When the established order begins to creak and dismantle, seemingly in front of our eyes, those fears of the unknown can kick in, especially if you have been used to managing in an established (slowly) evolving way for most, if not all, of your business life.

We seem confronted with rapid change, and it is primarily within the business world related to technology and market uncertainty that is driving this. We need to counter “fear” with a different approach, recognizing most of what we feel might be the ‘unknown’ is actually ‘known.’

We need to recognize our unknowns, search out others who might be experts in that point of not knowing and gain their help in piecing the parts that might be fragmented together to bring that need for recognition and clarity in our mind.

Fear can immobilize us.

In a recent exchange I had within one innovation community discussion, it was suggested that Innovation Business Ecosystems did not have the expected uptake because of this “fear of the unknowns”.

What initially prompted this was my post on making the business case for “Thinking about Innovation Ecosystems” Well, we need to address fear to get past this mental blockage of the “fear of those unknowns”.

So this short post is on tackling fear and dealing with the unknowns.

I would argue that far more of those unknowns are really knowns, often to others, than you might think. Our individual problem often lies in the time we have to discover, learn and explore new and different things. As well, and ask, are we really interested? We do need to ‘lean in’ on many specialists and experts to help us, not just business consultants!

We need to move beyond fear to invest in specialised thinking, open our minds up and seek out others who might offer expertise or insight that prompts and encourages a shift in thinking through their power of argument or insights.

What holds us back? It is fear of the unknowns. How can we move forward?

It is simply we have too many unknowns. That lack of investment in time and understanding to recognize the value and impact of opening up the thinking to different ideas, concepts or solutions. We need to find a better mechanism to manage our fears.

Let me provide some important points to consider in dealing with unknowns that have building blocks to reduce fear and reluctance to change.

NINE points of recognition to build into your thinking that can reduce fear:

1. Keep monitoring the industry and market trends, do ongoing market research and consistent risk analysis, and stay informed about changes and developments, however weak in initial signals.
2. Build relationships, network with industry leaders, and collaborate with industry experts and peers.
3. Stay flexible, agile and adaptable, and have up-to-date contingency plans in place to adjust course if needed and, in a controlled manner, options to existing business strategy.
4. Seek advice and support from a strong support network of mentors or peers that keeps you questioning and keeping you up to date. A dedicated coaching session or two can always help.
5. Develop a positive and proactive growth mindset and embrace failures as learning opportunities.
6. Break down the unknown into manageable parts of discovery, learning and translating, and experiment with new technologies in a controlled environment.
7. Gradually implement changes, test their impact, experiment, explore, and extract understanding.
8. Invest continually in training and education to stay ahead of the learning curve.
9. Try to identify and understand the source of fear and embrace uncertainty as a natural path of growth, personally and across the organization. Talk about this; empathy is all around us.

To counter fear and exposure, address so many of those unknown unknowns as many of them are actually known to others. You simply have not had the time or need to invest the time for understanding but others can be as supportive personally or in organizational settings that can translate their expertise into your understanding. A change manager or transformation advocate primary aim is to reduce fear but first, you have to recognize it.

For example, the early recognition that moving to any new business model, making changes, or significant process approaches means navigating uncertainty and managing risk. Change is all around us; the ground we once trusted is shifting under us, so we need to become far more aware and, in so doing, reduce those fears of the unknown. So who can help provide fresh thinking and different alternatives or prompt you to explore that area of (sudden) need or recognition as you address the unknowns?

Others can and will help- just ask. They can accelerate your learning, reduce your fears and bring the unknown in your present thinking into all the new opportunities in the new knowns that can be discovered.

The post Fears of those unknowns first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The post The art of "Back Casting" needs care first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Backcasting is a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified “future to the present”.

The fundamentals of the method were outlined by John. B. Robinson from the University of Waterloo in 1990. The fundamental question of backcasting asks: “if we want to attain a certain goal, what actions must be taken to get there?”

While forecasting involves predicting the future based on current trend analysis, backcasting approaches the challenge of discussing the future from the opposite direction; it is “a method in which the future desired conditions are envisioned, and steps are then defined to attain those conditions, rather than taking steps that are merely a continuation of present methods extrapolated into the future”

I have collected different views on “Backcasting”.

Those are from assorted references like Wikipedia, from past work on water and energy systems, Natural Step, from Innosight, discussed and promoted in Mark Johnson’s book “Lead for the Future” and a really recent one from Roxi Nicolussi and her Backcasting; Creating a Strategic Roadmap for the Future” or finally here, this one “All Roads Lead From The Future Back — A Vision and Spoke Model” by Aidan McCullen. I am looking to further explore the applications applied in water, energy and climate work.

So exploring backcasting as a method

Backcasting involves establishing the description of a very definite and particular future situation.

It then involves an imaginary moving backwards in time, step-by-step, in as many stages as are considered necessary, from the future to the present to reveal the mechanism through which that particular specified future could be attained from the present.

Backcasting is not concerned with predicting the future: The major distinguishing characteristic of backcasting analyses is the concern, not with likely energy futures, but with how desirable futures can be attained. Thus, it is explicitly normative, involving “working backwards” from a particular future end-point to the present to determine what policy measures would be required to reach that future.^[

The concept of “backcasting” is central to a strategic approach to sustainable development. It is a way of planning in which a successful outcome is imagined in the future, followed by the question: “what do we need to do today to reach that successful outcome?”

This is more effective than relying too much on forecasting, which tends to have the effect of presenting a more limited range of options, hence stifling creativity. More importantly, it projects the problems of today into the future.

In the context of sustainability, we can imagine an infinite number of scenarios for a sustainable society – and ‘backcasting from scenarios’ can be thought of as a jigsaw puzzle. We have a shared picture of where we want to go. We put the pieces together to get there.

However, getting large groups of people to agree on the desired future scenario is often all but impossible. Further, scenarios that are too specific may limit innovation and distract our minds from the innovative, creative solutions necessary for sustainable development.

Over the years, I have pursued the Three Horizons methodology. I am more comfortable with this and applied this approach to countless issues or future thinking as it feels more casting forward.

Backcasting offers a different approach nicely illustrated here.

Backcasting is further explained or applied.

