GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

“Innovation capital is the sum of all that promotes the development and changes required for achieving innovation outcomes, within one organization or its broader networked environment, for market place advantage.”

“These are made up of the resources, processes, knowledge and capabilities, that are constantly evolving and highly dynamic to build greater innovating capacity.”

“These build upon the capabilities of ‘sensing, seizing and transforming’ to build new capital that focus more upon the dynamics within innovation, that provide the true value creation in successful outcomes in final product, services or executing within business models.”

We need to value both “stocks and flows” in equal attention to build innovation capital.

The ‘stock’ of innovation capital can render different productive value outcomes, is a bundle of the firm’s resources/assets and holds the renewal capabilities and they possesses attributes that make it a “strategic asset”

Innovation capital is made up of many different assets that are often context specific and interconnected and this makes it hard to build without taking a broader, more holistic approach to developing your capabilities, capacities and competencies to innovate. You ‘map’ and align these to fit your strategic goals and aspirations.

We have a pressing need to clarify a new ‘valuing model’ for building innovation capital and each organization has a unique bundle of the firms resources and assets. It is the ability to integrate, reconfigure, renew and recreate these resources and turn these into new, more dynamic capabilities that builds on a continuous basis the innovation capital.

This is one of my most important focus points to assist and aid organizations in their understanding “what makes up their unique innovation capital” and what needs to be added to deepen and strengthen this capital stock.

Building our stock then leads to the flow that then leads to building more stock. We need both stocks and flow.

Most of our capitals are learning capitals

The more we strengthen our knowledge and value our people the more we can generate new knowledge, build greater narratives, deepen discussions, make better connections and build our interactions out across growing communities. The more we discover, the more knowledge we gain and this leads up to determine a potentially better decision-making that should, in theory, give greater confidence that our invested financial capital is in ‘good hands’. Our knowledge learning, the more dynamic, the more we search, absorb, called absorptive capacity and then diffuse, the more valuable it becomes.

The power lies in the linkages we can forge, in acquisition, in assimilation and then into eventual transformation that allows known knowledge to become new wealth-generating innovation.

My stated value position is…

I provide different framing techniques for helping to grow this necessary innovation capital and build the stock of the capabilities and capacities to enable and increase the dynamic flow of innovation activities.

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

I continue to investigate and explore as much of the thought leadership on innovation as I can, it continually points to a change in how we approach innovation. Delivering this changing message becomes simply a cause in itself as so many are failing to recognize it as radically different from their past innovation management.

We do stand on the cusp of a new innovation era but where do you stand?

We need to push well beyond our existing core of (existing) innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design that recognizes the “core” lies at the edges of discovery.

The tenet of each organization in the past has been in protecting its core.

This is changing at the very core is changing to adapt to more volatile conditions, changing landscapes and more disruption. The core is not so much in what we know or own but in what we can learn from all that surrounds our core and this is increasingly found at the edges and externally.

The edge is our new emerging adaptive core

The new core can only be found at the edge, the customer edge. The customer is critical, they are absolutely essential to any innovation. If their needs are not fully understood, to turn the present fuzziness from not fully understanding their needs and unmet needs into the opportunity to grow our business, you are at a real disadvantage today.

We need to really engage and have a real depth of understanding of the customer, their needs, their individual journey, by discovering and engaging with them constantly at all their current touch points and experiences of what they are wanting to do, that is different from today and this comes from new combinations.

We are rapidly appreciating the combination effect of technology, the data exchanges, and the analytics we gain from this, the insights and discoveries. The combination effect is changing the starting point of innovation, it is not beginning in idea generation found inside the building, and it is discovery found outside brought in, to then turn into potentially commercial ideas.

The world of discovery is rapidly opening up through software and technology solutions

There is a host of digital solutions that can bring discovery and insight into our innovative thinking.We have a growing selection of innovation software all looking far more at the “edge” to then bring this into the new core.

For example, we can automatically identify trends and technologies that might shape our world, we can scan different corporate environments by applying a more disciplined radar scanning approach, we can capture more inspirations and ideas “on the go” through all our mobile options, scanning, sending and collecting in dedicated ‘idea’ repositories.

We have multiple choices of collaborative platforms, we can quickly mount crowdsourcing campaigns, validate different concepts and prototypes, have corporate idealization platforms, construct roadmaps that can steer discovery, technology, resources, and ideas so as to ‘quickly’ translate these into a portfolio of options to judge and decide.

We can collaborate in ecosystems of mutual understanding, working to a desired end or range of new solutions, we have multiple platforms to leverage and work through. We have data inflows, analytic solutions, and insights, all crowding in on us to deliver sometimes overwhelming choices. The ability to reorganize differently becomes paramount to seizing the new potential that lies at the edges of external discovery.

No, our discovery side is so rich in possibility yet we often stay stuck in our existing core.Why?

I can liken it to an old heart, ticking away but not as capable of a great amount of real exertion as it used to be. It has had multiple bypasses, an odd heart attack and plenty of emergency interventions. We need a transformation, a new beating heart of innovation possibilities, recognizing these as continued infusions, becoming the essential (blood) flow that feeds the innovation heart. It has never been as healthy as today, of being able in providing a constant flow of possibilities that circulate and provide the new innovation oxygen.

Forget the past reliance

The old concept of a complete reliance on internally thinking, of “we have the best ideas and understanding” are totally out of date. Believing our growth is simply being reliant on internal product and service extension is failing to move this growth needle apart from limited short-term gains. We can’t rely on simply ‘tweaking’ the existing core anymore. We need to think differently. We need to be utterly outwardly orientated to all of the customer and market dynamics and it is through technology capture we can begin to translate these into new innovation opportunities.

