Part two, recognizing the broken process we currently have that stops innovation from becoming a core.

The innovation process and the structures build into our organization certainly need to be changed.

I outline here different barriers that require a change to bring innovation more into the core of a business.

Today, we are needing to build greater agility and responsiveness into our innovative design to counter a more rapidly changing market, sensing changing conditions and ‘seize’ breaking opportunities. .

A new combination of speed, flexibility, networking and focusing on adapting and fusing the skills and capabilities needed, will require changes in our innovation work.

Our current structures and processes for innovation are holding us back and will continue to not deliver the expected results needed today or the future, giving real growth and sustainability. We do need a far more radical approach to a solution for managing innovation inside our organizations.

The poor collective leadership of innovation, functional design, slow decisions and innovation not being focused enough,  along with a lack of appropriate skills or decision empowerment, are some of the inhibitors around innovation today.

We need to develop more agile and flexible processes that work more on outcomes that ‘seize’ the opportunity seen in the marketplace, emerging from greater (big data) insight, seen as strategically aligned and ensuring processes that shorten the ‘reaction’ to delivery time.

Firstly we have the strategic – innovation breakdown

The primary reasons for the breakdown in the strategic planning process that fails to connect strategy with operations are:

• A disconnect exists between corporate strategic plans, which typically define the company’s targets for growth, and their day-to-day execution activities.
• The annual operating plans are quickly out of date due to constant changes in the market, product, technology and competitive situations.
• The connection between corporate plans and the innovation strategy for new product development and product innovation strategy doesn’t exist in most companies – this is one critical gap.
• The operational side of the organization frequently doesn’t understand the strategy or how its execution connects to business goals.

We forget to alter our ‘thinking’ across different opportunity horizons, to direct resources around those innovations that address 1) the burning needs to improve on the existing here and now, with those that can build into the 2) next and different winning positions and finally, those that 3) explore fundamental different premises that can (radically) alter your innovation landscape. Mapping across all three is often missing, we stay trapped in the ‘here and now’ mindset far too much.

To achieve consistent, sustainable long-term growth and profitability in your company, you must have systems and processes in place to close this gap and connect your corporate plans with innovation strategy and operational activities.

“Our planning sucks, how can we be more responsive”

There is the fashionable argument that you abandon annual plans and you seek fresh planning ways to create an organization ready to react to critical changes in the marketplace. That is great for the little fella, all nimble and lean but for the larger complex organization, they struggle.

Each of the different organizational parts has different reaction and response times, are governed in totally different ways. Plans are essential as the instrument of strategic design but how can these become more reflective and responsive, this is a real thorny problem to crack.

A recent report by Strategy& suggests being more agile requires a clear focus on two attributes of ‘strategic responsiveness’ and ‘organizational flexibility being built into the design of the larger organizations so they can move far quicker as conditions change.

A combination of ‘sensing new risk and opportunities to craft quick responses and also being able to “shift execution rapidly”, applying fast retooling and rework, applying this progressively over weeks and months.

For innovation to fit within these challenges much of the current process and structures need to be changed.

Any ‘rapid action’ requires very different skills and infrastructure to support it.  Organizations will need to encourage a higher level of experimentation, with even more of a constant focus on reducing all the unnecessary complexity.

Reducing all the different concepts going through the pipeline with more corporate-wide support to drive these through the system to meet these critical new opportunities that meet changing market needs or strategic goals. To do this alignment becomes essential.

Pulling together the broken pieces and silos of knowledge will need different approaches

The operational areas in an organization have their own functional execution systems which are often not connected to planning and innovation systems and processes. They remain separated as there is no real depth in the integrating process, this needs addressing.

High degrees of resistance and communication breakdowns need real solutions.

I’ve written extensively on this lack of alignment (for example) and certainly believe there are far better ways to move forward in thoughtful, constructive ways that begin the movement to establish a clearer innovation management system.

Also we focus too much on cascading down organizations, I would argue the cascading effect of flowing back up, from the ‘grass roots’ needs a far more robust system, it provides for a deeper choice of better, connected decisions. It is this ‘cascading’ both up and down on where we often lack the real alignment and fail to incorporate it within our future plans.

Leadership constantly laments about ‘poor innovation’

Many organizations are failing to build and nurture any design toward the ‘innovation ecosystem.’ We are also not formulating and communicating where innovation links into strategy, we are not connecting all the different parts. Innovation stays often poorly articulated, lacking an understanding of what makes up a holistically designed innovation ecosystem.

Often innovation ‘appeals’ because we can build compelling stores. Organizations are poor at building a compelling narrative and lack the skills and communication methods that will engage us.  Innovation understanding is often left to others to interpret what it means to them to figure out their part, with a hope that their decisions will fit somehow.

Because there is often a lack of internal clarity, there is also a poor connection to the external environment where opportunities are never recognized for their internal value to develop. Leadership lacks much in addressing these issues.

We constantly fail  in building lasting client value

Equally, where the customer remains dissatisfied with the present offering, as one not meeting their explicit needs and where they often have to continue to compromise, they are ripe for change.

Often the very leadership of organizations has a less than adequate ‘grasp’ of all the necessary levers for clients’ innovation ‘need’ to not design this in a sustaining, repeatable process with constant customer engagement they keep this ad hoc, project-specific, they miss ongoing value building opportunities.

Innovation stays resolutely one-off, targeted and specialized and disconnected from planning out a series of solutions built through a well thought through a road map of evolving value that builds for the longer-term lasting client engagement. There are notable exceptions here, mostly based on technology solutions, constantly evolving, adding increased benefits over time.

There is such a disconnect going on in ‘talking and walking’ innovation.

The organization ‘demands’ innovation, the leadership presents innovation at every opportunity, often more as a ‘fig leaf’ for the embarrassment that eventually arrives, as innovation in the marketplace. We need to set up a real connection between rhetoric and real value, delivering substance, not just ‘promise’ or intent.

