9 Stages for building innovation fitness

May 27, 2018Posted inDynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Outcomes & Expectancies

St Gottard Pass

Achieving innovation fitness is a journey- to get there we often have to manage the switchbacks as we build our capabilities and capacities to innovate.

  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

The Challenges Being Faced by Innovation Consultants

November 22, 2015Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Shifting dynamics in innovation1 Comment

Ignoring different voicesFrom my perspective, I’ve been looking at a real challenge today, that many consultants offering innovation services are not providing real sustaining consulting value to clients, only ad-hoc services.

Unless this changes it will continue to erode the clients’ confidence in these service providers and they will be seeking increasing internal solutions to tackle their problems. I think if this trend continues it will be a mistaken course.

Consultants are not addressing many of the changes occurring and ignoring opportunities to adapt to different circumstances, they are simply not putting up a strong case of their engagement by redesigning their business models or opening themselves up to different forms of collaboration.

In many ways, the consulting industry specializing in innovation is its own worst enemy.

It is highly fragmented, often highly specialized in certain innovation practices, and much of the advice comes from a cottage industry of independent practitioners, caught up in executing and little time for advancing their own knowledge.

Restating the Value Proposition of Innovation Fitness

September 8, 2015Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Outcomes & Expectancies2 Comments

Innovation DNAI have been reviewing my work on innovation fitness landscapes, in the designing and understanding of the dynamic capabilities organizations constantly need to find, evolve and establish for sustaining successful innovation. Those that are more essential to manage the growing complexity in moving towards achieving successful and sustaining innovation outcomes.

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?

9 Stages for building innovation fitness

February 3, 2015Posted inDynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Outcomes & Expectancies6 Comments

St Gottard Pass

Achieving innovation fitness is a journey- to get there we often have to manage the switchbacks as we build our capabilities and capacities to innovate.

  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

Moving along the path to innovation fitness

March 1, 2012Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Exploratory Walks & Needs, Mapping & Rugged Terrains, System Solution models

Here, we are searching for the dynamics within the innovation system, that once recognized, can be constructed for a more dynamic innovation fitness solution. We are looking to improve the innovation performance engine within organizations.

These dynamics are made up of the capabilities and competencies that reveal and clarify what is required as the relevant traversing points needed to achieve improving innovation success, to move you more effectively towards your strategic innovation goals and build a fitter, more responsive and dynamic organization around its needed innovation capacities.

The lead explorer to walk you across this innovation terrain is Paul Hobcraft

The Journey Roadmap for Traversing with Innovation Fitness Dynamics

By exploring and modelling the mutual dependencies you get to see how the existing and alternative future innovation system  will behave as you begin to map out and recognize the different emphasis points that make up your innovation system. You can begin to identify what are the more important dynamic ones that require a more dedicated focus and placing more of your resources behind, while others can evolve at their own pace or simply improve as they are far more dependent on the dynamic ones than you realized initially. These can get simply get ‘pulled along’ and rise equally in their performance.

Innovation fitness dynamics – to engage with and recognize the need to change.

February 22, 2012Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Exploratory Walks & Needs, Outcomes & Expectancies, The Big Challenges2 Comments
Working through the innovation fitness lense
Working through the innovation fitness lens

There is a continuing need is to build the management of innovation into a clear organizational capability, where innovation becomes a continuous effective innovation process.

To this end I have produced a conceptual model of what constitutes the ‘make up’ for providing an ongoing innovation performance engine- the innovation fitness landscape and the dynamics– that determine the appropriate capabilities and capacities available & required. I felt it needs a dedicated website to be the ‘go to’ source of reference. It is a work-in-progress so please recognize this when you visit it here: http://bit.ly/wX5q8R.

The AC components that deepen the capacity to innovate

February 20, 2012Posted inAbsorptive Capacity, Outcomes & Expectancies

Generally, absorptive capacity should be focused on the capacity to make use of existing knowledge both internally and externally, placing the emphasis on the capacity to assimilate and transform it (often differently). It deepens the capacity that lies within an organization for exploring innovation further.

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.

Absoptive Capacity- Knoweldge Adoption Framework.

Explaining the key components shown in the above diagram

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

Cultivating Absorptive Capacity

February 20, 2012Posted inAbsorptive Capacity, Impact & Scale, System Solution models
The flow of knowledge as our alternative currents
The flow of knowledge as our alternative currents

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.

The Moving Space Required for Innovation

February 16, 2012Posted inDynamic capabilities, Motley & Sundries, System Solution models

The moving space for innovation is to allow everyone to participate in being involved and wanting to get ‘fit.’  To do this you have to be opened up to a number of “possible paths” to allow it to flow and take hold. There is the need to explore multiple ways to learn and find the right pathway. This needs a dynamic social fabric to allow it to flow, it needs organizational engagement through active experimentation.

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: