Covering Innovation My Way

May 7, 2017Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Building Innovation Capability, Interests, Molecules1 Comment

I set out to engage 100% in innovation work, it has been quite a journey of discovery, relating and then translating the parts into solutions. I still get overwhelmed by the sheer information overload or advice that seems to be offered.

Just trying to stay your own course is tough enough but with all the diversity of views, it must be even more overwhelming for others, those who are asked to take on a role within innovation. Where and who do you turn too must be a real dilemma?

In recent years I have found I need to diversify away from one given ‘voice’ on innovation and channel this out into specialized and more focused areas of innovation activity. At present, I have SIX channels open on innovation advice or advisory service that has made my life partly more complicated but more importantly, able to separate my thinking into these parts, as they deserve a ‘deeper’ dive and/or broader exposure.

I thought I’d outline the six here in this post as the sum of the parts that  contributes to the whole

We are pushing away from the old innovating core

May 1, 2017Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Interests, Molecules, Tackling innovation1 Comment

I continue to investigate and explore as much of the thought leadership on innovation as I can, it continually points to a change in how we approach innovation. Delivering this changing message becomes simply a cause in itself as so many are failing to recognize it as radically different from their past innovation management.

I have written about the new innovation era in 2017 made up of higher levels of needed collaboration, where platforms, ecosystems and customer experience understanding become increasingly central.

I felt I needed to provide a more dedicated perspective on these in a collaboration with my established sparing partner Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation in our website of Ecosystems4innovators.

We do stand at the cusp of a new innovation era but where do you stand?

We need to push well beyond our existing core of (existing) innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design that recognizes the “core” lies at the edges of discovery.

Digital technology is changing the innovation game

April 27, 2017Posted inBuilding Innovation Capability, Molecules4 Comments

Digital technologies are beginning to have a real impact on the methods, approaches, and rates of our innovation outputs. Social technologies are giving us real-time understanding.

We continually learn nthat intuition and ‘gut feel’ on research set up and gathered weeks or more often months ago, has a hidden cost as it rapidly goes out of date. This ‘knowledge’ is becoming out of date before we can gain from it and sometimes highly dangerous to follow, or believe in in the more volitile market conditions of today’s, those that are rapidly changing. We need to get closer to ‘real-time.’

This reliance on rapidly out-of-date understanding cannot be the basis for any justifications for high-stake bets when it comes to innovation. We need to change our thinking and design in the digital insight part more specifically within and along the innovation process. Technology in all its forms is altering the innovation game but are we adapting to this radical change potential? We need to embrace it.

The Value in Personal Innovation Learning Journeys

April 26, 2017Posted inCreation of Sustainable Value, Foster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking1 Comment

If you don’t have time, how can you learn? We are in need increasingly, of faster understanding, to quickly learn or resolve an immediate need, or we have this determination or essential requirement within our innovation role to deepen our knowledge and understanding of innovation. These are usually split into two parts, called are “micro or macro learning opportunities”.

The value of having an innovation guide, mentor or coach helps you accelerate through both these needs and learning opportunities. I see four points of value, my value proposition, if you like, for you to achieve personal innovation growth:

Peeling away the terrain of innovation reality

April 21, 2017Posted inCapabilities and Capacities, Dynamic capabilities, Fitness Landscaping Regimes, Impact & Scale, Mapping & Rugged Terrains

So do we have a clear understanding of where we are in our current innovation capabilities?

We have to establish a way to map our ‘terrain of reality’ in not just how we are performing but what lost opportunities have slipped through, simply because we lacked the awareness to seize on these opportunities when we first spotted them.

We have significant gaps in our innovation capabilities and competencies. Have you ever really audited them? Taken them through a structured examination?

We do need to achieve a ‘reality’ check or we stay in a state of, forgive me, ignorance. We don’t see the possibilities we only see the possible and in today’s world that is a losers mentality. We need to push ourselves but before we do, we do need to know where we are.

Through my work on building the Innovation Fitness Landscapes that are relevant to you today and then structuring the place you want to be by starting to address the questions: are we focusing on the right ones to deliver on the challenges we are facing?”, “what can we do differently?” and “how can we identify those critical ones”? and “how can these be structured to clearly move us to the new capabilities we require?”

My role here is to be the guide towards building improved innovation capabilities and capacity

My role is to help in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate understanding and identify what resources are needed, so my job is to help you to navigate the terrain. Here is my journey outline described as a typical story that we all need envision and go through.

Through an innovation fitness landscape plan, you can access where you are and what needs to be achieved to get you to the desired point you see as where you need to be.

