We have seen an incredible rise in digital platforms that have become part of our everyday lives.

Whether it’s Apple, Google, eBay, Amazon, Android, Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba, Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal or one of the many others, they all have become some of the hottest companies that consumers value.

These companies have built out their businesses on powerful platforms that drill down on what we value and allow us to connect. They (B2C) have connected the consumer like never before. Now we see the surge of the industrial platforms (B2B), the IIoT world arriving in force.

The big questions for many companies that simply sell products are: can they benefit from making changes in these platform models and how do they go about it? Is the stand-alone product model breaking down? Do the more traditional approaches to customers, those that are more supply sided, still serve their needs today?

Consumers have come to expect more

When any form of digitization is introduced, the expectations of the customer rise exponentially in the expectancy of service, engagement, response, and support – this is increasingly becoming 24×7. A brand is continuously determined by the service and how it fits within the individual’s life. This is having a more connected set of components coming from technology, built into the value proposition.

This rising expectation has its roots in our appreciation for the connecting value of Facebook, Google, Apple or Microsoft. Our “need” for technology has grown in recognition that it can solve our personal problems and situations and is quickly becoming the norm of everyday life. Today the industrial company, selling traditional tangible goods, is expected to engage, listen, adapt, and offer ever-increasing tailored services to our personal needs. Do-it-yourself has become do-it-with-us; let’s collaborate and let’s support each other on a more substantial journey of co-creation. This is where the platform comes in, the enabler in which you can build the exchanges.

We are seeing platforms transform the business landscape to ‘search for new growth’

There is an imperative to understand the whole meaning and implications of platforms. The business implications of platform management are significant because they have a transforming effect on all we do within companies. As technology continues to change the way we do business, we move from being internally directed to externally driven. There is the recognition that innovation does not occur inside, it occurs through collaboration, engagement and admitting that other people may have better ideas and possible answers. There are many people looking to combine their expertise into a new more radical design that increasingly meets the customer’s needs, which they could never be capable of on their own.

To understand where ecosystems and platforms fit within our corporate strategies, there are some well-respected voices discussing and predicting the rapid rise of the platform and what it all means in its implications and changes.

More and more people are asking constantly for platform understanding

Notably, for me, I have been referring back to a number of these experienced voices, as well as recognizing several books and thoughtful papers discussing the platform phenomenon and how it is radically changing our business landscape.

For me, one of the most exciting voices on platform’s comes from Simone Cicero and his team at platformdesigntoolkit.com. This excitement from my side is the result of how they are planning to tackle this. They are creating design tools for platforms and by extension, ecosystems. These come in highly visual formats, built on the canvas approach where they fully provide the toolkit, which you can download for free and a detailed user guide – providing their learning, growing depth in experience in workshops, masterclasses and consulting. They are increasingly focused on building stores around their thinking and are increasingly a great source of reference. Also, a great place to start is to download their Whitepaper “From Business Modelling to Platform Design”. Currently, Simone is working on how they are going to evolve their platform design toolkit. They made an incredibly long way in a short time, but this partly reflects the dynamic, evolving nature of platforms that each business has to get its head around. You can listen to Simone on this podcast to gain some excellent background on his thinking and developments around platforms.

As a real alternative on designing platforms, you have the Platform Innovation Kit developed and led by Matthias Walter. They help entrepreneurs and corporate innovators to design and implement successful network-based businesses. The 5 canvases of kit will guide startups and corporates identify, ideate, build and scale successful platform business models. They see Platforms businesses are hyperscaling and beating traditional business. Increasingly they are seeing more businesses are based on platform business models. Here, they have set about creating an innovation process to help companies build better platform business models leveraging the power of ecosystems. The Platform Innovation Kit is a series of five canvases to ideate, design and implement platform business models. It’s straightforward, easy to use and a must-have toolset for startups and corporates around the world.

The book “Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy – And How To Make Them Work for You” is co-authored by three of the leading voices of platform management, these being Geoffrey Parker, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, one of the world’s foremost scholars of information business models and visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Sangeet Paul Choudhary, an entrepreneur in Residence at INSEAD, who provides a great posting site from pipes to platforms. Each of them is bringing the considerable weight of understanding and insights into Platform Management to gain a really sound grasp of the shift we are all moving towards.

Then, there is John Hagel, co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, who provided valuable insights and thinking on ecosystems and platforms with his colleagues through Deloitte University Press. One of my favorite references is the paper “the power of ecosystems”, which is part of a whole series discussing, “Business ecosystems comes of age”, a must-read for anyone wanting to work systematically through ecosystems and platform thinking. They suggest that “businesses are moving well beyond traditional industry silos and coalescing into richly networked ecosystems, creating new opportunities for innovation alongside new challenges for many incumbent enterprises”.

Furthermore, I recommend the works of Haydn Shaughnessy and Nick Vitalari. I would suggest different books, such as,  “the Elastic Enterprise” on how enterprises scale and operate in a completely novel way, as well as one written just by Haydn “Shift: A Leader’s Guild to the Platform Economy”, and a range of posts to highlight different parts of the platform equation. Haydn continues to explore at the edges of platform thinking which I absolutely value, although it sometimes requires me to re-read his thoughts more than once, but hey, that’s often happening on my own as well, according to some.

My last voice on all things about ecosystems and platforms is Bala Iyer, a professor and chair of the Technology, Operations, and Information Management Division at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, who recently wrote a paper “To Predict the Trajectory of the Internet of Things looking to the Software Industry” where he identified 34 platform providers, although he identified 2,000 in total. In this paper, Professor Iyer provides a terrific graphic laying out the IoT ecosystem, one that is a broadly distributed among the network of these providers who, most of them, are providing application programming interfaces, many of them are offering infrastructure, devices, and platforms as their core, looking for others to connect and build their solutions on these platforms without the high levels of infrastructure investment cost. I’m presently looking to read more on Professor Iyer’s work, and we have been exchanging around the rapid number of platforms that are being created at present.

Each of these expert voices is offering great sources of knowledge, although they tend to revert to the software and technology-centric companies far more since this has been the source of platform understanding.

The industry is lagging but catching up in platform offering

There are growing voices on different aspects of innovation, which are being built through ecosystems and on collaborative platforms, more of which are coming from the traditional manufacturing and service industries. I can refer to these in my own joint site on ecosystems and platforms under https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com/about/.

I chose to shift part of my business over to developing a certain knowledge expertise on ecosystems and platforms last year. There are so many changes occurring around collaboration it needed a dedicated focus. This is a part of the posted site above as it sets about explaining this evolving phenomenon. It’s becoming a really big shift in innovation as this graph shows. When you start thinking about the ten types of innovation, those can be channeled onto platforms, in highly collaborative ways to cover off multiple types of innovation through platforms and ecosystem collaborations to meet customer needs.

Source: https://www.slideshare.net/lugtu/types-of-innovation-59505692

There are many platform providers. Two I would recommend investigating

I follow with growing interest Bosch, the main supplier into the smart era of mobility, cities, and homes and through their subsidiary, Bosch Software Innovation, is building a technology stack of IoT that is becoming, for now, a go-to place for the industry. In my review “Bosch Software Innovations will drive your connected device business” you get a real sense of this. In an earlier post “Bosch: A Leading Platform Exemplar of Digitally Connecting“, I outline some of the necessary details and put much into context, in order to understand why Bosch is becoming well positioned to connect “everything with everything”. They are mainly developing this to align with the new manufacturing era which has been dubbed Industry 4.0 and the need to build multiple ecosystems. Bosch is offering different analytic applications, device management tools, and platform enablement for rapid deployment and device development that becomes designed to your specifications and needs on their platform, validated mostly by their own implementation and application.

Equally, I stay very engaged on where Siemens are taking their business through a radical re-design around digital. MindSphere is their digital platform and is no doubt is the core of all Siemens future digital work and 2018 has been a very expansive year for Mindsphere.

