Sustainability will increasingly come through innovation ecosystem designs

April 4, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability

Making Sustainability central to our future innovation capability building will be through the adoption of taking on a new open ecosystem approach.

Broader collaborations will become central for future organizations to find ways to cooperate, network and build relationships, that recognize the partnership value, to achieve a sustainable, future business that offers impact and connected design for customers to value, that meets their changing needs.

Today’s challenge is to build the capacity to be different, to sustain and accelerate the critical aspect that innovation, ingenuity and creativity can provide, with the additional stimulus for sustaining lasting growth.

Our thinking needs to reflect a longer-term horizon, beyond just achieving immediate results. The dividend of thinking for a sustainable future has the promise of greater value and recognition. The reward by customers comes from the value of resolving growing complex problems, which is increasingly coming through this understanding of ecosystem design and collaborative endeavours.

We need to build far more collaborative environments for exchanging knowledge and sharing. To achieve this the recognition of the value of ecosystems as central to any future design is becoming central to this need, to co-create and capitalize on a wider knowledge only available in an open approach.

So what is value creation?

March 20, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Innovation strategy, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability
https://www.imsmarketing.ie/news/a-value-proposition-statement-is-critical-to-the-success-of-your-business/

Value creation is highly dynamic, it is going on all the time and can increase, decrease or transform, in different ways, when you exploit your different capitals that will be in constant change and adjusting to reflect your organization’s business activities and eventual outputs.

This is when you can begin to see the value created by the use of deploying all the capitals to build new growth and what I call “stock” that along with “flow”.

Robin Sloan does a brilliant job of explaining this. I loved this explanation of the two:

“There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy – too easy.”

“Flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein. And the real magic trick is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. It’s the hybrid strategy.”

Value is not just from within, it is the links our organizations are constantly making with others, in the interactions, relationships and the combining of the activities. The important need is to manage the stocks and flows of the capitals

Innovation Ecosystem Understanding through an AI-driven approach

March 8, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation Ecosystems, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation1 Comment

I always find it interesting when different though-strands seem to collide. You can put that down to serendipity, fate, luck or just being in the right spot at that time. I have always been a fan of the book “The Medici Effect; breakthrough insights at the intersections of ideas, concepts and culture” by Frans Johansson.

I like to think I am often colliding at the innovation intersections where I keep finding lots of synergies that feed my research and innovative curiosity to support others.

For the past six or so weeks I have been looking into Ecosystems and one of those (famous) strands took me to “Natural Language Understanding” and I read an article by Mark Seall, Head of Digital Communications at Siemens called “How AI is shaping the future of marketing communications” and it got me curious.

The critical interplay among innovation, business models and change

February 20, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation strategy, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The critical interplay among innovation, business models and change

Jeffrey Phillips and I have collaborated over a number of years and I have always felt these have been highly productive, original in thinking and truly valuable.

One such collaboration was around the interplay of innovation with business models and change.

I wanted to extract part of this white paper”Critical Interplay Innovation Business Models Change 6-2“(goes to PDF), in this post, as it offers all involved in innovation a structure to break down innovation into its different models of application. It describes some important observations we often forget when innovating.

Confronting Your Darwin Effect through Innovation

February 2, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Innovation strategy, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Confronting Your Darwin Effect through innovation

It is so hard to let go! It is so often harder to carry on, but determination prevails!

I have been working away, call it my labour of love, with plenty of frustrating moments but have “pushed on” through sheer determination, on my thinking through the ‘harnessing’ of the dynamics within innovation.

The journey has forced me into terrain that presented diverse challenges to achieve fresh insights and traversed many a rugged landscape to get closer to my goal of offering organizations their innovation fitness and future landscape design, one designed to alter their present capabilities and capacity to innovate radically.