So the edge will radically begin to transform the core

To become more aggressive and combat the disruptive forces at work all around us we must go to the edge. The edge can be still made up of products, services, and market opportunities but we need to consider the underlying forces that are at work within this and these lie outside our own domain of physical building, experience or our existing techniques to exploit the known.

We need to find the unknown, we need to pick up on the weak signals we can only find at the edges and begin to build a very different institutional innovation set of capabilities.

Thinking at the edge can be very transforming.

Edges require different practices from the core; they, over-time impact the core, hence why we need to begin to think through institutional innovation change to accommodate this leading from the edge.

The value of considering platforms and ecosystems within this redesign allows you to accelerate outside learning, leverage the knowledge available across a broader community and can deliver internally new understanding and knowledge in areas where the core lacks or is inadequately set up in expertise.

What was the internal competence of knowledge inside the organization is becoming increasingly an inhibitor? It only contains the core of the existing business; it does not allow you to tap into opportunities of tomorrow in new, openly shared ways.

Collaborations across organizations can defray the cost; it limits risk but encourages experiment. You achieve ways to gains quickly differently learning opportunities and connect with different areas of specialization not found within the one organization.

A different understanding of stocks and flows that come from our edges.

Today it is not “stocks of your knowledge” as these rapidly lose value, it is the “flows of all knowledge” and these come increasingly within the relationships you form at the edges and platforms and ecosystems can accelerate these flows and leverage knowledge and discovery.

We do need to re-conceive innovation – our new core is found at the edges if growth is important to you. It is how you apply all that is potentially available to you today, to leverage and learn what is valued and needed becomes the critical investment time, you need to put into the discovery of the edge and all it can mean to your existing core.

We simply need to transform our framing and much of this is outside not lying within, we must open up and reach out and connect. Have you made this recognition that your core is at increasing risk unless you discover the edges that will transform everything you do and you will want to protect as your new connected intelligent core highly connected to the outside world?

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

How can we establish Innovation as the vital link to a process of change and strategic direction options? One that lifts the debates of managing today’s business by linking it into the future and then turning this thinking into a series of plausible and coherent set of activities?

Innovation can drive change, change is required.  Without innovation, we progressively die, as we provide no option for change, no prospects of new, different growth. So why does it continually fail to happen?

We innovators certainly need a new model of change, for at least eight important reasons I can think of, that render what we have practiced in the past as obsolete:

1. As innovators we aren’t simply responding to external change, we are creating change, both for customers and for our companies and markets. (the inside, proactive change vs external, reactive impact). The ‘flood’ of data, of customer dialogues, is offering us ‘signals’ to explore and seize opportunities by being agile, aware and alert to the new discovery of needs not being fulfilled.

2. External change is far more unpredictable, in global markets new threats emerge from anywhere, at any time and often delivered in totally unexpected ways, through new business models that totally cut through and disrupt the existing positions. They can render the existing obsolete in seemingly rapid time, irrespective of the efforts to respond as they have discovered the unmet need to deliver solutions to it.

3. The pace and nature of change is not slowing down but accelerating and will continue to accelerate at increasing pace, frequency and amplitude of change. Organizations need to pick up the pace, learn to accept a greater risk, experimentation and rapid adjustment of the new knowledge flowing in to build the final outcome to the needs of the market and customer.

4. Sudden rapidly evolving markets make everything needing to be ‘super’ responsive by existing players, to the sudden realization they have missed opportunities, Many existing organizations cannot cope and alter with this demand for agility, flexibility, and responsiveness. They need to (re)learn this and build it into their systems and often this realization comes too late, they have fossilized.

5. As often demonstrated, most innovation has the potential to be business model innovation, which will require change. As more innovation becomes focused on business model innovation, this will create even more change and challenges.

6. We recognize that change is no longer an occasional threat but a constant companion, so we need to shift from the idea of change as a potential inhibitor into one of developing an ongoing change capacity as part of our unique competitive advantage, evolving and pushing boundaries.

7. The idea that companies can achieve a protected steady state where change won’t affect them doesn’t seem to apply anymore, as long periods of stasis, or standing still, is no longer possible, we must be able to learn to evolve constantly and reflect that more ‘dynamic’ condition.

8. We need to think of change as a capability that we constantly deploy, rather than a threat we typically avoid and fail to understand. We need to develop change as a capability, to build skills, reduce barriers, to extend our capacity and competencies through experimentation and discovery. We need to push out of our comfort zone constantly.

Are we asking ourselves do we recognize our need to change?

How can we focus the energy around the boardroom table on to this linking the future work to the shape and the organization’s needs, making the growing innovation debate as strategic as it can be? One where change becomes a constant, delivered through innovation.

How are we going to design our innovation capabilities, competencies or capacity unless we fully recognize the dramatic changes in business that are now underway and what this needs to be addressed, to allow for a more responsive, fluid, agile and adaptive culture, to flourish and respond so as to generate the better innovation of the future we need.

Recognizing differences

There are different traits, actions and activities to think through. Here are some of the needs:

* We need to build far more serendipity into what we do, also random connections, as well as purposeful discovery, by seeking out increasing connections and engaging in networks of learning and mutual exchange.

* We need ‘safe’ places where we are turning curiosity into reality and building our innovation mental abilities for growth, development, and accomplishment, opening up and having others being receptive and then jointly translating this into new innovation.

* We need to embed into our new innovation core new routines and thinking. It is determining the changes needed by those new combinations of fusion by seeking out the chemistry from all the connections and exchanges, pushing for creative collisions, positive tensions and dynamics to engage fully in innovation, so the culture, climate, and environment are vibrant, challenging and exciting.

* We need to constantly seek the new space from knowledge exploitation and exploration, redefining the organization edges, enlarging and enhancing our understanding.

* We need pushing constantly out, constantly evaluating, discovering and aligning growth options and then seeking out those outcomes that potentially offer the right return on innovation

* We need to place learning into the center, to allow our capability building, new competencies to grow and evolve.

