Month: August 2010

The National Innovation Institute argument

Further to my last blog post on the need for a National Innovation Institute, I’d like to expand on this further as I’m presently here in Singapore and feel this is even more topical.

Always Singapore provides you with a positive impression when it comes to development. It is a country that consistently experiments and explores its options to grow its economy. Innovation is within this mix but I still think it should be more central, visible and coordinated to extract that little ‘extra juice’ often needed today.

Visiting Singapore on this trip I’ve been examining where innovation ‘fits’, and there are plenty of examples of experimentation backed up by investment seed money, but for me, innovation still lacks a certain coherency and consistency of purpose within policy.

I feel with the changing nature of innovation and its increasing value creation aspect it does need to be given a greater sense of attention, so further investments can build innovation deeper into the fabric of society.

A national innovation body can bring this coherency of purpose that Singapore strives for. Continue reading “The National Innovation Institute argument”

A Need for a Ministry of Innovation

I am presently busy preparing for a visit to Singapore. I balance my time between Switzerland and Singapore as my business base and as they are ranked 1 & 3 in the WEF’s Global Competitive Index, it is sometimes hard to get even deeper attention to innovation as this sort of ranking gives a certain belief, yet I often wonder why. I think countries often get blindsided in the pursuit of what they know and ignore what they seemingly can’t capture.

Let me be perfectly clear both countries I operate between, take competitiveness seriously; they both have a real need to maintain their attraction to foreign investment for their prosperity, as they have limited resources to call upon if you compare them to the USA, China, India or Germany for example, and do set about creating the right environment for this but they have their blindsides it seems to me still. Continue reading “A Need for a Ministry of Innovation”

Sustaining Competitive Advantage through Innovation

A formula for sustaining competitive advantage through a structured innovation framework

Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress

Today’s challenge for me is not only to be building the innovation capacity but also to be establishing clear ways on how we should set about sustaining it.

Increasingly it is necessary for organizations to have the capability and capacity to sustain Innovation so it can provide the stimulus for lasting growth. To get there though, it does seem this must be through continued learning so your capabilities become stronger, evolving and more unique, thus making them more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate.

Let me outline an innovation framework that builds capability through a sustained approach.

When you set out to build capability to be sustaining you need to consider there are two types of capabilities, distinctive, which are the characteristics of the organization which cannot be replicated by others and reproductive, which can be bought in by the competition but always need to need to be appropriate to any objectives you are trying to achieve. Continue reading “Sustaining Competitive Advantage through Innovation”

The Amplified Individual for Innovation

Amplified Individuals for Innovation have four important characteristics.

I have been reading a fascinating report compiled for Nesta (www.nesta.org.uk) entitled “Amplified Leicester- Impact on social capital and cohesion”, written by Thilo Boeck and Sue Thomas of De Montford University (www.dmu.ac.uk)

As we all struggle with the increasing needs and complexity of innovation capacity it is the power of combining a greater diversity that holds real promise in the future

In this report, it explores at the intersection of difference, amplification and transliteracy the achievements of a city-wide experiment in Leicester to grow the innovation capacity across the city’s disparate and diverse communities and to share new skills which are fast becoming essential in 21st-century workplaces and communities.

It looks at social capital and uses emerging social media and provides a framework that allows for a diverse group to move towards cohesion and amplification. Continue reading “The Amplified Individual for Innovation”

The yin yang of innovation understanding

Can we recognize yin yang as a dual force of innovation?

Scholars tell us that there are two natural complementary yet contradictory forces at work within our universe.

 

The Chinese call these ‘Yin Yang’. Yin is regarded as more passive, receptive, more outside-in, whereas Yang is more active, creative and inside-out. These are seemingly opposing forces but interconnected and interdependent; one gives rise to the other, they actually reinforce each other.

Yin & yang seemingly have the following characteristics: they are opposing yet equally rooted together; they have the power to transform each other and eventually are balanced out. Continue reading “The yin yang of innovation understanding”

Exnovations place in the innovation life cycle

I was some time back reminded about the term “exnovation” in an interim report prepared for NESTA by the City University, London and the Work Psychology Group entitled “Characteristics & Behaviours of Innovative People in Organizations.”

Exnovation is if you were unaware, is at the end of the innovation life-cycle, where it “discards” or even purges existing practices to allow the organization to adopt different and fresh thinking to any new innovation activities.

A number of writers have discussed exnovation but its first use was attributed to Kimberly in 1981, who described innovation as a series of processes which in combination define an innovation life-cycle (Fiona Patterson, City University for NESTA). Continue reading “Exnovations place in the innovation life cycle”

The real desperate need for innovation

A desperate need for social innovation is where we should focus our energies.

Our past business models are not sustaining us, to take us forward. We have made this ‘rod for our own backs’ by producing thousands of competent managers, risk-averse not risk-taking managers, with our business leaders continually looking over their shoulders or in the rearview mirror who has become a short term in most of their actions. Governments still take ‘adversarial’ positions.

Business still seeks short term results. The end result of much of the activities of the past decade has led us to build a ‘failure framework’, one more sustaining old model being layered on top of other equally outdated approaches, and not the ones that can shift us truly up a gear or two, into a new age of prosperity. Continue reading “The real desperate need for innovation”

People buy meaning not product

A little while ago I was talking to the Marketing Director of one of the leading consumer goods companies here in Europe and we began talking around his question “where does design fit in innovation and consumer goods?”
I started this with posing the premise back “What do things really mean?”  For example we need to have a clear vision of what good food means to us. We need to seek out and define a new meaning through, perhaps, design. So the question then became “how do you give meaning to things?” We innovate by making sense of these things- “People don’t buy product they buy meaning” Continue reading “People buy meaning not product”

The Hidden Human Dimension of Innovation

Why do so many of us get fixated on new technologies, discoveries, inventions, the process, the structures, and even the art of creativity within innovation?

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

The Australian Business Foundation published a report last year- the Hidden Human Dimensions of Innovation (http://www.abfoundation.com.au/research_knowledge) and in part of a speech given by its Chief Executive, Narelle Kennedy at an Innovation 2009 conference she spoke of this people factor. Continue reading “The Hidden Human Dimension of Innovation”