Reducing confusion, promoting diffusion for new knowledge in innovation

The third and final part of exploring knowledge and education for innovation.

Part three – the value is in changing, doing and exchanging

How are we going to engage more people within the innovation process? Getting people involved is getting people “doing”. We learn far more when we are doing and gaining experience yet organizations are always in seems to me consciously or unconsciously reducing the experimental part to any persons learning.

We need to reverse this and simply encourage the exploring of new skills, gaining new experiences and probing established rules to value them but also to challenge and push them. Innovation is certainly not a friend to rules, established protocols and traditions.

‘It’ looks to attract the diverse opinions, the people willing to speak up and be heard as they often have observed and feel something can be changed and ‘itch’ for the chance to explore and learn from this.

Coupling, uncoupling and recoupling in complex systems
Innovation is a complex system where the coupling, uncoupling and re-coupling of  technology, design, product, organization, art and science, to name just a few of the parts, that need to constantly engage for good worthwhile innovation to happen, is important for us to recognize.

Organizations have real difficulties with this ‘fluid need’ to allow innovation to evolve as the natural tendencies are to apply, traditional, established ways to track, to attempt to ‘file away’ something that can be related too within the experiences.

This is why encouraging enquiry, by pushing experiences you ‘form’ less and ‘allow’ more to evolve before you make the judgement. Innovation needs to be allowed to stay ‘fluid’ as long as possible before the final commercial ‘freeze’ moment when all the combinations emerge as new to the world.
We also come back to the intrinsic nature of innovation; it needs different resources, skills and knowledge experiences to come into play. It is this very diversity of opinion, if allowed to engage and explore, gives us the chances of advancing innovation, of achieving a more radical solution.

Perhaps we ‘promote’ incremental innovation far more than we realize because we don’t go out and engage in broader communities due to not having the time, the inclination or the understanding of its real value.

Equally because we are simply not encouraged to do so, hence my argument we need a clear innovation knowledge exchange structure in place working through the absorptive capacity structure.

Openness and Convergence

Besides all the well-argued aspects of open innovation that certainly includes that famous statement that “all knowledge does not reside in one place” the more we interact, cooperate and network we share knowledge.

Often the regret is the ‘brief’ is getting tighter and tighter to work from, so as to speed up discussions, the searches and ‘lock-in’ solutions the more we ignore weaker signals that are out there, hinting at even greater innovation opportunity.

We chose to push past these due to this incentive, this often ‘hard’ metric that we work strictly on the ‘brief’ unless we simply trip over something so blindingly better.

Although we are certainly evolving innovation the more we open-up we do need to build in some slack time to explore, often go with a hunch and follow our noses. We are in danger of losing this opportunity in our focused intents.

Open innovation will not yield all it can promise if we don’t allow for more open knowledge exploration that might be out of the ‘norm’ but still within the parameters of what we are wanting to achieve – innovation that offers compelling competitive advantage – and we often can’t achieve that if we remain blind to those ‘weak signals’ that knowledge exchange that is encouraged to recognize, value and assimilate.

The Dangers Lurking in Innovation

We all speak of enhancing innovation capabilities but it can be both competence-enhancing and competence-destroying. We build on “preferred” routes to enhance our existing capabilities as this is traditionally viewed as the way to become ‘competitive’.

Actually, the very opposite can and does happen. Significant breakthroughs, changes in conditions, markets or technologies leave us increasingly unprepared. More and more disruption is occurring and with this it is bringing increasing obsolescence.

We do need to acquire new skills, not ones layered on pre-conceived ideas and practices but on ones that promote new “fields of activity” we built into our thinking. We need more intensive innovation that explores at the emerging new edges of innovation management.

A great example of new fields of activity is MIX

A real valuable example of this is the work taking place within the Management Innovation  eXchange (MIX) as an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. The premise: “while “modern” management is one of humankind’s most important inventions, it is now a mature technology that must be reinvented for a new age”.

This is a meeting place where The MIX is designed for all those who are frustrated by the limits of our legacy management practices. It’s for all the inspired thinkers and radical doers who believe we can — and must — find alternatives to the bureaucratic and dis-empowering management practices that still rule most organizations.

Principles of the MIX – Everyone Wins When Everyone Shares

“The MIX represents a pioneering attempt to use the open innovation model to help accelerate the evolution of a critical social technology — its management. Rather than struggling in isolation to reinvent the processes and practices of management, MIX members can leverage the expertise and insights of a global community of like-minded innovators.

The success of the MIX hinges on the willingness of its members to share their ideas and experiences, which depends in turn on a belief that more can be gained by sharing than by hoarding. Truth is, there’s a lot more management innovation going on in the world at large than in any particular organization.

Thus the MIX gives every progressive management innovator the chance to share a little and learn a lot”.

Certainly learning favours the brave
We certainly need to educate across innovation more than ever. It needs not just greater recognition of its vital parts, it needs to be recognized as a value enhancing and organizational life-changing event we need to move towards increasingly. Innovation needs to be recognized as a clear discipline, a new expertise that is as powerful as Marketing became some decades ago.

The more we embrace change, recognize innovation demands more of our time, the more we seek out knowledge that ‘feeds’ innovation and we ‘push’ for learning far more about its impact and its complex parts, the greater chance we have of thriving in a challenging world.

The expectation ‘bar’ needs to be raised and those practising within innovation, dealing in some of its parts do need to raise their game. Learning and Education always should start at home.

The more we learn, have open interactions and form linkages the more we will be ready to advance innovation into what it must become, innovation management, recognized as a discipline and highly valued for what it contributes in wealth and growth potential.

We need to find the determination to underpin the capacity for innovation, lying within us all, and that comes from knowledge and education through collaborative learning. So what is your capacity for innovation really like?