building innovation capability | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Are we playing snakes and ladders with innovation?

Have you ever played snakes and ladders? Called chutes and ladders in the US. A number of “ladders” and “snakes” are pictured on the board, each connecting two specific board squares.

The object of the game is to navigate one’s game piece, according to dice rolls, from the start (bottom square) to the finish (top square), helped or hindered by ladders and snakes respectively.

Originally from India the game is a simple race contest based on sheer luck and I am beginning to wonder if we are playing a new version of this with innovation? This is called “bust or boom” or “success or failure” or even “maybe or maybe not,” or even “will we, won’t we.” It just all depends on our luck in rolling the dice, a serendipity with a darker twist that many companies seem to be playing with their innovation capability building.

The game came to mind as I read through a recent survey on Innovation

I have just been reading an Innovation report / survey from Accenture called “Clear Vision, Cloudy Execution” and I really do think we are playing with innovation as a game, it has some really serious implications within it that need more drawing out than possibly offered in my view. We should be getting worried that many bigger companies are losing the innovation game.

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Delivering the innovation core: building capability, capacity and competency.

Each organization needs to understand its strategic resources to build continuously innovation, so as to sustain and grow the organization; otherwise, it will eventually die, starved of what is vital to sustaining itself.

The resources provide the lungs that give oxygen; they need to constantly be nurtured, too breathe and pump new life into the existing.

For innovation the same applies, we need to consistently build our innovative resources, they give delivery of the healthy living cells to promote and sustain us in new value potential.

The problem is we often are not very good at maintaining our resources and innovation activity. We just simply do not sustain our efforts, we tend to allow them to drift along or become lopsided from one individual team’s efforts, while the others simply ‘wallow’ Continue reading “Delivering the innovation core: building capability, capacity and competency.”

Building Innovation Capability Through Three Interlocking Platforms

A little while back I was reading somewhere an academic paper and it triggered a thought on interlocking platforms for innovation, so I set about capturing it for this post, and then it somehow got filed away.

So this is the reworked opening thought to record the idea to ‘capture’ it, so I can reflect later on, on how I should build on this further. I show a number of hyperlinks to help in pulling this together…..well for me anyway!

So this is a work-in-progress and should be taken as a thinking out loud at this stage.

Linking capability through interlocking platforms
We are in need of a different “sustaining” capacity build around innovation as its continuous core, constantly evolving, adapting, learning and adjusting, in perpetual motion.

How? Innovation has many ‘touch points, a myriad of dimensions that need to be aligned and integrated. How can we achieve this more holistic view, so innovation management can make a significant advancement on where we are today?

Making the business case for innovation to change is not easy but essential
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Innovation can be so remarkable if we can fully embrace it

What is so remarkable about innovation is that it can be highly dynamic. It’s a task that anyone could do, given the time, education, clarity of purpose and commitments from our organizations, those that recognize the true understanding of the contribution all their people can potentially make towards innovation.

Today, too few people are actually allowed to work on innovation activities, yet the outcomes are ones that everyone wants, and certainly want to be part of. We all want that sense of belonging, of working on or in something that is exciting, dynamic and forward-looking.

We really do need to find ways to allow innovation to be part of each person’s daily jobs. Having a sense of purpose to improve or change something through innovation is such a powerful enabler.

Getting from where we are today, seemingly bogged down in many of the legacies of past innovation understanding, seems to me something we must tackle sooner than later also.

There is no time like the present to overhaul the existing innovation thinking and upgrade it with a faster, more focused innovating machine that yields greater returns due to this overhaul .

Continue reading “Innovation can be so remarkable if we can fully embrace it”

Approaching innovation through fitness dynamics needs a structured approach.

This post follows on from my recent one of “the Innovation Journeyman.” We do have a real journey still to travel to understand the dynamics within innovation. Here, I want to lay out a possible path that might advance us towards achieving this. This includes a fairly ‘intensive’ nine step approach outlined below.

