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

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

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet 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

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing 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
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation

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

• Recognizing 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
• 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 road blocks – 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 recognizing 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
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
• 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 team to organizational learning in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational 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 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 fitness landscape

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

The post 9 Stages for building innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

There is this sense that consultants are resolutely staying very internally driven, self-promoting, still trying to convey the story of innovation mastery, when clearly this is lacking in rapidly changing market and technology conditions and due to this staying ahead of the knowledge curve are actually failing the client.

Many consulting firms have spent the last decade trying to make themselves more efficient, going from craftwork to selling one solution as a mass production to many, to yield ever-increasing fees, so as to gain a re-occurring return on a one-off invested solution. Innovation solutions simply need to be crafted to each set of circumstances mostly, in my opinion, and that conflicts with this repeating model.

When clients were pushing down prices it made sense to offer general solutions but the disruptive forces occurring in clients’ markets are requiring far more the return to crafting individual solutions.

Larger Consultants have been offering body shops, and set-piece solutions, to offset client resource shortfalls. This sits less well in a time where demand for unique innovation is required to offset these disruptive forces coming from often unexpected sources.

The two, quality versus quantity of consulting, are difficult to equate coming from the same consulting firm. Bespoke needs to be recognized as necessary for innovative solutions.

The scrabble for consultants is to re-position themselves back at the high-value end but they need a greater depth of knowledge, expertise and experience to convince clients of this need to change differently than simply providing resources. Both clients and consultants are struggling with their own legacy of where resources reside and what value these can provide.

The mismatch of client needs and consultants’ offerings.

The client is increasingly requiring more organic or holistic solutions not a ‘piecemeal’ innovation offerings. These separate pieces often don’t dovetail into one complete innovation system because they are supplied by a variety of different service providers, all having their own ‘pet’ approaches.

Perhaps there is a real mismatch between clients’ needs in aspirations and budgets and the available innovation consultants’ ability to match and relate to specific industry practices and scale to meet client needs.

There also seems this perpetual dilemma of clients’ wishes that are hard to reconcile with operational realities to turn their organizations from being focused on effective and efficient into agile and adaptive, required for innovation.

Often the two are caught in the classic “who does what”, “how much each can and should manage” and the ability to handover or what happens when the consultant finishes the project and leaves, taking a level of knowledge with them that was never given time to reside inside the clients.

Consultants are far too cautious for their own good

Consultant firms, on the other hand, are moving far too cautiously to any form of collaborative form, they tend to bring ‘experts’ in for ad hoc, one-off assignments when they need deeper expertise. Wherever possible consultants want to manage as much as possible internally to ‘keep’ the fees generated inside. This is not a recipe for building lasting relationships that have mutual value in growing understanding.

Often this ‘keep it in-house’ whatever it takes, promotes that in-breed fault and is not reflecting the commonly held view today, “that all knowledge does not reside within its own walls”; they still reluctantly hang on to the closed system of inventing only inside here.

This often manifests itself in the host of variations in what is claimed as their ‘unique’ versions of “common innovation” where they constantly reinvent the wheel in their own approaches to processes, definitions, tools, frameworks, systems of working and idea management etc. I often feel those “unique solutions” are often just simply mutton dressed up as lamb.’

The resultant cost of rework if clients bring in a different consultant grows.

Today I think part of the clients experimenting and learning internally is due to this disappointment with the consultant. Clients are becoming extremely selective for the use of any outside advice. Many clients are simply building their own innovation teams with individuals that have had some given time consulting to offset, defray and strengthen their own in-house capabilities.

The reality is these are often more ‘at odds’ with the business units, seen as elite, out of touch often just pursuing their own agenda, not accountable, and often less supportive of the current business needs.

Also, innovation itself is going through really a massive change.
The need for ecosystems, platforms, the greater use of analytics, big data and reliance on technology are all crowding in on innovation delivery.

The emphasis on thinking through new business models, combining design thinking, lean management, customer development, prototyping, experimenting outside the lab, collaborating with clients, finding different partners, the different exploitation of research techniques are all breaking out in different forms and combinations is radically altering approaches to innovation.

Also collaborating and networking are far more essential to innovation exchange, be this in the early idea forming stages but increasing in the development and execution of innovative solutions. Partnerships are diverse, delivering on the need of the job to be done. Orchestration is increasingly playing its part to manage all the assets and knowledge coming into play.

The innovation consultant can lead or can be simply a bit player in this synchronizing of innovation activities or offering ‘leading’ advice.