The leader needs to engage become the source or energy point to make valuable innovation really happen, no one else can. It cannot be simply delegated away.

Who wants a leader that simply delegates growth, new wealth creation and your future to others? The need to both ‘walk and talk’ innovation consistently not just in annual meetings or board reports but in their daily engagement and detailed understanding of what makes innovation happen..

We also need to become far more comfortable with our own emerging practices.
I just always feel uncomfortable with the reliance placed on copying others’ best practices. It is inherently wrong for your organization if it believes in its unique design and the offerings it can deliver upon.

If you want to simply copy then seek out best practices and enjoy your ‘race to the bottom’.  By all means, there are good practice solutions to learn from but if you are dependent on others’ best practices you need to kick the habit fast.

Your specific organizations needs its unique design to seed and cultivate innovation, otherwise, you fall into a  trap many constantly fall into. We need to work on our emerging practice as we learn through our own endeavours, far more than copying others. We need to capture these in our systems and processes as our stories and practices.

The constant switching on and off of our innovation activities.

Organizations constantly do this by switching on and off, believing by pressing the innovation button, it springs back into life and delivers on-demand.

We just can’t simply switch innovation ‘on or off’ to meet short-term needs, it is certainly not faddish, it provides future wealth and sustainability and needs sustaining and nurturing consistently.

We need a system that not just monitors the innovating health of the organization but its variances are as vigorously discussed as any operational variance.

Switch innovation ‘on and off at your eventual peril, as you will eventually short-circuit the organization and the source of your future will simply drain away. People leave when they see no future or are fed-up with all the constant change We need to make innovation our core to drive future organization performance and keep it burning bright for all to see and ‘fuel’ into to make it sustain.

An Enterprise-wide innovation process that provides transparency and visibility.

If the leadership of the organization fail to formally integrate innovation into the core of any strategic – management agenda, so that is ‘constantly running through’ the decision-making process of innovation, it will remain disappointing and frustrating in its impact and results.

With the increased disruptive competition and rapidly changing conditions in markets, technology and demands placed on organizations, innovation need to be more central in the design and its management.

The leadership need to close the gap between aspiration and execution of innovation, make it more central in their thinking and activities, delivering the explicit message for everyone up and down the organization to feel more confident that innovation is a core focus and needs development. Make it highly visible and central.

Our leaders need to explicitly lead and manage innovation

Leaders not only need to demand change to come from managing innovation, they need to create this case for change and must ‘make it happen’ by demanding all the connecting parts be understood, designed and delivered, in a more sustaining innovation process.

They need to see a solution that provides an Enterprise-wide innovation process built upon making all the connections for innovations complete understanding, not on selected parts.

One that can deliver organizational-wide visibility and transparency, designed for achieving the greater strategic responsiveness needed from the top and able to give back the organizational flexibility, and flexibility in adjusting resource commitments to meet changing needs.

A redesign that is not linear but adaptive and dynamically evolving, based on changing intelligence and knowledge, to bring greater agility and faster decision commitment into its design, something that our present systems do not have designed into them.

****My Additional Note: Recently I provided some opening thoughts into a debate on what is missing for our future, here is a link into a part of the deck provided to prompt that part of the discussion.**

The post Moving Innovation into our Core – Part Two first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Arguably this lack of being a core as the central need of providing sustainable growth holds the deeper understanding of innovation back.

A core that could offer up the sustaining value and contribution innovation can make, to the growth and future well-being of organizations and having available the level of resources and commitments it needs. Today innovation seems to be falling short in delivering on its promise. Why?

A three-part series on rethinking the management of the innovation system.

Part one, building the business case of needed change in how we manage innovation.

This part is about those constant top-level concerns that needs finally to be addressed, if innovation ever can become core
So we all hear the constant ‘disappointment’ surrounding innovation. There are consistent concerns of a “lack of resources”, the “top management is not giving innovation enough attention” or “innovation lacks a clear alignment to the strategic direction”.

There are constant complaints around innovation and its lack of ‘impact’ on final delivery from different disappointed stakeholders. To give innovation a better ‘fighting’ chance we need to rethink how we manage it and we have to make it more central to our organization’s thinking, decision making and management in those systems and processes that give it this chance.

Today innovation tends to operate in discreet, often stand-alone applications, where the systems for innovation stay often clustered in specialized groups working on their part. This is partly by design but also by the restrictions we place on ourselves in organizational design or solutions being offered.

We have no solid, robust innovation management system in place that is Enterprise-wide to handle all that ‘makes up’ innovation, we all really do fail to deliver transforming innovation, apart from some notable exceptions based upon emerging technology applications, platforms and integrated designs.

We lack the dedicated organizational process to manage innovation

Innovation lacks an Enterprise-wide Innovation Process as this has not been tackled through any ERP system as yet, apart from some selected parts. Is innovation management too tough to capture as a total system? Can innovation be ‘captured’ fully and turned into a robust process?

I believe so, but it will take a different, more radical form to deliver enterprise-wide innovation that is adaptive, agile and fluid in much of its management.

The flows we need to imagine will be far more constant in change, more dynamic in what occurs and its impact and not that ‘static’ or well-defined inputs that much of the current ERP system requires. It will take a significant re-thinking.

Whenever the activities around innovation are required to be reviewed, much of this ‘selective/collective intelligence’ has to be constantly reworked, to allow it to be disseminated to a broader audience for their response and new input.

What we have today is relatively inefficient and certainly not well-connected to make a system dynamic and agile in its evolution, to parallel the often talked about ‘messy’ innovation system of today.

Innovation has changed significantly over the past ten to twenty years
Innovation has moved from ‘just’ being within the domain of research and development, so as to then be passed over to marketing to implement, it has grown in its complexity with the movement to become far more open and complex in the necessary ‘touch points’ it needs to cover.

