It is not just replacing energy sources; it is all about solution renewal end-to-end and that needs innovation
Within the energy transition, we must not lose sight of the final consumer. The final consumer of energy is going to be the ultimate arbitrator.

The post Solutions for Energy do need to be end-to-end and highly innovative first appeared on Navigating Intelligent Business Ecosystems.

Here in this post, I want to expand on my thinking around navigating a complex landscape that the Energy Transition demands.

I am looking at the Energy Transition from an evolving technology innovation perspective. In other words, what “forces” can be identified or promoted that can transform the existing energy system through the pursuit of the new invention, innovation, or technological advancement. Specifically, ones that will be needed over such an extended time and complexity of change that this Energy Transition will take, upwards of twenty to thirty years to give it an unstoppable momentum.

For this, we need to continually identify resources and capital by addressing the competencies, capabilities, and capacities to generate and accelerate change and consistently map these back to the realities of the landscape of change we are trying to traverse.

When you look through the lens of innovating at the Energy Transition, you are often questioning the fitness, or the reality to achieve something.

A risk of the energy transition is we give higher emphasis on the depth of knowledge in one area and fail to pull this together, to map it into the bigger picture of the practical, broader-based one. This “mapping back” gives our broader Society and non-expert groups needing to relate to the Energy transition gives them identification. It generates their need to change or support change and brings about more extensive (behavioral) change and awareness. Otherwise, they just accept the idea of advancement but equally block it if it does not fit their frame of thinking or how or why it is relevant to them.

We need to recognize that the energy world is “stacked” with Scientists, Engineers, and Researchers that have a real depth of expertise but so often can be lacking the required “T” shape skills that can actually be restrictive to making change.

These T-shaped skills that we need more of by having a combination of general skills and knowledge that support in-depth expertise in one area. They can bring broader validation and understanding of the relationships within any journey of change so often needs.  Often the scientist or researcher simply wants to hand over. There is a greater need for skills that can anchor a solution, advocate the reason for the change, and then provide the broader resolve and purpose to ensure delivery of the change.

There are plenty of (dense) reports projecting the Energy transition change and what is required, but they often fail to make the connections to the broader audience involved in this change. In my view, we need to explore and generate a better understanding of adaptive landscapes and provide a “sense of identity.”

The value of fitness landscapes as part of any Energy Transition awareness makes sense to bring identity and structure.

Let me explain this by keeping Hydrogen as the initial focus:

I have taken Hydrogen as my opening exploration to traverse this Energy landscape and have been providing the ongoing analysis over on my dedicated innovating4energy posting site by exploring different aspects of Hydrogen in a series of extended posts (one- believing in hydrogen, two- the gas too deliver, three- shades of and four- tensions and bottlenecks)

I need to begin to evaluate the value of knowing the real part of any hydrogen ‘fitness’ and what makes up its distinctive dynamic capabilities that moves it towards the solutions we need to have in place to contribute in significant ways to the energy transition that is underway. These solutions can be, but not limited to, Technology and Innovation, Scale and Adoption, Infrastructure and Market Conditions, Government Engagement and Involvement, Industry, and critically vital Public adoption.

Let me return to the earlier point on “T-shaped” people first.

This valuable post offers a useful descriptor on how different people have different skills and why the “T-shaped” combinations become so helpful. Managing such a change in Energy Systems requires multiplying skills.  The post ‘designates’ the differences and points out the need is to be continuously adaptive to varying demand.

In my view, knowing or anticipating that “varying demand” requires a building of the fitness in the capabilities, competences, and capabilities. This ability to enact change is my starting point for my thinking over the need to think about the Energy Transition Fitness Landscape.

We deploy expertise to overcome difficult challenges or have the space to innovate, and we need non-expert people to clear the pathway and provide the experts with the ‘right’ environment. Both approaches changing the existing, breaking down the ‘bottlenecks’ but in different ways.

The more you have the right environment to develop “T-shaped people, who go beyond one skill or expertise and engage in the joint identification, then the quicker you can accelerate change through collective understanding

We need to visualize and articulate change in connecting ways.I believe both the Three Horizon framework that I have deployed for years  (see this post for relating it to the energy transition) and the concept of knowing your fitness and the landscape have real value in the Energy Transition. Both allow for a greater collective identity and engagement of all the necessary expertise and generalists to come together. In a complex challenge like the Energy Transition, you need to create the identification and build the collaborative ecosystem to focus resources on the (shared) identified goals.

Taking Hydrogen as my point of reference, to understand the context, complexities, and creative tension.

By firstly, mapping out the hydrogen terrain to the task at hand enables us to understand and relate to what is needed – I call that the context for change. I have been investigating Hydrogen as a promising energy carrier to understand the barriers and obstacles to the energy transition we need to undertake. There are so many underlying “tensions” in this change from established fuels, infrastructure, and product delivery that Hydrogen needs to overcome.

Taking this fitness landscape thinking a little further here.

