Happy New Year to our fellow innovators, trust and knowledge masters. It feels like this year has started with a slow slurp - we don't really want to but we have to. 

I have tried to catch up on my reading and did a little overhaul of our website and message, in between dodging covid and being in isolation (like many others).  Let me know what you think.  Our Capstone team, extraordinaire, Spartan Design, are also working on some cool enhancements.  We met for the first time over lunch, just before the Christmas break and crunched through some ideas.  It's so nice to get some young, fresh input into our thinking.

Also, just before the break, we met for the 2nd time with the Trust Alliance, at QUT.  The group's mission is to develop our understanding of Trust. I presented the Knowledge PulseTM system that measures Trust and explained how it relates to energy or motivation.  I explained how it can be used to help manage and monitor the affect of change - as innovation is all about some sort of change.  From that interesting group of scholars, skilled practitioners and interested parties, we are seeking feedback - what value does the system provide, what works, what doesn't.  We are looking forward to testing and improving the Knowledge PulseTM system with these Trust enthusiasts.  

In my spare time, you might have noticed from my LinkedIn posts, that I like doing article reviews to demonstrate how it relates to InnoWiseTM.  Here's some reviews from articles in the Harvard Business Review, Sept-Oct 2021.

Protecting your Patent - how that can influence knowledge mechanisms

This article (page 28), is a great example of the risk of protecting your knowledge that has been patented by having to unpack and share the new knowledge in the process.  Looking at it from a different perspective, it also shows the opportunities.  Innovation has been proven to work best when collaborating with parties external to your firm and is best when that party is a research based organisation (like a university or research institute like CSIRO).  While organisations feel they must protect their investment through patenting and then litigation, it may actually be more beneficial to work with some of these, otherwise, competitors to share that knowledge so that it can expand and grow. 

In the cases cited in the article, this happened organically 18% of the time.  That is, the accused firm, learnt from the organisation holding the patent, and turned that into a novelty of their own.  Would it be a better outcome, for the defending firm, to spend their resources working with such organisations to then share in this novelty? 

What Evolution can teach us about Innovation

This article (page 62) I really enjoyed and found it talked to the InnoWiseTM process. I enjoyed it also because it used a case study about the evolution of the Moderna vaccine for Covid which is obviously of interest. The core message of the article was that innovation does not have to be messy which can turn conventional, conservative management away from innovation.  It can and should be based on a disciplined process.  And if you have this discipline entrenched and proven within your organisation, then it could be as successful as Flagship's many off-shoots, Moderna being one. 

The advantage of InnoWiseTM  is that it provides your organisation with this disciplined, structured, process based approach.   You don't have to create your own.  They talk to the need to define your hypothesis that will be tested - to define it clearly and with us much detail as possible.  The advantage being that with clarity you can then create tests and a path forward with defined 'knowledge gaps' that need to be filled. 

One of the first steps in the InnoWiseTM process, FORM phase, is to define the problem, the need as well as the knowledge goals.  After defining your knowledge goal and reflecting on what knowledge you have available to you, creates the knowledge gap.  Then planning can commence on who and what you need to fill that gap which occurs in the CREATE phase. 

There could be several knowledge gaps, which the article refers to as destinations.  And having several being progressed at once is often undertaken. After some progress, alternate streams may come back together to provide a complete solution. 

Flagship refers to this process as moving from the 'what-if' question to the 'it turns out that' statement.  In terms of knowledge mechanisms: the 'what if' is the knowledge goal; and, the thing that it turns out to be is the new knowledge. 

They also refer to iterations in the process as "hypothesis are discarded, confirmed or refined, and core ideas about what's possible and useful evolve until an actionable invention is created".  This concurs with the CRITIQUE phase in the InnoWiseTM process.  By critiquing what has actually been adopted, by defining the new knowledge leads to further integration of this new knowledge into the organisation or solution as well as identifying why the hypothesis might have failed. 

The Flagship staff are encouraged to continue examination of the problem until the root cause of the failure is fully known and understood.  In the InnoWiseTM  process this action is encouraged at the FORM phase by looking ahead at what could be a road block in the create and adopt phases and then again in the CRITIQUE phase. 

The example the article refers to shows that looking at the roadblock from a different direction can be rewarding - that is, changing the thought process from questions like 'Why is it true?' to 'What can you do to show it is true?' is more supportive, constructive and open.  This approach would then lead to a new FORM phase, a new problem or a new knowledge gap being defined.  This process is how they expand their understanding, their learning, their knowledge.  If this part of the process is not done, so many new inventions would not come to par. How well does your organisation do their Critique?

I really like their approach.  It is supportive all the way and they do have discipline.  They support new ideas to a certain extent, but keep it lean.  They make the process about ideas, not about people or particular ownership to improve team collaboration.  And, quite rightly, it is not just about the process. The leadership need to be willing to trust the process, trust the people and remove judgement. 

What do you think?  Does your organisation or community have the type of leadership and a process that can support and drive breakthrough, or even incremental, innovation?