Often innovation succeeds or fails by the personal involvement and engagement of a ‘selected’ few. Recognizing the types of innovation leadership might help you manage the innovation work a little better.

So can you recognize the traits of your innovation leader?

Are they a front-end or back-end innovation leader? Here’s how you can begin to spot the difference.

Before we climb into this

I recall enjoying a book published a few years back, “Innovation Governance- how top management organizes and mobilizes for innovation”, written by Jean-Philippe Deschamps and Beebe Nelson. I can totally recommend it as it is so rich in thinking through much around innovation, placed within this governance framework. It lays out a clear improvement path for innovation to travel. I am drawing from this book on some thoughts about innovation leadership.

The author’s view argues that organizations are traditionally tribal and as innovation is a highly complex corporate activity, which crosses many boundaries both within and outside the organization, it needs clear governance and structures to manage these dynamics of often conflicting and differing goals, expertise and interests. Often each group possesses its own rules, its own judgment of what is important, and this ‘creates’ the absolute need to have a mechanism that ‘cuts’ across these potential barriers.

So can you recognize your innovation leader?

According to the authors of “Innovation Governance”, you need the right combination of front-end and back-end leaders, since the two types are complementary. An example of a front-end leader in pharmaceutical firms is typically found as heads of discovery, often under the leadership of the chief research officer. Whereas back-end leaders would tend to be in charge of clinical development, manufacturing, or marketing-driven activities.

The best way to identify these two types of leaders is often their functional orientation, possible background disciplines, and their general management interest and attitudes.

A good example of this ‘divide’ is between two really famous leaders that have propelled Apple to the top in innovation and sustained execution Steve Jobs and Tim Cook of Apple. Both have been highly visible and well cited in personality, backgrounds, and interests. As described well within the book this difference is best illustrated by this Apple leadership comparison.

The front-end leader.

Steve Jobs was clearly a front-end leader. He constantly sought out more radical creativity in design and end product results. Let’s make clear distinctions on what we think we know of the persons involved.

• He had a real passion for new ideas, exploring and combining different thinking and designs, searching for solutions to customers’ unarticulated needs to improve their product experience.
• He was constantly questioning the status quo and challenging (extremely hard) the team around him with constant how, what if, what else, why not type questions.
• He had a more entrepreneurial flair and more of a venture capital mentality regarding returns and risks; he kept focusing on ‘big win’ promises.
• He had this belief to constantly experiment, to open up new paths and different thinking and he looked to accept the risk and tolerate failure by moving through the ‘dwelling stage’ into the ‘learning from’ set of insights.
• He encouraged individuals to have a degree of freedom, he challenged them constantly, and he expected a climate of mental adventure and excitement to attract others into the organization but these were made up of a diversity of backgrounds. His own background was rich in diversity and inquiry.
• Finally, his tolerance levels were often ‘explosive’ but he generated the level of commitment to producing some of the stands out products of recent years.

The back-end innovation leader

It is often questioned why Tim Cook took over when Steve Jobs died. He is seemingly the archetypal back-end guy. He was credited with managing the Apple supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics, thus freeing up Jobs to focus on his front end pursuits. Tim Cook comes with more operational discipline.

• He focuses on getting products to market flawlessly in cost-effective ways, mastering all the complexity of putting in place the operational foundations necessary to go from concept to launch and roll-out.
• He has that insistence on achieving higher planning quality and expects the process discipline and standardization to make innovation replicable.
• He understands the demand for speed to market through a high level of cross-functional integration and a ‘first-time-right’ philosophy in implementation.
• Would have without doubt flexibility in execution decisions, based on detailed operational knowledge and pragmatic risk management.
• That ability to motivate staff for product battles and promotion of ‘launch and learn’ approach, leading to adapting quickly to improvements, re-launch cycles, and even recalls.

Balancing the respective innovation clout always needed.

If you have a front-end leader at the helm of your innovation activities then you need to find the balance of who manages the disciplined operational side, then if you have a back-end leader, who will defend an aggressive front-end agenda?

The appointing of any innovation leader has significant implications, sometimes huge. This ‘style’ can determine what generates innovation and can determine the passion, commitment, and the emphasis points that your organization’s innovation will possibly give preference to and provide resources.

So you have to ask “what is our innovation leadership” model?

Is there a balance within the leadership team, how can this be managed smoothly?

Having a better understanding of leadership traits, achieving a ‘given’ balance to offer a more complementary top team, alongside having in place a ‘greater’ innovation governance structure will help avoid many of the pitfalls and dysfunctional aspects, that can be encountered that software alone simply can’t resolve. People with their personal beliefs, passions, and understandings is what makes innovation work, the software is the ‘great’ enabler, and governance “pulls it” all together.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Do you recognize your innovators leaders position? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The best way is to encourage everyone to have the ongoing experience, to get really involved and caught up in projects and initiatives that have the potential for impact. Learning from failures needs to be part of this.

Yet the very best thing is to encourage connected minds for value-creating opportunities and knowledge sharing for innovation to flow across an organization. For this, we need to think about some modern engagement platforms that have ’engagement and knowledge’ at their heart.

Let me offer some thoughts on this engagement need. It is (really) valuable to relate too.

Firstly and most importantly- Absorptive Capacity really does need greater understanding.

