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.

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.

“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick”

There is so much built in tension, bias, barriers, mindsets, mental model conflicts, and all types of friction seemingly going on around us, you must sometimes think all our organizations can only be totally dysfunctional.

Has anyone not come across some or all of these?

Dysfunctional leadership symptoms and those typical warning signs of dictatorial leadership, no feedback on performance, personal agendas, more ‘political’ compensation than ‘performance related ones, inefficient use of resources, empire-building practices, unequal workload distribution, too much management, fragmented organization efforts. There is simply just too much talk, ineffective  and incessant meetings, a lack of collaboration across departments, ‘selective’ low productivity when you are working way beyond the normal, feeling in a constant crisis mode, watching a morale deterioration take place before your eyes, the,  backstabbing, starving projects of essential resources and finally, working in highly stressful workplaces.

A pretty depressing list isn’t it? I’m sure you can think of a few more besides.

When you are up against some or all of these how can you feel trust, belief and be innovative? Partly from what I’ve been reading and from my own perspective let me offer some thoughts to reduce some of these unhealthy tensions organizations seem to have, that certainly act as real constraints for innovation to really take hold.

The worrying thing is any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along.  Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick. The only way to ensure a speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted.  Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will reduce the tensions, reduce the shearing and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation has more space to equally site alongside efficiency as the organizations emphasis points, so both can focus on outcome orientation.

How can we break into this and design something different?

Recently a number of comments have triggered my thinking about this whole area of blockages that seem to not allow innovation to take hold in organizations the way it needs too. The writing of Scott Anthony recently under the article “Negotiating Innovation & Control”, the book “Relentless Innovation” and stream of thought provoking views of Jeffrey Phillips wanting us to challenge the “Business as Usual” approach. Then we have Gary Hamel in his new book “What Matters Now”  where he shares his agenda for building organizations, that can flourish in a world of diminished hopes, relentless change and ferocious competition. This is not a book about doing better. This is an impassioned plea to reinvent management as we know it—to rethink the fundamental assumptions we have about capitalism, organizational life, and the meaning of work.

Each has a theme running through them in different ways, the need to achieve continuous innovation needs a massive change in mindset and in managing the ‘heart’ of the organization. This heart is unhealthy and will need new values, new processes and new belief systems. You add in calls from John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Ranjay Gulati  and countless others, we are in need of a more radical agenda to rethink management, not just for innovation management.

The legend of the Gordian Knot

Some time back Chuck Frey, well known in innovation circles, wrote about the Gordian Knot. “For people the world over, the Gordian Knot represents the difficult, the intractable and often the insolvable problem. Today’s systemic business problems are the modern-day equivalent of this seemingly impossible challenge.

According to Greek mythology,  the huge, ball-like Turkish knot with no ends exposed was impossible to untie. An oracle had predicted that the first person to do so would become the ruler of all Asia. Thousands of people had tried, without success, to unlock its complex riddles. Alexander of Macedonia, son of King Philip II of Macedon, solved this puzzle simply and very creatively – by cutting it in half with his sword, exposing its ends and making it possible to untie. Alexander the Great went on to conquer all of Asia, just as the oracle predicted”.

So how can we cut the intractable knot inside organizations and survive?

We all face increasing uncertainties and are having our trust battered. We are seemingly not rising to the challenges that seem to be growing in complexity in global and organizational context.Innovation has a vital role to play but it must be ‘treated’ differently.

Where do we start? Firstly we need to revisit the work on “adaptive enterprises and systems”. We need to find ways to deal with unpredictable, discontinuous change and make this more predictable for us to manage.

We lack often a real coherence of purpose; we lurch from one opportunity to another, from one quarter of results into another with often no consistency in our activities. Performance has been taken over by opportunistic behaviours.  Innovation often takes the real brunt of this.

Our intended strategy, moves suddenly into a deliberate strategy, and then somehow this gets abandoned or unrealized and slowly we replace this with a emergent strategy that is rapidly become our realized strategy that we present to the world, as a response to ‘factors outside our control’ for our often indifferent performance. Who really talks about the EXACT results achieved from innovation for instance? All we here is just a general reference to it, to cloak innovation often in the ineffectiveness that lies within.

For innovation and many things going on within organizations they often lack a real coherence, they ‘signal’ inconsistent behaviours, especially within the organization. These bad signals simply build up all the tensions and dysfunctional aspects that middle order management and the organization in general has to mop up and cope with.

