Exploring Dynamics Within Innovation Landscapes
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:
Innovation is certainly a complex and dynamic process that involves many factors and actors and I certainly feel it has been shifting in its focus. I have been thinking of where we have been placing the emphasis over the past ten years.
I decided to ask GPT-4 what major shifts have occurred in how we approached innovation ten years ago and today. It was suggested that these were the following.
Do you agree, what do you feel is missing? I like the broad shifts indicated but what has been missed?
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
“Making something harmonious” often means we have to reconcile differences to balance out the tensions and issues to enable and make them compatible to work.
“Fusing” human engagement with technology enablement involves creating a harmonious integration of human collaboration and technological tools to enable an ecosystem’s successful development and operation. Is that possible?
How do we go about evaluating all the possible needs of customers, as they are mostly our success arbitrators? We must gain insights and refer through multiple information sources- digital data and direct human responses – than ever before; these insights are becoming essential to our businesses.
Calibrating the right way to use technology to create mutual benefit is an increasing theme across businesses, which means we need high levels of interdependence.
Energy is a vital part of any country’s ability to be competitive, and we need to recognize that to innovate is the critical enabler to a clean energy future. Today half the world’s capital is invested in energy and its related infrastructure, which is the backbone of any industrial and urbanization strategy.
We need to keep pushing for discoveries, experimentation, and demonstrating. We must nurture innovation and continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway in the Energy Transition we are presently travelling.
Our economic prosperity will be determined by transforming the energy sector, and it is through innovation we will achieve this. To avoid the predicted consequences of climate change, the global energy system must rapidly reduce its emissions.
Most global CO2 emissions come from the energy production sector, our buildings or transportation systems, and the making of “things” still from fossil fuels. They all need a purposeful design of a new, cleaner energy system.
Innovation needs to be at the top of its game, to be accelerated and scaled.
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.
How difficult would it be to embrace this Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework, as it is often argued that most people want to keep innovation management and its process simple? I wonder if that is the current incumbents, be these current innovation management software providers or individuals inside the organizations resisting change, as it brings significant uncertainty of change and disruption to the (inadequate) process, one that I feel is not fit for today’s and tomorrow’s innovation purpose.
So how to set about making this change and who should be involved as it is a more radical design of a holistic nature is what I am outlining in this post and the next one focuses more on the project organization needed.
Organizations in today’s business environment need to adapt rapidly and dynamically, the need to bring the innovation management process into a constant technological advancement, and more designed 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.
It needs increased agility and looks to have innovation consistently redesigned to meet different challenges and needs. It needs a better set of flexible design elements and system thinking to gain from reuse and redesign rapidly. I like the term I saw the other day “systems of gravity” to get tasks completed faster than what is being offered today in innovating software solutions.
The need is to set about building a compelling business case to make the move to embrace this (radical) design change and its potential value in returns and flexibility. I want to begin to sketch out the pathway of change this might need. It will be hard work, but doing this in stages gives growing understanding and value, and I believe ultimately rewarding.
We cannot afford not to avoid changing our innovation processes as we deal with a far more complex and challenging world. We seem to be keeping innovation as a disappointing and often frustrating outcome for many leaders of organizations today, innovation needs to be top of mind and better equipped to deliver.
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.