In the past we have often believed it is the genius laboring away in his lab that has made the discovery that has led to real breakthroughs in innovation.

So often in the past this lack of making the invention connection has often held many of us back to become engaged in discovery, ideas or contributions as we felt discouraged, as we had felt innovation can only happen in these ‘special’ places.

Most of us became disconnected with the early part of the discovery for innovation, we simply became just the implementors, pushing the innovation through the pipeline into its final execution. That can change if we are willing and able to challenge our past assumptions.

In many ways we have still not fully broken with this ‘mindset’ on innovation of being someone else’s need to identify and discover those new ways, new designs and solutions. Thankfully though that has been changing, as increasingly the message has been delivered that “innovation is all within our jobs, irrespective of what we do”

It has been the opening up of organization thinking through technology that has allowed for this innovation to flow, to be captured, absorbed, translated and delivered back out into the world. It is from this multiple and diverse difference of innovation understanding that can freely flow ideas and concepts that can evolve into new innovations that deliver better value than what was offered in the past.

We do need to find this “sweet spot” for encouraging more innovation

We live in a world where we are having greater connectivity than ever before. We are increasingly engaged in far greater interactivity with the easy and access to the social and organizational tools than ever before. We are encouraged to share what we know increasingly so others can built on this, or shape its original concept into a different value proposition simply by having that triggering idea and seeing the ‘possibilities’ to build upon it.

Perhaps we have a new innovation equation to explore and exploit more

It is the degree of connectivity times the degree of interactivity times the degree of sharing, that is within our growing community that enables the innovation to emerge.

We need to find the spaces to innovate. Where else in today’s more open world where technology allows us all higher degree’s of freedom, discovery and ability to make the innovation space a vibrant one. One where it is the collaborating we undertake, that leads us to breaking out of the existing, changing the known, investigating the unknown by the ‘degree’s of our willingness to explore and exploit all that is around us, if we only reach out and be open to new levels of thinking.

The post Innovations Degree’s of Connectivity, Interactivity and Sharing first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So this is the reworked opening thought to record the idea to ‘capture’ it, so I can reflect later on, on how I should build on this further. I show a number of hyperlinks to help in pulling this together…..well for me anyway!

So this is a work-in-progress and should be taken as a thinking out loud at this stage.

Linking capability through interlocking platforms
We are in need of a different “sustaining” capacity build around innovation as its continuous core, constantly evolving, adapting, learning and adjusting, in perpetual motion.

How? Innovation has many ‘touch points, a myriad of dimensions that need to be aligned and integrated. How can we achieve this more holistic view, so innovation management can make a significant advancement on where we are today?

Making the business case for innovation to change is not easy but essential

Innovation management is today, mostly standing outside organizations operating structures. Due to this, innovation is often missing the critical line of sight from top management and it often suffers accordingly.

The numerous resource constraints, a lack of cohesion, alignment and seen creation value are becoming a real performance drag against rising expectations and needs.

Capabilities, capacity to innovate well, and the competencies are sub-optimal. We need to achieve a greater line-of-sight into the makeup of these for raising the potential of our innovation activities.

Innovation needs to be more central in core process thinking or we are in danger of staying with the same as it seems sort of comfortable. We actually do need much to shift, more radical thinking in our future innovation design, all getting possible through technology and the wonders of the cloud.

Do we grab this shift in incremental bits or push for a more radical redesign of the innovation process? I would argue we can grasp the opportunity to redesign it through our understandings of what we have learnt about innovation to date, bring in the solutions through technology that offers innovation so much and find solutions that can deliver innovation into the core of organizations, so it becomes seamless and the critical enabler or driving ‘engine’ of the business going forward.

One critical design thought I have is having three mutually supporting capability building platforms

Within an organizational setting, you need to have in place three supporting building platforms: 1) organizational support, 2) knowledge and competency gathering abilities and 3) a clear innovation process to channel themselves through, as final products or new services. All three need to be in place. They stack together.

If you have these three platforms in place you can begin to move from more of an ad hoc set of capabilities through to a more integrated, synergistic and interlocking set of capabilities. A complete picture where you can see and exploit differently when you are needing existing capabilities to be brought together differently and combined in unique constantly evolving new ways.

Well that’s the theory.

Organizational support platform is made of proving clear leadership and commitment to building capabilities, set in place an infrastructure that accesses, anchors and diffuses capacity so it not just flows but is constantly creating and exploiting for new economic and social value. You need to make sure the conditions for a trusting environment and climate are actively worked on and supported, and finally, provide the resources and ways to measure this to support and re-enforce the value of each corporate initiative. You should take a look at an earlier blog here: http://bit.ly/mV7zjP.