Any Energy Transition Fitness Landscapes identifies the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts- the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The higher the ‘fitness’ transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities into final tangible outcomes.

Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your hydrogen landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

Mapping out your capabilities, competencies, and capacities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. You begin to get fit for the journey ahead.

I took what I call a “Fitness Landscape Result Expectancies” approach.

Fitness Landscape Result Expectancies

My approach here is a work-in-progress; it will evolve and adapt depending on interest and demand.

These are my “first pass” of the expected results or points of investigation sought, by identifying the critical aspects of capability identification for the Hydrogen (or any energy transformation journey), to make it a significant contributor to the Future Energy Mix.

• A greater understanding of the obstacles and barriers to Hydrogen, becoming a significant energy carrier in the future energy mix is critical to understand. It “conveys” the fitness landscape journey.
• The understanding of what needs to be changed moves Hydrogen towards an energy transition that is sustainable and evolutionary built on technology investigation, validation, and ability to scale. Solutions gain world-wide. Recognition and adoption as the resulting outcomes and processes from discovery to realization.
• The journey generates a learning process for the identification of real and ‘false’ dynamic capabilities. Dynamic capabilities bring about change in the environment. As we frame, we can identify differences separating the more static ones that often just need reinforcement or retirement as not of lasting value.
• Pursuing limited or ‘selective’ development allows for restrictive exchanges within a network of specialization. These will not have the desired effect to accelerate solutions that can replace the existing ones unless the broader network effects are not accounted for.
• Any fitness landscape journey, where change is a significant level of requirement, requires a holistic view of the existing issues and the intent and goal of the journey by framing a clear strategic plan to mobilize the necessary forces.
• The solutions suggested will draw out internal discussions, growing recognition, and reality of the present and future needs in this area of resource allocation and capital allocation.
• Importance of linking capability across different activities or technology applications to become increasingly ‘dynamic’ for a more sustainable future.
• The ability to build out a clear capability portfolio knowing where resource needs to be applied and their likely timeframe from concept to fruition. These evaluations will also help identify synergies to bring new value and future impact options.
• We need to challenge long, well-established routines and processes to see how we can extend technology options. To discover and continue the existing can be valuable to place additional resources behind.
• Having clarity in the fitness landscape allows for regularly taking additional “adaptive walks” to learn and adjust current thinking and question alternatives more openly.
• Knowing your capabilities, competencies, and capabilities intensifies and solidifies the studies, investigation, and importance of innovation through greater engagement and a growing understanding. You have greater confidence in where to invest new capital and resources.
• Outcomes from these expected results raise dynamic capability and the importance of dynamism for more flexibility and fitness discovery. By identifying higher points of value, you accelerate the change process and plot different projects and their impact.

Looking for outcomes and outputs.

The reason I am building this into a workable model, is it firstly extends on my previous work in Innovation Fitness Landscapes. Within this adaptive approach to the Energy Transition, we can seek out and determine the Energy Fitness Landscape to then determine where the critical focal points are so the necessary resources, and capital can be applied.

I want to identify the necessary capacities, competencies, and capabilities to undergo this journey. Its ultimate aim is to identify outcomes that can become ones that give additional focus to knowing which are valuable. Also, which aspects need to extend the existing solutions and which have limited or no value and those resources and capital should be released to be redirected onto the ones that hold promise, impact, and value.

The energy complexities do need understanding, explaining, and mapping. The knowledge of how the traversing will be undertaken to get to the end goal of a clean energy system as soon as we can, needs often different articulation? Fitness landscapes help make the journey a lot easier to determine what is needed to undertake it.

The post Why I like the idea of Energy Fitness Landscapes first appeared on Navigating Intelligent Business Ecosystems.

Hydrogen is undoubtedly becoming the big agenda ticket within any Energy Transition. It is the promise of being a central pillar for many parts of the world to achieve their targets of zero carbon by mid-century.

Hydrogen seems to holds, it seems, such a promise, but it is nearly all to do. There is so much to validate, prove, and certainly scale. We have some exciting pilots, even some full commercial-scale projects. Still, these are not connected up as we do not yet have a Hydrogen infrastructure, market, or overarching policies to build into a movement that shifts the energy needle. Lots of desire and willingness, but we do need to really make “hydrogen happen.”

I needed to step back and reframe my thinking on Hydrogen and also to help me understand the bigger “beast” of the Energy Transition. There was so much “hype” and future promise I was not getting a real sense of order.

So I sort of came to a screeching halt on researching further. I needed to get back into my ‘comfort’ zone of evaluating all the hype. So I wanted to go back to a comfortable place to ground my thinking. I have been wondering, have we the right focus to this? Are we often missing the real context of the need for the energy transition? Are we building the capabilities, competencies, and capacity to scale Hydrogen? In my view, we lack a specific focus. Opinions are varied, diverse, and in many cases, merely opportunistic. We need to a different level of strategic fitness

Applying Fitness Landscapes to the Energy Transition. Here in this post, I want to briefly introduce some thinking around navigating a complex landscape that the Energy Transition demands. I have taken Hydrogen as my opening exploration to traverse this landscape.

