Needing To Think Applied Innovation Services

May 26, 2017Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Molecules4 Comments

We can simply go on and on in the many ways we have evolved our problem-solving techniques or methodologies, as those help the innovation and discovery process; incremental, piecemeal and experimentally.

Yet we still get caught out by not resolving or addressing the essential building blocks of innovation (culture, environment, climate, governance, alignment). We have never ‘cracked’ the full innovation management system. Perhaps we can today. We should try at least.

Many of those innovation tools that have been emerging in recent years have now built up a powerful body of validation, and they become necessary to know and practice yet often miss the basic building block needs of innovation. We need to do better, we need to design a completely new innovation process that takes into account all that has evolved in our understanding and experiment in recent years. Some thoughts:

The innovation value lies within the new system

May 22, 2017Posted inAdvancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation1 Comment
Image credit: the film “the Core”

Core capabilities have upsides and downsides. As many of our business organizations seek to optimize their processes across the company, they are constantly reaching more outside to gain growing partnerships and greater innovation interactions. They are looking to complement and reinforce existing capabilities through more open innovation thinking and approaches but is that enough?

One focus area is on value chain optimization, another on customer engagement, yet the one that has the potential to really transform the innovation process lies in the partnerships emerging from reaching back into established suppliers, but also by tapping into the broader network of knowledge that can be found in reaching out to the innovation community of start-ups, venture capitalists, research institutions and other key players, capable of fostering and delivering innovation in unique and diverse collaborations. The collaborating edges are becoming our new core.

The core is far more found at the edge, in the collaborating capability and networks we form and this needs very different organizational design.

Are We Crushing Real Innovation?

May 12, 2017Posted inAntibodies, Shifting dynamics in innovation4 Comments

Well, this morning I came across an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, entitled “America has become so anti-innovation – it’s economic suicide“ written by Ben Tarnoff, a writer on technology and politics, living in San Fransisco.

This article did disturb me, it triggered a number of validations in my own mind. Once you get past the opening rant about the infamous Juicero juicer, that has now been used as an illustration of how investors funded something that automates something that you can do faster by hand.

The article opens up the doors to questioning much that is going on under the Silicon Valley umbrella. The juicer got funding of $120m from a number of blue-chip VC’s but it was not this that actually disturbs me, it was this “ant-innovation” tag the writer was attaching to (North) America.

The article goes deeper in questioning where we are in our innovation thinking. We do have a real innovation growth dilemma that we can’t lay at the door of Silicon Valley alone, it is part of the Western world’s current sickness. It has lost that ability to take a positive risk in so much, ‘kicking the can down the road’ for others to resolve, be these societal, educational, health, infrastructural or institutional reforming and so much more. All really important innovation opportunities.

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 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.

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.

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.

Innovation Mentoring versus Coaching

April 5, 2017Posted inFoster Performance

I lot of people get caught out in not knowing the differences between Mentoring and Coaching.

Equally, when you are in the coaching mode you need to guard against moving over to the mentoring mode unless it is conscious ways.

We are facing highly competitive environment changes. The key to the need of having facilitation is to bring fresher, more innovative and leading-edge solutions into any innovation thinking but it is often all about the blending of experiences and the relationship dynamics of those involved in this set of dialogues.

“For fresh vision and momentum, I need your past like you need mine”

The objectives are to deliver innovation understanding in both mentoring and coaching approaches