Advancing innovation - Innovation Thinking and Resources

Mapping the customer journey is the top driver for digital transformation

By @paul4innovating November 22, 2016Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Tackling innovation

Organizations are struggling to understand the behaviors of the ‘connected’ customer. Partly it seems executives don’t engage with their brand or business in the way that their customers do. There is often a difference in understanding the value creating points between them

The lack of having a well mapped out customer journey means missing out on opportunities caused by not knowing this complete set of connections being made into you. By not knowing all these connecting points and drawing them together in a cohesive plan, there is a significant chance you are simply restricting the developing of innovation solutions that map back to all the decision-making that is going on in the customers’ minds.

This failure to optimize and seize upon all the possible options to connect with your customers is restricting your ability to broaden out your innovation solutions, making the journey more value creating, it certainly can be really holding your business back.

As you explore the digital transformation path this can become your best opportunity to connect along the total customer experience and see a greater return on this understanding and investment.

Swimming along a road in a flood of digital transformation

By @paul4innovating November 5, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation

I am so caught up in transformation, no, actually I am swimming in it. No gentle backstroke for me lapping in the digital transformations that are being written about, this is a hard swim, one I’m not sure I can stay afloat and make headway, yet I must, well actually we all must. We all need to learn to swim along this new digital transformation road.

Recently I was asked to complete a review of digital transformation, to gauge where it presently is, to take a look at the leading emerging practices and ‘professional ‘wisdom’ and turn these insights into a report due out before the end of the year.

There are many innovation implications in this digital transformational journey that hold my increasing attention. For most of this last twelve months I have been increasingly tracking, researching and responding to supporting clients need about digital transformation, so I was happy to take this on. Little did I realize how this digital transformation has become a flood, a torrent of wisdom, many offerings different, often varying views and advice.

Bringing New Innovation Together Is Stretching the Mind

By @paul4innovating October 25, 2016Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation3 Comments

There is a profound shift taking place, relating to innovation. Increasingly we are seeing a growing dissatisfaction on the impact that innovation is having; in growth, in returns, in market and customer impact. There is a search for new solutions.

One of the implications is this growing recognition that innovation is rarely succeeding in isolation but it is growing on a more highly dependent type of complementary innovation, a collaborative network, working around this new emerging innovation to deliver a more connected, radical experience, requiring innovation ecosystem management.

This dramatic change we will all be undergoing will have a significant impact on organizations innovation management design and it requires new connecting’ thinking.

The voyages of discovery we all need

By @paul4innovating October 20, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Innovation strategy

Since early September I have been significantly focused on researching, relating and renewing my understanding of Business Ecosystems, Platforms and then what led into the power and need of improving customer end experience. This came about from having some evolving conversations with my ‘old’ sparring partner Jeffrey Phillips, over at Ovo Innovation. He nicely moved the ecosystem discussion towards capitalizing on a final outcome: achieving seamless customer experiences and our thinking began to really take off.

Jeffrey Phillips and I have collaborated around different innovation thinking for some years and in a late August discussion over Skype, we realized that what was emerging from our usual exchanges and insights was that the area of Innovation within Ecosystems was gathering pace and what did that mean for innovation in future business and practice implications.

We both have some shared as well as some different views on how this would shape up for the future. As usual in these discussions, we agreed to think about a potential collaboration on this by exchanging some opening thoughts in written exchanges. Those quickly took hold and we realized our need and the greater need was to explore and exploit the key themes of ecosystems, platforms and customer experience far more.

Intersections allow access; they open us up to new possibilities.

The New Innovation Need: Organizing within a Networks of Collaborators

By @paul4innovating October 3, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking4 Comments

We are facing tough challenges within the business world. To work through these we are all being asked to transform but there has to be a clear end, a return for all this energy and resources it requires, that we are being asked to spend?

How and where does innovation fit will clearly depend on this transforming effect. We are fairly clear that incremental innovation is just not cutting through to give the types of growth expected. There are many outside our existing organizations, standing impatiently at the gates, waiting to come in and take over with market breaking concepts through different business models .

We need to transform, be disrupted or certainly re-imagine and this is where knowing your ecosystem comes in.

Our existing organization needs to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical change. To meet different challenges, to be highly adaptive it needs to begin to organize around ecosystems to deliver on a vision that recognizes it has to be part of a greater collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected world.

Today larger organizations are having to face the stark truth.