How can innovation thrive in this sort of chaotic mess? No wonder it never takes hold, it just has nothing ‘permanent’ to attach too and grow. Management needs a radical overhaul so innovation can be the vehicle for what is articulated but often poorly delivered on a consistent basis.

Context & Coordination needs designing in purposefully.

Again, where do we start? We start with ‘disconnect’ that organizations often have. The understanding of the underlying purpose of the organization beyond just making money and keeping the shareholders happy does need a deeper primary function, it needs rearticulating. Some organizations do a reasonable job of this but many simply don’t.

We need to restate our primary function and purpose far more in its societal contribution. We need to express the bounds as a governing set of principles that are known, reinforced and measured against. We then need to set about building in a consistent way, the capabilities that are able to produce the outcomes. We need to build in the accountabilities into the roles that reflect that innovation, effectiveness and efficiency that is needed so they can be managed equally side by side. We need to teach the ability to be adaptable and recognize the differences so as to actively manage the ‘creative’ conflicts and tensions.

Reduce the tension in the layers or structures

The really hard part of managing in larger organizations is in managing the layers and competing forces. Often we forget to reinforce acceptable behaviours, we leave role structures lose and incomplete and we set deliverables in often ‘woolly’ ways. This just promotes uncertainly and it is not an adaptive organization in leaving this so open. These unnatural built-in tensions create this shearing effect. They grind against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

These different layers actually require several levels of reconfiguration designed into the organization. One really critical one to address and to ‘kill off,’ is the pressure of time. Time horizons to achieve different tasks often cannot be ‘legislated’ or ‘dictated’ but sadly they are forced on reluctant innovators responsible for delivery of new concepts. We need to re-establish the difference between goals– within a certain period covered (one year), objectives– attained later but are progressed within the period and finally ideals– those unattainable but clearly possible concepts, that progress at slower rates and go well beyond normal goals. Innovation works within this environment, actually it will thrive.

Not just the incremental, but the radical, disruptive and breakthrough innovation craved for by the top management, can finally have a ‘decent’ time horizon to be managed through. Planning needs to account for all three horizons and publically discussed, irrespective of the industry you are in, it does not matter if you are building planes or developing food products.

We really should stop pretending that innovation is not so hard and actually state it is often incompatible to much of what we perform on a daily basis.  The task of managing intangibles (unknowns) alongside tangibles (known’s) needs greater appreciation of their complexities, and the difficulties of balancing the two for achieving  a ‘decent’ result. Leadership, I believe, would need to understand innovation far more in this demanding environment of enquiry. No wonder it is often ducked and just vaguely talked about as much of innovation understanding is still poorly understood in its impacts and effect.

The opportunity of the network economy

Again, the realization of the growing web of networks that we are constantly engaging with, is become a growing part of the new more adaptive innovating enterprise. We need to encourage more empowerment to engage with outside parties, to explore, to investigate, to bring in and then diffuse and disperse in new ways. For this we need to design around more absorptive capacity I’ve often written about. (See   http://bit.ly/zdfmba).

Reducing activities and replacing these with outcome orientation

Innovation is no different from what we expect from efficiency or effectiveness; we want to see the outcomes.   We have struggled on many parts of establishing the really good metrics for judging innovation. They seem to get lost within organizations. Part of the innovation activities has been assigned to some other cost centre, or the capacity was already established and we often don’t break these down and assign these clearly enough to the different activities, we should, but into outcome orientation ones. Were the activities contributing to efficiency or innovation? We judge these through effectiveness of the outcome.

We need to balance existing performance engines for repeatable everyday tasks with innovation delivery engines for new activities to make our organizations function more effectively. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble have offered some thoughts on this at the implementation stage, although they are still needs more examination.  As Scott Anthony points out in his article “Negotiating Innovation and Control’ on the different ways to balance tension there is one, in my opinion, that needs deeper investigation and development and that is the ‘ambidextrous’ one. This makes distinctions but links the parts of the whole organization by developing competing frames, not competing forces. Roger Martin suggests in one of his books “The Opposable Mind” that we need to develop “integrative thinking” as part of this need to change.

Ecosystems often reflect the shearing effect.

In any environment the ‘rates of exchange’ of the different components or constituents operate at different speeds. Interactions occur more at your own level of contribution, the different layers sometimes you are simply oblivious too or ignore. The ‘in-spite of’ syndrome kicks in. Sometimes though, something catastrophic does occurs and you have to pay attention ( a merger, layoffs, threat of closure) but the real reality is, different layers within organizations tend to be often simply oblivious, even impervious, to necessary change and just ‘does its job’.

