Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Why do we need to change our thinking about innovation?

The Innovation Ecosystem Cascading Effect

I have been arguing in recent posts about the need to change how we approach innovation. We need to think about designs around innovation ecosystems.

In a series that builds the argument so far, I have provided the essential context within this post” Please, we need a different innovation narrative” followed by “Building out our innovation ecosystem in design and thinking.”

My personal energy is drawn from all the challenges we face, looking to help find solutions.

We must promote more dynamic environments and the constant desire that organizations and their people have to be fit for innovating purposes, adaptive and fluid in such highly challenging and confusing times.

Achieving this innovation ecosystem thinking does require a profound shift in how innovation is viewed and approached in the business landscape today and in the future.

*The stages of building out the Industrial Metaverse taking a three-horizon approach*

I had the pleasure of attending the Nvidia GTC22 event recently. Over four days, they did a good job of scrambling my brain. Take a look at some of the sessions that apply to you- amazing stuff.

I focused on the Industrial Metaverse and where it is going. It is only at the beginning of its journey, but the feast of predictions, future forecasting and bold, clear visions on this was impressive.

Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO gave the keynote where he took us into that opening understanding and a closer look at the game-changing technologies that are helping us take on the world’s greatest challenges. I really had to break this nearly two-hour keynote into “bite-sized” segments to absorb all the releases, updates and the speed of development that NVIDIA are undertaking.

Rev Lebaredian, VP within the Omniverse group, gave us a clear view of how and where the Industrial Metaverse can head. NVIDIA Omniverse is the platform for future building.

The Omniverse platform is for creating and operating metaverse applications.

*Finding the new building blocks of innovation ecosystem design and thinking.*

Why change our thinking and designing around innovation ecosystems?“

For me, ecosystem thinking and design offer fresh ways for accelerating mutual learning, and through this innovation, outcome potential for sharing and knowledge building.

As we build an understanding of the power of digital platforms and ecosystem thinking, we can see gains and new values and realize different opportunities denied to us in the past by a lack of clarity, depth of understanding of what was in front of us but not appreciated, as we were looking at it differently and not seeing its potential in a combined value or bundling.

Today we live in a more connected world; technology has enabled this.

We are becoming far more networked and have a growing awareness of hyper challenges that we are in part resolving. Still, we face many blurring boundaries across market positions, competitors and global trade that need combining our talent and expertise to provide a new set of solutions, delivering on promise and impact. We are in a more complex world, needing different approaches within business organizations.

We hold the promise of liberating potential in resolving wicked problems and opportunities, providing we embrace the potential to combine and share outside our organization and tap into the rich diversity of knowledge, equally keen to collaborate and cooperate to achieve a more cross-cutting innovation that provides solutions to these more complex problems.

*Thinking of innovation as an innovation ecosystem in design*

We need to re-think innovation and provide a new level of innovation integration and optimization.

What we see increasingly is the need to change to a different thinking, one of what “innovation ecosystems.” can provide.

In designing these innovation ecosystems, we might have the potential answer to overcoming and giving innovation that chance to be more central to the core of the business. It might offer us the ability to connect much of the rich internal knowledge with that outside one, that other organizations and individuals can provide, in diversity, or thought or contribution.

I envisage an ecosystem of working upon like-minded goals and ambitions, by collaborating for delivering a new form of innovation value. Collaborating in ecosystem thinking and design I would suggest opens up significant potential and combinations, that provide added value and significant opportunity for improvement on the existing offerings.

Approaching innovation on a common, shared technology platform can significantly enhance the discovery, experimentation, exploring and exploiting diverse skills and expertise through to commercialization.

(Visual adapted from AFSC explaining a narrative, in this case, social justice)

I have been struggling for quite some time with innovation’s increasing difficulties in influencing growth and achieving real impact.

I see many comments on the failure of innovation, in its inability to be at the core of an organization’s ambitions for growing and changing. Actually it is a long list of issues and concerns that we so often paper over and don’t fully address. There is a time for making a real change and I feel that could be now by shifting our thinking towards innovation ecosystems.

Let’s reflect first on the constraints or barriers that innovation faces, much self-imposed.

Innovation “fights” to attract resources, to gain management attention or to appreciate fully the difficulties and uncertainties in the time it takes, in its potential risks and its need often for a more ambitious and bold commitment of support and belief.