As customers are constantly being confronted with greater platform choice, those making offerings that are showing substance and quality have to find some critical edges that separate themselves and draw in and build digital services up for clients. It is a competitive field and Siemens seems well placed to compete but I wanted to find out why and have been discussing areas of opportunity over on my Ecosystems4Innovating site

I wanted to find those real competitive edges with MindSphere. I think I have found already some distinct value positioning from my research and a recent series of visits.  These can make for a distinctly different value proposition but this is an ongoing work-in-progress that needs building further. I wrote this a year ago

Just look at the pace of Mindsphere’s expansion this year. I wrote this on “Don’t hold your breath due to the increasing pace”

Lastly, in this part, I want to touch on Asia as powerful catalysts leading the change as well as the charge.

They are extending platform management and thinking in some very evolutionary ways. My main focus was on one special company so far, Alibaba, which is going more and more head to head with Amazon. In the post I wrote, “Where the physical and virtual worlds are blurring, thanks to Alibaba”, you gain a sense of how transformative they are becoming. They are so focused on building the fundamental infrastructure for modern commerce, presently comprising of marketplaces, payment, logistics, cloud computing, and big data, collectively empowering businesses of all sizes to leverage the internet for their own digital transformation.

I read a report recently where there are about 450 providers offering a very fragmented market. But of course, there are some substantial “biggies” that are covering the consumer market. If you break down the platform market into manufacturing, smart cities, energy, mobility, health, supply chain, retail, public services, and many others, the use of IoT platforms are catching up with the consumer side. One real growth area is the platform startup where funding seems to be strong. Cisco investments are backing a number.

A useful report summarizing the recent situation is from IoT analytics.com.

So, yes we are in the middle of this Platform Revolution

I recently read this and it’s worthy to share it here as it does work really well for me on explaining platforms in a fairly concise way. It’s by ING, Office for Experience Design 2016 being under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The full set of their insights does a good job of discussing not just platforms an the network effect but also ties these back into ecosystem thinking – again a good read and reference.

“The role of the platform is the creation of these connections. To this end, the platform facilitates an accessible, scalable and efficient network of users, services, devices, and intermediaries to make the value exchanges happen. It is over this network that value is created, distributed, discovered and consumed. The complementary aspects of platform and network are key to any platform ecosystem business model.

Users of the platform may be consumers, producers or a combination of both at times. Whatever their role, they connect and interact with each other over the network using the facilities provided by the platform. Depending on the nature of the business model, participants may or may not be required to connect explicitly. Social networks often require explicit connections, whereas marketplaces do not but match buyers and sellers on a case by a case basis. Users of a personal finances platform may not connect at all but still benefit by being benchmarked against comparable users.

The platform consists of core technologies, shared tools and services, and rules and standards that enable producers to create and share at scale with sufficiently low costs of distribution and transaction. It provides a set of interfaces for the participants of the network to communicate, interact and interoperate within the ecosystem.

This definition sits well with the generally accepted notion of “platform” as a product or technology that allows complementary, modular components be built on top of it. Well-known cases are product platforms (like VW’s MQB), industry platforms (like Intel’s x86 architecture) and cloud computing platforms (like Amazon Web Services).

Platform ecosystems often use the latter kind of platform. The platform’s job is to support the network comparably efficiently. This is not an unimportant task, but it just does not differentiate ecosystems in their evolutionary battles to the same degree as the networks do”

The 9 types of software platforms that you need to know

In a great article by Platform Hunt, they identify and track the 9 types of software platforms.

Let me just quote a small part of this article:

“All platforms are not created equal. Google Search, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Marketplace, Android, Uber, Airbnb, Waze, WeWork, Twilio and even Bitcoin are all platforms. At the same time, these platforms are very different in how they create network effects, interactions they enable, approaches to solving “chicken and egg” problems (do you build the demand side first or the supply side?), openness levels, growth dynamics, subsidies, competitive strategies, and monetization methods.

Building a successful platform is more about making the right trade-offs than it is about the best technology. To understand these tradeoffs you must have a good grasp on what kind of platform you are building. We decided to help platform entrepreneurs understand these tradeoffs, find their role models and learn from numerous examples of other platforms.

We took a data-driven approach and analyzed 170+ platform businesses created by Internet giants, traditional companies and startups. Several iterations on the data produced nine distinct platform types that we introduce in this post:

1. Technology Platforms
2. Computing Platforms
3. Utility Platforms
4. Interaction Networks
5. Marketplaces
6. On-demand Service Platforms
7. Content Crowdsourcing Platforms
8. Data Harvesting Platforms
9. Content Distribution Platforms

Platform Hunt is an open initiative aimed to help entrepreneurs build successful platform businesses. The list of 170+ (and growing) platform examples is open and is stored in a public Trello board at data.platform-hunt.com.”

Summing up where platforms sit in our present and future thinking or at least where they should

The goal of this post was to introduce platforms as I see them and provide a growing source of references and to encourage those of you who are interested to explore this topic even further.

Each platform has unique characteristics with a central effect being the presence and need for building the network effect. The more users engaged, the more increasingly dynamic it gets, offering a self-reinforcing cycle of growth. Platforms as they are today, digital in nature, capture, transmit and monetize data and connect this into the physical world.

Many platforms are transactional ones (Uber, Google, eBay) but the ones that really hold my growing interest are innovation platforms, such that provide the technological building blocks for collaborators to come together and use this as the foundation to exchange and build increasing value as they form the innovation ecosystem, that expands our innovation potential in new ways.

It is building these complementary technologies, services, and products that need to appeal to the customer. They connect and then provide the potential for greater seamless customer experiences. The push is combining transactional platforms with innovation platforms to give a more integrated platform.

The magnitude and impact of platforms is way too important to ignore

To understand the implications of the magnitude of what the changing technology will bring and any decision to move towards a platform strategy needs a deep understanding of all the consequences, risks, and investment costs, let alone in the different resources this will require.

This requires organizations to know what is cutting edge, what works for them and then working through the aligning of often complex IT systems, seeking higher levels of machine learning and investing increasingly in the future around advanced artificial intelligence. It is about exploiting technology that is appropriate to their and your strategic needs.

Platform management has formidable tasks in orchestrating, designing and developing clear and sound governance systems, along with clearly significant organizational capital to have the best chance to succeed.

The key takeaway is the huge implication for managers, when making the strategic and operating decisions, fully recognize that technology is central, it changes everything on how you plan and organize yourself. It forms many of the decisions on a platform strategy, its design and eventual business success. It changes the organizational design, workflow, and how it has this increasing need to be orientated out into a connected world.

**Adapted from an original post for Hype

The post The Rise of Platform Business Models first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

As we start to think about the next year, it is a time of reflection and some forward-thinking

From my standpoint, I am simply amazed at how the world seems to be spinning faster and faster. I am convinced my working days are shorter or the clock is moving faster. I never seem to finish what I had intended to complete by the end of a day or week. I get caught up in the spillover effect.

Something always gets in the way, something has to give. So we make a resolution to change something to improve on this constant catch up state we find ourselves in.

Innovation is just the same, it needs evolution and resolution.

Here are some thoughts for our future. The need for innovation results has sped up considerably. The belief that lean management principles will get the innovation out of the door quicker, has been one of those management adoptions that often trick us into believing we are achieving more than we actually are, but it is only been tackling part of the innovation process and the end results often remain the same – a slow process of innovation.

Certainly, in the majority of cases we have found nothing wrong at all with applying lean management, as it tends to lead to improvements in a final outcome, but does it actually speed up the process? I’m not sure it does.

For me, I think this speeding up of the whole innovation process is the only path to tread in the years ahead; we need to broaden out the whole process of rapid innovation application beyond the two current favorites of lean and design thinking.

Designing the complete rapid innovation application process.

Digital technologies are beginning to have a real impact on the methods, approaches, and rates of our innovation outputs. Social technologies are giving us real-time understanding. We continually learn, at our cost, that intuition and ‘gut feel’ or research set up and gathered weeks or months ago is becoming out of date before we can learn from it and sometimes highly dangerous to follow or believe in. They cannot be the basis for any justifications for high stake bets. We need to change our thinking and design in the digital insight part more specifically within and along the innovation process.

Digital technology and transformation are changing the innovation ‘game’.

We have, in the past, tended to take a safer route to market, by trying to achieve well-defined problems, place these into process maps and worked along the timelines, often impervious to the market conditions changing before our eyes. We continue to couch our bets and gravitate to solutions that are as close to what we currently offer, and that just keeps reinforcing the incremental route regretfully.

Yet digital threatens this entire incremental pathway. Markets continue to have even greater uncertainty and we need to respond in very different ways. Competition is changing, markets are blurring and customers are becoming far more vocal. To respond we need to reconceive innovation into a constant and rapid learning approach.

The need to be highly iterative, full of experimentation, testing, and adjusting lends itself to the minimal viable product approach, where we continually test assumptions, checking what we are thinking against the concept of value gained from the customer or market feedback.

Digital is also pushing us to shake off complacency since customers are increasingly further connected and interacting in new ways, we need to find paths to ‘plug into’ and join the conversation, to help shape that conversation and through these exchanges recognize how the brand and reputations become increasingly important in all things innovating.

Digital tools are changing how customers discover, evaluate, explore, make their purchases, and use products and then how they react, share, interact, and make their connections with our brands. The whole process is highly dynamic and reliant on the ‘network effect’, and the job of the innovator is to translate this and respond in fast, nimble, agile ways, to fulfill the needs and capitalize in responsive ways. This demands a radical redesign of the innovation process.

The need always is to “test to learn” and adapt

• Without a doubt, it is finding and using more techniques and tools that help you make far greater rapid prototyping, testing, piloting and learning from these understandings and how they can be quickly translated back into the innovation process to improve on what you have known, into one of what you have become aware of. “Testing to learn” will become the new innovation mantra and the accepted innovation process; a dynamic, fluid, and rapid experimenting that makes it a constant learning one.
• We are today, partly down this route of early learning, with the help of software that can capture ideas, offering a sound vehicle for communicating these and a place to gather and define solutions that can be taken forward. Yet we have to push the path of constant evolution and that will continue to come at increasing speed from technology to keep providing new knowledge so as you can constantly improve on your eventual value proposition but that is going to require an ever-increasing agile organization and adaptive system.
• We will need to find different ways to redesign the manufacturing process (more outsourcing) to have more adaptive points where we can intervene and change product design. We will need to find different ways to ramp up or dampen down finished goods and that is going to push ‘agile’ even further. The ability to balance “scale, speed, and scope” will become paramount in this.
• We will need to learn to focus on the seizing of emerging opportunities in quicker ways but also take a much tougher approach to divestment, so as to release resources from declining positions of advantage. The whole lifecycle thinking needs challenging and thinking through.
• We will need to push for “agile systems” where we can design new applications, find better communication and collaborative social technologies to reduce delays of getting the right information to the right people to advance the process and reduce the duplication of work or the search for the information needed to complete the job. We need to focus much more on reducing innovation process cycle time for faster deployment.
• We will also need to invest in more data-driven front ends to build a more sophisticated process of discovery. The whole concept of divergent experiments and convergent testing and validations will become the way to think along the innovation process as a re-looping process. This will require a critical mindset change from a linear one on how you set about it, in the design of the process and the use and application of the digital tools you deploy to move this through this constant, ongoing iterative process. Nothing can remain ‘static,’ we need to make it ‘highly’ dynamic.

Rapid innovation matters and it will become even more central as digital takes hold.

Rapid-iteration needs to replace the fixed product release date mentality. We are in a world, driven by digital that requires us to constantly adapt to new learning that is coming from real-time market feedback. The way we learn from this and our rapid innovation application process will be all about this continually testing new assumptions to improve our (final) product and service propositions.

This, I believe, requires a rethinking of the innovation process, as we will need to transform the existing methods and make them increasingly digital and social, in real-time. We need to focus on the rates of innovation output from our learning and improvement in the eventual offering, as our constant bearing. It is how we design this in a more comprehensive manner will be a real challenge in 2017.

I predict that innovation has some very pivotal year ahead of it, as we absorb and use more rapid innovation application processes, as the one to fully design and adopt as our new innovation discovery to the execution process. One that is a constant path of innovation understanding and evolution that fits far more with these digital transformational times we are going through.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Coping with Digital Transformation: Adopting a Rapid Innovation Process first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Often you hear the request made:

“can you give us a best practice snapshot; we would like to get a sense of where we are”.

The trouble with best practice is you are looking at someone else’s practices and these are highly individual, made up of different groups of methodologies, processes, rules, theories, values, and concepts. These together have provided that specific company a level of success that others – mostly competitors – begin to notice.

As the famous line in the film When Harry met Sally as Meg Ryan was faking it, went “I’ll have what she’s having”. No, there is no such thing as best practices, you can’t simply pick up and plug and play, as one organization’s initiative is never the same set of conditions or positioning that others can simply copy.

We desire the “one-size fits all” as a comfort blanket. Many consultants love this request, as they do not need to apply the real skills of discernment, subject matter expertise, and the difficult challenge of peeling away a client’s practice to understand how they can rebuild them to become unique, into a leading practice that cannot be copied.

Here does lie a true competitive component and so many organizations seek to apply someone else’s practice so they can end up as “same” practice.

Moving from “Best Practice” to “Next Practice”

The digital transformation that is underway becoming a very uncomfortable place. We are all presently learning a practice. The past best practices are now a very poor playbook for the future digital connected world. We need to ditch much of the endeavors that make up a legacy of past practice, and think forward, to which the term next practice becomes the learning spot.

No one can maintain the past, much of our systems are rooted in the 20^th century, in markets that were predictable and where supply and demand were simply managed to seek out the status quo.

We are facing such an unprecedented change and technology is re-writing the rule book in everything we are going to do. Many have argued it is a foundational shift and today we are struggling to articulate or codify the shifts. We seem to be moving from the world of complicated into the complex. It is hitting us in multiple ways, in scale, in speed, and across the whole organization. Technology and digital are changing the business dimensions significantly.

We are moving from “pre-connectivity” to “post-connectivity

I wrote a report for HYPE on the topic of Digital Transformation, attempting to find these emerging and next practices. It has been a very, very deep dive into this subject and it is full of different views, approaches, suggestions, and recommendations. In the report, I have attempted to ‘pick out’ those practices that take you towards a new thinking for digital transformation.

What I have not included in the report are these two wonderful paradigm shifts we need to take to grasp digital transformation.

The first contribution is from a short article I came across in my research written for information-age by Carl Bate, managing partner, digital strategy, and transformation, Atos

http://www.information-age.com/digital-transformation-are-you-living-and-breathing-next-practice-or-best-practice-123458572/

This emerging shift in leadership techniques, from best to next practice, from pre-connectivity to post-connectivity, is shown here.

The practices of ‘best’ on the left-hand side are the very practices that have fostered industrialization and led to global connectivity.

The irony is that these practices do not naturally foster external and connected views, which are essential to working in the connected world that the best practices have helped create.

The second contribution into thinking next practice comes from a really promising book by David L Rogers called “the Digital Transformation Playbook”, recently published in April 2016, and he is offering a superb list of changes to consider as we move from the Analog to the Digital Era.

The Author offers a view on how digital forces are reshaping five key domains of strategy—customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. These five domains describe the landscape of digital transformation for business today.

Many of the fundamental assumptions are outdated and he is suggesting we move from the Analog to Digital era, with his chapters in the book to work through these. This I think is such “next practice” thinking to get us in the digital era mindset.