So strategic sustainable development relies on ‘backcasting from sustainability principles’ – which are based on science and represent something we can all agree on: if these principles are violated, our global society is unsustainable.

To achieve a sustainable society, we know we have to not violate those principles – we don’t know exactly what that society will look like. Still, we can define success on a principle level.

In that way, backcasting from principles is more like chess – we don’t know exactly what success will look like, but we know the principles of checkmate – and we go about playing the game in a strategic way, always keeping that vision of future success in mind.

Natural systems are complex and non-linear, and while we understand more and more about how they behave on the principle level, we still cannot predict the weather. Social systems are far more complex. Still, we try to force these systems into models so we can ‘understand’ them and ‘predict’ how they will behave.

To do this, we are forced to make assumptions that often make the models reductionist, simplistic, and absurd. For example, in economic systems, the assumptions are that all people are ‘rational actors’ and that there is ‘perfect information’.

In large part, this is due to a tradition of compartmentalized disciplines in academia, where the social scientists have pushed a quantitative, value-neutral approach to study these systems in the misguided pursuit of establishing concrete laws similar to the laws of nature.

Even if we could predict the future, why would we want to? We have the power to create a better future.

If you backcast, future cast or apply the three horizons we do need to look out, into the future and try and bring it back to the present so we can move towards that desired state in a planned and methodical way.

More on backcasting in the future!!

The post The art of backcasting needs care in innovation activities first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Time takes on a different meaning; we are cutting out those (unproductive) meetings, the train, car, and flight times, and we have the luxury to do what?

Well, it is offering us that luxury of actually having time to think and reflect. Now that is dangerous as it takes us off our ‘chosen’ treadmill of pursuit.

I was pondering some thoughts around the quest for growth, the demands for change, and the need to become nimble, agile, and more dynamic in what we do. We crowd out our days and never stop to reflect.

So I started to think a little more. Now that can be dangerous, and I am not too sure it gave me answers, just more questions. My starting point was the endless journey of innovation.

We seem to be confronted with an endless journey when it comes to innovation.

We continuously want to change what we have, even when it patently does the jobs we need ‘it’ doing.

There is this nagging feeling of chasing for relentless destruction or maintaining disturbance with new products, features, updates, or adjustments. Often products and services never have time to settle, and the shift to ‘greater’ adoption can take place, we instead return to making change.

Change that simply meets a budget requirement, a belief it gives us a competitive advantage, in this constant update chase we are all caught up in. We seem in ‘pursuit of destruction,’ and arguably, this is wrong on a planet of limited resources. We are indeed a throwaway society.

Much of our quest for change is caught up in the search for new products. If we don’t have these, this will limit us in new growth. New growth is not just new products or services, it can also come from deepening the value of the existing, but that takes a shift in our current thinking.

Would shareholders reward us as highly, if we just extended the existing? That would be kind of boring, right?

Yet, are we getting so caught up in this chase for change?

We deliberately build into our systems the following mantras or ways we should work:

• As we are all becoming far more digital, fluid, and agile, we are absorbing and responding at faster rates, and we are adapting to a constant, multifaceted world of connections, systems, and knowledge piecing, so as to combine up into different new solutions. The outcome must be new products or services as a result, right?
• To get there, we are seeking out new ways to be far nimbler, so we need to learn different navigation skills and become far more assignment driven, less exploratory in many things, and relying on technology to take on this role. We sit back and interpret the results. We need to cut out the time-consuming parts as they make us look inefficient, but do we learn or just dependent on what our data provides us, do we have the time to deeply think, applying human intelligence to artifical intelligence?
• As we feel we are becoming increasingly agile, iterative, experimenting, and continuously determined to execute to drive our results and value-add, we simply focus on delivery and collaboration outcomes far more resolutely but do we fail to deepen a lasting relationship, in our determination to achieve the final result needed?

Yet with all this push to become different, we stay trapped

We fail to change the fundamentals. If we don’t change these all the energy as individuals, we deploy to be seen and valued as nimble, fluid, and agile have such limiting impact. We still seem to be trapped

We still have an over-reliance on past models – when the near future closely resembles the recent past, relying on existing models to determine appropriate actions and investments is rational, but it traps us, never to wriggle free and break out.

Given the increase in the pace of change and the amount and impact of innovation and its impact on business models, it’s evident that the near future does not resemble the recent past, so we must challenge and change these past models but do we, are we brave enough?

Do companies make the necessary profound assessments on the conditions and amplitude of change, driven far more from external factors; they tend to stay locked into the existing, and no amount of individual flair can a new organization learning emerge?

Change proficiency/capability – in most companies, people receive training and develop skills based on their specific roles and responsibilities, but rarely develop skills that enable or accelerate change.

The training received is to enact a specific change; it is static as it addresses a point of time. Change proficiencies should be fluid, dynamic, and constant.

There should be NO change managers. There should be evolutionary managers, keeping the organization in a “creative tension” where it becomes the natural form of everyday work.

We cannot expect companies and cultures to change frequently and capably if people don’t have the skills, capabilities, or proficiency to (change) evolve effectively.

We have this preference for stability over change, but we expect what we sell as consistently in a state of change, yet our people, organizations, and cultures prefer stability to change. We can take a different approach and look to, perhaps a return to deepen relationships, not reply to CRM management tools, extend existing products, increase their adoption, and we still can grow.

To learn a language, we have to keep practicing. To gain more out of Microsoft Word, we should continue exploring the existing features of the program, instead, we get taken over by a new release we never deepen our learning, or we simply brush up our language skills just before we need them. We are proficient, but we are not fluent or assured, in total command.

Of course, stability reinforces itself; that desire for security leads to inertia and, over time, active resistance to change. If we took the evolutionary perspective, would it be different? So Companies today must create a preference for more change, reducing inertia, and building change capabilities.

Focus on short term profits rather than longer-term viability – Since change is uncertain and distracts from that productive day-to-day in operations, there is an ever-increasing focus on short term profitability. Change always takes a back seat to efficient operations and short term profits until the ‘system’ or organization finds itself in crisis.

Longer-term viability suffers because of an over-reliance on an increasingly out of date business model, infrequent innovation, and a lack of planning that the evolutionary pathway of building and extending existing capacity can provide.