The more you investigate Hydrogen, the more you realize the complexity of what needs to be achieved to deliver what has been suggested; that Hydrogen could meet 24% of the world’s final energy demands by 2050. Today it provides around 1%. I find it hard to imagine the change our energy systems need. To move them from a reliance on Oil, Gas, and Coal and make these Systems based on renewables of Solar, Wind and, Water- suggested at a level of real global magnitude, I find it hard to imagine. I always need to see the bigger picture.

Enter My Energy Transition Fitness Landscape thinking

I decided I should attempt to sort out the “chaff from the wheat,” try to separate all the hype surrounding Hydrogen, and attempt to ground it in different realities.

I mentioned in a recent post here that states, “My Energy Journey is being navigated across three-time and opportunity related horizons,” where I introduced the Three Horizon framing to help me navigate the Energy Transition.

I always need to anchor my investigations and research.

So as I investigate, build and explore the Energy transition by taking Hydrogen as the first one to explore through the three horizons approach, I get a high-level sense of the different phases that we need to pass through, moving from the present to the future. It helps map out the terrain. So much of what I am reading is pushing personal agendas.

This post is explaining my structures to attempt to understand the Energy Transition and bring us all to a specific fitness to make the journey of realization that Hydrogen is central to our climate goals.

So as I am investigating the Energy transition deeper, it needed another layering of understanding to put order into my thinking.

Navigating the Energy Transition Fitness Landscape

This grabbing of the three horizons framework is still not enough. The other thing was to revert back to another piece of work I have been deploying for some years and applying it here; Navigating the fitness landscape required to bring Hydrogen to fruition as the alternative energy source.

The value of fitness landscapes as part of any Energy Transition awareness makes sense. Let me explain this by keeping Hydrogen as the focus:

To attempt to “distill” all the thoughts about how Hydrogen is going to become the Energy Fuel of the future, I, for one, need to work through this logically.

I need to begin to evaluate the value of knowing the real part of any hydrogen ‘fitness’ and what makes up its distinctive dynamic capabilities that moves it towards the solutions we need to have. These can be, but not limited to Technology and Innovation, Scale and Adoption, Infrastructure and Market Conditions, Government Engagement and Involvement, Industry, and critically important, Public adoption.

I wrote a post, “Recognizing a Unique Part of the Hydrogen Ecosystem,” it gives more context if you care to read it. The Energy Transition can only work in an Ecosystem thinking approach.

I have further applied a Landscape thinking to the Hydrogen challenges.

I propose it is necessary to map out the hydrogen terrain.

What I have been working through is the thinking here to put the Hydrogen story along a clear pathway for me to understand. I would like to attempt to explain the rationale behind this.

Turn away now if you are not up to a theoretical outline, but it is the best way to explain its value in helping us in figuring out the Energy Transition as a journey. Once you grasp the principles, you can “map, travel, and traverse.”

I am hopeful it might help your understanding of the process we all need to work through, to relate to the ‘Hydrogen story and its potential.’

It goes like this:

By firstly, mapping out the hydrogen terrain to the task at hand enables us to understand and relate to what is needed – I call that the context for change.

Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your hydrogen landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.

Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs.

The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, those challenges and peaks, the tougher the energy transition becomes for hydrogen to traverse. The harder these are, also determines the higher fitness for the rate of change needed.

The height of the peaks in these landscapes, in technology solutions, in Government support, in delivering research and development that can take ‘promising’ technologies or concepts, the greater value should be placed upon them.

As you identify how intense the transition challenge is, and as you determine, the number of critical peaks needed to be surmounted shows how diverse and awkward the whole terrain is, to get to any realization.

The more you can identify all the Hydrogen challenges, in this case, then you can scope out and recognize the appropriate resources this will need in Global coordination.

Presently Hydrogen is in exploratory phasing.

The search for validation of a concept, to show it has some pathway to scaling up gives us the path and ability to identify the emerging patterns and scope. From these pilots and initial investments provides the need to further act and invest, We are making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed.

Understanding these will enable you to move you to the higher fitness points where the viability of Hydrogen is enhanced and needed to be to resolve the challenges to be faced as they multiply and need phased resolution.

You need to experiment, to take the exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential, and learn how to scale accordingly. Many on this journey at present for understanding where and how Hydrogen fits. We need to build capabilities, capacities, and competencies so they become essential to even begin to enter this race to a Hydrogen future.

As you begin to think of your capabilities and capacities to instigate change, it raises critical questions. These are around “are we focusing on the right ones to deliver on the challenges we are facing?” “what can we do differently?” and “how can we identify those critical ones?”

Mapping out your capabilities, competencies, and capacities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed. You begin to get fit for the journey ahead.

Any Energy Transition Fitness Landscapes identifies the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts- the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater the ‘fitness’ transforms your landscape potential into accelerating opportunities into final tangible outcomes.

