Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

I am a “transition advocate” for innovation, ecosystems, and sustainability

specifically focusing on the industrial internet of things (IIoT) and energy systems that are radically changing our world

• Transformational insights are seen at the front end of our transitions that we are all undertaking, these observations are providing the “fuel” and underpin my supportive advisory & mentoring services to a client. This dynamic environment nurtures my understanding of what is evolving, and what impact and growth opportunities this has for a business to explore and exploit, by taking the innovators perspective into the assessment of the need of a clients energy and industrial transition.
• My primary role is advising and coaching within these areas. The principal focuses then is to support and build internal capacity, competencies, and capabilities to undertake any transformation journey.
• I break my business out into dedicated focal topics into “big transforming” points of impact, applying understanding and insights that are in my mind complementary, synergistic or clarifying new emerging intersections, for growth potential that has value-adding impact and business model change.
• The combination of innovation within ecosystem thinking and the design approach has arrived, capitalizing on the value points of digitalisation combined with technology and human ingenuity; both in the Industrial IoT world and finding a growing place and pace in the Energy Transition, each is having, in my view, a very different combination effect for value creation and business impact.

My Innovation intent has been central to this period in consulting, mentoring, coaching and advising business entities, start-ups, not-for-profit and government agencies. This intent has progressively ‘funnelled down’ into recognizing the value of ecosystems as the business design for innovation in the future; to thrive and deliver more significant value creation, especially in the Energy Transition underway.

I run a specialized advisor and mentoring business called Agility Innovation; it has an intensity of focus on its clients’ needs and always looking to contribute to your own specific journey.

https://paul4innovating.com/about/

Agility Innovation Specialists are presently based in Switzerland

Paul writes consistently about innovation, ecosystems and the future of business design, under paul4innovating on his blog www.paul4innovating.com and in different media channels specifically for innovation AND thought leadership, as well as some specialised focus, posting sites shown below.

Paul has been consistently voted in the top innovation knowledge providers since 2011 through his writing, providing different and often novel insights into innovation and the approaches we all need to take. He offers his personal views and experience on the DNA building that is required for innovation.

Related sites

Dedicated sites are my points of reference for others to explore

DNA building of Innovation: https://paul4innovating.com/
Capability Building for Innovation: https://innovationfitnessdynamics.wordpress.com/
Exploring the New Era of Innovation: https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com/
Advisory and Mentoring Innovation: https://guide4innovating.wordpress.com/

With two breakouts of innovation advisory service

Pure Innovation Work: https://thinking4innovators.com/

 
Paul Hobcraft’s profile can be viewed on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hobcraft-innovation/

Contact Paul Hobcraft on his email:  paul4innovating@gmail.com

Place For Innovation Discoveries

It does not matter what you want to achieve through workshops, seminars, training or innovation dialogues, we can provide the stimulating environment to bring these together.

The workshop or dialogue itself, although important needs commitment and follow up. It has to have clear objectives.
Here are some opening thoughts:

How can we all broaden our perspectives?

What gives us a safe space to think and develop?

What allows us to ‘synthesize’ learning?

What can be a stimulus for new lenses of discovery?

What are we trying to achieve actually?

What do we need to consider before and after any workshop and dialogue?

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Are we looking for a synthesizing space where we can Divergent, Convergent and then Evolve our thinking, deepened the knowledge and strengthen the resolve to move forward?

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Offering different thinking can come through using Agility Innovation Specialists- bringing diverging into converging innovation wisdom together in one place adding new space and potential.

Firstly we need to achieve Innovation Foresight

It really is about knowing the needs, those that can be seen and articulated but also those that are the unmet needs, the jobs we are all struggling to complete but don’t have the ideal solutions to complete it without a lot of ‘spent’ energy and applying solutions designed for other issues.

When we have foresight we need to look at both the external customer ones and to encourage the organizational ones that need extracting and working upon. Then it is for the leadership to focus their innovation creative energies and attention on these two crucial aspects to find new innovation opportunity, it is pretty simple really! 

Well perhaps it is not that simple. Foresight can be a science unto itself…….but we can help you develop your foresight for innovation? Just ask us.

Moving from your Core

As you work through new business models, mergers and acquisitions you arrive at the question of how close are these to our existing core or do they build up other pools of core value?

Moving from the core needs some considerable thinking through on its potential impact within the organization

How far away and how important does any move become as you then enter the transformational space? Potentially you are committing yourself to considerable change, both in internal and external learning and resource commitments.