Knowledge & competency platform is where you permit time to discover and absorb what is being made available. The key absorptive capacities mentioned above. Deliberately allowing the time to explore both the external world and the internal world, and then setting about to capturing this ‘new’ knowledge through clear consolidation techniques and technology is vital. Knowledge should focus on a given core and context of what the organization is looking to achieve and want to learn from/about. You need to explore explicit and tacit knowledge. See my recent blog on the value of tacit knowledge: http://bit.ly/sthlG1)

Innovation Process platform lies at the heart of your innovation capability needs. This I have called the Innovation Business Architecture within work I completed with Jeffrey Phillips of OVO and can be viewed here http://bit.ly/ggKQCs . The process needs to have in place the capability to explore, to converge, to keep moving through the innovation pipeline a portfolio and be able to consistently consolidate and further exploit the ‘raw’ material of ideas and concepts by designing in some controls and risk management. Other thoughts for thinking through the innovation process are discussed here http://bit.ly/ikgR4f as well.

Moving from ad hoc to an integrated, synergistic and unique state
It is not just simply having in place the three platforms outlined above; each is a building block on top of one another, dependent for the ‘strength’ of the interlocking structure, to achieve an ongoing momentum that reduces many of today’s ad hoc capabilities, often hidden and undervalued into to this integrated state where the flow and connecting can enable a much higher level of performance through the greater line of sight and then applying more the appropriate resource inputs and training.

The need is to recognize that you do move, over time and dedicated effort, from ad hoc availability into a more formalised and recognized capability building process, it covers a more broad-based structure where the three-building platforms become tightly integrated to gain a more synergistic effect.

Then those that participate can see and learn from this growing innovation capacity feeding into the three platforms. Overtime will also provide increasing self-governance as it becomes visible to all.

The need for external inputs is essential

Building the internal capabilities happens by the way it ‘embraces’ the world. The more you seek, the more you gain, and the more you are able to see new possibilities. Seeking knowledge externally clearly comes from the encouragement of exploring networks, and building relationships – accessing the external capacities through scanning, scouting and collaborating openly.

Finally, market-learning capabilities feed into this cascading need

The real strength of appropriate innovation is designing in the right tension points – see my blog post http://bit.ly/tUQBml on this. Appropriateness has to be designed in.

Set within these platforms you need to build in new (ongoing) capabilities for Co-creation orientation, Customer Knowledge Acquisition, Customer Sharing Dialogues and Information Interpretation.

This knowledge becomes your collective memory where capabilities learn and grow from these customer conversations, actively sought. Not only will you learn, but you have to unlearn here. Having a reflective market-learning outcome part enables new learning opportunities to be embedded and often triggers behavioural change.

For me, I feel the “cascading effects” are underappreciated and I have suggested in an earlier post the cascading frame and possible outcome benefits of approaching this.

A short ‘call to action’ summary

I would argue strongly the need to focus on the value of having a clear innovation capability platform structure needs to be a ongoing transforming one pushing the organization into a perpetual learning one, that draws in from each of these different platforms to be combined up to meet and address the tasks and challenges it faces. These are unique to each environment.

We need to bring innovation into organization alignment and make it more central to its organization core and that I have suggested a work mat alignment framework to help in this.

This growing capability for increased innovation maturity can offer much.
I need to thing about what makes up each of these platforms and know the points where they interlock and feed into each other. That is another stage of thinking to be undertaken to validate what seems a ‘good idea’ into something that will work.

If you want to find out more, keep tuned in or simply track me down. These are some of my early thoughts so as I said previously stated, as a work-in-progress.

I keep looking to find the ways and the means for building innovation capabilities and capacities. It is my passion and focuses on what I like to do in my innovation activities.

What triggered this thought was based on an academic paper from H E Essmann & N D du Preez advancing the view of maturity application and innovation models.

The post Building Innovation Capability Through Three Interlocking Platforms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today we grapple with more uncertainty than ever before, we are facing so much change. For many of us this is the time of year when planning out the future becomes more ‘top of mind’. These are moments where we have to stop chasing the daily numbers, pushing the immediate projects that are in the pipeline and turn our attention to laying out our future plans.

Sadly we often make a poor ‘stab’ at this thinking through process; we don’t get our thinking into the right mental frames.

The problem for management is anything discussing the future enters the ‘zone of uncertainty’ and this ability to often ‘read the tea leaves’ can very much determine the future health and direction of the organization. Ignore these shifts or signals and you are on the path to your own ‘destruction’.

Not only should we search for possibilities that extend and strengthen our existing core offerings but we should search out on a wider basis.

Often we make a complete mess of this planning out of our future.

We have not prepared as we should have done, we take what we are doing and project that forward, adding a few tweaks to give it a more ‘innovative’ feel that continues the incremental path we all so easily like to work in.

