Today’s challenge for me is not only to be building the innovation capacity but also to be establishing clear ways on how we should set about sustaining it. Increasingly, organizations must have the capability and capacity to sustain innovation to provide the stimulus for lasting growth and resolve the complex challenges we face today and in the future.

To get there, though, it does seem this must be through continued learning. Hence, your capabilities become stronger, evolving and more unique, thus making them more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate.

Let me outline an innovation framework that builds capability through a sustained approach.

When you set out to build capability to be sustaining, you need to consider there are two types of capabilities, distinctive, which are the characteristics of the organization which others cannot replicate and reproductive, which can be bought in by the competition but always need to need to be appropriate to any objectives you are trying to achieve.
Focusing on improving the capabilities of your people needs, in my opinion, five essential elements and applying these through consistent application and measurement and sustaining this within your activity leads to a greater potential to sustain innovation and lead to sustainable competitive advantage.

To achieve greater sustainability, I believe the five elements within this model can provide this path.

SCA = II + EE + MLC + OC + RNE

So what is within this framework?
Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) comes from the combining effects of the following:

• II Innovation Intensity– it’s the degree of adoption, uptake, the commitment to the investments made and explored, the how, what and where. How all the multiple levels of activities and the focus of the intensity given to building capabilities to innovate come together, wanting to innovate.
• EE Entrepreneurial Energies– this is more on how you set about, promote and generate the internal environment as entrepreneurial to enable innovation in all its different forms to take hold and be seen as a learning environment people want to get involved can readily identify with.
• MLC Market Learning Competence gives a clearer awareness of what and where to acquire from and then take the market lessons from. The key need is to orientate always towards, and generally get to the heart of, where innovation occurs in the marketplace and with your customers, knowing their real needs and figuring out their unmet ones also!
• OC Organizational Learning– knowing the differences in the different ways of learning by linking the different intellectual capitals and combining the complementary assets needed to make them more dynamic.
• RNE- Relationship & Networking Effects– the supporting and enhancing aspects of making greater connections, collaborations and exchanges to speed up the process of innovation, reduce or contain costs and enhance your understanding through these external relationships and getting closer to knowing where latent knowledge lies, to assist and share this internally for greater impact and result for all.

The make-up of each of these five elements has a significant set of activities to structure around but can deliver a clear set of benefits. These provide the necessary intensity of purpose.

What is the result of adopting the SCA framework?

ROII = Investment x Activity x Change (learning environment)/over Results Impact

It is applying this ROII that can measure this investment. The sustaining impact can be measured as continued investment across this framework pays off over time.

I would argue this organizing framework is a good starting point to build your Sustainable Competitive Advantage.

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There is a real increasing pressure to totally reinvent my business. The past business paradigm of reaching out, providing value, and making money is still there. Still, it is how we all undergo the changes needed in a radically different set of economic circumstances.

We all are seeing the world in a very different light, in some ways a very harsh one, where the old normals are breaking down. The change in our world is even a little scary, it actually is giving me a little “angst.” I need to put some reorder into my world.

Firstly as many of you know, I have been investing my time in growing my understanding, expertise, and thinking over three “core” topics. My Innovation intent has been central to this for twenty years, but this has ‘funneled down’ into recognizing the value of ecosystems as the business design for innovation to thrive and deliver more significant value creation. In the past two-plus years, the whole Energy Transition has been my vehicle to apply my innovation learning and ecosystem thinking.

We must hold on to much of what we have, but we really will be forced to abandon so much of our accepted norm.

My search or questioning is not about abandoning what I have invested over these years, it is how can I redirect it. To shift its position to actively contribute in new ways, to adapt and adjust to the ‘new normal’ we all must seriously recognize is coming towards us.

We are all undergoing such a paradigm shift at present, not just in the present “lockdowns” or social distancing rules imposed but how these will increasingly have an impact on our health, social and economic well-being.

The world just might never be the same.

The economic fallout is going to be a very rough time in the coming weeks and months. The levels of job loss, bankruptcies, and our old reliance on what we thought were stable businesses will be highly challenged. We are certainly in a VUCA world now, so often used to describe changes, but it can now be applied in a real reality we are facing. VUCA is short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity,

Something we are all undergoing and experiencing is needing us all to re-evaluate. It is way beyond social distancing, avoiding the Corona Virus or suffering lockdown, it is emerging out from this into a new world of different realities.

A paradigm shift is hitting us.

Yet we are undergoing such a paradigm shift I went back to look at the word “paradigm” to see its meaning at this point of time.

Firstly, a paradigm shift is defined as “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.” When you change paradigms, you’re changing how you think about something.

We are being challenged in our system of beliefs, ideas, values, and habits that are a way of thinking about the real world and what it means. A possible change from one way of thinking to another.

To get to this new paradigm, we need to establish a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitutes legitimate contributions to a field. We are in the “eye” of the coronavirus storm, so this is relatively difficult, but we need to become hyper-alert of how the changes will work and what they mean for each of us.

I used the visual above of the meteor hitting earth and wiping out the dinosaurs and a way of life as a warning of what cannot be allows to happen. The economy in the next few years may not have the same impact but it will impact us all!

We are possibly at a point in time, maybe the lifetime of all of us, one that alters the way we work, interact, and shift our thinking by this current event we are in. I can’t imagine we will return to our past normal; we need to search for a new one, each of us, and this new understanding becomes part of the new normal.

A paradigm shift is a significant change in the concepts and practices of how something works, it will mean different points of power, inequality, and social change. We are entering a position of significant disruption. We need leadership and guidance to help us form a view of the world, guided by the principles of objectivity, knowability, and deductive logic, not opportunism and self-interest.

Having a new understanding will eventually shape our day to day life. They control how you react to a situation, What actions you are taking for certain things and how you will solve a problem, a new way of working or living.

Accordingly, a paradigm shift is defined as “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.”

I read a view today offered by Brian Solis, “Get ready for the ‘Novel Economy’ and recovering from COVID-19 fallout.”

Brian Solis has been one of the industry’s most influential voices when it comes to humanizing disruptive technology trends and is the Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. This post was shared by Vala Afshar, the Chief Digital Evangelist for Salesforce. (@ValaAfshar)

“We are entering what I refer to as a #NovelEconomy. Novel means new and unusual, and that accurately describes these times. In a business sense, Novel represents a new strain of market conditions that are not fully identified or understood. Thus, we have no pre-existing defenses or experience against this level of astonishing disruption. We were all simultaneously thrust into a melee of panic, fear, confusion, and disorder. There’s really no widespread expertise, playbooks, or best practices to guide us. Nor, is there a preventative business vaccine to protect us from this or future disruption…yet. But truth be told, we don’t really want to respond with preexisting roadmaps or checklists. Herein lies the opportunity”

A new normal is upon us, the paradigm shift that will change the World. We need all to think about what the shift means and what opportunity or concerns this will bring us.

As more of our working becomes remote, we will increasingly need to rely on building a strong network of relationships, our need for multiple ecosystems to function and thrive in a post-corona virus world. “At a distance” sounds daunting, but it is not. I have worked remotely for nearly twenty years, and the value has progressively shifted over that time.

Brian offers three phases that make sense to me to frame my own new understanding of recovery:

1) Survive- Reaction to Crisis

2) Build, Secure, and Operationalize for Transition State

3) Thrive – Next Normal Business Continuity, Disruption Proofing, and Innovating Forward

As Brian suggests in his post, “our preexisting roadmaps are going to be inadequate.”

Hence my search for a new direction to apply what I know in a rapidly changing world where innovation, ecosystems, and networks will become important as ‘new’ ways of working.

As for the Energy transition part, well, we are still in a world that is rapidly warming, so investing in clean energy makes societal sense to curb climate change. If we don’t address this, climate warming is possibly our next global crisis that is, even more, going to be on a different ‘order of magnitude’ to this current virus crisis.

Clean energy, combined with intense climate action, is positioning the world even more dramatically into a better future. Getting our planet back into balance may not stop pandemics, floods, or disasters from happening in the near term, but we need a new order, that new normal. A new normal that often emerges out of a crisis.

He finishes with, “Our challenge and the gift before us is that we’re looking at a blank canvas for what lies ahead” I do not believe this is a blank canvas, but we must re-work the canvas while we can.

Let’s not load any canvas with old paradigms.

One of the possible consequences of the current “virus crisis” is the way we spend our resources and money to bail us all out of the economic downturn. For instance, will it be supporting fossil fuels due to intense lobbying to gain a short-term response? Or will we attempt to capitalize on the need for a long-term shift towards sustainable renewables? One that is reinforcing a permanent trend of generating new growth, new markets, new jobs, and protecting our future health and move towards that cleaner, safer future we all should seek ‘post’ this current period. Will it be to try and take us back to a consumption-driven economy where we keep throwing away precious resources that NEVER have their real cost built-in. Will we ’embrace’ the value of a circular economy at last?

My renewal needs a “higher” order to reframe my work.

We need to shift towards better foresight, fresh ways to envisage our world, reigniting our “collective imaginations.” We have been very complacent, we are at a time of heeding a ‘wake-up call,’ especially here in the Western world.

The awakening might be desire, taking to task those that have deflected investment money in our health systems, infrastructure, education, inventions, and investing in the needed global challenges we have talked about, given token investment.

How each of us makes sense of the new world before us will determine destruction or emergence. We need to channel as much as we can into new innovation to offer a new set of societal dynamics. Ones I believe would lead to higher levels of economic development, better welfare, and increase opportunities for more significant value creation for the broader society than was never offered in the old order, pre-corona virus, just talked about.

Perhaps one “higher-order” for me might be increased activism to bring about the changes that are clearly needed will become more central to my work?

The post A new normal is upon us, the paradigm shift that will change the World. 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.

How often do you feel the tensions surrounding innovation?  A tough part of managing within larger organizations is in reducing the layers and competing forces, the underlying tensions that innovation (uncertainty) brings out?

Hierarchy so often dominates or dictates the speed of what we do. That is so often set in weird logic and a shrug of the shoulders.

Confronted by the need for gathering facts, innovation often struggles as much of this takes significant time and is often outside the organization’s present understanding.

It is in the pursuit of logic, and often this lacks real (hardened) facts that hold innovation back, as it runs on a very different ‘timeline’ too much of our everyday organization processes or approaches.

The constant re-organization is ‘killing’ the organization to form any rhythm.   Innovation is often in that uncomfortable territory of ‘not knowing,’ it cuts across established structures, and so many time challenges the “status quo.” I often suggest that “innovation is a very uncomfortable bedfellow to have around. It does need separation, or it will never perform at its ‘very best.’

Let’s take a look at some of the consequences of these tensions.

Presently we see in large organizations this lack of “pushing for risk” or wanting to change the underlying business offerings. There is always a stated “we must be innovative to survive,” but we very rarely see what this means in real ongoing support to give that some framing, some guidelines, and clearly identified resourcing.

How many times do you see the organization set the deliverables in often ‘woolly’  undefined or impossible ways to truly measure the success of innovation.  Unable to meet the very system they impose of requiring KPIps by capturing and measuring what this means, so innovation struggles and often dumb-sized to meet arbitory measures, so it “fits” within the system..

This verbal remit never gets the underlying points to encourage those tasked with innovation to go and explore. This vagueness just further promotes uncertainly, delays any improved performance, and we end up with the same mediocre result, where safely has ‘ruled’ the day.

Organization layers grind against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

Are we ever going to honestly face up to the forces that immobilize our organizations?

If we really want to work progressively towards an adaptive organization, we must stop the knee-jerking or react to short-term pressures. To bring a better level of clarity to the many left open, fuzzy, and still so unclear areas within organizations, leadership must find better ways to resist their impulses to constantly re-organize. Strengthening what they have, allowing the existing structures to expand outwardly, is sometimes better than to break them into different structures that reinforce new silo thinking.

We still seem to love the ‘carrot and stick’ approach.

In leaving so much open to even ignoring critical parts of a business’s performance or operating model allows leaders one minute, use outcomes as the ‘whipping boy’ for unfortunate or disappointing results and, in so doing, slowly immobilize those underneath, scared to make a mistake or be associated with failure.

Adaptation to short-term performance works both ways. To the shareholder demanding immediate results but also to the management to hide behind this to create unnatural built-in tensions and often create a shearing effect. Innovation gets caught up in this. It can’t solve complicated product design solutions in thirteen weeks.

It can show quarterly results of progress, but that is often for internal consumption only. Innovation becomes a catch-all phrase, so it gets dumbed down to reinforce “our organization” is constantly undertaking it.

Innovation gets caught up in the needs of the reporting requirement so it can fit an arbitrary and stupid timeline that is required to adapt to a financial calendar year. Forced by the “bean counter” to be broken down into reporting on a quarterly result, as that is required by the system. No wonder we have tensions between innovation and an organization geared to this financial numbers game.

Organization structure ‘grinds’ against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

They ‘freezeout’ creativity unless it ‘arrives’ from the top of the organization, then it is often super-imposed, but is that optimized to get the best out of the creative or discovery process`? Eventually, the organization dies if it cannot allow the natural generating new forms of creativity from within, this has been hollowed out by this constant demanding and imposing from the top.

The organizational design needs to change to allow for creativity to flow back in.

We need to ensure creative knowledge flows up and down organizations. We need to change our thinking from layers into a network of connected parts that we keep small, flat, and focused but constantly aware their existence is dependent on others outside their mini-ecosystem. The “ebb and flow” of knowledge gain and interactions need to be allowed to evolve, not forced, or simply being reliant on machine learning or automating the process.

Today these different layers actually require several levels of reconfiguration designed into the organization. Creativity and innovation are primarily human endeavors. We add layers onto further layers, and each time we are constraining the organizations or the individuals to explore, they stay ‘trapped’ within their space if we superimpose on them. We progressively build up an unhealthy tension.

Imposing the killer effect of time just because of a financial calendar is stupid – it hurts innovation significantly

Just look at how organizations impose time on us. One really critical one to address and to ‘kill off’ is the pressure of time. Imposing time as a condition for innovation can be a real killer. Time horizons to achieve different tasks often cannot be ‘legislated’ or ‘dictated,’ but sadly, they are forced on reluctant innovators responsible for the delivery of new concepts.

We need to re-establish the difference between goals – within a specified period covered (one year), objectives – attained later but are progressed within the period and finally ideals– those unattainable but possible concepts that ‘advance’ at slower rates and go well beyond standard goals. Innovation works within this environment, actually it will thrive.

Not just the incremental, but the radical, disruptive, and breakthrough innovation craved for by the top management, can finally have a ‘decent’ time horizon to be managed through. Planning needs to account for all three horizons, and operating across these needs different mindsets, irrespective of the industry you are in, it does not matter if you are building planes or developing food products.

Managing innovation across the three horizon methodology helps reduce tensions, design innovations that can be more radical or breakthrough. The three horizon methodology spaces out the activity, thinking, and activity, it allows innovation to be defined and determined by its complexity and its time/value relationship in importance and complexity.

Tacking the incompatibles to ease the tensions

We really should stop pretending that innovation is not so hard and state it is often incompatible to much of what we perform on our daily business, it is really so often just incompatible, and we should recognize this.

The task of managing intangibles (unknowns) alongside the tangibles (known) needs a greater appreciation of their complexities and the difficulties of balancing the two for achieving a ‘decent’ result. The unknowns need far more investigation, relationship understanding, and evaluations to turn them from a possible discovery into a worthwhile one that can begin to be quantified.

In Leadership, I believe, would need to understand innovation far more in this demanding environment of inquiry. No wonder it is often ducked and just vaguely talked about as much of innovation understanding is still poorly understood in its impacts and effect. We do need to address this lack of acute innovation management within our organizations. It is not ‘business as usual.’ It is managing the process of unusual business inquiry.

Reducing activities and replacing these with outcome orientation

Innovation is no different from what we expect from efficiency or effectiveness; we want to see the outcomes, the results from all the investments, energy, and inputs.  Outcome orientation holds a precious key to think about far more.  We have struggled on many occasions to establish robust metrics for judging innovation. They seem to get lost within organizations’ obsession to judge the whole organization by the same KPI’s.

Often we find part of the innovation activities has been assigned to some other cost center, and organizations create cost center tensions in allocating resources or the necessary time. We should break activities down into outcome orientation ones. Were the activities contributing to efficiency accounting or actually progressing the innovation concept along? We need to judge these through the effectiveness of the outcome. Forget the allocation input, it is the successful innovation outcome.

Scott Anthony had pointed out in an old article “Negotiating Innovation and Control’ on the different ways to balance tension, there is one, in my opinion, that needs more in-depth investigation and development, and that is the ‘ambidextrous’ one. This makes distinctions but links the parts of the whole organization by developing competing frames, not competing forces.

Roger Martin suggests in one of his books, “The Opposable Mind,” that we need to establish “integrative thinking” as part of this need to change. The ability to understand the difference between exploring and exploiting is critical to how we manage innovation in its different needs of discovery and execution.

Innovation should be alongside as an equal partner to efficiency. It becomes efficient innovation and core to what you do and how you operate.

Seeking constant efficiencies is slowing down our organizations. We need to do the opposite, to speed them up and capitalize on finding innovation opportunities quickly and then knowing how to scale them equally fast. We need to do this by developing the competencies and understandings of experimentation, piloting, prototyping in fast, discreet and measured ways

The worrying thing is the slow components dominate any dynamics within the system, and the rapid aspects have to simply follow along. I see this an awful lot. In all organizations, it accommodates the slow, thereby reducing down the very effectiveness of the organization to adapt, respond, and grow to market changes. Slow holds everything back, and we can’t afford to keep waiting in a world where others are more adaptive or agile.

“Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick.”

The only way to ensure speeding up is to be coherent on purpose, clarify the bounds and governing principles that need to be enacted and evolve the organization design away from layers and hierarchy.

We need to build up a series of internal networks that depend on each other but continuously reach out to connect, share, and exchange but more within an organizational design that is flat but highly responsive and interdependent to work well. This needs orchestration, not a hierarchy in its managing. They need constant attention; they need to speed up, to be encouraged, and well-resourced.

We need to work a lot harder on all the dysfunction points in organizations

Only by consciously working on all the dysfunction points within an organization will undoubtedly reduce the tensions, reduce the ‘shearing effects.’ It allows the organization in all its layers, to ‘react’ by recognizing its tension points and set about addressing them, not allowing them to fester and continue.

Organizations somehow has to reflect far more on its continued lack of performance. It takes time to identify the ‘tension points’ and then to undertake the appropriate action to come back into a balance.

A balance where innovation sits equally alongside efficiency, especially if both focus on outcome orientation, and that certainly is not the current business way we often see today. We so often find much of the ‘tension’ is not favorable, it is debilitating.

The post Organizations suffer constantly from unhealthy Innovation tension first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

So do we have a clear understanding of where we are in our current innovation capabilities?

We have to establish a way to map our ‘terrain of innovation reality’ is not just how we are performing but what lost opportunities have slipped through. Why well simply because we lacked the awareness to seize on these opportunities when we first spotted them.

We have significant gaps in our innovation capabilities and competencies. Have you ever really audited them? Taken them through a structured examination?

We do need to achieve a ‘reality’ check or we stay in a state of, forgive me, ignorance. We don’t see the possibilities we only see what we know and in today’s world that is a loser’s position. We need to push ourselves but before we do, we do need to know where we are, what is possible and what will give us a real advantage in the marketplace

Through my work on building the Innovation Fitness Landscapes I look for what is relevant to you today and then structuring the place you want to be or go, by starting to address the questions: are we focusing on the right ones to deliver on the challenges you are facing?”, “what can you do differently?” and “how can you identify those critical ones needed”? and “how can these be structured to clearly move you to the new capabilities that are required?”

My role here is to be the guide towards building improved innovation capabilities and capacity

My role is to help in this task by identifying the opportunity spaces on where you need to focus your efforts‐ and apply the appropriate understanding and identify what resources are needed, so my job is to help you to navigate the terrain. Here is my journey outline described as a typical story that we all need to envision and go through.

Through an innovation fitness landscape plan, you can access where you are and what needs to be achieved to get you to the desired point you see as to where you need to be.

We call this “mapping the terrain of where you would like to be.” Your preferred place after you have accessed the competitive situation and what needs to differentiate yourselves, by being realistic about your present operational performance and rigorous evaluation of how you can perform.

This is asking those searching questions around whether you have the commitment, resources, and determination to make a significant change in changing your capabilities or capacities to innovate. How are you both internally coping in an era of challenging technology change conditions but equally how you are seen to be externally coping with the pressures, rigors, and changes occurring in your marketplace.

You need to arrive at your preferred place after you have first accessed the competitive situation. These lead you to discover what you might have or need to differentiate yourselves. You can learn about how realistic your present operational performance is measuring up. By performing a rigorous evaluation of how you can perform, whether you have the commitment, resources, and determination to make a significant change, you begin to get into the ‘right’ shape to think innovatively.

You start asking how you are internally coping in your innovation performance but equally how you are seen to be externally coping in the marketplace where the actual pressures, rigors, and changes are occurring. You are facing, perhaps for the first time, a reality check. Knowing your positioning and abilities gives you a clearer understanding of the innovation landscape and, most importantly, the terrain you have to travel.

Arriving at a clear point of view

The intent is that we have to arrive at a clear “point of view” of both the reality of where you are and where you would like to be. These have to be explicit, to achieve a conscious awareness. I believe we have to go through some very specific and recognized steps, I outline the nine stages we need to work through the process here. These stages are a mixture of discussion, investigation and structured analysis and diagnostics.

This set of reality checks needs a clear, defining pathway in how the organization will need to change, a level of clarity of how you see your innovation capacity is not at the required level.

Then we identify and describe the required outcomes of ‘fitness need’ of the structured work to be undertaken through the different parts of the Innovation Fitness Landscape assessment, establishing those capabilities you are likely to need, the more innovation dynamic capabilities.

It is establishing these, that drive your innovation performance towards your stated needs and goals, ones to close the gap in present capabilities and required ones.

This moving from the present to the preferred requires this journey across the mapped terrain and the nature and character of that journey need to be clarified, on what is needed from you and all the people involved to achieve your (transformation) goals. Those growing innovation dynamic capabilities become part of the enduring strategy that informs all those involved and mobilizes all that is needed to get you into this new innovation position.

The greater innovation fitness you achieve equates to more value creation potential you can generate.

These are the search for your dynamic points for innovation. These are unique to you, they make you distinctive. They lead you to new growth, new creations, new opportunities to innovate. You evolve. You continuously look to combine in different ways to stay ‘dynamic’ and sustaining. We are setting about building your innovation capital.

If you would like to learn more, then please contact me, and we can set up a clarifying conversation to talk through this specifically related to your unique position.

The post Peeling away the layers of your innovation reality first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are continually learning more about all the different tools, techniques, and approaches available for innovation that will certainly help in putting the learning tensions into our work, making them more dynamic, linked, and increasingly relevant to the work-to-be-done.

We do need to embrace a more open, experimental approach to explore and then extend concepts, tools or frameworks that seem to work. I say “seem to work” as each situation often needs different paths to get the best out of any innovation work.

Yet before we jump into all the frameworks and tools that are available, let’s think about establishing the “common” environment innovation needs. Set this up, and you have the potential to create those dynamics out of your innovation activity. So here is a handy few to think about

1). A common language is essential

Any dynamics in the system need the ability for all to talk the same language, something that becomes common and embedded to support the routines and move quickly to the ideas, concepts, and solutions, as others can begin to ‘understand’ them and their connections as well. It is through working on the personal stories and appreciating the history, it is having an appreciation of events, good and bad, it is through local slogans, your jargon, and dialogues that bring people together. The power of storytelling helps gain adoption and identification of those needs for working on a common cause.

2). Creating constant opportunities for conversations

So many organizations don’t work on the ongoing discussions. They tend to dive straight into design workshops, build roadshows, and limit sessions that give everyone linkage and growing identification. You begin to identify your sense of purpose and value contribution if there is a consistent diffusion of messages, an on-going dialogue. By investing in lots of engagement, ones that should be initially lead from the top, then allowed to move up and down the organization, to allow for these ongoing conversations to build through growing confidence and trust.

3). Using the knowledge that resides

Organizations like to believe they are building domains of expertise, but often they are actually creating lots of individual silo’s to further restrict the flow of knowledge. Knowing where the right functional expertise lies, the relevant skills, experiences, or relevant insights ‘reside’ is increasingly important to throw open to all, to tap into, extract and contribute needs a well-designed knowledge sharing structure. This extracting expertise can help with not just our daily routines by offering different thoughts, ideas, and practices that may have a real impact on how you can change but as timely contributions into group activities.

4). Wrapping up intelligence to give it real value and knowledge understanding

The bundling of data is becoming critical. It needs to be increasingly shared across the organization at real-time speed. As we look increasingly outside our organizations, our focal markets, we need to gather a more exceptional ability for ‘sensing and seizing’ on the information. As we accumulate this and being able to connect it, to bundle it into knowledge that has potential application or relevance, allows for absorptive capacities to really come to life. By bringing into the organization the process of accessing, anchoring, and diffusing that external capacity for creating and exploiting new value.

5). Capturing and extracting tacit knowledge

Our ability to capture and access the tacit understanding that resides in all our employees is a critical issue to achieve new dynamic tension. How do we harness tacit knowledge, capture it, even recognize its value we need to encourage a continuous learning environment, we need to have clear organization learning strategies. Tacit knowledge helps us tackle the unknowns associated with discovery. The more we share, put effort into collaborative ventures, the more we learn. The more we engage with external experts, the more we should gain from these exchanges. Context becomes vital, as does striving for that common language and association.

6). Allowing time to explore and improve our human capital

Tacit knowledge as it becomes embedded in shared values, assumptions, and beliefs you can qualify and map tacit knowledge. Our tacit knowledge increases human capital. It can, through creative acts, give a strong feeling and provide a real sense of commitment. The more we explore, the more we ‘ignite our passions,’ We all need to consciously find the time to explore. It is by clearing the path to allow the absorbing to take place. As we set about to extract the knowledge, carefully, through putting any challenge into context, we are setting the basis for knowledge content to build by allowing time to access, anchor, and diffuse by validating back to our pre-determined setting.

The ability to harness our dynamics is vital

The ability to make our environments more dynamic means they become more engaging, more challenging. The dynamics offer far of a more a place to learn and contribute. It gives us greater potential for innovation and growth. As we build the dynamics of learning, there is a real growth potential for the organization and its people. The ability to set about making sure all the different intellectual capitals can combine. When you can connect those human capitals (knowledge, skills, and experiences), relationship ones (social and through our networks) or through the structural ones, (where you pool knowledge, use routines, and systems)you put into place a more abundant “stock” of innovation potential.

Proper use of our intellectual capitals and knowing what these are does allow for a greater unlocking of innovation value. The more we ‘work and encourage’ our learning capitals, combining the power that lies in the dynamic linkages we can forge, in the acquisition, in assimilation and then into eventual transformation then this allows known knowledge to become new wealth-generating innovation

By setting up your innovation environment before you jump into all those useful tools, techniques, and frameworks will give you such a good “heads start.”

The post Achieving a more dynamic innovating environment first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Renewables that give us greater sustainability and clean energy and dramatic reductions in carbon emissions.

I wrote twelve dedicated posts over this period, including this one, to highlight the important place innovation has within the energy transition that we are undertaking. View all the opening introductions on the “home page” and scroll down.

To have any chance to reverse these temperature rises there is an increasing emphasis on innovation solutions within the technology that is required for the Worlds energy system. Solutions are needed to shift from the world’s present reliance on fossil fuels to renewable cleaner fuels to stop the growing pollution and harmful effects of greenhouse gases (GHG) that carbon-emitting fossil fuels are causing to our planet and giving us global warming issues that are deeply worrying.

I drew down on many different resources to get my more in-depth understanding of an area that is partly passion and partly a business focus, but one resource has stood out for their detailed work on innovation and the energy sector’s needs.

