Exploring Dynamics Within Innovation Landscapes
How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?
I believe we have eight needs to achieve.
Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.
Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning
So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly:
How can we establish Innovation as the vital link to a process of change and strategic direction options? One that lifts the debates of managing today’s business by linking it into the future and then turning this thinking into a series of plausible and coherent set of activities?
Innovation can drive change, change is required. Without innovation, we progressively die, as we provide no option for change, no prospects of new, different growth. So why does it continually fail to happen?
We innovators certainly need a new model of change, for at least eight important reasons I can think of, that render what we have practiced in the past as obsolete:
Breaking News: “Over the past 15 years, a portfolio of stocks based on the Innovation Leaders analysis has repeatedly outperformed all major indexes. Average return has been 14.5% CAGR and in 2016, growth was 18.9% – significantly higher than S&P500, NASDAQ and FTSE 100.
Year after year, this analysis has proven that those firms identified as being the most effective innovators consistently outperform their peers and the market.”
Now is that surprising?
It should not be but sadly for the vast majority of companies that do not treat innovation as seriously as they should, as the growth enabler, it keeps them in a constantly lagging position. It tells a very powerful message, one of investing in innovation seriously and in sustaining levels, you can grow well above others.
Points from this research
Innovation has been rapidly changing and much of its basics have been swallowed up by some newly defining frameworks that have raced up to the top of the innovation agenda. They have driven much of our thinking and reacting. It is right that we all respond to these but we often forget much of the rest of what innovation needs to be built upon.
The problem or challenge with this focusing upon ‘breaking’ practices or new methodologies, are they can be so much harder to master and build them into established positions and practices, without the right amount of debate, understanding and assessing the implications and impact.
It always catches you by surprise when one of the leading players within the innovation space makes a change. In this case, Innosight has been acquired by Huron, a fellow professional services firm, one that has the vast majority of their business in the United States. Huron focuses specifically on Healthcare, Education, and Life Sciences and has been to-date far more operationally driven in its delivery solutions.
Being fairly curious you search for the fit and its meaning to both parties as Innosight has been continually shaping their offering to focus more on the strategic positioning of innovation over the past few years as the market has been undergoing a significant change in client demands and innovation solutions. I wanted to work through all of what this might mean and some more.
The transaction overview is ” Huron will purchase Innosight Holdings, LLC for $100 million upon closing, consisting of $90 million in cash and $10 million in Huron common stock, plus contingent consideration of up to $35 million if specific financial performance targets are met over a four-year period”
This time last year we saw another acquiring of a pure innovation firm
In a recent post over on a dedicated website for discussing ecosystems and platforms, I was discussing the differences between Amazon and Alibaba. I quote “I’d say Amazon are “asset heavy” whereas Alibaba remains “asset light”.
They might be operating at the two ends of the current internet trading spectrum and are coming from different market maturity positions but it is the asset management that is becoming critical for delivering the profit or dragging performance.
Now Amazon is far from “asset heavy” when you compare them to the Industrial companies like GE but asset orchestration is seemingly getting far greater management time for all companies it seems. The lighter you are, the more likely you are to be more flexible and adaptive to respond to more disruptive challenges being faced by industries that are undergoing the shift to being more “digitally enabled”. Alibaba is very much a good asset orchestrator.
We so often get caught up in the building of our capabilities. In some ways, I keep attempting to “peel the innovation onion” in explaining the need to focus on building the capabilities in different ways but to be honest, it needs these various approaches to an ever-changing environment.
A different intensity of innovation onion perhaps? Why, well we have the business of today, the emerging business of tomorrow and the future business that will provide a radically different set of capability building needs?
The struggle to date is that innovation remains hard to manage well; we strive to systematize it and then attempt to replicate any success we then have, so as to achieve more, yet more often than not. we do not take into account all the variables that came together for that particular winning outcome. Often this does not work on a repetitive basis as the variables that make up innovation can be different for each innovation event or activity but we can learn under a growing ‘range of’ differentiating capabilities.
So this week my research was moving around issues of complexity within innovation and I came across a great paper, written by Deborah Dougherty “Organizing for innovation in complex innovation systems”
Although she is addressing within this paper the bigger more complex social and economic challenges we are facing in healthcare, alternative energy, water scarcity, climate management, poverty and economic revitalization, she is attempting to reframe these into problem resolutions from breaking down discovery into four distinct channels. I liked this thinking.
The new innovating world we face in the 21st Century
Her opening insight is in the twenty-first century we are all requiring more reliance on social technologies that are designed to allow the different technologies to emerge and be allowed to integrate, due to the diversity and diffusion of knowledge. This is different from past practices found within organizations. Dr Dougherty points out much of what takes place today is still based on nineteenth-century practices where organizations were designed to stabilize, scale up and optimize, mostly internally, the scientific and technological knowledge into large working configurations.
All companies talk about innovation and its growing importance but it seems to me very few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale.
So have you ever asked what inhibits innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to have so innovative growth can be achieved? Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities?
Have you ever evaluated your capabilities, competencies, and capacities to innovation in light of a changing landscape?
One where competitors have gained new ground or you have been confronted with a more disruptive product that threatens your established position or has even the potential to threaten your very existence? Your ability to respond to changing positions are often determined by knowing which capabilities and capacities you can call upon and leverage for finding new solutions that accelerate and innovate your position to respond and stay competitive.
If we take the view: