Are we in a more Darwinian world perhaps?

I’d suggest that today innovation is caught up in the survival race, where the bolder ones are more innovation fit and pulling further ahead. We need many more organizations to get out of this survival trap and exploiting innovation in bolder ways, become fitter in their innovating purpose.

So much of what we do actually is ‘static’ work, activities that are simply repeating what we have done time and time again, gaining us little new knowledge and offering poor value creating worth. These activities on their own keep us happily ‘treading water’ and does the job of locking us comfortably into the ‘efficient and effectiveness clan mindset that most business organizations like to be ^keep us all constantly working within.

The harsh reality is this is becoming a very crowded, increasing uncomfortable place to be, as we reduce our capabilities to take a risk, too invest, to take those decisions that create more radical innovation. If we don’t offer value creation, we become increasingly unattractive and not regarded as essential, simply disposable. The more we play ‘safe’ the more we run the risk of being disrupted. We are failing to leverage much of the liberating power within innovation. Is our business world today is it so predictable?  No, it is well and truly ‘dynamic’ and evolving.

There is an awful lot of creative destruction going on and I’ve also written previously about the Innovation Era: Creative Destruction or Destructive Creation where the replacement rate is constantly speeding up, we are facing more uncertainty and incoherence than ever.

We need to place the emphasis back on the “creative” innovation part and not the ‘destructive’ nature we have been moving towards recently. To achieve this we need to understand innovation far better than we currently do. This is partly where my exploring the dynamics of innovation through fitness landscapes comes in.

What we do need to do is constantly evolve our innovation capabilities to perform in more dynamic and flexible ways. We need to acquire that consistent aim of achieving a more adaptable and adjusting approach to innovation in all its parts. We need to meet the changing circumstances and challenges we are all facing to regain the real growth needed from our economies and organizations, making what we do at the same time, more sustainable. Delivering better innovation outcomes is central to this task.

Knowing your innovation ‘stock’ and ‘capital’ potential

So what do we need to do?

We need to know our ‘innovation stock’, a large part of our wealth generating capital and where it can be best put to use. We are valuing the knowledge perspective far more and with this, we are increasingly recognizing the importance of the intellectual capital that makes up the organization.

We certainly need to re-think many of the old world value delivery systems to assess organizations and make much more of a concerted effort to make innovation that renders different, unique value outcomes, that keep pushing the boundaries of strategic advantage within any business.

We need to ‘master’ our understanding of the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure, and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate innovation as this is increasingly needed for participating in more complex open collaboration efforts. To achieve this, we first need to know ourselves and our capacity to innovate, both the strengths and weaknesses.

Each organization does need to know its innovation fitness to thrive in the future

We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustainable into the longer-term. We need to find those capabilities that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ so they can be constantly adapted to meet the strategic need.

We are striving towards a true ‘innovation coherency premium’ in design, knowing what makes up your core dynamic components and how to bring them together for greater value-generating productive use. The outcomes of knowing where to invest, what to dampen down and what aspects can evolve naturally and be ‘taken along’ as you focus upon the ones that are more dynamic and relevant to your innovation needs are critical to understand and manage.

No journey is without pitfalls.

Finding the dynamic capabilities of innovation that ‘fit’ with the strategic needs of each organization will be different based on their own respective challenges and position. We need to stop simply copying others and create our own ‘dynamics’ to strengthen our own unique advantage points for sustaining our future. Do you want to become innovation fit?

The post Knowing where your innovation fitness comes from first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In contrast, dynamic capabilities are those higher level competencies that determine a firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure both the resources and competencies to possibly shape, have the power to transform and then be deployed to meet rapidly changing business environments to take advantage of these changing conditions.

Recognizing the importance of Dynamic Capabilities

Dynamic capabilities are about selecting the right things to do and getting them done, while ordinary capabilities are about doing things right. The former implicates dynamic efficiency, the latter static efficiency.

Dynamic capabilities require an organizational form that leverages the knowledge and capabilities of managers throughout the organization. In business firms with strong dynamic capabilities, the key tasks of managers, especially those in the top management team, are entrepreneurial. It’s not just a planning role; it’s also strategic. It involves planning along with engagement and enactment, it encourages agility.

