Because successful Innovation is new to so much of the business, it makes us think about how to manage it with a "new" process. But ultimately, the secret to making innovation really meaningful could lie in teaching the new dogs old tricks.

1. Innovation as Maturity
Orchestrating Agility
An archestra notebook.
© 2013 Malcolm Ryder / archestra

2. Agility as Maturity
• The prevailing notions regarding “successful” innovation fall into two groups.
• In one, success is about getting innovation underway as a day-to-day work practice. In the other, success is
about deriving practical business value from the outputs of innovation.
• Both groups now recognize the importance of pursuing success through a process that allows the pursuit to
be managed.
• However, more important than the process is a management program. Innovation is not merely a process
outcome but instead is a competency.
• Competency is about being able to bring the right elements into the activity that is needed at the time for
the problem (or opportunity) at hand. In management, a program protects the persistence of the processes
throughout changes in participants, resources and schedules. Meanwhile, a program also helps to
coordinate the intents of the process outputs from multiple processes.
• Akin to the overall intent of capability maturation, the real “business value” of innovation can be directed by
what kind of goal is the target of the competency. Innovation is just a way to reach the target.
• The following illustrates the primary target being Agility in the market. Sustainable agility is an advanced
stage of maturity at which the competency for innovation is stable and productive.

3. Why we like Amazon: a sketch
Amazon decided to sell books that can be delivered, by processing the sale start-to-finish online. Then it
decided to sell almost anything legal that can be delivered. People came to Amazon requesting a wide variety
of things, and different things needed different delivery mechanisms.
Over time, whenever Amazon decided to have another kind of item offered for sale and delivery, it compiled
different sources (suppliers) and different delivery mechanisms to underpin the offer of sale.
If the format of the sale items themselves evolved (e.g., from material to digital), Amazon re-engineered the
delivery mechanisms and the sources as necessary but applied standards and models to both, to maximize the
uniformity of available use that would still apply across the range of different requests.
As a result, Amazon computing, warehousing, fleets, and tablets are all industry state-of-the art infrastructure
for delivery. Amazon can even use its own infrastructure to radically renovate and evolve the infrastructure
itself.
Meanwhile, Amazon partners, software and content seamlessly interoperate as necessary, with high regularity,
to cover all of Amazon’s chosen market bases with an equally strong customer interface for linking supply and
demand. Their interactions in sourcing even generate new kinds of products before the market asks for them.
In effect, Amazon cycles continuously through its logistics, its architecture, and its interfacing to generate
incredibly high levels of synchronization with changing markets.
Few companies of any kind are as well known primarily for their competency at continually and rapidly
meeting new and expanding ranges of demand.

4. GOAL
STORY
Scope of requesters
In Market Territory
The market begins as a
heterogeneous population
in which a wide variety of
parties make requests for
goods and services. This
also includes having many
different ways of asking for
the same thing. A provider
determines how, if possible,
to reach the requesters
through means of delivery
that are feasible.
Economy of Scale
In Service Level
Economy of Scope
In Service Provision
The provider determines a
singular and efficient way
to adequately satisfy a
significant volume of the
identified requesters. For
the provider, this efficient
adequacy amounts to an
important type of
effectiveness. Reducing
complexity and variety
increases the affordability
and may be an ongoing
effort of improvement.
Where there are logical
similarities or logical interoperabilities, other kinds of
requests may be satisfied by
“porting”, integrating, or
otherwise extending the
request fulfillment ability to
them. Extensions also
include help by co-operators,
i.e. partners . Extensions
help establish effective
substantial coverage of more
types of requests.

5. Evolutionary Maturity
In constantly morphing and emerging markets, the business’s ambition is not really new: it wants to be a
dominant provider through being preferred by a wide range of customers.
This presumption, seen as a goal, creates three “market” problems to solve, respectively: capacity, adoption,
and diversity. The three market problems can represent stages in capability maturity. Ideally (as illustrated),
solving one problem stages the readiness to solve the next. Solving the diversity problem facilitates solving the
adoption problem, which facilitates solving the capacity problem. The final maturity features sustainable agility.
PAYOFF:
Customers’
deliveries are
supported
Provision
features built-in
quality
Production
offers more
choice
PROBLEM:
Diversity
Adoption
Capacity
The provider with this agility allows customers to find and choose what they want at a level of quality that
ensures their need will be supported.

