We are caught in a real tug of war within much of what we do in business today; in our responses and reactions to many of the dramatic business conditions we are facing, many deteriorating or being challenged by greater global competition.

We are facing a very uncertain future if we base our actions on past practices. We need a new management model, one where we are pushing to seek increasing new knowledge.

We actually are in urgent need of a new management operating model.

A new management model where we are pushing to seek increasing ‘fusion’ but still want degree’s of separation, we are seeking out ‘flows’ through new knowledge to break down barriers that restrict new insights so as to turn these into new value creation, and we are encouraged to seek out and establish a higher ‘fluidity’ in what we do and reduce the rigidity we presently have in place in our current organizations.

There are growing concerns centered around how we need to adapt our management practices to manage in a digital world, we are grappling with the consequences and we need to find new solutions and approaches. We face issues made up of increasing information overload, coming at us at increasing speed and failing in our abilities to fully interpret this. We lack the agility and flexibility to respond to what this all means in both its implications and potential, for sensing and seizing new value creation from understanding this.

We need a new management practice to deal with our digital world. One real need is for increasing knowledge and then being equipped in interpreting this in our learning, daily routines and activities is becoming paramount to break out of a declining performance cycle.

Applying the three horizon lens to develop new management practices

If you apply the three horizon lens we need to construct management and its performance approaches differently you begin to see the pathway for change.

Applying the three horizon lens to new management practices

The idea grew from picking up on Deloitte’s Shift Index that has come out ever year since its first release in 2009 I came across a way for me to frame this.

Our horizon one (extending business as usual) needs a deeper, yet strategic restructuring of firm economics to generate the maximum possible value from existing resources

For horizon three (the future need) we need to develop new management practices to be effectively catalyzing and participating in different knowledge flows, fusing what is gained into new value creation, reducing friction and barriers, constantly refreshing and extracting from the relevant knowledge flows that provide scalable learning pathways.

Our horizon two (transition from old to new) we need significant innovation, learning and experimentation to drive scalable participation in knowledge exploration and exploitation, a duality of fluidity and stability.

See here and here for a fuller explanation of the different approaches needed in three horizon approaches, if you are not familar with this framework approach, they will help.

Let me build this out in why we need to change the way we gain knowledge and translate this.

My three points of reference in researching and framing this post are, firstly, Deloitte’s ongoing work on the Shift Index, providing a longer-term set of indicators to how we can change performance through the flows of knowledge, capital, and talent (their second wave). This is coupled with my own studies and commentary on fluidity and thirdly, the “stock and flow” of knowledge and how we can harness it for our needed sustainability and this new value creation.

The future of managing will be through ecosystems and platforms

I am constantly drawn to ecosystems and platforms as the connecting mechanism that can drive each of the stages of the three horizon view taken here. It is going to be through greater collaboration, sharing and exchanging we can learn a new form of ’emerging’ management practice

In our past management practices, we have operated and exploited the linear world for ever-increasing efficiencies and effectiveness. This relied on stability, predictability and a willing end-user, ready to accept ‘our’ offer of product or service. All three of these conditions are increasingly absent from our world today and will increasingly be challenged in the future. Our increasing connectivity, brought about by our digital world is giving us increasing volume, richness at increasing speed. We are in a hyper-connected world, potentially global for all of us and increasingly we will operate in interdependent ecosystems that allow us to collaborate and share, driving up awareness and performance.

Classic models of management get broken down in any ecosystem approach, that is why it has such an exciting potential. You have to be open, prepared far more to share, to build trust and seek out increasing relationships and diversity of knowledge and much of that comes from external sources of new knowledge. Collaborating in collective ways helps break down complexity. To be ready to respond we must be ready to seek out unexpected outcomes, to be increasingly exposed to new opinions, experiences and learn from all those adjacencies and external connections help to  add and define new potential within our domain of expertise. What will be rewarded in this connecting world is agility to respond, the ability to absorb and learn quickly, and the nimbleness to translate and adapt new learning into insights and eventual outcomes, that build out our businesses, keeping them healthy, growing and sustainable.

Our world is shifting from scalable efficiency to scalable learning

In the work of John Hagel and John Seely Brown and their associates at Deloitte University Press, this scalable change from efficiency to learning is a central tenet of their work. Achieving scale is critical for all in business, be it the entrepreneur or start-up or the large institutions wanting to span the world. If you wanted to scale it had to be “efficient and effective” in our past approaches. Yet as the two John’s point out that is great in the stable, more predictable world or market conditions of the past but not when everything is evolving rapidly or changing before our eyes. The efficiency mantra often allows for applying the “lowest common denominator of need” and reduces the impact of ‘true’ innovation.

But we are now in a world that sees exponential change caused by digital technologies, this is making everything we do as uncertain. We arte experiencing consumers increasingly demanding personalized service and offerings, then the past standardizing approach is significantly under threat. We are seeing increasing friction, deteriorating trust and growing gaps in expectancy between “what we want and expect with what we receive” and institutions need to respond to these pressures. It cannot be the approach “business as usual” it needs a new recognition as outlined in my horizon one frame above.

We are recognizing “existing knowledge is depreciating at an accelerating rate”. To create new knowledge we have to step out of our silo of the one institution into a collaborative world, connecting with others where the physical, virtual and management of systems help accelerate learning. Increasingly these learnings will come through ecosystems and platforms where you can meet and exchange in systematic and holistic ways, building growing trusted relationships, sharing and exploring ‘collective’ knowledge to solve common problems.

You move from the need of conformity to be efficient, seeking out where you fit within a ‘given’ system you look for increasing the ‘flow’ of learning by encouraging increasing fluidity and being highly adaptive. Your role is not to fit as such, it becomes how you can separate, identify and deliver more value, to translate and learn faster, to rapidly connect understanding, ideas and potential outcomes for new value.

Balancing fluidity and stability

The world we live in is relentless, it is demanding and constantly changing. We begin to believe it is in a “continuously unstable state” yet it is this ongoing receiving of contradictions we can build a different, more fluid state that is adaptive, responsive and encourages different thinking to break through our bewilderment.

We need to build far more for countervailing functions and opinions, have greater understandings of pattern recognition and maintenance and be highly adaptive in our outcomes. We must start by establishing a different boundary building understanding (governance, risk-taking, ability to recognize managing exceptions are becoming the rule in individual consumer worlds), have a growing identity formation set of mechanisms and responses (in customer touch points, response alternatives, conflict skills to resolve issues early) and develop the problem-solving architecture to be constantly evolving (shared, reinforcing and breaking down present orthodoxies).

Ambidexterity and countervailing processes need developing and embedding. Achieving a constant duality to manage in our three horizons. It is the horizon two exploration and exploitation that allows this change in managing transit from the old (h1) to the new (h3). We need to re-enforce and extend (h2-), we need to ‘undo’, explore and redesign (h2+).

To become fluid we need to absorb and respond at faster rate and that comes from the increasing flow of new knowledge. We need to be highly adaptive to a constant, multi-faceted world of connections, systems and knowing where the different pieces need to be found, so we can then ‘pieced’ together into the ‘new whole’ you are needing to design, at individual or institutional design level.

To get to a point of being fluid we need to hone our navigation skills, we need to have more assignment driven work, not stuck in repeating work that can be automated far more effectively in today’s digital world.

We need to be more agile, iterative, to be encouraged to be experimenting and exploring. We need to believe and given trust to execute and drive our results into more value-add. We need to seek out empowerment, participate in collaborative endeavors, and most importantly grasp the makeup of value creation. To get to this point we need to build one of those boundary spanning guidelines of a sound conflict resolution pathway for ourselves, our customers and our institutions and these will be ‘living constantly evolving pathways‘ that feed on new learning.

To get to this ‘fluid state‘ we all must strive for authenticity, trust, and recognition. This only will come from a real willingness to seek out diversity in opinion, knowledge and experience, to be highly visible and understanding what that means in risk and reward, looking to constantly enter and exit projects where we can truly contribute to driving up our own confidence and belief, our personal satisfaction and contributing worth.

If we can design a framework that transforms us into being highly fluid and adaptive, we can move through horizon two and its conflicting challenges. We are seeking to balance stability with an ongoing need for dynamism and responsiveness, at agile and fast ‘reaction’ times from our ‘incoming learning’ and ‘outgoing value-added‘ outcome

Seeking out the relevant flows within new knowledge for increasing scalable learning, our new institutional state.

The stock of our existing knowledge is rapidly diminishing, we need to seek out the flow of new knowledge. Our fixed and enduring know-how and sets of experience are being diminished in their value inside organizations. What was once accumulated as ‘stock’ inside the organization was how organizations exploited this for profit. Yet this is under attack from multiple sides.

We are seeing a compression of time in life-cycles, we are not in stable markets but increasingly volatile. New generation replacements, driven along by digital solution power, are pushing innovation through the pipeline faster than before. We are failing to keep up with the knowledge you need. It simply can’t reside in one company, small teams or simply with one person, it requires a network of partners collaborating and contributing their expertise into exploring and exploiting new solutions, tapping into this inter-firm knowledge flow and experience with innovative solutions that are more aligned to customer needs, solving challenges and growing complexity.

The search for knowledge means a higher emphasis on tacit understanding (this link explains tacit knowledge)This understanding comes from relationships and exchanges, from personal stories, experiences, and personal connection. Our ability to tap into this tacit knowledge comes increasingly from these ecosystems and platforms set up to exchange, collaborate, and build a network of common understanding. A common understanding of a problem or challenge, through the diversity and power of the community that works together to find solutions and resolve the multiple issues.

I do think Deloitte’s view that we need to move to scalable learning is essential to achieve. This needs completely new practices to be effectively catalyzing and participating in different knowledge flows, fusing what is gained into new value creation, reducing friction and barriers, constantly refreshing and extracting from the relevant knowledge flows.

Knowledge intensity can risk fragmentation and inequality, it can lead to concentration of market power. It is finding more universal practices can level the playing field. Digital is part of this leveling. We equally have to learn how to create, disseminate and use knowledge differently.

Here I am a particular fan of absorptive capacity that pursues potential knowledge and extracts out its realized value through transformation and exploitation.

As more information comes towards us at increasing volume, we need to find ways to adapt and interpret this. There is a greater set of ‘forces of variation’ for innovation solution selection, all requiring this increased knowledge understanding. To codify and relate to this we need a structure to manage this knowledge flow, hence my belief in us needing to understand absorptive capacity.

In a future post, I will look more at knowledge and all its important components. We totally understate the value and importance of knowledge. It is managing the different types of knowledge that offer us the solutions in our digital age. We need to design a scalable learning approach (horizon 3 outcome) and recognizing all of what ‘makes-up’ knowledge is important to build into this h3 solution.

In summary

We need to harness the capacity of learning through the competencies for new knowledge acquiring. We need to replenish the internal diminishing stocks of knowledge with a constant flow of new knowledge. This comes from outside, it comes through networks, relationships and collaborations increasingly built on ecosystem and platforms.

It is our increasing ability to participate in this growing formation of managing knowledge flows, harnessed through digital solutions, as they will move us to value creation. Ones that are increasingly  collaborative, between partners but also with customers, all increasingly contributing their knowledge, insights, and needs to finding joint solutions and resolving challenges.

To achieve better outcomes and to drive sustained growth we need different management practices. We require scalable participation (ecosystems) to relate too and generate new knowledge flows. We need to be increasingly responsive, adaptive and fluid in any design of structures and solutions.

Performance requires us to quickly learn and translate, that cannot come from the pursuit of efficiency, it comes from learning to be highly adaptive and responsive, to have a high level of fluidity to fuse all the flows of knowledge into new potential value creation.

We do need this new management model to adapt to the digital world and all the uncertainty of our prevailing conditions of more open competitive and challenging markets, more demanding customers and the constant waves of information and ‘forces of change’ raining down on us. We need a new way of working to counter this.

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The post Fusion, Flow and Fluidity are needed in our Management Practices first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How can we learn to recognize it more actively as as essential part of our lives, when to trust it, how to teach it to others, how to share what it has offered to us, as individuals, to others.

Then imagine what it could provide us for this knowledge to be leveraged within any broader community use, so it is knowingly valued by others as something they can gain from, not as we often do, simply reject it as not within ‘our’ experience.

That could be pretty valuable. It could give us a deeper understanding and empower us to function better in many sorts of situations. Then surely we must search for understanding this more and what it means, as in this case, for relating it to innovation.

Let’s start off by stating tacit knowledge is inherently inefficient, so is good innovation; it is messy, often unstructured. Why do we continue to not give this TK sufficient ‘head space’ in our thinking? I

s this because it is not tangible, that softer aspect that we reject as we don’t have time for it or simply we don’t ‘trust’ it like those ‘hard’ quantifiable measuring points?
Using Michael Polanyi as my main anchoring point here.

Michael Polanyi, was a scientist and philosopher, who while writing Personal Knowledge he identified what he calls the “structure of tacit knowing”. He viewed it as his most important discovery. He claimed that we experience the world by integrating our subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness.

To quote part of an entry in the Wikipedia and get the ‘heavy stuff’ out of the way:

Tacit knowledge is not easily shared. It involves learning and skill, but not in a way that can be written down. Tacit knowledge consists often of habits and culture that we do often do not recognize in ourselves. In the field of knowledge management, the concept of tacit knowledge refers to a knowledge possessed only by an individual and difficult to communicate to others via words and symbols. Knowledge that is easy to communicate is called explicit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge has been described as “know-how” – as opposed to “know-what” (facts), “know-why” (science), or “know-who” (networking). It involves learning and skill but not in a way that can be written down.

The process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit or specifiable knowledge is known as codification, articulation, or specification. The tacit aspects of knowledge are those that cannot be codified, but can only be transmitted via training or gained through personal experience.

Tacit knowledge (TK) is a crucial input to the innovation process
We depend on many of our different levels of tacit knowledge on how to innovate.

Firstly, new and novel problems require TK about ‘ways’ to tackle the unknowns associated with discovery and how to bring this out into a final innovative concept. The more we can form into teams and share what we know or why we do things in certain ways the greater the potential power of the collaborative effort.

So the more interactions we have, especially face-to-face, direct contacts the more our tacit knowledge is seen and applied. The value of knowledge transfer to the innovation process is vital. Often we employ knowledge experts, subject matter experts and have a diversity of specialists collaborating as they are surprisingly as individuals, often unaware, often unable to articulate, communicate and describe what they know; it often requires others around them to bring it out.

The important point is they know but often cannot articulate it without prompting or drawing out what they know in a ‘given’ context to make clearer meaning of it, moving it from tacit to explicit.

Secondly, tacit knowledge can be a real sustainable competitive advantage. The more you can transfer knowledge, tacit and explicit and embed it in group settings, to in-build in shared core values, assumptions and beliefs, the better but as we know, it is often hard to pin this down, to locate this, quantify it, map or value it. Especially without encouraging and stimulating the environment to allow time to draw it out.

Thirdly, TK makes up a large part of our human capital, the knowing part. To give TK the chance to spread or diffuse across the organization or outside, organizations not have to invest in their individuals but bring groups together to greatly increase this human capital. Also this knowledge has to  simultaneously be captured (if possible) so it ‘resides’ and can be diffused out even more.

Knowledge management systems can help here if tacit knowledge was given the appropriate weight of focus it does need and a skill to decide the ‘what’ in its relevancy (and value) to any discussions.

Fourthly, and central to Michael Polanyi’s thinking on TK was the belief that creative acts (especially acts of discovery) are filled with strong personal feelings and commitments. He saw this as ‘creative tension’ where informed guesses, hunches and imaginings are part of exploratory acts and motivated by what he describes as our ‘passions’.

This is why there is always such a strong argument for innovation champions as well as the need to encourage anyone with a strong belief or insight, to find the time to explore it by clearing the path for them to do this as part of their workday- not just in their ‘free time’.

Conviction is always required for realizing innovation.
Polanyi talks of knowledge of approaching discovery. To hold such knowledge is an act deeply committed to the conviction that there is something there to be discovered -what we try to do through invention and innovation?

It is through our determinations and beliefs we ‘push’ our tacit knowledge as we believe this is a path to go on bringing something new into the world, our new innovation. He placed a strong emphasis on dialogue within an open community- our networks for innovation to work. This is why open collaborative innovation is making such headway. We are allowing more ‘convictions’ to enter the innovation pipeline

Polanyi wrote in The Tacit Dimension, we should start from the fact that ‘we can know more than we can tell‘. He termed this pre-logical phase of knowing as ‘tacit knowledge’.

We need to move tacit knowledge out- into the open and main stream- so it can be shared.

Finally, tacit knowledge is certainly very personal, rooted in action and for us needing to acquire new experiences consistently we need to push ‘the organisation’ to find the ways to be more committed, involved and identifying with wanting to strenthen this.

Organizations seek the knowledge owned by the individual as it is highly valuable to be shared, to be drawn out and not, as is often the way, the other way around, imposed upon individuals to bury their passions , guesses and hunches, the mistake we make today.

A top down process by determining only the knowledge they need to know stifles creativity, enquiry and innovation discovery. We need a ‘healthy’ mix and open minds to allow discovery.

Management certainly needs to lead. It needs to give the context so knowledge can flow. For instance leadership inspires and identifies the right targets, while management identifies the right practice and encourages dialogues and sharing.

We need to ‘codify’ as much as we can, hence why I argue, it needs to be built around context. This then allows people, time to explore, to exchange ideas and experiences so they all come together within the appropriate context or ‘spin out’ into something radical that leads to potential real breakthroughs.

Finding time and making connections, simply being allowed to explore is rich for innovation possibilities, set around some even loose context.

Having a more open network that seeks out diversity and through this, delves potentially deeper in this often latent tacit knowledge that resides in the individual does needs significant focus and commitment to allow it to happen.

To encourage the free flow requires extensive personal contact and trust. Do we provide this in today’s organisation? Seemingly we are going the other way and perhaps knowledge attainment might actually be suffering?

For this blog I drew on an exchange I had with someone within my network, Jim Burke, Manager, Futures, Forecasting & Change Mgt at TASC, Inc.  These were in his private capacity for the exchanges we had that covered a range of different subjects we both wanted to explore our thinking ‘out loud’. Also I drew upon different references that explore tacit knowledge to help me in making some of the points expressed here.

The post Tacit Knowledge- Rich in its Innovation Implications. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have been looking forward to this book; it addresses one of the most important areas of innovation that we have, the service sector and discusses open services.

In this last week, I have been reading Professor Henry Chesbrough’s new book “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your business to grow and compete in a new era”, published by Jossey-Bass, released last week on 18^th January.

Services are critical to understand and focus upon, for our continued economic growth, for the ability to offer an often distinct and unique competitive advantage, as well as provide much of our future employment opportunities, especially crucial in the Western economies. Services today comprise roughly 80% of economic activity in the United States, and 60% of economic activity in the top forty economies of the world (source OECD).

Mixed Emotions
After reading this book a couple of times I must admit I had a set of very mixed emotions.
His argument and business case for services is certainly compelling. He outlines a four key conceptual framework which can serve as a broad roadmap in thinking about how to tackle services in a more open way but, and it is big but he leaves an awful lot of ‘open’ questions to fill in and this is where the book disappoints.

His four foundational concepts that drive his framework
The four foundational concepts are bold and certainly radical in their strategic implications, although on first glance they may not seem that way.

1. Think of your business as an open services business in order to create and sustain differentiation in a commodity trap world
2. Invite customers to co-create innovation to generate (new) experiences they will value and reward
3. Use open innovation to help you turn your business into a platform for others to build on.
4. Transform your business model with Open Services Innovation to profit from building a platform business model so you can gain from others’ innovation activities as well.

The escape from the commodity trap is one of his biggest arguments for change

He talks a lot about escaping the commodity trap. I’m not sure I buy this argument yet. I feel too many organizations don’t differentiate enough and do not recognize their often unique position. They spend far too much in time, effort and money on benchmarking others, copying and mimicking best practices. This is often the easy route and eventually it can take you to commoditization but the case for opening up your thinking to new ways of service needs exploring more before many are really at today’s point of being ‘trapped’. It is more the present fixed mental mindset than being already at the commodity trap.

He ‘hits’ the right area of focus in Service Innovation
I can accept all the arguments put forward in the book about service innovation and one could certainly add even a few more to support the business case.  I agree to throw open your innovation thinking to engage with the customer as central is absolutely right but does this conceptual framework go deep enough in exploring this and explaining the consequences?

The Shift to catch more ‘open innovation’ winds.
Are Services the next natural step of open innovation or does this book simply float a balloon to gauge the existing and future winds and the ‘open movement’ is just catching the winds that already are in force? We are at risk that the lack of necessary detail within this book to support this fundamental framework will allow for more ‘hot air’ and expand the gases that surround open innovation already?

In my view, we should be tackling existing problems before we move on and introduce another layer of open complexity. It certainly will throw open the debate about how open can an organization become with its stakeholders and especially its customers.

Open questions abound
There are many, I mean many, open questions that Professor Chesbrough introduces that are within themselves significant concepts. These are for me, dealt with in a ‘light’ way and do not have the detailed examination I would expect.

Let me provide a couple of examples where there was a need of greater depth and structure to tackle these

1)       The Customers Experience
Just engaging with customers to provide them with more complete experiences has a huge body of existing work behind that in its impact, strategic needs and what is required to do this correctly yet these are not really discussed in the difficulties, risks or rewards. A ‘complete experience’ is seemingly dangled there.  Much is left to be investigated. Equally co-creating with customers as part of your development process is seismic in managing this sort of change at all levels of any organization.

This move to engage the customer and provide her with a complete experience is such a strategic decision, perhaps no different from opening up the R&D to outsiders, but I would have expected more on the problems this might entail for any debate the board and organizational will need to conduct to understand the implication for such changes as this. The level of structural, process and relationship change this would bring is huge.

2)       Understanding Tacit Knowledge
Another example where you really wanted more was the level of explanations around tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is very difficult to capture. I felt it was dealt with in a very light manner.

Professor Chesbrough is right, knowing more about your customers than anyone else does offer a potential strategic advantage, you can potentially get closer to tacit knowledge but is this for the few who can invest in this sort of information database (ie Amazon) or for the many that simply can’t make this type of database or research-related investment?

Tacit knowledge of clients’ experiences is still a major challenge to capture and interpret but I certainly didn’t get as much help here in this book on how to go about it yet it is stressed that it is most important going forward for this framework.

One insight on tacit knowledge really worth sharing for our thinking.
There is one wonderful insight on this though, that I found excellent and must share- “the ability to manage tacit information effectively can create competitive advantage….as the globe moves ever faster…it is precisely the knowledge that doesn’t move fast –the tacit knowledge- that becomes increasingly valuable”. I loved that observation.

The risk of non-adoption in an organization is higher when you lack the necessary detail.

The success of this book will be in its adoption; the taking up of this conceptual thinking and how it prompts ‘reactions’ and is seen by different organizations that are facing service challenges, for it to resonate with them. Will “Open Service Innovation” be recognised as essential to adopt for the required growth and improvement needed to stay competitive will determine whether this book has the same impact as his first one, “Open Innovation”?

It will be a tough sell to this opening up of services to C-Level executives for many, and I’m sure, it will be difficult on just this book‘s conceptual approach and limited guidance.

The post Taking the Open Services Innovation Road. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Certainly, each of these has an important contributing part to play in building a coherency for innovation, but the ingredient that tops them all and is often forgotten or assigned as the afterthought is people. People making innovation work, all the rest are the enablers to help them.

The Australian Business Foundation published a report last year- the Hidden Human Dimensions of Innovation (http://www.abfoundation.com.au/research_knowledge) and in part of a speech given by its Chief Executive, Narelle Kennedy at an Innovation 2009 conference she spoke of this people factor.
Let me quote as her comments are really powerful and help encourage people to conceive that innovation is more of a social process first, and not a technical one so often a misconception of many.

–  “People are innovation’s active ingredient, the catalyst that turns novelty into real benefits for economies and communities. Benefits like jobs, wealth, productivity and life-changing progress”

–  “The role of people in innovation is a fact that remains hidden in plain sight. It is axiomatic – everyone says it and believes it, but few understand anything at all about the human factors in innovation”

– “It is the pivotal role of people as innovation carriers – their networks, collaborations, knowledge flows, interactions and tacit knowledge – and how innovation itself is a potent competitive force that drives productivity”

–  “People who innovate together capitalise on their tacit knowledge and informal know-how and on past strategic investments to “navigate the white-water risks” of innovation more successfully than their competitors.”

–  “It is tacit knowledge, accumulated experience and learning by doing result in a highly valuable intangible asset that boosts the innovation odds”
–  “(It is people who) form a community of practice with a clear intangible asset value in the form of intellectual capital and human capital”

–  “(People rely on) long term and sustained investments in strategic capacity-building and continuity of interpersonal innovation networks and gains in value by sharing and usage”.

Where I do feel Narelle Kennedy nicely sums up is a much-needed re-think for innovation for it to really work and be valued for what it can truly offer comes from this statement: “drawing on knowledge and creativity to add value in products and processes is an expansive view of innovation – new things or ways of working; knowledge and creativity; add value; products and processes – it is a dynamic view”

Everything else today that does not place people in the centre of the innovation equation offers a dangerous misconception about innovation and why it should work.  It is our people that make it happen and we need to make innovation the social process it needs to be.

The original post was submitted to http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/wordpress/2009/12/innovation-perspectives-hidden-human-dimensions/

The post The Hidden Human Dimension of Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.