Appreciating and leveraging those ordinary capabilities is equally essential

The stronger these ordinary capabilities can be ‘honed’ then organizations can go beyond performing basic business functions well and can excel in these. While most capabilities, including some dynamic capabilities, are underpinned by organizational routines, many of the activities of top managers are non-routine by nature.

The key entrepreneurial capabilities needed for asset orchestration and realignment of the enterprise often reside in the skills and knowledge of top managers, managing the routines and assets and respond dynamically when changes are happening to adapt and respond

Ordinary capabilities involve operations, administration, and managing the governance. They are rooted more firmly in routines that are dynamic capabilities. A routine is a repeated action sequence, which may have its roots in algorithms and heuristics about how the enterprise is to get things done. Organizational routines transcend the individuals involved.

Finding the right complementary blend of capabilities is a real challenge to achieve

The capabilities perspective views the enterprise as clusters of complementary assets that must be combined and coordinated to create value. The utilization of such assets, therefore, requires managerial action. Managers in the dynamic capabilities framework perform that role. They orchestrate and call into being, the assets that are vital to firm performance.

They determine the speed at which and the degree to which, the firm’s particular resources can be aligned and realigned to match the requirements and opportunities of the business environment in order to generate sustained positive returns.

The alignment of resources both inside and outside the firm includes assessing when and how the enterprise ought to form alliances and joint ventures with other organizations.

Understanding all your required capabilities needed is essential

Valuing and knowing both your ordinary repeatable capabilities, to enhance and improve existing performance and discovering those that are more dynamic in nature, to change performance more significantly are both critical to identify, build and support in both consistent and thoughtful ways. The key is knowing what is critical and then how to focus and invest in those that drive and sustain performance.

Investing in a mapping of your innovation fitness landscape can significantly contribute to this understanding and advance organizational performance in the critical areas that offer it present and future value.

Extracts have been drawn from the paper and built upon: “The Functions of Middle and Top Management in the Dynamic Capabilities Framework” by Sunyoung Lee and David J. Teece

The post Recognizing the different capabilities to develop and grow first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I felt it was time to make a restatement.

Let me restate what I am focusing upon here, in this work and why it has a separate, dedicated website to allow me to evolve and share in this discovery and thinking through journey.

So my hypothesis, hopefully covered off in this initial explanation is made on the basis of growing research and evidence, as an investigative point for further work-to-be-done in thinking and constructing around the plotting or mapping out specific innovation landscapes that deliver the innovation capabilities needed.

This work is now at a point it needs additional help to take this out further in a testing and experimental environment and I am looking for one or more ‘willing’ organizations to be the pilot for this to validate and further improve from the learning.

The Challenge I’m trying to Solve

Knowing what are the critical factors for innovation and their dependence for sustaining innovation success are becoming a vital necessity to understand so an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them. The question is, which are critical, which naturally occur when others begin to be put into place, which seem to have limited or no real effect on changing the dynamics of innovation?

Knowing these and having these clearer shown as a ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII) has real business value. Today, we lack a clear system model that brings the critical innovation factors out and gives them their appropriate values, and then can equally provide the ability to model different future states and conceive future scenarios through different impact-investments.

We need to recognize Resources are scarce and need constant renewal

We still don’t understand the ‘dynamics’ of innovation, the interdependency of the parts. Which parts have greater impact, which are not so important? Innovation is still not treated company-wide in a holistic way as recognition of the dependencies is poorly understood. This is what needs to change.

What and where do you place your resources to gain greater impact? What is important to recognize as needing additional ‘weight and focus’, what capability and competencies need to have a stronger emphasis and why? How can we identify these, make the innovation process more dynamic yet these embed constantly as routines? What would happen if we ignore certain innovation aspects, what would give greater impact to our business?

Why do I think Fitness Landscapes will help?

The pressing need for a firm is to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies/ capabilities to address rapidly changing environments and its ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in market position.

This calls for more ‘dynamic capability” to be achieved, to be available and constantly being built up as they are in flux and change. The basic question that needs to be addressed is “what is our dynamic capabilities and more importantly which critical ones should we focus upon to improve our capabilities and competences to innovate?”