David Rogers sums up the change we are all facing from digital transformation

“We live in what is commonly referred to as a digital age. An overlapping ecosystem of digital technologies —each one building on those before, and catalyzing those to come—is transforming not only our personal and communal lives but the dynamics of business for organizations of every size and in every industry.

Digital technologies are transforming not just one aspect of business management, but virtually every aspect. They are rewriting the rules of customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. Responding to this change requires not just a piecemeal approach, but a total integrated effort—a process of holistic digital transformation within the firm.”

The key is to look forward and recognize past best practices are just not relevant today. We need to look forward and seek out those “next practices” that are emerging.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Forget Best Practice, It Is All About Next Practice first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

To attempt to keep up to date we all need to invest increasing time in acquiring a better understanding, a deeper knowledge of all the interconnected parts. Even if we are “time-starved” we simply must try and keep moving along in this understanding.

As part of my job, advising others on all things swirling around innovation, I invest significant time in researching, learning, and applying what I feel is important to others to understand or at least to raise their awareness.

The rich source of knowledge that comes from the consulting firms.

The emphasis has been on establishing a clear “thought leadership” approach to underpin the consulting expertise. As this is being published in more open ways, it is not just the client that is benefiting from this research or learning but the wider community.

Many of the bigger consulting companies highly value “thought leadership”. Many are presently actively trying to quantify the impact of this thought leadership. At the clients end in a recent survey of 400 CXO’s from www.sourceforconsulting.com found that half of these rarely read thought leadership so that automatically halves the size of the ‘market’.  But yet….

Yet, critically, of the remaining ‘active’ consumers, between 50% and 65% are surprisingly passing material on, reading more from the same firm, and so on. They are inclined to browse deeper into the website of the firm and extend their reading. But crucially, about a quarter contacted the firm concerned and, in many cases, bought services from them. It does seem thought leadership really can have a direct commercial impact. But not all thought leadership is equal.

The really important sniff test is “so what?”

One of the best sources of consulting news that focuses a fair amount on the “thought leadership” part comes from the company I mentioned above (sourceforconsulting.com). They suggest “thought leadership has come to dominate the marketing activities of consulting firms, and with good cause: our research with clients finds consistent evidence that good thought leadership matters to them, too. It helps them to do their job, to identify where world-class capability exists in consulting firms, and even to shortlist the firms for their projects. So “thought leadership” is becoming a highly valued part of the consulting equation.

As they state: given this is, or is becoming, the primary marketing mechanism for consulting firms, there is little point in producing thought leadership that leaves the reader thinking, “hmmm, interesting”, before tucking the report away in a drawer, never to see the light of day again”.

In their research in 2014, the impact of thought leadership clearly demonstrated that one personal recommendation is much more likely to drive engagement with thought leadership than one email from a faceless firm – and much more likely to be the start of a conversation.

Then we have the consistency test: Sourceforconsulting found firms dividing into three groups: the consistently good (a very small number), the consistently bad (a slightly larger number) and the consistently inconsistent (the biggest group by far). So it does seem thought leadership has some real mileage to go to get better, more consistent and in tune with client needs and the consulting practices expertise.

One consulting firm that I feel is doing a very good job – Deloitte’s US division.

According to the Chairman and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, Jim Moffatt:

“Deloitte is helping clients with their most complex challenges – how to grow globally; how to innovate; how to integrate technology and strategy; how to attract, develop and retain talent – so they can make bold decisions with confidence.” I’d buy that so far on their quality of thought leadership.

Deloitte has set up different thinking tanks. An exceptional one is Deloitte University Press who publish some really good original articles, reports, and periodicals that provide insights for businesses, the public sector, and NGOs. They break down their topics into these:

I thought I’d spend a little time raising your interest, curiosity and learning on this.

Within the topics that Deloitte’s focus on, there is clearly a reasonable level of crossover but let me outline some very useful thinking by briefly summarizing the ‘hot spots’ from my perspective, which may differ from your own. I only touch on some points of possible interest:

• Business Analytics covers Data Science and Analytics. It tackles artificial intelligence and cognitive analysis. It looks at connected learning and the network approach. One good link to explore is Digital Education 2.0: from content to connections.
• Emerging Technologies discusses Why strategy, not technology, drives digital transformation and also explores the value of smart devices, IoT, and amplified intelligence. It covers the topic of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and cloud solutions to scale quickly due to diminishing barriers occurring in our business world. Also trend sensing, ecosystems, experimentation and edge scaling are covered here, along with exponential organizations looking for disruption.
• Innovation offers articles on “Beyond design thinking”, written by Larry Keeley, co-founder of Doblin, designer of the ten types of innovation framework. Doblin is now part of Deloitte. They also discuss minimum viable transformation, and separately, a really interesting Editorial piece on scale and innovation.
• Risk and Security is a section that covers cybersecurity, global risks, choices of regulation and different governance models.
• Sustainability spends significant mileage on smart mobility for many options within businesses, industries or regions of the world. It offers different thinking on options and alternatives on this sustainability question.
• CFO focus is mostly about the transitions being undertaken in Executive transitions and offers thoughts around time, talent and relationships, making hard choices and letting go.
• Growth covers a fair amount (at present) on consumer trends, the growth, and options to be considered in their different focus industries.
• Performance is hunting for that “superior business performance”, exploring this in the supply chain, value webs, and platform management and in business relationships.
• Social Impact looks at health, aging, alternative options, scarcity as a podcast, ‘smart’ options, commuting, ride sharing, transport options.
• Finally Talent, here you have interesting topics like going rogue or connect passion with a profession, learning, leadership, engagement, simplification, and performance reinventing are nicely covered to stimulate our thinking.

In summary on Deloitte’s investment in thought leadership.

Deloitte offers a diverse range of topics, depth in introducing and discussing these on a website that is modern, attractive to engage and look around, and offers numerous different filter options and signs up options. Of course, we each have our own focal points but there is increasing value in appreciating different aspects of thought leadership in quality and depth of understanding.

Add the Deloitte consulting arms own web site that covers human capital, strategy, operations, and technology, it really delivers in my opinion, a highly professional impression and selection of good research in depth, ease of navigation to draw you in to find what you are looking for and that all important feeling they can add value to you as a client or researcher.

I rate Deloitte as one of the best in this thought leadership space, many of the other bigger consultancies are real laggards in this, which I feel is a mistake in their client/ reputation/marketing mix.

Thought leadership is really a very, very big, growing business.

Measuring its impact is not easy for the classic ROI yet if you can measure the material read and then passed on; you have achieved something highly significant. The screening for value has been pre-edited so that it’s relevance to the receiver is personally valued, sent by someone who really knows what concerns them – something even the most targeted mailings can’t achieve. If those people are in the position to buy, influence any consulting decision then that is worth millions but more importantly, allows the conversations to be on a mutual platform for deepening the discussions. Do you agree?

For me, it is not just the passing on but the number of yellow markers I add to remind myself in applying these. That is partly my litmus test of quality, interest and learning.

Thought leadership is important to demonstrate today so clients can help “size and fit” the thinking with their challenges.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Delving into a complex world; finding research to help you learn and adapt first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

So where do ideas come from? The most popular one is the ‘voice of the customer’ yet this is one of the many ‘voices’ that need to be allowed to speak.

In this fuzzy front end of innovation where ideas are generated, there are many places we can ‘discover and listen’ to the voices that will provide concrete ideas and concepts. Let’s take the time to recognize these and ask you, the reader, do you have a systematic plan to capture all these voices?

The Voice of the Customer

The most talked-about place to find the ideas that are closer and relevant is the search for new ideas around the jobs needing to be done (jtbd). We get closer to these voices when we use a variety of techniques that give this voice its chance to speak.

We do this through customer focus groups, user panels, customer surveys, lead-user research, direct observation of the user in their environment, and allowing ourselves to become fully immersed in a customer’s experience.

