Guidance in Innovation

Innovation Coaching Has Real Value

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Although this seems to be expensive to undertake, one-on-one coaching offers a lasting value to connect innovation far more deeply in the way a person and their organization ‘sees it’. It provides the place of context, meaning and content if facilitated well.

The importance, like all behavioral change coaching, is to create a safe but challenging environment so the recipient can take risks and learn. You as the coach find the balance between challenging through inquiry and supporting different thinking to draw out possibilities to gain new understanding from.

All the work is usually based on the recipient’s agenda, through a set of opening discussions you need to balance both personal learning’s with organizational needs. These need consistent clarification and re-calibrating as you go.

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Building Your Own Innovation Capital Lies Within Organizational Learning

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We need to know how to unlock the real value of innovation both personally and within the organization, we work for.

If we do not fully understand where the innovation capital comes from, and how new capital and stock can be provided, innovation will remain tentative, always stuttering along.

It will lack that essential organisational innovation rhythm, stay disconnected for many and will be frustrating your own evolution in understanding.

I’d like to offer a fresh view on building your own capital.

There are different building blocks and types of capital. Let’s start with the vast knowledge inside the organization, as this forms learning capital. We’re all expected to combine our existing internal knowledge with the external knowledge that flows into the company these days, mostly intangible, searching for its relevancy and context.

The stock we build in our use of this fresh knowledge so we can combine these into new insights that eventually create different sets of advantages – ones that foster value creation.

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Having A Curators Platform for Innovators

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I would like to lay out some thoughts on why we should be considering a curation platform for innovation and the value it can bring to a broader innovation community.

These are some opening thoughts that I felt needed to just “hang out there” and see where they take me and clearly, you as a reader.

The issue I am reflecting upon is our growing concern that we all are living in a world heading towards digital overload, with the risk of it simply overwhelming us, perhaps we are becoming more isolated and detached within this.

We can’t simply rely on focusing on ‘all things digital, we need people to bring the insights and their experience together for the eventual innovation solutions. We need to provide a curator’s platform for innovation, to make all the essential connections.

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Putting the coordinates into your innovation world

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Innovation can be fairly complex in what needs to be pulled together, as often it ‘flies’ in contradiction to the normal organization’s ways and wishes to work in structured, efficient ways. Innovation can often be rather chaotic and discovery-driven.

One of the useful ideas of using an external resource is to put additional coordinates into your innovation world, they see contradictions in a different way and can assist in working through the conflicting signals, so as to help align innovation in helpful and thoughtful ways. Certainly, the innovator’s role is not an easy one inside the structured world of larger business entities.

I like practical advice with evidence, it helps bridge misunderstandings. This can come through a variety of methods:  benchmarking, validating, frameworks and interpreting how innovation can fit with your current or future needs. Often the outside advice can place innovation into a greater context that can accelerate the outcomes you need to gain understanding and achieve increasing identification.

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The Value in Personal Innovation Learning Journeys

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If you don’t have time, how can you learn? We are in need increasingly, of faster understanding, to quickly learn or resolve an immediate need, or we have this determination or essential requirement within our innovation role to deepen our knowledge and understanding of innovation.

These are usually split into two parts, called “micro or macro learning opportunities”.

The value of having an innovation guide, mentor or coach helps you accelerate through both these needs and learning opportunities. I see four points of value, my value proposition, if you like, for you to achieve personal innovation growth:

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Fitting understanding into the innovation puzzle

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Formalizing a new innovation learning-as-a-service is complicated, far more than I originally thought, it is often a puzzle.

Still, a certain course has been set and it is now working through much of its structure, learning much myself on the way to fit this within the innovation puzzle we all have.

When I was thinking through this concept I fell back onto one of my most valuable techniques to work through, clustering a set of questions and capturing all the different thinking through the use of Mind Mapping techniques. Such a valuable tool.

A selection of maps included what a curator can do in innovation; of painting a picture of a strong advocacy practice, of working through a guiding approach, the need to reflect on the whole facilitation process, etc., and each brainstorm takes a time to work through, build and formalize.

The end result becomes a much richer landscape of what I can offer and what equally might be needed.

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Learning Platforms and Personal Learning Pathways

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My mind has been swirling around the significant changes taking place in learning. Not just in the time we have available, suggested recently as 25 minutes per week to stop and learn but in the variety of ways we can learn.

Clearly, many of these are digital to construct, so as to apply the more modern design process that works for each of us individually, in our time of need.

I have been struck by the emphasis on personal learning and development. We still get very caught up in the need for scale yet it is the ability and flexibility to design these to our individual pathways that become “the order of the day”.

The constant struggle is for each of us in simply stopping to focus, finding the time and the last thing you can afford to do, is take an ad-hoc approach to this, it needs a structured design.

This is where external facilitation might help

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Building a Strong Innovation Advocacy In Practice

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I have been a strong champion for innovation for a number of years. It has become my overriding passion, interest, and source of inspiration. I research continuously in this area, as innovation is restless, it never stays the same, it is always evolving. My worry though continues, innovation gets treated often as an add-on, often … Read more

Mentoring versus Coaching for Innovation

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I bet a lot of people get caught out in not knowing the differences between Mentoring and Coaching.

Equally, when you are in the coaching mode you need to guard against moving over to the mentoring mode unless it is the conscious way. Understanding the differences becomes important.

Why do we need to mentor or coach today? We are facing highly competitive environment changes. The key to the need of having facilitation is to bring fresher, more innovative and leading-edge solutions into any innovative thinking but it is often all about the blending of experiences and the relationship dynamics of those involved in this set of dialogues.

“For fresh vision and momentum, I need your past like you need mine”

The objectives are to deliver innovative understanding in both mentoring and coaching approaches 

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Time starved, innovation lacking

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Today most executives seem to be time-starved, innovation lacking. They are constantly reacting to daily events, for fix focusing and fixing short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior.

This time-starved environment has real implications for innovation.

If we don’t sit down and think through issues and implication of our present performance around innovation, how can we close the gaps and improve it? We just simply don’t seem to have a more systematic, connected road map within our thinking that points the way to the improving longer-term as we keep doing this ‘reacting’ only.

We have such a limited amount of time; to pause, to evaluate, or redesign. We equally don’t feel capable to simply assign this over, even to outsiders to help. We are far too challenged and driven, often far too inbreed into thinking that “our solutions can only be the only solutions to our problems or challenges”.

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