A significant range of interested parties have become involved and needed to be drawn into the process of innovation and its development.

Open innovation has been changing the way we see and work with innovation. Ideas are constantly entering the organization as raw concepts or simply ‘weak signals,’ or intelligence, then translated into areas of investigation and then translated into potential opportunities to investigate and explore.

Idea Management is part of an integration puzzle.

Idea Management started as simply a ‘stand-alone’ system but has evolved over the years to continually improve and become the front end intelligent tool to increase engagement and quality of innovation activities.

Within this, it has continued to push out to map the strategic innovation areas and set the hunting grounds for innovation.

The best solutions strive to encourage and create a balanced roadmap of ideas, look at ways to improve cost savings, and encourage dialogues and exchanges. The push to speed up the discovery, development and implementation of ideas is driving much of the idea management software solutions. These systems are improving the ability to offer different levels of governance and reporting, to keep moving towards effective and efficient decision making.

The ability to push the software and the technologies so as to provide the appropriate platform for engaging the creative energies within organizations is a key battleground at present.

Continuous social features are being ‘released’ to improve the quality of ideas by encouraging idea development and bottom-up support with community graduation, narrowing the focus on the most promising and well-developed ideas.

There has been a visible improvement in the workflow set of concepts that aims to simplify the idea development path, and makes progress more transparent. There is this encouraging management engagement through community platforms. All good and very positive.

The core of any idea management system is to drive campaigns, collect and develop ideas and provide the ability and structures to evaluate these and move them through into a pipeline and portfolio management system to be managed accordingly. This has evolved significantly in recent years.

The enterprise portfolio systems are certainly attempting to manage the growing complexity

The providers of portfolio and pipeline management systems have been exploiting the choices of the portfolio management needed, be this managing investment, projects, resources, applications, products, and services.

They are designing them to be an end-to-end solution that constantly are planning the resources needed to achieve a better potential for integrating, deciding and executing around choices, driven by a focus on ‘finding and calculating the ‘hard numbers for the return on investments.

These platforms are providing the opportunity to have enterprise-wide visibility into the allocation and use of resources to deliver against this evolving demand.

Whereas capturing all ideas is at the heart of Idea Management, it is managing resources within the Portfolio.

The present push is towards a more holistic view across investments, the assets, resources and services required that work from capture, through the planning cycle and through to execution and looking to achieve a more flexible integration. Analytics and visualization, along with greater updating of performance management and time-to-realization are being provided.

Yet I feel we still lack all the integration that the parts being offered can provide, for achieving greater line-of-sight and alignment into organizations’ goals. Also in managing the competencies, capabilities and capacities that need to combine and deliver on the potential discoveries made or identified.

Any next ‘big step’ by existing software vendors will require significant new rounds of investment and innovative thinking, is this a step too far for many and does this hold back the evolution we really need?

Social media is being ‘plugged in’ for greater innovation

Both idea management and portfolio software solutions have been working hard to integrate into leading business applications, including IBM Connections, Yammer, SharePoint, and Jive and become a host in the cloud or on-premise.

The need to increasingly connect to all the social media tools to attempt the capture of ideas and manage resources and portfolio decisions is requiring far more ‘real-time’ engagement that is needed to bring into any final decisions on ideas or portfolio management decisions.

Stand-alone or adjoining systems are not providing the full answer we are needing today.

These ‘stand-alone’ systems aim is working hard at trying to create sustainable engagement, encouraging ever-increasingly scale in handling increasingly larger volumes of dialogues, information and data, as well as span global enterprise deployments.

Many software solution providers are working towards focusing on capturing ideas that are Customer need-driven and utilize far more of the cloud-based potential.

By focusing on determining the Ideas and possible solutions to then work through the needed resource, identify gaps and then deliver a Work Management set of solutions, to move ideas through to eventual execution but we still have numerous ‘disconnects’ across the innovation process.

Yet we are still lacking a complete mindset for managing innovation
Historically this split between idea management software and the enterprise portfolio systems might have previously made sense but I think it is possibly holding the integration of innovation back for today and the future.

We need to make a greater connection between what is available, what is possible and what a broad innovation management understanding requires to finally deliver ‘the’ innovation solution and technology is advancing the possibilities here.

I worry over this ‘fixation’ on this front end of idea management as we are in a ‘race’ to provide and improve in a marketplace of 50 plus providers of idea management software. Equally the fragmenting within the messages and value within the portfolio and pipeline providers is possibly a cause for ‘holding back’ by a number of possible clients.

Solutions that don’t seem to align with the organization stay outside and forever stand-alone, not yielding the potential value for all concerned.

Those that can ‘see beyond’ just managing in this one or selected spaces of innovation around idea management or portfolio planning, would radically alter the innovation management game.

Providers may make claims they are achieving this complete innovation management system but I am not yet convinced by what I see. We need a more holistic and integrated approach.

We need to go to the next step – providers of a holistic Enterprise-wide Innovation Process 

We still are falling short in managing the total innovation process. The present software solutions, even if they capture radical ideas seem to ‘boil these down’ and ‘dilute these’ as they have to meet the criteria set within the portfolio management system and stage-gating decision process so as to actually work in delivering clear often predetermined outcomes .

The end result so often it seems is re-affirming the incremental cycle of repeating, predictable, known decisions, based on hard numbers alone and known facts, so as to be able to achieve some ‘given’ set of outcomes, both sold in the value of the software solution and believed as wanted by the management.

So many of our innovations we should be dealing with deals are so often in the unknown, unpredictable, in their uniqueness and today our systems simply can’t cope with these. We still struggle in dealing with a more radical innovation need, where unpredictable consequences can occur both in defining the right inputs, forecasting the process or outcome predictability.

Our present software systems are falling short to manage this fluidness and need for constant agility and adapting.

This is where we need to find a better solution, to find a way, a system and its process, that keeps moving innovation towards the broader strategic core, having a consistent ‘line of top management sight.’ As well as achieving consistent commitment to managing innovation far more dynamically, and in agile and fluid ways,

Even in this uncertainty, we all face today, the full scope of innovation activity has much uncertainty and risk built into it that our present software solutions are finding difficult to manage or capture.

It conflicts as they continue to build linear or parallel systems and not systems that adapt and respond as needed, ones that constantly ‘loopback, re-feeding the understanding to drive greater, broader, ever-increasing innovation performance.

Part two follows in the next post

****My Additional Note: Recently I provided some opening thoughts into a debate on what is missing for our future, here is a link to a part of the deck provided to prompt that part of the discussion.**

The post Moving innovation into our Core- Part One first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I recently participated in a survey for APQC that was looking to identify the hot topics within product development and innovation. One or two hot spots surprised me, others less so.

In the round-up of results almost two-thirds of survey respondents have placed refining the identification of customer needs and remaining competitive in terms of profit at the top of their product development agendas. I like the increasing emphasis on identifying customer needs

Among the potential research areas respondents were asked about, they felt that developing talent to drive innovation was the most important. The second one was around rapid product development: How to Move Products to Market Faster.

The one that really caught my eye was organizations have allocated the most funds to improvement in developing talent to drive innovation. This is heartening but also a worry.

We need to really stop and think about this before spending further funds

I think before we jump into spending more funds on developing talent to drive innovation are our organizations that clear on what they want innovation to achieve? Growth is one but how? What type of innovation is needed, what are the implications? Have we created the right conditions? I could go on but spending to develop your talent to drive innovation you do need a good understanding of the what for and where this needs directing.

A second voice of concern also caught my attention

Also this week a conversation caught my attention that confirms this growing concern I have had that innovation is becoming a major strategic issue. It does seem Strategy and Innovation concerns have converged.

Recently Rita Gunter McGrath a Professor at Columbia Business School and certainly globally recognized expert on strategy in uncertain and volatile environments was discussing the three top hot button concerns at the leadership level of large organizations. She discusses this here with Booz & Co.

So what are hot button issues keeping our leaders up at night according to Rita McGrath?

The three hot buttons she is constantly hearing across organizations are firstly leaders feel their organizations have not got the right talent or skills in the right place to lead projects.

The second is around the struggle of innovation and growth, and they are simply struggling in how to do innovation. In Rita McGrath’s view the organizations do not have systematic systems in place, when organizations do innovation it tends to be ‘one offs’.

The third and final hot button at present at the strategic level is a lack of line of sight and worrying about what is actually going on. These are leaving leaders not comfortable to make clear, confident decisions.

So are we seeing the effects of how our organizations have been managed over the last few years?  Is it all coming home to roost? The leadership may worry over innovation and poor growth but it is in really in their hands to do something about it. Spending funds on developing talent to drive innovation is part of the equation but it is only part.

So how are we going to develop our talent for innovation?

Does the leadership of organizations ever listen or read about innovation in enough detail to understand all the implications, constraints and pieces to put into place? Have they recognized their role within developing innovation as a core discipline within their organizations?

To care about developing a clear, strong innovation set of capabilities you need to observe and reflect on what is causing poor innovation results. A significant portion of the blame is because the leadership, for whatever reason, simply does not get fully involved. They need to determine and build the innovation capabilities into the core of their organizations day-to-day operations. It needs to be recognized as a core competence alongside all others.

How often do we hear about the constant time spent on validating innovation, arguing the innovations corner, the pleading for more resources, the layering on of unnecessary structure, demanding impossible ROI’s and the intense focus on the short-term. Innovation is often just failing to connect into the mainstream of organizations, yet we are told our leaders are worried about growth, not having enough developed talent to manage innovation and the projects yet innovation is in their top priorities.

 Yet they worry over ‘line of sight’. Their third hot button

Of course they do, innovation is constantly being driven into the dark corners of the organization, it is being treated as opportunistic, like a light bulb you can turn on or off when it suits the whims and fickleness that our organizations leaders often seeking to respond to a crisis expecting innovation to dig them out of it. Innovation needs to become systematic.

Innovation needs far more serious attention at the top of our organizations, it needs strategic innovation leadership. Until leadership leads by focusing back on the longer-term, innovation is going to deliver continued disappointments. Also leadership in organizations requires stability to sustain and deliver on their initial promise.

Aligning leadership, the strategy needs with innovation activity.

Leadership needs to recognize their role in making innovation a more sustaining discipline. They need to give this a focus where they initiate and provide the essential strategic inputs into a well-designed innovation framework and ensure this is put in place.

To develop the talent to drive innovation you have to put into place all the conditions, structures and guidance this needs. I’ve written consistently about the need for this by suggesting the value of the Executive Innovation Work Mat approach.

Setting the strategic innovation framework through this work mat approach allows for the structure to be put into place that will develop the talent to drive innovation. It provides the conditions and strategic innovation guidance.

Resolution for innovation starts at the top.

If our business leaders want to resolve the present hot buttons of poor growth, sporadic innovation and achieve a clear line of sight as Rita McGrath is suggesting, then I’d suggest you take the time to read what I have written about this, here on this site by entering ‘work mat’ into the search box for starters.

Gaining better understanding of structuring and building innovation capabilities

Building innovation capabilities to drive innovation takes time. I would suggest you find the opportunity to read the ‘White paper’ or the foundation document on this innovation work mat. Also some of the supporting articles over at my Issuu dedicated page here, where you can find different papers that can be visually picked out by the one to six billiard balls to understand the thinking behind this framework further.

Try to answer the seven parts to the innovation leader’s litmus test or exploring the ten great intractables for innovation resolution.  Each prompts the thinking. Innovation needs to challenge prevailing organizational thinking. Innovation surprisingly enough does needs to be justified so as to build its sustaining business case . it is through this structuring you gain the serious attention of senior management for them to address the role they play within this innovation framing.