You can read What if customers evaluated your company’s ideas? posted by Hutch Carpenter or Want to be Successful at Innovation? Start exploring your Customers’ “Jobs to be done”! posted by Elena Ozeritskaya  and so many more within the Hype blog around “jobs to be done” or “ideation” but please don’t forget the many other voices that need to be heard and the thinking behind these voices captured as they are equally of potentially great value.

The Voice of the Value Chain

We can gather plenty of ideas when we have visits to our suppliers and listen to their engineering, their specialists that work with our products or the production of the materials, even work alongside their product development staff as they often have broader industry exposure than we do, within our own organization. We can construct more formal cooperative and technology agreements and exchanges with our suppliers to find new ways to collaborate.

Also by spending time ‘in the field or marketplace’ we can discuss with the many players in the distribution system (distributors, wholesalers, customers, final retailers or those closest to our final point of sale. We can then ourselves look at all the stages along the value chain for opportunities to innovate in different ways. Just imagine all the collaborators working with your company that has knowledge that would contribute.

The Voices within the Organization

The more your innovation strategy is known internally the more likely you are to focus your opportunity investigations and draw out those rich ‘nuggets’ that lie somewhere within your organization’s experiences or insights. You can deliberately organize an operational capabilities audit to see what it might reveal in improvements or fresh ideas.

The attraction of brainstorming both within your functional and cross-functional groups can offer so much but the brainstorming techniques need to generate excitement and be seen as well worth the time and engagement, otherwise, these can fail badly. Often we miss the chance to systematically and equally on ad hoc occasions talk with the sales team in some structured ways to reveal their insights.

We should also remember many of the employee’s at the company might be users and will certainly offer an opinion that might provide some very frank and honest feedback.  Of course, there is that tried and tested new product idea suggestion scheme or contest but these do need to really offer something, besides money to gain real contributors value. Lastly, you might want to build or tap into a company idea bank.

The Voice of the Industry

We often ignore what is going on around us, many companies don’t really have good intelligence gathering systems, they tend to stay within very limited silo’s. There is absolutely no reason for this as the capturing of trends, of new patents, reading the prospectus or annual reports can yield much that can generate fresh ideas and point to future directions. Often a company belongs to numerous professional associations yet those attending fail to pick up some possible ideas as they feel this is not their job, we need to make it theirs.

The number of technical conferences that people within the organization attend gives such a productive source of insights but are they actually being ‘fed back’ into the system or just stay with the attendee alone?

Then how often is your organization participating in different standards committees, where you are often given great clues of the ‘collective’ thinking of trends, issues, roadblocks that might all lead to breakthrough ideas to gain a real competitive advantage.

The key to all of these being well-captured is putting to use the idea management software and make it mandatory those that attend and engage come back and ‘file’ a ideas report for those responsible for product or service development get the chance to ‘touch and feel’ the ideas emerging around them.

Voice of the Experts

So many consultants, training professionals, advisors are interacting daily with your company, are you tapping into this source of knowledge? Do you consider setting up focus groups with industry experts; take time out to tap into a consulting practice for its broader expertise deliberately for extracting ideas. Do you work with universities or individual facility members who can contribute different thinking and provide a rich source of knowledge?

Do you think about setting up some specific dedicated time for ‘walking around’ ideas with your research companies or consultants? Do you ever allow for providing a dedicated time that puts the product ‘brief’ on one side for the moment and just talks and exchanges? How often do you make contact through venture and equity fund that specialize in your industry and how these can offer up some very focused insights into your thinking.

Lastly, within our experts the relationships with government labs and private R&D labs are very engaged in leading-edge concepts and knowing and understanding these can dramatically alter your own perceptions.

Then we have the voice of Secondary Research

It always staggers me how academic papers are shunned and discounted yet offer such a rich source of insights and investigation. Of course, Google and the many different internet search engines can yield some interesting ideas but how often do we never dedicate the time or fail to go past the second or third page. I have found on page 8 or even ten often a search item that dramatically alters my thinking. These searches take time on the internet and you do have to stay focused and disciplined to extract all that you can as the ‘search strands’ can often take you so widely off course you wonder how you got there.

Of course, you have trade articles, white papers; competitor’s analysis, trade press clippings, but I wonder how systematic you really are in these? You should be.

Lastly, patent scans can be deadly boring, try doing those across twenty or so countries in multiple languages, it can be tough but thankfully these searches are getting easier, just go and visit the Pharmaceutical or Computer / internet related organizations to understand their leading practice in this and how strategically import this is to them. It will make your efforts seem minuscule in comparison.

Ideas can come from so many places – are you systematically listening?

We think of idea management systems in such narrow ways. Strategically across your organization, you should find ways where all ideas can get captured, where everyone working within the organization knows contributing knowledge, insights, intelligence and thinking can make a contribution.

Do you have a clear and precise plan to capture all those ideas that are whirling around or are so many ideas just left ignored, never captured or simply drowned out by your fixation and focus only upon the sources that might just be scratching the surface?

Perhaps you should give the many voices that chance to be heard?

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Are you systematically listening to the input around you? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Thinking about ecosystems certainly allows us to go out of our normal scope. The ability to tackle societal problems within an ecosystem can allow you to enter new markets that would have been impossible as an individual organization, as you did not have the collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional channels of delivery or utilize the infrastructure, building on others specialization.

We are all making greater connections within ourselves as we find and connect to our own “tribes” that all the different social platforms are providing. Crowdsourcing is another example that is offering huge potential to exploit as it can encourage much to forge, serve, and grow whole new communities from ‘simple’ beginning, building on real-time knowledge.

The future of collaborations can increasingly share previously idle or under-utilized assets. We are seeing the most valuable companies that are emerging today are largely based on sophisticated platform business models where ecosystems are vital to their health and global ambitions (Apple, Amazon, Car Manufacturers are all examples).

But be aware – the challenges are difficult to work through

Often this involves designing the architecture, platforms, construct new standards and be equipped to integrate and adapt different members of a community, who have something relevant to contribute. Managing this growing form of complexity is challenging old theories, boundaries, organizations and how they exist going forward.

Ecosystem innovation today is more about managing beyond the immediate known’s found within one organization’s limited focus of the world. The race is to gain advantage and often try to dominate and influence the future direction a market will take. This requires a broader perspective, a greater diversity of thinking by tapping into varying levels of specialized expertise.

Regretfully we are not yet fully equipped to manage these new innovation ecosystems. We need to think through a better emerging theory of leading or good practice. We need to advance the measurement and impact that ecosystems will have within advancing our innovation activity.

Measuring innovation in ecosystems has real differences

To start we need to measure innovation more on the following aspects:

Linkages – content and productivity of relationships, alliances, collaborations, interactions, networks, clusters and all the complementary aspects and assets deployed to do this

Knowledge engagement – the ability to attract knowledge into the organization, through greater content and value, through the people involved and the way we anchor and diffuse this new knowledge.

Intangible assets – increasingly people and the combination of their intellectual capital in knowledge, relationships and how they structure work will be the central focal point of innovation success.

Conditions for innovation – we need to develop the ability to ‘sense and respond’ to shifts in markets, from the competition and evaluating these changes in ‘real time’ and we will become far more reliant on data and analytics for this.

Connecting these four critical aspects becomes vital. As we learn to collect all this incoming knowledge (data-driven) this will then impact our own innovation programmes and require them to be more adaptive, dynamic and fluid. We need to recognize changing patterns, and then build in these reaction points to keep our own innovation activity staying ahead of the game.

Organising within Networks of Firms within multiple Ecosystems

The organization that envisages a changing world needs to organize around ecosystems to deliver on that vision to gain the leading influencers position.

Ecosystems require increased interactions within the community and need more tightly controlled activities to gain the synergies and effects from working within an ecosystem. Relationship management needs to keep focusing on enhancing, driving innovation and knowing how to adapt this to the whole concept. No easy task.

