A Cascade of Better Choices for Greater Innovation Outcomes

July 10, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

It is not an easy job to achieve the level of consistent innovation expected within any organization. Often those breakthroughs never seem to be repeated, we struggle to understand the reasons why we can’t achieve that regular rhythm or dependable outcomes from the innovation portfolio, that we would have expected or the board demands.

If you ever look at high performance in sport it is in the consistent, hour-upon-hour, day-upon-day of dedicated practice, hard work and consistent honing that gets you to that performance point. You seek to reduce deviance; you look to achieve a certain consistency.

Business Organizations will like that approach, it ‘plays’ to the efficiency and effectiveness message, it offers up predictability and reliability that allows for dedicated planning and ‘predicting’ solid performance and certainly. This is ideal for those investors looking for consistency in results and dividends and the Executive Board yearns for.

Today uncertainly asks for a different performance

The Age of Large Business Model Reinvention

July 5, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Most of our existing organizations are searching for the mechanisms to reinvent their business models, through identifying, designing and executing differently from the existing ones, where they tend to simply be ‘locking themselves into’ repeating patterns, possibly opening themselves up to new forces of disruption.

There is a sense of urgency that is growing at the corporate level, to master this ability to design different business models and then set about executing them, to combat the multiple ‘disruptive forces’ swirling around in the present and near-term business environment.

Reinventing the Business model is such a big ask in the complexities to overcome, the legacies, the vested interests, the distribution of created wealth (dividends, bonuses, performance) are all ‘locked into’ the existing business. Many of those necessary bolder decisions get caught up in horrible compromise.  Parallel managing is both an art and a science but it always needs clarity.

Addressing the current dilemma within business models

So we have a classic dilemma, we need to manage and extract as much as we can from the existing business but simultaneously begin to reinvent, to design something different.

The Understated Back-End of the Business Model Canvas.

June 26, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

 So we all know a standard company balance sheet has three parts: assets, liabilities and ownership equity. The accounting equation states assets and liabilities are known as equity or net worth and this net worth must equal assets minus liabilities. The balance sheet summarises the present position or last audited position.

Well in the Business model canvas we have the cost side, the back-end, made up of the activities, resources and partnership aspects and a revenue side, the front end, made up of customer segments, channels and customer relationships. It is the ‘net worth’ of all these blocks that makes up their contribution to the Value Proposition.

It is the nine building blocks when we put them together, tells the complete story, a little like a business model balance sheet. Balancing this out thoughtfully does need that bringing it all together, so as to give others the compelling story and begin to mobilise around and attract the necessary resources.

My question though is this: “is the BMC understated at the back-end today and should we strike a different balance for more established organizations?”

Balancing the BMC BMC model is by Osterwalder & Pigneur. Visual source: Steve Blank
Balancing the BMC
BMC model is by Osterwalder & Pigneur. Visual source: Steve Blank

What happens when one side perhaps gets over emphasised?

Very much the orientation of the business model canvas is presently skewed towards the front end – the market facing part and rightly so. You are in search of a new business model, you will never find it in the building. As Steve Blank rightly stated “you have to get out of the building” to validate your assumptions or hypothesis, to search for the value in the real marketplace.

The (Re)birth of the Architect for the Business Model Design

June 25, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Innovation strategy, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Business models both in new designs and it management have become centre stage in many of our existing organizations’ thinking. The need is not just too simply find new growth through new business models but to ‘react and adapt’ those existing business model designs that are in place, to catch-all the emerging possibilities that are around, hopefully before others do. Are we doing a good job of this at present?

BMC- Osterwalder & Pigneur. Visual source: Steve Blank
BMC- Osterwalder & Pigneur. BMC Visual source: Steve Blank

Those without a legacy or are really agile usually are in pole position to explore new opportunities quickly. Also to start with a blank business canvas is exhilarating. It seems we are in the era of the Entrepreneur or are we?

Juggling Innovation around Business Model Design

June 20, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation


Juggling Innovation image via Michael Grills
Juggling Innovation Is Hard
image via Michael Grills

There seems a lot at present going on around the Business Model and formulating its design. Following on from the Business Design Summit held in Berlin in April of this year there seems to be a gathering of momentum surrounding the Business model.

There is an awful lot of designing going on, actually it is hard to juggle with it all, even for me that has a 100% focus on innovation.

The Business Design Summit had as its primary question: “Are the Business Tools you are using relevant for today’s world?”

It went on to ask “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them, instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking”. “Your business ideas deserve better than PowerPoint and Excel”

The momentum is specifically aimed at Business innovation design tools and how to manipulate them and this is giving rise to the ‘school’ of tool-smiths. I wrote about the Business model canvas as set to explode in 2012 and events this year are certainly ‘exploding’ in multiple ways. Let me give some examples:

Figuring out a different strategic alignment with innovation being central.

June 13, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Strategy as we have previously known it is officially dead. Strategy is stuck! Competitive advantages have become transient. We are facing situations where advantages are copied quickly, technology is just one constant change, and our customers seek other alternatives and things move on faster and faster.

In a new book written by Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School in New York and one of the world’s leading experts on strategy, she has been exploring the changes rapidly taking place called  “ The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business”

 “Strategy (in the past) was all about finding a favourable position in a well-defined industry and then exploiting a long-term competitive advantage. Innovation was about creating new businesses and was seen as something separate from the business’s core set of activities.” “Sustainable competitive is not just ineffective, it’s actually counterproductive” says Professor McGrath.