Building the use of the innovation work mat as a compelling business case

January 1, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Sustainability, Tackling innovation
The Executive Innovation Work Mat as a compelling business case

After a series of conversations around the Executive Innovation work mat, Jeffrey Phillips and I decided there was a need to add one more to the series, one that makes the business case for the work mat, one that is more from the leaders perspective.

In this video conversation of around 13 minutes, we explore why the leadership of organizations needs to get deeply involved in the innovation activity.

The reason top leadership needs to be fully involved

How many of our organizations are not looking to search for new ways for organic growth, improve their profit margins and create differentiation? This makes innovation central to this CORE need.

Providing the glue in the common language, communications, and context needed for successful innovation

December 29, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Innovation strategy, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation
The Tower Of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

 

Central to any organizational innovation building, the enormous value of having a consistent common language is paramount; it is essential to gain identification and understanding that all can relate to; it provides the backbone to a clear, united “sense of purpose”.

Building upon this common language gives a greater chance of effective communication to place the innovation activities into their appropriate context.

In the fifth of a series, I am working with Jeffrey Phillips, a long-term collaborator on “all things concerning innovation” we have been discussing the different domains of the Executive Innovation Work Mat we propose as a framework to provide a great chance to bring all the various aspects of innovation together.

We explore why each factor is essential to innovation in the videos we’ve created. These have covered

Balancing Function, Design, Process and Structure for Creative Tension

December 22, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

In the fourth conversation between Jeffrey Phillips and myself, around parts of the Executive Innovation Work Mat, we took on several different issues around the design, function, structure and process needs for innovation.

The conversation lasted nineteen minutes, and for some reason, I lost sound briefly at my end a few times, which was a pity. So I hope I can help fill those gaps and explore the what, why and how of having a dynamic functioning design and structured process to meet today’s demanding and highly energetic world of constant change.

This specific conversation (LINK here) is about 19 minutes. It is all about the fit of innovation and the tensions between the design, function, structure, and process needs to manage innovation management. We relate this specifically within our Executive Innovation Work Mat.

It is always our intention to offer some different thrôughts about the balancing of function, design, process, and structure and giving it equally the creative dynamic attention it needs

Why we should focus on Innovation Governance

December 20, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Sustainability, Tackling innovation

I am working with Jeffrey Phillips, a long-term collaborator on “all things concerning innovation.” We have just had our third short conversation of a five-part series on Innovation Governance.

This specific conversation is all about the fit of innovation governance within our Executive Innovation Work Mat. This is the link on Innovation Governance to the conversation, just under 14 minutes to listen to. Hope it gives a different set of insights to this area of innovation alignment.

If you would like to listen to the two previous conversations then these are here in the links that take you to youtube.com  The first was setting the scene for these conversations on the “fundamental building blocks for innovation success” (LINK) and then the second into “the essential alignment of innovation to strategy” (LINK).

I have written supporting posts to these conversations, more to flesh out a number of different pointers to add more value and awareness of the importance of having a clear integrated solution for innovation in the solution we offer, the Executive Innovation Work Mat.

Innovations linkages to Strategy is vitally important

December 15, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation strategy, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation1 Comment

I have just finished the second of a planned series with one of my favourite long-term collaborators Jeffrey Phillips.

The link to this conversation is here, it is just over 15 minutes long. as a conversation between us, where we emphasise the important linkage between innovation and strategy. You might believe this is a no-brainer but you would be really surprised that this ‘tight’ linkage is often lacking.

Our first conversation called the Fundamental building blocks for innovation success (13 minutes), links here, introduces the series and the areas of our focus. I wrote a post supporting this “Getting back to the future about innovation”

All of these short conversations are drawing out the value of having an integrated approach through the Executive Innovation Work Mat, our central theme of the series and solution to integrating innovation.

In this latest conversation, Jeffrey and I argue most problems or disappointment with many innovation efforts within a business can be attributed to a lack of alignment to the organization’s strategy, resulting in poor growth and impact from innovations contribution.

We need to resolve that issue within any innovation activity, it needs a “tight” linkage to strategy.