A fair time back two researchers, Cohen and Levinthal (1990) pioneered the concept of absorptive capacity, further defined as the ability of an organization to identify, value, assimilate, and apply new knowledge. Since its 1990 publication, the concept has been further developed and given rise to many thousands of published papers around this subject.

The value of absorptive capacity is that when organizations have some prior knowledge they are more receptive to adding new understandings and new ideas.

Organizations that encourage and set about learning consciously set about the search for new ideas and by having this already established ‘learning’, are far better at recognizing new ideas that might lead to innovation.

These organizations develop a deeper understanding of integrating and experimenting with this new knowledge and set about placing it in a new setting, concept or hypothesis, to push this knowledge forward into new innovation. They are consciously advancing learning.

This gaining of continuous knowledge encourages constant learning and this has a positive feedback cycle as it builds the capacities and capabilities for future innovation activity. Absorptive capacity once recognized and established as a system promotes the search for new knowledge that greatly increases the capacity to make the necessary new connections for new innovation to happen.

The ability of our knowledge gathering needs a continuous focus and methodology of approach.

For this to happen, it does need continuous focus. If organizations take the alternative route of wanting to squeeze every last drop out of the existing innovation activity or research department, organizations over time develop as bad learners, they begin to ignore, to assume they have the knowledge and get fixed in their mindsets. They fail to absorb, they tend to reject and increasingly adopt the “not invented here” syndrome. That can only last for a limited time before ‘innovation decay’ sets in, people leave and the knowledge often goes with them also.

We need a system to capture and allow knowledge to flow, and a strong absorptive capacity has three main outputs which 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. This is why this becomes important to establish and apply.

Managing innovation is the ideal home. If we agree that most innovations happen outside often self-imposed boundaries then we have to extend to all our boundaries and beyond. We have to open up.

We certainly understand that today innovation is not confined to 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 innovative ideas, and regularly providing them with the content and context that they need to look for.

Absorptive capacities provide us with the system on which we can encourage the gathering, understanding, and translation of knowledge. It underpins engagement.

Then we have to align technology with this ‘needing to be engaged’

We work in different modes, we have ad-hoc communications, the more process-work-driven collaboration needs and we need to seek out more content-centric collaborations to help us in our work and sense of engagement and worth.

There are plenty of tools out there that need to bring ‘in-house’ as standard service delivery platforms. These include Business Intelligence gathering tools, open access to portals, websites, and intranets to acquire, assimilate, and transform what we are discovering.  Then we need to establish organization-specific collaboration tools, enterprise social networks, encourage the constant feeding and building of content management resources, streamlining workflows, to help others to explore and build on these insights.

The key, though, is a uniformed communication strategy for all to appreciate, accept to work on and gain increased value from it.

Then we need to build this modern engagement platform.

What needs to be part of this engagement platform? It needs to have the capacity to ‘listen’ and capture understanding, it needs to deploy some filtering and analytics, it needs to have some inbuilt principles of workflow and BPM.

Then you need to capture the interactions, offer search and discovery services, organize event management, and be able to retrace the interaction history.

Then it has to have application connectors, domain-specific apps, and value the activity streams to provide rich user experience of different points within the engagement.

Finally, all of this needs to be integrated into the larger organizations’ processes and be able to be ‘syncing’ capabilities with the more traditional systems of your organization.

Achieving engagement

So this engagement platform interacts with the world to bring it into your four walls, it engages with other systems that help it in their capturing and dispersing abilities and it simply connects people. Lastly, it has to contain interesting work, knowledge, or activity.

There is a real need to think through the modern engagement platforms we require, both externally with our customers and other stakeholders, and also for our internal needs and this comes increasingly from technology solutions.

.There is increasing acknowledgment on the value of collective wisdom, growing flexibility in discovery and selection, relying on others that can add new knowledge and insights as well as recognizing the match and balance between intrinsic and extrinsic values for motivating and achieving real engagement for all those wanting to grow and prosper.

The post We need to shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Constructing an innovation conversation framework is never easy, we all come at it in different ways and when it comes to those strategic conversations, we feel a sense of panic and growing tension as our messages begin to fray at the edges and slip more into tactical, the more we talk.

If you just diving into innovations, this sort of strategic conversation can change the goalposts, alter the perspective, and can give the innovation a more focused framing to build propositions around. It enables you to stand out as you are able to articulate the “bigger picture”

The framing of an innovation conversation framework

What I am suggesting here is an innovation conversation framework, on how we can approach different strategic value propositions, and where we might need to debate these across the organization, as the points of impact, so we can make a move towards a higher degree of innovation alignment for all involved.

If we take the three ‘classic’ strategic thrusts of product leadership, operational excellence, or customer intimacy, then we need to make clear the potentially different emphasis points within any suggested innovation approach that we should take. We must, within any innovation approach, be clear on what and where we should be placing our primary focus.

Aligning innovation within a strategic conversation framework

This framing can be most useful to remind people who are involved, that there are significant points of difference, or always need to be in anything new and innovative, otherwise, why are “we” doing it? There is a need to agree and align on what we are driving towards – and support any selected strategic direction. This framework can really open up the discussion. It can begin to show the possible implications and challenges ahead. It forms the required strategic dialogue.

