Fragile eco-systems (photo Simon Evans)

How do we look at the big picture of Innovation?

There are many different models of innovation out there, and they all have their respective merits and challenge our thinking in different ways.  In this (hopefully) post recession world however it is time that we take another look at how we are all looking at and thinking about our innovation capability.  There is a common perception that innovation is getting harder (see any of the recent Boston Consulting papers for example), and that our “freedoms to innovate” feel like they have been curtailed.  Our successful approaches in the past may no longer be good enough in this new world – unless we refresh out thinking there is a danger that we will end up stuck in the past trying to repeat those successes.

Innovation as we all know is not about a single magic formula, or a process that we can just implement and succeed.  It is instead a complex environment of subtle influences and capabilities which will vary wildly from place to place dependant on the emergent situation.  It is also very delicate– it takes little to upset it and prevent it from working well.

In this blog I would like to explore how we might describe innovation as an eco-system that supports and nurtures our ideas and extracts the maximum value from them.  Maybe we can gain some insights and regain our big picture understanding of what factors make innovation a success in today’s world.

Why an Eco-System?

The term has been used by a number of people in the past , but came into focus for us at InnovoFlow when it was suggested by a workshop client.  When asked, “what message will you take home from the workshop?” his answer was “I like the way there is a holistic overview of all the things that make innovation happen – it’s like an eco-system of inter-dependant habitats”.  This was spot on – we can imagine an effective innovation space as having different zones of activity – habitats if you like, filled with all the nutrients, symbiots,  life-forms and substrates (as well as a few predators), that are needed to make a healthy and successful eco-system.

By following this model we can start to help people know  what goes where and understand why it is needed and if anything is missing.  We can also help them understand when the eco-system needs to adapt or change, and give them the tools to construct an adaptive,  functional architecture that is a reflection of the current opportunity they face and the resources they can afford – we must remember there are no free lunches, only lunches that meet the needs and pockets of the diners.

Populating the Innovation Eco-system

Let’s imagine that our innovation eco-system has  4 habitats or zones as follows:

• Creativity – those things that inspire and generate ideas and allow us  to identify those ideas with greatest potential.
• Development – The activities which tend to add potential value to our idea and make it into something real.   Without this zone we would just have a pile of useless things that will soon be forgotten.
• Value Realisation – once our ideas have been validated and built into a real offering, it is time to release that pent up value and make the idea do some work!  Some form of value generation is what it is all about of course and so this activity is critical to our ongoing success, without it we may as well not bother having and developing ideas.
• Leadership – or perhaps we should term it Gardening?  Those activities that nurture the innovation eco-system and keep it healthy so that the other three zones can do their work of processing ideas quickly and with the greatest possible value add.

So what sort of activities could we place in these zones to populate them?  We must be realistic, scarcity of resources will not allow us to introduce everything we want to, but each habitat/zone must have sufficient processes and activities to ensure that ideas are created, developed and then value generated within the most efficient framework possible.  It is important to remember at this point that ideas cannot exist in a vacuum – as Alfred North Whitehead observed, “Ideas won’t keep.  Something must be done about them”.   In this model it means that at all times, your ideas must be supported by one process or another within the eco-system zone.   Without this the ideas will wither away in the breeze.  We can picture our ideas being born in the creative zone, and then moving through the various habitats while a variety of processes add value and solidity to them.  Maintaining the balance within and between the zones is the key to efficiency and innovation velocity (as measured by the rate of flow of good ideas through the system).

Some things are obvious.  In the Creative habitat we should not be surprised to see a selection of processes such as  idea management systems, crowdsourcing, open innovation, or unlearning, but what of “softer” things like courage, finding the non-conformists or allowing time to pursue personal projects?  Similarly considering our Development habitat, obvious things like development teams, joint ventures and open source developments may spring to mind, to which we can add less concrete things like diversity, rainmakers or maybe the value of taking a walk in the woods.  Leadership processes might include a management team willing to adopt new ideas, luck (self made), innovation strategies, the impact of working environments  or knowledge sharing.

The Importance of Visualisation

To stop the analysis simply becoming  shopping list of things that you want to do, it is important to physically populate the eco-system habitats on paper or a board so it becomes a very visual and you can start to map out the pathways your new ideas might take through the eco-system.  It also becomes painfully obvious where you are missing capability or resources and so you are less likely to have a nasty shock as your idea gets stuck somewhere unexpected.

At the very least, this approach makes it clear that a huge variety of different factors are at play here and that keeping your innovation eco-system healthy is not just a matter of training people to brainstorm, setting up an innovation initiative  and installing an idea management system (however valuable that tool might be!).

