Grounding innovation through convergence and intersections
Jobs-to-be-done seems to be a real convergence point for many innovation thinkers. This needs to be more central in our innovation thinking it seems to me.
Business model innovation can really help Venture Capital assessment
I believe the Business model canvas, presented by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur in their book “Business Model Generation”, holds a very powerful way for Venture Capital to use in their assessments of promising ventures they are considering for investment.
Traditional pitches to VC’s are loaded with financial numbers, providing crisp, well written business plans pitched by teams oozing with optimism but much of this is still highly intangible in reality. There is often a decision made on the people’s chemistry more than anything else.
There is nothing wrong with that if you are the lucky ones, but tough on the countless thousands that face rejection after rejection for their ideas to attract the necessary funding needed to move their business forward.
Where the Business model canvas can fit in the VC pitch.
The systematic understanding of Business Model Innovation design
Business model innovation is shaping up to be one of the most challenging aspects of leadership of existing businesses and aspiring leaders do need to fully understand how to map out the business value.
The question today being faced by many is how to transform existing business models so as to avoid that race to commoditization and decreasing shareholder value and so to provide improved value.
Equally business model innovation increasingly needs to be able to reduce the threat of new competition that is constantly finding ways to undermine your present business. The Entrepreneur is snapping at your heels like never before.
Leaders need the tools, skills and experience to envision, test and implement new business models more than ever and certainly faster than ever.
The worrying aspect today it seems is that many leaders are still not knowing what it is within their existing business model that ‘combines’ to make the existing profit engine of the business, those ‘value points’ that really provide the innovation opportunity to sustain or challenge their existing business models.
So what is Business Model Innovation?
The Pathway Curve of Innovation Understanding
The pathway curve methodology is a well structured way to move up in innovation understanding.
The Three Horizon Approach to Innovation
The three horizons for innovation thinking
Drawing fresh innovating oxygen into the body
This must be the time of year for all those innovation reports to resurface for fresh innovation thinking. Recently I went back to the OECD report (opener here. http://bit.ly/buIiv8) and began to breathe in more innovating air.
Not bad from the OECD but that is one of their purposes in life I suppose. Why? A number of points stand out and using OECD summary headings, these were:
Policies need to reflect innovation as it occurs today.
We all do get stuck in repeating old ways yet the world and how it explores, experiments and investigates is constantly changing. It has become highly interactive and a multidisciplinary process with so much more need for collaboration across a diverse network of stakeholders.
Although it is getting more complex focusing on performance through innovation is very much a today thing.
People should be empowered to innovate
Will we ever learn to manage innovation to make progress?
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?
The National Innovation Institute argument
Further to my last blog post on the need for a National Innovation Institute, I’d like to expand on this further as I’m presently here in Singapore and feel this is even more topical.
Always Singapore provides you with a positive impression when it comes to development. It is a country that consistently experiments and explores its options to grow its economy. Innovation is within this mix but I still think it should be more central, visible and coordinated to extract that little ‘extra juice’ often needed today.
Visiting Singapore on this trip I’ve been examining where innovation ‘fits’, and there are plenty of examples of experimentation backed up by investment seed money, but for me, innovation still lacks a certain coherency and consistency of purpose within policy.
I feel with the changing nature of innovation and its increasing value creation aspect it does need to be given a greater sense of attention, so further investments can build innovation deeper into the fabric of society.
A national innovation body can bring this coherency of purpose that Singapore strives for.
A Need for a Ministry of Innovation
I am presently busy preparing for a visit to Singapore. I balance my time between Switzerland and Singapore as my business base and as they are ranked 1 & 3 in the WEF’s Global Competitive Index, it is sometimes hard to get even deeper attention to innovation as this sort of ranking gives a certain belief, yet I often wonder why. I think countries often get blindsided in the pursuit of what they know and ignore what they seemingly can’t capture.
Let me be perfectly clear both countries I operate between, take competitiveness seriously; they both have a real need to maintain their attraction to foreign investment for their prosperity, as they have limited resources to call upon if you compare them to the USA, China, India or Germany for example, and do set about creating the right environment for this but they have their blindsides it seems to me still.
Sustaining Competitive Advantage through Innovation
A formula for sustaining competitive advantage through a structured innovation framework