Changing our ways

How do we move to a real sustaining value creation that is based on the existing, not just on the new? Is there more sustaining value in stopping product change for the sake of growth, when we seem not to have any in the Western world today and alter our thinking to extending what we have simply got?

We can’t continue to keep throwing away what we have, simply because there is something often just slightly better or giving us a certain “bragging” point as having the latest shiny tool. Can we change how we approach innovation for finding and extracting growth out of the existing, not out of the pursuit, always of something new?

The post Everything is changing faster- can we respond differently in our Innovation work? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Sadly he only had ten minutes. It would have been good to have this opening challenge expanded out so we can all recognize many of the areas that we are not doing enough in our need for the necessary energy transition.

Mr. Neike spoke of the battle we have in the energy and urbanization transformation, the need to accelerate the transition.

So his question sparked my thinking here that in my view, there are four parts to any Urban Transition.

Today 55% of the world’s population resides in urban areas; in2050, that will be staggering at 68% of the world population will be living in cities. We are heading for an urban crisis unless we recognize the four parts of the urban transition and bring them together.

The recognition that there were four parts comes from a piece I was reading a while back was to recognize that Urbanization has four urban transition aspects, outlined by the Urban Transitions Alliance

We need a significant Infrastructure transition, as much of the existing infrastructure is not fit for purpose. We need comprehensive infrastructure plans, ones built on flexible and renewable energy.

Secondly, we need a mobility transition. Our dependence on vehicles needs to change. We must accelerate the e-mobility thinking, in trains, buses, motorbikes, and cars. Many of our cities are choking on pollution from hazardous air quality and congestion. Our mobility does not necessarily need to be our own

Thirdly we need this all-important energy transition. We need new energy solutions; we need to deliver sustainable electricity, powered by green energies, not carbon-based. Cities can only become attractive places to live if we make this energy transition and that will require new physical systems that meet the needs of expanding cities

The fourth and perhaps the most important to manage, and manage well, is the social transition. We have constant tensions in cities, and it is through social engagement, building a shared identity can we successfully manage any change. We need to be fully inclusive, so all living in a city or its urban area can share in any economic and societal gains.

So the urbanization needs a real connected narrative that should connect these four parts.

Urbanization needs to take the idea of smart, through data, and make the city intelligent. Urban transitions are both physical and technology solutions combining. The solutions need always to change the current performance and delivery of a different sense of hope.  A set of solutions that simply improves on the existing. These always come from applying innovation to these four transition needs of the urbanization story, so it becomes a “fertile” place for dynamism, ideas, and where social cohesion can thrive.

We are seeing pockets of progress occurring in many cities, but others are perhaps going backward, take the case of Delhi in India. After the initial reaction to do something, we are past the point of picking off the low hanging fruit; we need to dig deeper into undertaking the urbanization transition. Many of our cities are in real crisis or lacking the transformational plan to take them through their changes required. The hard part of this transition is ahead of us.

So we are not doing enough, but in Mr. Neike’s closing, he struck a highly collaborative note.

So, returning to Mr. Neike’s closing remark was, a call to action: “do it together, do it fast.” This “fast and together” is needed to be highly collaborative energy and urban transition; it involves all of us and requires all of us to come together to resolve the multiple reasons for these transitions I am suggesting go together.

We have highly complex energy and urbanization transitions ahead of us. All I can say is we live in a polluted world, we rely on our energy to power our lives, and we, need to function individually and collectively. We live in a highly connected world, and, it is our “energy” source that makes it happen.

So today we are doing something but tomorrow we have to really learn to work even harder. Why?

Sadly, yesterday, the United States began the process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, notifying the UN of its intention to leave. The notification begins a one-year process of exiting the global climate change accord, culminating the day after the 2020 US election.

That presents even more significant challenges to the battle of achieving the energy transition.

Please visit my post for reflecting on this decision by the US administration:  “A dark day for the climate and the fight over global warming?” that is over on my ecosystem and platform posting site.

**Disclosure: Part of my work in research and advising in the energy transition is due to being engaged in the #SiemensInfluencer community or #SIEx. I want to emphasis the opinions and views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of Siemens.

The post So are we doing enough in the Energy and Urbanization Transition? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are seeing a very distinctive advantage in embracing digitalization into innovation. The potential of combining digitalization and innovation insights offers significantly more potential for sustaining growth and building a greater connection into the needs of our customers.

Much of our innovation work today is caught up in out-of-date information, poor and inadequate data, restricted research and limited market understanding. Our innovation insights are badly lagging, with the effect being the solutions offered are not ‘tuned’ into the present and anticipated needs, as they often lack dynamic data. We need to digitize our innovation activities fully.

We need to ditch much of our existing innovation processes and practices, reliant on manual systems and so often trapped in silos of knowledge. Digitalizing innovation processes can potentially liberate us from ‘second-guessing’ customer needs and connect us into real-time understanding. This being ‘digitally connected’ can provide the catalyst to a greater level of innovative solutions that are far more aligned to customer and market needs.

Why does the combination of digitalization and innovation have such a transforming effect?

The need for speed has become paramount in responding to market changes.

We need to increasingly find time to shorten our time to market yet there is this increasing complexity in our products we are designing. They are more connected, embodied and closer to what the customer expects. We have running shoes that can track our fitness, we can monitor our health through connected technology and we can build up personal conversations with our customers. These all rely on connected technology.

All this new complexity challenges the speed to the market concept. To overcome this we are reaching out and working more on platforms of collaborators and building up ecosystems of like-minded solution providers to jointly come to market with products that have technology designed into them

The increasing need to build-in flexibility

The pressures are to gain increased flexibility by personalizing products to fit individuals needs and that requires some radical redesigns of the supply chain and manufacturing process. The final personalization has been pushed further down the production line, closer to the final product. This has required major redesigns in the design of the manufacturing process to enable it to become more flexible. We are automating the plants far more so the “change over” is at a push of a switch and the pre-programmed software directs the robot to alter their routine.

We also have far more “responsive supply chains that are fully visible and adaptive to demand and directing the finished product to the appropriate distribution channels. By automating demand throughout the process we can reconfigure and reorganize manufacturing closer to demand, this shortening down the response time between a customer ordering and receiving the good. These fully integrated manufacturing and supply chains are increasingly reliant on a dedicated ecosystem of partners, all working towards shortening response time and delivering to customer needs, as quickly as possible.

Focusing on improving quality

Automation has become essential to lifting up and maintaining the consistency of quality, combined with being more responsive. The potential in fixed, programmable and flexible automation, provides options simply impossible, in past manufacturing. Automation is improving quality in so many ways that are helping to eliminate human error, allow for greater consistency and accuracy. This automating the process is giving us the flexibility and new capabilities to create more complex goods. We can identify far more errors quicker, thereby pushing production into a high-quality cycle that is delivering quality consistently in the finished product.

Also, the introduction of robots has significantly lifted the level of quality. The level of mistakes drops, the automation of the process allows for a highly repetitive process and digitalization and advanced technological solutions are delivering the consistency of quality, right away and every time. This ‘allows’ the innovation to be valued, as industrial automation yields increased safety, reliability, and profitability. Digitalizing the process allows for Smart Manufacturing that is giving us the ability to solve existing and future problems, via an open connected infrastructure that is highly visible and responsive. Having the environment where digital connects up everything and everybody, this has the potential that allows solutions to be implemented at the speed of business, visualized, assessed and modeled, to allow for increasing responsive rates of change, creating an advantage in new value opportunities.

We are seeing increasing efficiency  

The ability to think more about the environment and design the product as more sustainable has risen in everybody’s thinking as a real market need to focus upon. The concept of product lifecycle has added more meaning and value as the product need needs extending and having more opportunities to extend life through upgrades, revisions, add-ons, etc. We have a much higher level of awareness of the progress through a sequence of stages from introduction to growth, maturity, and decline and by combining the use of digital and innovation enables that far more. Products that can be upgraded through software upgrades add greater “service” value.

Technology can extend products or services by upgrading the software, by changing the composition of the product. Within this digitalization is enabling more monitoring of efficiency in the use of material, in product and as this has a huge *thumbs-up” with many of the customers the ability to reduce the environmental impact, is yielding real competitive advantages. As manufacturers manage the lifecycle it opens up more options for innovation. As we learn to proactively manage products throughout their lifetime, applying the appropriate innovative solutions, depending on what stage products are at in the cycle we can leverage more options within our innovation activities.

Digitalization is allowing for new business models

The ability to generate, collect and analyze appropriate data the more trends can be spotted, engagements with customers made, and investigations and evaluations analysed, to clarify their usage, needs, and feedbacks. As we record and exploit data, we can open up that data and reconfigure it into different “what ‘if’s” or come across new nuggets of opportunity, that can give rise to potential new business opportunities. To often deliver to these new concepts you need to redesign supply chains, change product specification that makes them different from existing business models in channels of delivery, value offerings or pricing options. Digitalization has combined with innovation to make product and services more dynamic.

The more you develop new, data-based business models the more you can explore alternatives in product design, and delivery.  Imagine how Airbnb crunches data and learns trends, demand and destination needs. This valuable information can be sold to the travel agents to tailor packages that meet this demand.

Increased protection and security

There is a growing fear that as we increasingly rely on digitalization, we are opening ourselves up for some level of cyber-attack. Realistically that will happen from all indications but we need to prepare for this. Not digitalizing is holding back progress. We have to be ready for this often-daily occurrence in our institutions, on our banks and security, at all key locations where people and machines can be vulnerable.

Business organizations must continue to protect their strategic assets, defend their intellectual property today and in the future. Although this has a huge cost in compliance with the cost of downtime, or attacks that make a business vulnerable has a much higher cost. Digitalization has downsides but it also has higher ones in this increased protection and security in a world where we all are feeling increasingly vulnerable.  We look to being protected, not just in the technology reliance within our lives but for our physical well-being. The ones that provide this assurance or confirm they are taking necessary precautions to gain far more from customers feeling re-assured. As we increasingly rely on our data, it becomes central to our innovation insights and essential to customers feeling confident in their protection and security, in their investments in product and services. You build a circle of trust.

Each of these changes from digitalizing has a positive impact on our innovation activities

We have distinctive ways to treat data and digitalization that leads to distinct new value points for innovation and the IBM Institute for Business Value identified five distinct opportunities where digital innovation provides additional value:

1. We gain new insights that augment products and change our thinking by the generation of real-time or constant flows of market and customer-driven data
2. We improve our assets by digitalizing them. We can connect up machines, whole plants and complete organizations can be designed around the flows of data. This has an enormous impact on the potential to collaborate, to liaise, learn and build from this data, a new fresh knowledge insight. This can trigger ideas and new concepts to be evaluated as well as gain from having full oversight over the assets generating data or that coming into the company.
3. The ability today is to combine data within and across different industries. Within our move towards platforms and ecosystems the exchange of data allows for a “greater whole” to view it, add insights and knowledge and from this combined effect those within the ecosystem can gain a commercial and competitive advantage to build appropriate products, services, and business models in response
4. Each party is building up its own data. We are in times where trading data has become a highly valuable new source of revenue. Knowing weather patterns helps farmers, utility and those dependent on delivery to know and plan far better. We can trade audience data, interest in articles or newsworthy stories so others can associate with these to build more of a profile of who is engaged so they can offer products and services more tailored to their possible needs. The business of trading data is the new oil in the economy
5. Lastly, we can begin to organize data into more distinctive patterns, service capability options and build more sustainable systems where you build increasingly an accepted language that becomes codified in some way that gives new value. We can systemize thinking through data that allows for uniformity and allows multiple systems to exchange and see patterns. This is where algorithms have increased value. They can predict change.

Each of these new ways to use the evolution of digitalization to add completely different levels of innovation potential. Seeing this value is one thing, achieving the connecting aspects it requires is another.

Innovation and digitalization are as powerful as innovation and knowledge in their combination. They both combine to give new insights, new options to generate significant new and greater value. The sooner we can bring in digital solutions and processes into the innovation process, the better to realize some of the real potentials that this combination can give us, as fresh opportunities to add new value

The post Valuing digitization alongside innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I do have to admit I did head to the Web Summit a little biased. Everything “smacked” of commercialization on a big scale. I never really got past this judgment. I had been invited so should I be so cynical or ungrateful, perhaps not but it is hard not to get past this “sheer” commercialization and randomness. I’ll explain randomness later.