The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks. These adaptive walks move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability and visibility is enhanced and needed to be identified, then resolved to be fitter for the challenges being faced.

Higher fitness equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter-couple landscape entities and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and improve repeatable cycle times.

Why Fitness Landscapes?

“The greater the fitness to evolve and innovate will equate to more value creation potential.”

The pressing need for any complex system of change is to integrate, build, and reconfigure it in a structured way.

Fitness landscapes provide an understanding of the existing position and ‘point’ to where to place your resource to improve your innovative capacity through understanding the dynamics of ALL the parts to know where you are heading.

If we are not aware, fit, or ready to navigate the terrain and do not have a clear understanding of where we are heading, just a vague idea of “achieving zero-carbon by 2050,” we are likely to get lost.

Hydrogen is far too over-hyped at present; let’s get it grounded in reality and build it accordingly.

We all need to get energy fit.  If Hydrogen is our decarbonization solution, we really do need to stop the ‘hype’ and get the rhetoric clear to provide the pathway of understanding. We need to get fit quick to enable hydrogen to exert its (rightful) place in any Energy Transition.

We must make sure that the journey has to be far better explained to allow ‘many’ to navigate the Energy Transition Landscape.

Understanding the value creation potential of fitness landscapes

The greater awareness of your fitness and the terrain and goal you want to achieve equates to more value creation potential.

The ability to take Hydrogen beyond much of today’s hype and “future promise” is to ground our understanding in realities, in knowing the landscape and terrain we have to navigate, if we want to emerge successfully on the other side of the energy transition. Knowing the possible terrain makes us all better prepared. Let’s treat any Energy Transition as a long journey that we all need to measure ourselves again, in progress, in fitness, and in moving towards the ultimates goals we have set ourselves.

The post Exploring the Energy Transition Fitness Landscapes – opening thoughts on Hydrogen first appeared on Navigating Intelligent Business Ecosystems.

The aim is to relate these to where your organization is in their existing capabilities, where they need to go, in identifying and clarifying the necessary capabilities they need to have, so as to achieve certain strategic goals and then, “we”, together, collectively prioritize the critical ones as ‘must have’ and then set about filling the gaps.

This is the innovative fitness journey needed to be travelled.

The building of those more ‘dynamic’ capabilities and competencies are the ones you need so as to provide for a more dynamic innovation environment and deliver unique capacity for your ongoing strategic goals.

This work is covered off partly on this website but does have its own dedicated site where the articles, post and thinking have been building up over a fairly lengthy period. Go and visit it at www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com.

So let me tell you what this is all about and I will describe this with heavy referencing from Geoffrey Moore’s book “Dealing with Darwin”. Without doubt one of my favourite books in how it helped me piece together a large part of my dynamic innovation fitness puzzle.

First you have the internal view.

Critically, you need to take a fresh look at your internal dynamics, at what happens when core competencies cease to differentiate, how resources must be shifted to new areas, how deeply threatening such changes can be, how protective inertia emerges as the enemy of destabilizing innovation, and finally, what kinds of management responses can best deal with inertia and redirect its energy towards fresh innovation.

This is the inward-facing dilemma that needs to be addressed.

Then you have the External viewpoint

It is about creating a competitive advantage in an increasingly commoditizing world. To lead that effort, you must continually reappraise what role your company is playing in the market ecosystem, how the market landscape of competition is changing and understand where your competitive advantage has come from in the past and where it is likely to come from in the future and with what kinds of differentiation will be most rewarded, and what kinds of innovation are most required.

This is the outward-facing portion of the story.

Then you have that growing sense of observations

Innovation and inertia: we often get stuck in particular types of innovation, promote given skills to the detriment of others, equally necessary but ignored or not understood fully.

We fail to adapt to market changes, we fund to much of one type of innovation to the exclusion of others and in the process create internal traffic jams of sorts, frustrations and tempers to match.

We squander our scarce resources of time, talent and management attention on initiatives that fail to give us a competitive advantage and get constantly impeded by these forces of inertia all around us. Indeed, the more successful we have been in the past, the stronger the resistance to any subsequent change in the innovation course.

Then you have those real-world worries

So what does keep management up at night about their performance on innovation? The rising anxieties stem from that worry that perhaps we are losing our ability to innovate, can our people still compete? Do we really get it? And even if we do, can we still get it to the market place at the right time and feed that need? Can we actually see the light of day?

Then Evolutions can happen

Evolution proceeds more gradually but in times of crisis we are forced to make choices that enable you to step back and reflect. I would argue we are all increasingly facing our own types of crisis in today’s volatile world.

If you were able to achieve an understanding that is based on more informed choice, so you can extract yourself from one path that makes you increasingly vulnerable and provides support to commit to a new core focus, one that offers you a more sustainable competitive position on which to compete through innovation. Would you take this different pathway?

Your task, challenges and keys to unlock your dilemma lie here.