Ecosystems that ultimately produce new business models rest on a large capacity for agility within the participating organizations. Internal capabilities and competencies get highly stretched by the new dynamics taking place, you need a strong orchestrator of the ecosystem to manage these challenges and many cultural biases that can blind a ‘line of sight’.

Aligning partners on a platform needs-basis is very different from aligning them to just one organization’s needs. In the past, we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process. Today you can argue differently, why what you see as needed is not the best and maybe different than first envisaged, and it is better and evolutionary but demands more change and disruption internally. It allows for more breakthrough innovation, greater challenging of the existing status quo and often taking organizations out of their existing comfort zones.

As we think ecosystems, we need to think differently

Think carefully through any move to join innovation ecosystems, they do have a high, immensely attractive return, if managed well; they are nearly always disruptive to the existing markets and highly valuable to the participants. There also is a big ‘but’ here, since the pathway to get to that ‘success point’ is full of potential risk and immense ‘spent’ energy.

Watch out for those “burning platforms”

Burning platforms will be all around us, as we continue into the age of disruption. To counter this we must welcome the new era of global collaborative innovation where we will be learning the abilities to move between different ecosystems, collaborating at different levels of participation, to extract completely different forms of innovation value that advance our growth prospects.

A suggested way we need to think about building ecosystems

One recent report I was reading from Deloitte, based on some of its recent analysis, suggests that we need to consider and recognize where ecosystems and the platforms will help us. They suggest we begin by answering these initial questions that I have adapted and extended:

1. What makes up the critical capabilities for minimum viable transformation to participate and learn about this shift taking place to understand and participate?
2. What needs to evolve in the enterprise strategy and especially where platform thinking comes in to play, to radically alter the innovation offerings that are not available as a stand-alone organization?
3. How can we liberate the internal potential of resources, stored knowledge, and latent assets so as to tackle harder challenges that can transform an industry and who can help in this?
4. Finally living in a changing world of blurring boundaries, uncharted frontiers, how can we participate in different ecosystems of learning and value that can transform our competitive position and provide us with a substantial leap?

In Summary

The ecosystem, through the use of technology, the cloud and a diverse set of collaborations will increasingly become the mainstream for innovation inputs, accelerants, and delivery of value. We need to prepare for it, experiment, become involved in different offerings. Platforms, strategic partnerships, new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and learn to deliver through this requires a radically different innovation system of management built around adapting and changing ecosystems.

Innovation will move from being based on incremental innovation, all designed in-house, into bold, collaborative offerings, cutting across today’s established industry boundaries, pushing out across different innovation frontiers, participating on a variety of platforms and extracting in different ways across multiple ecosystems. This will open up the whole need to re-evaluate the governance, the risk management and the resources needed to operate in this new innovating world. It is going to demand a very different set of disciplines, processes, and design.

Are you exploring this new innovation dynamic of platforms and ecosystems yet? You do need to get into a position to experiment, test, exploit and explore in limited ways to learn and adapt. It is even more dramatic in change than moving from closed to open innovation, it will challenge much that was only recently established to be radically redesigned and altered again.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post The Challenge is for Organizations to think differently about ecosystems first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Our whole understanding of innovation is changing; there are numerous shifts occurring.

We are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into ones that are having a far more open stance. We are searching for more collaborative innovation (external orientation) combining external partners into more ‘collective thinking’.

This shift is offering us extra acceleration that is needed to improve our innovation performances from concept to market delivery.

Collaborative innovation is also leading us to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success, as nearly all novel ideas lay outside the organization’s domain of understanding.

As we increasingly include the customer and their needs within our understanding, these multiple collaborations and dialogues are building this better internal understanding.

There also seems that many organizations are presently searching for their new business models’ of innovation delivery or architecture. I’d say we are presently in a state of flux on adjusting to all of what this might mean, in customer and market offerings, as well as internally adapting our structures to the new forms required in these business model changes.

Equally, we are constantly moving from managing linear innovation processes and making these more adaptive, constantly looping back when new information or data is being discovered, increasing this knowledge and insight in highly dynamic, constantly evolving, and informing ways.

Adjusting to many different forms of external relationships

We are forming external relationships in many different ways as this increased diversity does matter to each organization for building different competitive positions in their innovation offerings.

We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services through new business models that would not have been enabled by only having the one organization attempting it. Collaborations are significantly adding value into the innovation equation.

Also, we are seeing complexity rising significantly. The search for finding greater value is shifting even further, increasingly forming around innovation ecosystems, loose federations of vested interest, forming and dispersing when the job is complete.

Is ecosystem thinking part of your innovation make up? Let me offer some thoughts.

So why are business ecosystems emerging as a real competitive force?

As we begin to open up our thinking the concept of ecosystems will increasingly having a powerful effect on our future growth perspectives, as different partners will all contribute to this often ‘emergent’ thinking to increase the total sum of the value.

Our innovation exploration will become far more evolutionary and requires a completely different way to think and manage these ‘relationship contract’s’ that are forming around a given concept of platform engagements. As we tap into all the expertise up and down the value chain we will become far more aware and will need to explore all the depth in thinking, contributing and making available through extending our connections in deeper and broader ways. Knowing how to adjust, accommodate and shift our thinking requires us to become more agile, finding new ways of connecting and working.

A single industry focus is in decline

Opportunities exist everywhere. We need to look well beyond our own industry to evaluate different perspectives, seek out the potential of different concepts that can be adapted to our own industry. Many companies are exploring the value of becoming involved in a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries to build new communities that have the capacity to transform existing environments.

As an example, let’s take the “battle of mobile devices” has now become a war of building the better ecosystem. It is not one single product it is chasing increasing share of minds, preferences, changing habits and tastes and to achieve this ‘paradigm’ shift the search is on for forming the ecosystem that can deliver this ‘transformation’. This is coming through apps, technology, different value propositions built into a platform of offerings that combine through your mobile device.

Another example is how Autodesk and Adobe are building the environment for others to join, build and participate within. The focus is on rapid prototyping in collaborative environments. They are offering one-stop shops where technology, 3D printing, software design, their engineer services can be combined to work on your ideas, all ‘housed’ in one location.

For start-ups, small and medium-sized organizations are given even more chances to bring their concepts to life and finding the opportunity to compete with larger organizations through this approach. They are helping you to bring your prototypes to life and create real functional end-use parts with additive manufacturing, production processes, and software applications.

For instance, Autodesk facilities at Pier 9, in San Francisco includes: a cutting-edge digital fabrication lab, a woodworking shop, a metalworking shop, a 3D printing lab, laser cutting and printing capabilities, an electronics workshop, a commercial test kitchen, and an industrial sewing center as well as smaller specialty project areas.

In the car industry, consolidation is forcing a collaborative rethink. Sharing core platforms is driving commonality and global flexibility. There is this industry push for more universal regimes to drive down costs, guarantee quality and standardize the production and supply chains, these are cutting across suppliers, extending collaboration between traditional rivals on this need to contain costs and variance and extend global reach, redefining competitive positions closer to customer needs by focusing on distinctive propositions, less on car assembly (since industry reliability has universally risen by applying industry ‘best’ practice for much within the manufacturing and production of cars).

Stepping out is stepping up

Today there is growing realization that thinking ecosystems can allow us to have a new framing of possibilities and offer us different mind-sets that tap into different and diverse relationships, partnerships, alliances, and collaborations. This was unthinkable until recently, without the enablers to make these connections through technology and more open platforms where you can come together and collaborate.

The increasing value of participating in ecosystems allows for large and small organizations to create, scale and serve markets in ways unthought-of previously. The ability to interact and co-create in increasingly sophisticated and novel ways opens up new opportunities. These ecosystems form a bond of shared interest, of recognition and purpose which quickly becomes established as the new ‘commons’ in sharing and contributing.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems has a powerful effect first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Constructing an innovation conversation framework is never easy, we all come at it in different ways and those strategic conversations begin to fray at the edges and slip more into tactical the more we talk.