When you are told “Forbes has said we run “the best technology conference on the planet”;  or The Atlantic that Web Summit is “where the future goes to be born”;  The New York Times that we assemble “a grand conclave of the tech industry’s high priests.”

These overhyped claims roll on “Bloomberg calls it “Davos for geeks”, Politico “the Olympics of tech”, and the Guardian “Glastonbury for geeks”. My eyes are rolling on these. Overhype is an understatement.

The publicity blurb adds “At a time of great uncertainty for industry upon industry and the world itself, we gather the founders and CEOs of technology companies, fast-growing startups, policymakers and heads of state to ask a simple question: where to next?”

This year over 70,000 people were heading to Lisbon for this Web Summit.

The claim and I don’t doubt it, is that we’ll be joined by the CEOs and founders of the world’s biggest companies, the most promising new startups, influential investors and leading journalists. Can you find them might be another challenge as they are mostly tucked away in VIP or off-limits sections of the venue, pampered and feted? I doubt they lined up for their food from the food trucks provided. The lines were impressive and off-putting. I quickly gathered it was best to eat well before you came to this event and just keep “walking the halls”

It is claimed that the Web Summit is the world’s largest gathering of international journalists, attracting more than 2,500 global journalists from publications including Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, CNN, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal.

So let’s read all the reviews over on the Web Summit press site, where there are presently only THREE entries in SIX weeks as of today. Something is not connecting here. Where is the validation of worth provided by this largest gathering of journalists on the Web Summit site as the point of reference, of knowledge, insight or benefit? This focus on size and commercialized comes through again. Put some meat on your bone, Mr. Cosgrave.

The Commercial Icing on the Cake, the timing for me was suspect.

Then I receive this to add the extra “commercial” icing on the cake, announce just days before the event.

On the 3rd October 2018: Paddy Cosgrave, CEO of Web Summit, and António Costa, Prime Minister of Portugal revealed today that Lisbon will remain the host city of Web Summit for the next decade. This is under a new €110 million deal, including a large-scale venue expansion to facilitate the conference’s fast-growth.

After a robust and competitive tender process involving offers from over 20 cities across Europe, the company behind the world’s largest technology conference has come to a new agreement with the Portuguese government. As part of the deal, Web Summit will receive €11 million per year from the country.

Do your sums, this is a sizable revenue-generating event

Now assume 70,000 attendees at Euro 1,000 (average) and you have Euro 70m coming in for this one off event over as well as this Euro11m, not bad for any events, in today’s environment.

 The good news I have just found out is the Web Summit has launched a $50 million VC fund baptized Amaranthine, the Financial Times reported. According to the FT‘s sources, the new fund will use the data from the conference to support its investment decisions, such as which startups have attracted more attention at Web Summit and what trends are worth attention. The fund will supposedly take minority stakes in startups at all stages, however, judging by the fund’s size and the startups that usually exhibit at the conference, it’s more likely to be anywhere from pre-seed to early growth stage.

Amaranthine will reportedly be led by David Kelly, the co-founder of Web Summit, and Patrick Murphy, who used to work for Goldman Sach’s and Universal’s venture arm.

The other part of the pre-event announcement was that additionally, a part of the Web Summit deal to stay in Lisbon deal is to double the size of the Altice Arena and FIL (Feira Internacional de Lisboa) within the next three years, to fit Web Summit’s growth forecasts. Commencement of the first phase of the expansion project will start in the coming months and will be completed for Web Summit 2019. I think it is WAY TO BIG now

The catch for anyone interested in buying out Web Summit is that they have also agreed to a €3 billion buyout clause. The buyout clause is the minimum, the expected economic impact of Web Summit to Portugal over the duration of its contract, and provides security to Portugal that Web Summit will remain in its capital for the 10 year period. It was estimated by the Government of Portugal that Web Summit generated more than €300 million in economic impact for the country.

It is also claimed Web Summit has also helped elevate Portugal and Portuguese companies on the global stage. Portugal was described recently by The Wall Street Journal as “one of Europe’s hottest stars, with tech startups mushrooming and investment pouring in”.

Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave said: “We’re incredibly excited to be staying in Portugal. Without a larger venue, this would not be possible. Even until a few months ago, we never believed it would be possible. The plans are incredible and we’re very thankful to all those who have worked on them.

 This deal gives certainty to our many attendees from over 170 countries around the world, and our thousands of partners and exhibitors. It also gives certainty to our host country, and to our team of more than 200. Together we’re looking forward to doing incredible things.

 Finally, I should add that we are grateful for the support and encouragement we received from other cities who also placed bids to host the event. We very much recognize their efforts and definitely appreciate all they have done.”

The Mayor of Lisbon, Fernando Medina said: “This 10-year agreement with Web Summit will decisively make Lisboa a key capital for innovation, entrepreneurship, and talent. I am confident the next few years will bring a sharp rise in IT investment and employment in Lisboa. We are thrilled to continue to write this story together with Web Summit”

So did it live up to this hype? Simply NO! Well not for me. Let me explain

The Guardian’s quote of “it defines the Ecosystem”. All I felt was,  if this is defining an Ecosystem, then watch out, it is a lop-sided, highly unbalanced event. As my title of this post suggests “I was overwhelmed in its sheer size and underwhelmed in what it actually delivered to me”.

To start with just take a look at the jaw-dropping schedule.

Check out the schedule here. You can search by title, description or speaker or use the topic filter. The Web Summit App feeds you like the hungry beast sifting through so much. For me, personally it was not that easy to visualize, schedule and that was my loss in not investing pre-event time on this. This needs serious organization and focus and I am not famous for that!

The event crowds 1,200 speakers into limited time slots over three days. So in 20 to 30 minutes, all these speakers deliver a message. Inspiring, shallow, motivating, boils down to “depends” Some were listening to speakers for much of the time. Not sure why unless you wanted to top up your “I listened to..” claims to fame.

There are over 2,000 startups set up in ALPHA, BETA & START tracks pitching away to 1,400 Tech Investors. Where do you go, what do you visit really needs organizing your day and that is very hard unless you have a very definite focus.

I was talking to a fellow Web Summiteer on the way home on a plane. He valued the experience, he found some value but spent significant time having to “weed out” all the messages, promotions, announcements he was getting on his “Web App” as he found the “keyword” suggestions too broad, so he lost time picking up on those points of value in any (decent) organized way.