IRENA is an excellent resource on the energy transition, especially innovation within renewables

IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, based in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and its Innovation and Technology Center, in Bonn, Germany is an intergovernmental organization that is expressly set up to support countries in their transition to a sustainable energy future. IRENA serves as the primary platform for international co-operation, be a center of excellence and a repository of policy technology, resource, and financial knowledge on renewable energy.

IRENA promotes the widespread adoption and sustainable use of all forms of renewable energy in pursuit of sustainable development, energy access, security, and especially low-carbon growth and prosperity. It facilitates knowledge sharing and technology transfer, and here, with its emphasis on innovation’s contribution, IRENA is an excellent source of innovation understanding in the solution needs for our energy transitions.

Exploring the IRENA Innovation Landscape for Energy Transition

If you are interested in exploring the enabling technologies in different innovation landscapes, these links below will take you to specific briefs released in September 2019 on different parts of the energy system undergoing change.

IRENA’s Innovation Landscape report highlights innovations in enabling technologies and explored explicitly in the following briefs, where you go automatically to the download:

• Utility-scale batteries
• Behind-the-meter batteries
• Electric-vehicle smart charging
• Internet of Things
• Artificial Intelligence and Big Data
• Blockchain
• Renewable power-to-heat
• Renewable power-to-hydrogen
• Renewable mini-grids
• Super grids
• Flexibility in conventional power plants

Also, IRENA produced a substantial main Innovation Landscape report.

My focus on understanding the innovation needs of the energy transition

Why did I choose to exclusively focus on different aspects of innovation within the energy transition was a simple one for me.  It needs understanding, trying to encapsulate aspects of it, to raise attention and greater understanding.

We have such a real threat of climate change and any pathway to meet the Paris Agreements is going to be a very difficult one, where all countries pledged to keep the rise of the global temperature below 2 degrees C by 2050 and ideally try to work towards the position of 1.5-degree C above pre-industrial levels. These target goals mean bringing our temperatures down dramatically.

We are presently at a very critical decision time; there is the level of investment needed to achieve this,  the current estimate to create a safe climate system is a need to invest USD 110 trillion of new investments in the energy sector by 2050.

Much of the investments need to be directed away from fossil fuels (the primary carbon emitters) into clean technologies. It is renewables, including most power generation and end-use applications that need to invest mostly through generation sources of wind, solar, hydrogen, and biofuels. This level of investment commitment will radically alter the job landscape, where energy is generated, by what means, and how it is going to be distributed, stored and consumed by us all.

Presently we are not making the essential investments we need to make. We are far to slow in Government policy in providing incentives and organizing the capital markets to raise, distribute and commit to investment levels that are necessary to make this transition.

The period 2020 to 2030 is absolutely critical for investments not just to be pledged but effectively deployed on the ground in the physical solutions and effective operation needed to make this energy transition required on track to reach the climate goals.

Innovation is critical in this energy transition.

We need to move from research and development, through engineering validation but into (multiple) pilots and then scaling solutions at speed. We do not have the luxury of evaluating these over standard lifetime returns or observing others over the years, there is the need to raise validation and take higher risks, than in more stable times. We need to be more pioneering. Without a coordinated effort, the risk is always treated cautiously without some form of guarantee or point of crisis. To date, we have not generated co-ordination in policies, collaborations, and commitments to shared risks. We have yet to fully place in the minds of everyone what the crisis is and where it is heading if we do not respond with a real sense of purpose.

Take a look at the way IRENA is breaking down the innovation dimensions in this visual that covers 30 key innovation dimensions that will drive energy transitions across enabling technologies, new business models, different market designs, and system operation.

The Emission Gap is getting bigger, not smaller

I was reading a recent report, Emissions Gap Report 2019, by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) recently releases. The summary findings are bleak. Countries collectively failed to stop the growth in global GHG emissions, meaning that deeper and faster cuts are now required.

The Emissions Gap Report has been produced annually since 2010. This is the UNEP flagship report that assesses the gap between anticipated emission levels in 2030 and levels consistent with a 2°C/1.5°C temperature targets that are was fully agreed as the goals in the Paris Agreement in 2015.

The 2019 report provides the first-ever estimate of annual cuts needed to stay on track with the Paris Agreement. The report emphasizes that the levels of ambition in the Nationally Determined Contributions must increase at least fivefold for the 1.5°C goal and threefold for the 2°C goal.

The report concludes “that, while challenging, climate change can still be limited to 1.5°C if sufficient momentum can be generated to take advantage of technologies to support the energy transition; increased understanding of additional benefits of climate action in terms of health and the economy; and abundant examples of ambitious efforts from governments, cities, businesses and investors, “and the pressure and will to implement them”

The UNEP report states emissions have to fall now and drop 7.6% every year from 2020, and that needs a fivefold commitment in by all involved. So if we do not accept this growing crisis and start now, we will not achieve a world where temperatures take us beyond

The G20 countries emit 78% of all emissions; primarily, it is in their hands to make these deep commitments. Also, we must not lose sight of those developing countries. These countries need to look to “leapfrog” into renewables and all the associated technologies of storage, batteries, and power generation (hydro, hydrogen, wind, solar, and biomass) that gives them not just energy security but energy potential to advance their economies. The G20 countries has huge legacy issues to tackle; many will end up as well described in this article by Joel Makower, Chairman & Executive Editor, GreenBiz Group on  “stranded assets.”

In Summary

We require bold leaders, policymakers, institutions, researchers, engineers, and innovators to combine, coordinate, and commit to making the energy transition happen.

So for me,  the energy transition is at the forefront of “cutting edge” innovation to deliver. For this reason, it is why I have given this my 100% attention in the past few months to understand, investigate, research, and become even more fully immersed in it.

Coming out of this intense period, I feel really far more conversant in the energy transition and its complexity. This understanding covers both its issues and barriers but also its opportunities and magnitude. It raises even more where I can contribute wherever possible through my focus on innovation, as it is pivotal to future energy transition solutions.

