Bringing my thinking and solutions to your problems
This morning I decided to have an exchange on ChatGPT on the future of Innovation Management Software, I asked a number of questions in a short series and can well-relate to the answers provided incredibly quickly.
What do you think?
Do they make sense and are the suggestions a competitive threat or a trend towards a future that needs fully embracing before others do?
chat.openai.com/chat
Continue reading “Where will Innovation Management Software go?”
I started posting my thoughts on innovation in August 2010. I have written on this site alone, www.paul4innovating.com, by just coming up to a milestone of 700 posts focusing on innovation thoughts and opinions, so I just wanted to pause and think about all the different places I have tried to get the innovation message(s) out.
I always find the post-New Year to be a reflective part of the year of reviewing, deciding, and then setting new goals. This is a post about the sources of my knowledge that feeds my innovation passion.
Let me start. I often wonder whether the posts and articles I’ve written have been hitting the right buttons, helping solve the needs of those involved in innovation; I hope so. I have pushed out and explored various aspects, learning myself as I go. I have followed a number of great innovation thinkers and read different books on the areas of innovation.
It amazes me. How much is talked about, advice offered and sometimes that deep down nagging feeling, innovation understanding does not really change; it is the people managing it as they often seem to be simply passing through this innovation period onto other things or vanishing in pursuit of different career interests.
Continue reading “Helping discover your innovation pathway”
Part-way through 2022, I drew up a list of my focal points in researching, stimulating my thinking and finding different validation points on my Ecosystem thinking and design approaches. In early January this year, I took a stop, more a reflective period in these past months, to deepen down even further my knowledge of Ecosystem thinking and design. I aim to achieve, even advancing, Ecosystem understanding for those interested to learn and seeking advice through direct engagements.
My main focus on Ecosystems comes from the innovation perspective. How can we finally combine all the different parts of the Innovation system into one, fully connected up and achieve a far more open design where contributors, both inside and outside organizations, can contribute as it is the diversity of experience needed today to give fresh value and impact on complex and challenging issues, We need that discovery to commercialization fully connected up to be leveraged fully in all the diversity of contributions.
Innovation in its challenges and problems has become more complex and challenging, both in solutions offered and in working out all the connected parts to provide products or services that are superior to the existing ones. The need to provide that essential “dynamic” of having customer engagement in their data, a growing network of connected partners providing their input, their exploring and experimenting so the inventor can learn and seek to improve the product or service accordingly.
Continue reading “My building blocks towards Ecosystem thinking”
Over this weekend, I spent a fair amount of reading time working through the World Economic Forum Whitepapers I have collected to remind me of this incredible source of knowledge across many world issues and challenges, grasping the risks, potentials and value opportunities discussed in these papers.
These reports (Whitepapers) are a storehouse of knowledge, facts and suggested actions that need to be taken. The Whitepapers found here cover Climate issues, Green Deal views, Resilience, Circular Transformation, Global Value Chains, Electricity views, Securing the Energy Transition and plenty more.
For me, the weekend focus was specifically on the Energy Transition, following on from their recent Davos event and the series of reports and whitepapers co-sponsored with different organizations built up over many years.
One whitepaper I took some time to find more time to re-read. It was from a white paper “Accelerating Sustainable Energy Innovation, released in May 2018 and prepared in collaboration with KPMG.
Why is this whitepaper a timely one for me to relook at? It looks at the Energy Innovation (eco)system
Continue reading “Accelerating Sustainable Energy Innovation”
Innovation often fails to align with strategic needs. It is a known, well-discussed fact. This is often not the fault of the innovator but the very people designing but not sharing the strategy or failing to recognize all the implications this might mean in shifting resources, investing money or simply under-appreciating the complexities that often lie with innovation to conceive, validate, contribute and deliver the contributions into that strategy.
Sadly many innovators are simply happily working away with no specific guidelines, apart from the general remit of “we need to be more innovative”, and this lack of coherence merging from the boardroom, failing to cascade down the organisation leaves this strategic part that innovation should plan as far to vague. They are not drawn into the need for change and its implications from an innovative perspective. Alignment should be a rigorous evaluation.
Building our capacity to innovate needs understanding and reflects the organization’s business activities. Innovators need to grasp the value creation aspects that will deliver the necessary capital-efficient and profitable growth and then ‘go in pursuit’ to achieve their contribution to these goals.
Even the basic questions often remain unclear: “How are we looking to grow revenue, save costs, reduce working capital or improve our fixed capital?” What is specifically being deployed or recognized needs to change and to get into the necessary detail becomes essential.
Continue reading “The needs of Innovation Coherence”
Innovation has a very tough job of attracting the necessary money to take a concept or idea all the way through to commercialization. There is always that constant asking about the economic return and the associated risks.
Financing game-changing investments, replacing something existing or simply providing something new have tough financial questions always to be answered.
Here I am taking an innovation need in a different way than most are used to reading about. So what are right conditions to invest and realize innovation?