Equally, some might argue that you actually need to combine all three, well I’d certainly want to question whether this is possible all at the same time. I would really doubt it if you just consider some of the aspects I’ve laid out within this framework above.

If it is still demanded, and some leaders can be just that, demanding – wanting to cover all the bases without knowing why they should be really focusing down on one of these. The direction you go requires the organizational focus to build the type of capabilities, resources, and processes to match this.

The need for a real alignment of strategy and innovation

Innovation stands in service to strategic goals such as growing market share, differentiation, and disrupting adjacent markets, serving the consistent changing and demanding customer needs, or by honing the delivery process by spotting these and then exploiting them rapidly and effectively. The first thing is you need to have a solid, thoughtful conversation around the type of strategic emphasis you wish to achieve.

Creating clear goals and linking/aligning innovation to those more agile strategies is a vital step before you get into the actual innovation concept stage. Senior executives must establish the manner in which innovation fits within the strategic context established on their goals, vision, and strategies.

Really do try and establish some key principles

I would suggest you really do need, even more, a framework to remind you of the critical differences and what aspects need clear focus to deliver to the distinct value proposition parts. Each strategic value proposition has significant implications to plan and work through.

This framework can help you to contribute to achieving greater alignment between the strategic direction (product leadership, operational excellence, or customer intimacy) and the key innovation aspects that help to align with this which the organization will need to think about and work through. Of course, those that go and build their own, based on their different needs of innovation create something unique and more valuable to “gather around”

The post Those that learn to frame the Strategic Innovation discussion are the big winners first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The post Forget Best Practice, Think Always Of Learning Next Practice first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

• a slightly different version was originally published on the Hype blog posting site.

The post Taking Final Ideas to Market is the Hardest Part first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to clarify how to identify the existing prevailing or dominant system and the challenges to its sustainability into the future, i.e. the case for change (horizon 1). Innovation can lose the ‘fit’ aspects over time as the external environment changes.

We also need to think through the desirable future state, the ideal system you desire and the emerging options. Those that can displace what you already have. Often you can find elements in the present that give you encouragement (horizon 3); keeping yourself open to all options that could lead to transformational change.

Often the struggle is to draw out the nature of the tensions and dilemmas between vision and reality, and the distinction between innovations that serve to prolong the status quo and those that serve to bring the third horizon vision closer to reality (horizon 2); This is the space of transition, often unstable, called the intermediate space where views can collide and diverge.

We work this framework in a specific sequence of H1 – H3 – H2.

There is a good reason we look at H1, then H3 and then H2 in that order. Horizon two is the toughest one, as it needs to balance between today’s existing innovation and those seen as important to the future. H2 is you transition horizon, one where you need to learn, to gather, to pilot, prototype, place limited bets and investment to learn and adjust as you work towards improving your understanding and knowledge for making the ultimate move of managing what is or shaping in horizon three.

To get there, you will adjust, pivot and constantly reshape as you learn and experiment. This is the value of this horizon 2 as you work out how the landscape is changing and requiring constant adjustments. The horizon 2 tends to work on those sustaining innovations (h2-) and those transformative innovations (h2+).

There are always plenty of uncertainties to map and resolve
Clearly it’s not acceptable to stay still and be good at what you already do and expect this to just continue out into the future. We need to consciously evolve in how to counterbalance today’s business needs with new business opportunities offered out in Horizons 2 and 3. These are providing you with a more robust innovation portfolio of options under investigation and development.

Having different perspectives will enhance your innovation activities
The 3H framework offers a perspective that accepts the need to both address the multiple challenges that occur in the first horizon, foster the seeds of the third and, allocate appropriate focus and resources to manage the transitions from one to another. We secure, build and explore across these different horizons.

What makes the model valuable to innovators is that it ‘accepts’ that competition is restless, markets are evolving, and that change is a constant. The three horizons approach offers the methodology for constructing plausible and coherent innovation activities projected out into the future. It looks for emerging winners.

This is not a planning tool; it is providing a valuable evolutionary perspective that dialogues can be formed around so decisions on where to focus and what resources to apply can be made on a more plausible and coherent set of activities, projected into the future, searching for emerging winners that can change and challenge your existing business.

The need is to address the challenges in horizon one and nurture the seeds of the third. It is not an either/or, good/bad discussion. You need those robust discussions to form fresh perspectives. The key is in listening out and becoming adept at managing these conversations between the ‘voices’ of the three horizons.

The three voices that need to be in the same room
The different voices involved can be highly engaged, all wanting to add their perspective:

• You have the voice of today, the incumbent, the manager(s) responsible for delivering today’s result, very much operational and result orientated, that are more concerned with managing the existing, maximizing returns and keeping the organization going efficiently and effectively.
• Then you have the second voice, the voice of the entrepreneur, the one eager to experiment, try out new things, wanting to push further, to explore and extend, accepting some aspects will not work but keen to investigate, experiment and learning from these discoveries.
• Last we have the third voice, the voice of the aspirant, who is looking to build a different vision, believing in different, more pioneering, perhaps radical solutions that seeks to visualize things in their ‘mind’s eye’, far more aspirational. This concepts often can seemingly look on first ‘take’ to be totally incompatible to the reality of today but are picking up on ‘weak signals’ that are out there that signify a changing future that might impact your own.