* We need to focus on the constant wish to improve, so as to improve performance and capacities by focusing on both our mental and physical abilities to develop our position and function, to explore, expand and exploit. Each contributes to our ability to receive, hold and absorb new knowledge. We measure these by the increased volume and quality outcomes, others provide back to us.

* We need new structures, attitudes, investment and motivation to change, to focus on innovation building that needs being instilled, drive with a dedicated focus from the top, not just as a commitment that must happen but integrated and aligned with the strategic thinking and planning, worked through a clear pathway of change to achieve a different, core innovation capability.

* We need to determine the abilities to deliver in very effective, focused, efficient and aligned ways. Knowing what is important, seeking out the actions to support and deliver the part needed to achieve the desired goals. Adjusting as we go, as we learn, ramping up what is working, dampening down what is clearly not.

* We need to build innovation by working it continuously.  On making our environment into this more evolving, fluid and dynamic one, where the climate and culture of innovation thrive and grows from this constant feeding and attention.

Our innovation problem that never seems to change

Innovation requires increasing agility, flexibility and allowing creativity to flourish on a constant, evolving basis. Today, innovation often stays outside the mainstream system and operational structures, most often to the organization’s detriment, as we simply accept innovation work as something that does not fit the ‘norm’.

Innovation needs to be fluid, open, responsive, adaptive; sometimes reliant on the instinct, hunch or powerful insight that is never ‘predictable’ but suddenly emerges from a collision of events, or random thoughts that lead to a new insight, a game-changing one.

Of course, it is really hard to turn this ‘randomness’ or serendipity found in innovation into a system but it is certainly not impossible. The few who recognize the ‘power’ of innovation continually show in their capacities to innovate, that they recognize that they have real growth by understanding a need and innovation, however hard, delivers on this, once identified.

This is today’s innovation problem, tackling the differences in managing innovation, so often we can’t bring innovation into the very core, it actually feeds the core but why is it that it just never seems to become the ‘beating heart’, for many? It seems too hard and disturbs the “business as usual” needs until eventually, this approach implodes, the company gets wiped from existence, lost in a wistful world of “if only.”

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

Innovation has been rapidly changing and much of its basics have been swallowed up by some newly defining frameworks that have raced up to the top of the innovation agenda. They have driven much of our thinking and reacting. It is right that we all respond to these but we often forget much of the rest of what innovation needs to be built upon.

The problem or challenge with this focusing upon ‘breaking’ practices or new methodologies are they can be so much harder to master and build them into established positions and practices, without the right amount of debate, understanding and assessing the implications and impact.

This often needs different perspectives to form the final position. We fail to constantly review and re-engineer the innovation process and tend to layer more upon it, without a consistent reassessing what we are trying to achieve.

The excitement of ‘breaking innovation’ is in the pioneering, experimenting, discovering, sharing and exchanging. If you are always open to this new thinking, it does enrich and advance innovation understanding and that makes it so valuable but so demanding.

Many of these for me has been utterly enjoyable to explore as they advance our understanding of the emerging management practice of innovation but you can’t ‘gloss over’ the basics of innovation.

The ability to translate innovation understanding is a constant challenge. The ‘lead-lag’ time is sometimes very long and tortuous to make the necessary changes within established organizations to achieve the necessary ‘buy-in’ and understanding of the impact and return and establish a certain rhythm and return.

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly?

Often we were missing the constants that are required to ‘set in place’ for innovation, I call these those anchor points, otherwise, we often are simply increasing the layering on, more and more, not giving enough emphasis on how to integrate these into a newly emerging practice of innovation that builds on a solid foundation.

The basics of innovation still form around building the engagement, leadership, and involvement, in constructing a culture, the climate and environment needed, so as to allow innovation to evolve and thrive. Then there is that need for a constant investment in people, in our networks and relationships, that all need to come together. These are the foundation to build innovation capacities.

Then, we have the investments in structures, systems, and governance, making sure these are flexible and robust enough to make what we work upon, as responsive, agile, adaptive, exploitative and exploratory. All coming together so we can end up with great new ideas, things and most importantly, in winning successful concepts that grow our business.

The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

The shifts taking place has been hugely shaped by how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. how it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs and then, it is forcing us to reconstruct our innovative thinking, so as to gain from all this transformation occurring all around us.

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period have come from a great explosion of Lean Management principles and practices and the incorporating of Design thinking into our work. Both of these are being rapidly embraced by our organizations, large and small. How these are fully and successfully integrated remains a challenge for most to resolve today.

The understanding of relating more to individual customer needs, building new business models has been greatly encouraged by the real need to “get out of the building” and learn to pilot, experiment and build a growing system of prototyping on what we learn from these engagements and testing, many emerging from innovation labs, encouraging an intrapreneur spirit, set up on entrepreneurship principles.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around that are about to massively change the way we collaborate and build solutions that are more complex and require many parties to come together and attempt to solve greater challenges. The movement towards the different crowdsourcing techniques and all the variations (or derivations) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’ have changed the game.

Innovation is constantly opening up when you combined diverse thinking with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much.

The raw power of knowledge needs harnessing and translating

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks that need deeper capture and translation, so as to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the constructing of minimal viable products and rapid experiment and design to increase in focus, so as to accelerate innovation discovery and delivery.

We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before with our innovative concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well into the “how” from the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it certainly still seems. Speed is dominating at present then we all are in need to “Scale” and resolve the constant worries over the “Execution” of the new value proposition.

There is this constant, pressing need, to absorb, synthesize and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovative thinking.  It becomes a constant task to manage just this new understanding, translating it and embedding new practices as difficult, time consuming and tough.

Reflecting on all of this – so what does this all mean?

There is this need to be reacting to this in new framing ways, building this into a new innovation roadmap for our businesses.

It can be a dangerous assumption that we ‘think’ innovation is well understood; often it is not, it continues to be a serious source of frustration and disappointment, at all levels. This essential ‘fixing the basics’ still needs a clear focus to resolve, coupled with new emerging practices to forge a pathway for others to understand and feel comfortable to use. It needs a constant balance between extolling the old, exploring the new; that blending of practice, existing, new and breaking.

Our need is to ask is how can we blend this emerging thinking into core aspects of the innovating beliefs and structures in place, so they can build and contribute to the ongoing building of innovation capabilities, competencies and capacity, surely a key focal area?

My work entails being reactive, reflective and responsive.

Sometimes as we take stock it does surprise you on how the innovation needle had been moved, again and again. This sometimes makes navigation sometimes difficult

It is clear innovation is constantly advancing, yet, offering my reflective thought here, it can have countless layers of fresh paint but if the basic foundation is not solid, it only hides the truth underneath, that much is simply “rusting away¨.  Innovation needs a clear, strong core that needs constantly re-calibrating to the changing market conditions we are finding ourselves in.

We so often miss this fundamental addressing of the urgent need for peeling away these old decaying, rather rusty layers and fixing the basics on a new design, reflecting where innovation is today (not in the past) and where we believe it is heading for in the future by balancing out the portfolio and equipping ourselves with the capabilities and capacities to build these in progressive ways.

May I ask?

Have you ever had an independent assessment of your innovation process simply because the basics around innovation are not common knowledge? I would argue that so often senior teams are somewhat paralyzed in terms of being able to move forward strategically, despite the need and recognition of innovation’s importance

The challenge is how to unlock this often conflicting set of innovation pressures and bring everyone to a common point of understanding of today and where all need to head in the future.

I certainly believe we are in need to conduct some rigorous analysis of the innovation system as we have understood a lot but much does need to be challenged as the future will be managing innovation in a very different way; more collaborative, more open, more reliant on technology and customer involvement

I’d certainly recommend starting with both an Innovation Work Mat discussion and a Three Horizon framing of the future from today’s understanding of where we think it is heading and how can we plan out how to get there, insensible steps, as part of any comprehensive review.

We do need to not only embed innovation practices we need to strive to update these.

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

We so often get caught up in the building of our capabilities. In some ways, I keep attempting to “peel the innovation onion” in explaining the need to focus on building the capabilities in different ways but to be honest, it needs these various approaches to an ever-changing environment.

A different intensity of innovation onion perhaps? Why, well we have the business of today, the emerging business of tomorrow and the future business that will provide a radically different set of capacity building needs?

The struggle to date is that innovation remains hard to manage well; we strive to systematize it and then attempt to replicate any success we then have, so as to achieve more, yet more often than not. we do not take into account all the variables that came together for that particular winning outcome. Often this does not work on a repetitive basis as the variables that makeup innovation can be different for each innovation event or activity but we can learn under a growing ‘range of’ differentiating capabilities.

I would argue there is the real, urgent need is to make the innovation capabilities and capacities as distinctive and unique as the circumstances ‘we’ are facing today and in the future but also highly adaptive and flexible, so you can be ready to call upon each of the components when needed, in new combinations that deliver on the result.

We spend far too much time copying others and not deliberately setting about building our own ‘distinct’ capabilities and capacities to innovate, building the necessary building blocks through our own learning experiences. These are always shaped by the context and content of your innovation, the organization’s position, its resources, commitment and leadership appetite for innovation. Each of our choices takes up on our own evolutionary paths, we can never truly understand other ones because we never really  “walk in someone else’s shoes” Copying only renders us the same, not a great ‘winning position in highly competitive market conditions, is it?

Can we find you a unique set of critical innovation capabilities?

I believe we can as I outlined here on discussing dynamic capabilities. Here I am exploring solutions along with an evolutionary path, that search for the unique innovation dynamics that are needed so you will arrive at the distinct and adaptive ones to what the CEO and board want to achieve out their strategic goals from its innovation investments. You take a fairly structured approach. It is knowing the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy and the present organization’s innovation fitness to lay out the pathway to learning how to improve, focus and execute these distinct capabilities needed in a highly focused manner and move progressively towards them.

I often break my explanations down on this building core competency into eight parts.

We have two levels to it. The first (or higher level) is the need for a 1) Unifying framework, 2) to gain alignment and this needs two essential aspects to be well-clarified. We need to establish 3) a working blueprint and a clear understanding of 4) the business focus orientation for innovation to reside in.

The outcomes of this top-tier framing then we can begin to construct the underlying level of 5) well-designed competencies and capabilities that need to be pursued so we need to move the organization or the innovation activities into ones that are seeking out this constant alignment, and this needs building 6) critical enablers and behaviours, a seeking out of 7) motivators and finally, 8) the dependencies we must have to map back so as to advance our core and build our innovation competencies upon.

The innovation accelerators model – I often keep coming back to this

I have been working on arguing you can have a unique model for some time. I think the way I have it structured is it is a formula for an innovation acceleration model. I’ve outlined this solution in a previous post. I think it is worth working through, it seems to move with the times of what we need to focus upon. Building an innovation framework that has real capabilities at its heart.

I have worked on a formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE for this.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) comes from the combining effects of the following:

• II Innovation Intensity– its degree of adoption, the investments made, the multiple levels of activities and the focus of the intensity given to building capabilities to innovate.
• EE Entrepreneurial Energies– this os more on how you set about, promote and generate the internal environment as entrepreneurial to enable innovation in all its different forms to take hold and be seen as a learning environment people want to get involved with as they can readily identify with.
• MLC Market Learning Competence– these give a clearer awareness of what and where to acquire from and then take the market lessons from. The key need is to orientate always towards, and generally get to the heart of, where innovation takes place- in the marketplace and with your customers, knowing their real needs and also figuring out their unmet ones also!
• OC Organizational Learning– knowing the differences in the different ways of learning by linking the different intellectual capitals and combining the complementary assets needed to make them more dynamic.
• RNE- Relationship & Networking Effects– the supporting and enhancing aspects of making greater connections, collaborations and exchanges so as to speed up the process of innovation, reduce or contain costs and enhance your understanding through these external relationships and getting closer to knowing where latent knowledge lies, to assist and share this internally for greater impact and result for all.