Equally ‘how far’ are you prepared to go in future designs of new product and services away from your core? Is the organisation equipped to make such a move? Knowing the pitfalls and dangers of moving too far is important to understand; often there is increased value in asking an external party who has no ‘vested’ interest to make their assessments.

Moving from your core in innovation and what it truly means is vital to think through before you embark on the journey.

Perhaps we can contribute to this thinking through assessment? Having foresight saves so much in lost energy, investments made, time spent.

The Three Horizons can structure the mission and intent, it can frame the options, determine the resources and ‘paint’ the viewpoint of how to manage innovation across multiple horizons

The workshop is introducing the multiple values and benefits this powerful methodology can offer for framing innovation.

Why is it necessary?

We so often struggle to articulate our innovation activity and then can’t seemingly project our plans into the future in consistent and coherent ways.

We often lack the framing necessary. If this rings true of the innovation activity in your organization, then it is in danger of being seen as isolated, one-off events, that fail to link to your organizational strategy. Furthermore you’ll be missing out, or not capitalizing on emerging trends and insights where fresh growth opportunities reside.

I so often come back to the messages we need to learn, which centers around the three horizon methodology.

This methodology lends itself well for mapping out the different horizons for innovation to begin to position capabilities, capacities and fill-in those needed competencies, to manage across different opportunities that emerge.

It also requires a certain amount of ‘letting go’ as well as ‘embracing’ a future that still may have many uncertainties that can really challenge our established mindsets.

Its value – if well-managed – can offer a helpful way for a significant series of dialogues and tensions to surface, but through this engagement and respect for different positions you can find mutual ways of connecting your innovation activities over different horizons, and managing uncertainty in better ways as a team or organization.

 The Three Horizon framework is about having strategic conversations about the future and feeds the conversation about your innovation direction and longer-term portfolio and capability understandings.

The workshop is broken down into nine parts of exchange by all the participants within the workshop

* How do we visualize and talk innovation options

* Recognizing that different opinions and discussions are always needed

* Allow the Evolutionary Perspective to progress across multiple horizons

* How to look across the Multiple horizons so you improve, extend and change

* So framing the “Burning Needs”- where does the growth come from?

* Our search for emerging winners- discovering and managing the Winning Needs

* Recognizing the Mindset traps- fixations, time constraints, intractable positions

* Avoiding the “typical” dangers, spotting and amplifying the weak signals, avioding the creeping “uncertainty”

* Constructing the three horizons through different lenses and tools.

The key takeaways from this workshop:

– You will recognize and really make it a “must go to” it within your innovation thinking and toolbox.

– It frames much within the innovation activity to manage and structure this.

– It ‘aids’ the framing of your present to future needs and gives ‘voice’ to all the different thinking and opinions on building the innovation pipeline and dialogues surrounding the innovation activity.

– It strives to actively balance the portfolio and different, often conflicting voices within the room, by helping to identify all the gaps and opportunities that need resolution.

– It brings a greater dynamics into your innovation thinking.

The Three Horizon Workshop

The Three Horizons can structure the mission and intent, it can frame the options, determine the resources and ‘paint’ the viewpoint of how to manage innovation across multiple horizons

The workshop is introducing the multiple values and benefits this powerful methodology can offer for framing innovation.

Why is it necessary?

We so often struggle to articulate our innovation activity and then can’t seemingly project our plans into the future in consistent and coherent ways.

We often lack the framing necessary. If this rings true of the innovation activity in your organization, then it is in danger of being seen as isolated, one-off events, that fail to link to your organizational strategy. Furthermore you’ll be missing out, or not capitalizing on emerging trends and insights where fresh growth opportunities reside.

I so often come back to the messages we need to learn, which centers around the three horizon methodology.

This methodology lends itself well for mapping out the different horizons for innovation to begin to position capabilities, capacities and fill-in those needed competencies, to manage across different opportunities that emerge.

It also requires a certain amount of ‘letting go’ as well as ‘embracing’ a future that still may have many uncertainties that can really challenge our established mindsets.

Its value – if well-managed – can offer a helpful way for a significant series of dialogues and tensions to surface, but through this engagement and respect for different positions you can find mutual ways of connecting your innovation activities over different horizons, and managing uncertainty in better ways as a team or organization.

 The Three Horizon framework is about having strategic conversations about the future and feeds the conversation about your innovation direction and longer-term portfolio and capability understandings.

The workshop is broken down into nine parts of exchange by all the participants within the workshop

* How do we visualize and talk innovation options

* Recognizing that different opinions and discussions are always needed

* Allow the Evolutionary Perspective to progress across multiple horizons

* How to look across the Multiple horizons so you improve, extend and change

* So framing the “Burning Needs”- where does the growth come from?

