Integrated Innovation Thinking | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Deepening the Thinking Around the Innovation Mandate – part two

Building out the clarity of any robust innovations mandate needs a depth of thinking

Following on from my first post “Constructing the Innovation Mandate” we should look further into aspects of the innovation mandate that need considering and clarification

Any innovation mandate needs to consider what is meant by the following and provide explanations:

Corporate Objectives: The innovation mandate should clearly align with the organization’s corporate objectives and business strategy. It should articulate how innovation will contribute to achieving these objectives, and what specific goals and metrics will be used to measure the success of the innovation program.

Value Goals: Innovation should create value for the organization in various forms, including revenue growth, cost savings, improved customer satisfaction, and enhanced brand reputation. The innovation mandate should clearly define the value goals for the innovation program and how they will be measured and tracked over time.

Innovation Policy: An innovation policy provides guidance and direction for the innovation program, defining the types of innovation that will be pursued, how innovation projects will be prioritized, and how intellectual property will be managed. The innovation mandate should articulate the organization’s innovation policy and how it will be implemented.

License to Operate: License to operate refers to the organization’s social and environmental responsibilities and obligations. An innovation mandate should consider how innovation can help the organization fulfil these responsibilities and enhance its reputation as a responsible corporate citizen.

Constructing the innovation mandate

So often innovation struggles to be recognized for what it is. Innovation is a critical source of future competitive advantage. It is our ability to consistently capture, build and develop new ideas within organizations or in open collaborations with others that have a direct effect on revenue growth and the ability to provide future sustainability. So why is it not more central within an organization’s core?

This is part one of a two-part post around the construction of an innovation mandate.

We need to understand successful innovation actually touches all aspects of a business, by contributing to improving business processes, identifying new, often imaginative, ways to reduce costs, building out existing business models into new directions and value and discovering new ways and positioning into markets. To get to a consistent performance of innovation and creativity within organizations you do need to rely on a process, structure and the consistent ability to foster a culture of innovation.

The innovation mandate is often overlooked or undervalued.

We require a more dynamic view of Innovation understanding.

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.

Completing transitions through innovation, ecosystems and sustainable approaches

*Completing transitions through innovation, ecosystems and sustainability thinking*

Today, our innovation activity needs to transition through collaborating and co-creating, applying ecosystem thinking and platform designs for business. We increasingly recognize the future value and impact for businesses to grow, is through combining innovation, and external collaborations, and ensuring solutions are more sustainable.

We need to have a new open architecture for undergoing this transformation that is scalable and built, combining technology and tools, for speed and effectiveness.

Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building requires a new ecosystem-designed way that connects the parts.

Let me tell you my story of what I believe; it continues to evolve

Today’s challenge is to build the capacity, competencies and capabilities to be different, more resilient and resourceful. These need to be built upon a deep appreciation of what innovation can provide; the stimulus for creative solutions that have sustained lasting growth.

The power of ecosystem thinking for resolving the innovation complexity of today

*Applying ecosystem thinking to innovate complex and challenging problems*

“Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems will have a powerful effect,

it alters the way we will approach problems today and in the future,

ecosystems offer a greater potential for collaborative growth, impact and sustaining innovating value”

Our understanding of innovation is changing; we are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into open and far more collaborative innovation (external orientation), with our collective thinking offering the acceleration into improving our innovation performances, leading to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success.

The search is seemingly on to find greater value, which will increasingly coalesce around different innovation ecosystems. In many different ways, we need to form significantly more relationships that increasingly matter to each organization, add value and insight, and bring external expertise inside to work on ‘greater’ innovation solutions.

Innovation Software, is it facing the Innovators Dilemma?

*The Winds of Change- Innovation Software facing the Innovators’ Dilemma*

In my research, I am getting a real sense that the current Innovation Management Software model is about to be upended and disrupted as per Clayton Christensens’ “Innovators Dilemma.”

The book the “Innovation Dilemma” published in 2016 was written by innovation expert Clayton Christensen suggesting even though even the most outstanding companies can do everything right–yet still lose market leadership.

Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.

Today if the technology software solutions are not advancing and adapting to new ways of building open, collaborative exchanges across not just a single organization but multiple ones. This need of all coming together to co-create, often solving more complex problems, ideas are lost or not being spotted by the incumbents and over time, others recognize these “blind spots” will present opportunities to offer new approaches to solve problems.

In this book it expands on the concept of disruptive technologies, a term Christensen coined in a 1995 in an article “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave”. It describes how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appear to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from the established business. (source Wikipeda)

Today the reversal is happening.

Fears of those unknowns

*The fear of the unknowns explodes upon those not ready*

When the established order begins to creak and dismantle, seemingly in front of our eyes, those fears of the unknown can kick in, especially if you have been used to managing in an established (slowly) evolving way for most, if not all, of your business life.

We seem confronted with rapid change, and it is primarily within the business world related to technology and market uncertainty that is driving this. We need to counter “fear” with a different approach, recognizing most of what we feel might be the ‘unknown’ is actually ‘known.’

We need to recognize our unknowns, search out others who might be experts in that point of not knowing and gain their help in piecing the parts that might be fragmented together to bring that need for recognition and clarity in our mind.

Fear can immobilize us.

In a recent exchange I had within one innovation community discussion, it was suggested that Innovation Business Ecosystems did not have the expected uptake because of this “fear of the unknowns”.

What initially prompted this was my post on making the business case for “Thinking about Innovation Ecosystems” Well, we need to address fear to get past this mental blockage of the “fear of those unknowns”.

So this short post is on tackling fear and dealing with the unknowns.

Where will Innovation Management Software go?

This morning I decided to have an exchange on ChatGPT on the future of Innovation Management Software, I asked a number of questions in a short series and can well-relate to the answers provided incredibly quickly.

What do you think?

Do they make sense and are the suggestions a competitive threat or a trend towards a future that needs fully embracing before others do?

chat.openai.com/chat

Helping discover your innovation pathway

*You need to discover your innovation pathway*.

I started posting my thoughts on innovation in August 2010. I have written on this site alone, www.paul4innovating.com, by just coming up to a milestone of 700 posts focusing on innovation thoughts and opinions, so I just wanted to pause and think about all the different places I have tried to get the innovation message(s) out.

I always find the post-New Year to be a reflective part of the year of reviewing, deciding, and then setting new goals. This is a post about the sources of my knowledge that feeds my innovation passion.

Let me start. I often wonder whether the posts and articles I’ve written have been hitting the right buttons, helping solve the needs of those involved in innovation; I hope so. I have pushed out and explored various aspects, learning myself as I go. I have followed a number of great innovation thinkers and read different books on the areas of innovation.

It amazes me. How much is talked about, advice offered and sometimes that deep down nagging feeling, innovation understanding does not really change; it is the people managing it as they often seem to be simply passing through this innovation period onto other things or vanishing in pursuit of different career interests.

The needs of Innovation Coherence

Innovation often fails to align with strategic needs. It is a known, well-discussed fact. This is often not the fault of the innovator but the very people designing but not sharing the strategy or failing to recognize all the implications this might mean in shifting resources, investing money or simply under-appreciating the complexities that often lie with innovation to conceive, validate, contribute and deliver the contributions into that strategy.

Sadly many innovators are simply happily working away with no specific guidelines, apart from the general remit of “we need to be more innovative”, and this lack of coherence merging from the boardroom, failing to cascade down the organisation leaves this strategic part that innovation should plan as far to vague. They are not drawn into the need for change and its implications from an innovative perspective. Alignment should be a rigorous evaluation.

Building our capacity to innovate needs understanding and reflects the organization’s business activities. Innovators need to grasp the value creation aspects that will deliver the necessary capital-efficient and profitable growth and then ‘go in pursuit’ to achieve their contribution to these goals.

Even the basic questions often remain unclear: “How are we looking to grow revenue, save costs, reduce working capital or improve our fixed capital?” What is specifically being deployed or recognized needs to change and to get into the necessary detail becomes essential.