Exploring Dynamics Within Innovation Landscapes
I wrote in an earlier blog called “the new extended innovation funnel” (http://bit.ly/hQTEJz) my reasoning for thinking differently from our traditional view of how the innovation funnel should look like. I feel it should look more like this.
The ‘classic’ innovation funnel talked about is wrong for todays job!
Innovation happens across time. We often constrain our innovation because we ‘shoe horn’ any conceptual thinking into a given time, usually the yearly budgetary plan seems to exercise a large influence in this constraining. We should make the case that different types of innovation operate and evolve over different time horizons.
I call this the innovation rates of exchange.
A little of the theory: Coherence between organizational context and coordination of outcomes is subject always to those natural tensions of planning, resource allocation and the time imposed. Often decisions have a real tension built into them and they ‘shear’ against the real forces in play.
Like our tectonic plates ‘shear’ and cause earthquakes, the ‘shear’ effect has a disruptive influence on innovation outcomes.
Often the time horizon of possible desired innovation often has these real conflicts. The actual realities and needs of the organization we lower the innovation impact in final delivery. We fall back on incremental solutions as the organization does not have the patience, appetite or desire to see through the potential fully.
So that puts the theory out there.
I have planned to explore in three simultaneous blogs, a trilogy of blogs, the three horizon model more extensively. It is a most valuable one to build into your thinking about strategy and innovation.
This is the final blog of the trilogy on the Three Horizon Framework and offers my thinking on an emerging framing to help in navigating through this.
The need is to define your different horizons.
This is part two of three blogs on the Three Horizon Framework and follows my one called “The value of managing innovation across the three horizons.” It further adds to the initial blog I wrote last year, called “the three horizon approach to innovation (http://bit.ly/ck8KfN). That blog gave a short introduction to the three horizon approach arguing we should take a more evolutionary perspective across the entire innovation business portfolio by using this model.
Going beyond that initial introduction in a trilogy of blogs, I plan to explore in this one, the second of these three simultaneous blogs, much of the thinking behind the Three Horizon model.
Today managing innovation is complex; often success is measured and valued by the creative destruction of others.
The ability to ‘evolve’ is very determinant of the knowledge base, either within a given economy or within a ‘federation’ to bring together as something new, offering more value than what is on offer today.
Innovation is highly dynamic in its constant change but also in its need of constant coordination of its parts.
Nations are Very Different
No one nation can just copy another, the same as one business entity cannot simply copy another, each has distinct characteristics, a history and a certain set of ‘physical’ boundaries on where it is located.
Different cultures, and different histories set each Nation apart.
A growing group of investors around the world are increasingly seeking to make investments that generate social and environmental value as well as financial return. Sound impossible?
Well, no actually. There is a growing recognition of the need for effective solutions to social and environmental challenges that have increasingly real threat and growing inequalities.
Impact investing or more often housed under the broader heading of “Impact Economy” is about finding the ways to combine investors, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and business executives along with governments in finding new and different ways to explore the changing economic and social landscape.
Through this emerging newer type of investing there is potentially that the promise of new jobs and profits, mixed in with improved social impact, can be derived from new innovation activities.
It needs this convergence and seems to be gathering in pace and broader recognition.
After some recent #innochat debates (www.innochat.com) around innovation and economic recovery, including the future of Nations, of the US, and of innovation itself and how it needs an organizing framework to work more efficiently, I wanted to dig a little deeper, to get my own head around all of this.
We do have real problems in the world and we need to find solutions but something strange is happening and I was not sure I understood it. So I’ve been on a little investigative journey that is beginning to make some good sense, well at least to me.
A host of financial contagions has been heaped upon us progressively in recent years.
The challenges are growing in their social dimension across Europe, the United States and a host of other countries, both developed and developing, that are needing new fresh responses.
Social demands will inevitably increase as nations are being confronted with budgetary constraints, increased deficits and mounting debts to resolve.
Social needs will become more pressing and innovation, social innovation, will increasingly explore opportunities to extract ‘more from less.
Innovation can play an increasing part in resolving social challenges that are increasingly confronting us.
Starting a new movement on social innovation in Europe
Recently I became a member of www.socialinnovationeurope.eu . I certainly feel this is going to offer something exciting and vibrant. It is a growing community of thinkers, creators and innovators with the knowledge and skills to change the way we face Europe’s most pressing issues.
Contributors to the site will take a strong hand in shaping the direction of social innovation across Europe, breaking down silos and raising a unified voice. I need to find my own part in this, as there are multiple ways for contribution, which I’m still presently figuring out.
Some weeks back the International Herald Tribune (June 7th, 2011) offered a view by Chandran Nair, the CEO of Global Institute for Tomorrow, under the title “Can the planet support more Americas?
Then this week an article “Over-innovation makes US firms suck at Sustainability because they are too innovative” by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen (http://bit.ly/oGDObX).
Each makes me stop and come back to my deepening view we have to decouple growth and consumption through innovation.
This is not an easy subject but let me lay out some opening views and thoughts. Why bother? Well, I really do believe we need to radically change our approaches through the use of applying innovation in new ways.
These two articles added further to my personal concerns that we do need to (quickly) come out of the denial we seem to have in all societies. Innovation needs to be radically applied in new ways that alter the present mindsets of politicians, economists and business people who feel that the only path is continued consumption and growth.
This approach is simply not sustainable and we need to find a radical alternative that still offers all of us progress but in a radically altered world.
The two articles in summary first
In a blog I wrote in November last year entitled “Moving-towards-a-more-distributed-innovation-model”( http://bit.ly/b38ixv) I outlined some thoughts on the flow of knowledge in a distributed innovation model and discussed the Absorptive Capacities more from an internal organizational perspective.
Increasingly we are looking outside for new knowledge that needs internally managing.
As organizations seek increasingly outside their own walls, the appreciation of how they are managing knowledge, learning and interpreting this is becoming a critical aspect of open innovation to be successful.
There is a growing need to absorb, integrate and apply this in new and novel ways for accelerating innovation performance.
The more we seek, the more the knowledge increases in complexity as markets are rapidly changing. The more we are relying on knowledge flowing into the organization the more we have to strengthen our inter-dependence and collaboration efforts to extract the knowledge we are acquiring for it potential value.
Are organizations recognizing the value of structuring their knowledge flows? Do they have the right learning mechanisms to accelerate and exploit new potentials from this knowledge?
Organizations tend to be set up for incremental learning.