At this time of year for many, this is a potential chance gained (or lost) to influence the strategic plans and secure the commitment and funding towards your innovation activities for the coming year and beyond.

If you just diving into innovations, this sort of strategic conversation can change the goalposts, alter the perspective, and can give the innovation a more focused framing to build propositions around.

The framing of an innovation conversation framework

What I am suggesting here is an innovation conversation framework, on how we can approach different strategic value propositions, and where we might need to debate these across the organization, as the points of impact, so we can make a move towards a higher degree of innovation alignment for all involved.

If we take the three ‘classic’ strategic thrusts of product leadership, operational excellence, or customer intimacy, then we need to make clear the potentially different emphasis points within any suggested innovation approach that we should take. We must, within any innovation approach, be clear on what and where we should be placing our primary focus.

Aligning innovation within a strategic conversation framework

This framing can be most useful to remind people who are involved that there are significant points of difference. There is a need to agree and align on what we are driving towards – and support any selected strategic direction. This framework can really open up the discussion. It can begin to show the possible implications and challenges ahead.

Equally some might argue that you actually need to combine all three, well I’d certainly want to question whether this is possible all at the same time. I would really doubt it, if you just consider some of the aspects I’ve laid out within this framework above.

If it is still demanded, and some leaders can be just that, demanding – wanting to cover all the bases without knowing why they should be really focusing down on one of these. The direction you go requires the organizational focus to build the type of capabilities, resources and processes to match this.

The need for a real alignment of strategy and innovation

Innovation stands in service to strategic goals such as growing market share, differentiation and disrupting adjacent markets, serving the consistent changing and demanding customer needs or by honing the delivery process by spotting these and then exploiting them rapidly and effectively. The first thing is you need to have a solid, thoughtful conversation around the type of strategic emphasis you wish to achieve.

Creating clear goals and linking / aligning innovation to those more agile strategies is a vital step before you get into the actual innovation concept stage. Senior executives must establish the manner in which innovation fits within the strategic context established by goals, vision and strategies.

Really do try and establish some key principles

I would suggest you really do need, even more, a framework to remind you of the critical differences and what aspects need clear focus to deliver to the distinct value proposition parts. Each strategic value proposition has significant implications to plan and work through.

This framework can help you to contribute to achieving a greater alignment between the strategic direction (product leadership, operational excellence or customer intimacy) and the key innovation aspects that help to align to this which the organization will need to think about and work through.

Does it make sense to you? I’m keen to get your feedback.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Framing the strategic innovation discussion first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Anyone who has felt the ‘full force of the wind’ will know the feeling of how hard it is to keep on your feet, to stay determined to stay upright and true, to hold the course, whatever happens.

When you feel the force of change running through the organization, you tend to have that same sensation, to resist the force with all your energy. It is often really hard to let go, the environment was something you had become used to, you accepted and become resigned to its weaknesses and constantly exploited its possibilities or even possibly the other way round.

Firstly the sharks are circling

Change is all around us, it is accelerating not abating. You often hear of volatile trading conditions, a more complex market, and situations changing constantly and faster than ever. We do need to re-equip ourselves for constant disruption; we see a shift from the classic bell curve into more of a shark fin.

A curve that is characterized by sudden, even violent success, some moments of brilliant dominance, followed by a dramatic change in conditions as others have spotted the same opportunity and you hit a rapid decline, the race to the bottom of competition constantly negating one another. Market segmenting is shortening or having an even longer tail.

It does seem “creative destruction” is a central force in many of our activities. Activities where innovation is continually replacing not just in products and new services but in designing radically different business models, searching to replace less adaptive competitors in the marketplace.

Some are arguing we live in a VUCA world, full of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. I remember one phrase in a great book to read “Moments of Impact” written by Chris Ertel and a wonderful associate of mine, Lisa Kay Soloman. They regard this period of living as the VUCA world, as “one that is a  little like those thrilling rides you find in amusement parks but just not all of them are fun!”

These “change forces” are making many organizations and the leadership a little wary and weary, they double down. They become risk adverse, defensive and determined to ‘weather it through’. They might be hanging on tight, simply believing but the force of change requires a very different set of beliefs and will whisk them away if they don’t adapt and change.

Shifting from accepted to adaptive

The changes that are occurring all around us are those sudden switches from the predictable markets, the interruptions to that constant reassuring rhythm of the one, three and five year plans and developing the organizations principle ‘skill set’ as tackling technical challenges suddenly gets challenged by novel, agile, adaptive concepts stealing the growth out of ‘our’ markets. Where is that feeling of being predictable, offering incremental improvements? Innovation as part of this change is so much more than incremental.

Today we are far more on this quest for novel insights, much of what we do is transient, much that was enduring is being challenged, even ripped out and replaced. We might still hear the reassuring sound of those generic statements of “focusing on our core assets”, “providing solid shareholder value”, “having clear target markets”, focusing on “reducing low yielding businesses to release value and drive up our stock” and the favourite by many “vested” C-level individuals announcing the latest “driving up our share price by a well-designed buyback programme.”

All these generic statements are often masking a deeper story in many organizations not at ease with itself at all. These reassuring statements make those on the outside feel some level of short-term comfort and stay invested but if you scratch the surface just a little, there is an underlying sense of panic. If you push too hard, ask difficult questions suddenly it all becomes a little uncomfortable. The organization is highly vulnerable to attack.

Ignoring the power of choice, a lack of focus and change is dangerous

Constructing a climate for any transformation is hard. Our cultures are deep rooted; we resist those winds blowing into us “full on,” well beyond being reasonable or smart enough to avoid them before they confront us. The Chinese proverb above gives us a clear choice: “to build walls or build windmills”

When an organization decides to change its culture, set about constructing a different climate or environment so innovation can thrive. But there are so many steps to work through, so many obstacles to overcome, bridges to burn, habits to undo as well as construct the path of understanding, of recognition and providing the building blocks to this.

Context is the vital ingredient often never told.

Often we hear “location, location, location” as the mantra for real-state property. What should the mantra be for innovation? For me it is “people, people, people” followed by “context, context and context”. We have often heard (and it is totally right) ‘innovation only happens through people’. Everything else- systems, processes, structures, incentive and investments- sets the context that defines how people approach their jobs. Context not only sets the stage, it gives us the reason to go and find the tools to get the job done but it is ‘our’ people who need to be motivated to go find them and apply them.

The power of context also refers to the conditions and circumstances of time and place for combining new ways to make a shift, a new understanding, perhaps to make the organization more sensitive to the need of innovation, to help fully support the people to innovate.

Context is powerful but only in the hands of knowledgeable people.

So to make change we need context- the understanding of why we need to change and what we need to do with it. Then we can begin to think of the climate and eventual culture we want to have so as to achieve the change. These actions shape behaviors, alters perceptions, establishes itself within the larger social group that change is directed towards, it alters the ‘norm’, it opens up new possibilities and pushes the established boundaries.

Actually making change for innovation is a lot harder.

Let me explain: Innovation however, doesn’t work in many of our normal processes and procedures. Yes we constantly attempt to squeeze all our innovation activity into a well-designed process but so much of those more radical innovations just cannot fit and we are then forced to ‘kill them off’ as the system rejects them. We block any chance of making radical change if we remain slaves to the pursuit of structured innovation alone. We should find ways to become flexible, more agile, and more ready to work with ambiguity and find the ways and means to challenge the consistent process for innovation.

Transactional processes have their context embedded in them. Innovation, on the other hand, needs to attach context to every idea or concept, it needs to be moulded, shaped and aligned to the ‘greater purpose’.

Innovation is very fluid; we build systems that often impede it.

I kept a reference but I can’t recall who wrote it:

“An idea tends to be very fluid, and without context may be hard to evaluate or even consider.Certainly any culture that discourages ideas will produce few, that rewards people for complying will not promote challenge and make the necessary breakthroughs business require today in new and different thinking. Having systems that minimize risk will also minimize innovation and risk-taking. Structures built to control only impede the very interactions that innovation thrives off of and restricting the movement of ideas will completely undercut the capacity for innovation”.

