Recently I have been reading about how innovation management needs to get back to basics or how it needs to be given a fresh lick of paint in professional certification, revised and updated university training programs or short courses.

For twenty years, since I have been working in the innovation space, we have constantly complained about so many different aspects of innovation failure and offered solutions to why innovation management still seemingly fails to deliver on its promise to build new growth inside our organizations. Offering innovation advice is a big industry to consult and academically, to teach in.

We keep innovation management locked into a 20th-century paradigm and I believe we must break the “chains” and make a significant shift in our innovation thinking, into innovation and business ecosystems

Innovation had a major new lease of life when the concept of “open innovation” promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.

This concept took hold of where innovation had been constrained, in the R&D labs of organizations obsessed with secrecy and their siloed mentalities of hanging on to their “worth” of traditional corporate research labs (source Wikipedia)

The recognition that open innovation is not solely firm-centric changed how we looked at innovation management. The problem, for me, was that we did not adapt it or push its potential boundaries as hard as we could with all the technological advancements.

So briefly the value of this shift to Ecosystem thinking and design

I would like to summarize the salient points of Innovation Ecosystems and their value over existing or presently accepted approaches to Innovation.

Innovation Ecosystems represent a transformative approach to innovation that offers significant advantages over traditional methods. Here’s a summary of the key points and their value:

Core Concepts of Innovation Ecosystems

° Innovation Ecosystems are dynamic, interconnected communities of diverse stakeholders collaborating to accelerate innovation. They are built on four fundamental and dynamic threads:

° Greater Value Creation: Ecosystems generate multifaceted value, impacting not just finances but also society and the environment

° Extending Knowledge Transfer: The free flow of information and ideas across various entities nurtures creativity and progress

° More Co-creation potential: Diverse actors collaborate to weave innovative solutions, fostering a culture of collective genius

° Improve Competitive Positioning: Participants must strategically adapt and form partnerships to thrive in this dynamic environment.

So what gives these advantages Over Traditional Approaches

Innovation Ecosystems offer several benefits compared to conventional innovation models:

+ Broader Resource Access: Participants gain access to a wider range of expertise, technologies, and customer insights

+Enhanced Collaboration: The ecosystem fosters increased opportunities for co-creation and cross-pollination of ideas

+ Improved Scalability and Speed: Leveraging collective resources allows for faster scaling and market entry

+ Greater Flexibility: Multiple perspectives enable quicker adaptation to market changes and customer needs

+ Sustainability Focus: Ecosystems are better positioned to design more sustainable and socially responsible solutions

The need is to take and advance Key Strategies for Implementation

To effectively leverage Innovation Ecosystems, organizations should:

–Extend Collaborative Ideation: Look beyond existing boundaries for external perspectives and insights

-Launch Open Innovation Challenges: Invite external contributors to solve specific business problems

–Form Strategic Partnerships: Collaborate with diverse entities like startups, research institutions, and industry experts

-Integrate External Technologies: Actively scout and incorporate cutting-edge innovations from outside the organization

-Facilitate Cross-Industry Collaboration: Explore innovative solutions through partnerships across different sectors

-Engage in Co-Creation: Involve customers and end-users directly in the development process

Establishing the Value Proposition of shifting towards an Innovation Ecosystem

The shift towards Innovation Ecosystems offers:

*Expanded Innovation Horizons: Access to a broader range of ideas and potential for breakthrough innovations

*Accelerated Time-to-Market: Faster development and commercialization of new products and services

*Enhanced Competitiveness: Staying ahead in the market by tapping into collective intelligence and industry trends

*Increased Adaptability: Better equipped to navigate uncertainties in a rapidly changing business environment

*Synergistic Collaborations: Integration of efforts leads to outcomes greater than the sum of individual contributions

By embracing Innovation Ecosystems, organizations can foster a more open, collaborative approach to innovation that is better suited to address the complexities and challenges of the modern business landscape

Can we move beyond the appeal of going back to basics, focusing on single-entity innovation building and expanding our thinking into the connected world we live in today? We live in the age of connected ecosystems, lets recognize this and embrace innovative ecosystem designs and thinking.

The post Lets change the old record and sound on innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

To build a pathway in order to enable more dynamic innovation capabilities one needs to go through Nine Stages.