1. The task is to develop a suite of core innovation competencies with proven capability to create (unique) competitive advantage.
2. The challenge for management teams is to choose the type of innovation appropriate to their situation and to exploit it deeply enough to create definitive separation from their direct competitors. This can be completed in different ways but a thorough analysis is recommended
3. The key is to identify and then extract (scarce) resources from (existing) context and re-channel this into the new core that will differentiate you through the new emerging innovation competencies and systemic approach.
4. A real need is to reposition resources and provide focus on the ‘right’ capabilities to meet new challenges knowing your “Innovation Fitness & the Dynamics in the Landscape”

“The sooner you start, the sooner you will be able to extract yourself from the commitments that make you vulnerable and establish those commitments that will strengthen your new position“- Geoffrey A. Moore

Survival of the fittest dominates irrespective.

• We are all caught in this Darwinian race- all of us it seems.
• So where do you want to focus your limited resources? The ‘natural selection’ choice to increase your abilities to innovate linked to your needs.
• Start by mapping out your innovation direction to the tasks and capabilities on hand and those needed or required to get you to certain predefined goals.
• Chose the path that will leverage and expand your knowledge, capabilities and capacities and start the journey.
• Start recognizing the opportunity spaces and gaps when you think you should be heading but feel you might have constraints in moving towards.
• The greater you can identify the need for improving your ‘innovation fitness’ allows you to get closer to accelerating towards the seen and yet unseen opportunities.
• The greater ‘innovation fitness’ equates to more value creation potential.
• As you learn to recognize the difference between managing the existing routines and building the new capabilities, the quicker you can absorb these new learnings within the organization, so they can become the new dynamic routines that are needed.
• You then begin to reduce uncertainties and strengthen the true innovation capabilities you need to thrive and survive in this Darwinian world.

Interested to learn more?

Then simply contact me. I am happy to discuss this and how this can be applied to your organization and what it means in engagement and commitments.

You build progressively the Innovation capabilities and competencies levels to become dynamic and fitter to compete and succeed.

The post Dealing with Your Darwin Effect through Innovation first appeared on Navigating Intelligent Business Ecosystems.

This begins to show you the way www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com is new and perhaps your possible innovative workout gym.

Firstly stop and survey our world from a new advantage point

Can you imagine standing on top of a mountain, looking out across a vast expanse of nothing but mountains and valleys stretching out before you? If you squint hard enough you can just make out that somewhere in the hazy distance, the endpoint of your travels.

The distance you have to travel towards that much-needed innovation understanding, that is made up of so many different dynamics that make you and your organization that much fitter to compete in today’s challenging world seems really far off, or actually is it?

Exhilaration can quickly turn to reality.

Clearly, while you are on top of this mountain you feel exhilarated to have even got up to this point. To even get there you have already made a decision that you and your organization need to become more innovative.

One that needs to look beyond what you have, to what is possible, you are curious to explore this further, you have to, innovation is a strategic imperative for, adding value, growth and improved wealth creation.

You have innovative choices
You had some vague ideas on what that might mean when you set out on that first climb to achieve this first advantage point. What you never expected once you had got to this particular mountain top was just what the vista that had so suddenly opened up in front of you, would actually mean.

The sudden shock of what might be in front of you suddenly became overwhelming; it stopped you in your tracks. You felt suddenly confronted on what all this might actually mean. Do you go on or go back down?

Starting any journey always needs a first step.

While you had lived fairly comfortably down in the valley below, you simply kept looking up wondering what it would be like to become a more innovative organization.

What was beyond that one mountain you constantly looked up too? You had survived, sometimes you even thrived but much of that ‘success’ was actually outside your own hands, it was often determined by some luck, often those abilities to react to something quickly enough on what went on around you.

You followed others, you adapted and adjusted to changes going on and kept simply going but you felt this was not a really sustaining position. You wanted to change this, you felt you just wanted to be more in charge of your own innovation destiny. The question was how?

The big idea, a decision to walk a new path with a journey’s end in mind.
Then the big idea came to you. The way  to change was to make a critical decision, to move on by following a new path, a path towards innovation fitness. Why innovation, why the need to get fit? What was the journey end you had in mind?

To help on your journey I believe we need to raise our game and provide a greater fitness to the way we manage innovation. The dynamics of innovation need to be understood

A new website dedicated to Making Your Organization Fit.
Innovation Fitness Dynamics is a structured approach, you might want to find out about. There is a fair amount of information already ‘posted’ but in any journey, you need to get prepared, to be equipped. Jog on over:

www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com

This blog is about offering you a pathway towards achieving your own innovative fitness dynamics

The journey has many peaks and troughs, mountains and valleys to forge. Firstly you have to understand your present fitness to travel on any ‘change’  journey and in this particular case, to achieve any innovation fitness is highly dynamic and challenging.

There are lots of fitness points needed to transform your innovation potential from a simple follower to a leader, recognized and respected for your ability to consistently deliver innovation in a sustainable way.