I believe Digital has not really arrived at the show to help the attendee pack in the real return on investment. It is great at knowing where the night time events were happening or the next “star turn” on the main Stages if you can get to them on time. Somehow the Web Summit people need to think about investing in a greater digital event set of tools. I was not impressed.

Without a doubt, the Web Summit is a very different beast than I had experienced before.

I felt I was sometimes on a different plant. The halls were seething, thousands were constantly on the move, walking these halls, chatting, meeting and drawn together. Some of the vendors like Amazon were pitching to packed audiences. So it attracts without a doubt.  It has the chance to mingle, seek out tech founders, investors, prime ministers, magazine editors, heads of global banks and multiple startups all under one roof. This is certainly unique and draws in such a diversity. Yet it is a little scary. I am not a techie, geek or seeking to compete in the technology Olympics. I wanted to learn a little more from some of the bigger sponsors on where the future was heading (AI, Big Data etc). To be honest I am learning more ‘rooted’ to my desk than I did for much of the time at this event.

The one thing that certainly struck me was how CISCO, Google and Microsoft were working very hard on AI face image recognition. The one that caught me was Pedro over on the Cisco booth and his coffee brew to show how tired you were. Take a look, the coffee grinder worked overtime. While over on Google it was comparing your face to famous people or past ones or Microsoft comparing you to a dog breed. So they decided I was comparable to a bluetick coonhound. I am smart, devoted and tenacious- I’ll take that! Fun maybe, helpful for them to build out their data bank of faces but where was the serious stuff I had come to hear from very significant tech companies. Missed it and they are missing what they can deliver if they bother to think beyond “missing out” by not being there. They need to rethink what they can offer web summit attendees.

Most of the big players in technology were sponsors but lacked any real substance. They had the bigger booths (bigger pockets) but gave little of their size, contribution or what they offered. Perhaps there were so many startup or tech investors they have not figured out the appropriate messages they want to deliver into such an audience like this. They had a brand presence but not a great amount more, they should. You do notice the Chinese, Japanese and most of the Asian tech world is dramatically underrepresented at the event- I wonder why? Bring them in, it might raise the bar for the established ones.

One example of a decent delivery of content was Amazon,.  I managed to listen to the Amazon AWS presentation on Knowledge Graphs and found out it was repeating what I knew or had invested in research, so not much new came out of this, apart from the fact it is a very hot topic figuring out AI and where Knowledge Graphs fit within this. The event was overflowing though and many more just gave up and simply moved on, back in the mass migration from one hall to another.

Actually, Amazon did seem to have the most active presence in what they are offering, so they get my vote for being the most tuned in for what was needed and provide as good awareness material. The other biggies were honestly a waste of time for what they should have given me or countless others as a “captive” market. So underwhelming.

Now the real appeal for many is the networking.

I think there was so many who were attending were having this as a reward for their contribution to the work they were doing. I think there was some serious partying going on at the Night Events and recovering during the day. So maybe CISCO had tapped into our need to check how tired we all were with their coffee idea.

At all the events, night and day, you can start up some great conversations but getting to know this one person is that someone you should talk too, is still left to chance. I cannot figure out why the bracelet we are all told to wear throughout the event can’t work with the web app to “signal” and connect us more.

Networking is such a generic term, how can the Web Summit turn this into a real powerhouse of connecting investors, those that are pitching and actually looking to change job. I loved the bland “we are hiring” signs for many, so lacking in anything imaginative besides this. Another lost opportunity

I found it amusing, up to a point, when I was pitched non-stop for three minutes, with his partner or wife I think, holding one or two sales pointers. To stop him and point out he was wasting his time on a randomness that was bordering on the ridiculous.

Randomness is where I want to finish.

This event is far too random, far too diverse, far to big in what it tries to provide; a melting pot “a place where many different people and ideas exist together, often mixing and producing something new”. It is certainly a “potpourri” offering an unusual or interesting mixture of things but does it work?

There was one talk “We cannot rely on algorithms to determine quality” by Ev Williams, CEO, and Co-Founder of Medium and former CEO of Twitter, but in the case of this Web Summit. If Paddy and his team invested in AI and some well-focused algorithms for their event, we might get a greater connection going, even more than presently claimed, with a real validation of its value, a real take-home value over simply tiredness.

As I said this event was both overwhelming in size, and due mostly to this, it failed for me and underwhelming in value I got out of it. I can’t imagine heading back to Lisbon for this event unless Paddy Cosgrove and his team stop thinking size and really investing in understanding what really matters, besides the buzz of this, and that means a very different set of digital solutions, not ones focused on selling hype and tickets.

It is certainly not the “the best technology conference on the planet”. For me, I feel it is an event that needs to be experienced once, a bit like The Great Wildebeest Migration – the annual migration of giant herds of grazers across Northern Tanzania and Kenya is a truly spectacular event. Replace herds with nerds of digital devotees moving around an event, restless for new feeding grounds. Yes, that was the Web Summit for me, the problem is I failed to get across the divide.

The post Overwhelmed, underwhelmed at the Web Summit, Lisbon first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We have seen the incredible rise of platforms that have become part of our everyday lives. Be these Apple, Google, eBay, Amazon, Android, Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba, Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal and many more, all becoming some of the hottest companies in value. They have built out their business on powerful platforms for us to simply connect into and draw down what we value.

The post Platform models are the new order of our innovating business need first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

For some weeks this has been in preparation and as I am lucky enough to be one of the curators and hosts, I had the chance to chat with SIX terrific and highly knowledgeable people around different  subject that are dear to all our hearts, overcoming barriers and resolving many tough issues surrounding innovation.

So What Is Your #1 Question or Challenge in the next 6 to 18 months?

Virtual Summits have a great future to support

I think virtual summits are becoming a real differentiator and one of the main reasons to work on this. This is organized by the team from www.intrapreneurship.com under their innov8rs brand.So why should virtual be for you? Some benefits suggested by the organizers.

There is no travel and you can watch anywhere with an internet connection. In the office, during your commute, on your couch. There’s no flight or hotel room to book, saving you thousands of euros, travel time, and time away from the office and your family. No need to get a budget from your boss, how does that sound? For me utterly worth the time and effort to learn at my own pace, where I choose, when I choose.

