Common Capability Requirements

The requirements and practices that follow have been identified as contributing to the Lifecycle Execution and Organisational Efficacy capability areas.

The need to understand, manage and continuously improve organisational core competencies has been identified as essential for executing innovation initiatives and for ensuring an innovation facilitative environment (Prahalad & Hamel 1990; Hamel 1996; Ahmed 1998(1); Christensen & Overdorf 2000; Moore 2005). Practices include establishing an understanding of the organisation‟s core competencies (Hamel 1996; Ahmed 1998(1); Moore,2005), identifying and distinguishing between contextual and core organisational activities (Moore,2005), identifying and managing the sources (resources, processes and/or values) of core competencies (Christensen & Overdorf 2000), continuously identifying and developing next-generation core competencies (Prahalad & Hamel 1990), and managing core competencies as resources and assigning them to activities where they are most likely to generate value (Prahalad & Hamel 1990)

The organisational ability to adapt and change is seen as fundamental to an innovation capability (Zairi 1995; Hamel 1996; Christensen & Overdorf 2000; Cook & Hunsaker 2001; Baker 2002; Größler et al. 2006; Katz 2006) Practices include developing an attitude accepting of change throughout the organisation (Ahmed 1998(2)), early engagement of individuals in the activities leading up to the change process (Hamel 1996), realising that change is a process that needs to be understood and managed (Cook & Hunsaker 2001; Katz 2006), distinguishing between implicit and explicit organisational adaptation and managing them appropriately (Größler et al. 2006), considering the degree of change that is necessary and whether the organisation is capable of such change (Christensen & Overdorf 2000; Katz 2006), and managing the sources of core competencies to facilitate the necessary degree of change (Christensen & Overdorf 2000).

The requirements and practices that follow have been identified as contributing to the Lifecycle Execution and Knowledge Exploitation capability areas.

Involving and integrating consumers, suppliers and stakeholders has been identified as essential for ensuring the relevance of innovation initiatives (Rothwell 1992; Zairi 1995; Ahmed 1998 (1), 1998(2); Brown 2003; Reid & de Brentani 2004; Cormican & O'Sullivan 2004; Kostoff et al. 2004) Practices include establishing and utilising the requirements of customers to drive initiatives (Rothwell 1992; Cormican & O'Sullivan 2004), facilitating and managing communication with external stakeholders (Rothwell 1992; Cormican & O'Sullivan 2004; Kostoff et al. 2004), interacting with the consumers and tapping their ideas and tacit knowledge (Ahmed 1998(1); Brown 2003), and establishing and building relationships with stakeholders, suppliers and consumers (Rothwell 1992; Ahmed 1998(2)).

The ability to identify and evaluate long-term opportunities has been identified as facilitative of innovation (Stopper 2002; Albright 2003; Kostoff et al. 2004; Reid & de Brentani 2004; Dismukes 2005; Pretium

Consulting Services 2005; Phaal 2005; Du Preez et al. 2006). Practices include establishing a future orientation (Ahmed 1998(2); Kostoff et al. 2004), performing wide and deep scanning of diverse environments to identify opportunities and patterns (Stopper 2002; Reid & de Brentani 2004; Kostoff et al. 2004; Dismukes 2005); relating opportunities to the appropriate timelines (Stopper 2002; Kostoff et al. 2004; Dismukes 2005; Phaal 2005; Du Preez et al. 2006), identifying technologies required for opportunities, attaching technologies to timelines, identifying the necessary convergences, and relating to opportunities (Kostoff et al. 2004), and relating opportunities to required core competencies and resources (Stopper 2002).

The requirements and practices that follow have been identified as those that contribute to the Lifecycle Execution, Knowledge Exploitation, and Organisational Efficacy capability areas.