6. Scope of requesters
In Market Territory
Economy of Scale
In Service Level
Economy of Scope
In Service Provision
PROBLEM
Diversity
in Reach
Adoption
In Range
Capacity
In Supply
SOLUTION
Logistics
Standards
Channels
ENABLER
Infrastructure
Architecture
Interfacing
MARKET
VALUE
Support
Quality
Choice
© 2013 Malcolm Ryder / archestra
GOAL

7. ENABLERS
Infrastructure
Architecture
Interfacing
Embracing this foundation of production agility requires recognizing the different ways that its terms can logically apply. The terms must be
understood as roles. The varieties of what serves in the roles expose many possibilities of how they might actually interact and create ROI.
Interfacing is the use of connectors allowing multiple entities to co-operate. These entities can be people, procedures, or machines – and
therefore the interfaces can create channels of interconnected persons (communicators), organizations (partners), software (applications),
devices (networks), and so on.
Architectures are structural designs giving particular specifications. By regulating how things are put together, they amount to formulas of
organization. Architecture also excludes things that are not recommended or accepted. This means that most practices using rules have an
architectural role; this can include engineering, contracting, marketing, or other “constructive” activities and platforms.
Infrastructure likewise is whatever systems and services are the environment’s utility and facility bases for executing operations.
In this model, innovations alter the capabilities and/or the performance of the roles by introducing, for example, a new component, condition
or method. The capabilities or performance enable solutions needed for the market problems.
Innovations such as social networks (interfaces), open source (architecture) and WiFi (infrastructure) easily come to mind; likewise, XML
(interfaces), web browsers (architecture), and virtualization (infrastructure) are identifiable innovations. Now, analytics is rapidly taking on an
infrastructural role, smartphones are becoming architectural, and location services are becoming interfaces. These variations and innovations
reflect the nature of the problems being presented by the market – they represent opportunities created through solving the problems

8. A value chain of agility (example)
Within a given market problem there will be a major solution approach and a key enabler of that solution. The impact that a future solution
needs from an enabler is often identifiable as the origin or driver of a potential “innovation”. For example, a new kind of infrastructure
might revolutionize logistics and improve the mastery of the logistics needed for deliveries to a diverse market population. “Progressing”
across the problems (left to right), the key solution of one problem may heavily influence the enabler needed for the “next” problem. For
example, the logistics already used for diverse delivery can be a primary reference point for the architecture needed to standardize
widespread provisioning. Given that, architecture may present certain critical requirements to the infrastructure underlying the logistics.
Likewise, interfaces enabling the creation of purposeful channels are sensitive to existing provisioning standards and, in order to leverage
them, may present certain critical requirements to the architecture enabling assurance of those standards. These dynamics can be iterative.
and
and
Provision
features built-in
quality
Production
offers more
choice
SOLUTION:
Logistics
Standards
Channels
ENABLER:
Infrastructure
requirements
Architecture
requirements
Interfacing
© 2013 Malcolm Ryder / archestra
PAYOFF:
Customers’
deliveries are
supported

9. Orchestrating Innovation Value (examples)
We recognize the value of innovations with increasing frequency, largely due to the size of investments dedicated to Go-To-Market efforts from
companies such as Google, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Pandora, Facebook, Skype, OnStar, Tesla, and many others in many industries. We see
innovations as developments that provide environments, platforms, processes, services and products both within an enabler role, and by
leveraging each other across roles. Orchestrating the innovations can strategically generate sustained market agility.
Support of
Delivery
Quality of
Provision
FUNCTION:
Enable Logistics
Apply Standards
ROLE:
Infrastructure
Architecture
ENABLERS:
•
•
•
•
•
GPS
Streaming video/audio
Map Reduce
Li-Ion rechargeable battery
VoIP
•
•
•
•
•
Map services
Algorithms
Machine learning
Design automation
4G LTE
Choice of
Products/services
Build Channels
Interfacing
•
•
•
•
•
“Presence” technology
Personal Queues
3D Printing
Alternative fuel cars
Unified messaging
© 2013 Malcolm Ryder / archestra
MARKET
VALUE:

10. Innovation as Maturity
Maturity is sustained behavior that is appropriate and beneficial
The market presents the business with its descriptions of propriety and benefit
Changing needs in the market pose new problems (or opportunities)
New problems/opportunities expose a place for future solutions
Future solutions call for new, modified, or re-purposed enablers
Enablement is inherently valuable for targeted solutions
Innovation generates enablement, delivering inherent value from the investment
Managing an enablement towards the goal of a solution is a competency
A persistently popular idea is that the competency can be incorporated through some combination
of a system and a process. Program management is likely to be that combination.