Innovation, ecosystems, platforms and the promise of more to come

By @paul4innovating September 24, 2016Advancing innovation, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation Ecosystems, Leading innovation

Jeffrey Phillips and I are launching our fourth collaboration together, this time we are exploring innovation ecosystems and the growing impact they are having in the business world through their ‘conecting and collaborating difference’ that can lead to vastly different final customer experiences.

I just want to reaffirm what he has written on this, originally over on his site.

This is what he wrote:

Innovation, ecosystems, platforms and more

“I’m pleased to announce that Paul Hobcraft and I will be working together on a number of posts that relate to some discussions we’ve had about innovation, more specifically how innovation must evolve from creating interesting but incomplete solutions to understanding how customers want to have interesting, seamless experiences. Over the next few weeks we’ll be writing posts on a new shared website that examine the state of innovation, and provide a reason we think so many innovation outcomes fail to achieve their goals.

Getting out of the Building, Going Cross-Industry for Seeking Out Radical Ideas

By @paul4innovating September 20, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, gaining innovation momentum, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Polymers

We all value those times when we can slip away from our desk, from the computer or phone and just simply step outside.

Some do this because of a necessity of topping up their nicotine levels or finding a few moments for having a chat, others just simply want to step away, relax a little and freshen up.

Another reason to get out of the office is when it comes to thinking differently within the business, going out to seek out different, often radically new ideas. This offers the chance of seeing something completely differently, by being simply aware and open to new possibilities, detaching yourself from your own (comfortable) environment .

So how do you manage exploiting and exploring for Innovation?

By @paul4innovating September 7, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, gaining innovation momentum, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Shifting dynamics in innovation

So how do businesses organise their structures to be able to simultaneously manage the needs to exploit and explore innovation?

In this post I wanted to explain my thinking through on this ability to be ‘ambidextrous’, knowing the difference of when to exploit and when to explore as essential to leveraging innovation, in all its forms and watching out for some of the traps in not managing this well.

Managing this, in all honesty, though, is hard to get the balance right but highly valuable if you do achieve it, it can transform the business. Many of our organisations struggle to manage both successfully as they tend to focus more on separation mostly in organisational structures alone as their attempt to become ambidextrous. It is far more than ‘just’ this. Get the balance right across the organisation’s design and in its leadership management, it becomes a very powerful mechanism for accelerating performances by delivering significantly new innovation and equally sustaining and leveraging the core business you have today.

Recently I contributed a blog post over on the Hype Innovation Blog ” Balancing Exploitation & Exploration for Changing Performance” that opens up the subject but then extensively dives into three examples of Apple, GE and Google that are working in highly ambidextrous ways, pursuing exploiting and exploring in their own unique ways.

Making a compelling business case for an integrated innovation framework

By @paul4innovating September 1, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, innovation execution delivery, Tackling innovation7 Comments

As innovation becomes a more consistent requirement rather than an occasional exercise, it must align to strategic goals and become part of the planning and execution cycle in more aligned ways.

An increased focus on innovation as a consistent discipline requires significant reflection on what needs changing, what impact this change will have and how do we proceed to implement it. This requires senior management attention because of the significant organisational impact.

The leadership within an organisation provide the linkage into the strategy, provide the framework and set this in the context of the vision and goals needed to be achieved. You, as the innovator, seek out the synergies between strategy and innovation, between innovation and capabilities, between culture, the environment, the process, structure and routines and how it all should be governed.

The compelling value is in having an integrated innovation framework

So Are You Thinking Crowdsourcing?

By @paul4innovating August 5, 2016Achieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Foster Performance, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Polymers1 Comment

Crowdsourcing does have a real potential in my mind but does seem to have some formidable issues to work through, to be well understood and managed.

Partnering with experts in this field will help overcome many of these barriers or at least have reassuring suggestions for resolving them. Let’s take a look at some of these here in this post.

Certainly, I think over time we will learn what works for us and what becomes leading practice, so we can become a lot clearer on crowdsourcing position and value to us, within our context, terms and circumstances.

That is why it will be really hard to cite ‘best practice’ as each crowdsourcing challenge will need different inputs and will yield very different outcomes for each unique challenge or problem raised.

Continuing with my exploring crowdsourcing. Part one is here. Within this second post, I want to offer some different thoughts to work through around the issues and concerns that came out in my researching the subject. There is a part three coming out in a few days to finish this mini-series off.