It is the combination of these different three voices that need to come together and frame the innovation journey by using the three horizons framework.
You really should give it a far greater consideration within your innovation toolbox, it ‘aids’ the framing of your present to future needs and gives ‘voice’ to all the different thinking and opinions on building the innovation pipeline, balancing the portfolio and helping to identify all the gaps and opportunities that need resolution.
*****
Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit

The post Drawing out the different voices within the three horizon methodology for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How do we set about engaging with all these different voices surrounding innovation?

Have you ever worked with the three horizon framework?
It is really useful for managing your innovation activities, drawing out the often conflicting voices within the organization on how to take innovation forward. The approach can unlock you from just being caught in the present, to one of envisaging a future that then allows you to begin to build different capabilities, competencies and capacities.

Find out more here and here and here on the three horizons or within this blog site put “three horizon approach ” into the search box. You will find  I have provided a considerable overview in different posts’ thoughts on the 3H thinking and why I place such value in it for innovation’s evolution.

The 3H framework offers a perspective that accepts the need to both address the multiple challenges that occur in the first horizon, foster the seeds of the third and, allocate appropriate focus and resources to manage the transitions from one to another.

What makes the model valuable to innovators is that it ‘accepts’ that competition is restless, markets are evolving, and that change is a constant. The three horizons approach offers the methodology for constructing plausible and coherent innovation activities projected out into the future. It looks for emerging winners.

The 3H not a planning tool; it is providing a valuable evolutionary perspective that dialogues can be formed around, so decisions on where to focus and what resources to apply can be based on a more plausible and coherent set of activities projected into the future, searching for emerging winners, those that can potentially change and challenge your existing business but evolve it in clear ways.

The 3H is a dialogue mechanism to help frame the evolving journey and allow you to move towards it in a better-structured way.

The need is to discuss the challenges in horizon one and nurture the seeds of the third. It is not an either/or, good/bad discussion. You need those robust discussions to form fresh perspectives. The key is in listening out and becoming adept at managing these conversations between the ‘voices’ of the three horizons.

The three voices that need to be in the same room

• You have the voice of today, the voice of the manager(s) responsible for delivering todays result that are more concerned with managing the existing, maximizing returns and keeping the organization going efficiently and effectively.

• Then you have the second voice, the voice of the entrepreneur, the one eager to experiment, try out new things, explore and extend, accepting some aspects will not work

• Last we have the third voice, the voice of the aspirant, who is looking to build a different vision, believing in different, more pioneering ways and visualize things in their ‘mind’s eye’, far more aspirational they often seem on the first take to look to be totally incompatible to the reality of today.

The different voices involved can be highly engaged, all wanting to add their perspective, you need to listen to them. You need to search for common ground, growing recognition and sometimes realization, that these are not so much separate voices, but actually ones that can all be combined, to provide a far greater outcome when they can ‘see the same future’ but through their own specific voice.

It is the combination of these different three voices that need to come together and help frame the innovation journey. It is by applying and using the three horizons framework and its methodology you can draw out and advance better outcomes for your future innovation activity.

There is this powerful need to look toward the future

Based on what we know today and what we can set about building and exploring, does hold the exciting promise of the future. Look out of ourselves offers a more rewarding prospect. Valuing the often conflicting voices around us or even seeking them out provides for richer promise.

We need to keep reflecting upon what is dominant, prevalent and seems to be pattern-changing, as these positions are constantly shifting. Scanning the horizons and what is simply all around ‘us’ offers those ‘pockets of the future’ to invest in, explore and experiment, to be open to change, to shape and prepare for, to become far more “future ready”.

Initially these pockets of the future may seem a long way off, often just really weak signals, but are indicating different, perhaps far more radical and perhaps disruptive changes for our organizations to re-equip for. The earlier yon can spot and organize for changes ahead the greater the chances of building the different capabilities and competencies these are more likely to need.

Technology clearly comes to mind with wave upon wave of change is crashing against the established rocks, beginning to weaken the existing structures and form new ones. Innovation gains from this constant flow, if you are ready to receive it.

Change does come from different experiments and explorations

It is partly through the treatment of innovation, feeding into the system a rising wave of future innovations that alter positions. Staying stuck in ‘just’ incremental to serve the existing conditions in the market seriously constrains you for the future, you stop growing, exploring, being curious and experimental.

You need to encourage experimentation, testing, prototyping, accelerating the learning and then being ready to scale what holds promise and abandon what seems not to.

For this, you need all the voices within your organization seeing the future, so they can consciously work towards it, even when it might seem vague and not fully clear. The 3H framework draws out discussions, it helps project into the future.

Just always remember, the present is already in decline.

Look out, do not stay locked in.

Entrenchment limits your options to break out, as much as you might feel it needs defending, as it’s providing your present-day core yet it is ‘holding you hostage’ not able to break free and embrace the future in the planned ways you can achieve.

The post Are you engaging with all the different voices around you? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Organizations continue to push for business growth by launching wave upon wave of new products, yet many end up as just hardly ripples. We seem to have this NPD ‘bug’ of wanting to constantly innovate, it is required, expected and keeps our organization’s teams of developers and marketing groups gainfully employed. Yet we continue to have poor product rates of return. Why?