I firmly believe the energy transition needs all the help and attention it can get from all aspects and contributions. For all of us, being aware is a vital step to the recognition we are in a race against time to reverse the climate damage occurring, on a seemingly daily basis. Energy solutions, based on renewables and carbon sequestration are critical to this.

The post Understanding the Innovation Landscape needed for Enabling Technologies in the World’s Energy Transition first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The energy transition that the world is undertaking is one of the most critical areas where innovation needs to be at its very best, that top of the game to make the level of change necessary.

The existing solutions found in wind and solar solutions jockeying to replace oil, gas, and coal, in our present electricity distribution, as well as our current customer solutions for managing our energy, will only take you so far in our need to change our energy systems.

If we are to meet the mandated Paris Agreement of 2015, where member states agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees C versus pre-industrial levels by 2050, we have to look at every climate change mitigation we can find. We have to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80 to 95 percent of the 1990 level by 20150. Today the solutions are centered on decarbonization, applying digitalization, and switching to an energy system that is more decentralized than at present and it is finding imaginative, innovating solutions that become essential to achieve this climate change through the energy transition we are undertaking.

We must find innovative solutions to reduce local air pollution, strength the energy security and develop a more significant energy system that is resilience to minimize the shutdowns and power outs. We need to find solutions to reliable and sustainable energy solutions that deal with heating, lighting, cooking, and cooling. Any change needs to find a way to create local economic value and jobs, as others in any change of this magnitude will be displaced.

We need to switch from fossil fuel into renewables, and the whole shift of significant invested assets for power generation and distribution have to accommodate an energy mix that provides us electricity certainty 24 x 7.

As we switch from conventional power to renewables or we look to upgrade the distribution grids, we need to look towards innovative solutions.

Everything we are looking at in energy solutions faces a scalability challenge.  We must continue to decarbonize challenging industry sectors like steel, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals or our transportation systems if we wish to achieve any positive outlook of curbing carbon emissions and move onto a pathway towards a zero-carbon future.

Where can innovation help?

The opening answer is everywhere within the energy system. Technological and systemic innovation is incredibly important to the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings, as well as replacing and upgrading much of the overall system design and operation to generate increased electrification. We need to digitalize our grid services, provide new concepts for the grid and local storage, provide improved smart charging for electric vehicles, add different ways of building into the energy system the idea of mini-grids.

Each day there seems some level of innovation development, but my aim here is not to list these or where they need to go in future but to take a broader view of where and how innovation can help in general terms

Innovation needs to resolve different parts of the energy transition

Any discoveries are unpredictable, but if there are sound well-established innovation systems in place, you can pursue solutions that have both short-term medium-term and longer-term approaches to advancing the understanding of a solution.  For example, improving battery technology, improving charging efficiencies for an electric vehicle, or exploring different storage capacity for longer times.

Any energy transition takes a long time, and it requires a highly collaborative and multidisciplinary approach. For example, wind solutions have continued to evolve as we learn to explore new materials, improve the integration of advanced technology development,  improve the blade technology, as well as a gaining a greater understanding of weather conditions for strength and resilience. From the first wind turbines of less than 30 KW, we now have 9MW or more today. Wind turbines have evolved for over forty years. Wind turbines are just not seen on land, but we have floating wind farms out at sea.  Innovation takes a long time to push existing knowledge and find new solutions.

We are seeing discoveries that come from the interface of different areas where imagination sees possibilities and experiments in applying the principles to a completely different field or problem.

Innovation is a long hard task of iterative improvements and some rare breakthroughs, and this requires increasing collaborations between public, private, and research institutions to pursue together ideas and concepts. It is their combined disciplines and understanding that can push design and solutions in a continued, innovative way.

Innovation inspires action; it can focus on efforts and drive synergies if set up correctly. It is having a well-established innovation process or a clear, transparent one you can engage, communicate, and build shared understanding. That sense of collective identity has a more significant chance of generating new innovative solutions.

Collaborative working needs a system that offers a portfolio approach to ideas generated, concepts investigated, and potential solutions in the innovation pipeline, so the portfolio provides a common purpose and that shared understanding.

Innovation is often made up of novel solutions. As energy has significant areas of complexity, the better the understanding in standards, in the harmonization of approaches, in recognizing “universal” performance, there is this potential, of burden share. Investments in any new energy solution need to work through validation to commercialization in established ways. It builds mutual learning that adds more momentum to solve the problems and improve the designs.

Sharing the best ideas allows for more significant open exchanges. Governments, institutions, and the private sector each have roles to play in any transition of this size. The Private sector mostly brings innovations to market, yet all parties are involved in sharing risks or can be supportive and mutually re-inforcing. Through collaborations, they can jointly validate, promote, and clear the pathway for new innovations that require regulations to adapt to change when new solutions are being explored, tested, and commercialized.

Innovation has a central role to play in the energy system.

Our need is to keep pushing for discoveries, for experimentation, for demonstrating. We must nurture innovation, and we must continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway. Innovation is made up of many enabling technologies; it needs to be built in a highly systematic way. The need is to continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.

Energy is a vital part of any country’s ability to be competitive. Today half the world’s capital is invested in energy and its related infrastructure as it is the backbone of any industrial and urbanization strategy.

Our economic prosperity will be determined by transforming the energy sector, and it is through innovation we will achieve this.

Innovation is vital to the integration and operation design of the energy system, and we need to recognize its crucial role.

The post Focusing on Innovation for our Energy Transition we are all undertaking first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This GII report investigates and reports on 129 countries and then analyzes and ranks them accordingly.

When you are caught up in generating innovation within a business these sorts of reports can often pass you by as not so relevant to your everyday job of innovation.

