Innovation is often too intangible, full of unknowns as the very nature of anything new and different. Innovation risk leaves many executives very uncomfortable.

Organizations get uncomfortable when the words “radical” “intangible”, “unknowns” and other words like these when they form part of the conversation. It often starts to induce that “risk twitch” where that careful management for short-term performance might become threatened, or the manager feels any decision is ‘going out on a limb’ and possibly career threatening.

That growing uncomfortable feeling that innovation places their bonus at “risk” so they like to ring-fence innovation as much as possible. Now some of that ring-fencing is fine, you contain a risk to keep it manageable but most innovation does not constitute organization risk, yet it gets caught up in that risky fear that innovation seems to induce. Actually, if we were managing innovation at the core, our risk management for it would be very heightened and managed differently, but how many of our companies’ have innovation as their core?

So I always welcome discussion on risk and innovation. The more we talk about it the better for what is coming towards us.

As we talk about managing risk and innovation we can become more comfortable, yet when you often hear those leading the discussions on this innovation risk, where they keep overemphasizing “Risk-appetite, risk-attitude, risk-adversity, broader risk, even risk-contagion,” now if this does begin to get you nervous. Reality simply is, when most of the innovation is exploring the unknown to change the known for something better, then organizations seem to go into a certain “lock-down” when it manages the innovation-risk equation. Innovation remains uncomfortable for many senior executives.

Recently I re-read a recent PwC report “Managing risks and enabling growth in the age of innovation” as they continued to periodically give risk an innovation focus. We need more reports on innovation and risk. I can recall two or three reports they produced around this ‘risk and innovation’ theme over the years, happily sitting in my taxonomy of innovation, always useful to refer too. This latest one had an opening theme about innovation being described in more revolutionary terms such as part of the fourth industrial revolution, the second machine age, the cognitive age and this is adding more pressure to innovate or search for “greater innovation within companies.

Of course, the more you invest in innovation, the likely the risks will increase. So the report polled 1,500 executives, focusing on managing innovation risk and how effective they are in managing this risk-reward balance needed for innovation. As I have just finished writing about innovation and the 4^th Industrial Revolution in my last post, it was good to try to find some new ways to look at the changes going on in innovation.

I cannot agree more with PwC and the fact that the innovation and changing risk landscape is making us all think differently. I have called this the “new innovation era” where technology is underpinning so much of innovation’s activity and outcomes.

I have written about risk at different times, such as a post “Treating innovation risk differently, dealing with uncertainty” and a few times since. Enter “risk” into the search box to check these out if you are interested. A very extensive review of risk I wrote in suggesting “Developing a new framework for risk and innovation”

Yet this post is not about the risks but the emerging possibilities

As we enter this different era of innovation, as we begin to connect “everything up” through implementing the 4^th Industrial Revolution we do have so much new possibility for innovation than ever. Two of the visuals (figures) within the PwC report excite me in the optimism of taking innovation out.

If you look at the “within 3 years” add-on (see below), it does paint a really good picture of innovation opportunity, and by implication, the increased risk, in my opinion. This will simply not be the “as is” to simply extend our existing innovation activity,” it will be radical in innovative change. It simply has to be, coming from technology connecting up our networks supporting and forming new collaborative relationships providing us a growing set of new technology options, we have to integrate within our business thinking. These are all emerging frontiers for innovation to explore

Combining technology and innovation gives me real optimism for innovation, does it for you?

Yet just question if you are focusing on these types of innovation? I bet you many of you are not giving this much focus, your company is still debating and figuring out how to integrate the systems and processes required for such a magnitude of change. Well, innovators need to start pondering all the possibilities. Ask yourself what new innovation growth they could bring to your innovation activities?

There are new sources of revenue, of building out our growth options will certainly come from technology- it will enable projects, form new alliances through the greater ecosystem and network forming platforms. We have the potential for this connecting ability to achieve scale and global presence through the ability to connect across global networks and form new partnerships. New business models can emerge, enabling a moving beyond traditional borders, adding in new supply chain resources. All grow in innovative opportunities when you build out a digitally connected enterprise.

Then I wanted to put another spin on a second  PwC visual shown below.

This one outlines'” a programs ability to effectively manage AI, IoT, and robotic risks”. Confidence is growing as we learn to embrace and value new technology enablers. Now my spin is simply  around “where is the new innovation possibilities in the exploitation of these emerging new technologies?” They really excite me, a little frightening for me as well, yet this adoption of new technology innovation must have so much new innovating potential, waiting to be extracted from implementing and leveraging these new technologies.