The end goal of your journey is simply “the greater fitness you can achieve in innovation capability the more it can equate to a new value creation“.  The exploring of the terrain that suddenly is opening up in front of you as you look over the mountains and valleys is in need of exploring, of travelling, of searching out those different combinations you require to get you to your own dynamics of innovation fitness understanding.

Welcome.  You will find here your guide, your companion, to be available to walk alongside you on your innovation journey.

The first step towards achieving any innovation fitness is to decide that you are are not going to stay where you are and so you become aware, the second step is a clear acceptance that you have to take a journey. The first step leads one to the second.

“One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything – and one’s last is to come to terms with everything”

–  George Christoph Lichten- physics professor and scientist 1742- 1799.

We begin our journey, a journey full of innovative fitness dynamics.Visit:
www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com

The post The Real Need Is Achieving Innovation Fitness first appeared on Navigating Intelligent Business Ecosystems.

I’ve already written in previous blogs about the need of “constantly checking for the pulse of innovation” ( http://bit.ly/c3G0Ta) and suggesting the way to “open up your thinking to dynamic capabilities for innovation success” (   http://bit.ly/bxTeYO).

I’d like to take this one step further in this blog and outline my thinking on innovative fitness landscapes and why they are essential to understand.

Each organization needs to know its Innovation Fitness Landscape- why?

There is a pressing need for a firm is to consistently build and reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities to address rapidly changing environments.

It is the mastering of this ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in rapid changing market conditions that will enable certain organizations to emerge as the winners of the innovation race.

This view requires a more ‘dynamic’ set of capabilities. Often the question becomes one of “which are the critical ones to focus upon to improve the chance of greater success?
Knowing your fitness landscape does provide a good understanding of your existing position and set of capabilities and can ‘point’ you towards the ones that you need to have to move towards to have in place to improve your innovation capacity and achieve closer to your goals.

Survival of the fittest dominates

Each organization has limited resources, it is to know where to focus your limited resources to maximise your abilities to deliver better innovation.

The key is to map out those current innovation capabilities to the tasks (and aspirations) at hand and identify the opportunity spaces and gaps that need to be filled to match aspiration with abilities, so as to deliver against the stated strategic need.

It does seem Darwin seemingly raises his head in much of what we do to simply keep up and adapt. So we do need to understand innovation in more of its entirety not only to survive but to thrive.

So what are Innovation Fitness Landscapes?

“The greater the fitness to innovate will equate to more value creation potential.”

I believe we do need to provide a solution to this understanding the innovation challenge by constructing a more comprehensive framework.

Part of my present work is to find a working model to achieve this, I’m getting close.

It is this critical need of any business organization or country for wealth creation through (new) growth and successful innovation lies in understanding the path to achieving this. But what are the factors, the enablers to support this? It is by identifying the more dynamic capabilities and then plotting these to understand your existing ‘fitness’.

There is still today far too much of a ‘piecemeal’ approach in evaluating the inter-related dynamics needed for innovation still going on, both at Government and Organizational level. We need to see this differently, to tackle it in a more comprehensive manner.

If you can imagine that you are looking out over a range of mountains and valleys and you need to determine your journey to get from one point to another as your goal.

You need to understand your fitness and in this case your innovation fitness of what is needed to achieve your goals with the resources you have available or understanding what will bridge those gaps and transverse the challenges you face.

Let me explain this a little more.

Let’s mix the theory of fitness landscapes with your innovation objectives

• By firstly mapping out your innovation capabilities to the task at hand enables you to understand and relate to what is needed- we call that the context for innovation.
• Innovation Fitness Landscapes helps in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate resources to navigate the terrain. The greater understanding of the ‘fitness points needed’ can transform your innovation landscape potential, or in business parlance, achieve your goal.
• Achieving this fitness accelerates your opportunities into final tangible outcomes. Here is a little bit of the theory:  you look for those critical factors that will give higher value potential or ‘peaks’ that are more valuable to your needs. The more ‘rugged’ the landscape, the tougher the innovation challenge, can also determine the greater fitness for the rate of innovation.
• The height of the peaks in these landscapes, the greater value placed upon them, illustrates how intense the innovation challenge is, and the number of critical peaks shows how diverse its potentially is to provide the appropriate resources.
• The ability to identifying the emerging patterns provides the need to act and invest, making adaptive even exploratory walks to provide the appropriate resources needed so as to move you to the higher fitness points where innovation viability is enhanced and needed to be so as to resolve the challenges faced. You need to experiment, to take these exploratory ‘walk’s to realize the potential and learn how to scale accordingly.
• Greater fitness equates to more value creation potential. The ability to inter‐couple landscape entities, to constantly combine the different capabilities in different often unique ways and exploit individual interactions alters your dynamics to innovate and does improve repeatable cycle times from this constant recreation potential.
• The key  is to know what these capability points are- by dynamic linking those that are important and ignoring those that are not.
• By learning from these experiments or adaptive walks you can quickly operationalize routines that can be quickly absorbed across the organization and so reduce uncertainties and strengthen the capabilities.
• The ability to create ‘natural tensions’ from this fitness learning triggers the need to further explore and search out different combinations, this adds even further to your dynamics of innovation understanding.
• Clear distinctive capabilities emerge; these are your dynamic points for innovation.