The solution I am looking for offers Innovation Fitness landscapes by provide the understanding of the existing position and ‘point towards’ where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity to adjust and deliver the capabilities and capacities to meet the challenges on hand. Equally to project and forecast the gaps needing solutions to bridge.

Fitness Landscapes as a solution has its roots in Darwin.

In any competitive situation, the survival of the fittest dominates (Darwinian). Knowing your innovation fitness is essential in this race. The question often raised is where do we focus our limited resource to achieve a better fitness to be successful at innovation?

Mapping out innovation capabilities and capacities

Mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. Innovation Fitness Landscapes identify the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain and move towards greater and more successful innovation outcomes. The greater the ‘fitness’ and peaks obtained transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities and increasing tangible outcomes.

These critical factors that are identified give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged or diverse’ the landscape can also determine the greater fitness needed for a higher rate of innovation. The strength of the peaks in these landscapes illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse it potentially is to have resolved as contributing factors.
The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, you begin to make adaptive walks, so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and understanding is needed to be in place so as to resolve the challenges faced. Greater fitness equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter-couple landscape entities and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and improve repeatable cycle times and provides for increasing options to explore.

Moving towards a solution

I want to take this (pioneering) work out for testing and experimenting, to calibrate its framework so it delivers a strong rigor and validation to take out and scale further.  This is why I believe I am at a point of needing some invested time by a client or two to work on this with me in this testing, validation environment.

The solution is a framework that shows promise but it needs to go further from theory into practice. What are the mutual dependencies, how the innovation ‘system’ behaves, what are its more important impact factors which are weaker and what should be considered in the ‘best’ innovation environment?

The key is to know what are those capability points that are dynamic and highly relevant to the delivery of innovation, and dampening down the ones that are less so. A greater innovation fitness equates to more value creation potential as clear distinctive capabilities emerge as points of greater value, these are the dynamic points of your innovation need.

The post Restating the Value Proposition of Innovation Fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In contrast, dynamic capabilities are those higher level competences that determine a firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure both the resources and competences to possibly shape, have the power to transform and  then be deployed to meet rapidly changing business environments to take advantage of these changing conditions.

Recognizing the importance of Dynamic Capabilities

Dynamic capabilities are about selecting the right things to do and getting them done, while ordinary capabilities are about doing things right. The former implicates dynamic efficiency, the latter static efficiency.

Dynamic capabilities require an organizational form that leverages the knowledge and capabilities of managers throughout the organization. In business firms with strong dynamic capabilities, the key tasks of managers, especially those in the top management team, are entrepreneurial. It’s not just a planning role; it’s also strategic. It involves planning along with engagement and enactment, it encourages agility.

Appreciating and leveraging those ordinary capabilities is equally essential

The stronger these ordinary capabilities can be ‘honed’ then organizations can go beyond performing basic business functions well and can excel in these. While most capabilities, including some dynamic capabilities, are underpinned by organizational routines, many of the activities of top managers are non-routine by nature.

The key entrepreneurial capabilities needed for asset orchestration and realignment of the enterprise often reside in the skills and knowledge of top managers, managing the routines and assets and respond dynamically when changes are happening to adapt and respond

Ordinary capabilities involve operations, administration, and managing the governance. They are rooted more firmly in routines than are dynamic capabilities. A routine is a repeated action sequence, which may have its roots in algorithms and heuristics about how the enterprise is to get things done. Organizational routines transcend the individuals involved.

Finding the right complementary blend of capabilities is a real challenge to achieve

The capabilities perspective views the enterprise as clusters of complementary assets that must be combined and coordinated to create value. The utilization of such assets therefore requires managerial action. Managers in the dynamic capabilities framework perform that role. They orchestrate, and call into being, the assets that are vital to firm performance.

They determine the speed at which, and degree to which, the firm’s particular resources can be aligned and realigned to match the requirements and opportunities of the business environment in order to generate sustained positive returns.

The alignment of resources both inside and outside the firm includes assessing when and how the enterprise ought to form alliances and joint ventures with other organizations.