Researching new product failure is fairly hard to cut through fact and fiction

Recently I was asked to research into these failure rates, the part of the broader question was interesting, in trying to understand this continually high failure rate, as it is claimed we have advanced significantly with our innovation understanding, structures and research techniques to understand market and customer needs, yet we still have, it seems, the same ongoing failure rates. Why?

Firstly getting at definitive failure rates really can be one of those “it depends” replies. Not just which industry you are in but which market, which segment within the market, what are you trying to do, what are you trying to build, defend or advance etc., etc. It gets incredibly complex to give a baseline to failure; apart from it does seem unacceptably high.

Four strands of insight seem to reflect some measurement ‘sense’ of failure

Firstly, I liked one view here provided through the PDMA: “often new product ideas are not developed and the majority of new products never make it to market. Consider these two interesting statistics: 1) New products have a failure rate of 25 per cent to 45 per cent; and 2) For every seven new product ideas, about four enter development, one and a half are launched, and only one succeeds”.

Secondly, according to Booz & Company, they report that 66 per cent of new products fail within two years.

Thirdly, the Doblin Group reckons a startling 96 per cent of all innovations fail to return their cost of capital.

Fourthly, this makes product development very sobering. Few product introductions, for instance, within the food and beverage categories, are blockbusters. Companies in mature industries often must find another way to make a splash. Only 1% of new product launches reached $100 million or more in sales revenues in their first year (Bain & Co in a report back in 2008). I doubt it has got any easier, most probably a lot harder since then!

Each of these failure rates speaks to me

Each of these four metrics has given a clear qualification to failure rates. Failure is qualified and framed.

Yet it grows in my mind so often that our failure rates are not to do with the market or customer acceptance but the very poor ways we conduct new product development within many of our organizations. How we manage innovation internally can contribute to market success or failure.

Much of our failure might lie with us, not the market
We seem to have five really big internal failure points, let me call this the internal “magic five” that have hidden within them the common problems that might be stopping organizations from improving their internal npd rates.

1. Innovation Execution

The high level of products that miss launch dates is often due to a lack of dedicated time and resources assigned to execution. It simply leaves the product at the factory gate, not having the dedicated focus and gaining the attention it needs in the marketplace. You hit the rocky road of execution as Innovation execution is not a smooth process, it is full of surprises, Innovation is serendipitous, full of fortunate discoveries, and often you stumble across something that takes it further forward and these need dedicated attention.

How often does your innovation execution lacks momentum, as suddenly all that necessary energy dissipates and falls away, what started as a bang ended with a whimper as resources get pulled due to the mistake that “job done” was when the product rolled off the production line. You really need to have as much leadership and attention immersed in the deployment zone of execution but we often fail to recognize this.

2. Too Few Good Impactful Ideas

How many times have you got caught up in that ongoing debate on ideas, the quest for many required by a (stupid) metric, clashing with top managers who need to find and fund those higher-value projects that have real value impact? The hyping up in tensions this can have internally, staking the future on some personal bets, padding out others to meet yet another metric, of products launched in the year.

Also, some organizations get caught up in that underlying ‘push’ to introduce increasingly more incremental products to offset underperformance. The lack of clear criteria on what will be supported and why, or those that work the idea so as to ‘massage’ the numbers up to get it into the next stage of the pipeline. Idea Management needs clear, concise governance and well-thought-through metrics to deliver against and that is NOT ideas, for idea’s sake!

3. Lack of Alignment
The alignment of product innovations to areas of strategic focus is one issue but then even if they are aligned, the organization fails to allocate and connect the need to make the appropriate resource allocation to deliver. This gap of alignment between strategy and product development activity is one of the real gaps as they are internally driven and not customer alignment driven.

To get closer to achieving alignment of strategic needs and our innovation outcomes, we need an overarching strategic design, to reduce the ‘disconnects’. Innovation needs constant alignment. One essential need is to provide a well-designed strategic plan that will allow the connections needed. We need to seek out alignment through clarification, through talking to each other, by working explicitly from the ‘same page.’ Putting together alignment and objectives need a specific design.

4. Portfolio “Placing Bad Bets”
The feelings, instincts, and personal favourites often get the favoured resources but are they ‘grounded’ on exact customer needs? No, more personal beliefs, and in the end, precious resources are wasted on unsuccessful products.

Do we actually do product profitability evaluations one or two years later to encourage the culling and learning from our product launches? How can you promote a more careful evaluation of innovation practices, striving to eliminate variances yet guard against that relentless pursuit to reduce the failures?

We need to guard against acquiring that prevailing risk mitigation mindset with the idea of standardising and simplifying, validating through increased data verification and mining, striving for benchmarking and searching for best practices.

These ‘good practice intentions’ seem to go nicely with placing the innovation bets on increasing the incremental activities, all to the detriment of seeking out more radical innovation. If one type of innovation prevails and begins to dominate, the risks of not providing for a healthy future increase. We begin to lose our abilities to be responsive and flexible.

We lose our agility to respond to changes in our markets, we are beginning to ossify our innovation, and ending up with ‘no good bets’ means you are placing no decent bets for your future health. Managing the innovation portfolio well can be the difference between success and failure.