What we do need to do is constantly evolve our innovation capabilities to perform in more dynamic and flexible ways. We need to acquire that consistent aim of achieving a more adaptable and adjusting approach to innovation in all its parts.

We need to meet the changing circumstances and challenges we are all facing to regain the real growth needed from our economies and organizations, making what we do at the same time, more sustainable. Delivering better innovation outcomes is central to this task.

Continue reading “Approaching innovation through fitness dynamics needs a structured approach.”

The Innovation Journeyman

Continuing the innovation journey searching for the framework to deliver the dynamics of innovation by focusing upon achieving a certain innovation fitness.

My personal innovation journey started way back in 2001 when I got ‘hooked’ on innovation and what it could deliver in its impact on a business.

I believe it is for greater engagement within the organization and increased identification through their people, with the potential for learning and improving their capabilities.

Progressively I learnt about innovation, studied it as part of my Master’s degree and began to practice the parts others were prepared to pay me for, either to listen to, or offer advice.

This innovation journey took on a shape that eventually became 100% of my focus within my advisory practice at Agility Innovation Specialists by systematically building my understanding of innovation and providing this knowledge to others through advisory, coaching, writing and mentoring services.

It still is a long continuous journey twelve plus years later.

I’m constantly learning, reading, absorbing and interpreting what I understand and then attempting to provide my thoughts to others, those willing to listen!

I’m comfortable in much, totally restless in so much more out there to explore and work through, so as to achieve potential solutions, through experimentation and prototyping until they become recognized as relevant and applicable.

Investigating, researching and reading all required a significant amount of time, all alongside needing to practice innovation, working to clients’ needs or pushing for their attention to changes taking place within the field of innovation management and what they needed to do about it.

Dynamic capability applied to innovation gained my increased attention Continue reading “The Innovation Journeyman”

Building an Integrated Innovation Capability Framework

My real area of dedicated focus and wish to achieve, is in supporting organizations, teams or even the individual, to really build their integrated capability and capacity to innovate as a connected framework.

The critical design is of three mutually supporting capability building platforms do need to be put into place.

Within an organizational setting, you need to have in place three supporting capability building platforms; organizational supporting, knowledge and competency gathering, and a clear innovation process to channel new capacity through as final products or new services. All three need to be in place and integrated.

If you have these three platforms in place you can begin to move from more of an ad hoc set of capabilities through to a more integrated, synergistic and unique innovation capability framework to grow from. Continue reading “Building an Integrated Innovation Capability Framework”

There are two distinct parts to any Innovation Funnel

I wrote in an earlier blog called “the new extended innovation funnel” (http://bit.ly/hQTEJz) my reasoning for thinking differently from our traditional view of how the innovation funnel should look like. I feel it should look more like this.

Extended Innovation Funnel Both sides — Extended Innovation Funnel – are we really listening?

The ‘classic’ innovation funnel talked about is wrong for todays job!
Continue reading “There are two distinct parts to any Innovation Funnel”

Walking that narrow innovation pathway.

Walking that narrow innovation pathway needs some rethinking.

narrow pathway — The narrow innovation pathway

“Innovation is the pathway to travel and seek out our future”

Today there is as much of a gap between the aspiration to innovate and the ability to deliver on this.

We still continue to ignore the constant suggestion that innovation should be systematic so the organization can provide some degree of reliability to innovate in a continuous fashion.

We often allow the concept of ‘holistic’ to simply float over us and ignore the intimate connection between strategic thinking, innovation and their alignment. It is still sad we seem not to go beyond a certain point in our innovation thinking, it continues along a narrow path of limited understanding. Will it ever change?

I appreciate the statement, I think made by John Kao: “Strategy is useless without innovation, innovation is directionless without strategy”. Innovation can be a strategy catalyst but is it still? I really do believe we need a new sense of the scale and scope of innovation; we do need to get a firmer grip on its complexities. Continue reading “Walking that narrow innovation pathway.”