These nine stages are, in my opinion, needed for developing an understanding of your innovation capabilities, so as to make them more dynamic and, as a result, to be at the top of your innovation game.

This “step process,” I believe, gets you to the point of understanding what innovation capabilities are a better ‘fit’ for the purpose, to deliver on your innovation needs on a consistent, repeatable, and evolving basis.

Building innovation capabilities take time; they are complex, highly structured, and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment. Any learning involves sensing, seizing, and then transforming.

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 in the longer-term. Those that can be continually ‘orchestrated’ and 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. The outcomes are to know 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.

Each stage needs questioning and then answering to create specific phases of the journey. Ask yourself the following questions by creating a checklist to start building your own dynamic innovation capability and to understand your innovation fitness and landscape. 

1.Getting Started – understanding the needs & imperatives of innovation fitness

• Why we must travel this critical path for Innovation.
• The meaning of dynamic capabilities and innovation fitness landscapes
• Merging the theory with practical reality to produce new outcomes and positive results.
• Focusing on resources and performance – why is this important.
• The problem is knowing what we have and what we really need and seeing the differences

2.The Fuel of Innovation Performance – the dynamics of innovation

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet the strategic need.
• What is known about resources to sustain, enhance performance?
• Knowing and aligning your strategic criteria – for sound innovation approaches
• Getting innovation within the right context of your business
• Moving your resources in the right direction takes courage and decisive leadership.

3.Getting Even More Specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognising the building of scale, change rates, and dynamics that happen over time and why we need to constantly build our innovation capabilities.
• Developing the resources to meet the need – structured, focused, clarified by bringing out the necessary discussion.
• An illustrative scenario for a directional innovation fitness landscape map
• Recognising that resources can stretch beyond the firm and then bringing these in successfully, in gradual steps. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving mutual dependencies to support; recognising the hindering ones
• Being aware of the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation allows for designing a flexible response capability.

4.Building the Innovation Fitness Machine – reinforcing feedback, identifying needs

• Recognising the current status, spotting emerging patterns, seeing spaces and gaps, and identifying solutions.
• Beginning the ‘adaptive walk’ to get to higher fitness points needed to compete.
• Clarifying the complementary resources, looking to embed new routines quickly, and set up follow through approaches.
• Introducing natural tensions into the system to trigger ‘step change.’
• Resource dependence climate, culture, diversity, intensity, and uniqueness
• Reinforcing feedback – watching for dangers, managing the machine capacity, removing the brakes selectively
• Shifting your resources need not deplete or force other people to compete for them – working through the tensions within teams and silos.
• Matching resource dynamics with the innovation value chain & life cycle stages helps maintain momentum.
• Simulation modelling the ‘what ifs’ and ‘why.’

5.The Strategic Architecture – designing the system to perform as needed

• The step process for designing and executing the architecture design
• Diagnosing performance challenges and roadblocks – resolving, moving on
• Lining up the solutions is not a linear process and needs careful management
• Addressing the effects of intangibles in the Strategic Architecture.

6.The Hard Face of Soft(er) Factors – the hidden power of intangible resources

• Clarifying the impact of the intangibles and recognising that time, climate, and conditions are significant contributors to innovation activities.
• The different rivalry types: internal and external, inter-department, inter projects, and working through resolutions to these.
• Reflecting feelings and expectations, addressing all the different needs
• Measuring the tougher parts of intellectual capital
• The real value of your intangible resources
• Recognising the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7.Entering into Competitive Battle – the dynamics of rivalry, the uniqueness of you

• Recognising, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding, and outmanoeuvring
• Your point of choosing what, where, how, and when to compete.
• Building capabilities that are unique to you and hard to replicate
• Building sustainability into the innovation equation as ongoing
• Extending the turf, exploiting the situation, pushing beyond, seeking partners.

8.Building and Testing Capabilities to Perform

• Measuring capabilities through different fitness levels and scale
• Learning to build capabilities as ‘ongoing’ and evolving for changing needs
• Re-Structuring the process for dealing with the dynamics of change
• Knowing the points of impact on performance to enable recognition and reality
• Managing innovation performance progressively across the spectrum of business need through testing and extending capability learning.
• Building from personal to the team, to organisational learning, in measured steps
• Recognising the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment, and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organisational levels.