* Our search for emerging winners- discovering and managing the Winning Needs

* Recognizing the Mindset traps- fixations, time constraints, intractable positions

* Avoiding the “typical” dangers, spotting and amplifying the weak signals, avioding the creeping “uncertainty”

* Constructing the three horizons through different lenses and tools.

The key takeaways from this workshop:

– You will recognize and really make it a “must go to” it within your innovation thinking and toolbox.

– It frames much within the innovation activity to manage and structure this.

– It ‘aids’ the framing of your present to future needs and gives ‘voice’ to all the different thinking and opinions on building the innovation pipeline and dialogues surrounding the innovation activity.

– It strives to actively balance the portfolio and different, often conflicting voices within the room, by helping to identify all the gaps and opportunities that need resolution.

– It brings a greater dynamics into your innovation thinking.

The Work Mat Approach

This work mat approach illustrates our unique approach to ‘working out’ your solutions in novel ways. We need to ‘wrestle’ with the problems but in a creative way

Getting a thorough any workout makes us all feel ‘fitter’. These can be brain storming, structured design or collectively working through a difficult problem.  We use our ‘work mat’ approach that helps you ‘wrestle to the ground’ your unique challenges.

We can tackle different problems through this work mat approach but to share one example with you here that covers a part of the series around “Building Sustaining Competitive Advantage” through our intensity approach.

There is a structured approach to this to gain the best from your innovation workout.

If you would like to find out more about this approach to working out through workshops then contact us through paul@agilityinnovation.com

Designing Unique Workshops

Finding opportunities for Innovation and Growth is hard work.

We design our workshops to meet your needs, to push the thinking and to generate new returns in innovation understanding.

Our workshop are designed to help you need to think through many areas of productive innovation opportunity. For example:

1. Understand the trends and drivers in your industry as well as explore alternative perspectives allows you to look at not just ‘best practice’ but leading and emerging practice.

2. Look constantly outside your organization to ‘see’ and collaborate from the values of applying open innovation principles and techniques

3. Fostering the culture and climate for Innovation to workinside your organization can create the environment you are looking for but it takes a real understanding.

4. We all need to be aware of the way we earn our profit and where and why and it becomes absolutely vital that our innovation activity fully aligns to the strategic needs

5. Complete differently in the value chain- what it gives from new Business Models and discovering new opportunities to energize your business in different ways

6. When we stop and look at customers in different ways so as to listen to their needs we can discover new innovation opportunities and then how do you discover those unarticulated ones?

7. Expand into new markets and customers thoughtfully using the core within your business, in exploring the adjacency spaces and probing those ‘white spaces’ needs careful consideration.

8. Develop new product, services, structures and processes needs debate and understanding

9. Pursue a range of degrees of novelty to generate a greater sense of innovation possibility

10. Being able to sustain your momentum and make innovation repeatable does needs a broad identification and set of discussions to raise awareness, and build those capabilities and capacities well.

We need a crisis, a shock!

A priority shift is required for innovation– in leadership, responsibility, accountability, overcoming the reluctance to innovate.

“Even though it is important and we want to do innovation, we believe that there are many more important things in an organization to be done……..”

As a result we do these more important things and by the time we come to the just important ones we have run out of time and we never do it.”

“Unfortunately, innovation is important but not urgent. And as a result, it stays in the middle of the bottom of the list and we never find time to do it.

 In my experience, for an organization to encourage the honest questioning to take place, it has to create a positive crisis.

“We have to create some kind of a shock.”

a quote made by Professor. Costas Markides of the London Business School

This statement about turning the intent to innovate into actually want to innovate, we believe does apply to many organizations in our opinion- they fail to convert their words into actions and deeds.

We believe innovation should be a far more critical business priority for growth, prosperity and sustaining our institutions, communities and nations well-being.

Do you avoid that essential Sense of Renewal or attempt it in small incremental steps? Renewal needs to occur constantly; it needs to be embedded into your core activities.

Are you looking for a structured approach to renewal and then being able to sustain it through innovation?

How receptive are you to making the necessary changes demanded by difficult times, and can you really change?

