Leading innovation | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Balancing Function, Design, Process and Structure for Creative Tension

In the fourth conversation between Jeffrey Phillips and myself, around parts of the Executive Innovation Work Mat, we took on several different issues around the design, function, structure and process needs for innovation.

The conversation lasted nineteen minutes, and for some reason, I lost sound briefly at my end a few times, which was a pity. So I hope I can help fill those gaps and explore the what, why and how of having a dynamic functioning design and structured process to meet today’s demanding and highly energetic world of constant change.

This specific conversation (LINK here) is about 19 minutes. It is all about the fit of innovation and the tensions between the design, function, structure, and process needs to manage innovation management. We relate this specifically within our Executive Innovation Work Mat.

It is always our intention to offer some different thrôughts about the balancing of function, design, process, and structure and giving it equally the creative dynamic attention it needs Continue reading “Balancing Function, Design, Process and Structure for Creative Tension”

Why we should focus on Innovation Governance

I am working with Jeffrey Phillips, a long-term collaborator on “all things concerning innovation.” We have just had our third short conversation of a five-part series on Innovation Governance.

This specific conversation is all about the fit of innovation governance within our Executive Innovation Work Mat. This is the link on Innovation Governance to the conversation, just under 14 minutes to listen to. Hope it gives a different set of insights to this area of innovation alignment.

If you would like to listen to the two previous conversations then these are here in the links that take you to youtube.com The first was setting the scene for these conversations on the “fundamental building blocks for innovation success” (LINK) and then the second into “the essential alignment of innovation to strategy” (LINK).

I have written supporting posts to these conversations, more to flesh out a number of different pointers to add more value and awareness of the importance of having a clear integrated solution for innovation in the solution we offer, the Executive Innovation Work Mat. Continue reading “Why we should focus on Innovation Governance”

The essential five sense-making steps in any innovative transition

Today’s call is for more ‘search, scope, speed, stretch and scale’ irrespective of the challenge being worked upon. These are essential steps in any transformation work, in any innovation undertaken to take discovery through to commercialisation.

Applying the innovation lense to the energy transition requires a significant need for innovation in all it does to undertake the transformation needed. It needs to apply these five steps within any innovation thinking.

The five aspects of search, scope, speed, stretch and scale are highly relevant to the success of any innovation introduction.

So we need to think through the five essential needs within innovation when applying innovative thinking to the Energy Transition, a growing focal point of my work. Continue reading “The essential five sense-making steps in any innovative transition”

Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress

Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress

Building a sustainable competitive advantage

Today’s challenge for me is not only to be building the innovation capacity but also to be establishing clear ways on how we should set about sustaining it. Increasingly, organizations must have the capability and capacity to sustain innovation to provide the stimulus for lasting growth and resolve the complex challenges we face today and in the future.

To get there, though, it does seem this must be through continued learning. Hence, your capabilities become stronger, evolving and more unique, thus making them more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate.

Let me outline an innovation framework that builds capability through a sustained approach.

When you set out to build capability to be sustaining, you need to consider there are two types of capabilities, distinctive, which are the characteristics of the organization which others cannot replicate and reproductive, which can be bought in by the competition but always need to need to be appropriate to any objectives you are trying to achieve. Continue reading “Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress”

Thinking sustainability needs a mix of future scenarios.

The accelerating need to build a sustainability pathway

Sustainability is near top or close to the top of a board’s agenda.

The growing concerns of several intertwined issues need addressing as they will initiate a significant change to the Business and how it operates and presents itself to the world.

Boards are asking where our business fits within and alongside society, both in who we serve and society in general, coupled with realising that the planet is heading towards a critical crisis and what we can do to reduce these pressures?

Not just sustainability forces a sharper need for strategic choices but the ability to undertake the product reinvention. A reinvention that concerns itself with reducing waste, minimizing carbon emissions, valuing the full life cycle and the ability to show the increasingly important end-of-life part of the lifecycle model.

Extracting precious, rare earth minerals and recycling parts reduces the demand for future mining or heat intensive materials.

Any products need to have a clear understanding of all their stages for the clarity of sustainability. Continue reading “Thinking sustainability needs a mix of future scenarios.”

