May, 2024 - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

25 years of Innovation- how has it evolved? Has it been successful?

25 years looking back at Innovation’s evolution

I decided to hold a conversation with Google’s Gemini about how innovation had changed and hopefully progressed since I first became involved 25 years ago, when I lived in Singapore and was heavily involved in my MBA, which had innovation as an elective.

The MBA elective “hooked” me on innovation, and here I am 25 years later, still going on about innovation, championing, cajoling and encouraging innovation to be more central, disciplined and structured.

So I have taken the educational looking back from Gemini lense of perspective and broken this into three parts. I find it interesting and reaffirming. This is the first of these posts looking at the development, thinking and design of innovation from 1999 to today 2024, twenty-five years.

Innovation can be both highly frustrating and rewarding. It is good to gain a real sense of progress in these past 25 years; otherwise, where have I been?

I often feel innovation has not advanced in these past twenty-odd years, but having all the changes nicely summarized here makes me feel there has been a shape and purpose to be so actively involved in the evolution of innovation over these 25 years and been part of that evolution.

Firstly, this post outlines how innovation has evolved since 1999 and does a further recheck for 2019 until today. So, it covers a twenty-five-year period but recognizes that the last five years have seen a very different set of innovation accelerants.

Business Ecosystems are important today

We live in a world of interconnected Ecosystems. Businesses have been actively working in their own connected ecosystems to suit their own business needs. That needs to change. We need to open up our thinking to collaborative ecosystems.

Let’s briefly examine why and what I have been working on as my focus for some time—the need for interconnected business ecosystems. They are highly valuable and very relevant today in dealing with complexity. They are interlinked in different ecosystems to generate greater returns and resolve complexity and challenges that need co-creation and cooperation.

Valuing Business Ecosystems Driving Design and My Thinking

Connected Business Ecosystems for Impact and Value

After a short break, I have further solidified and deepened my approach to business ecosystem thinking and design through my “Hierarchy of business ecosystems” framework. This recent work has been focused on making this framework more robust, where integrating the suggested ecosystems of innovation, business, dynamic, and enterprise ecosystems brings out the value of such an overarching design.( see below for these as integrated value )

I provided a recent post “Returning to the Hierarchy of Business Ecosystems” where I summarized what the framework provided in its structured approach but also highlighted the area for improvement in its design value by offering a more robust, real and practical construct that offers components and bridging points for adoption. Some of these really important ones I will post upon as they need that “singled out focus” such as a more comprehensive Governance mechanisms, explicit integrations of dynamic adaptation and resilience, addressing interdependence and feedback loops and more quantitative metrics.

The Vision of the interconnected Business Ecosystem has this as its objectives.

“The Hierarchy of Business Ecosystem Needs presents a holistic approach to navigating the complexities of the modern business landscape. It emphasizes collaborative ecosystems as the key to unlocking untapped potential, driving sustained growth, and achieving collective prosperity.