Welcome to the brave new world of innovation ecosystems

February 12, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Will ecosystems replace simple ‘old’ innovation collaborations as we know them today? Open innovation has suddenly lost its pole position. Board rooms around the world will be thinking through the events that unfolded yesterday and I’m not talking about Eygpt.

Just get into the story that has been unfolding at Nokia in recent weeks, it has been breathtaking but it signals a massive change in where innovation will be going.

Let me summarize some of this story and add some of my own thoughts on what this means.

Firstly the famous burning platform memo within Nokia.

The Promise of Open Services innovation

January 24, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Absorbing the different messages coming out of Professor Henry Chesbrough’s new book has been interesting. The book “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your business to grow and compete in a new era”, published by Jossey-Bass was just launched in January 2011.

The book can go the way of a lightning rod to bringing service innovation up in many people’s thinking both in academic research and corporate agendas.

Professor Chesbrough is absolutely right, services are critical to developed countries’ economies and within our organizations. It is time to move service innovation up in our thinking by combining the internal capabilities within organizations and by enlisting the efforts of many others in support of their business.

The challenge is to combine the customer and the supplier on the same platform for Open Services Innovation to work. It is thinking through platforms more that catches my interest and what this means in generating new, innovative business models.

Taking services into a more open approach is not so easy.

Taking the Open Services Innovation Road.

January 24, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, gaining innovation momentum, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation
Open Road to Innovation

I have been looking forward to this book; it addresses one of the most important areas of innovation that we have, the service sector and discusses open services.

In this last week, I have been reading Professor Henry Chesbrough’s new book “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your business to grow and compete in a new era”, published by Jossey-Bass, released last week on 18th January.

Services are critical to understand and focus upon, for our continued economic growth, for the ability to offer an often distinct and unique competitive advantage, as well as provide much of our future employment opportunities, especially crucial in the Western economies. Services today comprise roughly 80% of economic activity in the United States, and 60% of economic activity in the top forty economies of the world (source OECD).

Mixed Emotions
After reading this book a couple of times I must admit I had a set of very mixed emotions.

Service innovation- can it become more open?

January 10, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

For a better understanding of what makes up service innovation, we need to fill in far too many gaps at present, can it become more open?.

I’m hopeful that the forthcoming book of Henry Chesbrough: “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era”, published by Jossey-Bass and being launched officially next week, 18th January 2011, will go some of the ways to be a lightning rod to bringing this up in many people’s agenda if it is not already!

I felt with his past books on Open Innovation and Open Business Innovation they were the catalysts for deeper thinking. He provided the stimulus to find better answers with his many reflections and case studies through his solid research work and his ‘open’ and questioning thinking to prompt community ‘reactions’. This galvanized significant innovation movements and this time hopefully, it will be to open up and manage service innovation more effectively.

I will be completing a book review on this latest open innovation thinking by Dr.Chesbrough for www.innovationmanagement.se as an early February publication and I’m certainly looking forward to reading the final edition of this book when it arrives.

Social will dominate innovation thinking in 2011 and beyond.

January 4, 2011Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Putting the word social into our innovation thinking is going to be a really important thing to do in the coming year, if you haven’t already, it will dominate our actions increasingly.

The challenges of ‘social’ is everywhere; within organizations, in all sorts of collective movements, in politics, across government, society, markets, academic institutions and effecting our personal lives in a host of ways.
Society has to face up to some really tough challenges and only innovation can solve these with human beings inventiveness and ingenuity. Regretfully we have still an accelerating ‘creative destruction’ and we are often more Schumpeterian than ever.

Something has got to give and it will be within the broad social domain where it will all come together, many social things are converging or feeding off each other. Let’s take a brief look at all this social orientation going on.

Reflecting on the drivers for innovation we have choices?

December 20, 2010Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

There are many different places to go and ‘look’ for innovation but often we need to think through a little more of what is driving the changes before we ‘run off’ into finding solutions that are simply immediate to grow our organizations, we need to find time to reflect more.

Sometimes they are, of course in plain sight, but when you alter your thinking lens you might see innovation opportunities in different ways.

We might miss sizable opportunities in not exploring all the different drivers that are around to drive innovation and provide us opportunities. So why not take the time to ‘reflect’ a little bit more on all the different potential drivers of innovation available to you?

So what can and does drive innovation?

I’ve been recently looking at the different drivers that can be explored for innovation. They seem to be many and it can be confusing. I feel there are eight that merit thinking through in a more structured way. Working through these can significantly improve the agility and options of the organization to generate new opportunities and give you a ‘rich’ potential to explore.

My identified eight drivers of innovation

Are we constantly checking for the pulse of innovation?

November 22, 2010Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

So often our innovation health seems to change abruptly or equally just simply slip away. It could be caused by many things: a call for reorganization or restructuring or a key part of the team decides to leave.

It might be the organization has a second quarterly drop in sales and profits or those layoffs simply keep cutting away until you are into the bone. Suddenly the ‘beating heart of innovation seems to slow and sometimes even stops completely. Innovation abruptly goes into intensive care.


We so often miss the ‘vital signs’ of healthy innovation as we get caught up in the issues of the day, in defending our corner or simply playing safe, hoping the ‘ill winds’ that constantly blow over us go away.

In the meantime we often fail to recognize what has ebbed away in creative energy or innovation initiatives until we are heading for the emergency ward, fighting for our competitive lives like others who we had been competitively jogging along with having stayed fit and healthy and simply ‘kept on innovating’ and pulled away. Where did our fitness actually go?

So how do we check our innovative vital signs?

Will we ever learn to manage innovation to make progress?

September 5, 2010Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Fresh thinking, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I was asking myself when are we ever going to really learn about how to manage innovation as we seem to make so little progress?

Reading through the latest global survey results from McKinsey entitled ‘Innovation & Commercialization, 2010’ at http://fwd4.me/cRK and you must wonder with all the activity (and hype) surrounding innovation why we do not make the type of positive progress you should expect in innovation management.

There are very positive signs innovation is emerging stronger than ever from the recent bout of economic ‘flu’ we all have been going through. The report starts on a high note “84% of all executives say innovation is extremely or very important to their companies’ growth strategy”- yippee!

The darker side is the ‘but’- “little has changed in the way they generate ideas and turn them into products and services plus many other challenges remain remarkably consistent”- oh dear!

Do we ever learn?