Innovation capital | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Is Innovation Capital important to us?

Perhaps we are failing to recognise the importance of our Innovation capital, stopping to ask how really valuable knowing this is to us?

Should we care, does it matter? I would argue it does, increasingly so. Within our innovation capital lies the future of the organisation and holds one of the really important ‘golden keys’ to the sustaining performance of the company and its future growth potential.

We need to find a way to unlock this as we are constantly being pushed for new business models that create, deliver and capture value. It is in the entire makeup, the value structure around the offering, and this is made up of distinct capitals that drive the new business towards success.

Continue reading “Is Innovation Capital important to us?”

What makes up your innovation capital?

If someone came to you and asked the question: “tell me what makes up your financial capital?”

I expect you could answer this fairly comfortably.

It might need a little added help from your finance department but you could produce and show significant details that we are all ‘schooled’ to understand and generally have accepted, under common definitions and standard practice.

Our businesses are measured constantly on their financials, we produce a constant flow of reporting documents that provide useful insight and allow for a more informed judgement by present and future investors on the health of the company. We are ‘wedded’ to our financials and ignore the real value within our organizations of all the other critical capitals that generate and strengthen the business.

What if that same person came to you and asked instead: “what makes up the innovation capital of the company?’” could you answer this as clearly as the financial one – I would suggest most probably not. (By the way, if you feel you can then please let me know I would be more than interested).

We are focusing more on past performance and not future generating potential by staying fixated on just the financials within all that makes up our organizational capital

So what makes up our innovation capital and why is it important to know?
Should we care, does it matter? I would argue it does, increasingly so. Within the innovation capital lies the future of the organization and holds one of the real golden keys to the sustaining performance of the company, or not.
Continue reading “What makes up your innovation capital?”

Exploring the Value Of Your Innovation Capital

Following on from my last post of “Place your future bets- invest in Innovation Capital” which outlined the significant contribution innovation capital plays in our economic growth and value enhancement, let’s explore some more.

Let me offer some further thoughts on its value to really capture and understand, so we can measure it within our organizations.

We have the three components; of physical capital, knowledge capital and human capital that are the innovation-related assets, these make-up Innovation Capital.

I have been arguing that innovation capital draws from the core of intellectual capital and its suggested (and broadly recognized) components of human, structural and relational capitals or social capital.

I have previously discussed this converging up, as the ‘nesting effect’
Innovation capital needs assessing and measuring so we can understand the relationship between these innovation capitals (and their present and future potential) and organization performance. We need to know the innovation capital ‘stock’.

Why, well ‘stock’ can be ‘static’ and we need to make this more ‘dynamic’ so innovation can ‘flow’ from this constant renewing of our capitals and be transformed into new value.
Continue reading “Exploring the Value Of Your Innovation Capital”

Place Your Future Bets – Invest In Innovation Capital

Recognizing the value of our innovation-related assets is where the smart money should go, and then we need to invest in innovation capital. To gain growth and improve productivity is through innovation. We need to translate knowledge into new values.

When you pause and consider the make-up of Innovation Capital you realize it makes such an economic contribution and in a report from McKinsey & Co, they have set about identifying this to produce the above summary, covering 16 countries, to understand the real value of this Innovation Capital.

These numbers are big and still don’t fully capture everything associated with innovation as much remains ‘hidden’ or ‘attached’ to other activities as well.
We need to shift our thinking on what makes up Innovation Capital
Continue reading “Place Your Future Bets – Invest In Innovation Capital”

Building upon four key wealth creating pillars

Most rooms we enter have four sides and are traditionally built on a standard four-pillar design; they provide the structure to build upon.

Presently in many of our economies, particularly in the West, we are struggling to find real growth; we are limited in our wealth-creating possibilities.

Why is that? Our structures seem to be weak, not strong. Continue reading “Building upon four key wealth creating pillars”

Where innovation value resides

Often surveys and reports catch you by surprise. I’ve been working through the Imaginatik Global Report called “The State of Global Innovation for 2013” and certain parts did exactly that. The sheer difficulties that organizations seem to have to quantify the benefits and value achieved through innovation worries me.

I had previously provided a review more on the Strategic and readiness part of the Imaginatik report, in my post “The coming age of innovation in 2014 and beyond” and less so on the other part discussed, the Process and Execution part.

It is the process and execution side that have more of the deeper issues to tackle and more importantly, the one’s that take considerable time if you are tacking culture and the environment to allow for innovation. They are far more complicated to provide answers too. I feel like pushing this along, here goes:

Continue reading “Where innovation value resides”

Value realization comes through innovation and our business models.

Everything, it seems we work towards in business, is for seeking out new value creation, for new growth and wealth creation, for providing improved returns on the investments we have been making and this is where innovation becomes so important.

To achieve this we consciously have to set about the value capture and what contributes to its realization. This is where innovation plays such a vital part. If we don’t build our innovation capital we will certainly have a much harder, perhaps even impossible time of realizing new value.

We are more than likely to just maintain our existing value or see it steadily decline. So a constant focus upon renewal is always needed. Do we consciously do that on a daily basis or just once a year at annual review time?

Value-adding activities need to be central in nearly all of our decisions. The how we can turn our resources into being more productive, more creative is increasingly becoming one our biggest strategic areas of future investment decision.

Our resources are those all-inclusive assets, capabilities and processes that make up the Enterprise. Continue reading “Value realization comes through innovation and our business models.”

Failing to explain innovation capital

Last week I made a complete ‘hash’ of explaining innovation capital. I made a set of basic mistakes in my preparation and my delivery. I allowed for little discussion and debate and I just ‘blasted’ on regardless. I’ve been standing in the innovation ‘sins’ corner most of this week.

I can honestly say I don’t feel so good about this failure at the moment and I thought a more public ‘confession’ was in order. I will also let the ones that suffered from this also know how I feel.I made such a simple set of basic mistakes. I’m still asking myself why and have been slowly working through it to get to the bottom of my ‘aberration’ moment. Let me share some of this with you as learning from failure is as important as celebrating success.

The story could easily go……”well it was simply one of those days…to much coffee beforehand, being distracted by other issues……” No, those should simply not happen. Somehow I forgot some basics and then some more but I’m certainly never too old to (re)learn and own up to this.

Let me explain, I was asked my opinion in a thirty minute exchange on innovation capital. It was not my finest thirty minutes. Continue reading “Failing to explain innovation capital”