I would encourage you to explore it, work it around in your own situation, it can provide a powerful catalyst to get everyone working at the critical parts of the formula and it is easy to remember.

So my additional ‘peeled onion’ to add to the stock of capability building for innovation is here

We do have to adopt out capability building increasing towards the future. We need to continue to differentiate ourselves and I would offer seven ‘generic’ thoughts or broad theme clusters that you might want to build around, to build your capabilities that will make you far more ‘innovation fit’ for the future.

1. Linking to a clear sense of purpose. If we are aware of the direction we can ‘open up’ the discussions about our needs to achieve this sense of purpose. A clarity of what ‘we’ have along with the gaps we need to bridge to get to this future purpose. This was my own attempt some time back to get at my own “Finding our true purpose”
2. Translating knowledge into value. Are we allowing knowledge to be gathered, understood, applied and diffused with our organization’s in thoughtful, well-structured ways. We need to learn how to amplify the signals in why this resonates and then we need to share these. I can never get away from the Absorptive Capacity needed to have in place and to ‘allow’ this knowledge to flow across the organization.
3. Achieving impact and intensity. We do have to strengthen our resolve to perform. Innovation work needs to arrive at distinct outcomes that offer impact and intensity. This conveys’ change, it challenges the existing by delivering something better.
4. Building the capacity to perform. How we assess and improve needs to be ongoing. We need to articulate the values and core needs of the organization, we need to set aside learning and exploring time and we have to show the commitments to sustaining this building ethics. We need constant walkabouts for testing and learning. The future depends on it, as we are in far more in fluid and adaptive situations that the past where agility, creativity, and ingenuity are all required.
5. Aligning People, Technology, and Innovation. Technology is dominating much of what we do and how and what we do it upon. We are having higher degree’s of connectivity, interactivity and sharing opportunities than in the past to be engaged in networks, ecosystems and different relationship forums than ever before. We need to harness the essential interplays this requires.
6. Exploiting and Exploring. The realization that we need to operate in ‘dual minds’ and structures is at last beginning to be recognized as essential to master. We need to be constantly striving for the innovation balance: between exploring and exploiting. We need to tackle innovation in tow different thinking hats These are about learning, searching and delivering the winning value of ‘new generation activity’ by recognizing how we balance out exploitation (extending the life) and exploration (new understanding). These need separation and different approaches.
7. Creating Sustaining Value. So many organizations require re-energizing, of being re-equipped for the future in different skills and behaviors. There are so many spaces to connect into and explore and this will come from the asset orchestration that you provide (structuring, building and leveraging).

We need to not just know the appropriate resources; we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate mostly our intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors.

Assets that deliver the new innovation needed, through attracting in collaboration efforts and integrating these into your own evolving resources by turning them into being far more dynamic and evolving in nature to meet the future challenges.

Under these seven broad ‘capability building’ approaches we can build your future innovation into being ‘sustaining’. We need to distinguish ourselves from others, as we equally have to compete with them. If we do believe we have the unique potential both in our people and in the opportunities out there, then you have to be highly purposeful in your committed intent to build the capabilities, capacity, and competencies on a very consistent basis that offer that uniqueness.

If we do believe we have the unique potential both in our people and in the opportunities out there, then you have to be highly purposeful in your committed intent to build the capabilities, capacity, and competencies on a very consistent basis that offer that uniqueness.

How you set about this building I have, within this post, suggested a number of ways to ‘peel the innovation onion’ and can only state my willingness to engage with you individually in this. This is of course if you believe innovation is essential to your future, as I certainly convinced it is increasingly becoming mission-critical to master, which is my starting point always for building the capacities to innovate

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

We often forget it is our people that really make innovation work. They determine the ideas, drive these forward to deliver them as new innovative concepts into the world. People connect the fragmented pieces or dots within innovation from being random and intangible, into being explicit and tangible.

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 the 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 the 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 build on this, or shape its original concept into a different value proposition simply by having that triggering an 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 degrees 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 break out of the existing, changing the known, investigating the unknown by the ‘degrees’ 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.

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

Digital technologies are beginning to have a real impact on the methods, approaches, and rates of our innovation outputs. Social technologies are giving us real-time understanding.

We continually learn, often at our cost, that intuition and ‘gut feel’ on research set up and gathered weeks or more often months ago. This ‘knowledge’ is becoming out of date before we can gain from it and sometimes highly dangerous to follow, or believe in some today’s rapidly changing times. We need to get closer to ‘real-time.’

This reliance on rapidly out-of-date understanding cannot be the basis for any justifications for high-stake bets when it comes to innovation. We need to change our thinking and design in the digital insight part more specifically within and along the innovation process. Technology in all its forms is altering the innovation game but are we adapting to this radical change potential? We need to embrace it.

We have, in the past, partly because of levels of uncertainty, been overly reliant on ‘poor’ limited data tended and taken a safer route to market, by trying to achieve well-defined problems, limited validation and simply place these into the pipeline for innovation,  working methodically along the timelines irrespective, often impervious to the market conditions change, often going on before our eyes. The end result is a disappointment.

We continue to couch our bets and gravitate to solutions that are as close to what we currently offer, and that just keeps reinforcing the incremental route regretfully.

