Overview
No matter how smart you are, or how smart you think you are, you don’t know what you don’t know.
By now, you will be well aware that we view capabilities as the true backbone of sustainable innovation.
Capabilities = Knowledge
Whenever you think about the concept of capabilities, it’s easiest to think of them as bundles of resources. Knowledge is a resource and as we clarified earlier, knowledge includes technology.
Knowledge is often your company’s most valuable source of sustaining competitive advantages. This article will provide you with more clarity on the specific innovation-competitiveness factors most deserving of your company’s valuable resources.
Right now, it is time for some of you to turn your company’s attention toward recovery, ensuring that your businesses are ready to thrive for success in the “new normal”. For those of you who have proved to be even more resilient, you may have a number of innovations in your new product pipeline.
Regardless, we will all benefit from gaining a greater understanding and awareness of what knowledge is.
Fear of not knowing what we don’t know
A natural feeling, doubt arises from the “fear of not knowing what we don’t know”. No matter who you are, we are all experiencing this doubt to some degree right now.
At the least, you had better hope that you experienced some doubt over the past couple of months at least, because the alternative is just plain ignorance.
Bertrand Russell said it best.
“The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
With the knowledge of our capabilities in hand, however, we have a greater chance to quell this doubt.
Explore to Exploit
This diagram represents this concept through the basic, fundamental elements of the design process. Every design – and change process – starts from exploration.
When your strategic conversations get cluttered, utilise this diagram to ensure that you return back to the very essence of what we are trying to achieve. Referring to this diagram moves everyone back to the same page, providing greater clarity and purpose to a meeting.
Three key questions can help to structure our strategic thinking:
1. What is the current state? (What do we know?)
2. What is the preferred future state? (What do we need to know?)
3. How might we achieve that future state? (How are we going to get there?)
How can these be answered?
In the NewLedge®-Program, our initial focus centres on one innovation project alone. This is different from most programs that apply a broad brush to increase your overall innovativeness. As we explained earlier, we break the innovation process down into 3 key processes, explore, transform and exploit.
We take this approach as a means to begin to embed each process in your company’s core activities. However, as we explained towards the start of module one, the innovation and design processes can be messy and anything but linear.
Now, let’s dive into the complex nature of knowledge, company awareness and how we can really get a handle on it.
Key Take AWAYS
Three key questions can help to structure our strategic thinking:
1. What is the current state? (What do we know?)
2. What is the preferred future state? (What do we need to know?)
3. How might we achieve that future state? (How are we going to get there?)
