I want to relate adoption back to business platforms and anchor it in the process.
Today business platform adoption is a struggle. It needs a clear revisiting of the theory of diffusion and adoption to extract the relevant points of necessary practice.
What is vitally needed is the recognition that deciding on adopting a business platform approach has five stages or decision points to go through.
So often, platform providers automatically go to the assumption that their platform will be adopted. It simply will not without working through and gaining confirmation the five stages of adoption are clarified.
The Combination Effect for Adoption in today’s world
The level of interest in business platforms in the B2B space has rapidly grown. Platforms are more viable and relevant today than ever. The platform’s ability to offer multiple values will influence many of the client’s adoption decisions over the choices their business will engage with.
I suggested in this post, “Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.”
Recently in Stanford Social Innovation Review, an article on the “Adoption of Innovation” by Benjamin Kumpf & Emma Proud is well worth the read as adopting any innovation process is a tough, slow one.
They take a position on looking at behavioural approaches suggesting when behavioural insights have been adopted, innovation has ceased to be “innovative.” When a method, technology, or approach to a problem has moved from the experimental edges of an organization to the core of its work: no longer a novelty but something normal and institutionalized. My fear here is this becomes “static” and losses its dynamism.
Business Platforms provide the backbone of the Network.
Today we are still caught up in the validation and relevance of managing a business through platform thinking by making the business case of its value and impact. We should not be; it is time for you to hop onto the train.
The ability to present a compelling business case for the use and application of platforms is overwhelming. I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact and application.
For me, platforms are needed as we face a very different economic landscape.
We need to choose where to focus in the future, where to concentrate our resources and attempt to bridge the fragmentation that is occurring. The world of collaboration, where we can find partners to share and reinforce what we do, is leading to new dynamics of combining.
Platforms are more viable and relevant.
Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.
Choosing new innovative approaches to counter the fear of Business Contagion
What has been changing in how we approach innovation, and have we taken the opportunity to radically revise the innovation system and process accordingly?
Many of our innovative approaches or systems are based on very often just an internal perspective, restricted in available resources and limited knowledge and insights, often constraining the evolving new solutions and then limiting the impact and outcome.
For many years open innovation has been encouraged to be adopted to break out of this very narrow internal focus. Having a real diversity of opinion with this greater access to different knowledge and experiences does open up our thinking, but it is, on its own, not enough to make a real difference, especially in times of acute change. We need to put to use a different innovation model or approach.
We are at the cusp or already into significant changes to how the world, society and we as individuals will manage or engage going into the future.
This is my second post discussing the belief that we are being to see a real contagion breaking down how we have been operating and living in the world.
We are facing the potential of unprecedented change, and we need to recognize how a different approach to innovation can help offset or mitigate many of the destabilizing aspects and provide a pathway to managing differently in a new environment that will inevitably come from this contagion.
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…
The three degrees of ecosystem design- the innovating equation
In any ecosystem thinking and design, we do need to find this “sweet spot” for encouraging more innovation. For me, it is the ability to build the dynamics within the involvement required.
We live in a world where we are having greater connectivity than ever before. We are increasingly engaged in far greater interactivity with easy access to social and organizational tools than ever before.
We are encouraged to share what we know increasingly so others can build on this, or shape its original concept into a different value proposition simply by having that triggering idea and seeing the ‘possibilities’ to build upon it.
Tackling Societal Challenges with Ecosystem collaborations
Perhaps why innovation feels somewhat flat (well for me) is our organizations and societies are utterly failing to allow us all to step up in innovation to tackle those huge societal issues; those massive, growing problems that are swirling all around us.
We need to shake out of our lethargy and really begin to attempt to solve the real issues of our time. Some organizations are clearly working on and trying to draw attention and gain greater engagement but we need a much greater concerted effort to focus on the big societal challenges.
Global warming, rising health issues, finally cracking cancer, malaria, dementia, finding different solutions to the ageing within society. How are we going to tackle the rapidly depleting natural resources, the future conflicts over water, food, or energy? These are big, hairy, audacious gaps to be resolved.
Are we capable or simply just avoiding these BIG challenges?
I like to think I am often colliding at the innovation intersections where I keep finding lots of synergies that feed my research and innovative curiosity to support others.
For the past six or so weeks I have been looking into Ecosystems and one of those (famous) strands took me to “Natural Language Understanding” and I read an article by Mark Seall, Head of Digital Communications at Siemens called “How AI is shaping the future of marketing communications” and it got me curious.
Jeffrey Phillips and I are launching our fourth collaboration together, this time we are exploring innovation ecosystems and the growing impact they are having in the business world through their ‘conecting and collaborating difference’ that can lead to vastly different final customer experiences.
I just want to reaffirm what he has written on this, originally over on his site.
This is what he wrote:
Innovation, ecosystems, platforms and more
“I’m pleased to announce that Paul Hobcraft and I will be working together on a number of posts that relate to some discussions we’ve had about innovation, more specifically how innovation must evolve from creating interesting but incomplete solutions to understanding how customers want to have interesting, seamless experiences. Over the next few weeks we’ll be writing posts on a new shared website that examine the state of innovation, and provide a reason we think so many innovation outcomes fail to achieve their goals.
Thinking about ecosystems certainly allows us to go out of our normal scope of internally generating new products.
It opens up a host of possibilities, that can add significantly to a new service design, new capabilities and solving more complex problems.
In opening up to managing within ecosystems, you begin to see your ability to contribute and tackle societal problems within a collaborative system.
You can see new opportunities that can allow you to enter new markets that would have been impossible as an individual organization.
You begin to see the power, scale and strength of having the collective collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional thinking design. You go beyond the utilization of leveraging existing infrastructure, building on others’ specializations and leveraging through technology powerful new concepts to tackle increasingly complex innovation design.