When using the model it is important that whole end-to-end life-cycle of the ideas is represented and clearly visible so that each step can be supported in a deliberate way, with sufficient resources so that the required activities actually work in the environment.  If this is done well, then not only will the innovation capability will be more coherent and efficient, but also there is a good chance you will find it much easier to argue the case for funding as the processes that drive the returns are considered with the same weight as those activities which generate the ideas in the first place!

Summary

The eco-system approach to innovation can be summarised as follows:

• Visualise your innovation space as consisting of creative, development, value realisation and leadership zones
• Ensure that each of these zones is populated with a variety of “things” (processes, people, skills, philosophies, events, architectures, strategies etc.) sufficient to meet your current challenge effectively and within any resource constraints.  Ensure that as much attention is applied to the value realisation zone as the creative zone (which of course is very sexy and is where a lot of the fun is).
• Imagine your ideas appearing in the creative zone and moving across the the other zones.  Ask yourself what do you need to do at each stage to maximise the flow of ideas and the potential value that is added to them
• Be prepared to have multiple eco-systems – one size approach does not fit all situations within your organisation.
• Be adaptive - be an agile innovation leader!  Continuously remodel the eco-system as needed to keep up with emergent trends.  Be aware of the need to change approach, have the freedom to innovate – don’t be constrained by the way things have always been done.
• Practice these skills routinely so your thinking is always being challenged.  Test your model and see what might happen if you introduced some new thinking.
• Have fun – innovation should be fun, engaging and exciting and involve everyone in some way -  we are all sharing the same eco-system after all!

“If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got”  Albert Einstein

Are you the champion of innovation?

InnovoFlow’s Victor Newman and Simon Evans have been developing an innovation game that exposes the legacy innovation process to view, and opens up the options for designing a more proactive innovation ecosystem.

Successful innovation relies on a well populated and carefully tended eco-system of processes, skilled people, architectures and strategies.  This complex environment will not deliver results if it is not continually refreshed and fed, but who in the organisation is responsible for doing this?  Who is the custodian of the innovation eco-system?

As part of what has become more of a consulting process than innovation simulation, the issue of who owns the innovation eco-system has come to fore, in the sense that our consulting has brought out the issue that often the legacy innovation process is fractured, emergent (in the sense that participants make up their piece as they go along) and in some cases largely invisible (where there may be a corporate model that is not reflected in practice).

The benefits of having a clear eco-system for innovating seems obvious, but as in so many other things, who owns the overall responsibility for managing the innovation process, the most important process at the heart of creating new value, growth and survival?

We asked a group of key innovators with practitioner experience this question, and also how would they manage this eco-system to best effect?

It would be true to say that they struggled to come up with an answer that they liked or agreed on.  The initial reaction was “The CEO or everyone” but further discussion examined other possibilities:

• It seems in many cases IT management steps up to provide a technology centric solutions and will often look also to designing new business processes to suit.   This tends to miss the point as IT is not well placed to deliver the softer, non tech side of innovation.  The “Idea Management System”, however useful is not the total solution to innovation
• R&D may see themselves as the natural home of innovation, but they are not positioned to drive the whole idea life cycle from inspiration through creativity, development to value realisation.
• The role of the illusive Chief Innovation Officer may at first seem to cover the ground, but how many organisations properly fill this role with someone who can truly influence across the whole business?  They may be responsible for the processes and architecture but does their role really cover all the behavioural and cultural aspects of the total solution adequately?
• The innovation team/initiative – are lost before they start!  They tend to be disconnected from the business, sent into a corner with no budget and told to “tell us how to be more innovative”.  They can sometimes  be populated by a few creative “troublemakers”, nominated for the team to keep them out of the way and prevent them from asking difficult questions!

There was an emergent thought in the discussion that as innovation is ultimately about creating value, either to the shareholders or to some other community, the key individual or group is the one that is accountable for the delivery of the value to the target.  Possibly the Chairman or …… everyone!?

Maybe the topical answer is a coalition, but who must be involved for it to be effective and how would it be managed?

Thoughts on a postcard!

Let us analyse the similarities:

• Innovation is achieved through taking the output of a creative process (an idea), developing it into something tangible with potential value, then realising that value (getting a return on  investment) and having a leadership framework which allows all this to happen in the most effective way.
• Change Management traditionally talks about identifying the need for change, defining the processes needed to effect the change, communicating and implementing the change, measuring the impact of the change.

