During this week, commencing 15th October 2023, I am discussing and explaining a framework for building innovation ecosystems on my ecosystem4innovators.composting site.
I have been exploring for some time a transformative concept to move innovation into the world of ecosystems. I outlined my proposed innovation framework in the building blocks necessary. The extended series of posts over thirteen or so, are all here on this posting site, summarized in this post of “The building out of the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework.”
The focus was on proposing to single entities, and now I want to extend this into the future need to build innovation ecosystems that enable and connect the essential components required.
The interplay potential in exploring the combination of humans, technology and AI
This interplay between humans, technology, and AI is dynamic and involves continuous interaction, collaboration, and feedback between these elements. The future of innovation, by combining these, offers a very rich promise to provide a fascinating and different future.
Firstly, this interplay needs some higher-level thinking to put some insights into what this interplay might look like and lead to:
Exploring the interplay between Humans, Technology and AI for design thinking
Why is design thinking regarded as so crucial to the future of innovation in a world of accelerating interplays between humans, technology and generative AI?
By embracing Design Thinking principles differently in the future of innovation, organizations can foster a more profound culture of creativity, empathy, collaboration, and user-centricity. This can lead to the development of innovative solutions that address real-world problems while considering the interplays between humans, technology, and generative AI.
Firstly, we have the interconnected global marketplace as our context
The change toward an interconnected and conscious global marketplace has been of significant importance, reshaping business strategies, consumer expectations, and societal values.
I wrote a mini-series of three posts to introduce a radical concept that envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy.
It aims to trigger innovation engagement and activation strategies to change the energy transition dynamics within a community setting, offering decentralized community energy.
It focuses on the community in a decentralized way for its energy. It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment through innovation, creativity and ecosystem thinking and design.
Imagine transforming the energy transition into a holistic ecosystem of interconnected businesses, each contributing unique value to accelerate sustainable energy adoption.
The links to take you to the sites where you can read the proposed solution are at the bottom of this post.
Introducing the Energy Transition Nexus: A Living Energy Organism” that challenges the Conventional Approach to the Energy Transition
Within the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework lies the core, the different innovation stacks, and the learning components. Here, I want to briefly talk about the importance of the learning components that support the innovation design and especially the different innovation stacks.
The elements of the innovation stack are designed to support innovation’s core tasks, including learning, absorbing, assessing knowledge management, creativity, design, experimentation, and testing. By modularizing these tasks and their interfaces, organizations can assess their innovation progress by having a complete innovation system available to them, designed on specific stack elements to address knowledge operation requirements in the stage of development to commercialization.
The Innovation Stacks are ready to support different steps in the innovation engagement process
Additionally, with the upgrade in technology and platform approach, we can support the rapidly emerging human-AI collaboration needed for each building block and component and provide a step-by-step validation.
Yet it is the sequence of how we learn that becomes vital to “feed” and build the innovation stacks.
During May and June 2023, I worked through and concluded my thinking on why we needed to change our Innovation approach from far to often a linear one, and consider a new, more up-to-date, and dynamic solution for managing innovation, one that recognises the non-linear nature of so much of our undertakings today in innovation, from discovery to commercialisation.
I have called this the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework– here is why and what went into this proposal that I feel should be adopted for managing innovation in the future.
As the investigation, validation, and viewpoints were built up over several posts, I felt summarising the series here gives you the appetite to delve into the posts themselves.
We need to shift our innovative thinking from static to dynamic.
We have been in very static, traditional approaches to innovation, very segmented and often insular, and as so often happens in innovation, it has complexities that seemingly grow and multiple changes, partly from what we discover in the development of new solutions but partly from far more rapid changes in the business landscape and our current innovation process often breaks down and limits the ability to manage this across the whole development to delivery lifecycle.
We need systems and processes that are flexible, adaptable, and can enable continuous improvements but are fully connected, transparent, and integrated across the entire business. We need to approach innovation differently through connected agility, have speed and automation more central, and provide roles for a great diverse set of participants.
A system that encourages forming strategic alliances, partnerships, and knowledge sharing to drive innovation and create shared value in open, thoughtful, and collaborative ways. This is where technology enables these connections and triggers different thinking in the quest for moving toward more extraordinary valuable solutions—the “connected” value of behaviours thinking ecosystems and operating on collaborative platforms.
After a series of posts introducing and explaining the thinking and design behind the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework, I thought it would be a good idea to put this into a sequence of visuals that should take you through this to provide a decent understanding of its make-up and logic.
Organizations in today’s business environment need to adapt rapidly and dynamically, have the need to bring the innovation management process into a constant technological advancement, and be more tailored in its design by their own specific needs and not “offered” as a rigid set of solutions. We need to embrace a significant change in the way we “set about” innovation.
If you are interested in reading more in the series I have been posting then here are the links in the order of posting.
The importance here is recognizing the shift in mindset and thinking towards a Building Block approach to build up the Innovation Stacks. Each stack “sits” on a technology platform. Thinking through what this means requires understanding, relating, and putting a clear context of innovation, what you want to achieve, and how to set about this.
As I mentioned in a previous post, for any innovation enterprise change, I do not recommend a “big bang” solution; it should be phased to validate and grow to understand, build up validation, justify making the changes, bedding in the thinking needed and approaches to provide the level of returns and the growing understanding of cost/ benefit conversion.
The potential returns, including increased agility, improved innovation outcomes, enhanced collaboration, and long-term competitiveness, make this radical change worthwhile for organizations aspiring to thrive in today’s dynamic business environment. The ability to build the context and show its (ongoing) value makes the difference. You need a systematic approach and project staging plan.
The importance here is recognizing the shift in mindset and thinking towards a Building Block approach to build up the Innovation Stacks. Each stack “sits” on a technology platform. Thinking through what this means requires understanding, relating, and putting a clear context of innovation, what you want to achieve, and how to set about this.
I proposed a new Framework for managing innovation this week, called the Final Perspective: A Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework. This is approaching innovation and its management in more of a holistic, technology-enabled way based on the use of a cloud-enabled Platform and Ecosystem thinking and design.
The thrust of the framework is “Organizations can create a more comprehensive and effective innovation ecosystem by utilizing building blocks as components of the innovation stack, guiding platform development using the innovation stack, and supporting the innovation stack with a platform. Equally, components are oriented towards learning, knowledge, creativity, design, and testing—essential tasks in the innovation process“.
I am suggesting a vertical and horizontal design applying innovation stack and building block approaches, which may be new concepts for many. Still, they do have value in enabling a more dynamic environment for innovation to connect to the potential it so often promises but fails to deliver upon.
Much stands in the way of taking an idea or concept and getting it to a successful launch, recognition, and, most importantly, adoption. Innovation management and its process need changing, seriously updating with more of an enterprise framework. I am proposing one.
I wrote a post “Building Up to the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework Validation“, providing the investigations and subsequent posts I provided to build the argument towards this solution. They are concise synopsises to get this base for my thinking and understanding of why innovation processes and their management need to change.
On Monday 12th June 2023 I made a proposal that innovation is in need of a radical redesign. The post was my “The Final Perspective: A Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework“. This recommendation had been built out over the past three months toward this final conclusion.
Here I want to summarize the posts that were part of this build-up, that build the compelling business case for the need to change our thinking about innovation.
I looked at the present limitations of existing innovation software, emphasizing the value and contribution that having more of an innovation ecosystem thinking and design and then introducing different more technology-related concepts such as building blocks, innovation stacks, and key component relationships built on a platform approach were highlighted and explained in these posts.
The “final perspective” post proposed the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework as a comprehensive approach to addressing today and the future complexities of innovation management.