Today we can radically alter this innovation discovery by getting as close to ‘real-time’ if we care to invest in its enablers of technology to deliver data to allow greater analysis of choices and potential, closer to ‘go/no-go’ decision points.

Digital threatens (thankfully) this entire incremental pathway.

Markets continue to have even greater uncertainty and we need to respond in very different, faster, well-informed ways. Competition is changing, markets are blurring and customers are becoming far more vocal. To respond we need to reconceive innovation into a constant and rapid learning approach, listening and observing from these sources.

The need is to become far more iterative in feeding back what we hear; full of experimentation, testing, and adjusting, we must lend ourselves to adopting a far more minimal viable product approach, where we continually test assumptions, checking what is valued about the concept, gained constantly from the customer or market feedback.

Digital is also pushing us to shake off complacency since customers are increasingly further connected and interacting in new ways, making the constant choice, adapting to best experiences, imaginative offers and certainly not being as brand loyal for most of our products as previously. We need to find different and adaptive paths to ‘plug into’ and join the conversation, to help shape that conversation and through these exchanges, recognize how the brand and reputations become increasingly important in all things innovating.

Digital tools are changing how customers discover, evaluate, explore, make their purchases and use products and then how they react, share, interact and make their connections to our brands. The whole process is highly dynamic and reliant on the ‘network and social media effect’, and the job of the innovator is to translate this and respond in fast, nimble, agile ways, to fulfill the needs and capitalize in responsive ways. This demands a radical redesign of the innovation process and the whole customer engagement process. Most of our organizations today, really lag on this engagement, let alone on building a more adaptive and agile innovation process being ‘fed’ by the technology solutions we have available to us today.

The need is to “test to learn” and then adjust and adapt, some thoughts include:

• Without a doubt, it is finding and using more techniques and tools that help you make far greater rapid prototyping, testing, piloting and learning from these understandings and how they can be quickly translated back into the innovation process to improve on what you have known, into one of what you have become aware of. “Testing to learn” will become the new innovation mantra and the accepted innovation process; a dynamic, fluid and rapid experimenting that makes it a constant learning one.
• We are today, partly down this route of early learning, with the help of software that can capture ideas, offering a sound vehicle for communicating these and a place to gather and define solutions that can be taken forward. Yet we have to push the path of constant evolution and that will continue to come at increasing speed from technology to keep providing new knowledge so as you can constantly improve on your eventual value proposition but that is going to require an ever-increasing agile organization and adaptive system.
• We will need to find different ways to redesign the manufacturing process (more outsourcing) to have more adaptive points where we can intervene and change product design further upstream. We will need to find different ways to ramp up or dampen down finished goods and that is going to push ‘agile’ even further. The ability to balance “scale, speed, and scope” will become paramount in this.
• We will need to learn to focus on the seizing of emerging opportunities in quicker ways but also take a much tougher approach to divestment, so as to release resources from declining positions of advantage. The whole life-cycle thinking needs challenging and thinking through.
• We will need to push for “agile systems” where we can design new applications, find better communication and collaborative social technologies to reduce delays in getting the right information to the right people to advance the process and reduce the duplication of work or the search for the information needed to complete the job. We need to focus much more on reducing innovation process cycle time for faster deployment.We must be constantly adaptive not blindly following an outdated innovation process, that is full of rigidity.
• We will also need to invest in more data-driven front ends to build a more sophisticated process of discovery. The whole concept of divergent experiments and convergent testing leading to validations will become the way to think of the innovation process as a re-looping process. This will require a critical mindset change from a linear one on how you set it, in the design of the process and the use and application of the digital tools you deploy to move this through this constant, ongoing iterative process. Nothing can remain ‘static,’ we need to make it ‘highly’ dynamic, iterative and fluid, a constant learn and adapt.

Rapid innovation matters and it will become even more central in 2017 as digital takes hold.

Rapid-iteration needs to replace the fixed product release date mentality we see in much of our innovative software. We are in a world, driven by digital that requires us to constantly adapt to new learning that is coming from real-time market feedback. The way we learn from this and our rapid innovation application process will be all about this continually testing new assumptions to improve our (final) product and service propositions. This is where the cloud provides the ability to constantly update and release, so we the innovators benefit.

This, I believe, requires a rethinking of the innovation process, as we will need to transform the existing methods and make them increasingly digital and social, in real time, feeding (as close to) real-time data and insights. We need to focus on the rates of innovation output from our learning and improvement in the eventual offering, not on the ‘classic’ input and output metrics from the past, as our constant bearing. It is outcome learning as the driver for metrics It is how we design this in a more comprehensive manner will be a real challenge in 2017.

Are we in a pivotal year of the rapid innovation application process? Will we finally move towards a greater fluid and looping innovation process? One that is fully designed and adopt as our new innovation discovery to the execution process based on the transformational effect of technology. One that is a constant path of innovation understanding and evolution that fits far more with these digital transformational times we are going through. They certainly do need to form a closer partnership for us to gain the transforming value.

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

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

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

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

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

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

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

Applying the three horizon lens to develop new management practices

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

Applying the three horizon lens to new management practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future of managing will be through ecosystems and platforms

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

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

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

Our world is shifting from scalable efficiency to scalable learning

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

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

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

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

Balancing fluidity and stability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

Most organizations are seeking solutions to the necessary connections between Strategy and Innovation. The connection between the two is often broken.

Often it is within the strategies that should be outlined, lies the potential new spaces to play for innovation’s design. Yet how often do we fail to connect the innovation’s we design and execute specifically aligned to the strategic need?

We somehow seem to stay locked in the ‘here and now’ constantly repeating and refining the known and established within our domain of responsibility. Is this because innovation is not at the core of the business as it should be? Often we are inherently resisting to exploring change as it becomes risky and far more demanding. A good strategy, well outlined should encourage innovation and gain engagement but it can equally determine how we break down our imposed boundaries by its strategic intent, to encourage exploring and extending on what we know into the what we need to know. Strategic intent informs innovation.

