Following on from my last post suggesting the way to move innovation forward, it was to ‘take the different innovation hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement” I used a military metaphor of “taking the hills”.

So what are the hills we need to take?

 There are plenty of innovation hills to attack but here are ten suggestions that would advance the cause of innovation and establish its territorial importance in the organization somewhat.

Some hills maybe on first glance, seem not so important but they all move towards setting up the winning conditions for innovation to become a core within organizations. Some are sending clear signals of intent; others show the fighting commitment necessary to take that hill because it is strategically important.

Hill one is by abandoning quarterly reporting

Thank heavens there are organizational leaders beginning to push back on the obsessive need of reporting results every three months. A number of multinational businesses, such as Google, Unilever, Coca-Cola and National Grid have signalled the end for Quarterly Reporting in order to halt short-term relationships with investors. This is such a psychological hill to regain to signal a better focus on the longer-term,

Steve Holliday, CEO of energy company National Grid PLC, recently stated quarterly reporting encouraged short-term thinking and behaviour, stating, “Chief Executives and investors must move beyond financial value as the only recognised metric of business success.”

Unilever CEO, Paul Polman, when announcing Unilever’s approach to reporting, “If you buy into this long-term value creation model, which is sustainable, then come and invest with us. If you don’t buy into this, I respect you as a human being, but don’t put your money in our company.”

The second hill is trying to regain stability in organizations leadership

Let’s get some stability at the top of our organizations. Through this focus on longer-term value creation it might allow the C-level a better chance at considering the strategic effects of ‘rushed, responding to the short-term’ can bring. They need motivated people and the limited talent will go elsewhere if they feel the conditions laid out are too risky and uncertain.

Stability in leadership and strategic direction are important to innovation, The tenure of CEO’s has got dangerously short and as they have become increasingly incentivised to gain their reward on their time in the job with a direct consequence that more radical innovation gets ignored or relegated.

Hill three to take- making innovation not just the addition to the day job.

Innovation to really work, to become sustaining, has to be integrated and central to the daily job. Innovation needs to lead each person’s thinking. Let’s do away with those often separate focused activities of managing (exclusively) through efficiency and effectiveness and add in innovation. Innovation should not be a ‘bolt on’ afterthought, it needs integrating into each person’s daily role.

Hill four- stopping the fad and fashion of innovation

How often do we hear that innovation is in our top three priorities yet leadership is concerned over their innovation success rates? Innovation swings through this fad, popular to trot out when needed and pushed back when times require ‘swinging’ cost cuts. These cuts take out any slack within the system, freeze the hell out of what is left and then the leadership can’t understand the lack of commitment, of trust, of engagement.

This hill is vital to capture and plant the flag of innovation to announce it has become a core driver of growth, performance and valuation and we will hold this hill at whatever cost.

Hill five- the ability to understand and stimulate innovation

Survey after survey senior executives are only “somewhat”, “a little” or “concerned” in the decisions they are making around innovation. What does explain this gap between aspirations and eventual execution? Innovation as a force is hard to build but it becomes impossible, if you do not immerse yourself in it. To sustain innovation you need to create ongoing capabilities, then scale to build the momentum of overwhelming forces that deliver lasting impact around innovation.

Hill six. There are no best-practice solutions, this is full of booby traps.

Those organizations that rush to copy others simply forget they are uniquely different. Simply copying and being selective on taking others best practices enables those others to always be ahead. What you think is a best practice has most probably moved on. If you are busy chasing your competitor to get ahead you have to change this best practice crutch and exchange this for more modern fighting equipment.

Base your own practice on ‘good’ practice, or ‘emerging’ practice and explore ‘novel’ practice with greater confidence. These allow you to  scan the practice horizon but intelligently assessing the terrain in better, more adaptive ways, to see what you can learn to deploy to give you your advantage. Avoid the best practice hill, you will find it full of booby traps that will ‘bog’ you down in your longer-term advancement if you blindly stumble onto this hill.

Hill seven- taking explicit steps to foster an innovation culture

Creating the conditions, the environment for innovation to take hold allows for growing trust and increasing commitment. If executives listen to their people’s ideas and value them, it brings growing trust; it pulls individuals together in a collective identity. This offers more as an innovation culture of trust than monetary incentives. People go that extra yard, push their bodies and go to extremes if they believe.

Hill eight- Ensuring you have a formal integrated innovation plan

Approaching innovation in an ad-hoc fashion delivers occasional success and the potential for plenty of failures. By integrating innovation fully into the strategic management agenda, in the vast majority of senior level meetings encourages a more structured approach to innovation. Innovation should be consistently managed, tracked and assessed as a core element of an organizations strategic agenda. This is a hill that provides that essential higher ground.

Hill nine- senior leaders need to explicitly lead the innovation battle.