Help is at hand if you care to grab it!

The other way is to stop and think about this very differently. For this we need to develop different mindsets, ones that change, ones that can allow us to think in different time horizons.

That is managing innovation not just in today’s operational horizon (h1) but in traversing into the future with more breakthroughs (h2) and transformational innovation (h3) that is organized around the three horizon methodology.

The three horizons ‘asks you’ to apply three totally different mindsets to see constraints, weaknesses and often very limited opportunities differently, often called “weak signals”, it alters your thinking into a far more evolutionary approach. We just do not allow our thinking to open up to this evolutionary approach.

We stay trapped in our existing thinking, due to a lack of time or a lack of encouragement to think differently, to challenge our existing approaches to business.

We tend to look more at extending products but we only play a little with business model alternatives and rarely with ideas that stretch our minds or pick up on these “weak signals”. We stay trapped within our existing bodies.

Can we attempt to break free? How about if we broke our thinking down into separate steps?

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

a) Firstly we set about to clarify the burning needs relating to your present position and link these to your known strategy and approaches but keep questioning this to keep it fresh and relevant to ever-changing market conditions.

b) Try a technique like concept boarding that can capture the emerging trends so you can begin to put together plausible ideas that may be those emerging winning needs (h3) you begin to articulate and frame these. These start to shape your decisions on where to focus your ‘future’ resources as you search for emerging winners.

c) Then you begin to think through the “space for transition” (h2) to begin to reflect and start working through that constant dilemma of “protecting core or investing in new” debates. You are beginning to shape an ‘emerging’ strategy that really brings your thinking out.

d) The end result is you are beginning to explore fundamental different premises for replacing “business as usual” with exploring nascent ideas. Then you need to seek out the appropriate platform, a strategic planning meeting, to explore these.

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

What emerges is more uncertainly know you need to map and ‘attack’ this

We are moving across ‘transitional ‘points. We do need this longer-term perspective and we do need to traverse into the future in clear thinking through steps (or horizons).

Our horizon one (h1) does begin to decay faster today than ever, it does not fully cover off the strategic fit we want and can begin to lose its dominance over time. We need to manage this transition, not let others, our competitors or new entrants, manage it for us.

It is how we manage this transition becomes so critical. We need to exploit developing trends that are emerging (h2) and begin to tune into possible options in the future (h3).  Within these options will emerge the winners and become the more dominant systems or solutions that we should be moving towards, even from today.

Some of these only have faint emerging signals but they need to be brought into the innovation portfolio activity to explore, often in novel ways.

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

The discussions that centre on often conflicting views of the future, compared to the existing realities and those providing the returns for today’s business. Often we can detect change but we consciously ignore them.

This is the place where the disruptor’s are at work, existing or new competitors, working at displacing your products and market positions

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

The concepts that emerge from horizon two will include the rising stars of the organization and will, over time, become even the new core business.

These are a mixture of step-outs from today’s core, or extensions that have come from the adjacent work consciously being undertaken or are truly emerging as new activities that need new depth in capabilities and time to build.

Many executives ‘defending’ the core will ‘attack’ or hold back any release of their resources to help these emerging initiatives. It is a ‘hard-nosed’ reality.  It needs a very high level and conscious set of decisions coming from the top to determine these new moves.

Do not believe that when most executives ‘just’ react and shrug their shoulders regarding h2 as a natural, everyday occurrence, it is far from not.

Many have to come ‘kicking and screaming’ to supporting emerging activities. Far too much ‘invested’ interest comes into play. They see this more as a threat not an opportunity. It is not their sand box so why should they ‘play’.

These positions need drawing out and how you execute on your thinking will help.

Horizon two is where you work through your future options

This is where you try out, experiment, explore. This is the transiting point (my space of transition and zone of uncertainty) where you work through different dilemmas and paradoxes to shift the organisation through this horizon two to position it for the longer-term future.

This horizon is a real point of disruption to be well-managed as you navigate from shifting resources from today’s core to that third horizon, the predicted future where ideas and proposals are still forming.

The ‘zone of uncertainty’ needs more of your time

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

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

You owe it to your planning to think in different mindsets and horizons

The three horizons working through in different mindsets does allow you to pick your fights, explore your emerging options and show others how and where you can possibly win in better ways than just in the ‘present’. You are ‘allowing’ discussion to shape the future business in  a more evolutionary way.

By ‘seeing’ these three horizons differently and setting about managing the different challenges each horizon brings, can help you can break down the complexities within the issues.

By simply recognizing and then attacking the ‘uncertainties in horizon two (h2), you do have a much to have a better chance to ‘win’ in more ‘transforming ways’ by anticipating and evolving the delivery of innovation in a more structured way.

