Balanced Dynamics Innovation

Balanced Dynamics InnovationTM

This is an innovative approach that helps organisations increase their chances of getting innovative breakthroughs from their innovation teams.

The approach addresses the need of putting together a team that has all the capabilities and capacities to create and deliver innovative breakthroughs. It also overcomes the difficulties of getting a team, with very diverse backgrounds, to stay together long enough to bring their innovative breakthroughs to the market.

It is not natural that the teams will succeed. They need to be set up for success. Balanced Dynamics InnovationTM brings together two sets of technology to do just this. Here is a brief description of each of these technologies:

Setting the Team Up for Success

The typical reasons for teams which are unable to bring innovation to market include their failure to recruit entrepreneurial individuals to the job, leaders who ignore important tasks in the innovation process, and members failing to resolve conflicts.

The Opportunities-Obstacles, Team Management (visit this link or if you have a Facebook account, do click on this link to sample the Facebook edition of the 'Work Preference Profile') and Linking Skills (visit this link to sample the Facebook edition of the 'Linking Skills Profile')Profiles provide individuals with valuable insights and information into the way they prefer to work, their preferred roles within an innovative team, and propensity their teams are likely to deliver breakthroughs to the market.

This feedback will help improve the team members' relationship, and its capability to create and deliver, which in turn increases the organisation’s propensity to innovation.

Cycle of InnovationTM

This is a proven methodology that alleviates the adverse effects of the forming and storming phases of the team’s development. It takes the team from the creation of an idea to turning it into actual working prototypes within a short span of 3 days, thereby strengthening the team’s capacity to deliver what they have created.

The members of the team will also address issues pertaining to marketing the solution, dealing with sceptics, managing resources, and negotiating between different interest groups. It is fast-paced and is used for designing, refining, and introducing new products, services and processes. The roots of Cycle of InnovationTM can be trace to iDive, a process that has been used by the MINDEF Innovation and Transformation Office since 2004.

There are several recommended approaches to introduce Balanced Dynamics InnovationTM into your organisation. You could use one or several in combination, depending on how you like these technologies to be encased in the culture of your organisation:

• Starter - Organisation adopts the left hand side of the Balanced Dynamics InnovationTM. This consists of a set of profiling exercises and a half to one-day worth of Post-profiling Developmental Session. The knowledge gained could be dovetailed into the organisation's existing team development or management systems.
  
  

  

• Pilot - Organisation runs the Balanced Dynamics InnovationTM Workshop. The outcomes of the three-day workshop is the creation of an effective innovation team, which will deliver the prototype of the innovative breakthrough and the business plan for its introduction into the market. Recently, MICA has successfully incorporated this process in its 2008's Innovation Jam.

Testimonies from participants had attended the programme:

• I have learnt to use different tools to solve different types of problems.


• I found the tool useful both at work and at home.


• I have discovered a way to analyse problems in a systematic and comprehensive manner, hence I am able to tackle the problem with the most appropriate set of tools.

• Scaled - Organisation is imbued with the technologies. This approach is more involved as the organisation learns to use these technologies and conducts their own post-profiling developmental session and Balanced Dynamics InnovationTM workshop.

Please contact me (spaceman@pacific.net.sg) if you want to learn more about Balanced Dynamics InnovationTM or if you want to explore the approaches for bringing the technology into your organisation.

This article was 1st written on 20th August 2007 and subsequently updated on 7 & 23 Oct 2008, 11 Mar 09 & 15 Jan 2010.

Copyright 2007 & 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

GIST Planning Board and Strategic Thinking Cards

There are many reasons why innovation fails to take off after much of the fanfare introduced at its launch. One key reason is that the owners of the innovation do not think through their longer term strategies, and when conditions change, they either lack the disposition or resources to allow them to sustain the diffusion of the innovation to reach its critical tipping point, where the change could take place without further interference from the owners.

Thinking strategically involves looking not just at the past and present, but also at the future. Only after the successful completion of this phase could we strategically plan for the future. In short, regardless of the innovation introduced strategic thinking helps you anticipate changes in the environment, and plan for them so you are prepared and not go under.


The GISTTM Strategic Thinking Cards and Planning Board is a methodology that comes with a set of cards and board that take you through a series of steps where you think critically, strategically and creatively about your strategies and action plans to introduce innovative solutions into your organisation and marketplace.

The methodology presents four phases and these are:

Grounding the Problem. In this phase, a set of questions are presented to help you identify your users' requirements. You may like to view the slide-share below by clicking on the board.

GIST Planning Board - Panel 1

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: planning creativity)

Ideation and Refinements. Here, the board guides you in generating and refining innovative solutions.

Strategy Development and Leveraging. The planning board now asks you about your strategies of sustaining the change.

Putting Them Together. Finally, you are led into putting together a plan that introduces the innovative solution into your organisation or market.

There are several ways the methodology could be brought into your organisation. These are some of the suggested approaches:

Since 2008, the GISTTM Strategic Thinking Cards and Planning Board has been introduced to the trainers at the National Community Leadership Institute, innovation activists from the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts Innovation Teams and Land Transport Authority of Singapore.

This article was updated on 14 Sept 2008, 12 Feb 2009 & 31 Mar 2009.
Copyright 2007, 08 & 09. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.