I would argue you need to make the innovation value proposition afresh

Then, and I am being deadly serious here, you need to go and actually sell what systematic innovation really means as a real value proposition to the leadership.

This VP needs to focus on what needs to be done to turn innovation into the engine of growth and through its strategic design, put in place the vehicle to attract and develop this innovation talent. You are tackling the leaderships hot buttons of concern.

Any development of talent needs a well-structured approach but you need to put in place an awful lot to really give the type of returns these ‘driving innovation’ needs. If leaders are worried about poor growth, disappointed with innovation and worry over ‘line of sight’ then innovation capability needs radically redesigning. Much of the present innovation is caught in a legacy trap, this needs overhauling. How will you think about addressing this?

Do you want to really develop the talent to drive innovation? If so then talk to me, I believe I can deliver a clear return on your investment of allocated funds.

The post Developing talent to drive innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The collaborative work that Jeffrey Philips and I undertook has been a significant contributing factor, and I owe him a big thank you for being such a great collaborating partner.

Also during the year I have tried to keep a consistent update on the flow of this work through this blog: paul4innovating.com and wanted to keep publishing selected aspects in association with the recognized leaders in innovation knowledge.

I often like to think out loud and it is specifically motivating when others respond positively to what I’m thinking – thanks for that, it is motivating and encouraging.

You may not know but I work through two organizational structures, firstly www.agilityinnovation.com that is 100% focused on innovation and also www.hocaconsulting.com that works on subjects important to growing organization’s capability in today’s world but keeping innovation central to the framing solutions.

These combine and underpin my advisory, coaching and consulting work. These need more shaping but do have all the essential content, perhaps too much!
Recently I was outlining my thoughts on 2013 here and here

For me, last year the most important piece of work was around the Executive Innovation Work Mat. This was conceived and designed by Jeffrey and myself in 2012, to help assess the strengths and gaps that exist in an organizations innovation management process, and to deliver a formal “workout” methodology for those that holding senior positions. who are the biggest influences for innovation to be successful or not.

This work mat approach allows them, through its engagement process, to recognize their roles and all the necessary links within innovation they need to influence and think through.

This work mat provides the essential framing desired around innovation articulated by the senior team, so it then can be used as the mechanism to discuss and communicate this throughout the organization, so they can gather around it and relate their contributions into the innovation need.

The work mat forms a crucial part of the strategic innovation framework that becomes essential to understanding and then building a sustaining set of innovation competencies and capabilities, so as to deliver innovation required and aligned to the organizations strategy.

This work mat can then be used as the communicating framework to ‘cascade’ throughout the organization, with the aim to achieve engagement and be used as the founding ‘mechanism’ to align innovation activities to the strategic intent.

The concept of a Work mat is to ‘wrestle’ over it, to debate and then deliver a formal workout methodology that provides the essential framing desired to be understood throughout the organization to align the innovation activities as much as possible to the strategic direction and goals.

It provides the basis for a well-articulated innovation framework for the organization to work from.

Going beyond the Work Mat

Beyond the Executive Innovation Work Mat, I have equally been working on offering a cascading set of frameworks to help innovation executives and teams throughout their organizations to build the methods and structures for strong innovation functions and processes, understandings of cultures, environment and methods.

These are expressly established around strong innovation governance, a clarification and set of approaches to establishing different environment and cultural make ups, mostly through focusing on a fairly broad selection of capability and competency approaches, tools and methodologies.

I do believe the make-up of innovation services that are needed to be offered by external solution providers has to be broad ranging and robust. The range and scope can often be highly dependent on the level of executive understanding associated with innovation and the conditions imposed or set.

You can, as the external facilitator, be highly involved or fairly hands off, more a guide and mentor but this is determined through the conducting of a variety of assessments and audits, drawing down on different training programs and workshops and selecting within a toolbox the different methods and practices to satisfy the inquiring mind, rightly so.

I find a mix of advising, coaching and consulting as a real help. In initial discussions you can define the executive team’s role and create an environment where innovation can be sustained in taking this approach but it is demanding on everyone’s time in these early ‘storming and forming’ discussions.

Researching different aspects to underpin innovation  becomes critical, it provides the position and does validate each of the essential components that make up any approach to innovation. Within the frameworks Jeffrey and I developed it was absolutely necessary .

From this work you can provide a structured and measured process of the transfer of knowledge that can be assimilated and embedded, and then adapted to the unique circumstances you find in each organization. It all adds up to a lot of dedicated work but I believe worthwhile.

Exploring the Innovation Reference Framework

One layer further that Jeffrey and I went was within developing and structuring a comprehensive framework. This was through the application of our Innovation Reference Framework, which defines the different cascading activities toward building a robust innovation capability or discipline. It examines four key “layers” of innovation – strategy, people, process and types and delves into each one in considerable detail.

This Innovation Reference Framework is designed to ‘map’ back into this Senior Executive Innovation Work Mat to underpin it, with a set of robust approaches to structuring innovation, that enable innovation to be greatly enhanced and linked throughout the organization.

This offers a very useful way into establishing a common language and  you can see through the different modules within the  Innovation Reference Framework a clear understanding  of the essential of innovation. This provides a meeting point for organizational understanding, often missing due to this lack of structure taken here.

This can be viewed at:  http://cirf.pbwiki.com.

I do think this framework provides a reasonable, thoughtful approach to developing a robust innovation capability and ensures your team considers all the relevant aspects of an innovation discipline.

As organizations continue to turn more towards innovation to regain their growth and provide a more sustaining future the ability to ‘frame’ innovation in its entirety becomes critical.

Clearly building competencies and capabilities requires expertise, time and commitment. Having access into a toolkit of innovation solutions, along with access to a deep knowledge base, combined with cross industry experience does certainly offer a broad understanding of all the essential aspects needed for successful innovation, so it can fit together, but in each organizations unique way.

