Chapter 6
BUILDING KNOWLEDGE ENABLED INNOVATION CAPABILITY
Snapshot
To succeed in the twenty-first century, organizations need to create and respond to opportunities, develop new products and services, adapt and change – in other words, they have to innovate. The capability to manage the processes that enable this needs to be refined by managers. Knowledge enabled innovation is an organizational capability that takes time and effort to develop. We look at what this involves, how to go about understanding an organization’s current strengths and weaknesses in this area, and what can be done to build the capability over time.
Six factors together create the organizational capability for knowledge enabled innovation: effective internal and external collaboration, developing a learning organization with the tools in place to re-use knowledge, learning from successful innovation, and recognizing opportunities for innovation. All six must co-exist and work together if this capability is to be maintained and developed.
Evaluating how well your organization performs in these areas is a useful starting point. Here a framework is proposed to help you do this in a structured fashion. If one part of the organization is better than another on any one of the factors, then managing a peer learning process can help build the capability of the whole organization.
Why this Matters
Change provides opportunities for learning, which stimulates us to make different connections between what we know ...
