Innovation comes in different forms and problems, all requiring financial support.

January 11, 2023Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Energy Transition, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability
Innovation & Finance needed for the Energy Transition in developing countries

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?

Were we all upside down in 2022?

December 17, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation
Image adapted from Imaginary Forces for this post

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.

What makes the Innovation Ecosystem different?

November 14, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Business Platforms and Ecosystems, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation Ecosystems, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

In the past few months, I have been writing consistently on the need to change our innovating process, thinking and designs into Innovation Ecosystem ones.

Source: tmforum.org

In October, for example, I wrote, “Why do we need to change our thinking about innovation“. I continue here with some more arguments of “why” we need to move towards an innovation ecosystem in design and thinking.

I continue to gather, reflect and construct the “how and what” structure of this redesigned innovation (ecosystem) process/system. This will be my initial view of how this needs to be shaped as the overriding architecture of an Innovation Ecosystem. I’m coming closer to the point of sharing this in the coming weeks.

I am focusing here on arguing for changing our innovation process on the Business-to-Business or Industry-to-industry, not the retail or consumer ecosystems and their designs.

Let us first provide the top view of the difference in need and the offer of new values.

Building out our innovation ecosystem in design and thinking

September 26, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Business Platforms and Ecosystems, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation Ecosystems, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation2 Comments
Finding the new building blocks of innovation ecosystem design and thinking.

Why change our thinking and designing around innovation ecosystems?“

For me, ecosystem thinking and design offer fresh ways for accelerating mutual learning, and through this innovation, outcome potential for sharing and knowledge building.

As we build an understanding of the power of digital platforms and ecosystem thinking, we can see gains and new values and realize different opportunities denied to us in the past by a lack of clarity, depth of understanding of what was in front of us but not appreciated, as we were looking at it differently and not seeing its potential in a combined value or bundling.

Today we live in a more connected world; technology has enabled this.

We are becoming far more networked and have a growing awareness of hyper challenges that we are in part resolving. Still, we face many blurring boundaries across market positions, competitors and global trade that need combining our talent and expertise to provide a new set of solutions, delivering on promise and impact. We are in a more complex world, needing different approaches within business organizations.

We hold the promise of liberating potential in resolving wicked problems and opportunities, providing we embrace the potential to combine and share outside our organization and tap into the rich diversity of knowledge, equally keen to collaborate and cooperate to achieve a more cross-cutting innovation that provides solutions to these more complex problems.

Innovation requires a more dynamic systematic approach

July 28, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Innovation requires a more dynamic, systematic approach

All companies talk about innovation and its growing importance, but why is it that still so few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale?

What inhibits innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to achieving such innovative growth? Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities?

The difficulty for many is that innovation is a complex process that has many intangibles within the total mix to manage. Management today is far happier managing the ‘harder’ aspects of business, the current physical ones of everyday organization, not the ‘softer’ more intangible ones, where innovation often lies or emerges from.

Positioning my innovating approach

Positioning my innovating approach

July 22, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation Ecosystems, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation
I want to find a new way of approaching innovation, a new positioning, and these are my opening statements to be questioned and built upon Chasing dedicated focal points, looking…

Phasing the Energy Transition by Technology and Horizon Management

June 15, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation
Applying the Three Horizon Methodology is an Evolutionary Perspective

Innovation is the key driver to turning our world from a fossil-led one into one based on renewables and technology is the enabler.

For this to happen, our focus today should be fully on low-carbon technologies and their technical realization.

We should be looking at applying the three horizon methodology here to determine a pathway from today through to 2050 to achieve our goals of having a world free of man-made carbon emissions.

The lost innovation pathway

May 9, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Innovation strategy, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Credit Chrisnaton, Flickr

I was recently working through a set of older presentation files and came across this extract concerning innovation again and thought I must share this. Sadly, it rings true as much as it did those  (many) years back.

“Strategy is useless without innovation; innovation is directionless without strategy”.

Below is an extract from “Reinventing Innovation” by John J Kao. For me, it is sadly as relevant today as when I first came across it, some years back. Are we making real progress in our innovation activities?

The trough of innovation disillusionment

May 6, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Boredom
innovation disillusionment or just boring?

You get this increasing sense that the ‘fizz’ has gone out of the innovation bubbly, we are seemingly in a trough of innovation disillusionment. The innovation party presently feels a little flat.

When we turn up at those creative innovative parties today the numerous delicious canapés to choose from are turning up at the edges as we are becoming disillusioned, just being fed on a present unexciting incremental innovation diet, lacking any real substance.

We are not being challenged, we are being constrained, bored and fearful of taking bold risks

People are milling around with that bored look on their faces, some are also slumped down checking their watch or smartphones on when is the best time to cut out and find somewhere else to be, rather than be here. Has the fizz gone from innovation?

Transforming What? Delivering Future Impact

April 17, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation strategy, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability

Delivering Future Impact on Performance

As demand is more volatile today what becomes more important is the work to be done, not the work done.

Surprisingly Adam Smith identified this important difference back in 1776.

This can be explained as the work done is the accumulated knowledge, which has built up and been embodied in the firm’s results with the innovations achieved in the past and is seen as the tangible capital.

The work to be done is how well it can adapt to change. In the past century, we operated in the mass production era, with systems with standard goods and stable market conditions, the work done was equivalent to the ‘work to be done.

In today’s global market, with its rapid technology diffusion, disruptive and constant change with an emphasis on servicing the work to be done is more important than the work done and intangible assets are fundamental to this.