Identifying Key Component Relationships of Innovation Stacks and Building Blocks.

Introduction: Mapping out the relationships within an innovation management system is a challenging task. It requires understanding how individuals, data, and communications connect to contribute to innovation at every stage, from discovery to execution.

Regretfully today, many innovation management solutions, especially software solutions, have not successfully addressed this relationship problem across the full innovation management process.

In this post, I continue to explore the key components and relationships of innovation stacks and building blocks moving towards a solution that might address our current weaknesses in innovation management.

Section 1: Understanding Innovation Stack Components

A. Defining the Innovation Stack: The innovation stack represents a coordinated and mutually functional organization of subsystems and services that comprise an innovation system. It encompasses the language, infrastructure, libraries, APIs, and more that enable companies to build their innovation capabilities. These stack components are modular, shared, and persistent.

B. Orientation towards Innovation Tasks: The elements of the innovation stack are designed to support the core tasks of innovation, these include learning, absorbing, assessing knowledge management, creativity, design, experimentation, and testing. By modularizing these tasks and their interfaces, organizations can assess their innovation progress by having a complete innovation system available to them, designed on specific stack elements to address knowledge operation requirements in the stage of development to commercialization. Additionally, with the upgrade in technology and platform approach, we can support the rapidly emerging human-AI collaboration needed for each component and step validation.

C. The innovation stack’s modular nature. This allows developers to focus on specific software intelligence capabilities, rather than attempting to design a general-purpose innovation intelligence all at once. This approach encourages the emergence of specialized, intelligent tools that align with the various knowledge operations. The innovation stack also helps organizations understand and optimize their ecosystems by mapping out component relationships and identifying collaboration and growth opportunities.

Section 2: Complexity Resolution Potential from Building Blocks and Innovation Stack Architecture

A. Addressing Increasing Complexity: The world’s complexity level is rapidly increasing, and intelligent software is both solving and creating new forms of complexity. Developing an innovation stack architecture can help address this complexity by providing a framework for managing and coordinating the diverse knowledge operations within an innovation system.

B. Digital Building Blocks and Interoperability: Digital building blocks enable a system of interoperable solutions that can be easily combined and coordinated within an ecosystem. This flexibility allows diverse solution creators to collaborate effectively in solving large-scale problems through context-rich solutions. Building blocks enable further flexibility in unbundling and re-bundling, allowing for even higher innovation and acceleration of solution development.

C. Formulating an integrated design. As I have mentioned previously, we integrate a design based upon:

            1. Using building blocks as components of the innovation stack

            2. Using the innovation stack to guide platform development

            3. Using the platform to support the innovation stack modular design

            4. Enabling the building and deploying new applications and services as applicable.

Conclusion: Identifying the key components and relationships of innovation stacks and building blocks is crucial for developing a comprehensive and effective innovation ecosystem. By leveraging the tools, frameworks, and mechanisms provided by the innovation stack, organizations can create an ecosystem that fosters a culture of innovation, accelerates the innovation process, enhances collaboration, leverages diverse perspectives, and drives competitive advantage. Stay tuned for future posts where we will explore additional aspects of building a successful innovation ecosystem.

Innovation Management needs to “come of age”. Through growing connectivity, cloud adoption, and multiple data resources, firms need to leverage resources and technology designs differently than in the past. Organizational boundaries need to open up to allow knowledge to flow across the entity as well as to seek different knowledge outside to create and deliver solutions. Seeking openness does allow organizations to scale both in solution creation and usage by transforming innovation into a more modern, highly integrated design.

References:

Larry Schmitt in an inspirational article: “The Innovation Stack“