If the leadership of organizations is not seen to be explicitly leading and fully involved and committed to innovation it sends the wrong signal to the troops. Being visible, being engaged, and being as committed to taking the innovation battle on makes a world of difference.

Hill ten- Winning the hearts and minds of all those around you

The failure within organizations is that innovation is foremost a peoples game. All the technology, processes, frameworks mean nothing unless there is utter engagement and commitment in what we do. To protect and encourage people that make bold decisions signals the fear of failure is part and parcel of innovation. Encouraging behaviour of ‘wanting innovation’ inspires trust and belief.

Winning the battle for innovation

Laying out the conditions, explaining the context, communicating the ground rules and governance gives a sense of clarity. By knowing the objectives, the taking of all these different hills becomes easier. Who is leading your charge, what hills does your organization need to take to give innovation the liberating effect it deserves?

The post Taking on those innovation hills is never easy first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How do we move innovation forward? We need to see this as a battle of hearts and minds, of overcoming dogma and fixed mindsets, using skirmishes to advance the innovation advancement. We need to break out of entrenched positions and lead innovation forward.

Many people feel innovation is an uncomfortable place, it often is at the edge, it deals in both opportunity and risk, it is uncertain to commit to joining the innovation battle. Sadly the majority working within our organizations do not understand innovation, it is too intangible, it seems shrouded in mysteries, yet it offers challenge, excitement and satisfaction. To achieve ‘something’ is highly motivating.

We firstly need to mobilize around innovation

To mobilize the organizations troops you have to give them objectives, they need to identify and be given a clear understanding of the ‘cause and its effect’. Over time they can recognize the positive effects and begin to understand the consequences if they don’t join in and engage.

Let me use a military metaphor, in war for this post.

Achieving advantage it is necessary to take the high ground away from others, “to take the hill”. This is always a costly operation, both because an attacker usually suffers from this ‘push’ and because it is more difficult to attack uphill and take someone else’s hill or advantage point.

The uphill battle for innovation is not an easy one

Innovation is in an uphill fight to gain the high ground and provide the strategic advantage that this will eventually bring, if it is sustaining and well executed. To help in this our leaders have to decide the strategic framework for advancing innovation.

The approach and the eventual strategy needs to lay out what the intent is, it needs to define the objectives. Any clear statement needs to state where the business is headed in the long term and how innovation will contribute. It should include major goals and milestones, as well as how resources and assets are going to be deployed. It needs a real comprehensive innovation battle plan.

Planning our innovation battle requires the taking of different hills

This plan or framework needs to be simple, clear, credible, motivating and it reflects the uniqueness of the organization to achieve the innovations needed. We need to see this as taking one hill at a time, tactics may change but each new hill taken signals advancement and provide better conditions to ‘think’ innovation with growing confidence.

Each hill might be just one mission in the overall innovation strategy. The role of our organization’s leader is ensuring they are putting strategy into practice by constructing and then communicating where do we want to get to and how are we going to get there.

We need to take each hill one at a time and then to secure it to gain a lasting position for innovation

Innovation does not happen overnight, it takes time and preparation. It takes dedicated commitment. We need to advance ‘one hill at a time’.

So what are the hills we need to take?

Any thoughts, I’m going over a few suggestions in my next post? Some are establishing strategic change, some are to stabilize positions and some are to push out and establish the strategic advantage. Others hills need to be established so organizations can build capabilities, then mobilize theses to deploy innovation in structured ways.

amended -broken into two posts for ease of reading

The post Taking the hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Where does innovation figure within this? In new products, new services and plenty of noble entreaties to adding to the growth I am sure. One aspect you might want to consider within all this activity and planning is to develop a resolution list of issues that need resolving.

I mean really, finally, actually resolving in 2012, to allow innovation to have a greater ‘hold’ on future thinking. Achieving a consensus, a clear focus, and a corporate commitment is what strategic plans are about so draw up your list of innovation resolutions needed to be resolved in 2012 and commit to them within the plans. Be upfront and bold.

Make sure you choose ‘soft’ as well as ‘hard’ innovation resolutions within any mix

One thing I would recommend when you draw up your list. Most corporate executives find the ‘softer’ aspects of innovation harder to work through.

There is this certain ‘hard wiring’ that everything has to be clear, measurable and tucked away  in the accounts or ‘ticked off’ in each person’s mind.

Softer aspects of innovation often don’t conform to this orderly view of the world and it is addressing this inconsistency ‘head-on’ has great value.
As anyone working across innovation challenges can recognize, it is the intangibles, the softer aspects of innovation, that make it truly work, so my recommendation, make sure you embed these softer ones within any set of innovation resolutions.

Eventually more people become comfortable these ‘softer’ aspects are critical to focus upon as they become strategically established and it makes the job of any person engaged in innovation a little easier that it is recognized.

