How often do you pause for thought, testing yourself, questioning even simply for ‘just those few minutes,’ to allow yourself to openly challenge where you are and what you are attempting to do?
We keep relentlessly moving on, like a wandering herd of buffalo, always looking for fresh pasture, those new feeding grounds. It’s not good; we often hear and see things differently when we find the time to stand still.
Do you let those moments go? Do you ignore them, quickly pass over them, attempt to capture the issue as something worth investigating later, or just get them behind you in the here and now? We often do need to slow down and figure it out there and then.
Of course, I often get caught up in this restless pursuit of gathering more when I spend a growing amount of my time researching innovation. I keep coming across so many things that ‘trigger’ the thinking, pushing me to feel I am more often the “hunter-gatherer.”
By long-term habit, I keep reverting more into a hunter-gatherer, in my case, upon innovation insights, collecting the raw material that I am looking to translate and distribute as this growing knowledge stock eventually.
The outcome of appreciating both “reflective” moments and collecting more understanding I trust is moving me slowly towards becoming an innovation curator who, hopefully, is valued by others. Well, it’s a goal of mine.
“Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems will have a powerful effect,
it alters the way we will approach problems today and in the future,
ecosystems offer a greater potential for collaborative growth, impact and sustaining innovating value”
Our understanding of innovation is changing; we are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into open and far more collaborative innovation (external orientation), with our collective thinking offering the acceleration into improving our innovation performances, leading to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success.
The search is seemingly on to find greater value, which will increasingly coalesce around different innovation ecosystems. In many different ways, we need to form significantly more relationships that increasingly matter to each organization, add value and insight, and bring external expertise inside to work on ‘greater’ innovation solutions.
In my research, I am getting a real sense that the current Innovation Management Software model is about to be upended and disrupted as per Clayton Christensens’ “Innovators Dilemma.”
The book the “Innovation Dilemma” published in 2016 was written by innovation expert Clayton Christensen suggesting even though even the most outstanding companies can do everything right–yet still lose market leadership.
Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.
Today if the technology software solutions are not advancing and adapting to new ways of building open, collaborative exchanges across not just a single organization but multiple ones. This need of all coming together to co-create, often solving more complex problems, ideas are lost or not being spotted by the incumbents and over time, others recognize these “blind spots” will present opportunities to offer new approaches to solve problems.
In this book it expands on the concept of disruptive technologies, a term Christensen coined in a 1995 in an article “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave”. It describes how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appear to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from the established business. (source Wikipeda)
This morning I decided to have an exchange on ChatGPT on the future of Innovation Management Software, I asked a number of questions in a short series and can well-relate to the answers provided incredibly quickly.
What do you think?
Do they make sense and are the suggestions a competitive threat or a trend towards a future that needs fully embracing before others do?
I started posting my thoughts on innovation in August 2010. I have written on this site alone, www.paul4innovating.com, by just coming up to a milestone of 700 posts focusing on innovation thoughts and opinions, so I just wanted to pause and think about all the different places I have tried to get the innovation message(s) out.
I always find the post-New Year to be a reflective part of the year of reviewing, deciding, and then setting new goals. This is a post about the sources of my knowledge that feeds my innovation passion.
Let me start. I often wonder whether the posts and articles I’ve written have been hitting the right buttons, helping solve the needs of those involved in innovation; I hope so. I have pushed out and explored various aspects, learning myself as I go. I have followed a number of great innovation thinkers and read different books on the areas of innovation.
It amazes me. How much is talked about, advice offered and sometimes that deep down nagging feeling, innovation understanding does not really change; it is the people managing it as they often seem to be simply passing through this innovation period onto other things or vanishing in pursuit of different career interests.
Innovation has a very tough job of attracting the necessary money to take a concept or idea all the way through to commercialization. There is always that constant asking about the economic return and the associated risks.
Financing game-changing investments, replacing something existing or simply providing something new have tough financial questions always to be answered.
Here I am taking an innovation need in a different way than most are used to reading about. So what are right conditions to invest and realize innovation?
The Energy Transition is one of the toughest innovation challenges ever. We must remove fossil fuel as a source of energy, decarbonize our planet and replace it with clean energy alternatives of solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear and green hydrogen solutions. To make the transformation in just under 30 years is a massive task. So far, we are doing a poor job of this as markets, solutions, opinions, and financial support are all highly fragmented.