Maybe then, this is why so many organizations seem dysfunctional but do continue to survive, to limp along, until something really does disrupt their world as the existing ecosystem just seems to allow different interactions and speeds. Can we not alter this though in more thoughtful ways. than the ‘carrot and the stick’ approach or ‘fear and retribution’ methodologies often employed to achieve results?

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the worrying thing is that any dynamics within the system are dominated by the slow components, and the rapid components simply have to follow along. Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick. The only way to ensure a speeding up is to be coherent on the purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted.

Simply by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will certainly reduce the tensions, reduce the shearing and allow the organization in all its layers to ‘react’ and be allowed to come back into a balance, where innovation sits equally alongside efficiency, especially if both focus on outcome orientation and that certainly is not the current business as usual we see today.

Perhaps working on these dysfunction spots it might free up some real, much needed space for innovation to take a deeper hold. It does seem with all the suggested emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness, if you accept this argument, it might be a good idea to have innovation alongside, as it does thrives more when there is creative tensions around!

You bring a more ‘dynamic’ environment into play by bringing together the sense of purpose and the governing principles of how you are setting about achieving this- through your people and building their capabilities to innovation.

The post Layers that shear against each other are full of tension. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The importance is to develop the ability to achieve “new value recognition”in new and different ways.

How do you go about to recognize value when it is not linked to existing thinking?  Absorptive capacity can be a paradox. You require more external knowledge to ‘push’ beyond your existing knowledge learning and so absorbing from it; you are demanding more absorptive capacity to be in place.  Equally you need to combine this with the need to break down that “prior related knowledge” radically differently, so it can stimulate breakthroughs in your thinking. Absorptive Capacity can pose significant challenges to the organization. How you deal effectively with the absorption of knowledge determines it’s potential to be transformed for new innovative ability and this will be determined partly by  how you structure the attractiveness for a learning environment so it ‘takes hold’ and can be absorbed differently, for different needs.

Explaining the key components shown in the above diagram

These components make up the essential elements of a ‘knowledge adoption’ innovation system.

The ‘access capacity’ is the ability to connect and link to external and increasingly international networks of knowledge and innovation. This capacity represents the ability of firms, universities, institutions or individuals to secure benefits through network access, cultivating relationships and being active members. The benefits then can include privileged access to knowledge and information, preferential opportunities and influence. It requires ‘engagement agents’ who can identify sources of knowledge elsewhere; they can be individuals or teams of practitioners. They will require a combination of intellectual, organisational and financial resources to make contacts and diffuse new ideas. A culture of openness and learning is particularly important. Open innovation comes to mind where this should apply.

The ‘anchor capacity’ is about the ability to identify and domesticate external knowledge from people, institutions and firms. While external knowledge flows contribute to local learning, it is the ability to ‘anchor’ these external flows that matters most. Anchoring is the capacity to attract international people, investment and firms to set up in a collaborative form. It is also defined as a process of identifying, attracting and articulating the context between externally mobile knowledge and immobile local context needs. The quality of anchoring will decide the wealth, diversity, intensity and duration of the relationships between external knowledge and local learning within the firm and its ability to absorb and translate this new knowledge. Knowledge anchoring is enhanced by ‘anchoring’ agents, organisations (such as firms and universities) that attract new ideas, technologies or processes from elsewhere and adapt them to their local circumstances. Anchoring activities are often reflected increasingly in business or science parks, and other industrial clusters that form around each other due to mutual reinforcing dependence but also critical advantage. These ‘feed’ into the internal innovation pipeline.

Diffusion capacity is the ability to ‘diffuse knowledge.’ It is the collective ability of a firm to adapt and assimilate new innovations, practices and technologies and then commercialise them in the economy. Diffusion can happen through either ‘active’ or ‘passive’ emulation. The former takes place through activities such as purchases and imports of new patents, technologies or systems. The latter happens through applied learning, reverse engineering or efforts to catch up with the competition. Diffusion is a critical capacity for innovation performance. In open innovation this is the ‘transformation’ from idea to final concept.