Here are 9 innovation areas that might need your resolution for better outcomes in 2012.

These 9 struck me as issues that are causing problems for innovation but please don’t let me stop you making your own list, but all I ask you is please make sure you have not forgotten them by the end of January. These resolutions should be strategic commitments to really work upon to fully resolve.

Raise them, talk about them, get them agreed as important to resolve and build them into your strategic plans for 2012, along with the required actions, resources and thoughtful solutions to delivering on these.

–          There is this urge to keep forcing change on the client with new products and services. We are in really different economic times at present and they might find these as difficult to accept so working out ways for extracting value from their need for a ‘steady state’ can provide different innovation opportunities such as adding services to a product.

–          The recent emphasis has been on finding the ‘disrupting’ application, product or business model, nothing is wrong with this to change existing markets or move into new segments. There are many other ‘types’ of innovation to explore which might actually not be as equally disruptive to you. Disruptive approaches are often fraught with risks for you and this might not be the time for this strategy anyway, explore the others to contain risks in volatile times. Learning about the significant differences in required competencies and approaches for each type of innovation will provide for a greater dimension to your future innovation activities and your ability to deliver on these.

–          Establishing a more ‘listening culture’ so you can discover far more about the issues effecting your customers, your employees so you can adjust your innovation offerings to cater for a more exact need. This can be a really powerful competitive advantage. There is a lot to absorb in this, from social media to CRM and through learning and experimenting. Raising this up within a resolution need for 2012 would be strategically important for your organizations future to really define and structure.

–          We struggle to leverage the tools that are available for finding new opportunities, be these at the discovery stage or in market research. By exploring the array of tools that are available for spotting trends, needs or unearthing the next big opportunity you can leverage and exploit these different techniques allowing a deeper appreciation of their value. Also one positive outcome is to have established a greater toolkit of techniques to take forward.

–          Downturns are really good times to get rid of some of the ‘legacy’ within your organization, to finally recognize older systems, flat file repositories for managing innovation, idea management systems can be reviewed and you re-position yourselves with some incredibly nimble, low cost, highly flexible systems that are available through a Web 2.0 approach. This can greater advance a more integrated flow of ideas to concepts through product life cycle management approaches and cloud management. No time is lost in learning and experimenting with these in pilot, beta testing environments so you can be well-positioned to justify new expenditures based on these ‘investments’.

–          One of the biggest issues for me is the continued lack of innovation alignment to the strategy within organizations. A recent report suggested that anywhere from 25% to 50% of your organization’s time and effort is being spent on tasks that don’t fully align with the corporate strategies. If innovation folks don’t understand that their efforts are not really contributing to the strategic goals then you should be concerned. I would suggest fixing this potential ‘unproductive loss’ is a great resolution to pursue.

–          When is the right time-frame for innovation delivery? Next quarter, next year, in three years or in what period. Setting about establishing that innovation simply does not conform to annual financial calendars and needs to be accounted for differently would be an incredible, potentially internal breakthrough point. Having this on your resolution list to ‘crack’ through extensive internal discussions so as  to allow innovations to move within its more natural discovery through to the right delivery cycle. Far to often it is being shoehorned into an unnatural calendar that limits the original concept and compromises the potential result, that could allow for delivering more game-changing innovation would be a dramatic recognition.

–          The question still remains for many organizations of when will innovation will be totally embedded in the psyche of the C-level corner office. Spending dedicated time and efforts for the numerous C-level executives to finally ‘get it’ so they move from emerging to emergent would solve one of the biggest innovation inhibitors faced in most organizations. Making the commitment to educate and inform the top echelons or your colleagues on a consistent basis would make a terrific resolution to steadfastly go after throughout the next twelve months.

–          Quantifying innovation is always a difficult ‘nut’ to crack. Again the majority of the management want everything to be measured, a return on the investment. Taking time out to delve into the different ways to quantify and establish these as the metrics to be adopted and used can put finally ‘to bed’ this perennial issue. Showing the real value innovation brings to the organization needs a real dedication in understanding. Getting to an innovation value ROI map and all that it impacts as innovation ‘touch points’ can galvanise an organization hugely if they understand this. Time well invested.

Of course, these are just some suggested resolutions, tough ones actually but I think resolutions should be demanding on you.  I’m sure you have some of your own that should be written down and ‘baked’ into the 2012 strategic plans to manage, pursue and resolve.

Sometimes fixing some of what you have got that sometimes does not fully work, is far better than always searching out for something new. Many of the ones suggested above really would strengthen and embed innovation into your organization’s culture.

Go on, adopt some innovation resolutions that need really fixing in 2012, I’m sure you can name a few.

Establish them in your strategic goals and personal commitments and then set about cascading them down and across the organization as important ones to be fixed in 2012.

Do plan for fixing them by drawing up your innovation resolution list and include it in any and every review.

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