Structuring your thinking across different horizons is far better than ‘jumping into your plans’ as more of that “business as usual”, simply repeating the same exercises from previous years that keep you on a safe path but maybe, one that plants even more seeds of destruction for your business.

You might have chosen the path of least resistance or work, due to not giving this adequate time but you will certainly be missing the real opportunities to ‘transform’ your existing business. Your choice?

The post Entering the zone of innovation uncertainty first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The big idea of the three different horizons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning across these different horizons needs different tools

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

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

Managing with different mindsets

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you see the three horizons value?

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

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

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

The critical design is of three mutually supporting capability building platforms do need to be put into place.

Within an organizational setting, you need to have in place three supporting capability building platforms; organizational supporting, knowledge and competency gathering, and a clear innovation process to channel new capacity through as final products or new services. All three need to be in place and integrated.

If you have these three platforms in place you can begin to move from more of an ad hoc set of capabilities through to a more integrated, synergistic and unique innovation capability framework to grow from.

Organizational support platform is made of proving clear leadership and commitment to building capabilities by setting in place an infrastructure that accesses, anchors and diffuses capacity, so it not just flows but is constantly creating and exploiting for new economic and social value.

You need to ensure the conditions for a trusting environment and climate are actively worked on and supported and finally provide the resources and ways to measure this to support and re-enforce the value of this corporate initiative. You should take a look at a previous blog here:  http://bit.ly/mV7zjP.

Knowledge & competency platform is where you permit time to discover and absorb what is being made available. The key absorptive capacities mentioned above. Deliberately allowing the time to explore both the external world and the internal world, and then setting about to capturing this ‘new’ knowledge through clear consolidation techniques and technology is vital.

Knowledge should focus on a given core and context of what the organization is looking to achieve and want to learn from/about. You need to explore explicit and tacit knowledge. See my recent blog on tacit knowledge:  http://bit.ly/sthlG1)

Innovation Process platform lies at the heart of your innovation capability needs. This I have called the Innovation Business Architecture within work I completed with Jeffrey Phillips of OVO, and can be viewed here http://bit.ly/ggKQCs .

The process needs to have in place the capability to explore, to converge, to keep moving through the innovation pipeline, a portfolio of concepts and be able to consistently consolidate and further exploit the ‘raw’ material of these ideas and concepts, by designing in some controls and risk management.

Other thoughts for thinking through the innovation process are discussed here  http://bit.ly/tUQBml and here  http://bit.ly/ikgR4f as well.

Moving from ad hoc to an integrated, synergistic and unique state

It is not just simply having in place the three platforms outlined above; each is a building block on top of one another, dependent for the ‘strength’ of the structure and to achieve a momentum from have ad hoc capabilities to call upon, usually scarce and over stretched, to this integrated state.

The need is to recognize that you do move, over time and dedicated effort, from ad hoc availability through a more formalised and recognized capability building process into a more broad based structure with deepening capacity to innovate.

This is where the three building platforms become tightly integrated to gain a more synergistic effect for all that that participate to learn from and this growing innovation capacity provide increasing self-governance.

The need for external inputs is essential

Building the internal capabilities happens largely by the way it ‘embraces’ the world. The more you seek, the more you gain, and the more you are able to see new possibilities. Seeking knowledge externally clearly comes from the encouragement of exploring networks, and building relationships- accessing the external capacities through scanning, scouting and collaborating openly.

Finally, market-learning capabilities feed into this cascading platform
The real strength of appropriate innovation is designing in the right tension points- see my blog http://bit.ly/tUQBml  on this. “Appropriateness has to be designed in“. Set within these platforms you need to build in new (ongoing) capabilities for Co-creation orientation, Customer Knowledge Acquisition, Customer Sharing Dialogues and Information Interpretation.

This knowledge becomes your collective memory where capabilities learn and grow from these customer conversations, actively sought out and nurtured. Not only will you learn, but you have to unlearn here as well.

Having a reflective market-learning outcome part built in enables new learning opportunities to be embedded and often triggering those critival behavioural changes often needed to align to market opinion and sentiment.

A short ‘call to action’ summary

I would argue strongly for this need to focus on the value of having a clear innovation capability platform structure as it has the real potential to transform the organization into a perpetual learning one, unique to your environment, and capable of lifting innovation delivery significantly.

This dedication grows your capability maturity and can offer much.

If you want to find out more, keep tuned in or simply track me down. This is my passion and focus within what I like and want to do- advancing innovation capabilities and capacities for those that want to see their innovation efforts thrive.

Based from an academic paper from H E Essmann & N D du Preez advancing the view of maturity application and innovation models.

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