Most rooms we enter have four sides and are traditionally built on a standard four-pillar design; they provide the structure to build upon.
Presently in many of our economies, particularly in the West, we are struggling to find real growth; we are limited in our wealth-creating possibilities.
Why is that? Our structures seem to be weak, not strong.
We are certainly relying far too much on ‘selected’ pockets of economic activity to keep us going. Technology is clearly one of these.
Yet our longer-term forces for sustaining growth remain ‘fragile’, our structures remain wickedly out of kilter and we need to find stronger connecting frameworks that reinforce each other, so we can build further upon these to manage our business activities in new ways.
In most of our economic activities technology is playing a significant part in altering our habits, routines and thinking but it alone is not enough.
For technology to really give benefit it needs to be driven by our ability to generate wealth-creating activity and that comes from integrating knowledge, gaining experience and being able to articulate this in better ways.
To achieve this, the business structures that we have in the past relied upon are in need of changing. They need different pillars to build upon.
Welcome to my four pillar room……..with a view
One such room I see has four pillars; firstly a value creation one, then one that prompts a change in our thinking around the value and creation of constantly evolving business models, a third one based on understanding our intellectual capital base, where our knowledge resides and can be harnessed, and then the final pillar of the innovation capital that can be generated from this to create wealth-generating opportunities.
Why are these four pillars important as our structure within our ‘wealth-creating’ room?
Pillar one – For me we lack the ability to articulate the value creation narrative.
We need always the wealth-generating perspective to get behind. We want to feel this is ‘dynamic’ and can offer all those involved that feeling of identification, so we can find individual ways to apply them, where there are the combining and transforming possibilities for us to, investigate, explore and exploit. We are searching to manifest fresh, new outcomes to create new wealth-creating potential.
To have the ability to articulate the value, what potentials can make up the possibilities to develop and deliver the future promise? Developing a good value creation narrative is essential, it requires critical components and for us all to identify through a common language.
Value creation and its potential can be created through the Business Model. It is identifying the inputs from the different capitals and the ways we can transform these through business activities and interactions. Our ability to articulate where the value creation potential lies requires our ‘narrative’ to be broken down, often called the value proposition.
Pillar two – The Business model is becoming even more critical today
The whole movement towards creating the business model through a canvas approach allows us to articulate our ‘potential’ value generating story. As we learn to work with all the components that make up a business model we are responding, capturing, creating and delivering a constant flow of new value generating opportunities.
The more we can express ourselves through narratives and the emerging business model canvas we are offering disclosures, we are setting in train discussions so others can contribute and add to these emerging business model concepts.
To sketch out our business model canvas, we do need to constantly work the BM canvas for the integrated design. What we must try to develop within our narrative and canvas is the underlying dynamics that capture the process of change and why this combination provides the value creation.
Underlying any Business Model is knowledge, experiences and insight. These come from combing all our capitals and the ones often described under our ‘intellectual capital assets’ become essential.
Pillar three – Re-framing the debate around our intellectual capital assets
It seems today our business environment is highly diverse, far more dynamic and subject to rapid change. We need to constantly survey the landscape to adapt and adjust, acquiring what is needed. The increasing value is to know all the potentials within the ‘interactions’ of the parts and how to renew and recombine them on a constant basis.
Often intellectual capital is grouped into three or sometimes more categories. The capitals commonly used to describe ICA are human, structural and relationship capitals. In summary:
a) human capital have at its core the competences we build, our intellectual agility and attitudes to form potential synergies for new value creation. Our outcomes are governed by our motivations to want to produce fresh knowledge creation or simply absorb what is ‘out’ there.
b) The structural capital provides ‘the skeleton and glue’ of the organization in its philosophies, processes, routines, infrastructures, culture etc., for permitting and building knowledge. It builds the mechanisms and architecture.
c) Our relationship capital, is our third ICA, which represents our abilities to make connections, to network so as to absorb, exploit and explore new knowledge, it is this new understanding that feeds and influences organizations life, to renew, to rejuvenate, and to offer longevity.
We need to move beyond often just that academic debate around intellectual capital and their asset value, moving well beyond simply infer the value of our intellectual capital, we need to really understand its make-up.
It is the interactions of these intellectual capitals that is becoming essential to understand, they make up our innovation capital. Knowledge alone has limited value, it is the knowing how to apply it through innovation that will offer us the potential for wealth generation.
Pillar four – Innovation capital is the essential strategic asset to strive for.
Innovation is made up of a collection of ‘stock’ and our abilities to allow this stock to ‘flow’. We mostly acknowledge and recognize innovation is essential for business growth and our future wealth generation potential.
Innovation is for me a real wealth generating capital, it is future orientated; it needs consistent learning, experimentation, exploration and reconfiguring. The innovation capital is the ‘core sum’ of the abilities we can combine from our intellectual capitals.
I believe we need a new innovation capital valuation model. It needs to capture the dynamic interactions of our capitals contributing and ‘render’ these into different productive outcomes. This model needs to find and then separate the ‘dynamic’ from the ‘static’ innovation capabilities, the ones that offer new potential not ones simply repeating the process.
To achieve this we need to unbundle resources, assets, renewables, competencies and capabilities and describe these outcomes in , in my view, a fitness landscape that provides a visual of what you have, what you might need and highlight where the critical gaps lie.
We are needing to understand how our organizations can integrate, reconfigure, renew and recreate its resources and capabilities to build different value creation propositions and business models.
Recognizing the combining effect of the four pillars
For me, it is recognizing the ‘combining effects’ of these four pillars; of value creation (vc), business models (bm), intellectual capital assets (ica) and innovation capital (ic). It is the dynamics within the multiple combinations that will generate the future wealth creation we need.
We are in need of having a better understanding of the integrated value focal points of these four pillars combining, they need connecting so we can build the supporting structures and place the roof of need, our wealth creating one, to give us a new potential of harnessing our innate abilities to be creative.
These four pillars offer perhaps a new core, a new transforming power, they make our activities connected and dynamic.
Unlocking all our potential is the job needing to be delivered upon
Our job today is to unlock the potentials from knowledge, harnessing our capitals to focus more on releasing our resources to work on their dynamic capabilities that combine vc + bm + ica + ic to make this a ‘room’ that gives us the potential to reside and generate new wealth potential.
A transforming one, where the make-up of value creation, articulated through business model designs by knowing the capitals that ‘feed into’ and build our stocks and flows for new innovation that does have the greater potential for wealth creation to occur.