Tacking emerging and developing markets is even harder to achieve an energy transition.
Can you imagine what it is like in a developing country that lacks sufficient energy and infrastructure yet is faced with the sizable task of expanding its economy to meet growing population expectancies and the need for rising incomes to give that essential potential for growth that having energy available can provide?
No energy transition will be achieved without invention and innovation, yet we are currently failing badly to fund research, development and deployment. We are losing the race to stop our planet’s warming as our innovative human endeavours are not at the level they should be, or we lack the “will” to make the changes we so desperately need to undergo to protect our planet.
The sheer scope of the energy transition often pulls me in so many different directions. Still, the foundation stays in place, that of making the contribution of my understanding of innovation as my focal point of contribution- the accelerant to energy change.
Transformational innovation is increasingly needed to cope with the change needed in many organizations to find a new or repositioned value proposition.
Transformational innovation is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, to achieve. When you are required to become (really) different at the core, you face the inherent conflict that making change is where clear leadership can only bring about, guiding the changes required through this highly disruptive period and providing the compelling story of the compelling future that provides a fundamentally better state than the one occupied today.
We have many innovation outcomes to choose from, including incremental, distinctive, radical or disruptive. Today we focus more on open innovation where a greater external diversity combines with internal expertise to generate the potential for something fundamentally different. Today we have technology as an enabler and applying innovation ecosystem thinking in designing open platforms so this network of experience can be exchanged, shared and developed.
Yet transformational innovation does require something really different.
To become different, you have to go beyond adding innovation at the periphery, bolting new concepts onto the existing core, you need to dismantle the core fundamentally.
What an utterly strange year, 2022 has been. We have been confronted, reflective and seemingly having to “kick start” our lives again after the challenges of living through the impacts of a global pandemic.
We go into 2023 far more in personal and business conflict. We do need to find a new way of working. It is not throwing away the technology, tools or established processes, it is transforming these in new and different ways. We have not found the “real-time” to stop, explore and approach concepts and innovative ideas in different ways. Our mindset or conditioning was fairly hard-wired from our past ways of working, we felt unable to justify “permission” to change how we undertook work and have found it challenging with the impact of being remote. Many have simply walked away from their past established ways of working. We are confronting unsettling times for many reasons.
In many ways, it felt all we knew or needed was suddenly not good enough. We have lost our understanding of many things we became used to, and suddenly it all seemed challenged in far bigger ways. War, flooding, famine, shortages, and illness challenges began impacting our lives. We were indeed been confronted with a series of crises and the need for a fast, thoughtful set of responses which we were unprepared or incapable to give as each challenge has been highly complex.
We were beginning to be more open to being more reflective but we have been constantly pushed to take us back to “business as usual”. In many ways, we are struggling with a need for a “reset” but it is far more complex than that as we are in the middle of multiple crises.
This return to the old normal is a non-starter for me, we are in a rapidly changing world
We are in need of recognizing and discerning how much our world is upside down, so we can begin to understand how we need to re-equip ourselves to a new way of working, thinking and responding. We need to “righten” what is wrong with this feeling of much of what we are doing being out of balance.
We are all struggling to transform ourselves. Our businesses are grappling with the current economic difficulties we all presently facing including shortages, disruptions, and dealing with inflation and economic downturns and massive climate change challenges. We are not only confronted with the potential of the toughest downturn in modern times but with all the pressures with the speed of decision-making, and technological advances that seem to ‘suck up’ more of our daily lives instead of helping to resolve it. 2022 was unsettling for me.
Here is my solution that I think is worth working through first to absorb it and its combination. Then apply it to your innovation-building activity as a framework for innovation. Each time you are reviewing innovative activity, run through this formula in your head to see if each of the parts is embedded into the work.
I have worked on the formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE for many years.
In that post, I detail the make-up of the formula, made up of the combination of positive relationships between the following interrelated parts.
We are or need to be, in search of a sustainable future where we can constantly build upon innovation capabilities, capacities and competencies that can be refreshed, strengthened and sometimes reduced to meet the circumstances.
The formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE makes sense to me. How you build out these yourself further adds more uniqueness and source of advantage.