She rightly states:“Think about it: the presumption of stability creates all the wrong reflexes. It allows for inertia and power to build up along the lines of an existing business model. It allows people to fall into routines and habits of mind. It creates the conditions for turf wars and organizational rigidity. It inhibits innovation.

Traversing different horizons for transformational innovation

June 7, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Irrespective of the organization, we all struggle with transformational innovation. So often we are simply comfortable in our ‘business as usual’. We gear performance to the short-term, we put the emphasis on the current fiscal year, and we support the core business in numerous ways, usually with lots and lots of incremental innovation, so the results are realizable in this year.

We are sometimes comfortable or confident enough to move into adjacent areas, to expand and feed off the core but these are less than transformational in most cases. This space is the one we are the most comfortable to work within, this is the horizon one of the three horizon model approach outlined to manage innovation across a more balanced portfolio of investment.

In summary, the three horizon model for innovation is actually a reasonably simple idea: with Horizon One (h1) being the current business focus, Horizon Two (h2) being more the related emerging business opportunities and Horizon Three (h3) being those that are moving towards a completely new business that can have the potential to disrupt the existing one.

The complexity lies underneath this simple idea, you need to manage these different horizons with completely different mindsets. You need clear well-structured ways to extract the real return from managing a comprehensive innovation portfolio based on knowledge, experience, intelligence but exploring plenty of the unknowns about the future and openness to get you there, as ready as you can be . Its necessary today.

The seeds of destruction lie in horizon one

Breaking out of the current economic dilemma needs radical innovation

June 3, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

I gaze through unbelieving eyes at the continued rise of unemployed in Europe. Unemployment in the Eurozone has reached another record high with the seasonally-adjusted rate for April  2013 going to 12.2%, up from 12.1% the month before according to the European Commission’s statistics office, Eurostat:Eurozone Unemployment May 2013 EurostatAn extra 95,000 people were out of work in the 17 countries that use the Euro, taking the total to 19.38 million. Both Greece and Spain have jobless rates above 25%. The lowest unemployment rate is in Austria at 4.9%.

It seems never-ending.

Youth unemployment remains a particular concern; you simply have to wonder what we are storing up in the longer term with this situation. Can the youth ever catch up, can our society as it is positioned give them the opportunities to turn today’s grim world into a world of optimism and contentment, or is it a lost generation?  In April, 3.6 million people under the age of 25 were out of work in the Eurozone, which translated to an unemployment rate of 24.4%.

Why does this issue of growing unemployment seem to be drowned out by events that seem important on the day but realistically pale in their significance against something as damaging as this present crisis?

Examples of persistent economic and social challenges

We are facing significant society challenges. These include declining Economic competitiveness, deepening Social inequalities, rising Mental ill-health, increasing Crime and social disorder and we see growing Alcohol and drug abuse, to name some of the issues being increasingly tackled as part of the consequences of these tough economic and social times.

We must increasingly recognise that the cost of deferring concerted action to confront these growing set of social challenges is beginning to rise – and could easily outpace our ability to respond.

Can we afford to wait? There are so many pressing questions.

Casting-around with a wider innovation net.

May 22, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation, Uncategorized

When we ‘cast around’ we are looking for something; to try it out, to think about it, to search for connecting a vague idea with something more tangible. So let’s go innovation fishing.

The word ‘cast’ is around us in so many ways – anglers cast their line, we are cast adrift, we cast or drop anchor, we cast to put about, to tack, we cast our eyes upon the speaker, we cast light, we cast aspersions, we cast someone in a play, we cast a plan, we cast into a certain mould, are all just some of the many examples of how ‘cast’ is part of our everyday thinking.

In innovation, cast can become a fairly dominating action – we can cast about or around for ideas, to devise a plan, we can equally cast off those ideas or concepts we reject or simply cast out, or finally, we can agree to cast one’s lot into a plan or concept to take forward as a united team.

For me casting around is a most important part of how I work through innovation coaching.

Moving Towards Globally Integrated Innovation

May 15, 2013Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

There are so many books out there on innovation that it sometimes gets just hard to decide which to buy and read, to invest time into. I’ve got a growing stack of books sitting on my coffee table or in my e-reader file all shouting “read me, read me!”

Managing Global InnovationWell one I recently finished has been one of those rare books that got the Paul Hobcraft treatment; considerable underlining, scribbles in the margins, circles around some pages that I want to refer back too as quickly as I can. You can never achieve that same sense of ‘ownership’ and possession through the e-reader can you, or am I missing something there?

So the book that joined that elite pantheon to the innovation gods on my top shelf was one written by Yves Doz and Keeley Wilson entitled “Managing Global Innovation – frameworks for integrating capabilities around the World”, printed by Harvard Business Review Press. I really recommend it.

The Key to bridging your Global Innovation Gap

The book is all about providing the understanding of integrating your global resources to build and leverage a global innovation network. I think it does a good job in explaining the different parts, the considerations and the tougher aspects of making this work for you.

Ok, I’m a sucker when it starts off by discussing the innovation challenges, then starts climbing into chapters on optimizing the innovation footprint, then communications, receptivity and then how to organize for global projects focusing on collaborative and integrated innovation, it does draw you in.

I’ll leave you to explore this in your own time, if global innovation and integrating is your bag. Equally I think it will be more than helpful in thinking this fully through or recognizing gaps within your present operations.

What the book does for me