9.Keeping the Innovation Fitness Wheels Turning, keeping your eyes on the road

• Resolution of conflicting goals, control, and structure
• Dissecting conflicting positions, resolving the impasse
• Knowing the limits of human engagement
• Goals, controls, and measurements can dominate and strangle
• Keeping the measurements simple and clear
• Managing innovation as a critical strategic resource
• Merging the results into a greater alignment to strategy and approaches

The end result is looking to generate your innovation fitness landscape. If you need any coaching help, advice, or mentoring through this process, just get in touch with me here. 

The post A pathway towards building your dynamic innovation capabilities first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’d suggest this might be a great starting point. Considering the intractable in anything is hard. To recognize these firstly is terrific, as they are tough to manage but phenomenal if you can surface them.

Then having the capability of knowing how to set about tackling these, drawing in a growing consensus that these are the real blocks to the team becoming truly innovative.

If you could ask a series of question that might help unlock innovation blockages it would make such a difference to our innovation performance and engagement. I think this might need a good external facilitator as my recommendation, one who has deep innovation knowledge and expertise, able to manage the ‘dynamics’ within the room.

These are shaped as discussions to raise, explore and extract views and then to be pulled together into a collective position, that gives strength and identification to resolving issues surrounding innovation. Surfacing differences, finding common ground and developing a ‘collective’ way forward makes a significant contribution to building a common language and a common sense of identity. It underpins innovation engagement. It gives confidence to any innovation undertaking.

• Addressing the issue of unfamiliar responsibilities – new and different ways of working, of understanding, of allowing innovation to take hold and flourish is often demanding on those to find those new ways of responding, to leading, to encouraging others. It becomes even harder when innovation is often added to increase a person’s responsibilities. This different way of thinking needs surfacing. Many holding leadership positions in our organizations are uncomfortable with innovation, it is too intangible,  it often seems to ‘sit’ outside the normal processes and structures. It is full of risk and uncertainty. It is raising the unfamiliar, yet it should become a great place to start this dialogue to bring innovation inside, in all that we do. Innovation needs to become a real consistent in all our thinking as it can advance our thinking beyond the “norm”

• Innovation demands new directions – making significant changes to the way the organization is run is very challenging, potentially disrupting and needs thinking through at the top-level well. To ‘hone’ an organization into a lean efficient and effective ‘machine’ is one thing, to allow diversity and conflicting signals to pervade and challenge this is extremely uncomfortable territory, so ring fencing often seems to this keep it at bay! Is this the right solution, are we facing different times to manage our organizations in 20th-century practices? If we are needing to become the 21st century in our thinking and practices how do we open up the dialogue Where does agility, flexibility, adaptive and exploratory come into our thinking, into our systems, into our culture?

• Inherited problems always surface – addressing countless and inherent problems is messy and requires dedicated resolution. Changing the culture to become more innovative can be a massive step in structure, organization, and policies. How do we manage such a revolution, what is needed, what is a culture and environment for innovation anyway? How do we manage our legacy, what should stay, what can go? How do we set about this?

• Problems within the organization’s makeup – inadequate experience and resistance to change, often surface when a person is not equipped to deal with it. Installing innovation capacity, capabilities and competencies needs figuring out. How long does this take, where can we turn too? How do we relate change to its positive contribution to the future and can innovation lead that change?

• High stakes of innovation – demanding ‘breakthrough innovation’ makes everyone feel increasingly vulnerable, increasingly visible and it is for leadership to take ownership and real responsibility to manage this demand and shape the risk and set of fears against the gain and return. They need to be ready to ‘positively react and encourage’ both in supporting winning solutions and extracting positive learning from failures. Can you run breakthroughs alongside incremental innovation activities, what is really different in how can we manage these?

• Scope and scale of innovation – Managing in scale and scope is demanding and requires well thought through systems and processes. To scope, innovation needs robust business case approaches, its flexibility in its management and then to scale this up requires well-established approaches and clear commitments to its engagement and execution. Are we really good at seizing ‘breaking’ opportunities and quickly scaling these up? Can we learn new approaches to this? How do we approach the issues of scale, scope, and speed for innovation?

• External pressures multiply – everyone has an opinion outside the organization, let alone inside. Balancing these different interfaces and the pressures from these as you explore innovation needs managing well. Avoid that trait of just keeping piling on the raising of expectations and then failing to back this up, by demonstrating progress or ensuring you are not actively working on this alignment. What does it take for the ability to deliver on the promise? What can we learn by listening to those outside, what can we take inside and apply, have we our core beliefs to check these opinions against to stay firm upon or adapt by these new insights?

• Influencing without full authority – key activities within innovation usually demand that you become reliant on others. You need to spend (seemingly) inordinate time explaining and gaining others to make their ‘buy-in’ and find ways for them to find their own identification with concepts. So by ‘growing identification’, you are able to move emerging innovation concepts along the pipeline. You also so often need to find often imaginative ways of attracting across the resources needed. This is especially hard for senior managers to adapt too, the need to attract across, instead of simply expect, demand and just take, today people want to be attracted and expect to learn from the experience and exposure. How can we learn new ways or different ways where collaboration becomes the norm and we can learn to borrow and exchange resources across functions more freely and then let them go to move on to the next challenge where their talent is most needed? To let go and watch talent soar.

• Work more with a listening and feedback culture – this can be totally different from the way business has been conducted up to today, through a more hierarchical structure. Flattening organizations to allow greater two-way flow sucks up time; it simply undoes or unpicks ‘command and control’ over time. It takes time to establish and gain confidence and momentum. You need to allow more for debate, it shifts and alters the hierarchy and structures and that is a big step into an unknown, yet it is necessary for organizational change, to allow innovation to truly flourish on a more sustainable basis. What needs to be put in place to listen and respond to our organizations and customers’ needs? How can the relationships within the organization re-calibrate and mutually respect each other’s position?

• The need to develop work group diversity – innovation asks for more diversity in opinion, it draws out more in thinking, in discipline, in alternative approaches and solution. This often leaves senior executives feeling they are less in control, reliant on other and that can feel scary and surface their own insecurities, buried increasingly as they moved up the organization and took on responsibility and accountability. It challenges often their very notion of management as they have known and experienced it. Innovation in its management does certainly challenge many past notions of managing, such as for productivity, yield and simply, extraction. How can we encourage a greater diversity of thought, of working, of judging performance that would help our organization’s absorption of different knowledge and approaches occurring all around us? How can we exploit and explore and know when to apply the differences in our thinking

To summarize

Each of these ten innovation challenges needs to be surfaced at the right time, usually as early as you can to provide a person handling innovation to gain the best and strongest foothold of their understanding.

Each one of these ‘intractable’ points can individually block innovation from advancing – we must find ways to bring them out, to surface opinions and find common solutions to resolving them. We need to build these into a common understanding to move innovation forward.

To send out a compelling message into our organizations we are wanting to tackle these intractable barriers, so as to give innovation its rightful place within all our thinking and activities. That we want to ’embrace’ it, as it far too important for our growth and future sustainability makes everyone want to become more innovative as they can see change taking place, as the organization begins to break down the barriers.

The post Surfacing the real barriers to innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The importance, like all behavioral change coaching, is to create a safe but challenging environment so the recipient can take risks and learn. You as the coach find the balance between challenging through inquiry and supporting different thinking to draw out possibilities to gain new understanding from.

All the work is usually based on the recipient’s agenda, through a set of opening discussions you need to balance both personal learning’s with organizational needs. These need consistent clarification and re-calibrating as you go.

The coach’s role is to facilitate and collaborate.

You need to take care not to act like ‘the expert’ imposing a given view but you can explore options that the recipient draws their own conclusions and value from. Avoid imposing and provide different thinking and perspectives so it becomes a facilitated debate that the recipient draws into.

Coaching is made up of a series of interactions

The ability to create meaningful interactions that connect people with ideas allows them to clarify and connect on the more important principles and critical issues surrounding innovation. Having a real passion and depth of innovation knowledge becomes critical to navigating this often tricky road to discovery.

The value of a coach is he/she is both a catalyst and facilitator of individual development. The value is in looking to improve innovation performance within that person’s understanding so there is a distinct ROII (return on innovation investment).