Understanding all your required capabilities needed is essential

Valuing and knowing both your ordinary repeatable capabilities, to enhance and improve existing performance and discovering those that are more dynamic in nature, to change performance more significantly are both critical to identify, build and support in consistent and thoughtful ways. The key is knowing what is critical and then how to focus and invest in those that drive and sustain performance.

Investing in a mapping of your innovation fitness landscape can significantly contribute to this understanding and advance organizational performance in the critical areas that offer it present and future value.

Extracts drawn from the paper and built upon: “The Functions of Middle and Top Management in the Dynamic Capabilities Framework” by Sunyoung Lee and David J. Teece

The post Recognizing the different capabilities to develop and grow first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Are we in a more Darwinian world perhaps?

I’d suggest that today innovation is caught up in the survival race, where the bolder ones are more innovation fit and pulling further ahead. We need many more organizations to get out of this survival trap and exploiting innovation in bolder ways, become fitter in their innovating purpose.

So much of what we do actually is ‘static’ work, activities that are simply repeating what we have done time and time again, gaining us little new knowledge and offering poor value creating worth. These activities on their own keeps us happily ‘treading water’ and does the job of locking us comfortably into the ‘efficient and effectiveness clan mindset that most business organizations like to be ^keep us all constantly working within.

The harsh reality is this is becoming a very crowded, increasing uncomfortable place to be, as we reduce our capabilities to take risk, too invest, to take those decisions that create more radical innovation. If we don’t offer value creation, we become increasingly unattractive and not regarded as essential, simply disposable. The more we play ‘safe’ the more we run the risk of being disrupted. We are failing to leverage much of the liberating power within innovation. Is our business world today is it so predictable?  No, it is well and truly ‘dynamic’ and evolving.

There is an awful lot of creative destruction going on and I’ve also written previously about the Innovation Era: Creative Destruction or Destructive Creation where the replacement rate is constantly speeding up, we are facing more uncertainly and incoherence than ever.

We need to place the emphasis back on the “creative” innovation part and not the ‘destructive’ nature we have been moving towards recently. To achieve this we need to understand innovation far better than we currently do. This is partly where my exploring the dynamics of innovation through fitness landscapes comes in.

What we do need to do is constantly evolve our innovation capabilities to perform in more dynamic and flexible ways. We need to acquire that consistent aim of achieving a more adaptable and adjusting approach to innovation in all its parts. We need to meet the changing circumstances and challenges we are all facing to regain the real growth needed from our economies and organizations, making what we do at the same time, more sustainable. Delivering better innovation outcomes is central to this task.

Knowing your innovation ‘stock’ and ‘capital’ potential

So what do we need to do?

We need to know our ‘innovation stock’, a large part of our wealth generating capital and where it can be best put to use. We are valuing the knowledge perspective far more and with this we are increasingly recognizing the importance of the intellectual capital that makes up the organization.

We certainly need to re-think many of the old world value delivery systems to assess organizations and make much more of a concerted effort to make innovation that renders different, unique value outcomes, that keep pushing the boundaries of strategic advantage within any business.

We need to ‘master’ our understanding of the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate innovation as this is increasingly needed for participating in more complex open collaboration efforts. To achieve this, we first need to know ourselves and our capability to innovate, both the strengths and weaknesses.

Each organization does needs to know its innovation fitness to thrive in the future

We are searching for what makes up the present system and what needs to be part of the future to create a ‘best’ innovation capability environment that is sustaining into the longer-term. We need to find those capabilities that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ so they can be constantly adapted to meet the strategic need.

We are striving towards a true ‘innovation coherency premium’ in design, knowing what makes up your core dynamic components and how to bring them together for greater value-generating productive use. The outcomes of knowing where to invest, what to dampen down and what aspects can evolve naturally and be ‘taken along’ as you focus upon the ones that are more dynamic and relevant to your innovation needs is critical to understand and manage.

No journey is without pitfalls.

Finding the dynamic capabilities of innovation that ‘fit’ with the strategic needs of each organization will be different based on their own respective challenges and position. We need to stop simply copying others and create our own ‘dynamics’ to strengthen our own unique advantage points for sustaining our future. Do you want to become innovation fit?

The post Knowing where your innovation fitness comes from first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.