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Framing innovation around four management dimensions

Julian Birkinshaw, the London Business School Professor for Strategy and Entrepreneurship wrote in his book “Reinvention Management” about the failure of management. He is a strong advocate of reinventing and broadening out the awareness and need for a more disciplined and up to date practice of management

Working through a kind of contingency theory of management

Julian points out different situations demand different kinds of management. To be effective, a manager needs to adapt to the demands of the situation. Managerial behaviour is mapped on four dimensions: bureaucracy-to-emergence, hierarchy-to-collective wisdom, alignment-to-obliquity, and extrinsic-to-intrinsic motivation.

The principles of emergence, collective wisdom, obliquity and intrinsic are newer ways of thinking about management. I must say I like these as I do his framework as a really good way to think about the approach we need to explore that fits with the strategy and the way we want to develop a business and its environment.

Innovation needs to exploit all the ‘opposing’ principles across the four dimensions

Continue reading “Framing innovation around four management dimensions”

A Cascade of Better Choices for Greater Innovation Outcomes

It is not an easy job to achieve the level of consistent innovation expected within any organization. Often those breakthroughs never seem to be repeated, we struggle to understand the reasons why we can’t achieve that regular rhythm or dependable outcomes from the innovation portfolio, that we would have expected or the board demands.

If you ever look at high performance in sport it is in the consistent, hour-upon-hour, day-upon-day of dedicated practice, hard work and consistent honing that gets you to that performance point. You seek to reduce deviance; you look to achieve a certain consistency.

Business Organizations will like that approach, it ‘plays’ to the efficiency and effectiveness message, it offers up predictability and reliability that allows for dedicated planning and ‘predicting’ solid performance and certainly. This is ideal for those investors looking for consistency in results and dividends and the Executive Board yearns for.

Today uncertainly asks for a different performance

Continue reading “A Cascade of Better Choices for Greater Innovation Outcomes”

The (Re)birth of the Architect for the Business Model Design

Business models both in new designs and it management have become centre stage in many of our existing organizations’ thinking. The need is not just too simply find new growth through new business models but to ‘react and adapt’ those existing business model designs that are in place, to catch-all the emerging possibilities that are around, hopefully before others do. Are we doing a good job of this at present?

BMC- Osterwalder & Pigneur. Visual source: Steve Blank — BMC- Osterwalder & Pigneur. BMC Visual source: Steve Blank

Those without a legacy or are really agile usually are in pole position to explore new opportunities quickly. Also to start with a blank business canvas is exhilarating. It seems we are in the era of the Entrepreneur or are we? Continue reading “The (Re)birth of the Architect for the Business Model Design”

Juggling Innovation around Business Model Design

Juggling Innovation image via Michael Grills — Juggling Innovation Is Hard
image via Michael Grills

There seems a lot at present going on around the Business Model and formulating its design. Following on from the Business Design Summit held in Berlin in April of this year there seems to be a gathering of momentum surrounding the Business model.

There is an awful lot of designing going on, actually it is hard to juggle with it all, even for me that has a 100% focus on innovation.

The Business Design Summit had as its primary question: “Are the Business Tools you are using relevant for today’s world?”

It went on to ask “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them, instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking”. “Your business ideas deserve better than PowerPoint and Excel”

The momentum is specifically aimed at Business innovation design tools and how to manipulate them and this is giving rise to the ‘school’ of tool-smiths. I wrote about the Business model canvas as set to explode in 2012 and events this year are certainly ‘exploding’ in multiple ways. Let me give some examples: Continue reading “Juggling Innovation around Business Model Design”

Breaking out of the current economic dilemma needs radical innovation

I gaze through unbelieving eyes at the continued rise of unemployed in Europe. Unemployment in the Eurozone has reached another record high with the seasonally-adjusted rate for April 2013 going to 12.2%, up from 12.1% the month before according to the European Commission’s statistics office, Eurostat:An extra 95,000 people were out of work in the 17 countries that use the Euro, taking the total to 19.38 million. Both Greece and Spain have jobless rates above 25%. The lowest unemployment rate is in Austria at 4.9%.

It seems never-ending.

Youth unemployment remains a particular concern; you simply have to wonder what we are storing up in the longer term with this situation. Can the youth ever catch up, can our society as it is positioned give them the opportunities to turn today’s grim world into a world of optimism and contentment, or is it a lost generation? In April, 3.6 million people under the age of 25 were out of work in the Eurozone, which translated to an unemployment rate of 24.4%.

Why does this issue of growing unemployment seem to be drowned out by events that seem important on the day but realistically pale in their significance against something as damaging as this present crisis?

Examples of persistent economic and social challenges

We are facing significant society challenges. These include declining Economic competitiveness, deepening Social inequalities, rising Mental ill-health, increasing Crime and social disorder and we see growing Alcohol and drug abuse, to name some of the issues being increasingly tackled as part of the consequences of these tough economic and social times.

We must increasingly recognise that the cost of deferring concerted action to confront these growing set of social challenges is beginning to rise – and could easily outpace our ability to respond.

Can we afford to wait? There are so many pressing questions. Continue reading “Breaking out of the current economic dilemma needs radical innovation”

Moving Towards Globally Integrated Innovation

There are so many books out there on innovation that it sometimes gets just hard to decide which to buy and read, to invest time into. I’ve got a growing stack of books sitting on my coffee table or in my e-reader file all shouting “read me, read me!”

Well one I recently finished has been one of those rare books that got the Paul Hobcraft treatment; considerable underlining, scribbles in the margins, circles around some pages that I want to refer back too as quickly as I can. You can never achieve that same sense of ‘ownership’ and possession through the e-reader can you, or am I missing something there?

