consistent need to keep looking around us; on what is going on, what has happened in the past, what is alongside us, what might be ahead and the people and resources we have available.

This is taught to anyone who wants to be well equipped in any mountainous area. We need to be prepared as best we can in business and be ready to anticipate different scenarios and predictions- to be ready to be more adaptive and agile. Innovation requires that.

It is knowing this so-called innovation terrain, understanding the opportunities or possibilities around us along with appreciating the time pressures, positions both internally and externally in the market that provide us much of the context of why we need to innovate in a certain way.

Knowing the intensity of your innovation challenge gives you a better appreciation of what is needed to resolve these challenges- your innovation fitness.

In our understanding of the often ‘diverse’ set of challenges you have to overcome and knowing what is available to you and what you need to find to bridge any gaps becomes essential. The obtaining of insights for innovation enables you to relocate or locate the resources that are capable to be combined to traverse the landscape (or challenge) and innovate better.

Innovation is complex but can be modelled.

Innovation is complex, it is the intricate and often multiple intertwined interactions and relationships that lead to innovation. The greater the connectivity and interdependence that spreads across the organization and externally in our more open innovation initiatives does affects the actions, decisions and behaviours throughout the whole innovation ecosystem. We often talk about the cultural and environment needed to innovate.

Knowing the inter-coupling points mapped out in an innovation fitness landscape, depicting the richness of individual interactions and combinations can alter the dynamics and your thinking of where you need to place your scarce resources to innovate better and in more sustainable ways.

Knowing what is dynamic, those critical determinants within your innovation capabilities do lead you to achieve new and innovative forms of competitive advantage.

I feel it is worth understanding your present fitness levels and knowing what is required to get you to become a more ‘fit’ for the purpose to innovate on a consistent, repeatable basis.

I feel it  is worth knowing, don’t you?

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