5. Product development remains often ego-driven

Many responsible for new product development seem to suffer a selective perception, full of wishful thinking and optimism which can lead to biases in the direction of their wants. There is this growing internal trait to become predisposed and think of ‘our’ ideas in terms of product success, not a product failure.

We overestimate, interpret evidence to meet our wants and forget to keep going back to focus on the needs of our customers. A much harder place to focus upon and stay determined to deliver to. I repeat “are we internally driven and not customer alignment driven and do our egos get in the way?”

Product failure might lie far more internally than we are prepared to admit
Uncomfortable as it is there is a time to call into question the lack of a decent set of values that our innovation governance should be tackling.

I’d argue we are failing ourselves as much as we are failing our customers, when products don’t live up to the promise that was originally intended, as identified and needed, they just seems to somehow get lost in internal compromise and product development failure.

It does seem how we are managing innovation internally has a large part to play in the present contributing to market success or failure and that needs addressing.

****

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Questioning internally those many product failures first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are sometimes comfortable or confident enough to move into adjacent areas, to expand and feed off the core but these are less than transformational in most cases. This space is the one we are the most comfortable to work within, this is the horizon one of the three horizon model approach outlined to manage innovation across a more balanced portfolio of investment.

In summary, the three horizon model for innovation is actually a reasonably simple idea: with Horizon One (h1) being the current business focus, Horizon Two (h2) being more the related emerging business opportunities and Horizon Three (h3) being those that are moving towards a completely new business that can have the potential to disrupt the existing one.

The complexity lies underneath this simple idea, you need to manage these different horizons with completely different mindsets. You need clear well-structured ways to extract the real return from managing a comprehensive innovation portfolio based on knowledge, experience, intelligence but exploring plenty of the unknowns about the future and openness to get you there, as ready as you can be . Its necessary today.

The seeds of destruction lie in horizon one

Within our ‘business as usual’ attitudes lies the seeds of destruction. Today there is a relentless pace; we are facing stagnation in many maturing markets. We place a disproportionately high amount of our resources here to defend what we have and what we know; we actually subvert the future to prolong the life of the existing. We constantly look to make it more efficient and more effective but this is in the majority of cases just incremental in what we do, both in innovation and our activities. These are often simply propping up the past success instead of shifting the resources into the investments of the future.

This is why the three horizon approach has real sustaining value because if we don’t have this longer-term, transformational perspective we are just prolonging the existing until it gets disrupted by others. This is where the working across different horizons for ‘thinking’ through innovation does need different tools and mindsets and these should be based on (h1) see and operate, (h2) adjust your thinking frame and solutions, (h3) more evolutionary. Each has different techniques to explore as I’ve previously outlined in my navigation guide to this approach.

Clayton Christensen has written about this theory of disruption in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. Professor Christensen then went on to write extensively on this and one further book “Seeing What’s Next” co-authored with Scott Anthony and Erik Roth develops this disruptive theory into how the future will unfold and how to make wiser choices on these insights. The three horizon connecting approach is an excellent methodology to use to help in managing these wiser choices.

The hardest part is to traverse across into horizon 2 for new ‘breaking’ innovation

We do need this longer-term perspective and we do need to traverse into the future in clear thinking through steps (or horizons). Our horizon one does begin to decay faster today than ever, it does not fully cover off the strategic fit we want and can begin to lose its dominance over time. We need to manage this transition, not let others manage it for us.

It is how we manage this transition becomes so critical. We need to exploit developing trends that are emerging (h2) and begin to tune into possible options in the future (h3).  Within these options will emerge the winners and become the more dominant systems or solutions that we should be moving towards, even from today. Some of these only have faint emerging signals but they need to be brought into the innovation portfolio activity to explore, often in novel ways.

The horizon two is beginning to address some of the current decay arising from the core within the existing activities (or system). Here we have the highest tension.

The discussions that centre on often conflicting views of the future, compared to the existing realities and those providing the returns for today’s business. Often we can detect change but we consciously ignore it. This is the place where the disruptor’s are at work, existing or new competitors, working at displacing your products and market positions. They look to be more agile, they might have greater entrepreneurial ways, they are ready to explore emerging practices far more than the established leaders, they look to leverage different business models and are certainly not handicapped with legacy and mindsets stuck in the past. Increasing competition is today’s certainty.

Horizon Two needs a totally different mindset.

You need to see H2 with different metrics, with different perspectives, with more open minds. This is not easy. This needs to become the meeting point or “the space for transition” where you begin to let go of just protecting your core and open up your thinking to experimentation, prototyping, exploring different business models and begin to figure out how these will impact your existing core, to become more agile and adaptive than you are in the existing system or structures

These horizon (h2) concepts being explored  really do need ‘ring fencing,’ so you can protect these from all the ‘vested’ claims that your horizon one focus will continually demand to keep, so as to bring in the results in this calendar year. It is a real fight, these ideas or nascent concepts ‘give off’ negative results, they are still a mix of the tangible and intangibles where you can’t get the ‘hard’ fix on the ROI, on their real market value or potential.

Many executives ‘defending’ the core will ‘attack’ or hold back any release of their resources to help these emerging initiatives. It is a ‘hard-nosed’ reality.  It needs a very high level and conscious set of decisions coming from the top to determine these new moves. Do not believe that when most executives ‘just’ react and shrug their shoulders regarding h2 as a natural, everyday occurrence, it is far from not. Many have to come ‘kicking and screaming’ to supporting emerging activities. Far too much ‘invested’ interest comes into play. They see this more as a threat not an opportunity. It is not their sand box so why should they ‘play’.

The tensions are not just visible but played out in many subversive ways.

Just take performance metrics, if these are solely structured on the calendar year, are you realistically expecting a dilution of focus as their compensation is totally caught up  in this. Horizon two poses a real challenge within any management of our organizations. If it provides current small bases of volume, no real meaningful profit from the investments made it can be a hard sell across the organization.

Projects that focus on the future work mostly are based on ‘best’ assumptions. Sadly it is often executives expect to see the same ‘hard’ metrics being applied as the existing business. We ignore significant differences and  this is a huge mistake. So you get these clear sense that many are sceptical or pay lip service to the products of the future as the thinking, judgement and value orientation are at such odds with the existing measures and metrics they apply to run today’s business and how they get judged.

Often we then impose a set of metrics to compensate for this resistance.

This allows for a sudden rush of promising new products entering the market, of chasing and competing for those same resources as the ones focused on the core. The push to validate, explore and experiment might make the situation worse. You introduce waves of inefficiency into your highly tuned supply chain, you detract from selling and competing in tough market conditions and you then hear that comment “we took our eye off the ball”

This new ‘push’ for establishing the rising stars ends up that most of the promising concepts never really cross the finish line of moving from ‘interesting’ to main stream. The core also starts to suffer from these multiple distractions and eventually ‘innovation’ gets a bad rap. Many promising ideas get starved or killed off from emotional reactions.

The demand from supporting horizon two products or emerging concepts demands managements serious attention to getting resource allocation, response and focus into ‘actively’ managing this very real and tangible ‘innovators dilemma’.

Managing the rising stars or future potential one is hard in existing structures.

The concepts that emerge from horizon two will include the rising stars of the organization and will, over time, become even the new core business. These are a mixture of step-outs from today’s core, or extensions that have come from the adjacency work consciously being undertaken or are truly emerging as new activities that need new depth in capabilities and time to build.

These all have the potential to shift the organizations revenue base and challenge today’s cash generators. These need careful ‘portfolio and resource’ allocation. These extend the organization from your existing into new competencies, new markets and new challenges. Just please don’t use the same measures or metrics when you mix H1 and H2, although there is a huge temptation because it is just simply easy.

Horizon two is where you work through your future options

This is where you try out, experiment, explore. This is the transiting point (my space of transition) where you work through different dilemmas and paradoxes to shift the organisation through this horizon two to position it for the longer-term future. This horizon is a real point of disruption to be well-managed as you navigate from shifting resources from today’s core to that third horizon, the predicted future where ideas and proposals are still forming.

Horizon two actually ‘claims’ more time and attention than on the surface it deserves but this is the wrong mindset,  it simply needs too. This is not about supporting the ‘existing’, this is working actively on the ‘preferred’ as it is working to reduce current shortcomings, injecting new life and vigour into the present to offer a broader sustaining future.

Horizon two investments should be challenging ‘business as usual’ and should contain many of the catalysts for renewal, for the future growth. It is renewing the ‘fitness for purpose’ through innovation taking you along different pathways to the long-term successors of your business.

Horizon two can be a powerful catalyst.

 It can alter the way you are currently doing things, in new business models, in new systems, structures and delivery. It points you to a new, hopefully preferable future, worthwhile to pursue and attractive. It refreshes, it can invigorate and this horizon holds the keys and transition path to realizing that vision laid out in the ideas forming in horizon three.

To battle the increasing pace of obsolescence, we need to not just see and operate in today’s world; we must look towards the future. We must break out of incremental steps alone in our innovation activities, they just don’t simply ‘cut the mustard’ any-more, they are simply not good enough, in our rapidly changing world where increased competition is appearing from anywhere. We need to build out new capabilities, capacities through new innovation competencies.

We not only need to envision our future and the part we want to play within it but need a clear approach to working through the challenges and tensions to achieving a real balance in our innovation portfolio that work towards the same goal of being a material part of the business.

That is managing innovation not just in today’s horizon (h1) but in traversing into the future with more breakthroughs (h2) and transformational innovation (h3) that is organized around the three horizon methodology.  Making that essential traverse through horizon two is the toughest part. It needs carefully managing to have any really sustaining pathway to the emerging future.

The post Traversing different horizons for transformational innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Let me outline the rationale for adopting this within your organization.

Clarifying our options requires multiple thinking horizons
For me, the three horizons have great value to map different thinking and possible innovation options over changing horizons.

You can frame innovation in alternative ways by using this approach. Innovation has multiple evolution points and working with this framework allows you to significantly improve innovations contribution.

It goes well beyond the present value of ‘just’ fitting your existing innovation portfolio and directional management into a one dimensional, viewed in the present, framework.

You can see opportunities completely differently beyond the existing mindset and activities, it takes innovation from tactical to strategic, to foresight in your evaluations.
Innovation is constantly facing disruption; it is constantly going through life cycles and new waves of different activities. We need a far more robust, well thought-through way to apply our innovation resources to meet and anticipate these changing events.