If you have a clear strategic understanding of the needs of the business you are getting more of the understanding of where-to-play and how-to-win in your innovation activities and market investment. It is making these strategic connections that are giving innovators a better chance to deliver back concepts that offer alignment to this strategic need. Investing in this understanding and alignment should never be understated. The time invested, allows for the innovation investments to do their part in supporting the business and feeding it with the growth options required, or highlighting where the possible gaps might be, for additional investment or M&A activity, to accelerate this and bring-in fresh innovating momentum.

We need to close down the issue that Innovation is full of open interpretation by purposeful design

How often have we heard “innovation is important for our future success” but when this is probed deeper there is a huge dissatisfaction on its performance or contribution at all levels within organizations, why is that? Where does the problem lie? I am sure we all have multiple suggestions, some perhaps radical in the extreme but most are confirming this growing frustration with innovation’s performance yet not fully pointing to the underlying cause. This suggests that there are multiple failure points within the management of innovation.

One absolute critical one that needs resolution is achieving alignment and engagement of innovation understanding throughout the organization. It is one of the biggest challenges to resolve, it takes hard coordinating work to sort out of numerous amount of problems that need rectifying.

Frustrations abound up and down the Organization.

Clearly, one critical part of this present frustration is a seemingly lack of alignment between the organization’s strategic goals and its mission and how innovation is expected to contribute, so as to fuel the growth and deliver many of the essential parts of the strategic need. Often it is left far too open or unclear for individual interpretation. It is often when we have uncertainty, opportunism steps in and attempts to fill the space. Innovation needs a much stronger alignment to strategy, they need connecting far better. One suggestion here is the adoption of the choice cascade model, discussed later as part of the suggested solution.

One of the basic troubles increasingly today is we are not in the world of stable markets, we are seeing increasing competitive intensity and challenges to market definitions that are radically altering how we proceed. Technology has become both the enabler and the disruptor to this. We are ‘reacting’ far more in knee-jerk ways to resolve a sudden crisis and look increasingly towards fast innovation solutions to fill the gap. Some of these solutions create ‘knock.-on’ effects and create a mismatch between solving an interim problem and causing disruption to the longer-term direction.  They also can distract resources away from more critical solutions to solve underlying growth issues within the organization.

This is why I also highly recommend the three horizon framework as part of this discipline of managing the ‘needs of today’ with the strategy of having a thoughtful portfolio of options for the future that requires this different horizon thinking.

Of course much in the future has no boundaries we can determine and evaluate against and this gives high levels of uncertainty but it can be reduced, by being driven by a clearer clarity of purpose or intent. It is this ‘clarity of purpose’ that innovation needs to ‘track, mirror and explore’. If we keep ‘reacting’ constantly to the present we might never arrive at the future.

The strategic purpose ‘informs’ and I think we all have this growing recognition that today’s business model will not remain viable for long periods, as we operate increasingly in fluid and volatile conditions, that require constant adjustment and response. This means our innovation resources must align far more with the direction seen or looks reasonably plausible and ‘shape and form’ around this. Foresight should be governed by beliefs about the future and innovation should be driven in this direction but always with a word of caution, that we equally have to always recognize that the future is a moving target. It is beholden to innovation to explore and exploit this, to pursue an evolutionary path towards understanding and validation.

Taking action in designing your innovation alignment

“Strategy informs”. Knowing where to place your innovation thinking becomes critical; it is knowing where the leadership places its importance, its ‘bets to win’. This might be in having the need for a richer user engagement experience, a more robust futurist product portfolio to test, learn and explore potential options. It can be where it plans to invest it’s technology options to leverage knowledge.

We have to keep asking those essential questions that link strategy and innovation in understanding. It becomes important to know if the growth is going to come through acquisition of capabilities and competencies that fill critical gaps. What are those ‘perceived’ gaps? Can they be filled by shifting the innovation competencies, capabilities or capacities? If you are not ‘informed’ by strategy, you are simply ‘second guessing’ and here is where alignment breaks down by not having this understanding. Often the designers of strategy omit the essential details of “how we believe we will get there” and what are the primary resource levers to commit to this.

You need to know what type of company ‘we are’ today and does it need to change: are you integrators, leader, laggards, or best in class, pioneers, or fast copiers. This recognition equally ‘inform’ much of the innovation activity. What types of business model are you working towards, where is the scope to expand and explore from the innovation perspective? What processes and structures would then need to be in place to complement and align with the strategic aspirations or positioning stated?

These answers become the foundation that aligns strategy direction with innovation activity.

These can only come from formulating strategic thinking between the strategy of the organization (its goals, mission, and visions) and innovation, for it to be directed in its efforts to contribute to these aims and growth aspirations.

Then the other, often the unspoken silent part, of any strategic thinking that needs to be drawn out, actually revolves around the ‘creative destruction’ being faced, externally and internally. It indicates the prevalence of change and opens the dialogue up on how innovation will respond to this. Often boards remain in denial or lack the essential relevant understanding of the changes occurring and do not address change or transformation as strongly as they should in any strategic design. Innovation then has a really hard time to respond.

This is the way I recommend to set about this alignment to build an Innovation Master Plan.

It is structured and designed and externally facilitated. Facilitation becomes critical as the external provider can ‘draw out’ all the different views, often highly diverging, where prejudices and opinions abound, around innovation. Opinions differ so much, you need to work through divergence to then seek the convergence. It is only when you get a ‘collective view’ you can begin to get that greater alignment of strategic and innovation activities

Here is how I suggest you might set about alignment….

I have written explicitly on the Executive Innovation Work Mat, making the compelling case and one outline of the framework offering a further alignment view,  as I believe this Work Mat approach becomes a critical framework to communicate the fit of innovation and strategy.  It becomes the “living” innovation document to refer too, engagement with (and improve). I co-developed this executive innovation work mat with Jeffrey Phillips from Ovo Innovation.

