Confronting Your Darwin Effect through innovation
It is so hard to let go! It is so often harder to carry on, but determination prevails!
I have been working away, call it my labour of love, with plenty of frustrating moments but have “pushed on” through sheer determination, on my thinking through the ‘harnessing’ of the dynamics within innovation.
The journey has forced me into terrain that presented diverse challenges to achieve fresh insights and traversed many a rugged landscape to get closer to my goal of offering organizations their innovation fitness and future landscape design, one designed to alter their present capabilities and capacity to innovate radically.
The aim is to relate these to where your organization is in its existing capabilities to avoid the Darwin Effect and its impact on a business. Where should an organization need to identify and clarify the necessary dynamic innovation capabilities they need to have to achieve specific strategic goals. Once understood then, “we”, together, collectively prioritize the critical ones as ‘must have’ and then set about filling the gaps and getting the organization innovation fit. We then were at the point of being equipped for the innovative fitness journey necessary to travel.
Building those more ‘dynamic’ capabilities and competencies is the ones you need to provide for a more dynamic innovation environment and deliver unique capacity for your ongoing strategic goals.
This work is covered partly on this website but has a dedicated site where the articles, posts and thinking have been building up over a reasonably lengthy period.
Please go and visit it at www.innovationfitnessdynamics.wordpress.com.
So let me tell you what this is all about, and I will describe this with heavy referencing from Geoffrey Moore’s book “Dealing with Darwin“. Without a doubt, one of my favourite books in how it helped me piece together a large part of my dynamic innovation fitness puzzle.
First, you have the internal view.
Critically, you need to take a fresh look at your internal dynamics, at what happens when core competencies cease to differentiate. Question how resources must be shifted to new areas, how deeply threatening such changes can be, how protective inertia emerges as the enemy of destabilizing innovation. Finally, what kinds of management responses can best deal with inertia to stimulate and redirect its “untapped” energy towards fresh innovation; this is the inward-facing dilemma that needs to be addressed.
Then you have the External viewpoint.
It is about creating a competitive advantage in an increasingly commoditizing world. To lead that effort, you must continually reappraise what role your company is playing in the market ecosystem. How the market landscape of competition is changing and understand where your competitive advantage has come from in the past and where it is likely to come from in the future. Then from this analysis, determine what kinds of differentiation will be most rewarded and what types of innovation are most required; this is the outward-facing portion of the story.
Then you have that growing sense of observations.
Innovation and inertia: we often get stuck in particular types of innovation that promote given skills to the detriment of others, equally necessary but ignored or not understood fully.
We fail to adapt to market changes; we fund too much of one type of innovation to the exclusion of others and in the process, create internal traffic jams of sorts; frustrations and tempers to match.
We squander our scarce resources of time, talent and management attention on initiatives that fail to give us a competitive advantage and get constantly impeded by these forces of inertia all around us. Indeed, the more successful we have been in the past, the stronger the resistance to any subsequent change in the innovation course.
Then you have those real-world worries.
So what does keep management up at night about their performance on innovation? The rising anxieties stem from that worry that perhaps they are losing their ability to innovate. Can our people still compete? Do we really get what innovating is all about? And even if we do, can we still get it to the marketplace at the right time and feed that need? Can we actually see the light of day? Are we lacking speed, scale or sense of purpose?
Then Evolutions can happen.
Evolution proceeds more gradually but in times of crisis, we are forced to make choices that enable us to step back and reflect. I would argue we are all increasingly facing our own types of crisis in today’s volatile world.
If you were able to achieve an understanding that is based on more informed choice, so you can extract yourself from one path that makes you increasingly vulnerable and provides support to commit to a new core focus, one that offers you a more sustainable competitive position on which to compete through innovation. Would you take this different pathway?
Your task, challenges and keys to unlock your dilemma lie here.
- The task is to develop a suite of core innovation competencies with proven capability to create (unique) competitive advantage.
2. The challenge for management teams is to choose the type of innovation appropriate to their situation and to exploit it deeply enough to create definitive separation from their direct competitors. This can be completed in different ways through a thorough analysis is recommended
3. The key is to identify and then extract (scarce) resources from (existing) context and re-channel this into the new core that will differentiate you through the new emerging innovation competencies and systemic approach.
4. A real need is to reposition resources and provide focus on the ‘right’ capabilities to meet new challenges knowing your “Innovation Fitness & the Dynamics in the Landscape.”
“The sooner you start, the sooner you will be able to extract yourself from the commitments that make you vulnerable and establish those commitments that will strengthen your new position “- Geoffrey A. Moore
Survival of the fittest dominates irrespective.
- We are all caught in this Darwinian race- all of us need to evolve.
- So, where do you want to focus your limited resources when it comes to innovation?
- The ‘natural selection’ choice to increase your abilities to innovate is linked to your needs.
- Start by mapping out your innovation direction to the tasks and capabilities on hand and those needed or required to get you to certain predefined goals.
- Chose the path that will leverage and expand your knowledge, capabilities and capacities and start the journey.
- Start recognizing the opportunity spaces and gaps when you think you should be heading but feel you might have constraints in moving towards.
- The greater you can identify the need for improving your ‘innovation fitness’ allows you to get closer to accelerating towards the seen and yet unseen opportunities.
- The greater ‘innovation fitness’ equates to more value creation potential.
- As you learn to recognize the difference between managing the existing routines and building the new capabilities, the quicker you can absorb these new learnings within the organization, so they can become the new effective dynamic routines that are needed.
- You then begin to reduce uncertainties and strengthen the true innovation capabilities you need to thrive and survive in this Darwinian world.
Why do I believe in Innovation Fitness Landscapes?
There are so many pressing needs for a firm to integrate and align all their resources
Firms need to build and constantly reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities
If we want to address rapidly changing environments and step up to these challenges, the firm’s ability to achieve new, more innovative forms of business models, products and engagements within the markets they operate and seek out new customer segments and positioning, innovation becomes increasingly essential.
This requires a more dynamic set of capabilities to innovate but what are these? What determines a critical capability, competence or capacity to improve innovation and raise chances to be more successful?
For me and my work, fitness landscapes provide an emerging understanding of the existing position, the essential audit, and point towards where you need to go to build your limited resources to improve your overall innovation capacity.
The understanding of the future needs enables that effective understanding of not just direction but what, where, why and how you set about innovation capacity building.
Interested to learn more?
Then simply contact me. I am happy to discuss this and how this can be applied to your organization and what it means in engagement and commitments.
Certainly by delving into the” open work” housed on my dedicated site www.innovationfitnessdynamics.wordpress.com.there are plenty of reference points to trigger your thinking. Each journey might start at the same point “I want to innovate more effectively” but travel in uniquely designed ways.
Your result is to build progressively the Innovation capabilities and competencies levels to become dynamic and fitter to compete and succeed.