Innovation is presently gaining greater senior executive attention.
Organizations are beginning to engage in new, often different but exciting experiments to reinvent the way they firstly conceptualize then translate to see how they fit to create the future. There is growing recognition that the old business-as-usual approaches have not produced the desired results or has simply run their course in alternative productivity and efficiency approaches.

Innovation is at a point where it is becoming embedded as a transformation method for its sustaining value and potential for discovering and exploiting new growth. Many are being forced beyond taking just the incremental route within innovation.

Innovation is increasingly recognized as essential to establish in more formal, structured ways as it is the catalyst to provide both the broadest possible relevance to all our futures and the ability to manage the parts that we can specifically impact.

Impact comes from more breakthrough, disruptive and distinctive innovation and this needs careful managing and senior managers specific focus. I’m trying to be the equipment source and translation point for this.

Entering 2013 ready to do battle

I enter 2013 knowing it is going to be an extremely demanding year, to compete for attention, for funds, for gaining access and people’s time is not going to be easy.

Having the structure, processes and understanding of innovation to the level I have will help me justify and hopefully get me through the door but business development is never easy, is it?

The post Innovation and the Deepening Linkage first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I’d like to go a little deeper with a suggested way to surface these deeper personal hidden blockages that you do find in working with innovation, that the work mat brings out. It is surprising as they often have real commonality once surfaced and then you need to find the dedicated time to allow them to be fully discussed, as they are critical to unlock.

Often in innovation adoption there are so many hidden barriers that need drawing out and resolving. Take a read of Jeffrey’s observations, as they clearly triggered my own approach of how to deal with them which I thought I’d share here.

As Jeffrey states there are “very different perspectives, different goals and even different definitions between and among members of many executive teams.” The key is to surface these.

We both totally share this point that Jeffrey raises, that “sustained innovation can only occur when there is clarity about goals, alignment within the executive team to the goals, deep commitments to appropriate staffing and resource allocation, and the willingness to lead into risky or uncertain initiatives.  When these factors are present, innovation can flourish.”

To get to this point we need to draw out those real hidden concerns that inhibit innovations adoption at executive level. We need to trigger ‘collective’ discussions so the team can relate and share their concerns and offer up solutions that breaks through those barriers.
Surfacing hidden barriers is hard work

To surface hidden barriers that might be blocking innovation does needs a conscious effort, a consistent questioning, validating and exploring to “peel away” and get at the root of the problem.

Often it is simply the fear of moving from the current established practices into new ways and that stepping over is very hard and often very personal.

When it comes to getting an executive team to recognize this and then make a collective team move is extremely hard, it needs a lot of debate, facts and recognition, that this behavioral change- as that is what it is- needs to be taken if they believe in innovation.

This is one of the real value points of having an external adviser as the facilitator and where the value of the Executive Work Mat starts kicking in.

It is very hard for a member of a team, including the CEO, to instigate a change of the magnitude needed for innovation to really be embraced and adopted without specialized help.

Innovation requires concerted, dedicated efforts to take hold, to become fully embedded and run through the veins of the organization as the new blood type. Those famous antibodies kick in from all sides to protect the status quo, keep doing “business as usual.” The external adviser has the tough job of grappling all those objections to the floor, hence why we call it a work mat.

Stimulating the innovation carriers

I’ve outlined previously about the issues surrounding the hidden human dimension of 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”. To allow innovation to flow within organizations requires the senior executives to address their own potential inhibitions so they then become the innovation carriers and allow the true force of innovation to be unleashed.

It is through engagement that allows innovation to happen. We need to make innovation the social process it needs to be but this starts from the top, leaders have to come together and decide to lea.

They need to surface their own hidden barriers to innovation otherwise many others within the organization simply stumble along in their own interpretations of how innovation fits within the grand scheme of things. Or they simply “wait” or never change as they don’t see the direction coming from the top of the organization.

Leadership is required for innovation to really make that transformational hold.

We need to re-frame innovation as a series of challenges
Let me explain part of the power of the Executive Innovation Work Mat. I think it is important to offer any change deriving from the work coming out of the work mat as innovation challenges that need addressing, as necessary issues to be aligned and clarified. The work mat can only trigger, its outcomes need resolution and commitment.

For me managers relate to challenges, they are trained to respond, to investigate, to surface the issues and find ways to tackle the problems. Innovation management is no different. Part of the design of the work mat is to surface the gaps that exist that requires executive resolution so to allow innovation to be fully integrated within organizations and aligned with strategic goals and objectives.

Also the work mat although stemming from initial work at the Executive and Senior levels of organizations needs to have a “cascading effect.” The work mat outcomes need articulating, communicating and eventually becoming the adopted common language framework of the organization to gather around so alignment can potentially happen.

Addressing hidden barriers and personal blockages through ten challenges
So for each executive to address innovation I believe lies ten challenges they need to question within themselves so as to answer and then collectively discuss. These allow a clear framing dialogue to unblock innovation and bring together clarity of where innovation needs to fit within the organization going forward.

The ten challenges can actually have a vital part to play in cascading this down the organization, for everyone to reflect upon and address. They become part of the communication mechanism to form a common language for innovation. Different views can surface for the challenges but they all need addressing.

The ten innovation change challenges

Addressing the issue of unfamiliar responsibilities – new and different ways of working, of understanding, of allowing innovation to take hold and flourish is often demanding new ways of responding, often adding to increasing responsibilities. This needs surfacing

Innovation demands new directions – making significant changes to the way the organization is run is very challenging, potentially disrupting and needs thinking through at the top level well.

Inherited problems always surface – addressing countless and inherent problems is messy and requires dedicated resolution. Changing a culture to become more innovative can be a massive step in structure, organization and policies.