I have suggested in past posts that we all need to think differently:

innovation is based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services, into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently.

The external innovation consultant needs to change

I get the distinct impression the focus of most innovation consultants is still locked into product innovation or improving the process of the pipeline/portfolio, the idea generation and project execution model. It is not evolving into broader services or accounting for the transformations underway at the clients end.

While the consulting firm stays closed-up, intent on delivering their own solutions,will mean they are often far too busy catching up, lagging in their own emerging practice and due to this ‘lag’ have lost any leadership position in many things relating to innovation.

To overcome this you need to be engaged, to be able to piece together fragments of information to gain the insights that independence can offer. Consultants need to explore and experiment themselves in a laboratory and pilot testing environment, that allows clients to work alongside them to learn and gain from this in collaborative ways. Both learn and both benefit going forward in new ways.

Sadly general well experienced innovation practitioners are actually thin on the ground. You do need to search hard for these but they are available. This exploring and extracting insight requires dedicated experience and constant involvement in broader innovation understanding

Often even the large consulting practices can’t afford to have more than a few experts scanning this innovation terrain yet clients, again and again turn to the broad consulting provider for specialist advice.

The one real change that is occurring is in thought leadership from consultants

Clients often lack real deep insight or draw out the implications of these emerging practices, they want to work more alongside others in experimental practice spaces to truly figure out how to respond to them or understand the implications to their own business. It is only part of the innovation knowledge puzzle for the client.

They need to constantly look elsewhere to piece this together, if at all they can, as so often the reporting loses much of its value as it is not translated into suggested solutions if the consulting industry fails to provide these services or knowledge laboratories.

There is increasing value in the thought leadership pieces emerging from the large, well connected consulting firms. Their ability to extract knowledge from their clients and increasingly match this with merging practice is valuable.

The work of many of the larger consultants in the field of thought leadership, including Deloitte’s, Bains, McKinsey, Booz, PWC, A D Little, PA Consulting and some others, has begun to provide a much greater insight through their access to C-level people and their ability to provide reports on best or emerging practice.

This is helping understand changes occurring and the emerging practices around organizations’ current thinking of innovation, yet it is failing to be fully translated into the client application.

Translating thought leadership to new practice is a real opportunity for all
Presently much of this thought leadership is failing to be translated into practical solutions, they remain research findings.

Thought leadership seems to be increasingly dominating the marketing activities of consulting firms, and with some good cause: clients require evidence and good thought leadership, it does matter to them, to figure out their internal solutions.

I’m not unhappy with that, I’ll be honest, as my competitive space is largely about understanding emergent innovation practice to relate and absorb the findings and then attempt to connect the thinking to improving innovation practice within client thinking at individual, team or organizational level.

I’ve been shifting my business model in the past few years, into a far more advisory one than consultative for clients, attempting to connect the multiple and different dots coming in from multiple sources to help this thinking and understanding.

We come back to the reason why, what used to work before, often doesn’t now.

If the innovation consultant needs to question the changes occurring all around them, then they need to ask “why not develop a different type of sustaining collaborative arrangement?” One where they, the consulting firm have scale and resources, become far more aligned with people like me, who have the entrepreneurial energy and zeal that explores and exploits, probes and connects, offering a further validation path that clients might value.

There is so much convergence, linkage, networking, and integration pieces occurring that none of us can remain islands of specific knowledge, we must find innovative ways to collaborate, to build an ecosystem of knowledge that provides clients a real competitive advantage. I want to participate in far more scaling, proving and validating.

Consultants must learn within themselves to collaborate, exchange and value a greater ‘collective pool’ of innovation knowledge, otherwise, solutions being offered to clients remain incomplete, stilted and lack the real diversity of understanding they require to combat a different set of market conditions than in the past. They need greater transformational services.

Collaboration in the making?

Perhaps we have here a collaboration in the making, that is for the clients (markets) benefit and bridges some of the current client / consulting gaps that I feel are there.

I wonder if the larger consulting company can see beyond their own noses for the value in this?

The post The Challenges Being Faced by Innovation Consultants 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.