There seems to be a fundamental similarity here, but how alike are they in reality and is there sufficient overlap in the disciplines to make it valuable for each to learn from the other?  Are they basically the same thing?

Perhaps Innovation Leaders could take a leaf out of the change management handbook around providing great focus on the behavioural changes needed for change to be embedded and successful, as too often  innovators will foist change on an unsuspecting target audience without truly understanding their needs or communicating with them meaningfully.  This leads to innovation failure.

Likewise Change Managers who often seem a little “traditional” in their approach to driving change (for example taking very risk averse approaches or over using  metrics)  could learn a lesson from the Innovation Leaders and use a fuller range of creative innovation processes that are now available. They could learn perhaps from open innovation strategies and be much more radical in the change they propose – remember Henry Ford “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse”.

So – what can the two communities learn from each other?  Is there a real separation between the two?  Should we strive to reduce this?  Can we clearly differentiate approaches?

My view is that the two disciplines are 2 facets of the same gem, however there is a key differential which we should seek to remove.   “Change Management” is usually and very clearly placed at the centre of the business and managed as part of its core activity, whereas Innovation is too often seen as something separate – witness the deadly “Innovation Initiative”  which is set up by management who have been tasked “to be more innovative”.  They react by nominating a few bright individuals to go off and and report back on what the answer is.  This dissociation from the real business causes innovation to fail.  Let’s  look to move innovation into the centre stage and see it as part of the overall change management process within organisations.

The recently published Accenture report “Innovation: a Priority for Growth in the Aftermath of the Downturn” highlights that although many companies are increasing their innovation spend, they frequently do not enforce the same management discipline as they do for other critical processes, citing as a possible reason:

“Many people believe innovation is a creative endeavour that cannot or should not be managed”

I want to explore this a little.  I have come across this attitude fairly often and have at times promoted this view myself, not wanting to tie the creative types down with red tape and processes that reduce their freedoms to innovate.  However we would argue that a happy medium is entirely possible to achieve which provides clarity to the architecture of the end-to-end innovation process and also yet maintains the freedoms to innovate for the people involved.

In other words, we need defined hard/tight disciplines that win us the time to do the soft/loose creative thinking and playing that make innovation possible. We can’t ever afford to be too busy on the wrong stuff, to have time to think.

Without an effective environment provided and maintained by Agile Innovation Leadership, those great ideas will wither and die very quickly.  Without a crystal clear map of the processes that identify the great, well-aligned ideas,  develop them into a tangible products with high potential value and then maximise the return of this value in the market you are trusting  far too much to chance.

It is no good waiting for the “innovation fairies” to come and wave their magic wands to generate ideas.  Innovation does not just happen for free or by magic – it’s like a game you can choose to win.  You must proactively create the opportunities to innovate, and keep the pressure up to ensure a steady flow of new ideas into the pipeline.  This will only occur with a clearly visualised architecture that is well understood by all, and which is  properly supported by the right resources and where the points of interaction are clearly defined.

It seems to us that  too many companies develop an immune response to innovation – they build up antibodies created by a history of poor results from past innovation initiatives that did not truly embed innovation across the whole spectrum of business activities.   This tends to push management into a risk-averse state and not fully trust their creative processes or the ideas that they come up with.  There is also a tendency to keep the “Innovation Initiative” slightly at arms length in order to “protect” the rest of the business from these risky ideas.  However you cannot innovate in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the business – it is not a thing apart – it *is* the business – without it, the future of your success is at severe risk!

The analysis above implies that a significant degree of management rigour is essential to reap the benefits of innovation, but how do we do this without crushing the innovators beneath a  intolerable weight of management processes, metrics and reporting commitments?  Many will chant the  mantra that innovation management must be “repeatable and consistent  in order to sustain growth”.  We feel that this view should be challenged as  in that direction lies a rut in the road which forces us to adopt the same approach as our legacy successes, and therefore risks us being in a position of always fighting the last battle.   Whatever innovation  leadership we put in place needs to be agile and responsive to both internal imperatives and external changes so that we are ready to benefit from any emergent trend at the earliest opportunity.  This will allow us to more effectively fit our innovation architecture to the needs of the ever changing world.  In order to achieve this Leaders must be bold, risk taking and visionary.

So, should innovation be managed in the same way as other business processes?  The answer has to be yes, but maybe we should turn this on its head and ask “should other business processes be managed the same way as we manage innovation”?   If we are successful in providing true Agile Innovation Leadership then this could perhaps be a model for the rest of the organisation!