So companies need to put a great amount of attention on the context that will allow people to work clearly and effectively and provide the vital enablers that contribute to making this happen. This power of context is something we are extremely alert or sensitive too, and when these change and we don’t understand why, we often just stop innovating, or being productive and often become disinclined to be creative. So making change for reasons that are seen as not clear to those involved stops people from doing their job of making innovation happen.

Context may be the arbitrator of success but people are first and foremost, hence why my two mantras are both critical “people followed by context” that are inexplicably linked for successful innovation but these should always be placed in the right order and recognition; people come first, context follows, innovation flows from the combination and you have the best chance to bring about positive change.

The leader within all of us needs to arise

Leadership when it wants change for innovation needs to encourage a new set of principles so as to draw in everyone to the change process, so they can collectively unleash the potency to create the climate for creativity, innovation and eventual transformation, in a rapidly changing environment and culture that wants this change – it is liberating for individuals.

A number of years back academics Kouzes and Posner developed a leadership practice inventory and came out with five practices that encouraged change. I sort of like these when you think about changing the culture to innovate differently. These were:

• 1) challenge the process to encourage experimentation and taking measured scaling risks,
• 2) inspire with building a shared vision for others to see and participate in a more exciting possibility of the future,
• 3) enable others to act by fostering collaborations, involving different teams in mix and match thinking and exchanges and strive for creating the atmosphere of trust, dignity and being valued,
• 4) modeling the way forward in leading by example, setting interim goals, encouraging small wins and help to unravel the bureaucracy built up around ‘us all’, and finally,
• 5) encourage the heart, share rewards, treat people as heroes, promote solutions that move change, and discuss the learning outcomes.

When the wind of change does blow we must adjust

When the wind of change does blow and it is in every corner of every organization, it really does deliver a ‘punch’ of complex variables to manage. We have invoked “the very nature of a changing climate” needed where the patterns of behavior are required to change; we have the “power of the context” change that is required to alter ‘our state of understanding’.

These ‘change winds’ influence the processes running through the organization as they are challenging and probing what is in place, they are looking to raise the creativity, in adjusting and changing the norms, to making new activities work, to experiment and learn. Then you have to set about how to construct and design a more deliberate process kit for managing innovation, one that is more fluid, adaptive and agile too changing conditions and knowledge, and finally, the setting about addressing the environment and cultures needed to create more lasting conditions, so as to embed the change and establish the new (innovating) order.

Encouraging change has one very powerful empowering step

If you encourage a certain readiness, willingness and ability to want to transform- to devolve power down to the individual to experiment, to create, to develop, to test, then they will want to innovate.

It is not the mechanical systems or processes that innovation often requires, it is the intellectual effort from the people wanting to engage in what it changes for them and those that benefit from something better and different.

I finish with one of my favorite quotes I have up on the wall in my office on change’s effect:

“Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is carrying me across the sky” Ojibwa chant

Let those winds blow….but do be ready.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post When Change is a Must – Put People and Context First first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

For a big majority of us, open innovation is now well established, it is part of our innovation furniture. The quest for many, today, is the search for richer engagements, possibilities, and exchanges. We need to move beyond the existing boundaries and go deeper into the collaborative space.

I regard collaboration as the active ingredient, the yeast that allows our ‘daily innovation bread’ to rise. Getting all the parties ‘gathered around’ puts increased vitality, energy, and commitment to working together on a project or idea.

As we learn to reach out and collaborate, exchanging perspectives and our different thoughts, it is in these interactions, in the many exchanges on-line and off-line that we move towards a real sense of achievement.

Allowing outside ideas through our doors

Open innovation has literally thrown open the doors, many of our research and development activities are increasingly relying on the input from outside. Open innovation is changing our behaviors.

Yet it can be tough to shift our ingrained habits and patterns of behavior to accommodate differences of opinion, acceptance that many of the answers lie outside of our building and domain of expertise. The more we look outside for answers the more we are getting closer to the truth, as the truth lies out in the marketplace.

We need to seek those “moments of truth” and be true to ourselves, in having open, honest dialogues; these strengthen sharing, confidence, and trust – all essential to collaborations.

There are certain behaviors to avoid, certain ones to embrace.

I am sure we have all looked at collaborations as more one way, our way, and not made the progress we had originally expected. True collaborating is an art, not a science. It needs constant practice, a freedom to explore and express. You need to have a clear sense of purpose, on why you are talking; otherwise, you wander and never get to the point of real value.

The work is around issues/ challenges/problems that have the potential for mutual gain. No one enjoys those “black holes” or “long silences” of one-way dialogues, those that often feel like “I think this person is sucking out my brain” and expecting that for free.

No, for me collaborations, good collaborations, can move up a gear from those past open innovation experiences. We need to make them human dialogues that appreciate and respect the others’ opinion, otherwise, why bother with open innovation, if we already know the answer, we just want you to confirm it?

Designing our collaborative platforms with some suggested principles

• I like the principles of “demonstrating, validating, sharing and discussing” as you ‘plug’ into each other so you can achieve active dialogue on ‘given’ subjects on a solid ‘give and take’ approach.
• Often we constrain ourselves in working out the prescribed agenda of needs before we get into any dialogue, I think this is a huge mistake. We should make conversations creative, a rich mix of development techniques that generate good interactions and create that growing bond and identification.
• Allow time to let discussions and exchanges grow and flow and sometimes they can move into unusual directions that lead to even better creative exchanges for value building.
• We need to have and seek a bias for action, by simply keeping on asking the basics of “for whom, why are we discussing this, how can we proceed, when and what issues stand in our way?”
• I like the idea to start off any potential innovation conversation with a belief of its change possibilities; it opens us up to what both parties can truly get out of the collaboration.
• We should always start with the belief that we need to gain mutually, and often just simply recognizing that you might ‘just’ simply gain personal knowledge and insights that could offer value somewhere ‘down the line’.
• Each side constantly needs to track back to a sense of worth and that comes from allowing time for feedback and open thinking. Take your time to really engage in mutual conversations, they prove to be increasingly valuable over time.
• I believe the ability to use design thinking techniques can give a greater dimension to ideas, flow, exchanges and creative moves towards solutions. Learn the techniques and then try it as an alternative way to work and create together.
• We need to practice “circles of conversation” where they loop around, move around the parties and you gain increasingly from the positive reinforcing loop of different conversation strands.
• Lastly, we all bond, sometimes not so much with the problem but far more with the person explaining the problem, so mixing up the expected problem statement with personal experience and your values make for a far more positive atmosphere, leading to fruitful conversations you might not have initially expected.

Why is a collaboration so important to our future?

As we engage, we learn.

We can’t imagine what we don’t often see; others open our minds to new possibilities. We can stay anchored in what we see and do, or if we are prepared to let go and have this ‘freedom’ to look for a mutual exchange we can scale new heights. Conversations, exchanges, and collaborations give us the experience to learn.

The huge value of collaborative exchanges is how it opens up our minds as we sometimes realize that we were ‘vested’ in selective thoughts that were less informed than we expected. Opinions can fall away as better ones replace them.

We need to let go, unlock the knowledge that comes from collaborations. Just remember outsiders are not insiders, they have different perspectives and do not expect to ‘shoehorn’ their opinions into the one size fits all.

I’d argue to remain as open as possible, so as to allow yourself to simply open up in a world of mutual collaboration, it can lead to some powerful innovation ideas. Build trust, value your own instincts and permit judgment calls to be pushed off until you have allowed the other party to explain their potential contribution, and then jointly work towards the solutions.

Make your collaborative efforts move just beyond open innovation into relationships that continue the learning process for all sides. Make all your collaborating endeavors stimulating, then you move into that higher creative, co-creating gear and it is a far more rewarding place to be.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Moving up into those higher collaborative gears first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.