Sometimes, we need to go back to our original roots of thinking to remind ourselves and sometimes refresh the areas of focus we need to emphasise. Today, I focus increasingly on how innovation and ecosystem thinking and design need to combine in the Energy Transition.
I believe Ecosystems in design and thinking must form the future path to travel for innovation, collaborations, invention and growing cooperation. We need to think through more demanding challenges today that are highly complex and to do this with a higher degree of success in valuable outcomes. We need to open our thinking and minds and share knowledge to learn from each other.
A fundamental question to ask: “What do I need to consider for entering into an innovation ecosystem design?”
There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we manage innovation, which needs the power of ecosystem thinking and design. Not only in thinking and design but in how…
I can remember getting completely “hooked” on Business Ecosystems by a series from Deliottes and one specific report, introduced and coordinated by Eamonn Kelley, with many contributors including Kelly Machese, Anna Muoio, John Hagel, and Larry Keeley. It was called “Business ecosystems come of age” and maybe it did not change my life, but it gave it a clearer focus- innovation ecosystems. Take a read, it is well worth it, its value then, 2015 has only matured in my mind.
I was also looking at another great piece by Deloitte on tapping into the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem under a report called “How to Innovate the Silicon Valley Way” that came out in 2016. Another great motivation for focusing on innovation ecosystems.
One question asked in the Silicon Valley piece was “Why should enterprises give up transactional approaches in favor of dynamic, ecosystem-led innovation?
Today I would reverse that question “Why would any company still be locked into transactional approaches only functioning on its own resources?”
Today the struggle is to deal with increasing complexity, undoing the “knot” of difficult challenges and these cannot be undone or solved without collaborations outside one organization’s walls. We need to push this even further and totally accept that the hardest but best collaborations come from being involved in cross-industry or sector innovation systems.
I finished my last post, “Are we EVER going to embrace innovation?” With the argument, we need to change the innovation narrative and significantly update the innovation approach and processes to meet today’s and tomorrow’s business challenges.
I am working through what I think this should become in design and application, involving providing the key innovation building blocks as components of the innovation stack, using the innovation stack to guide platform development and the platform to support this innovation stack.
It is the “fit” of this framework that needs more of my time as we need a new powerful innovation engine that leverages the strengths of each but to ensure innovation flows across organizations transparently and openly so collaborations can utilize all that we have in proven innovation thinking to take advantage of and build this out in new ways of thinking and design.
To look forward, I would argue we always need to look back and account for the progress made in managing innovation over the years. The need today is not to dispense with this but to link it fully up.
So this post reviews many great contributors to advancing innovation over the years.
I will not apologize here; this will partly be a “rant” and then begin to suggest a way forward on embracing innovation fully.
I was thinking of having the headline “Innovation as our eternal doom or shame” or “innovation groundhog day”. Let me begin in why.
I really am fed up with constantly seeing claims that “innovation is core to our business” and that we are “constantly seeking fresh growth” Both of these are simply bullshit statements from the vast majority of our businesses.
Is managing innovation too complex or fragmented? Do organizations have a clear understanding of their innovation activities?
How many people are full-time employed in the innovation team, and how many in driving strategic growth? Ten, twenty, perhaps fifty out of thousands in medium to large companies.
In the bigger scheme of things, thousands within large organizations are working on innovation. These are from different functions such as R&D, Engineering disciplines, Technologists, Designers, Application and Digital. Do they work on standard innovation platforms or individually, left over from a legacy position or have they individually found a given application more suited to their specific needs?
I struggle increasingly with individual energy organizations’ pledges to move their solutions towards a carbon-neutral future. The mixture of reports, initiatives, and viewpoints all move towards the transformation of the energy system, but they all admit or fail to address TWO crucial aspects.
Firstly the limited time we have to make such a transition in their offerings of new and different imaginative ways to change the current dynamics within our energy systems. Secondly, how each organization alone cannot achieve it with limited or no alternative suggestions to overcome this “constraint”. Well, this post is about one alternative, well worth considering.
One area of potential to bridge is the collaborations at the multiple firm levels. There is a weakness that deprives the ecosystem of a greater “collective action and innovation” to achieve a more accelerated pathway to the Energy Transition.
The Energy Transition has a rich network of complimentary ecosystems, all keeping the change moving at a ‘certain’ level of momentum, but is it good enough? I don’t think so.
The sheer number of Energy companies working on solutions within the Energy Transition is vast, varied and geographically spread. Each is struggling to get out of their (self-made) islands of knowledge to grow their business value through mostly individual innovation solutions.
We then have an Ecosystem of Governments and intergovernmental organizations providing policy suggestions and directions, offering sources of analysis, central data collection and interpretation along with proving reference and exchange points and forums. Then you have general and highly specialised Consulting firms, and investing institutions that are all constantly providing insights and supporting solutions.
We need to find new ways of collaborating and that means applying ecosystem thinking and platform solutions.
This is the fourth and final post discussing cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations. It is primarily dealing with the benefits of collaboration and bringing up to a ‘given point’ a compelling value proposition for potential collaborators in understanding the basic building blocks to consider, for achieving the engagement outcomes required.
Within the series of four posts, I have been emphasising that cross-sector collaborations are becoming essential to our future in tackling highly complex challenging issues that need collaborative resolution, the necessary parts need connecting.
Yet to get to these cross-sector collaborations you do need to take a very considered holistic view of what is needed in any collaboration, let alone ane cutting across sectors to generate a successful outcome. All the elements of skills, processes, tools, capabilities and behaviours are important in supporting an effective collaboration across sectors that might need to be involved.
This is the fourth and final post discussing cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations. It is primarily dealing with the benefits of collaboration and bringing up to a ‘given point’ a compelling value proposition for potential collaborators in understanding the basic building blocks to consider, for achieving the engagement outcomes required.
Within the series of four posts, I have been emphasising that cross-sector collaborations are becoming essential to our future in tackling highly complex challenging issues that need collaborative resolution, the necessary parts need connecting.
Yet to get to these cross-sector collaborations you do need to take a very considered holistic view of what is needed in any collaboration, let alone ane cutting across sectors to generate a successful outcome. All the elements of skills, processes, tools, capabilities and behaviours are important in supporting an effective collaboration across sectors that might need to be involved.
In a series exploring cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations, this is the third post discussing different aspects and the approach to this that needs to be taken as my suggested starting point.
All the elements of skills, processes, tools, capabilities and behaviours are important in supporting an effective collaboration across sectors that might need to be involved.
Clarifying the design and common points is essential
In a series exploring cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations, this is the third post discussing different aspects and the approach to this that needs to be taken as my suggested starting point.
All the elements of skills, processes, tools, capabilities and behaviours are important in supporting an effective collaboration across sectors that might need to be involved.
Clarifying the design and common points is essential