Problems within the organizations make up – inadequate experience and resistance to change especially surface when a person is not equipped to deal with it. Installing innovation capacity, capabilities and competencies needs figuring out

High stakes of innovation – demanding breakthrough innovation makes everyone feel increasing vulnerable, increasingly visible and leadership has a real responsibility to manage this risk and set of fears. They need to be ready to ‘positively react and encourage’ both in supporting winning solutions and extracting positive learning from failures.

Scope and scale of innovation – Managing in scale and scope is demanding and requires well thought through systems and processes. To scope innovation needs robust business case approaches, its flexibility in its management and then to scale this up requires well established approaches and clear commitments to its engagement and execution.

External pressures multiply – everyone has an opinion outside the organization, let alone inside. Balancing these different interfaces and the pressures from these as you explore innovation needs managing well. Avoid that trait of just keeping raising expectations and actively work at the alignment for the ability to deliver on the promise.

Influencing without full authority – key activities within innovation usually demand that you become reliant on others. You need to spend (seemingly) inordinate time explaining and gaining others buy in and their own identification with concepts so as to move emerging innovation concepts along the pipeline. You need to find often imaginative ways of attracting across the resources needed. This is especially hard for senior managers to adapt too, the need to attract across, instead of simply expect, demand and simply take.

Work more with a listening and feedback culture – this can be totally different from the way business has been conducted today, through a more hierarchical structure. Flattening organizations to allow greater two way flow sucks up time; it simply undoes or unpicks command and control over time. It takes time to establish and gain the confidence and momentum. You need to allow more for debate, it shifts and alters the hierarchy and structures and that is a big step into an unknown, yet it is necessary for organization change, to allow innovation to truly flourish on a more sustaining basis.

The need to develop work group diversity – innovation asks for more diversity in opinion, it draws out more in thinking, in discipline, in alternative approaches and solution. This often leaves senior executives feeling they are less in control, reliant on other and that can feel scary and surface their own insecurities, buried increasingly as they moved up the organization and took on responsibility and accountability. It challenges often their very notion of management as they have known and experienced it.

Innovation in its management challenges many past notions of how to manage it differently.

To summarize
Each of these ten innovation challenges needs to be surfaced at the right time within any executive work mat discussion. Each one, individually can block innovation from advancing. Finding the right moment is not easy to draw these out but it is certainly necessary, otherwise, those hidden barriers never come to the surface and get resolved.

The real barriers to allowing innovation into organizations to flourish are these blockages. The job of the work mat and within the sessions is not just to align the seven parts of the work mat as simply an academic exercise itself but to really wrestle and grapple with those tough questions, that leadership engagement for innovation and what it really means to deliver a cohesive framework that the organization can work from with growing confidence.

Reducing concerns, addressing risks and making considered decisions are what senior executives are trained and schooled to be good at. To allow innovation to take hold, the key is to work hard at surfacing the known and hidden dimensions blocking innovation. These ten challenges can ‘break open’ the road blocks.

Clearly any innovation journey, if seriously undertaken, needs some really dedicated work. The Executive Innovation work mat facilities this as the central gathering point and that is why Jeffrey and I really believe in its value to innovation’s future within organizations.

We have to often remember senior managers are used to being successful by competing. The genuine change in their mindsets and understandings they need to often undertake for innovation is sometimes difficult to adapt too and sustain, as they are often on a steep and unexpected learning curve themselves.

Like all aspects of change, this is only achieved through engaging them to practice, to use the work mat as the communicating mechanism for positive reinforcement as the strategic innovation framework, where all involved can learn and benefit.

This calls for a collective and real collaborative effort but the return is worth it, they are making a decisive contribution to establishing a sustaining innovation within their organization. They are beginning to change the way the organization needs to work.

The original list of the ten challenges has been adapted from “creating learning experiences without changing jobs” by Cynthia McCauley at the CCL in 2006. I’ve  applied it for a way for surfacing innovation issues and personal concerns at executive and organization levels.

The post Surfacing the challenges and road blocks to innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

During the seven days these will document seven important “domains” that determine innovation success or failure.

Each domain creates innovation potential, but sustained, successful innovation requires a unified “framework” in which all of these domains are appropriately engaged and aligned.

The development of this framework, which we call the Executive Innovation Work Mat, is the responsibility of the CEO or senior executive.  They can deliver alignment by engaging and providing this leadership required in innovation.

If you have the opportunity, do go over to the www.innovationexcellence.com site to see the first two blogs, the foundation document and whose role it is to design this and why.

The first document is called The Seven Essential Domains for Innovation Leadership – the Work Mat Approach and the second The Critical Role that Senior Leaders must fill for Innovation Success

As this is a collaborative effort between Jeffrey Phillips and me, we see this opening series as the engagement to the innovation community. We are looking for feedback and thoughts to take this forward as we clearly believe it is an important problem within innovation to break down.
Seeking reactions, searching for the barriers and issues is critical.
On my previous blog on this site Leaders need to engage and drive innovation I receive a really encouraging set of comments around many of the issues and barriers we seem to have when we want to engage our leaders in business on innovation.

Go and take a look, add more comments if you would like- I’m open to listening on this as I believe it vital to ‘crack’. I have ‘pulled out’ three that strike at some of our issues in getting the concept understood and adopted.

Three comments I want to highlight here

Comment 1-  the risk-adverse top executive
One comment was from Joachim von Heimburg who is certainly a very experienced practitioner of innovation. He commented: “Top executives are risk-averse. But innovation is scary. Most senior business leaders made it to the top of big companies because they were successful as (current) problem solvers, not as innovators. They are not that interested in considering a new business model or going after an amazing yet high-risk breakthrough when that may undermine their current profitable business. And who wants to risk having a major innovation effort fail on their watch?”