Within that Innovation Work Mat approach, it is designed to allow engagement from the top to communicate and cascade down the organizations, to allow for the growing understanding of how and where innovation fits and what is provided to support this. I believe the “cascading effect” becomes critical to success and often missed out on any innovation thinking This design of the Work Mat allows for a greater connected design of innovation.

Innovation needs alignment- Resources to quickly refer too.

Available is a short presentation on this innovation alignment approach to the choice cascade view, as used in the Executive Innovation Work Mat Framework. Here is a download of its cascading effect approach: Cascading Choices for Greater Alignment (a PDF file)

Image credit: itpro.co.uk

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GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

Any innovation common language needs working upon. It firstly needs recognition it is in our best interests to find a common point. It needs to be relevant to each of us, it must be current, appropriate, accurate and highly visible throughout the entire organization. It also needs to be allowed to grow and flourish, to evolve and become the lingua franca of all our innovation work. It needs building and constructing in conscious ways and design.

Let’s step back just for one minute, these ‘sentiments’ are fine, yet we actually do, seriously lack a common language for innovation and we should find the ways and the means to change this. It holds innovation back significantly. It can’t continue in a world of greater networking and collaboration.

Languages unites us or keeps dividing us

Language can have the power to unite us or potentially divide us. Developing a language to unite us in our innovation efforts goes some way to reduce disagreements and egos, to qualify individual interpretation or bias, often a key inhibitor that can block a team’s success. It lays in a common foundation. It builds confidence and understanding.

Once we have a common language, we can set about building and creating a more robust innovation management system. One that builds on this framework so it can relate to the relevant context, conditions, and environment for innovation, to offer within this building block, the common identity.

These identifiers can build into better understanding how to structure governance, process, and functional structures, to build a culture that is responsive as ‘they’ can identify a need for a common cause of understanding. It is in this central innovation language that becomes our clear unifying context, the enabler, and sense of personal identity with the purpose of what we are wishing to achieve.

In any common language, we need to master the understanding, the nuances and how it all fits together. We need to exploit it and extract what it can offer to enhance all the work we do in innovation. We need to appreciate always its terms, its definitions (and limitations) and the related performance values that can help to improve our performance and in our achievements of working increasingly with others.  A common understanding of our meaning to ‘innovate’ becomes an imperative.

Today we all having a different meaning and interpretations within our innovation understanding.

Each organization has specifics in meaning that can often end up in results that break down and so deliver results totally different from their original intent. As we grow out our collaborations into ecosystems the need for a common language becomes even more vital. For example:

• Often misunderstanding occurs, even though we initially thought we had communicated well but those that receive this often apply different interpretations that confirm their personal views,
• There is always this risk that others often apply subtle nuances and variations built on their experiences or understanding on how ‘something works’, and it is within these different readings we can suffer costly errors, extensive delays and wrong end results in the final product or service delivery.
• We suffer significant inefficiencies because we don’t pay enough attention to ensuring the correct meaning is well understood, we simply believe our way of thinking is the only way it is conveyed to be understood, and as we all know, this is often far from the reality. Context and Communications are kings in my opinion.
• We need to seek explicit language and context to allow innovation to do its final job, of delivering a valuable new contribution that builds on the existing and meets new market and customers’ needs or the jobs-to-be-done.

Innovation becomes highly constrained if we fail to find that common language, that common purpose, the understanding of the right context and ended up providing something that was not as good as it could have been, or we simply veered completely off track, on the original insight. It somehow got lost in translation, in applying individual meaning. Translation is one of those keys that can unlock so much within innovation but often it just simply goes the other way and gets “lost in translation”

To apply a common language, we need to invest in its practice

The more we practice and move towards a common understanding of innovation, we are moving towards clarifying and reconciling, as best we can, within the constraints of what common language or context offers. We give innovation a greater chance to succeed. A common language enables greater transparency, clarity in accountability through its definitions; we achieve greater collaborative dialogues and meet more concurrence than without this move towards a common understanding.

So much of innovation is piecing together many fragmented pieces, strands of knowledge that can be unstructured can be very ambiguous, yet requires sound judgment. Innovation builds on shared experience and the quality of its interaction points. The more we learn to collaborate, the more we begin to share experiences, the more we achieve a growing common language. We need to bring together increasingly the parts that growing specialization, our limited grasp of all the complexities that can influence a decision. We need to constantly reconcile incoming information with our own language of understanding, so we need to strive towards improving the common parts surely?

I think as we build a common language we need a certain learning rhythm.

This is where absorptive capacity can come in, as it offers a structured way of building our knowledge understanding and fits within this. Absorptive capacity has the different steps of acquiring, assimilating, transforming and exploiting but these need a clear sequence, structure, and commonality to their approach, to gain the lasting benefit.

A common language of innovation working to a common end cause also allows for a knowledge learning repository to be built up, so all can potentially prosper as their starting point to innovate, as they learn from past experiences and insights. Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something

Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something enhancing.

A bedrock for building and sustaining innovation is a common intent, language, and context

Forming a common language should be the bedrock for how we set about innovation. It cannot be silo driven or developed to fit one individual team, unless you want stilted results with incremental innovation being most likely as the best you can achieve most of the time, within this ‘constraint’, as we increasingly need to reach out and learn to collaborate

How we go about our communications, what and who you can connect with and your level of innovation engagement, do matter significantly. It is the ability to find the common identity, a real unifying sense of purpose that sends positive signals to all involved and those interested parties, often external to your ‘inner’ innovation process, to engage fully.

A common language can change much within innovation. Can we find the investment time to build this into the work we need to do? We should. It is in all of our future collaborating interests.

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