Taking a systematic and structured approach can re-equip you for a more innovative future by working through a step-by-step approach that enables clarity and understanding so everyone involved can see the problems, the challenges and emerging solutions. This certainly calls for a very structured, comprehensive approach that we offer:

Taking 12 critical steps equips you to know where the future lies through this diagnostic structure. These are:

1. Assessment of your present position through a range of evaluation tools.
2. Benchmark quickly your competitors to begin to build the momentum for change.
3. Seek out pockets of resistance that are constantly just below the surface or deep-seated through various methods and techniques with a real sense of urgency.
4. Making a battery of tests to assess the readiness for change necessary to structure a new momentum.
5. Approach solutions with a greater understanding of different style options, adopt different techniques, and respect diversity across the organization.
6. Learning the techniques of facilitation to mobilize latent energy, provide encouragement, revitalize and respond to the multiple layers within your organization
7. Focus upon the business’s critical aspects that assess, realign, restructures, and redeploys around the three critical aspects of knowing and leveraging your core business required to meet the new market needs.
8. Managing change needs a clear, dedicated focus in clarifying plans, thinking through the building blocks of commitment and shared identification.
9. Knowing where the levers are to revitalize requires a range of techniques and dedicated change champions to clarify objectives, giving a sense of renewed urgency.
10. Regeneration needs setting new visions, directions and building the communication plans to cascade these throughout the organization.
11. Provide clear solutions that define the goals, structure, systems and processes and invest in the design considerations and cultural shifts that identify and promote emerging opportunities.
12. Place innovation at the heart of generating new growth with a structured process and corporate sense of engagement.

Taking this structured approach takes that ‘sense of renewal’ commitment deep inside the organization. We need to recognize the future is not waiting for us and simply ‘seizing the initiative’, and knowing destiny is in our hands and on our terms, we can be better equipped to move back ahead.

A structured approach to renewal is not an easy journey; it takes dedicated time and incredible determination. The rewards come through an organization that emerges from today’s ‘recession’ in a stronger form to sustain and grow its-self to travel down a more innovative path, equipped to be more resistant and flexible.

Onee positioned to seize emerging opportunities quicker, at innovation speed and with a clarity of thought and a real sense of purpose.  Positioning for an upturn in fortunes does not come just by luck or chance; we have to create the right environment to enable it to happen.

We at Agility Innovation Specialists see renewal as essential in so many cases. This methodology helps you work through a clear structure towards solutions.

Balancing Risk & Opportunity

Innovation is about two sides of the coin, risk and opportunity. You need risk and opportunity in different measures. We often like to call this the “yin and yang” of innovation.

Some thoughts as you look at risk and opportunity for innovation to consider:

1. Recognize each side of the ‘coin’ enables better decisions

2. You seize better opportunities with confidence by balancing these two

3. Recognition means you allocate money more wisely

4. You achieve better deliver on an improving scale

5. You anticipate problems far earlier

A quote “We cannot eliminate risk, we have to live with it and manage it” (Blair 2004)

Finally, we should celebrate the opportunities that risk and innovation can generate, we must constantly ‘shine’ both sides of the coin.

Find out about our view of risk and opportunity within a broader context for innovation

Intrepreneurship or Entrepreneurship is all about getting the right environment to prosper and grow, to experiment and learn, to pivot and advance.

The internal agent of change within an organization needs to be more an entrepreneur, ready and willing to champion and push for innovation so the organization succeeds.

The difficulty for this to happen is often bound up in different organizational aspects that all need addressing including the culture, environment, the appetite for risk and reward.

How can you cut through these multiple inhibitors and encourage this greater spirit of risk-taking needed to push innovation through to commercial success?

So what is the approach we take?

• Knowing the many multiple factors of entrepreneurial energy within larger organizations needs a roadmap to follow, it needs structuring and supporting. This framework looks to provide this so this culture is seen and built into the very essence of innovation capability needed to succeed.

The elements include:

• Transmission of vision and strategic intent in clear ways to form the mandate
• Building the supporting mechanisms that give momentum to the entrepreneurial spirit
• Knowing the boundaries for tolerance for risk, mistakes and dealing with failure and being comfortable with these
• Setting the ‘working’ conditions for this spirit to thrive across perceptions, boundaries and norms
• Healthy questioning of the factors that inhibit and promote entrepreneurial spirit and then addressing these systematically to actively reduce down or build up
• Knowing what the limits and possibilities of innovation are (cultural, resources, history, market place etc.)

Building the Environment for Entrepreneurship to Grow

This is one of the main challenges in larger organizations, to avoid the premature stifling of ideas, to break down the barriers and resistance to change. The adding into the mix the entrepreneurial energy you promote the intensity of purpose.

By actively promoting the values and knowing the underlying needs to allow the entrepreneurial activity to thrive, needs a sound investigation and framework that builds into a set of conditions that promotes the identification, encourages involvement and gains individual desire to be part of something fresh and exciting.

Find out more then please contact us.