My reply was partly: You strike at the heart of the problem. Getting the senior business leader looking more towards innovation, it will happen as you say if one targets the wider community (investor and Shareholder) even the end customer voting with their feet. Thankfully survival is changing as tenure reduces and something will eventually ‘give’ to alter their risk appetite. In some ways we do not want to change their behaviour, more change their engagement and alignment to innovation that goes on.

The link between strategy and innovation, if we can reduce this gap then it begins to ‘appeal’ to the leader as one less problem for greater utilization and tighter performance -which does play into their short-term performance mindset. If they can set the frameworks more, still stand back and make the necessary judgement calls then we have shifted the ground. If they engage even more and become more comfortable with increasing risk by increasing their understanding, again there is a real gain.

Comment 2- the fear of disruption
For my second comment was offered by Drew Marshall who runs his own practice Primed Associates, LLC and one of the founders of the weekly innovation chat under the hashtag  of innochat.

He offered the view  “Too many leaders are distracted by the simple solution and frustrated by the fact that their complex problems are not resolved. For many the notion of inviting disruption into the systems and processes that they have often spent careers building and protecting is anathema, and the risk acceptance and resilience capacity necessary to embrace it is too often missing in action. There is much work to be done”

My reply to Drew was: Drew, it is such a persistent problem, as we say, it has become a boil on the back of our neck, and it needs to be ‘lanced’. Of course there is so much to distract leaders, they are pulled in so many different directions but you don’t delegate growth, new wealth creation, your future to others. Presently many of our leaders simple do that! There is much work to be done, I call this the new work of this decade and this only comes through innovation. Leaders need to get it!

Comment 3- the lack of industry participation in discussions about innovation

The third comment was from Jack Hipple, who is without doubt very well-respected in TRIZ and its practice and who has written continuously for years on the subject of innovation. His comment that I picked up upon was: “all the participants in these discussions are by consultants and no one from industry ever participates. Why?”

In many ways this is the most disturbing, because Jack is right that across so many suggestions on innovation (good and bad alike) there does seem to be this absence of the industry practitioner themselves engaging and participating with their insights, knowledge or counter observation.

I replied to Jack: “It is frustrating that the actual community that is working innovation stays silent on so many forums or discussions on innovation. Notable exceptions are where leaders of innovation initiatives have their own blogs or deliver ‘thinking’ pieces into some of the established innovation knowledge sites.

I know many read the articles but feel often ‘constrained’ by who they work for and not feeling they can participate, even if the views expressed are theirs, or feel sometimes a little daunted entering into areas they feel they lack that broader experience, both constraints are a great pity.

Perhaps the number of consultants or ‘experts’ drown out the voices from industries and often provide conflicting advice that can leave many simply confused, it is better to just get on with what you are doing. Equally they feel they don’t have the time or intellectual curiosity and simply just get (stay) within the bounds of what they can influence to apply their energies. Not an easy one to resolve”.

Making it happen depends on you wanting it too

The engagement that is required to make innovation happen is demanding.  Deloittes Centre for the Edge has looked previously at the connections between passion and engagement and found that only 20% of the sample regarded themselves as “passionate” about their work.

That begins to point to a lack of real engagement and just passive interest that seems to occur within many knowledge communities.

Secondly there were marked differences in employees in large firms and those self-employed with higher scores of disengaged,and passive for firm employees.

Unless the environments change in large organizations where the feeling of having a “safe place”, not always needing “permission” and one where people can “think out loud” and have “ownership”, not precise goals underwritten by tight measures but by suggesting “broader parameters” we might see a re-engagement, a reactivation and “sense of pride” but it lies in the hands of the leaders to construct this.

Where those within the innovation community they need to push back up the organization a different view, one that offers a different “construct” to manage innovation.

We are trying to offer that thinking through this present series and in the final framework we are suggesting. Why Jeffrey and I feel you need an integrated innovation framework approach as we are outlining this week, is critical to innovations long term sustaining future, let alone the immediate term of boosting quarterly results so often the judge of organization effectiveness and management.

The need of collaborators and champions

Turning prisoners from being captive within organizations into “partners, collaborators and champions” that grow in their identity with what innovation provides to the cause and mission of the organization, is powerful. It unleashes much.

Why do I call them prisoners?

Well today I was reading a short paper from Richard Merrick, the CEO of Inspiration Engineering on Engagement and Innovation they suggest from studies on engagement the average workforce is divided on something of an 80/20 basis between the ―Instigators (the passionate and enthusiastic), ―Willing passengers (who turn up and do as asked) and ―prisoners (who would rather be somewhere else, but are afraid of leaving). It could be described in a similar way to Rogers adoption curve: (% for illustration, based on Centre for the Edge)

The challenge it is suggested, in rather same way as Malcolm Gladwell discusses in ―Tipping Point, is to enable the ―instigators, enthuse the ―Adopters and convert a good number of the ―Passengers to ―Adopters. Prisoners may be more problematic and longer term issues.

So will we get the adopters to “push” the Executive Innovation Work Mat and gain conversions, not just in colleagues who would like to get more engaged but find the way to place this series of blogs under the noses of the leaders, that all crave for improving innovation performance but perhaps did not recognize the essential role they should play?

We hope we can say “welcome on board” and “sit back, buckle up and enjoy the ride” to many within the innovation community and we can achieve a better all-round service performance because the leaders of our organizations finally do get to understand their role to play in the innovation sphere, as outlined in the Executive Innovation Work Mat series.

A role that can help unlock all those prisoners that are currently residing within organizations, who can offer so much more, if they are given the encouragement and the organizing framework to guide them back into being engaged employees seeing innovation for what it is, a place for identification and pride.

We see the CEO has the ability to:

• link innovation to strategy, and
• create focus, engagement and passion for innovation, and
• direct funds and resources to good innovation programs, and
• speed good ideas to market as new business models, products and services, and
• ensure defined innovation processes and metrics exist so innovation is sustainable.

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