Integrated Innovation Thinking

Putting the coordinates into your innovation world

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Innovation can be fairly complex in what needs to be pulled together, as often it ‘flies’ in contradiction to the normal organization’s ways and wishes to work in structured, efficient ways. Innovation can often be rather chaotic and discovery-driven.

One of the useful ideas of using an external resource is to put additional coordinates into your innovation world, they see contradictions in a different way and can assist in working through the conflicting signals, so as to help align innovation in helpful and thoughtful ways. Certainly, the innovator’s role is not an easy one inside the structured world of larger business entities.

I like practical advice with evidence, it helps bridge misunderstandings. This can come through a variety of methods:  benchmarking, validating, frameworks and interpreting how innovation can fit with your current or future needs. Often the outside advice can place innovation into a greater context that can accelerate the outcomes you need to gain understanding and achieve increasing identification.

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The Value in Personal Innovation Learning Journeys

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If you don’t have time, how can you learn? We are in need increasingly, of faster understanding, to quickly learn or resolve an immediate need, or we have this determination or essential requirement within our innovation role to deepen our knowledge and understanding of innovation.

These are usually split into two parts, called “micro or macro learning opportunities”.

The value of having an innovation guide, mentor or coach helps you accelerate through both these needs and learning opportunities. I see four points of value, my value proposition, if you like, for you to achieve personal innovation growth:

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Fitting understanding into the innovation puzzle

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Formalizing a new innovation learning-as-a-service is complicated, far more than I originally thought, it is often a puzzle.

Still, a certain course has been set and it is now working through much of its structure, learning much myself on the way to fit this within the innovation puzzle we all have.

When I was thinking through this concept I fell back onto one of my most valuable techniques to work through, clustering a set of questions and capturing all the different thinking through the use of Mind Mapping techniques. Such a valuable tool.

A selection of maps included what a curator can do in innovation; of painting a picture of a strong advocacy practice, of working through a guiding approach, the need to reflect on the whole facilitation process, etc., and each brainstorm takes a time to work through, build and formalize.

The end result becomes a much richer landscape of what I can offer and what equally might be needed.

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Learning Platforms and Personal Learning Pathways

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My mind has been swirling around the significant changes taking place in learning. Not just in the time we have available, suggested recently as 25 minutes per week to stop and learn but in the variety of ways we can learn.

Clearly, many of these are digital to construct, so as to apply the more modern design process that works for each of us individually, in our time of need.

I have been struck by the emphasis on personal learning and development. We still get very caught up in the need for scale yet it is the ability and flexibility to design these to our individual pathways that become “the order of the day”.

The constant struggle is for each of us in simply stopping to focus, finding the time and the last thing you can afford to do, is take an ad-hoc approach to this, it needs a structured design.

This is where external facilitation might help

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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

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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Jumping to a fresh cycle of innovation design

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Jumping to a fresh cycle of innovation design

I have argued in the past that innovation management needs to radically adjust, it requires being designed differently, it needs to be highly adaptive, and technology-driven, it actually is in need of a fresh cycle of design.

In my opinion, it needs to be based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to building far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options.

instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently through technology where platforms dominate and transformation becomes an ongoing process to evolve the business model, so as to seek out constantly changing market opportunities, in agile, adaptive and fluid ways, for successful innovation outcomes, that meet those real customer needs.

I’d like to offer some views, partly looking out to the future, partly considering what is potentially within our grasp, if we step back and rethink innovation design. So here I offer some parts of this design, my thinking out loud, somewhat in random order and some of the reasons why:

For me, I have a picture floating around in my head. It is emergent and not yet in full view

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Agile Learners are ideal for Innovation

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Agility holds a special interest for me. I named my consulting business Agility Innovation Specialists and constantly am looking to emphasize that agility is really important to managing innovation.

I came across an article written a few years back by the Korn Ferry Institute and I thought it was worth extracting the top line thoughts as important in my advocacy of innovation.

If you want to read more from their report here is the link.

My takeaways from this:

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