Our innovation processes stay locked in islands of knowledge, stubbornly not flowing across organizations, informing others and giving the right levels of insights, support, or collaboration needed. Innovation software management continues to be sold piecemeal, so often just bolted onto the other selected parts already in place, not being optimized.

Managing Governance within Ecosystem Designs

Governance needs to constantly “account” for change. Here is a handy reference or reflection of its capacity to deliver:

You need a living environment, one that evolves constantly

+ Here, you must establish a relational, institutional and coordination set of strategic and operational approaches. The “living” document needs to reflect on the constant reshaping of the ecosystem as it evolves and recognize that this is a constantly evolving design.

+ Governance needs to articulate the influencing and coordinating mechanisms, their different levels, and the protocols and procedures to resolve any disputes or pathway directions all would need to follow and adhere to.

+ It needs to determine the boundary conditions and if and when these change, which they are most likely to, there is a mechanism in place to recognize this and determine any new scope, direction or design to be accepted going forward.

+ A governance document must have built into it sufficient commonality and be transparent in its spirit of amiability to coordination and decision-making.

+ It needs to determine the critical driving forces but equally reflect on the different catalyzing forces in tensions and design that individual members will attempt to impose, so there needs a resolution method to be able to go back and refer to.

So many multiple strands constantly need to be pulled together to build a complete innovation picture.

We need to build theories, explore multiple connections, and build continuously on the patterns, the signals, and the interactions by extracting from all the different ‘cells’ of knowledge we all possess, which makes the application of innovation often highly unique to each of us.

Innovation ‘speaks to us all in different ways and has multiple meanings.

Then, when we grasp what we understand, we have to translate these thoughts into practical, workable solutions. By sharing, you learn and continue to build on this knowledge. You actually blend your own creation and learn from others, and that combination effect curates even greater knowledge and application.

To build a comprehensive view of any innovation built in a digital world needs is bringing together multiple strands of understanding, and that is tough, demanding and time-consuming.

Innovation needs to speak to us.

I have been asking myself how a combined effect of innovation and ecosystem design thinking will support the energy transition we are undertaking to give it additional traction and generation.

Let me share my thoughts and proposition here.

The vital “infusion” of innovation in thinking, approaching and building this into the front end of any energy transition provides a greater discovery structure and process that can greatly facilitate the changes, with more informed knowledge, insights and validation of a path to travel.

Finding fresh ideas and momentum Continue reading “Gaining energy and idea generation”

I want to relate adoption back to business platforms and anchor it in the process.

Today business platform adoption is a struggle. It needs a clear revisiting of the theory of diffusion and adoption to extract the relevant points of necessary practice.

What is vitally needed is the recognition that deciding on adopting a business platform approach has five stages or decision points to go through.

So often, platform providers automatically go to the assumption that their platform will be adopted. It simply will not without working through and gaining confirmation the five stages of adoption are clarified.

Continue reading “The difficulties of adoption for the business platform”

The Combination Effect for Adoption in today’s world

The level of interest in business platforms in the B2B space has rapidly grown. Platforms are more viable and relevant today than ever. The platform’s ability to offer multiple values will influence many of the client’s adoption decisions over the choices their business will engage with.

I wrote a recent article on my ecosystem and platform posting site, “Exploring points of value in adopting business platforms.”

I suggested in this post, “Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.”

Recently in Stanford Social Innovation Review, an article on the “Adoption of Innovation” by Benjamin Kumpf & Emma Proud is well worth the read as adopting any innovation process is a tough, slow one.

They take a position on looking at behavioural approaches suggesting when behavioural insights have been adopted, innovation has ceased to be “innovative.” When a method, technology, or approach to a problem has moved from the experimental edges of an organization to the core of its work: no longer a novelty but something normal and institutionalized. My fear here is this becomes “static” and losses its dynamism. Continue reading “Establishing an innovative business platform adoption approach”

Why do we need to change our thinking about innovation?

The necessary Plumbing, Pipework and Pumps for the Industrial Metaverse

Building out our innovation ecosystem in design and thinking

Seeing innovation differently through ecosystem thinking and design

Please, we need a different Innovation narrative

Governance within Ecosystems

Innovation Passion led me here

Gaining energy and idea generation

The difficulties of adoption for the business platform

Establishing an innovative business platform adoption approach