One great visual paints a thousand innovating words

One great visual paints a thousand words
This visual I came across some years back, and for me, is outstanding in providing the feedback loops that go into developing the right innovation vision. To get to a definitive endpoint of having an innovation vision, you are faced with some complex challenges. These are well shown here.
Each influences the other and constantly loop back, making an improving vision success hopefully.

The critical feedback needs for constructing an innovation vision

The different challenges seen in this terrific depiction provide the sort of dialogue and efforts that needs to go into ‘crafting’ the innovation vision. It is hard, thoughtful work. Let’s look at each of these a little more.
The Time Challenge
Continue reading “One great visual paints a thousand innovating words”

Why do we have difficulties to self-disrupt?

“Why do we always seem to have internal difficulties to self-disrupt?”

Now that is an interesting question. My quick and simple answer is to look at all the internal constraints you can see, or ask those around you what they can see as constraints for them. You will be surprised at all the constraints that stop the individual or the organization to make changes.

It is also being constrained when you look outside your organization and not recognizing the (perpetual) changes going on, often until it is too late or a fast, nimble entrepreneur has nipped in and set about building a new alternative to your existing offering that has, perhaps for some time shown signs of business model decay. Continue reading “Why do we have difficulties to self-disrupt?”

Adjusting to a changing world

Reflecting on a rapidly changing business world.

The issue we must tackle today, is how we go about adapting to the changing world? One that will be able to take all the advantages of the changes all businesses are undergoing, how societies will be adjusting and responding. We are facing a time of unprecedented economic and social crisis but this is a time equally for seizing and sizing different opportunities.

We clearly need to find ways to navigate ourselves back into some (new) order; to stabilize the chaos we are in. What we first need to do is make sense of what is going on around us, we need to determine what actions to take and the level of action, resource and support each part needs. We are in a period of (great) change. How are we thinking about how to adjust, not just to the immediate challenges but the greater ones that are certainly heading our way.

Within business, the present crisis is offering a chance to make significant changes to how we operate in the future. I am not sure many of you feel the same, it seems disruption is in everything, in what we need to undertake, in what is coming towards us in change. We are challenged but we have ample signals to amplify and explore.

Disruption actually has a common purpose, often far less sinister than promoted or we suspect, it requires us to re-equip and open up, as we learn to deal in this changing world where connections can emerge from anywhere at any time, offering a new ‘line of sight’ onto an existing problem to begin to break down the barriers and find new fresh ways forward. Continue reading “Adjusting to a changing world”

Do you recognize your innovators leaders position?

Recognizing your innovation leadership style

Often innovation succeeds or fails by the personal involvement and engagement of a ‘selected’ few. Recognizing the types of innovation leadership might help you manage the innovation work a little better.

So can you recognize the traits of your innovation leader?

Are they a front-end or back-end innovation leader? Here’s how you can begin to spot the difference.

Before we climb into this

I recall enjoying a book published a few years back, “Innovation Governance- how top management organizes and mobilizes for innovation”, written by Jean-Philippe Deschamps and Beebe Nelson. I can totally recommend it as it is so rich in thinking through much around innovation, placed within this governance framework. It lays out a clear improvement path for innovation to travel. I am drawing from this book on some thoughts about innovation leadership.

Continue reading “Do you recognize your innovators leaders position?”

Focusing on moving from disorder in today’s world

To borrow and adapt a phrase from F. Scott Fitzgerald and those over at Cognitive Edge: “The test of (complex adaptive) intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

I wanted to go back to one of my favourite frameworks, the Cynefin framework for partly thinking through the “known-unknown-unknowable” in our present world. We are seemingly more in the “unknown or unknowable” at present, perhaps in a world of disorder, in our understanding and actions relating to the current global worry, this coronavirus, as it became a global pandemic.

The Cynefin framework is from Dave Snowden through Cognitive Edge. The positioning of Cognitive Edge is “making sense of complexity in order to act.”

I start by suggesting we need to find ways to navigate ourselves back into some (new) order; to stabilize the chaos we are in. What we first need to do is make sense of what is going on around us, we need to determine what actions to take and the level of action, resource and support each part needs. We need to constantly ask: is it clear, complicated, complex, or chaotic, or even worse, highly confusing. The Cynefin framework significantly helps us to determine what particular parts we are dealing with, in the decisions needed. Continue reading “Focusing on moving from disorder in today’s world”

Category: Leading innovation