So the book that joined that elite pantheon to the innovation gods on my top shelf was one written by Yves Doz and Keeley Wilson entitled “Managing Global Innovation – frameworks for integrating capabilities around the World”, printed by Harvard Business Review Press. I really recommend it.

The Key to bridging your Global Innovation Gap

The book is all about providing the understanding of integrating your global resources to build and leverage a global innovation network. I think it does a good job in explaining the different parts, the considerations and the tougher aspects of making this work for you.

Ok, I’m a sucker when it starts off by discussing the innovation challenges, then starts climbing into chapters on optimizing the innovation footprint, then communications, receptivity and then how to organize for global projects focusing on collaborative and integrated innovation, it does draw you in.

I’ll leave you to explore this in your own time, if global innovation and integrating is your bag. Equally I think it will be more than helpful in thinking this fully through or recognizing gaps within your present operations.

What the book does for me Continue reading “Moving Towards Globally Integrated Innovation”

The Innovation Bunker – Avoiding Cognitive Traps Part Three

Often we forget to look back as we constantly get into that habit of always wanting to simply keep moving forward in our innovation activity. So, sometimes I would recommend we stop and reflect. I, for myself, keep returning to great thinkers in innovation to remind me and these can often bring me back on track in avoiding certain traps.

Part Three of the Cognitive Traps we find ourselves in. Go here for Part One and Part Two

I’ve always valued one terrific observation of Professor Clayton Christensen (of many thoughts) where he talks of the core theories of innovation. One small part:
He states “theory helps to block out the noise and to amplify the signal”

So I looked back at a theory to go forward to reduce our cognitive traps

If we link back into Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovation for much, it is not a bad place to go. He firstly offers us his five stages of adoption or the decision stages of the innovation-process of Knowledge, Persuasion, Decision, Implementation and Confirmation. Continue reading “The Innovation Bunker – Avoiding Cognitive Traps Part Three”

Innovation Job Chasing – A Race Needed To Win

There are times when we all have to “up our game”. We are entering one of those periods where we have to relearn how to compete, how to win. The world is in the throes of some dramatic changes and the innovation gloves have to come off. Innovation capacity in many countries needs a new, more robust solution.

I wrote about “The present jobless innovation era we face” raising up the theory that Professor Christensen points towards, that we are working on the wrong types of innovation to create jobs.

We are measuring our businesses in financial metrics that were more designed for periods of scarce money supply and not what most of our companies have today, cash in abundance, sitting on their books and a world ‘awash’ of cheap money. Professor Christensen calls this theory of his “the Capitalists Dilemma.”

Risk-aversion is dominating our Western thinking
The present situation is that we are in a period of risk-aversion where the innovation ‘bets’ are more incremental, more short-term pushing for greater utilization of existing assets that are designated by Professor Christensen as “sustaining or efficiency” innovations. He believes we need more “empowering innovation” – those that create jobs and invest capital across longer-term horizons than today. Continue reading “Innovation Job Chasing – A Race Needed To Win”

The Present Jobless Innovation Era We Face

Over the last few months I have kept going back and forth on Professor Clayton Christensen’s paradox he has named “The Capitalist’s Dilemma” and been relating it to this jobless era we seem to be at present.

This idea ‘hit the world’ when he wrote a piece in the New York Times last November, 2012. I gather this has been one of his best, if not his best read article ever.

As I’m sure you are aware Professor Christensen must be regarded as if not the top, then one of the top experts, on innovation. For me he sits at the top, so when he explores a theory, you stop to think about what he is trying to explain. It takes some of us mere mortal awhile to grasp and relate to these ideas and theories.

Theories into solutions sometimes is a long wait for wrong reasons

Firstly an aside, I need to get this off my chest. Although I suspect a book will eventually emerge, perhaps only next year 2014, far too often this is a little later than preferred or when really needed. The ‘currency’ or present day relevance often suffers from this parallel world of academics, moving on a much slower level.

They are still working within the publishing strictures and structures where a book has to be firstly written, reworked, proofed by editors, printed, bounded and distributed.

As you might guess here, I just wish some of these breaking theories that emerge from the academics could be sped up, they are seemingly just caught up in the dogma of rigour, validation and peer review. Weighed down in this legacy they often fail to provide the valuable insights that can alter the present day where the theory or dilemma has arisen.

That valuable thinking to address the very problem we need a solution too is today not having even further debate after a book comes out, sometime in the future. We need to begin to travel the road, not just survey it! Continue reading “The Present Jobless Innovation Era We Face”

Reorganized, delayered and downsized – goodbye trust it arrives fast.

So who has not faced one of those moments when it is announced that there is a reorganization about to take place. It often has the habit of freezing what you are doing; you begin to put things on hold, waiting to understand what this latest reorganization has in store for you.

The questions build up in your mind, it starts to block you. Creativity begins to be lost. Certainty suddenly gets replaced by growing degrees of uncertainty, as rumours begin to feed rumours.

Management has simply stopped innovation in its tracks, until they unfreeze it with the new organization, as long as it makes sense. If it is clear and logical then its effect is not as disruptive as it might have been initially feared, innovation can return quickly. If not and when it is badly described, planned for, executed then it’s a different story.

Equally when reorganizations are allowed to extend over those sometimes intractable time periods, dreamed up to ease the pain, you can say goodbye to innovation for weeks, months, even years. You actually might even never get your ‘innovation mojo’ back again. Continue reading “Reorganized, delayered and downsized – goodbye trust it arrives fast.”