@paul4innovating

Building a Strong Innovation Advocacy In Practice

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I have been a strong champion for innovation for a number of years. It has become my overriding passion, interest, and source of inspiration. I research continuously in this area, as innovation is restless, it never stays the same, it is always evolving. My worry though continues, innovation gets treated often as an add-on, often … Read more

Mentoring versus Coaching for Innovation

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I bet a lot of people get caught out in not knowing the differences between Mentoring and Coaching.

Equally, when you are in the coaching mode you need to guard against moving over to the mentoring mode unless it is the conscious way. Understanding the differences becomes important.

Why do we need to mentor or coach today? We are facing highly competitive environment changes. The key to the need of having facilitation is to bring fresher, more innovative and leading-edge solutions into any innovative thinking but it is often all about the blending of experiences and the relationship dynamics of those involved in this set of dialogues.

“For fresh vision and momentum, I need your past like you need mine”

The objectives are to deliver innovative understanding in both mentoring and coaching approaches 

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Time starved, innovation lacking

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Today most executives seem to be time-starved, innovation lacking. They are constantly reacting to daily events, for fix focusing and fixing short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior.

This time-starved environment has real implications for innovation.

If we don’t sit down and think through issues and implication of our present performance around innovation, how can we close the gaps and improve it? We just simply don’t seem to have a more systematic, connected road map within our thinking that points the way to the improving longer-term as we keep doing this ‘reacting’ only.

We have such a limited amount of time; to pause, to evaluate, or redesign. We equally don’t feel capable to simply assign this over, even to outsiders to help. We are far too challenged and driven, often far too inbreed into thinking that “our solutions can only be the only solutions to our problems or challenges”.

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A platform providing innovation learning.

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I was reminded last week of what I seem to have forgotten in my years of focusing on innovation or was it that feeling it was simply repeating.

I am constantly aware of just how innovation has seemingly stayed still in much of its design in recent years, irrespective of what we believe have been ‘innovation advances’.

We certainly do keep moving relentlessly on in finding new tools, to squeeze a little more out of the innovation process but when you stop and think about it, we actually are still extracting mostly that incremental juice, we are not transforming how we innovate.

In the main, the radical solutions often so desperately needed in our business are somehow avoided. This is where this repeating cycle comes in, we are as stuck today in the same incremental ‘stuff’ as we have been for years. A sort of “rinse and repeat” cycle.

Revolving doors and growing intensity

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Offering You An Innovation Coaching Methodology

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Coaching offers real benefits for innovation. For instance, in Leadership Coaching, the results offer an ROI on the initial investment of nearly SIX times on average.

Can you imagine this X return factor going through the roof, going way beyond the initial investment if the innovation outcomes ‘take off?

One that delivers the level of growth across the organization’s business, partly gained from a greater awareness of innovation through coaching and how to then apply these different levers within its application to achieve this X return?

It often puzzles me the lack of investment we make in coaching, mentoring, or even facilitating innovation with the use of an external innovation expert. That should change and this is one of my personal goals to contribute to this intent as outlined in my Building a Strong Advocacy Practice on the launch of this site and service.

Let’s look at a possible innovation coaching methodology here

Are you aware we all pass through 4 distinct stages when it comes to learning and being coached?

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Differentiating Yourself in Innovation Part Two

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So my further part of how we need to set about and differentiate ourselves

How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?

I believe we have eight needs to achieve.

Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.

Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning

So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly Part one is here:

Exploring the second four below ( the first four are here )

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Differentiating Yourself in Innovation Part One

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How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?

I believe we have eight needs to achieve.

Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.

Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning

So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly:

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Forging our future through innovation

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I’ve been working in the innovation forge arena for coming up to sixteen years; relating, learning,  designing, shaping and writing about innovation, trying to translate this into value for clients and their innovation challenges.

Innovation Advocacy needs strong guidance.  As a “go to” trusted authority that can influence, argue, advocate new directions, and provide clear options for change, I can push the ‘edges’ of today’s status quo, perhaps be your required catalyst to trigger ideas or offer different insights.

We have to remember that innovation is always restless and constantly changing and I want to bring about meaningful up-to-date thinking in innovation practices adding further to your own.

Balancing the ‘inflow’ of knowledge about innovation with the necessary customer ‘insights’ is not easy, you have to be well positioned to advocate and show value, to guide different conversations and provide ‘impactful’ results.

Over the years we all see the business model has evolved

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A new paradigm of focusing on ingenuity lies in work to be done

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a new paradigm for ingenuity

Much of what we read about artificial intelligence, deep learning and robots can present fear of a new paradigm that our jobs are simply going, or vanish fairly soon, so we should find ways to release our human ingenuity.

Technology, machines and information solutions will take over in this new world of accelerating technology with the concern of “so then, what do we do?

Well, I believe we have a real chance to, at last, celebrate. Yes celebrate, we can finally be liberated! Ever since the industrial revolution, we have been caught up in the productivity and efficiency trap, in the monotony of repeating work.

Today we are on the cusp of changing that.  Can you imagine all those boring, repetitive jobs we are faced with today can be simply handed over to machine intelligence, just happy to do the task at hand?

Surely, if we manage this correctly it can release us up, it can enable our ingenuity to thrive and the answer lies in the work to be done

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Connecting Innovation is the New Order of Play

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There is a lot of change occurring in our innovation abilities. There is this constant shift to more open-sourcing and collaborating. We are seeing profound shifts that technology and digital transformation are bringing us to deliver innovate differently. These changes are influencing all of our worlds, allowing a very different “connecting” innovation to come into play and provide ‘greater value’

Nothing succeeds in isolation anymore, it needs fully connecting up, to bring increased value to the market and customer needs.

There are major shifts taking shape. What is radically changing how we innovate? We are seeing a significant acceleration of innovative collaborations through ecosystems. We are increasingly recognizing all the different collaborative tools increasingly at our disposal We are exploring both platforms and forming ecosystems to radically alter the competitive edge previously seen to reside inside the single company.

A more opening out, forming more connections into customers, engaging with them. so as to fully appreciate their needs and working with them to find solutions. This is leading us to recognize the value and power of the seamless customer experience. All of this comes from achieving a greater access and deepening the connections across networks. It is becoming the innovation network economy, to bring all the parts together.

For some time we have recognized the present innovating was simply not working

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