The Knowledge Creation & Exploitation part is the ‘Development Capacity’

The development capacity are the components of the innovation knowledge adoption framework. Knowledge creation and exploitation are often understood as start and finish points for innovation. In the past it has been often assume these must take place within a specific context to be successful. However, knowledge creation and knowledge exploitation often happen in different and unexpected places. Developing that awareness, that ‘sense’ of potential is important. ‘Absorptive capacity’ is an important channel of ‘knowledge creation’ and ‘knowledge exploitation’, the two components of the ‘development capacities’ which we now define:

The capacity to ‘create knowledge’ is the ability of a place to generate new ideas, discoveries, designs and inventions. This capacity is often expressed in the production of scientific papers, patents, registered designs and graduates. This capacity can extend horizontally across a broad range of fields and sectors and vertically through specialisation and concentration in specific knowledge domains. A horizontally broad knowledge creation capacity facilitates knowledge absorption from wider fields of knowledge, while a vertically specialised knowledge development capacity gives a region a stronger absorptive capacity in complex domains of knowledge.This capacity, though classified as a ‘development capacity’, is nevertheless critical to any absorptive capacity approach.

The ability to ‘exploit’ knowledge is the general capacity to utilise knowledge for commercial use and to extract value from it. This capacity is about the application of knowledge for practical use. In innovation policy literature, this ability is sometimes referred as the ‘innovation capacity’. In this paper, we consider it only as an innovation output; it is not used to represent all innovation activity. While ‘exploitation’ activities involve the ability to generate new knowledge too, their main aim is ‘knowledge exploitation’ rather than ‘knowledge creation’. Knowledge exploitation requires agents and resources – as well as an entrepreneurial culture – committed to the generation of new social and commercial value from new knowledge. A culture that supports entrepreneurship and risk-taking is often required for a knowledge exploitation capacity to flourish.

Main Source: Extracted and (partly) adapted from the report entitled “Innovation by Adoption”, published by NESTA in October 2008.  The full report was written by Sami Mahroum (NESTA), Rob Huggins (University of Wales Institute in Cardiff), Naomi Clayton (The Work Foundation), Kathy Pain and Peter Taylor (Loughborough University – GaWC).

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We need to cultivate Absorptive behaviour and allow it to flow.

We need a system to capture and allow knowledge to flow. For me the adoption model seems to be one worth investigating. If we want to achieve the goal of distributed innovation we need to have in place this possible framework around absorptive capacity to encourage different learning behaviours.. Nesta (www.nesta.org.uk) produced a useful report some time back called “Innovation by Adoption” and I feel this has a good framework that support distributed innovation.

The report argues in a place with a strong absorptive capacity three main outputs subsequently result from the flow of external or distributed knowledge: (1) the creation of new innovation; (2) the creation of new knowledge; and (3) that it does lead to new economic and social value.

Innovation by adapting the adoption model within your distributed innovation needs.

If we agree that most innovations happen outside often self-imposed boundaries then we have to extend out all our boundaries and go beyond our present levels of innovation building. Go outside our box to expand it.  We have to open up. We certainly understand that today innovation is not confined with the walls of one particular company. The world ‘absorbs’ more innovation than we can turn into greater value but we need to attempt to capture this and see if and where its value might lie. This is going to be achieved more likely within a distributed approach asking everyone to contribute to innovation ideas and providing them on a consistent basis the likely content and context fit that they need to look for .

We need to continue to push innovation created often locally, back up through the organization so it can potentially turn these insights into  innovation that will find a place in our world that improved on the existing that was something that we contributed too, that can be highly motivating. For this to happen organization have to recognise the inter-dependency and reliance that a diversified, distributed engaged group of people can bring to accelerate innovation to share, explore and work on turning ideas into new solutions .

What we need to find is ways to absorb this flow of daily knowledge, quickly recognise where it might meet our needs and then fit these to the wider audiences available that search for innovative solutions. There is an awful lot that can derive from a more distributed innovation network that allows a greater flow across a networked organization.

Approaching absorption in two ways

Absorptive capacity captures and enables this flow in each direction. Nesta through its research into this absorptive need  also suggested a model called the AC/DC model where they argue you need to develop two broad sets of capacities: the absorptive capacity (AC) to identify, value, and assimilate and the development capacity (DC) of places to develop and exploit such knowledge.

AC/DC Model

We need to adopt a more distributed innovation model in our thinking

Applying these two models into your thinking to achieve a more distributed innovation model would help to capture, anchor and diffuse all the innovation that lies not just within the ‘walls’ of your organization but just beyond where your local people can see it, value it and bring it into the organisation as one of their contributions to innovation.

Permit people to ‘see’, to ‘engage’, to become ‘deeply involved’ then organizing around distributed innovation can lead to greater empowerment and sustaining your innovation engine and knowledge. Fortune will favour the connected mind not just the brave lonely few. Absoptive capacity has a clear role to play in building capacity to innovate.