The flexible schedule simply works for you, in your time and need. The interview talks will be available online to watch at your own convenience – there’s no strict schedule to follow and everything will be available until December 15th, and if you want to purchase these longer you’ll get access to all the interviews and bonus material forever. Follow this link to sign up.

It is a really unique set of experts. Virtual events are becoming more important for us all, to get better understandings across at times that are more convenient. They can be increasingly tailored to get so much closer to your specific needs. In this case crowdsourcing, clustering and expert exchanges give a closer experience to addressing your challenges in a broader context. I think this beats so many of those bland ‘one-Corporate view only’ set of experiences that really so very often provide little ‘take home’ value apart from shades of jealousy or “we wish”. These speakers at this conference are very committed to driving innovation, it is their passion, work and diversity of experiences that get drawn out, and I, in my discussions, do certainly got the distinct impression are genuinely committed to helping the broader innovation community, meaning you, to succeed.

 Let me highlight the SIX experts I worked with

I had the delight of working on SIX key topics with a terrific group of knowledgeable people. I gained from the exchanges, it generated such terrific insights, ideas, and triggers to lift up my understanding and help me ‘fill in’ my questions and set me some of my own challenges for next year. They really did discuss different topics that are often top of mind for all innovators, intrapreneurs, and teams tackling innovation. The value also becomes one of those not working in the innovation space but have direct responsibility or simply curiosity on different parts of the innovation story will gain immeasurably from registering and attending this virtual summit.

The group I shared thoughts and heard their ideas and experiences on overcoming problems, dealing with challenges or simply drawing down from their experiences were stimulating sessions. I’d encourage you to catch all of these, as well as many, many other great exchanges.

Meet the curators and hosts

The curators and hosts for this virtual summit had such a diversity of experience and geographical coverage. I am wanting to tune in to many of their sessions to learn from their experiences and exchanges with the experts. This included:

So come on, join me, it’s online and free. Hopefully, I’ll see you there. Here is my link  

The Innovator’s Handbook 2018 – Virtual Summit gives you cross-industry best practices, and ready-to-use and easy-to-implement advice from in-the-trenches experts…and you can attend on any device, from anywhere you have an internet connection and then you can sign up for sharing with your team and colleagues in the months ahead for a small one-off fee to give you access to all the content forever.

There is an upgrade option before or once you get the ‘feel’ of the Virtual Summit

This upgrade is a no-obligation option when you sign up for the free virtual summit.

What does this upgrade offer? If you do upgrade you have anytime access to all 88+ videos forever. This comes with your own playbook called the Innov8rs Handbook 2018. It is a professionally written and designed playbook, organized by topic area and question, containing the key points, strategies and practices from each expert session.

If you upgrade, you also get 25% discount for any event of your choice in 2018 from the organizers of some great conferences. Not just for 1 ticket, but for 5 tickets. Yup, that means you can bring your team.

The free Summit pass comes with one week of access to an exclusive Innov8rs online community. If you chose to turn this into your upgrade, you’ll get full community access for one month for direct access to best practices; weekly live expert sessions; and on-demand advice and support from a community of people who, just like you, are leading innovation, transformation, and growth initiatives in their organizations.

Finally, a choice for you on upgrades, now or later. If you decide to upgrade irrespective of waiting for the virtual conference it is only €88. The price goes up to €188 when the summit starts on November 28. Up to you, no obligation but it might make real sense of what you will be getting.

Use this link now 

Don’t miss the first-ever crowdsourced and virtual Innovation Summit. It holds real promise and plenty of valuable content and learning. It is 100% co-created by corporate innovators, for corporate innovators.

The post Are you coming to the Innovation Virtual Summit? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

That part of the day spent on innovation, researching and reading, tends to partly stimulate my week ahead in different ways, as I try to reinforce what I’ve learned by applying this to the work gathered around me at that point in time. I am looking to see how it does help shape and influence it, it ‘fuels’ the coming-in week in some part. Of course, this greatly depends on what I am working on, for others and, for myself. Some weeks I just don’t find the opportunity to apply it, so that “Sunday thinking” sits there for another day or week, or even months before I revisit it or connect it back up.

What started me on a given innovation “tack” was that for a long time I have seen an awful lot of opinions, solutions, concepts, that have been breaking down innovation into its many parts. The practice of lean thinking, design thinking, visual thinking has increasingly started to dominate our “innovation thinking.” We keep breaking down innovation into its parts, we continue to fail to build this back up into a whole system approach, simply because we don’t understand the whole innovation system and how it all interconnects. We, in general, all seem to remain constantly disappointed at the end results of our innovation efforts. In some ways, all this new learning or applying novel solutions that we are adapting to the different parts are often just triggering knock-on consequences that still consign innovation outcomes as a failure. It must continue to frustrate each of us, if the final outcomes, if out of our hands, end up as disappointing even though we all feel we are making progress in improving innovation. We must think differently and that might mean whole innovation system thinking.

We, in general, all seem to remain constantly disappointed at the end results of our innovation efforts. In some ways, all this new learning, or applying novel solutions that we are adapting to the different parts, are often just triggering knock-on consequences that still consign innovation outcomes as a failure. It must continue to frustrate each of us, if the final outcomes, often out of our hands, end up as disappointing, even though we all feel we are making progress in improving innovation. We must think differently and that might mean whole innovation system thinking.

Going back and reminding myself

So this Sunday I went back to a range of concepts that all have a critical impact on the innovation process, ones that many of the present popular thinking parts only trigger, a specific part of the innovation system for incremental improvement, even if it is dramatic for one person or a team exposed to it. It so often does not yield the impact we require from innovation; successful outcomes that accelerate growth or make for substantial change.

So where was I going this Sunday morning? These have included (eye-roll please) the dynamics capabilities within the innovation system, where the work of David Teece, for example, is exploring the theory. I know wretched theory on a Sunday or any day come to think of it, but it does inform.

Teece’s concept of dynamic capabilities is a theory about the source of corporate agility: the capacity (1) to sense and shape opportunities and threats, (2) to seize opportunities by mobilizing your resources to capture new value from those opportunities, and (3) to maintain competitiveness through enhancing, combining, protecting, and, when necessary, re-configuring the business enterprise’s intangible and tangible assets, by transforming them for continuous renewal. This makes organizations dynamic. It is the dynamics of the innovation system that can make it transformational.