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

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

• A sharper, clearer focus on innovation resources to meet 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

3. Getting even more specific – quantification and qualification

• Recognizing 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
• Recognizing resources can come beyond the firm and bringing these in successfully. Managing within a more open environment.
• Achieving  mutual dependencies to support; recognizing the hindering ones
• Being aware of  the impact of different scenarios in the management of innovation

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

• Recognizing 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
• 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 road blocks – 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 recognizing 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
• Recognizing the value of hidden innovation and spotting its occurrence

7. Entering into Competitive Battle – the Dynamics of Rivalry, the Uniqueness of You

• Recognizing, developing, capturing, transforming, avoiding and out – manoeuvring
• 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 team to organizational learning in measured steps
• Recognizing the role of leadership, achieving strategic alignment and working on broadening out innovation competence at different organizational 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 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 fitness landscape

As you can see this is applying a very comprehensive approach, a fairly ‘intensive’ one.  This might alter individually after some clear piloting, learning and experimentation undertaken.  Building innovation capabilities takes time; they are complex, highly structured and multi-dimensional. Any structured approach to tackling innovation takes time and considerable commitment.

The post 9 Stages for building innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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.

There is a complementary set of forces; improving one often triggers improvement in another. What you have to guard against is possibly ignoring one might equally impact negatively on others. Recognizing dependencies is critical and their triggering effect makes innovation evolution even more dynamic.

We are looking for the ‘combination’ effect of a dynamic set of capabilities and competencies that generates improved performance. The issue is to know what and which ones?

The combination effect to gain a greater innovation fitness effect comes from managing this over four stages shown in the above visual of the journey of innovation fitness dynamics.

The four stages will be described in more detail in future blogs but briefly are:

1. The goal within these stage is to identify the key dependencies relevant for improved innovation within your organization to discover
2. what are the mutual dependencies that will have a more dynamic impact on your innovation system so you understand
3. what consequences come from this and how the changing environment will behave so as to consider the effect, that then leads to
4. what recognition and implications this has so as to put in place an ongoing, evolving set of innovation dynamics that keep you fit to perform innovation on a sustaining higher performance basis.

Again I want to emphasis here, this is an evolving journey but the critical recognition here is, for innovation to continue to be the driver of future growth and wealth, it clearly does need to have a greater understanding and recognition of its management potential within organizations.

This site www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com is determined to push beyond today’s accepted, often ‘lagging’ performance from innovation activity, and raise the innovation performance engine up within organizations. I feel we do have this critical need to have in place a growing clarity of the factors needed to consistently deliver a more ‘leading’ position of knowing what does actually have real dynamic impact, both on an organizations innovation performance and the individual contributions that contribute towards the required strategic goals and objectives.

This I feel states our journey and how we are planning this out to traverse across the terrain towards better innovation solutions, that make up the dynamics of innovation and provide a ‘fitness’ solution that is unique to your needs. Care to share and join the journey?

Paul Hobcraft

Mail to : paul*AT*agilityinnovation.com

www.paul4innovating.com

www.agilityinnovation.com

The post Moving along the path to innovation fitness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

This is an evolving journey, any terrain that we travel over does offers very different challenges to build innovation capability into the very fabric of organizations, it needs building and structuring thoughtfully. You will see there are so far already thirteen categories making up this quest to map out and build out this innovation fitness. Each category is part of the total workout we need to go through. I’d suggest be selective in reading these, take your time and as you explore these progressively you will begin to see the overarching ‘fit’ these have with each other but each person, each organization will have different needs to get innovation fit. The more you explore, the more dynamic they become in possibility but it does takes time, for you and for me to build this fitness regime. We do always need a clear starting point and also a journey’s end in mind. See http://bit.ly/A0en7f for the ‘about’ story we all need to reflect upon.

The recognition that innovation for us all, to make it sustaining, does needs dedicated  investment in the understanding of the makeup of the capabilities to build a required ‘innovation performance engine.’ This is to provide more of the rich potential for wealth and value creation required in most organizations. It is an area of serious under-development at present, when you compare this with the focus on physical assets and general make up of offering support with limited direct knowledge application, within the majority of organizations.

The makeup of innovation

Innovation is made up of both tangible and intangible assets. It is the marriage of these two that makes innovation a unique capability to manage in well structured ways. It is the people engaged in innovation activity that make it work.  Everything else, the process, structures, technologies and management systems are just the contributing enablers.

The struggle to date is that innovation remains hard to manage well; we strive to systemize it and then attempt to replicate any success we achieve. Often this does not work as the variables that make up innovation can be different for each innovation event or activity.

The important point though is successful innovation contains core elements and processes regardless of industry, form, or type of innovation, we are pursuing.  Much of the difference though is in its varying degree’s based on these core elements. Our search was to find those core elements so as to leverage and strengthen them even further to strengthen an organizations capability to innovation continuously in a sustaining manner.