Pause, learn and then move on with new innovation purpose and knowledge

By helping executives to firstly pause, then take stock of the significance of various innovation transitions, and help them determine the best way to proceed is invaluable. Of course, this support is determined by the commitment, engagement, the given skills, and scope as well as the person’s real interests in wanting to have a greater understanding of innovation. It all requires available time.

Innovation coaching has a valuable contribution to make, in the right hands and with the right person. It has a significant personal investment on all sides involved to achieve clarity, insight, and returns for innovation to flourish so others can equally benefit from this more intensive approach and emerging internal expertise that will eventually come from within.

The post Innovation Coaching Has Real Value first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’d like to offer a fresh view on building your own capital.

There are different building blocks and types of capital. Let’s start with the vast knowledge inside the organization, as this forms learning capital. We’re all expected to combine our existing internal knowledge with the external knowledge that flows into the company these days, mostly intangible, searching for its relevancy and context. The stock we build in our use of this fresh knowledge so we can combine these into new insights that eventually create different sets of advantages – ones that foster value creation.

Then we have the opportunity to build Innovation Capital.

Key elements of innovation capital also, equally consist of mostly non-technological intangibles embodied in the organizational routines and employees’ mindset.  So, it is important also to understand the make-up of innovation capital, in its “stock” and these, can be clarified in the following ways:

• Innovation capital as renewal capabilities of our organizations in the form of producing intellectual properties that offer value and are increasingly being extracted from our intangible assets.
• Innovation capital possesses attributes that make it a “strategic” asset. The key to success lies in specifying the nature and application of these assets in relation to the new knowledge flowing into the organization. This generates and commercializes concepts and ideas into new forms of innovation value.
• Innovation capital is made up of the ongoing “dynamic interactions” between intangibles and tangibles. Built up from experience over time, they develop into mostly intangible assets, and eventually into valuable outcomes.
• It is the effective use of different kinds of intangibles that contribute to innovation capital. Only a few of them can be formally captured as they are built on interactions, relationships, applied experience, generally accepted understanding and based on pattern recognition and meaningfulness.
• As we grow our networks and relationships, we increase knowledge sharing. This promotes our understanding and provides increased intangibles inside the organization. As we deepen our knowledge, we gain experience and achieve higher “pattern recognition” and insight.

When we look around we are able to spot the enablers for innovation stock to grow, as they contribute into your experiences and exposure to general principles of understanding. See how you can learn from these:

These elements can be described as follows:

• Innovation strategy relates to strategic choices a firm makes regarding its innovation
• The selection of the type of innovation that fits best to the firm’s objectives and the allocation of resources to different types of innovations
• Innovation culture is a mixture of employees’ innovation-related attitudes, experiences, beliefs, and values
• The integrating function of environment, culture, and climates that stimulate innovation activities
• Innovation structures that are formed to make up the innovation process
• The approach to organization and the way employees engage in innovation are grouped
• The employees’ knowledge (technological and non-technological) engaged in the innovation process
• The stock of knowledge can be increased by an organization’s internal and external learning

“Internal learning” refers to the creation of new knowledge within the enterprise, while “external learning” pertains to the integration of knowledge from outside. We can model innovation capital and apply different capital needs to different innovation challenges to leverage them in more dynamic ways.

The more we strengthen our knowledge and appreciate the value within our people, the more we can generate new knowledge, build greater narratives, deepen discussions, and establish better connections and interactions across growing communities. In this way, we can turn innovation capital into a highly dynamic and valuable asset, just as we treat financial capital today.

The more we discover, the more knowledge we gain.

This enables better decision-making and fosters our value-creating potential. This will, in theory, give us greater confidence, both internally and externally, that today, our invested financial capital is in good hands. We are effectively applying innovation capital to value creation.

Our learning capital needs to emerge and dominate future discussions in improving its quality and value contribution. We need to increase incentives for organizations and their people to learn or update their existing knowledge.

The power lies in the linkages we can forge, in the acquisition, in assimilation, and eventually in a transformation that allows known and new knowledge to fuel our wealth-generating innovation pipeline.

The post Building Your Own Innovation Capital Lies Within Organizational Learning first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.