new ways of thinking | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Sinking the unthinkable

Innovation and the Titanic The days of simply having ideas moving through a pipeline and coming out the other end as finished product and services seems part of our great past.

I believe Innovation is becoming overwhelmed by all the changes we are applying into innovation activity and its management.

I would say the IM system is under even greater strain from the shifts coming from the multiple applications of technology, new approaches to design and modelling as well as all the necessary engagement and touchpoints.

Yet we are still expecting this deluge of change occurring to happily move our innovations through that past established, often manual processes, we have presently in place. I think not. We are deluding ourselves, that all is well.
There are such changes occurring.
Continue reading “Sinking the unthinkable”

Risk Is Understanding Your Scope of Reach Should Exceed Your Grasp.

We were not born as risk-takers but we can develop it through our own growing self-actualization, creativity, a pursuit for growth and enjoying that feeling of being stretched, going beyond your normal scope of reach.

Well some of us do, but sadly most tend to become risk-avoiding because of the environment they are in or have been associated with for long periods, where avoidance rubs off, it seeps into the soul.

Many enjoy being simply ‘passive’, avoiding anything that smacks of being ‘proactive’; it is safer to be ‘reactive’. Innovation and heaven can equally wait.

Putting it simply most people and organizations are just afraid to take risks and this fear takes over and drives their choices. Innovation is certainly something that suffers from this fear of risk.

Organizations miss critical opportunities, individuals fail to speak out and argue for a given change or innovative idea. We can simply stop growing, to want to become something more, we take the easy option, we avoid risk.
Continue reading “Risk Is Understanding Your Scope of Reach Should Exceed Your Grasp.”

Framing innovation around four management dimensions

Julian Birkinshaw, the London Business School Professor for Strategy and Entrepreneurship wrote in his book “Reinvention Management” about the failure of management. He is a strong advocate of reinventing and broadening out the awareness and need for a more disciplined and up to date practice of management

Working through a kind of contingency theory of management

Julian points out different situations demand different kinds of management. To be effective, a manager needs to adapt to the demands of the situation. Managerial behaviour is mapped on four dimensions: bureaucracy-to-emergence, hierarchy-to-collective wisdom, alignment-to-obliquity, and extrinsic-to-intrinsic motivation.

The principles of emergence, collective wisdom, obliquity and intrinsic are newer ways of thinking about management. I must say I like these as I do his framework as a really good way to think about the approach we need to explore that fits with the strategy and the way we want to develop a business and its environment.

Innovation needs to exploit all the ‘opposing’ principles across the four dimensions

Continue reading “Framing innovation around four management dimensions”