Teams that are diverse in terms of discipline, skills and organisational functions represented are considered facilitative of innovation (Prahalad & Hamel 1990; Zairi 1995; Ahmed 1998(1), 1998(2); Neely et al. 2001; Wycoff 2003; Cormican & O'Sullivan 2004; Dismukes 2005). Practices include populating teams with individuals of varying disciplines, skills and organisational functions (Prahalad & Hamel 1990; Ahmed 1998(2); Cormican & O'Sullivan 2004), ensuring teams are working across organisational boundaries (Prahalad & Hamel 1990; Ahmed 1998(1); Neely et al. 2001), encouraging individuals and teams to interact with one another (Ahmed 1998(1), 1998(2)), and identifying interdependencies between teams, and facilitating interaction and sharing (Ahmed 1998(2); Dismukes 2005).

The concept of innovating in terms of innovation and innovation capability is not extensively covered in the literature. Brown (2003) makes mention of the need to innovate innovation, with specific reference to the business models deployed for innovation. In other words, innovation applied to the business models deployed to ensure (and enhance) innovation. This is very similar to the interpretation utilised in this thesis. Innovating innovation refers to the need to apply the principles of innovation to organisational innovation capability improvement and the Innovation Capability Maturity Model itself. This serves as a mechanism for innovation capability improvement and renewal, and ensures a consistently fresh approach to the improvement of innovation capability maturity. The greatest challenge inherent in the development of a maturity model is attempting to capture the domain best practice in a sufficiently generic manner, such that the model is not rendered extraneous with the unrelenting reality of change. This is in essence a catch-22 – the change that innovation addresses is the same change that necessitates innovating innovation. It is therefore inherently impossible to create a timeless representation of innovation capability. New approaches to supporting and facilitating innovation will be required to further improve innovation capability, as innovating becomes the norm. It is for this reason that the requirement to innovate innovation is included in the model and is essential to improving (relative to the competition) innovation capability.

There are two additional requirements for an innovation capability that were not addressed in the literature (or at least not identified initially), and which were created to close gaps that existed after the initial construction of the ICMM v1 had been completed.

The first is a need for identifying and deploying integrative systems to facilitate the coordination of multiple innovation initiatives in an effort to achieve synergy from the results. The individual systems necessary for the various requirements had been addressed, but the model did not make provision for a system that brought all systems and initiatives together. The need for an integrated approach has been mentioned on several occasions in the previous paragraphs.

The second requirement is the need to identify and implement metrics that are facilitative of innovation activities and outputs. Katz (2006) mentioned the importance of metrics and the vital role that they play in the initially flexible and nebulous phase, and the later systematic phase of innovation initiatives. Furthermore, a saying from E. Goldratt, the father of the Theory of Constraints, specifically addresses the importance of metrics: “Tell me how you‟ll measure me, and I‟ll tell you how I‟ll behave”. Metrics therefore influence the behaviour of individuals. This presents an opportunity to utilise metrics that are facilitative of innovative behaviour. Innovation metrics is a concept that remains elusive to the greater understanding of innovation, however. The vast majority of literature addressing innovation metrics studies instances of initiative return (Return on Innovation), initiative output (number of patents), or characteristics of individuals aligned with innovative activity (one-dimensional approach). Focus is lacking in terms of metrics designed and deployed to encourage individual and team innovative behaviour. According to Kleysen and Street (2001), a multi-dimensional measure of individual innovative behaviour is required to facilitate innovative activity. The intention of this requirement is, therefore, to ensure that metrics are identified and deployed that address the need to encourage individual and team innovative behaviour while still ensuring that the operational needs of the organisation are met.

3.3 Conclusion

This chapter served to contextualise innovation capability and identify those innovation requirements and practices captured within the literature, and thereby lay the foundation for an Innovation Capability Maturity Model.

An interesting development of this chapter is the realisation that it is inherently impossible (or at least in the long term) to create a timeless representation of innovation capability. One of the initial objectives of the innovation capability requirements and practices was that they represent generic and timeless instances of their applied counterparts, as discussed in the literature. The ability to reverse engineer the requirements and practices of the literature and obtain those fundamental innovation capabilities that the applied requirements and practices fulfil is still possible (see Chapter 4). This will ensure the generic nature of the model and broaden its scope of applicability. It will, however, not ensure the timeless applicability of the model. Change is simply too unpredictable to state that any model can remain relevant in the long term.