We as organizations strive to achieve distinct competitive advantage, and innovation is one of those real contribution points this can achieve this. The need is to make the innovation capabilities and capacities a distinctive, not easy to copy, unique set. These are shaped by the context and content of innovation, the organizations position and its choice of evolutionary paths it has decided to take or needs to take.

The emphasis points needed for dynamic innovation capabilities

Dynamic capabilities emphasize management capabilities and the inimitable (unique) combinations of resources that are constantly at work across all functions to make them distinctive and valuable.

Distinguishing innovation capabilities that are relevant are based on the type of knowledge they contain. Functional capabilities allow development of technical, practical knowledge. Integrative capabilities allow firms to absorb knowledge from external sources and this is where the absorptive capacity develop comes in. Innovation requires more of a higher-order integrated capability approach to constantly learn, develop, mould and manage multiple capabilities. This required the integration of critical capabilities to successfully stimulate innovation for effective and improving performance.

Many of the identified resources in capabilities have some level of complementary, improving one triggers improvement in another. Equally ignoring one can impact negatively on others. So individual components on their own have limited effect, it is the combination effect that generates the improving performance. Equally, the needs do change over time and you have to constantly ‘refresh, challenge and stimulate’ these otherwise you can have core rigidly set in.

Shifting away from the accepted norm

Innovation understanding and building strength in competencies and capabilities takes an organization beyond the accepted norm of managing efficiency, quality, being responsive and reacting with speed- all challenging within themselves. Innovation represents today’s competitive advantage statement that should be supported by these others. We must avoid dysfunctional consequences and why the existing systems and structures do have to ‘fold into’ new innovation based ones.

Organizations need to shift from the one often still found today, of a higher focus on stability, efficiency and effectiveness for profitability though that current preoccupation with performing routines and formalised structures. The challenge in today’s world is to be adaptable, agile, adjusting to offer consistent instability in the right ways to keep adjusting to the consistent market challenges. Innovation in itself is a force of instability. The shift needed to be made is to balance the dual ‘tensions of stability through efficiency, with change driven by innovation. It is the dynamic forces within the world we operate within that require us to respond and mirror, with equally the capacity for managing dynamic innovation capabilities.

Integrating back or making anew

The challenge is to integrate all of the organizations capabilities into the innovation process, not as many do today, try to integrate innovation into the existing structures- it does not work. The linkage and mechanisms need to be focused on creating new knowledge and competitive advantage, not searching to maintain obtained knowledge offering known results, today we are searching for resolving the unknowns, yet to be articulated needs to grow our markets in ways that customers strongly relate too and reward us for in multiple ways.

So the combination of efficiency of the existing structures needs folding into the more knowledge intensive ‘creative’ new one for achieving competitive advantage.

Innovation capability is defined as the ability to continuously transform incoming knowledge and news concepts and ideas into new products, services, processes, systems and new business models, for the benefit of the organization and the stakeholders. Innovation is about synthesising as well as operating in the two paradigms of efficiency of the existing and innovating new to the world.

The need is to recognize an organization-wide innovation capability that pervades all aspects of the organizations existence, forming the core value system to the measures and behaviours that are exhibited and on show on a daily basis for all to appreciate, assess and value.

Being nimble, flexible for managing across the different domains.

The need is to build a nimble, flexibly effective innovation performance engine that is quick to adapt to those constant changing market conditions. High performance deliberately and systematically enable and motivate the chaotic and complex domains (reference the Cynefin model on this) of novel and emergent practice that ‘present’ divergent behaviours and where the dynamics of innovation lie. Equally knowing the reinforcing practices and processes that make up of existing good and best practice are needed to make these more efficient and effective and reliable in their management.

Each part of the innovation fitness dynamics though is designed to reinforce and extract the innovation performance required of them. It is identifying the elements (both dynamic and more static repeating aspects) that make up the fitness landscape for managing innovation’s performance. I can only encourage you to begin to explore the categories that make up our terrain map to begin to consider your own innovation fitness journey of building capability and capacity that makes you a more dynamic organization to respond to different challenges in todays more fluid and adaptive world.

Ó      PAH 22.02.2012.W-I-P

Paul Hobcraft

Mail to : paul*AT*agilityinnovation.com

www.paul4innovating.com

www.agilityinnovation.com

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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.

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The question is how do you see the journey to achieve innovation fitness through two different ‘cloud’ maps

Or do you see this journey totally differently, not what it needs to cover but the route and challenges it will need to work out?

Irrespective the terrain can look rugged and challenging. Are you ready to begin your journey?

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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?

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