The post Cultivating Absorptive Capacity first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Previously I had discussed the difficulty of setting rules for innovation. What is required is a looser approach to mutual adaption and mutual adjustment. This arises from working through the same rules and resources to access, integrate, expand and recombine knowledge as part of everyday daily jobs. The understanding of absorptive capacity helps

Possible a starting point is through three simple rules and resources I came across but can’t find the reference to at present, regretfully but these are powerful in their intent and engagement:

• Mapping organizational and project innovation processes in the context of a shared responsibility for innovation relies on the rule of taking full responsibility that allows all “to see” the space of innovation that exists.

• Generalizing organizational and project knowledge in the context where knowledge is a central task relies on the rule of supporting routines for getting to that space and for keeping it open for all to share and explore. a) This helps people be collectively consciousness of what they know and how they now, build up and having expertise in are all dynamic routine activities to become competent experts, and b) it also fosters respect for knowing and leaning what others know and contributes to skills more towards understanding higher-level conceptual frameworks.

• Spiraling across cycles of adaptation in a context of constantly looking for new opportunities relies on the rule for constantly searching for new opportunities that creates an organization in which people are used to innovation, so that it becomes a second nature– “the chaos is that we are constantly innovating”. Also the rule provides people with vital resource of having ways to deal with inevitable surprises of innovation.

Emerging space of innovation

These could be particular kinds of new knowledge to adapt in manufacturing, products, and service provisions. The Manager’s role here is to prompt knowledge clusters and learning exposure- the more the better. This valuing knowledge provides for a propensity for a common language (emerging) and methodology. The use of knowledge also provides for outcomes, not ongoing.  It brings common purpose and identity.

Emerging space could be to improve customer satisfaction by different delivery times for example and can also give a sense of possibilities by enacting and situating the knowledge appropriately top address this.

We need to find ways to combined general knowledge for wide awareness of available options, and specialized knowledge for assessing the systemic impact of specific options to move towards the development of “T-Shaped skills” being available constantly to apply to different problems. Choice can stay fluid and it gradually ‘firms up’ to allow greater exploration and evaluation as we ‘master’ knowledge and progressively experiment.

Lastly the ability to innovate is always with the people, it is not in a procedure , or through technology or the process. Innovation needs to be structured into everyday work to make it dynamic, not as it is found often today of being a static, boring environment. Building consciously in the capabilities to innovate with the intent for this to be more ‘as routine work’ then I do feel these three simple rules just seem to make such good sense. Managing innovation preciously is not possible. What do you think?

The post The Moving Space Required for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Firstly what we are trying to achieve so we get a rough idea of what we want to achieve, in strategic objective, in our innovation goals and in aligning them. Secondly we require knowledge, a clear working knowledge of how innovation can work for us.

We learn by exploring, the more peaks we cover we improve our knowledge and experience. We build our knowledge landscape. The more we understand each other, the more we can collectively climb and scale our innovation fitness. The more we learn and scale the more we can explore sub peaks on smaller, experimental levels, all contributing to our growing knowledge and fitness to innovate.

Exploring the rugged terrain early helps.

The terrain is identifying the opportunities or possibilities a ‘field’ holds for us. The more we can survey, the more we pick up patterns, insights and understanding. As we begin to map these out we begin to appreciate the height of the efforts (in this case our mountains) to clarify the intensity and ruggedness of the terrain we have to traverse and manage to get to that peak. The number of peaks we wish to scale or need to can tell us how diverse a challenge this might become. The more we can map these out, the more we can identify what we need in making this happen. Knowing the correct innovation type, the capabilities and capacities to build and deliver certainly helps makes us more effective, especially when resources are scarce.

The more we have insights for innovation the more we can build the right fitness models or regimes. Equally the more we survey, the more our competitors come into clearer focus, the better we can predict what they are doing themselves.

This adds up progressively to a fitness map to innovate

All of this adds up to identifying the fitness to innovate. The level of appropriate capabilities and capacities needed to support this venture. We help identify the correct type and number of activities that are appropriate through different protocols, workshops and techniques

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- the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater the ‘fitness’ transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities into tangible outcomes.

Higher value potential and rate of intensity determines need.

These critical factors give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged’ the landscape can also determine the greater fitness for the rate of innovation. The height 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.

The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive walks, 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. 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.

Fitness landscapes provide increased understanding of not just your existing position but ‘point’ to where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity. Mapping these clearly and knowing the innovation rugged terrain you have to travel provides the appropriate focus and intensity you require closing the gap and achieving peak performance.

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