 Then I went into System Thinking.

Our quest should be finding answers to why innovation is often failing to deliver on our expectations and needs. So for me “System thinking for Innovation, as a whole” should be grabbing more of our attention. Yet we seem not to get our heads around this “whole” part so we set about redesigning the parts. Nothing wrong with that, it has lots of moving, sometimes unique parts, improvements are certainly happening, replacing past approaches but they still remain discreet parts but overall innovation performance, does it improve?

System thinking looks at ALL the interacting parts, their interdependence and how one part fits and reacts with another. We get caught up in the linear progression of one part and not considering enough the reinforcing loops or balancing the loops to foster stability or understand impact across the wider system. Actually, we are potentially increasing its complexity and volatility, pushing this down the line, to somewhere that is not capable of absorbing this “great piece of thinking” and translating it into the outcome expected, even when we did the initial work or visualizing. We always need to translate what we do, for others to pick up with and turn this into something better.

If we don’t have a well-understood view of the whole system of the innovation design, it does not matter how many separate parts we design or apply, the end result is this either ends up the same (disappointing), poorer, as it replaces something we failed to improve what was existing from the end-users perspective, or managed some increased ‘spike’ that needs constantly improving upon to get finally right. Constant improvement often makes up much of a business, as it continually improves on its offering, especially as technology is continually changing, allowing us to apply what we are learning and as we plug into the feedback we are getting from the market but these reinforce the incremental improvements not change the market or product dynamics as much as we often want

Then we have system imbalance to contend with in innovation.

So we have plenty of dynamics and system thinking improvements, so why do we need to spoil a perfectly good Sunday looking deeper and questioning? Well, it’s all about system imbalance. System imbalance? Yes, a system imbalance in what we are doing in our innovation work.We come back to the point until we connect up the whole innovation system we are just pushing our piece of efficiency into someone else’s in-efficiency, as we have not integrated or interconnected the whole, we just have compounded more independent parts.Pushed more work (or rework) off to somewhere else. It continually keeps innovation as inefficient and less effective. Everything should be connected, all the subsystems should connect.

Today we have systems for design, ideas, portfolio management, for research, for evaluation, for pipeline management, all operating in their ‘silo’ of activity. If we fail to understand the relationships and the connections between them all we are having a real difficulty to optimise the whole innovation system. Our focus should become far more focused on achieving better interconnection and interdependence.

Then as the Gym beckons, I start picking up on System Dynamics

So system thinking needs a greater area of our focus within the innovation system. We need to understand reoccurring patterns that constrain us. This begins to take we into System Dynamics. Do you remember the brilliant book of Peter Senge: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization”. This book needs dusting down, searching out, purchasing as essential reading, as it gives us some more clues on System thinking as many of our problems are reoccurring ones. It might become a way to understand the reasons we lack an interconnected innovation system.

Just take a look, step back, before you have opened that special bottle of wine for Sunday or you go off and do what all sane people should be doing on a sunny Sunday, getting out and enjoying the day. I’m heading out the door mighty soon after this ‘outpouring’ but I’m asking you to think about all those reoccurring bad patterns we have fallen into, around innovation

Take a look at the eight system archetypes, outlined here by Jorge Taborga in a piece on system archetypes and their application.

Eight systems archetypes and their storylines

The eight, most common systems archetypes are: 

1. Fixes that Fail—A solution is rapidly implemented to address the symptoms of an urgent problem. This quick fix sets into motion unintended consequences that are not evident at first but end-up adding to the symptoms.
2. Shifting the Burden—A problem symptom is addressed by a short-term and a fundamental solution.  The short-term solution produces side effects affecting the fundamental solution.  As this occurs, the system’s attention shifts to the short-term solution or to the side effects.
3. Limits to Success—A given effort initially generates positive performance.  However, over time the effort reaches a constraint that slows down the overall performance no matter how much energy is applied.
4. Drifting Goals—As a gap between goal and actual performance is realized, the conscious decision is to lower the goal.  The effect of this decision is a gradual decline in the system performance.
5. Growth and Underinvestment—Growth approaches a limit potentially avoidable with investments in capacity.  However, a decision is made to not invest resulting in performance degradation which results in the decline in demand validating the decision not to invest.
6. Success to the Successful—Two or more efforts compete for the same finite resources.  The more successful effort gets a disproportionately larger allocation of the resources to the detriment of the others.
7. Escalation—Parties take mutually threatening actions which escalate their retaliation attempting to “one-up” each other.
8. The tragedy of the Commons—Multiple parties enjoying the benefits of a common resource do not pay attention to the effects they are having on the common resource.  Eventually, this resource is exhausted resulting in the shutdown of the activities of all parties in the system.

Now apply these to why innovation often fails, they constrain what we do. We get unwanted results due to a specific set of behaviors. If we start looking through these archetypes as lenses we might begin to ‘flesh out’ the needs to think through when we look at a whole system design for innovation. We are testing what we do, to see if it passes through this lens. If we can change individual behavior and keep coming back to improving the ‘whole’ design needed for innovation we do get to connect it all up.

So my Sunday morning: has it been well spent or not?

In this limited time I had on this Sunday, I have triggered my thinking into Dynamics of Innovation, System Thinking, System Dynamics and System Archetypes and recognizing we have to look for more interaction and interdependence within any innovation work we do. We need to take our innovation activities out, recognizing consequences and attempting to manage the whole design.

So where does that take me or innovation? Firstly, I’m off to the Gym, I think I need to work off a few more pounds of newly gained brain ‘fat’ in my (limited) understanding. I need to deepen my thinking around all these areas as I know, no actually I am convinced until we map the whole innovation system, we are just moving the pieces around and I just can’t see this as optimizing it, it is simply making innovation more complex and disappointing. It does not need to be.

Complex adaptive systems relate to innovation, are yet another story that I attempted some time back to quantify, actually back in 2012 and, yes, it still sits here in my pile of things to connect up as part of this integrated system we require for innovation

Now back to a more normal Sunday…….

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The post Innovation System Thinking on a Sunday! What, no roast or glass of wine? Later. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.