Category: Integrated Innovation Thinking

What is top of your mind? Mine’s innovation and value creation

I’ve been watching the debate for the Presidency of the United States and thankfully the second one became a more ‘alive’ one, one that offered a good value where you felt some real tensions on different issues.

One of the most central discussion points was around jobs- creation, partly from bringing them back to America, and unleashing the Entrepreneurs from all that ‘crushing’ burden of bureaucratic ‘red’ tape but lacking in real specifics.

Innovation I noticed came to the rescue as that ‘certain’ word needed to be played, like a cloak you can hid behind, so the person waving its potential in magic dust will make us all feel happy,  that it will solve most of our problems. Apple was raised in the questions asked and how can the jobs overseas be brought back to the USA?

President Obama stated some of the jobs lost will not come back, those that are low skill, low wages and he wants to achieve high skill, higher earning jobs. I’m sure both candidates would want that and both know certain jobs will never come back.

Will Apple invest back in the United States in manufacturing unless there is a fundamental change in policy or consumer sentiment? They are more likely to invest on consumer sentiment than just policy alone, if it changed and suddenly there was demanded “I want home-made products, made within the US 100%” stamped upon them.

Customers voting with their feet and wallets can deliver more than policy incentives alone. Pride of ownership might even replace status in ownership. Continue reading “What is top of your mind? Mine’s innovation and value creation”

What is the missing cost of not innovating?

We can often be asked “what is the ROI on this particular innovation or alternatively, on our innovating activity?”

This questioning increases particularly when there grows even more uncertainties in marketplaces, when you are forced into making tougher investment decisions, in allocating resources, in adjusting a strategy to meet changing circumstances.

Then you get the “well, what’s the payback period then?”

Often we struggle to offer a half-decent reply as most innovation has stayed mired in incremental approaches and so becomes fairly complicated in identify the new part from the old that is already the invested part, or it remains uncertain, as it is often exploring the unknowns.

Perhaps we should reverse this question or be ready to ‘gazump’ it and beat them to the question before they ask. Two specific ways to think about this come to mind.

The first was suggested in a post back in 2005 by Ruth Ann Hattori called “the cost of not innovating” and I like this one. The other came from a post by my innovating friend and collaborator, Jeffrey Phillips “what are the opportunity costs on not innovating?”

Jeffrey is still not residing on a tropical beach as he still has not got the complete answer to that one. Both are tough questions but well worth reflecting over. Continue reading “What is the missing cost of not innovating?”

Making innovation practice spread

Recently I have enjoyed reading Peter J Denning’s thoughts around innovation. He is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Cebrowski Institure for information innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

He discusses adoption, team practices, ubiquity, networks, language actions, the practice of innovation and other related topics. All are stimulating and worth finding the time to read but one caught my eye and

I’ve gone back to it at least four, maybe five times. It intrigues me.  It is entitled “The idea idea” written in early 2011 and asks the question “What if practices rather than ideas are the main source of innovation?”

I think we all agree “ideas pervade our professional work” and as Professor Denning points out “we borrow them, we apply them, we solve problems with them, we create new ones, and we try to foster more of them in our teams”.

We do put a disproportionately greater emphasis on ideas yet as he points out, all these great ideas and the energy applied to them we still end up with really poor adoption rates, he suggests our success rate in business are around 4%.

All of this ‘idea’ energy seems to be wasting so much time, resources and money. He puts this so well “we are idea rich, selection baffled and adoption poor”

The whole thrust of the article is perhaps that innovation is not ideas generated and I agree so much on this, but practices adopted. We need to spend more efforts on the skills and adoption of new practices and as he suggests “as the framework for new practices” Continue reading “Making innovation practice spread”

Innovation struggles to integrate fully within the organization

In the past few weeks I have outlined the existing gaps at the leadership level on innovation engagement and innovations continued lack of being integrated into an organizations strategy. Time and time again there are new reports, surveys and different comments made on this serious disconnect still going on that needs clear resolution.

It is always pleasing to sometimes be on the same track as the Big Consultants, for working on and moving beyond the trends they are spotting and highlighting, into some clear tangible solutions, to help resolve these. Recently McKinsey Quarterly conducted an on-line survey of just under 3,000 executives on issues surrounding innovation.

The report is entitled “Making innovation structures work”- see the link below. They confirm much that I have seen or gained through my research and point very specifically to the key difficulties organizations are presently having around innovation. Continue reading “Innovation struggles to integrate fully within the organization”

Lining up the fundamentals in leadership and innovation

A week can feel like a long time, actually this present week has got condensed from six months of investigating, exploring and debating but even now it is only the beginning, that testing moment when you bring out into the public domain the work around a new framework for innovation.

It is what happens after this first public exposure, that you will find out its value and contribution and that does depends on a lot of factors, all in other people’s hands seeing value and worth. Those that will recognize a clear value to help them and their organizations should welcome this, I hope.

So what am I talking about?
The development of an emerging framework, which we call the Executive Innovation Work Mat, is where we are suggesting, lies the responsibility of the CEO or senior executive, to construct and enact.

Executives need to fill a leadership gap found in innovation, and define a robust innovation framework.  They can deliver the missing innovation alignment part by engaging and providing this leadership required in innovation that is often missing.

What these contain are outlined in our framework that we have exposed this week in a series of seven blogs. Just click on the link above for the foundation article.

There is a movement detected in the innovation air!
Continue reading “Lining up the fundamentals in leadership and innovation”

Seeking engagement for innovation change

I’m right in the middle of a launch of the Executive Innovation Work Mat approach, a series of seven blogs outlining a framework and structured approach to this.

During the seven days these will document seven important “domains” that determine innovation success or failure.

Each domain creates innovation potential, but sustained, successful innovation requires a unified “framework” in which all of these domains are appropriately engaged and aligned.

The development of this framework, which we call the Executive Innovation Work Mat, is the responsibility of the CEO or senior executive.  They can deliver alignment by engaging and providing this leadership required in innovation.

Introduction to the Series of the Executive Innovation Work Mat with image credit: opening curtain image from bigstock

If you have the opportunity, do go over to the www.innovationexcellence.com site to see the first two blogs, the foundation document and whose role it is to design this and why.

The first document is called The Seven Essential Domains for Innovation Leadership – the Work Mat Approach and the second The Critical Role that Senior Leaders must fill for Innovation Success

As this is a collaborative effort between Jeffrey Phillips and me, we see this opening series as the engagement to the innovation community. We are looking for feedback and thoughts to take this forward as we clearly believe it is an important problem within innovation to break down. Continue reading “Seeking engagement for innovation change”

Leaders need to engage and drive innovation

It continues to amaze me; actually it is depressing that although our business leaders constantly confirm that innovation is in their top three priorities yet they stay stubbornly disengaged in facilitating this across their organizations, especially the larger ones.

Of course I am not suggesting this is all our business leaders but I would argue innovation and its ‘make up’ remains a mystery to nearly all our leaders.

They are more than willing to allocate responsibility down the organization, failing to recognize their pivotal role in managing or orchestrating innovation engagement themselves, or even ensuring the mechanisms are fully in place. Why is this?

Time and time again you read one report after another, about the leadership gap in innovation or issues relating to innovation disconnecting from the top of the organization.

You can read reports from Booz, Allen Hamilton, Boston Consulting, the Conference Board, Harvard Business Review, IBM, A T Kearney, A D Little and many others all reporting issues and gaps in connecting innovation at the top of our organizations.

Can they all be wrong, if not then why aren’t our CEO’s listening? Why are we not resolving this and only just keep reporting it?

In March of this year Capgemini Consulting and IESE issued their report called the “Innovation leadership study” and this went deeper than most into the problems. Continue reading “Leaders need to engage and drive innovation”

Identification sits at the core of innovation

There are so many aspects to get right in innovation. These can be ensuring the culture, climate and environment for innovation are working well, it could mean setting up processes, well-designed procedures and structures, it can be providing innovation governance.

Each part has a vital part to play in being combined for innovation, so it can function but these are not the core. Our identification with innovation is that core.

The core lies in the scope and definitions, the context that innovation is set and the identification with these. How often do organizations fail because they rushed into innovation, along those classic lines of: “let’s experiment and learn as we go” as their mentality.

We fail because we don’t take the necessary time to examine the significant differences in innovation terminology, in the different ways or types of innovation, in gaining from ‘evidence based’ research and experimentation.

What we expect to see from our day-to-day work seems not to apply to our innovation selection criteria. We experiment indiscriminately, poking a stick around the opportunity haystack looking for that elusive ‘golden’ needle. Continue reading “Identification sits at the core of innovation”

People, motivations and a well-designed innovation framework

We still do not seem to understand all the linkages that make up innovation. We just continue to struggle because we don’t connect all the essential parts together. We need too. I think there are different components that when combined can form the innovation ‘glue.’

Let me suggest some that can be combined well within a broader framework I think is emerging from work I’m currently working upon and being conducted in a collaborative effort showing increasing promise.

People are the last great innovation frontier and great connectors

People are essential across all of innovation and its useful production; innovation does not work unless you have full engagement, commitment and desire from the people involved. Everything else we provide in tools, techniques and methods only enables and supports that one vital cog in the need to turn the innovation wheel, our people, and their commitment to ‘generate to innovate’.

Innovation is the last people-centric process.  While many other business processes or functions have changed consistently over the decades, innovation has been placing more demands on its people than any other business process or function and as yet, we cannot automate this.

We rely on engagement, on relying on people wanting to be involved, sometimes we simply just seem to hope with the lack of support or encouragement they often seem to get!

How do we make this happen? Continue reading “People, motivations and a well-designed innovation framework”

Two sides of an equation for shaping innovation.

To manage innovation you have to move across a broad spectrum of activities. You need to think through Structure, Strategy, Processes, Culture, Metrics and a host of other aspects to support a robust innovation management system.

When it comes to fostering innovation we do get more into the fuzzy part that for many is made up of more the intangibles that covers culture, climate and conditions to innovate. These increasingly make up the environment for innovation.

There is another side of the equation, less fuzzy if you determine its parts well, and that is its governance.

For me, the environment and governance make up the formal and informal part of fostering innovation. I’d like to touch on both here in this blog.
Continue reading “Two sides of an equation for shaping innovation.”