I’ve outlined the three horizon methodology I subscribe too, in a number of different blogs and these can be viewed here, here and some further thoughts here. They each contribute into your understanding of this emerging frame so I’d ask you to spend a few minutes viewing these if you feel this has real value to you and how you need to manage your innovation in better ways.

The innovation perspective for the use of the three horizons framework
We are all well aware that organizations struggle on innovation –  they seem to have real difficulties to climb out of the incremental traps. One of the primary reasons is that they fail to apply different mindsets to evolutionary thinking and stay locked in the ‘here and now’ and this is such a huge mistake.

I believe the three horizons can be specifically set up for a specific innovation engagement to allow you to have some far more stimulating and added value to your discussions around innovation, these can go from detailed to broad evolutionary explorations and so, radically alter many of your present constraints and debates.

We need to separate and structure different mindsets to develop innovation capabilities.

Structuring the approach, by looking across multiple horizons, allow you to evolve the entire innovation portfolio and begin to recognize the many gaps that exist within your thinking, within your capabilities and capacities to innovate.

By looking at this through separate lenses assists you in allocating the appropriate but usually different resources needed to be applied to each of the time horizons and challenges that lie within.

There is this prevailing or dominant system where many organizations stay firmly engaged, that needs radically challenging, as this is the famous incremental trap where growth performance stays restricted.

The three horizons ‘asks you’ to apply three totally different mindsets to see constraints, weaknesses and often very limited opportunities differently, it alters your thinking into a far more evolutionary approach.

The big idea of the three different horizons

The (big) idea is you go beyond the usual focus on fixing problems in the present and begin to plot and map some of the future disruptions that might occur as you move forward. You work and think through three different time and clarity lenses focusing on different horizons.

The three horizons also seek to capture the linkage on the transition points and possible disrupting junctions, as well as highlight those potential gaps are presently seen that needs clearly resolving.

It can provide the ‘distinction of choices’ as well as begins to highlight present organisational realities. The more you ‘see’ the more you can fill those gaps. The more you can foresee, the more you can become ready for managing the transformation that will be needed.

The three horizons will also help you with innovation differently than the S-Curve approach, as it is more evolutionary where you are work far more concurrently and building capacity and understanding progressively on the future “predictions” as they emerge and become clearer.

To approach the three horizons I see this going through different phases
a) Firstly clarify the burning needs relating to your present position and required future position by asking what improves existing activities, what extends the current competencies and takes you into new avenues to develop/ mature. Link it to your known strategy but keep questioning this to keep it fresh and relevant to ever-changing market conditions.

b) Then by deciding and weighting accordingly the winning needs you begin to articulate and frame these. These concept storyboards provide the necessary linkage; it captures emerging trends for constructing plausible and coherent innovation activities projected into the future.

These begin to shape the decisions on resources and to determine investment options. This offers a clear shaping of the search for emerging winners yet you are still able to constantly scan the horizons for changes.

c) By looking across the three horizons separately you allow H2 to have the discussions for the “space for transition” and resolve the constant dilemma of “protecting core or investing in new” debates.

d) The H3 starts exploring fundamental different premises for replacing “business as usual” with exploring nascent ideas, concepts that might replace what you presently have, it begins to shape your thinking and awareness of what is needed to build capabilities and capacities.

e) Often these H3, even some in H2 are weak signals today where many unknowns prevail but allow you to straddle between (h1) improve, (h2) extend and (h3) change.

Planning across these different horizons needs different tools

Planning in different horizons needs different tools and these are based on (h1) see and operate, (h2) adjust your thinking frame and solutions, (h3) more evolutionary. Each has different techniques to explore.

For me innovation portfolio allocations require the double axis of knowledge needed, over the axis of known knowledge, to manage the dimensions of innovation concern, to see and operate accordingly. This is something I’ll explore at another time.

Managing with different mindsets

Different mindsets and discussions are based on (h1) operational: the here and now, (h2) more entrepreneurial: attempting to detect shifts and adjusting in agile ways, (h3) more futuristic: based on values, visions and beliefs. Each needs separating.

There is a need to work through “typical” dangers – competing voices, mixed signals and all the uncertainly dimensions. What you must consciously stop doing is looking backwards (legacy) and keep the mind ‘free’ to project forward. There is a lot of work specifically on the mindset traps and how to avoid them, or to find the solutions, to surface them and address them.

The value of visualization to align dissenting as well as consenting opinions

Work through the visualisation and turning the “talking into planning” you can work through three options (h1) what’s now, (h2) what’s next and (h3) what’s the goal to drive towards in descriptors and actions (resource allocations and specialised need to develop for example). This helps further extend your horizon thinking and relate this into the actions you need to take.

The three horizons for innovation is very useful. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi ““First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.

The three horizons does allow you to pick your fights and show others how and where you can possibly win in better ways than just in the ‘present’.

Can you see the three horizons value?

The value of the three horizon approach for innovation is where I partly wish to take my work beyond its present position through far more testing and exploring its application across different challenges and business segments.

I’m looking to engage with organizations on this – do you want to make a proposal? I’d welcome the opening conversations on this with you.

The post Mapping innovation across the three horizons first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.