The Energy Transition is one of the toughest innovation challenges ever. We must remove fossil fuel as a source of energy, decarbonize our planet and replace it with clean energy alternatives of solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear and green hydrogen solutions. To make the transformation in just under 30 years is a massive task. So far, we are doing a poor job of this as markets, solutions, opinions, and financial support are all highly fragmented.
Tacking emerging and developing markets is even harder to achieve an energy transition.
Can you imagine what it is like in a developing country that lacks sufficient energy and infrastructure yet is faced with the sizable task of expanding its economy to meet growing population expectancies and the need for rising incomes to give that essential potential for growth that having energy available can provide?
Continue reading “Innovation comes in different forms and problems, all requiring financial support.”
No energy transition will be achieved without invention and innovation, yet we are currently failing badly to fund research, development and deployment. We are losing the race to stop our planet’s warming as our innovative human endeavours are not at the level they should be, or we lack the “will” to make the changes we so desperately need to undergo to protect our planet.
The sheer scope of the energy transition often pulls me in so many different directions. Still, the foundation stays in place, that of making the contribution of my understanding of innovation as my focal point of contribution- the accelerant to energy change.
Continue reading “Innovation: the accelerator for the changes in our energy transitions”
Transformational innovation is increasingly needed to cope with the change needed in many organizations to find a new or repositioned value proposition.
Transformational innovation is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, to achieve. When you are required to become (really) different at the core, you face the inherent conflict that making change is where clear leadership can only bring about, guiding the changes required through this highly disruptive period and providing the compelling story of the compelling future that provides a fundamentally better state than the one occupied today.
We have many innovation outcomes to choose from, including incremental, distinctive, radical or disruptive. Today we focus more on open innovation where a greater external diversity combines with internal expertise to generate the potential for something fundamentally different. Today we have technology as an enabler and applying innovation ecosystem thinking in designing open platforms so this network of experience can be exchanged, shared and developed.
Yet transformational innovation does require something really different.
To become different, you have to go beyond adding innovation at the periphery, bolting new concepts onto the existing core, you need to dismantle the core fundamentally.
Continue reading “The need for Transformational Innovation”
What an utterly strange year, 2022 has been. We have been confronted, reflective and seemingly having to “kick start” our lives again after the challenges of living through the impacts of a global pandemic.
We go into 2023 far more in personal and business conflict. We do need to find a new way of working. It is not throwing away the technology, tools or established processes, it is transforming these in new and different ways. We have not found the “real-time” to stop, explore and approach concepts and innovative ideas in different ways. Our mindset or conditioning was fairly hard-wired from our past ways of working, we felt unable to justify “permission” to change how we undertook work and have found it challenging with the impact of being remote. Many have simply walked away from their past established ways of working. We are confronting unsettling times for many reasons.
In many ways, it felt all we knew or needed was suddenly not good enough. We have lost our understanding of many things we became used to, and suddenly it all seemed challenged in far bigger ways. War, flooding, famine, shortages, and illness challenges began impacting our lives. We were indeed been confronted with a series of crises and the need for a fast, thoughtful set of responses which we were unprepared or incapable to give as each challenge has been highly complex.
We were beginning to be more open to being more reflective but we have been constantly pushed to take us back to “business as usual”. In many ways, we are struggling with a need for a “reset” but it is far more complex than that as we are in the middle of multiple crises.
This return to the old normal is a non-starter for me, we are in a rapidly changing world
We are in need of recognizing and discerning how much our world is upside down, so we can begin to understand how we need to re-equip ourselves to a new way of working, thinking and responding. We need to “righten” what is wrong with this feeling of much of what we are doing being out of balance.
We are all struggling to transform ourselves. Our businesses are grappling with the current economic difficulties we all presently facing including shortages, disruptions, and dealing with inflation and economic downturns and massive climate change challenges. We are not only confronted with the potential of the toughest downturn in modern times but with all the pressures with the speed of decision-making, and technological advances that seem to ‘suck up’ more of our daily lives instead of helping to resolve it. 2022 was unsettling for me.
Continue reading “Were we all upside down in 2022?”
The Industrial Metaverse has really “announced” itself this year. For me, it accelerated in my attention once Siemens and Nvidia announced their partnership to explore the Industrial Metaverse in early July.
The announcement came at the launch of Siemens Xcelerator, a digital platform and having both announcements made at the same event had a more extensive “bang” with the more attention-grabbing one, announcing the Industrial Metaverse partnership, in my view, overshadowed the other, the Siemens Xcelerator, which forms the Siemens building block towards this industrial future and the essentials required of a digital platform to accelerate any businesses digital transformation.
“Siemens Xcelerator is an open digital business platform that will accelerate digital transformation. Now companies of all sizes can access the digital technologies to transform how they compete, collaborate and connect“- Siemens website.
Through this open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator is featuring and building a curated portfolio of IoT-enabled hardware and software, a powerful ecosystem of partners, and a marketplace.
The journey is moving towards the Industrial Metaverse and I see it evolving in this way
Continue reading “Stages of a Virtual Industrial Metaverse Learning Journey”