The backdrop of digital transformation and its consequences

April 19, 2017Posted inBuilding Innovation Capability, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation1 Comment

Digital transformation is now omnipresent and has the potential to reshape the way all organizations operate.

The customer has become absolutely central to this transformation and the push towards the 4th Industrial revolution is driving this transformation wholesale, across all industries and services engaged in business.

Let me outline some of the challenges in my opinion that might help us all form a clear view of the digital transformation journey, recently researched.

Firstly I’m sure we can all agree transformation is very hard at the best of times

Digital transformation is doubly difficult, it forces us to work with mostly emerging, constantly evolving technologies, and then apply these in an integrated way into an existing business. This stretches our abilities significantly.

Beyond making a series of incremental improvements to become cloud-ready, we are supposed to reflect social, mobile and digital technologies. We need to fundamentally transform our processes by opening up and engaging with customers. On top, we have to deal with a broad range of communities, across platforms and in different ecosystems at speed, scale, and scope. However, we must do all this to reposition all our businesses towards the digital world.

I provided a recent digital transformation report that might help you in planning this digital journey.

Fitting understanding into the innovation puzzle

April 18, 2017Posted inCreation of Sustainable Value, Foster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

Formalizing a new Innovation learning-as-a-service is complicated, far more than I originally thought. Still, a certain course has been set and it is now working through much of its structure, learning much myself on the way to fit this within the innovation puzzle we all have.

When I was thinking through this concept I fell back into onto one of my most valuable techniques to work through, clustering a set of questions and capturing all the different thinking through the use of Mind Mapping techniques. Such a valuable tool.

A selection of maps that included: what a curator can do in innovation, of painting a picture of a strong advocacy practice, of working through a guiding approach, the need to reflect on the whole facilitation process, etc., and each brainstorm takes a time to work through, build and formalize. The end result becomes a much richer landscape of what I can offer and what equally might be needed.

The Global StartUp Ecosystem

April 13, 2017Posted inAdvancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Molecules2 Comments

The 2017 report by Startup Genome recently came out (April 5, 2017) You can find it here “Global StartUp Ecosystem Report 2017” which provides a 150-page review of the global state of startups. It is a really good resource to understand that not everything “starting up” is just coming from Silicon Valley, there are some vibrant startup ecosystems emerging all around the world, some most certainly near you.

The report goes into some depth of the top 20 places and then deep dives into others in America, Europe, Africa and Asia-Pacific. In all 45 cities around the world are nurturing startup ecosystems that are worth reading up about.

The report is copyright to the Startup Genome but I am sure they will not object to me quoting them in their goals for this

“Every city has the right to participate in the global startup revolution and reap the benefits of job creation, innovation, and economic growth. As this report documents, however, too many places are currently excluded from this revolution”

The aim of the report is to provide data-driven insights for startup leaders, investors, and the other ecosystem stakeholders like city leaders to capture and access policies and practices so they can learn from this research on what does and does not work, to build these startup ecosystems.

Learning Platforms and Personal Learning Pathways

April 12, 2017Posted inCreation of Sustainable Value, Foster Performance, Integrated Innovation Thinking

My mind has been swirling around the significant changes taking place around learning. Not just in the time we have available, suggested recently as 25 minutes per week to stop and learn but in the variety of ways we can learn. Clearly, many of these are digital to construct, so as to apply the more modern design process that works for each of us individually, at our time of need.

I have been struck by the emphasis on personal learning and development. We still get very caught up in the need for scale yet it is the ability and flexibility to design these to our individual pathway that becomes “the order of the day”. The constant struggle is for each of us in simply stopping to focus, finding the time and the last thing you can afford to do, is take an ad-hoc approach to this, it needs a structured design.

This is where external facilitation might help

A light-bulb moment in Innovation Learning

April 8, 2017Posted inAdvancing innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation3 Comments

Over the past few weeks, or is it months or is it even years, I have been constantly thinking through how we are learning in our innovation understanding. I have been struggling over this for a long time, looking to create a more compelling narrative and have only realized part of my ongoing difficulties was that I was coming at this the wrong way.

Firstly a narrative should be open-ended, there is no finite resolution yet to innovation understanding and secondly, it is for the intended audience to determine and relate, not the person presenting the narrative. For me, one light bulb went on.

The second light bulb moment came earlier this week. I was reading an article by Josh Bersin, called “the disruption of digital learning: ten things we have learned”. Josh is the founder of Bersin by Deloitte and this article was on one of his LinkedIn Pulse views. It actually stopped me in my tracks, it made me really think and recognize some of my recent shifts in my innovation focus was making real sense. The article alarmed me but it also ‘re-armed’ me.