When you consider the incredible list of technology enhancements we are thinking through and adopting across a business, as we  learn their value to our business, we can clearly see a number of real innovative growth opportunities as we embed and extract value out of these:

• We can streamline operations and maintenance
• We can optimize assets and increase their ‘connecting’ value
• We can get closer to greater workflow automation
• We will focus on data as it forms a greater part of our strategic input as well as build out the security of this
• The ability to engage with customers directly and in highly personal ways from the connected 3economy
• We can achieve a higher dynamic of scale, speed, size and customer intimacy thanks to technology.
• We can achieve rapid adaption and continuous improvements through greater data monitoring and management.
• We can own assets, share and build out our service provider activities from leveraging technology
• New Business models become increasingly possible by mixing and matching resources and opportunity spotting.
• We gain new learning and awareness, sharing and exchanges on experiences

All of these bodes well for a new innovation era they give me optimism. Just reflect on this excellent visual supplied by PwC on each of the enablers to achieve this new range of innovative options.

Yet the innovation impact is troubling me though. Can we achieve all the promise emerging from these different technologies?

The huge elephant in the room is this: do we have a new innovation system in place to adapt to all this significant change occurring in the next few years?. Our present innovation processes and structures live in a different age, the old industrial age, not in the new one, the one where we connect up everything, as the 4th Industrial Revolution indicates can be realized. I wrote about this from the innovation perspective in my last post “Innovation cannot expand without the 4th Industrial Revolution“.

Have you explored these yet? I think we are still grappling with their meaning, their new positioning inside and outside our organization on their effect. Yet if we ask “what are those new possibilities” by exploring them from the innovation perspective, it perhaps offers some really new, exciting innovation potential we can only begin to consider.

Innovation is moving from taking an idea, validating it and then run it through a pipeline to build out and commercialize. Innovation is going to get increasingly complex as it brings in all the different technology enablers into play. What they provide is data, in new insights on how to manage, respond and connect all part of the business, to extend this into customers to engage. Without a doubt we need to design a far better process to innovation, we need to rethink how we manage innovation.

I am scratching my head on this, yes I am getting splinters in doing this, but we are changing the very way we are needing to manage innovation. It involves different people, different thinking, different processes and this adds up to a very sizable new level of risk that we have to manage and orchestrate. As PwC suggests there is a new risk appetite in how we are investing in technology and yes, we are learning to share risks far more through managing innovation, this being far more through platforms and ecosystem design. We need to manage our assets differently, we need to invest and equally divest and outsource and give a real fresh emphasis to our innovation capital differently, and that also means discussing innovation risk differently.

I don’t have the answers, only some emerging thoughts on where this seems to be heading- the new innovation era –  but we do need to lift innovation out of its place today and give it a much higher sense of urgency in how we manage it. Risk’s are taking on greater risks in Security, in Transaction, in Customer dialogue that innovation needs re-setting.

It is all about building new capabilities and the capacity for innovation

As we move towards a new age where technoölogy connects us up we are forced to address the need for a radical review of our existing capabilities. Do we have the capacity and skill-sets for extracting out new innovation opportiûnities? We will need a much higher level of “rapid and effective” sense-making, portfolio management, and execution, of those new innovation opportunities.

We will certainly need a very different approach to risk management. The greater the innovation opportunity, the higher the risk management becomes. We need reset points all round We are going to be dealing in a world of “all things” being visible and a greater relationship with all potential things being invisible. We are dealing in a world of the immediate, to read and react too and the dual world of scoping and exploring, based on a greater informed gut-feel, growing in relying on data validation and a healthy theoretical belief and vision of how this all connects up all those ‘famous’ dots.

Today we are facing increased frequency to react, a greater pace and speed to move from decision to execution. We need to redefine new tolerances of performance, to firstly seize and then grow these “breaking” opportunities. These new opportunities are coming from multiple points of value, not just one product or a service perspective, they are all different and we need to bring a different thinking to innovation to manage them accordingly.

We need to accommodate data analysis through ‘richer’ visualization tools, we need better dashboards of discovery and awareness, we need a new approach to different capturing tools on the needed innovation inputs, drawing our attention of where innovation is emerging and signaling opportunity. It is the ability to utilize and extract from all this technology connecting-up, through our learning of the innovation outputs and outcomes from applying the 4^th Industrial Revolution, through working in platforms and ecosystem designs for innovation, we really need this transformation of innovation thinking

Interestingly I feel one old evaluation model of innovation risk actually seems to have a new twist or lease of life if we add one new evaluation dimension. We have mapped innovation ând its associated risk according to three dimensions in the past: the degree of uncertainty, the degree of controllability and the relative importance in benefit. Well perhaps we add another, the degree of technology connection (our network relationships) we have embedded and put to use in our innovation activity.

In Summary

We are recognizing there is a growing pressure to change, the technical advantage is offering new revenue and innovative sources of growth. We can see a dramatically changing landscape of the business boundaries becoming more permeable, and a increased pressure on resource management in a changing world. Innovation needs to shape up to deal with this.

I want to thank PwC for their continued focus on innovation and risk. This recent report gives me optimism. It raises the level of risk but it is offering different strands of thought (for me) to begin to frame my “new era of innovation” in further ways.

The post Optimism in Innovation, Thinking About Risk Differently first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In a recent report called “Radical Innovation and Growth: Global Board Survey 2016 ” (link opens the pdf) we have results from a survey jointly conducted by Deloitte Denmark and Board Network – The Danish Professional Directors Association, that opens up much that can concern us about the current boardroom and its great difficulty with managing more radical innovation.

It seems within our boardrooms they are ill-equipped to managing in today’s world, grappling with the past, holding on, perhaps too tightly, to the present and certainly being unsure of the future. It is struggling to adjust to all that is entering their world.

In this report, they surveyed 614 global board professionals from a total of 50 countries during the period covered from November 2015 through to February 2016 and then published in February 2016.

I quote extensively from the Executive Summary and Introduction and urge you, the reader, to delve into the report which I found an easy read to understand and grasp the magnitude of this present boardroom discomfort.

It comes as no surprise to me, or many out there working to disrupt the incumbent but it makes for difficult reading that this is not addressed far more head on. This is a more than timely report in my view.

Corporations are under increasing attack and are really struggling to become more radical in how they can defend, secure and achieve growth. A lack of understanding innovation in all its forms is coming back to haunt them. They can’t seemingly handle radical innovation and there is even more of an imperative to learn.

The Survey wanted to understand the current mood within the boardroom

The survey set about understanding the current boardroom thinking about how to address  the exponential technology is affecting growth (and indirectly competitiveness) in international companies and organizations, they have gathered insight on how global corporate boards address and work with radical innovation and to what extent they see growth stemming from their efforts. Radical innovation is defined here as:

The report dug into the boards’ appetite for growth; how high is the bar? It looked at their risk profile and tolerance of failure. It examined the role of innovation in company strategy and its strategic importance on the board’s agenda. Is radical innovation a bulleted point at board meetings?

It questioned whether there is a clear alignment of innovation and growth goals. Do boards spend enough in terms of man hours, consultants or other expenditures on new initiatives? It asked if companies actually own a Division-X and if yes, to what extent they are successful.

It wanted to address the skill-set at board level to handle digital disruption and the urgency to act proactively. It set about the identifying of board barriers to handle radical innovation and finished with a set of recommendations based on their quantitative findings topped with first-hand experience and opinions from a number of selected global board chairs.

The respondents describe that competition and technology are among the four most important external challenges their companies are facing now. The issue was on how are the boards taking on the challenging responsibility of overseeing their companies’ radical innovation efforts?

It concludes: “At board level, what we are seeing is the beginning of a shift among board professionals’ responsibility. As if oversight of company strategy, risk management, succession planning, budgeting and forecasting, sales and marketing, operations, auditing, IT, remuneration and tax was not already a fight.

Now corporate governance includes overseeing new business development with its itchy elements of experimentation, demand for scalability, risk of failure and navigation in a fully digitized and unpredictable new business world. On top of this new business today is developed at a pace that leaves little time for thorough analysis and precise risk mitigation”

 The Common trends they found were:

• The two dominant barriers for boards working with radical innovation are lack of insight (47%) and lack of organizational design to handle radical innovation (46%).

• 40% of respondents have no director with sufficient knowledge about digital disruption and 43% feel their management invests too little to achieve their long-term growth goals.

• The boards’ failure tolerance is low as seen 18% try to avoid failure in all their dealings.

• The financial risk scenario is also conservative, 34% of respondents characterize their board’s risk appetite as one where they try to avoid big financial risk.

• There is a clear tendency towards expecting radical change coming later (in five years) rather than sooner (this quarter).

• A staggering 75% of companies with the highest growth expectations for the coming 24 months (above 10%) also own an actual Division-X (or equivalent). We see this result as a clear indication of Division-X actually driving growth. (Note: only 22% have a so called Division- X, with 58% of these starting this in the last two years)

• Radical innovation is still a new idiom at board level with 65% not having it as a formalized item for discussion or action at the board meetings. (Note: Understandable but not forgivable in this disrupting world)

Welcome to the era of disruption, it is a tsunami of issues being grappled with.

The report suggests that while global boards are taking action now, there is room for improvement. Especially when it comes to the need for greater insight into the area of innovative initiatives, grappling with organizational design, dealing with risk and failure, and sheer experience in working in the huge discomfort zone driven by accelerating technology.

“If work has become steadily more demanding for the global board member recently, at least there was a predictability associated with that work but it is all about to change.

Now, in light of massive technological disruption, the new workload for a board professional revolves around a risky, failure prone and unknown innovation territory as they can start seeing themselves as largely inexperienced new business development leaders”

I do recommend reading this report.

I certainly do recommend this report, it confirms much, it conveys much, it certainly helps to frame many of the issues the boards are less than certain about; of the uncertainties they are facing, of where their business will come from in the future.

Indeed how they are presently ill-equipped to fight on these new battlefields of future business creation in this disrupting world, as these are “largely inexperienced new business development leaders,” in a radically changing world of radical innovation.  With lots of uncharted waters entering the boardroom they need to become far more radical within themselves or will be drowned from not navigating this at all well, the worry is who and what else sinks with them?

It does seem the board members need a lot of help and it needs to come from well beyond the usual advisors but are they prepared to take different advice? It does not auger well as there does seem a real stubbornness to make real change and perhaps a belief that these disruptive forces are not knocking on their boardroom door. How wrong they so are!

The post Uncharted Waters Disrupting the Corporate Boardrooms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The reality of lasting ownership is much tougher; there are huge, often yawning gaps, in innovation accountability. The right answer should of course be everyone but making that statement on its own is a little bit of a cop-out, an easy answer to a complicated dilemma. So let me offer a connected way.

Working through the Executive Work Mat , jointly developed with our friends at Ovo Innovation, this Work Mat was designed for many reasons but principally to gain leadership engagement within all things involving innovation.

One of its overarching principles was the quest to gain alignment from the top, at the board level, through its interconnected structure and their strategic inputs so as to establish and make the critical connections all the way down and throughout the organization.

What we needed also was putting in place a fairly rigorous ‘litmus test‘ to establish if this is achieving the positive reaction required and the Work Mats intent.

These are my thoughts on this.
To achieve the alignment of innovation to the organizations strategy goals and objectives is so critical to have the best chance to deliver the necessary impact needed; to gain growth and improvement on the existing position.

We need to test for alignment, we need to see if innovation is being adopted, if innovation is cascading through the organization. Is it having a positive effect on how the organization and its people view innovation? How do we harness all the necessary efforts for a positive ‘reaction’?

The Litmus Test required for Innovation.

There are two handy definitions of a “litmus test” and why I think this can be applied nicely here in evaluating the value of the Executive Work Mat.

One, a litmus test is used in chemistry to test and establish the acidity or alkalinity of the mixture- I think innovation does prompt plenty of ‘reactions’ so this works well.

The second, is a litmus test becomes a critical indicator of future success or failure, exactly what the Executive work Mat is attempting to influence in managing the innovation efforts.

The other  aspect is the ‘cascading’ or ‘waterfall effect’ we need.

To enable the Executive Work Mat to permeate down the organization, it needs to be “cascaded.” This needs to be completed though developing a common language as well as having a constant communications and variety of dialogues, so as to make better connections up and down the organization on the levers, resources and issues to ‘enable and promote’ innovation.

Often a cascading affect is regarded as more of an unforeseen chain of events that suddenly effect the system, they trigger often an unfavourable ‘reaction’.

The effects of any cascading can be analysed and these are often through consequence/impact analysis or even event trees.  One can view this within my litmus test explanation in this case, as an impact analysis assessment, to achieve a better alignment and move towards a more positive set of reactions:

1. Working through the logic of the work mat, what works, what doesn’t?
2.  Is it being understood and aligned with the objectives laid out?
3. What are the main contributors (and inhibitors) to managing this effectively?
4. Is there the exercising of regular sets of dialogues to monitor its effectiveness in place?
5. Is it supporting and enabling a more effective allocation of resource?
6. Does it assist in the design of the innovation system, if not how can it?
7. The work mat becomes in itself a diagnostic tool to identify and correct causes and inhibitors as well as accelerate the parts that provide real sustaining impact

The Seven Parts of the Litmus Test – a short summary

Translation points in value, impact and alignment – the value of the Executive Work Mat is to gain alignment, to promote value and achieve a better positive impact from innovation.
The Leadership Commitment – how leaders chose to engage, to encourage and promote innovation activity is critical. They need to mentor, coach, listen and respond to the concerns, opportunities and offer their contribution and judgment.
Peoples involvement – In some recent research by Deloittes on what is required for successful collaboration they felt three conditions needed to be in place. These I really resonated  with, in where I feel any litmus test for innovation should focus upon when it comes to people:

• Do they Belong: people collaborate on behalf of organizations they feel connected too.
• Do they Believe: people collaborate when they commit to carrying out specific actions
• How do they Behave: people collaborate when they share a common understanding of how things are done.

Designed-In – the effectiveness of any innovation system is within its design, its processes and functioning. Here within the litmus test you are looking far more at establishing, generating, exploring, validating and using what is available and learning from it. It is in the care and thoughtfulness of the design.

Engagement & Understanding Outputs – the ability to communication, to find a growing common language of innovation is vital to sustaining success. It boils down to the relating, the responding and the respecting of this. Identification and dialogue allows innovation to flow more freely. Respect generates growing trust. Trust is vital to innovation.

Risk & Rewards – Always the risk and fear working on innovation naturally comes up, it consciously needs to be addressed. To assess the exposure, the barriers, the balances and checks needed, the learning from success and failure needs openly exploring.

Finally, we always need Outcomes – Any effort or initiative has to have outcomes measured on its return of effort and cost involved. It is focusing on effective implementation, on execution, on gaining a ROI and on achievements you can raise the awareness and value of innovation. Outcomes become essential to drive and sustain innovation. People hunger for success, leaders also.

Adoption and cascading become our litmus test for delivering sustaining innovation

So for me, to achieve a lasting value out of the suggested Executive Work Mat you need to do these litmus tests and impact assessments to gauge the successful cascading and alignment effects. You are looking for the connection between engagement, alignment and ownership through growing identification.

If you have not yet considered the Executive Work Mat then I would simply encourage you to reach out and make that first connection, knowing a positive result from the ‘effect’ can make or break your organization.

I’m certainly looking for more workouts in supporting your innovative fitness efforts. Interested?

The post Taking ownership for innovation – the litmus test. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Actually it is heard a fair amount if you ask about risk and innovation. This is often never stated in earshot of others within the same organization, it comes in a sudden burst of honesty, perhaps over drinks, and always outside their ‘normal’ working environment.

Sometimes you have a rare exception, especially if you have been called in to help, when someone has just been appointed into the position to simply “do something about innovation, we are dying as an organization”

We all need a meaning but we don’t like the risks associated with it

I was reading an excellent article by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer on “How leaders kill meaning at work” and they offer the insight about the lack of recognition that everyone within any organization requires as the single most important need,that is the feeling they are making progress in meaningful work.

Managers often undermine the meaningfulness of work to us as individuals; it is too often dismissed or not thought as relevant to the work at hand.

In the article they suggest four traps to avoid and one of them ‘Mediocrity signals’ triggered this blog.

The organization they used as the example within this trap drove new-product innovation into the ground as the top management was so focused on cost savings they no longer were a leader in innovation, they simply became followers.

One comment made by an employee was “mediocre work for a mediocre company”, yet it was not previously like that.

Risk aversion had become dominating and the organizations leadership was signalling “they were really more comfortable being ordinary”.

How do we arrive at this point of being just ordinary?

Human being have always been risk takers, otherwise we would not be where we are today. As a species we survived because we took risks, but was this because we were threatened?

There is a strong argument that we really only innovate when we are in crisis, being threatened, either with our jobs, within our organizations when we feel under attack.

So do we only feel we can take risks to survive? It is often amazing how the barriers are unlocked to innovation, within those deadlock meetings when someone signals “we can break the rules, we can go beyond our normal comfort barriers, into uncharted waters, it is acceptable, it will be supported”. We can change in seconds; it becomes liberating, exciting and risky.

The argument goes that risk-taking enables growth.

We have all heard the mantra “without risk, there is no reward”. Yet the very opposite occurs more often than not. Those that do take a risk, often find their ‘reward’ is in being fired, demoted or being warned “this behavior is not something we encourage in our organization”

So if you want to be an average manager or an average employee, then you need to find the average organization were little risk-taking is required. Does that fill our lives with meaningful work? I think there are better ways to go through life than hating the very thought of getting up and going into work.

If we lack fulfillment, and being in an environment where work begins to have, each day, less meaningful purpose then we have taken out one of the major factors of life surely? If risk is being progressively taken out of the equation I think innovation suffers, let alone us as human beings having to live with this feeling of working in such a mind-numbing environment.

How often do we hear managers quantifying more on all the downsides of risk, looking at the possibilities of loss and less at the probabilities of success?

Risk-taking becomes threatening to them, their tenure, so they work the downsides wherever they can, rework the product so it can still be innovative but is simply ordinary as against the original idea where it was potentially extraordinary. Risk aversion took hold and we are left with this “no appetite” and being ordinary.

We need a shift in risk thinking to help innovation.
Organizations need to work at ways to reduce fear, discomfort and resistance. To allow for opposing views, seeking out a diversity of opinion and establishing that one thing we all would love to be part of, this is an authentic culture that matches the promise with the reality .

One that shifts away from conventional thinking to embrace risk and not try to always control but to seek actively experimentation. It is through experimentation we gain our best learning.

Equally, experimentation should be at the core of every organizations drive to innovate, we accelerate our knowledge the more we attempt something different, proving or disproving is exciting work.

Shaping ideas, taking risks, allowing experimentation, providing tolerance, exploring the unknowns all should be an integral part of innovation. Innovation is risk-taking.

Kouzes and Posner back in 1987 suggested that individual’s be encouraged to keep trying despite failures, and focus more on on the learning from this than just simply from the outcome alone.

They suggested three points as a way forward to improve risk tolerance:

1. Choose tasks that are challenging but within the person’s skill level to build a sense of control
2. Encourage people to see change as full of possibilities and to build an attitude of change
3. Offer more rewards than punishments.

Over time this increases our risk tolerances, we become progressively more creative in this risk-taking orientation to seek out and push for more innovation.

We allow in a greater desire for the capacity to be innovating and how we want things we are working on to improve, to give us a greater meaning within our lives. More purpose, more satisfaction, greater identification.

Equally allow those who are willing to take risk, as their more natural position, the head room to explore, to push boundaries. Outline the guidelines, expect them to be broken on a few occasions but work with them, talk with them and talk about what they are doing where ever you can.

Work towards expecting more positive surprises through your engagement than fire fighting the negative ones because you were unaware.  Do also make sure others above you or alongside you are party to the risks.

There is a certain thrill in any ride if it has a little edge to it but equally it is in a successful finish. Risks always need active but positive managing, keeping them within a certain tolerance.

Building environments that encourage risk-taking should be sought.

If we can provide environments that encourage risk-taking and they are consistent in what is expected this becomes a big step to change our present thinking about innovation.

If the leaders within organizations lay out what they want to achieve, breakthrough innovation for example ,and this is clearly articulate and laid out in the governance, the culture and in the environment and linked to the purpose of the organizations goals, then risk becomes better managed and valued.

Risk-taking can come through experimentation, through more open learning and discussing, through testing and pushing for greater innovation alters the tolerance levels. These tolerances change over time as more confidence seeps into the way we evaluate and make the betting on the outcome more risk-rewarding. We begin to move back into truly innovating.

As I suggested earlier: “innovation is about risk-taking”.

We look for a meaningful contribution as Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer suggest. It boosts the “inner work life” and as they equally suggest “inner work life affects the bottom line” if employees are allowed to be engaged, part of something that allows them to be more creative, productive, committed and collegial in their jobs.

I would add fostering risk tolerance can push innovation beyond the ordinary back into the extraordinary.

Nothing is better than being associated with extraordinary moments, we all need them, and they give us real meaning and purpose, just make sure you add a certain spice of risk into the mix.

If you can’t live with risk, risk may come and live with you.

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