So why is finding the right skills and competencies for innovation a real challenge but so essential?
How do we know the critical skills, competencies and capabilities for innovation? Also, what are the additional dependencies for sustaining innovation capabilities that are becoming vital to understand so an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them, build upon a sustainable future and leverage these innovation dynamics?
We often miss or fail to ask which skills or attributes are critical to providing a more significant impact for a successful innovation solution. What naturally occurs can be only having access to a fundamental building block, like a dedicated innovation team. This will often stay limited in outcomes as it may lack the necessary skills, understanding, or capabilities to tackle complex challenges. The result will provide a limited impact on finding the best solutions to these complex challenges and problems we often need to tackle.
We stifle and lose the real potential by not having the correct dynamics of innovation on offer. Recognizing the skills, competencies, capabilities, and capacity needed does constantly differ by the problem tackled. We must identify what is needed and the gaps to be plugged through a comprehensive fitness framework that can be applied constantly.
Knowing the critical differences and then applying the ones that deliver the impact required to a ‘given’ problem or challenge often needs us to recognize innovation competencies and capabilities that are needed.
These skills need to be constantly mixed up, reconfigured and reblended to put to use the ‘optimum’ to show the best possibilities to deliver innovation Knowing those offers a different measurement for a ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII) for real business value., judging speed and impact by applying this optimum.
Today, we lack a comprehensive system model that brings the critical innovation skill factors out, gives them their appropriate values, and when those needed are applied appropriately. We need a model that recognizes that different challenges and problems require the ability to model different innovation dynamics, consciously dampening down some and empowering and energizing others.
Strong personalities can (badly) influence creativity or innovation execution. If these “personalities” are too dominating, the innovation outcome is often wrong; it often ignores the multiple options available to us in innovation teams, or we should be able to call upon across organizations.
Equally, if the innovation team is too ‘light’ in the depth of experience on a given problem, the risks rise of generating the best results due to a lack of appreciation of all that is needed or how to ‘pull it’ all together. We lose precious time resolving uncertainties and clarifications if we don’t have the necessary understanding and lack the expertise to translate this.
I firmly believe innovation teams that are static and not fluid in constantly ‘churning’ and mixing diversity to meet different challenges or problems often produce less than optimal results. For example, the complexity rises if the same people in a given innovation team cannot deliver the optimum result for different challenges and problems. Outsourcing only partly helps.
People and their curiosity, passion, experience and abilities make innovation happen through what they ‘bring in’ of their experiences, energy, insights and competencies to apply these to each specific challenge. The issue is how do we fully identify the ‘what’ that is needed? We need to invest more in assessing and evaluating the competencies on hand, from journey start to finish, and they clearly often differ.
Good resources are scarce; how do we identify them to deliver impactful innovation?
We still don’t understand the ‘dynamics’ of innovation and the interdependency of the parts. Which parts have a more significant impact, and which are less important? Innovation is still not treated company-wide holistically, as recognition of the dependencies is poorly understood. This is what needs to change and why innovation is not fully integrated across the organization; it stands alone far too much.
What and where do you place your resources to gain a more significant impact? What is essential to recognize as needing additional ‘weight and focus’, what capability and competencies need a stronger emphasis and why? How can we identify these and make the innovation process more dynamic yet embed constantly as routines?
What would happen if we ignored certain innovation aspects? What would have a more significant impact on our business? Do we understand all the options we might have? Do we spend enough time on putting the most appropriate skills, capabilities and competencies to work on our challenges and problems?
The need to look harder through the Innovation Lens
Why Fitness Landscapes? We do need to get to know where our innovation capabilities lie.
The pressing need for a firm is to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies/ capabilities to address rapidly changing environments and have the ability to achieve different, new innovative forms in constantly evolving and adapting skills.
This calls for more ‘dynamic capability” to be achieved. The fundamental question that needs to be addressed is “what are our dynamic capabilities” and more importantly, which critical ones should we focus upon to improve our capabilities and competencies to innovate?”
Fitness landscapes provide the understanding of the existing position and ‘point’ to where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity. I have been exploring fitness landscapes from theory to application for several years.
Fitness Landscapes as a solution has its roots in Darwin.
In any competitive situation, the survival of the fittest dominates (Darwinian). Knowing your innovative fitness is essential in this race. The question often raised is where do we focus our limited resources to achieve better fitness and succeed at innovation?
- Mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. Innovation Fitness Landscapes identify the opportunity spaces where you need to focus your efforts- the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater the ‘fitness’ transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities and increasing tangible outcomes.
These identified critical factors give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged or diverse’ the landscape can also determine the greater fitness needed for a higher rate of innovation. The strength of the peaks in these landscapes illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is. The number of critical peaks shows how diverse it potentially is to have resolved as contributing factors.
The ability to identify emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest; you begin to make adaptive walks, applying the capabilities and competencies needed for a given challenge or problem. Over time you begin to learn and spot different values and skills to know who and what can move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced, as well as understanding is needed to be in place to resolve the challenges faced.
Greater fitness understanding equates to more value-creation potential. I believe you can map the needs on a constant evaluating basis, working through the requirements based on a structured approach based around appropriateness, impact and intensity, which I call descriptor sets.
The ability to inter-couple landscape entities and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and improve repeatable cycle times and provides increasing options to explore. Each challenge or problem is different, and so should the application of innovation capabilities, competencies and capacities.
The solution I see has a framework but needs to go further from theory into more testing and application. What are the mutual dependencies, how the innovation ‘system’ behaves, what are its more essential impact factors which are weaker and what should be considered in the ‘best’ innovation environment?
I keep working on this; I need some partners to collaborate and invest in building this out further.
- Paul Hobcraft and Agility Innovation Specialists, all rights reserved, a journey that continues to pursue the innovation dynamics studies and suggested frameworks 2009 – 2023.