February, 2015 | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

What makes up your innovation capital?

If someone came to you and asked the question: “tell me what makes up your financial capital?”

I expect you could answer this fairly comfortably.

It might need a little added help from your finance department but you could produce and show significant details that we are all ‘schooled’ to understand and generally have accepted, under common definitions and standard practice.

Our businesses are measured constantly on their financials, we produce a constant flow of reporting documents that provide useful insight and allow for a more informed judgement by present and future investors on the health of the company. We are ‘wedded’ to our financials and ignore the real value within our organizations of all the other critical capitals that generate and strengthen the business.

What if that same person came to you and asked instead: “what makes up the innovation capital of the company?’” could you answer this as clearly as the financial one – I would suggest most probably not. (By the way, if you feel you can then please let me know I would be more than interested).

We are focusing more on past performance and not future generating potential by staying fixated on just the financials within all that makes up our organizational capital

So what makes up our innovation capital and why is it important to know?
Should we care, does it matter? I would argue it does, increasingly so. Within the innovation capital lies the future of the organization and holds one of the real golden keys to the sustaining performance of the company, or not.
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Building Innovation Capability Through Three Interlocking Platforms

A little while back I was reading somewhere an academic paper and it triggered a thought on interlocking platforms for innovation, so I set about capturing it for this post, and then it somehow got filed away.

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

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

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

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

Making the business case for innovation to change is not easy but essential
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The Four Lenses of Innovation by Rowan Gibson

Every now and then, a book comes along that completely surprises me in terms of my own reactions to it.

They always force me to unglue some of my preconceived ideas thankfully, and then I can stick them back together again into a whole new pattern.

To be honest, I still have not fully figured out why I keep pondering over Rowan Gibson’s “The Four Lenses of Innovation: a power tool for creative thinking”, which will be published in early March, and why it is forcing me to reconcile different thoughts in my mind.

Rowan Gibson’s previous book was “Innovation to the Core- a blueprint for transforming the way your company innovates”, which he co-authored with Peter Skarzynski. It has been one of my favourites since it came out in 2008.

I often dip into this book and refer to some of its thinking and frames that have emerged following its publication. One of those frames was the “The Four Lenses of Innovation”, outlined in Chapter Three, which became the basis for Rowan’s new book.
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Are you engaging with all the different voices around you?

Having different perspectives and voices will enhance your innovation activities, they provide diversity, stimulus and greater options for you to consider the future innovation journey.

How do we set about engaging with all these different voices surrounding innovation?

Have you ever worked with the three horizon framework?
It is really useful for managing your innovation activities, drawing out the often conflicting voices within the organization on how to take innovation forward. The approach can unlock you from just being caught in the present, to one of envisaging a future that then allows you to begin to build different capabilities, competencies and capacities.

Find out more here and here and here on the three horizons or within this blog site put “three horizon approach ” into the search box. You will find I have provided a considerable overview in different posts’ thoughts on the 3H thinking and why I place such value in it for innovation’s evolution.
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One really big issue is aligning strategy and innovation, right?

Achieving innovation alignment always needs clear framing.

I would argue most problems or disappointment with our innovation efforts can be attributed to a lack of alignment to the organizations strategy and/or its poor governance with our end results.

Here I am suggesting a way to overcome this constant frustration.
Poor strategic alignment can be overcome by working through a comprehensive approach to addressing all areas that impact innovation. One such framework I believe can help, as explained here, through the work mat approach.

I believe this work mat approach does moderate and organize innovation for greater alignment. It allows for the senior management to become engaged and shape the direction as it takes a more holistic approach. The work mat contains governance as a specific part of its framing as this can do far more in driving the conditions to innovate.

The intent with developing this work mat approach has been to clearly set out that much-needed ‘greater’ strategic connection through engagement at a senior level, they drive the outcomes, they provide understanding beyond the vision to make the necessary connections, they fuel the engine and ignite the energy that innovation needs.
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Seeking strategic and innovation alignment conversations

Innovation stands in service to the strategic goals of our organization, or it certainly should!

The first thing is you need to have a solid, thoughtful conversation around the type of strategic emphasis you wish to achieve from your innovation activity, and how will it support the organization’s strategic direction.

These can be aligned to general strategic needs such as growing market share, differentiation and disrupting adjacent markets, serving the consistent changing and demanding customer needs, or by honing the delivery process, by spotting those and then exploiting them rapidly and effectively. All these become alignment conversations.

Creating clear goals and linking/aligning innovation to those, gives a more agile top-level strategy dialogue as a vital step before you get into the actual innovation concept – delivery stage. Senior executives must establish the manner in which innovation fits within the strategic context established by goals, vision and strategies.
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The last five yards – the really hard part

It seems so simple doesn’t it – “bringing final ideas to market”. So easy to say, yet it does seem so very hard to achieve.

Everything we should be aiming towards boils down to the judgement of a ‘successful execution’ or not.

It is this last, hard five yards of all the work that went into something, which can make or break so much of the efforts that have gone into this emerging ‘commercial life’ of our new innovation activities.

We should regard the back-end of innovation as the rugged part
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