At InnovoFlow (www.innovoflow.co.uk) we provide some help in achieving this state by articulating and envisioning the agile innovation leadership process through the use of a tool – “The Innovation Game” which can be used either as a diagnostic tool to help model innovation behaviours and processes, or as a fun, competitive learning tool which will help you think more broadly about the setting up and maintenance of a responsive innovation architecture.

The Problem with Innovation

It is a truism that armies tend to continue to fight their last war and need to go through bitter learning experiences before they can understand and adapt to the new, emergent rules of conflict.  Present innovation thinking is constrained by legacy successes achieved within a context of unsustainable economic market growth patterns and obsolete models.

This recession is heightening a natural fear of risk and failure, which combined with a perception of increasing innovation difficulty (as highlighted by the Boston Consulting Group reviews in the past couple of years), is encouraging management caution toward innovation. This is reducing leaders’ ability to recognise, understand and manage the full range of options available, and this is slowing the pace of innovation (innovation velocity).

We need some new tools to help us deliver approaches to innovation that better suit the emerging realities of the 21^st century environment.

Introducing Gaming as a Tool

We propose to use gaming as a tool in this context.

Winning sports teams work on individual players’ kinesiology (ability to manoeuvre) and on “plays” that integrate team movement to gain advantage, at pace.   Just as the great team players have to develop peripheral vision, the ability to spot the gap in the opposition defence, and change the way they play within the game, great innovative organisations need to become better than their last approach to innovation, with the ability and agility to customise and integrate options as they emerge, in real-time.

Can we develop leaders’ innovation agility by widening their options and building their ability to exploit a greater range of freedoms to innovate through a similar form of “gaming”?

Considering innovation as a game could help us move forward again by allowing us to test and broaden our leadership skills in a competitive and fun environment without the risks associated in trying things out for real!  Such a game would have to act in two ways:

• As a diagnostic tool to help us visualise and review our legacy positions and highlight any areas of inadequacy
• As a means of developing a competitive leadership ability to rapidly construct and test a radical new Innovation Architecture that fits within an emerging market

By introducing a competitive game into our analysis of innovation capability, players can be gently pushed into novel thinking, broaden their options and find new freedoms to innovate.  Accelerated learning from game playing is widely accepted now as an effective tool, and the serious games market is now worth some billions of dollars.  There is an opportunity to help innovation leaders develop their agility using this paradigm.

Agile Innovation Leadership

So what characteristics are we looking for in an Agile Innovation Leader which will make them successful in the game?   The primary role of the leader is:

“To enable an environment which can create great ideas, rapidly develop them to the highest possible potential value, and then to maximise the realisation of their value in the market.”

Effectively, they need to manage the whole idea lifecycle which we can picture as follows:

By considering the processes and people needed to support the four main activity types in this model – creativity, development, value realisation and leadership, the great leader is able to construct chains of capability which will create ideas and carry them from left to right in the model in the most efficient way.  If we can model these within a game, we have a tool that can help explore new ways of innovating.

The key elements which the leader needs to consider in order to do this are:

• Having few restrictions on freedoms to innovate (F2i) – basically having no constraints on the tools and approaches they can use, for example looking externally for inspiration
• Maximising the return on investment in innovation (ROI2) – obviously balancing the investment costs against the returns
• Developing innovation velocity to optimise time to market – being nimble and agile enough to go to market at the right time
• Proactively constructing opportunities to innovate – there is no free lunch here!  A sticky corporate culture can be a problem.  Without proactive intervention your ideas will not come flying in through the window (unless you are Alexander Fleming with a Petri dish!)

Of course In addition to this, innovation does not happen for free, you need to invest resources appropriate to the process.  So what skills do you need?  We suggest that a combination of the following are needed to drive innovation:

• Finance – obviously money is needed in many cases to fund an innovation process.  Does you innovation strategy generate sufficient management faith that it gets the funds it needs?
• People – many hands can make light work, do you have the manpower to make things happen?
• Knowledge – be it tacit, explicit or emergent, knowledge underpins so much of our innovation capability – are you ready to act on key knowledge or is it lost or inaccessible to you internally or externally?
• Relationships – becoming increasingly vital in these days of collaboration and open innovation – how good are your internal and external relationships?  How much relationship capital do you have in the bank?
• Innovation – the trickiest resource to define, but we probably all recognise those people or events that just spark new ideas all the time.  You need to find these people and recognise their contribution.

Summary – where do we go next?

