For innovation to be successful, the bottom line is the commitment and focus made for building the capabilities and competencies in innovation.
It is recognition that people make us the real value and ARE the innovation success equation in my opinion
So we must simply invest in them by focusing on the 3 C’s of developing people, these are Capabilities, Competency and Capability.
As we set about building and expanding capabilities, we need to consider:
- How we can accelerate the uptake of innovation activity around the conditions provided through investing in them
- The need to trigger engagement and achieve growing attainment of knowledge acquisition and dispersion skills- essential for collaborative innovation
- Setting about building practices for greater synergies, relationships and networking conditions, for ongoing learning and absorptive capacity
- Extracting the right cultural, design, climate and environmental conditions,
- Placing increasing value on evolving the structures, processes and technology application
- Investing in lessons learnt through validation and resolutions to challenges to build an ongoing adaptive capacity.
- Recognizing people solve the critical bottlenecks and find solutions to overcome the constraints, they become increasingly motivated to find solutions and resolve gaps through their ability to be creative and inquisitive.
- The ongoing building of capabilities and competencies clearly leads to a more sustaining and determined innovation future.
Increasing capacity through coaching
There are many benefits from having an intense course of one-on-one coaching, irrespective of the level of responsibility you have for innovation within your organization.
It is very similar to management behavioural coaching to change perceptions, reorientate your thinking and approach, and open up to different thinking to build out your innovation understanding. Coaching yields a clear return, but the hard work lies with coaching, wanting to see the alternatives, and adding these into their daily actions and lives.
Increasingly your innovation knowledge through coaching, you can accelerate different insights that can form a vital part of any innovation comprehension that can reduce uncertainties, encourage experimentation, draw others towards a changing relationship of trust, and increase productivity and engagement.
Working with us you work through some fairly intensive and context-specific sessions, you quickly deepen your personal knowledge and accelerate your critical business awareness and contribution.
Our innovation coaching approach provides ideal safe environments to enable innovation to quickly take hold and be translated.
Leaders, champions, sponsors and teams can gain from this coaching as well as the individual.
The Real Tipping Point in your understanding comes through ‘tailored’ Innovation Coaching where you see real benefits by discussing why and this, in my opinion, always is framed around content and context:
•Context matters a great deal
•Content needs to offer a total solution
•Success takes time & effort
•Finding a release of working time to focus on adding new value to the Business (hard-wiring) becomes essential to achieve this shift
I wrote this sometime back “Learning the Mantra of Innovation Context. It has value to read.
I take the approach to coaching innovation in multiple ways:
•Our approach is a mix of questioning, listening and re-skilling techniques asking always why does this make sense?
•We recommend coaching is normally on a 1to1 basis is ideal, but this can be in team situations as well, although this has a different approach
•This coaching is always innovation-centric in everything we do in these 1on1 sessions
•Ownership lies with the person being coached, and we seek to transfer the necessary insight and knowledge quickly and effectively
•We facilitate the unscrambling of many random thoughts and provide the clarity of piecing the innovation puzzle all together
It is yours alone to finally assimilate and use this new knowledge gained; we will help you achieve your personal goals, provide a fresh dimension, and place innovation understanding into the context necessary.
Why not contact me to find out more about the many unique ways we approach innovation through coaching. Many of these become ‘deep dives’ to provide the necessary breakthroughs.
Then we have Peer-to-Peer Mentoring.
There are certainly growing benefits in using external advisors and innovation mentors.
Finding someone empathetic and experienced in business innovation is growing harder to avoid many typical, sometimes unseen ‘pitfalls’ on innovation.
Someone who has a depth gained from their own business experiences; working in large organizations, managing complexity, projects and starting up fresh initiatives or taking them over to turn them around.
Someone who can empathize with the managing of innovation; in learning and leading significant activities.
A mentor or advisor can certainly provide:
* The opportunity and environment for you to step back from the day-to-day detail to take fresh stock, to re-engage in the bigger picture of what innovation can provide. They can help you to refocus and re-energize innovation activities. They can be timely.
* They can be a great sounding board; they can prompt and stimulate your thinking as they listen. They can challenge it and help in arriving at new ideas for solutions to your challenges. They can offer a series of directions and courses of action to be considered.
* Growth or the needs for Renewal needed are often tough areas to manage and deliver through innovation activities. Timely advice can instil growing confidence, the chance to debate and explore alternatives, and explore emerging options. A mentoring approach can help in avoiding ‘classic’ mistakes made by others.
* Today, we need to leverage the connections within our networks more and more. Knowing who, where and why becomes increasingly valuable to avoid loss of time, energy and basic mistakes.
A mentor who has a wide network to tap into can seek the best advice to support assumptions or offer even more clarification.
Each mentoring or advisory engagement will be different
Discussing constantly changing business challenges often values external evaluation. Often you can forget one issue as another one ‘pops up on the crowded agenda.
A mentor can remind, prompt and connect issues and bring a fresh perspective to these. Having the opportunity to revisit the different complexities within innovation to have available a knowledge resource to share and reflect on constant changes since the last conversation or meeting can provide a catalyst to taking the appropriate action.
Having the opportunity to engage in different discussions about innovation can become a powerful motivational force for you to recalibrate, stay motivated, and have added incentives to think through these again.
In our view, an innovation advisor or mentor needs to offer:
A good innovation mentor or trusted advisor should offer a different perspective based on a combination of their own practical business experiences and a real depth of innovation understanding to provide a real return to your needs from innovation.
So to build the 3 C’s of Capabilities, Capacities and Competencies, we can follow a people’s equation and invest in coaching and mentoring to really accelerate these.