Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress

June 30, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability

Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress

Building a sustainable competitive advantage

Today’s challenge for me is not only to be building the innovation capacity but also to be establishing clear ways on how we should set about sustaining it. Increasingly, organizations must have the capability and capacity to sustain innovation to provide the stimulus for lasting growth and resolve the complex challenges we face today and in the future.

To get there, though, it does seem this must be through continued learning. Hence, your capabilities become stronger, evolving and more unique, thus making them more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate.

Let me outline an innovation framework that builds capability through a sustained approach.

When you set out to build capability to be sustaining, you need to consider there are two types of capabilities, distinctive, which are the characteristics of the organization which others cannot replicate and reproductive, which can be bought in by the competition but always need to need to be appropriate to any objectives you are trying to achieve.

Learning to collaborate in a rapidly changing world

June 22, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Building Innovation Capability, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability
visual from www.amle.org collaboration-the-missing-standard/

We clearly need to find ways to navigate ourselves back into some (new) order, to stabilize the chaos we are in, or beginning to feel we are finally moving out of the crisis and chaos of the last 18 months..
What we first need to do is make sense of what is going on around us.
Then, we need to determine what actions to take and the level of action, resource and support each part needs.
For this we need help, we need collaborators wanting to not just navigate back but more to navigate forward.
We are in a period of (great) change. How are we thinking about adjusting, not just to the immediate challenges but the greater ones that are certainly heading our way?
Within business, the present crisis offers a chance to make significant changes to how we operate in the future. However, I am not sure many of you feel the same; it seems disruption is in everything we need to undertake in what is coming towards us in change.

Are we losing the Energy Transition Battle? Innovation to the rescue?

June 9, 2021Posted inShifting dynamics in innovation

The growing fears are that we are falling behind the need to meet the Energy Transition required goals to the World has agreed to by 2050, set to meet the Paris Climate Agreement.
The climate is about to get really difficult to predict. We are facing some of the natural consequences of our present inability not to reduce greenhouse gases at the rate they are required.  We as humans are the perpetrators of generating all these greenhouse gases, and global warming is ruining this one and only planet we have.
Each part of the world is pursuing its energy agenda, understandably so in many ways, but the shift from the dependence on fossil fuels and recognizing all future solutions should be clean energy.
Our environment is in such a significant crisis when you witness the changing weather patterns increasingly becoming unstable and unpredictable. Then we have the increased frequency and amount of flooding or drought many places in the world are facing, let alone the melting of our ice caps and arctic regions.
Our planet is under great stress.

Thinking sustainability needs a mix of future scenarios.

June 3, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability, Tackling innovation1 Comment
The accelerating need to build a sustainability pathway

Sustainability is rising to be top or close to the top of a boards agenda. The growing concerns of several intertwined issues need addressing as they will initiate a significant change to the Business and how it operates and presents itself to the world.
Boards are asking where our business fits within and alongside society, both in who we serve and society in general, coupled with realising that the planet is heading towards a critical crisis and what we can do to reduce these pressures?
Not just sustainability forces a sharper need for strategic choices but the ability to undertake the product reinvention. A reinvention that concerns itself with reducing waste, minimizing carbon emissions, valuing the full life cycle and the ability to show the increasingly important end-of-life part of the lifecycle model. To extract precious, rare earth minerals and recycle parts reduces the demand for future mining or heat intensive materials.
Any products need to have a clear understanding of all their stages for the clarity of sustainability.