Act effectively amid uncertainty
There is a consistent need to keep looking around us; on what is going on, what has happened in the past, what is alongside us, what might be ahead and the people and resources we have available.

This is taught to anyone who wants to be well equipped in any mountainous area. We need to be prepared as best we can in business and be ready to anticipate different scenarios and predictions- to be ready to be more adaptive and agile. Innovation requires that.

It is knowing this so-called innovation terrain, understanding the opportunities or possibilities around us along with appreciating the time pressures, positions both internally and externally in the market that provide us much of the context of why we need to innovate in a certain way.

Knowing the intensity of your innovation challenge gives you a better appreciation of what is needed to resolve these challenges- your innovation fitness.

In our understanding of the often ‘diverse’ set of challenges you have to overcome and knowing what is available to you and what you need to find to bridge any gaps becomes essential. The obtaining of insights for innovation enables you to relocate or locate the resources that are capable to be combined to traverse the landscape (or challenge) and innovate better.

Innovation is complex but can be modelled.

Innovation is complex, it is the intricate and often multiple intertwined interactions and relationships that lead to innovation. The greater the connectivity and interdependence that spreads across the organization and externally in our more open innovation initiatives does affects the actions, decisions and behaviours throughout the whole innovation ecosystem. We often talk about the cultural and environment needed to innovate.

Knowing the inter-coupling points mapped out in an innovation fitness landscape, depicting the richness of individual interactions and combinations can alter the dynamics and your thinking of where you need to place your scarce resources to innovate better and in more sustainable ways.

Knowing what is dynamic, those critical determinants within your innovation capabilities do lead you to achieve new and innovative forms of competitive advantage.

I feel it is worth understanding your present fitness levels and knowing what is required to get you to become a more ‘fit’ for the purpose to innovate on a consistent, repeatable basis.

I feel it  is worth knowing, don’t you?

The post Orchestrating the new dynamics of innovation fitness first appeared on Navigating Intelligent Business Ecosystems.

As someone who runs a small, independent consulting and research business that is 100% focused on innovation, the focus has to be on capabilities so  I am always grateful for the continued involvement of the bigger consulting companies in producing sound, relevant and topical research issues on innovation and the building out greater, well-researched understanding.

Large consulting organizations ‘stoke the innovation fire within’, they confirm what you felt you knew but needed it to be validated. These great sources include McKinsey, Bain & Co, Booz & Co, Monitor, BCG, ADL and to a lesser degree Accenture for innovation research.

There are others but the ability to have access to C-Level thinking is this groups real strength and so they come more immediate to mind.

The emphasis is on distinct capabilities for innovation success.
Recently we had the release of the annual Global Innovation 1000 from Booz & Co (now Strategy&), updated under “global innovation” and there was an increased emphasis on distinct capabilities that each company has in talent, knowledge, team structures, tools and processes that are put together to enable their innovation efforts. Booz calls this the “coherence premium”.

I regard these as “the dynamics within the capabilities that need to be fully understood and needed to be focused upon to be more successful in innovation”.
Irrespective, those big, consistent growing questions still nag away in the CEO’s mind on innovation.

“What and where do I place my limited (and scarce) resources to maximize the impact of our innovation efforts and how can I be sure?”

“What are those capabilities that generate differential advantage?” How can the CEO or CIO identify the links and connections they want to make their innovation activity align more with the overall capabilities system they have in place? Where does the CEO place his ‘bets’ to get the limited resources he has available aligned to gain this better return on the investments in innovation?

Can we identify a common set of critical innovation capabilities?

I believe we can. Something that is not as it is presently, scattershot in building innovation capabilities but distinct to what the CEO wants to achieve, knowing the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy and then in his awareness of the organizations innovation fitness learn how to improve, focus and execute these distinct capabilities needed in a highly focused manner- sound too good to be true? I don’t think so.

My work on dynamic capabilities for innovation

Over a period of the last eighteen months or so, I have been studying and researching this whole area. I have some hypotheses that need testing but the outcome of this effort to date has got me closer to believing we can achieve greater identification with those distinct capabilities to support EACH unique position.

Firstly you have to keep in mind the big four issues to think around 1) the Environment Complexity, 2) The Existing Asset Base, 3) the Value Creation Mechanisms established, and lastly 4) the Organizing Context of what innovation needs to achieve for the organization. Context for me is really important and often lacking.

The objectives behind this work are to show present and future impact of innovation.

Simply put it is to provide a robust model that understands the critical aspects that impact innovation, that can show the critical dependencies to focus upon and understand there need, so these can lead to which ones are more likely to deliver ‘greater’ growth through a more focused approach and provide longer‐term sustainability in innovation activity.

Background of why this model is potentially important to provide.
All companies talk about innovation and its growing importance but few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale. What inhibits innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to have so innovative growth can be achieved? Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities?