I can certainly understand that but as a barometer of the health and investment going into innovation, it will eventually filter through to you and has more relevance than you first imagine.

This report is mainly for those interested in forming national policy on innovation, or judging where they are within the global race on innovation, yet it tells us all some really important points on the current health of innovation.

Yet the innovation message is for us all. If nothing else read this summary.

The really important message to hearten all involved in innovation is “that formal and informal innovation seems to be blossoming globally” (pg 2) even though the concerns are growing on the effects of both economic and geopolitical uncertainties are taking their toll on global economic growth. The report suggests this is “losing momentum”. As innovation is a major engine to investments and productivity growth around the world this is signaling some problems ahead unless things change.

The suggestion in the report is there are two possible bottlenecks from the innovative perspective might be contributing to the forward-looking innovation investment and adoptions needed

These being, firstly a decline in the level and speed of innovation, partly due to lower investments in research and development and also a continuing uneven adoption of innovation across individual economies and the world at large. This fits very much with the present needs of innovators, managing on the job, are struggling to scale and attract the right levels of investments or have sufficient resources to implement innovation. Then as we continue to run our innovation activities in many unstructured ways, failing to provide a comprehensive approach to innovation from end-to-end we do limit adoption and identification. Both of these policy issues are very much part of the incumbent innovator’s dilemma to resolve. Policy and Reality seem to mirror the same issues.

The scope of “breakthrough innovation” is coming increasingly reliant on digital technologies, automation, data processing and artificial intelligence (AI) the view is this has a longer-term impact and is potentially drawing from the immediate and medium-term innovation as this shift in innovation continues to gather momentum. This longer-term focus might not provide the productivity growth in the medium term as we go through the changes that these technology and digital solutions require. Again, I think this mirrors the current organization dilemmas on making the level of commitment to changing and adapting to technology and what it will bring in any new innovation activity.

The two other crucial observations that emerge from this GII report are, firstly “businesses do not seem to engage in innovation processes, products and solutions evenly, leading to slower productivity growth” I view this comment validating the struggle many organizations are facing moving from a closed innovation approach into a more open one, even embracing platforms and ecosystems which point far more to greater growth potential.

Secondly, they worry over “knowledge gaps” are still prominent and possibly growing. Perhaps we are losing more experience in capabilities and competences and becoming a little over-reliant on automating the process would be a question I would have from this comment?

The really encouraging messages for us all are these.

The really encouraging messages that should give belief into the innovator working in the trenches from this report are the following

1. Innovation is recognized by all economies as vitally important to nurture and develop. In the past, it was the domain of the high-income economies but the developing economies are getting the “innovation message, where they have an “abundance” of natural resources they need innovative thinking and policies to boast both economical and social development. The interest in innovation is getting wider appreciation and attention. That is a good thing for innovators in those countries to get the sense of identity of innovations importance and their need to embrace it.
2. Then the recognition that innovation covers “all realms of the economy” and finally “breaking the myth” innovation is solely concerned with science-driven and high-tech driven outputs is a potential breakthrough for the sustaining health of innovation into the future. We need solutions to countless global challenges so we need to recognize innovation’s place within this.
3. The ability to conceptualize innovation has radically altered innovation understanding. The active interest in promoting local, frugal and inclusive innovation is taking hold and blending far more with local cultures, crafts, and skillsets. This recognizing innovation is local, it can evolve in local ways that may on the surface not be traditional but can encourage a platform of new entrepreneurs and creative thinkers to release themselves from the shackles of doctrine and just experiment, explore and discover innovation “their way”.

What I take away here is the changing recognition we are having of the importance of innovation globally.

This bottom-up movement of innovation activity is so much more productive than imposing innovation conditions from the top. The policy should be far more towards enablers and facilitators, measuring engagement and achievement so much differently than we do today. Grass-roots innovation leads to green-shoots of economic and social stimulus and growth. The policy should be more nurturing and more sustaining.

Each of these has stimulated modern-day trend shifts in innovation policy.

• The realization of societal challenges, such as food security, environmental challenges, energy transitions, and health is gaining increased attention and realization that innovation is central to these.
• The organization of innovation is for all. Innovation stimulus or activity is not the focus of one department or ministry, it has become cross-ministerial in the task and collective government attention. This allows for greater potential in public and private collaborations as dealing across ministries was always a significant barrier, that seems to be finally addressed.
• The really major shift is towards dynamic innovation ecosystems. The report is detecting the gravitating from “just” fostering science and R&D expenditure to the striving for the creation and upkeep of sound and dynamic innovation ecosystems. This is absolute (lovely) music to my ears, focusing my time and energy onto dynamic innovation ecosystems.
• The last one is how date-based evidence and innovation metrics are increasing at the center of crafting, deploying and evaluating innovation (policies).

Equally, the good thing is innovation is gravitating into a healthier recognition of its critical role at the national country level.

The report points towards a growing awareness for promoting “increased curiosity of science and entrepreneurship in children and students, on how to make public research more relevant to business, how to promote inward technology transfers and foster business innovation expenditure to be designed into innovation policies to gain increased adoption of innovation and enabling the conditions for this to happen.

The underlying messages from the GII report.

The underlying message one gets is the realization (finally), at national level, to anchor policy objectives into innovation is necessitating investment in these enabling conditions such as infrastructure in research and technology transfer, in education and skills, in promoting entrepreneurs and seek to attract venture capital as occurring, not just as part of past practice for a few developed economies but for the vast majority seeking ways to reduce the divides and gaps, finally recognizing that within their possession is a cadre of innovators who can make a real difference in their national economies but also increasingly on the global stage,.

The report concludes there is true progress in fostering innovation on the ground globally to foster innovation. Now that enables all innovators and can help in recognizing and delivering the foundations for innovation-driven growth, something we all need to work towards.

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