The Assistum Innovation Knowledge Base helps your managers develop a shared understanding of what needs to be done to enhance your organisation’s ability to innovate and prosper.

The ability to innovate effectively is widely recognised as critical to long term business success. The question is how to develop concrete plans that have widespread support within your business and lead to a measurable long-term improvement in innovative capability.

There are two major traps for the unwary.

Management jumps straight into detailed action planning after a very superficial analysis (or no analysis at all) of areas of organisational innovation strengths and weaknesses . The result can often be that key areas are overlooked and/or there is insufficient buy-in to the action plans.

A detailed analysis is done incorporating many diverse views and some fairly woolly discussions. But there is no action at the end of it because the subject proves too difficult to get a handle on. No clear shared conclusions on what needs to be done are reached.

Without a clear business purpose and motivating stretching goals that require new ideas to achieve them, innovation is unlikely to thrive.

As well as creative people and space for them to create, an innovative organisation also needs an external orientation to spark ideas that are of value to others, and good partnering skills to gain the confidence and creative input from others.

The Innovation Knowledge Base is one of a number of "business knowledge base templates" that are supplied with the Business Edition of the Assistum Knowledge Editor.

Higher Level Systems Ltd can also provide a facilitated workshop, built into the ongoing management development programme, together with an Assistum Innovation Knowledge Base that provides a comprehensive framework of innovation issues and a mechanism for focusing on areas for action. This process can be applied to the whole organisation or to sub-units such as individual functions or subsidiaries.

As Peter Drucker once said "There is nothing so inefficient as very efficiently doing the wrong things".

Good decision making is needed for selecting projects, as a key component of innovation as described above, for sourcing decisions and for effective pricing - to name just four strategic areas.

Businesses seem to fall into one of two camps when it comes to making decisions. Either they are paralysed by analysis or rush to ill-considered gut judgements.

Ann Langley (Universite du Quebec a Montreal) has written a very interesting paper on this very subject in Sloan Management Review Spring 1995 entitled "Between Paralysis by Analysis and Extinction by Instinct".

Assistum provides a tool - Decision-making Capability Knowledge Base - that follows her approach. This is a high level Organisation Development diagnostic tool that helps you or your business team assess the strengths and weaknesses of the decision-making style of your business or a sub-unit. It provides a disciplined process that will assist managers come to a shared understanding of what needs to be done.

This includes organisational layers, role of staff groups, degree of participation, focus of power, range of opinions, style of leadership and cognitive style.

These include "the dialogue of the deaf", "the vicious circle", "the decision vaccuum", "the dominant leader", "parallel power" and "natural unanimity".

Possible interventions

These include levels of hierachy, decision-making power, role of staff groups, internal or external promotion, leadership style, common values or diversity.