At InnovoFlow, we believe that by assisting Innovation Leaders to visualise their innovation architectures using a game as a diagnostic tool, and then giving them an opportunity to exercise new approaches in a competitive environment, we can broaden their thinking, help them see innovation in a holistic way and grow their agility and freedoms to innovate.

An effective gaming model will provide leaders with a framework for articulating, discussing, exploring and testing alternative Innovation Architectures and practising the integration of key elements for successful innovation agility.  A game gives people a shared vocabulary that they can use to clarify their discussions.  In our experience, many valuable, insightful and often amusing stories are generated as players relate the game outcomes to real experiences – generating powerful learning.

See www.innovoflow.co.uk or contact info@innovoflow.co.uk for more information.

Simon Evans is an experienced consultant with many years service in the global Pharmaceutical market and a track record of developing innovative business solutions.
Victor Newman is an internationally renowned innovation and knowledge management consultant, lecturer and author of “the Knowledge Activist’s Handbook.  Together they founded InnovoFlow Ltd in late 2008.

If you work for an organisation where innovation is important (all companies surely!)  or can represent one (anonymously) as a consultant,  please complete this brief survey – it should only take 10 minutes or so.

Find the survey here – thanks again.

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Developing Innovation Leadership

Today 15th July InnovoFlow publishes a new White Paper - ” Innovation Velocity:  Developing Agile Innovation Leadership”.

Abstract:

• It is a truism that armies tend to continue to fight their last war and need to go through bitter learning experiences before they can understand and adapt to the new, emergent rules of conflict.
• Present innovation thinking is constrained by legacy successes achieved within a context of unsustainable economic market growth patterns and obsolete models.
• This recession is heightening a natural fear of risk and failure, which combined with a perception of increasing innovation difficulty, is encouraging management caution toward  innovation. This is reducing leaders’ ability to understand and manage the full potential range of options available, and is slowing the pace of innovation (innovation velocity).

• Winning sports teams work on individual players’ kinesiology (ability to manoeuvre) and on “plays” that integrate team movement to gain advantage, at pace. Can we similarly develop leaders’ innovation agility by widening their options and building their ability to exploit a greater range of freedoms to innovate through a similar form of “gaming”?

• Considering innovation as a game may help us move forward again by allowing us to explore new Freedoms to Innovate and visualise the architecture needed.

• Such a game would have to help us review and articulate our legacy positions and develop our ability to rapidly construct an Innovation Architecture that fits within an emerging market.

• The purpose of such an Innovation Architecture is to enable the creation of great ideas, the rapid development of them to the highest possible potential value, and then to maximise the realisation of their value in the market.

• The key elements for great agile innovation leadership are:

• Having few restrictions on your Freedoms to Innovate (F2i),
• Maximising the return on your investment in innovation (ROI2),
• Developing innovation velocity to optimise time to market and
• Proactively constructing opportunities to innovate

• An approach to innovation leadership development, “The Innovation Game” is being developed to provide a tool and framework for visualising, discussing, exploring and testing alternative Innovation Architectures and practising the integration of key elements for successful innovation agility.

Read the whole paper.

©InnovoFlow, 15th July 2009 All rights reserved

If you read the BCG Report Innovation 2009:  Making Hard Decisions in the Downturn you will see a continuing trend for high levels of dissatisfaction with ROI2.  Fully 50% of Managers/VP’s are not happy with what they get from their innovation process, and this is bound to impact investment levels in the future.  Why is this?  Is it temporary and due to the economic climate over the last couple of years or are the reasons deeper?

• Are organisations becoming immune to innovation?  Are “not invented here” antibodies being created by a history of poor results from innovation initiatives?
• Are we at the end of a technology wave? Do we need to develop or adopt new scientific and social paradigms that offer the potential to become novel technologies?
• Are our innovation “initiatives” loosing face as they claim victory before the recommendations have been embedded in a meaningful way and developed into an innovation culture that is adds real value to our ideas?
• Have we lost some of the ability to take an overview of our innovation architectures and design effective end-to-end processes that speedily develop ideas that have great value?
• Is our innovation leadership failing us? ⁽⁴⁾ Has this leadership generation simply grown in a time of artificial economic growth and therefore not had the time to adapt to the new realities?

Also interesting in the report is that although only 50% of managers and VPs were satisfied, 63% of top level execs (CEOs) were happy – is this evidence of a mismatch of expectations at senior levels which could be damaging?

What do you think?

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By being able to name the role, we are halfway to identifying those who can fulfill it and maybe recognise some talent already in place in your organisation whose contributions are going unnoticed currently.

Ideas on a postcard