Let me first outline the challenge I see.

Knowing what are the critical factors and their dependencies for sustaining innovation success is vital to understand so that an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them. The questions are: which are critical, which naturally occur when others begin to be put into place, which seem to have limited or no real effect on changing the dynamics of innovation? Knowing these answers and having these clearer to achieve a higher ‘return on impact/investment’ (ROII) has a real business value.

Today, we lack a clear system model that brings the critical innovation factors out and gives them their appropriate values of importance so resources can be allocated accordingly.

Also if this can further be extended to provide the ability to model different future states and conceived future scenarios through different impact-investment simulations, this would certainly provide a strong relational tool for assessing business and innovation allocation with the appropriate resources to achieve a greater ‘fitness and impact’ in innovation to focus upon within their capability build.

Today’s challenges lie with understanding Dynamics Capabilities and the organization’s fitness to innovate.

Firm resources are scarce; we still don’t understand the ‘dynamics’ of innovation, the interdependency of the parts, this framework I’m presently working upon sets out to achieve this. Which parts have greater impact, which are not so important? Innovation is still not treated company-wide in a holistic way as recognition of the dependencies is poorly understood.

This is what I want to change. What and where do you place your resources to gain greater impact? What is important to recognize as needing additional ‘weight and focus’, what capability and competencies need to have a stronger emphasis and why? How can we identify these, and make the innovation process more dynamic yet these embed constantly as routines? What would happen if we ignore certain innovation aspects, what would give greater impact to our business?

Why each company needs to know its Fitness Landscapes
The pressing need for a firm is to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies and capabilities to address rapidly changing environments and it is the ability to achieve new, more innovative forms in rapid changing market conditions that will emerge as the winners of the innovation race.

This calls for more ‘dynamic capability” to be achieved. The basic question that needs to be addressed is “what are our dynamic capabilities?” More importantly “which critical ones should we focus upon to improve our capabilities and competences to innovate?” Fitness landscapes provide the understanding of the existing position and then point to where to place your resource so as to improve your innovative capacity through understanding the dynamics of ALL the parts and selecting the ones that are the critically important ones for the organization to achieve their goals.

Jumping to the end result of what I want to achieve.

Progressively within this blog I can outline this concept further as I continue. Now is not the time as my work is still a significant work-in-progress, and I am searching for ways to take this forward quickly through a collaborative format where the potential partner can support and develop this further. Do you have any collaborative  suggests?

All I can do at present is share the result outcomes I would like to achieve from this work:
Expected results I am seeking out of this work will lead too:

1. A framework that moves towards a company-wide development program that gains identification and the target of company-wide improvement of routines and different skills required for innovation to succeed/ improve and be distinctive.
2. Pursuing limited or ‘selective’ development will not have the desired effect, it is not just a human resource department exercise or individual division or team level exercise, but provide a framework that offers the real answer to innovation and why it does require a ‘holistic’ view of innovation development to manage.
3. Be in a position to challenges long-established organizational capabilities and routines that are taking place by knowing where (and why) they reside and are often more ‘static’ in reality than understood. Often many of these ‘static’ capabilities are simply not valuable to further invest in, the waste of precious funds just for the sake of it, as other areas identified offer a more dynamic aspect closer to achieving the strategic results set within the corporate strategy for innovation return.
4. Importance of linking capability to become dynamic with the strategy gives greater alignment and potential and can offer a clear capability portfolio where resource needs to be applied to bring new value and alignment to the organizations goals.
5. The internal dialogue generates a self-reflection process for identification of true and ‘false’ dynamic capabilities and identifies the more static ones that often just need reinforcement. The solutions draw out internal discussions for a recognition and reality of the present and future needs in this area of innovation resource allocation.
6. It provides the means to achieve additional resource allocation and raising the importance of these to support the strategic intent of the company and it intensifies and solidifies the studies and importance of innovation within the framework of the organization as an area of specialized knowledge.
7. Results achieved from this raises the need to understand dynamic innovation capability. Knowing the importance and effect of dynamism for the growing need of greater flexibility and agility in changing, challenging times becomes a clear focus. Then through seeking routines and knowing the diversity within these choices, one can identify the basis of sound differentiation to meet different innovation challenges.

My closing thoughts here.

Can I achieve this framework; I stated that I think so. Clearly there are many variables or factors for innovation success and far too often organizations suffer from the inability to sustain innovation over time. There is a failure to fully appreciate or recognize that there are many inter-dependencies that surround innovation.

We must break out of selecting innovation activities that simply appeal or are the current vogue. To generate sustaining, distinctive innovation does not have to be elusive, it is through a more comprehensive, holistic approach and recognition of the dynamics within innovation capabilities that are needed to solve your objectives.

I’m working on the components that make up dynamic innovation, as we do need to provide a more comprehensive framework for knowing which capabilities are the important ones to focus upon and which are not.

The post Thinking over dynamic capabilities for innovation success first appeared on Navigating Intelligent Business Ecosystems.