A new innovation era - Building Your Innovation Intelligence

Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation

Being surronded Finally, I am completely surrounded. I have that feeling of being somewhat overwhelmed, I can’t twist and turn anymore, it simply will not go away. Do I throw myself off the building or decide to listen a little longer? It really is forcing me to think.

Today it seems whenever I pick up a business book each chapter has a section on it. Also, I seem not to be able to not fall over all the articles extolling its virtues, I mindlessly Google it and you can see your whole life flash before you if you decided to investigate this seriously.

What am I talking about? Well, nothing other than Design Thinking. I know, most of you are so heavily into this you feel you might as well ‘flip’ over to the next article but are you, really?

Design thinking is a mindset Continue reading “Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation”

Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 2

The future of our engagements will determine diffusion and adoption

It is all about letting go but grabbing more

Technology has opened up the door to both scale and fragmentation and social business is the one pushing through this open door. We are increasingly facing the Collaborative Economy everywhere we turn. Social business is becoming the denominator of success or failure.

New rules are emerging – you could say new theories – and where are these fitting within the corporate mindset?

The shift of what our customer means to us, are we still competing with them, pushing them to accept a value proposition that forces them to begin to look elsewhere?

Are we still determined to hang onto control, in the (mistaken) belief we know what is best for our customers? Continue reading “Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 2”

Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 1

crossing-the-chasm

According to Professor Clayton Christensen and drawn from his book “Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth. Harvard Business School Press, the only way to look into the future is to use theories.

“The best way to make accurate sense of the present, and the best way to look into the future, is through the lens of theory.” The theory of innovation helps to understand the forces that shape the context and influence natural decisions.

This might not be fashionable for many because as soon as you introduce “theory” into the discussion for many of my practical colleagues they want to dismiss it. Continue reading “Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 1”

Exploring the criteria for collaborative innovation

identification

The shape of our collaboration activities has been radically changing in recent years. The combination of technology, the internet, resource constraints and opening up of innovation to the outside world has changed the shape and content of conversations. Shaping conversations can be either intentional or through serendipity. Ideas are usually never fully formed but emerge over these conversations from fragments that need nurturing, encouraging, aligning and developing through ongoing conversations. Often the fragments need a wider network to come together and form around.

sharpen-ideas-quickly The push today is the ability to sharpen the ideas quickly and move into some early testing and validation, ideally with the final customer somehow engaged and then from this ‘interaction’ the idea shapes and its final understanding deepens onto a concrete delivery. There is a growing need for more radical, out of the existing box innovation to tap into. Collaborators help here. Continue reading “Exploring the criteria for collaborative innovation”

Balancing fluidity and stability

I would argue for new management practices that need to be evolved to deal with digital, disruption and rapidly changing conditions on a consistent basis. Our high levels of rigidity and linear thinking need changing

One of the most critical ones is the degree of fluidity we can achieve in ourselves and our organizations, this will significantly help us to adjust to a changing world, more dynamic, requiring us to be constantly adaptive, with information coming at us at an ever-increasing speed, that needs assimilating, transforming and embedding as new knowledge. Continue reading “Balancing fluidity and stability”

Innovation Formula- Intensity and Purpose

The Innovation Accelerator Model Formula by Agility Innovation

The innovation accelerators model – I often am coming back to this as the formula for building intensity into your innovation activity.

I have been arguing that you can have a unique model for some time. I think the way I have it structured is it is a formula for an innovation acceleration model.

I think it is worth working through, it seems to move with the times of what we need to focus upon.

Continue reading “Innovation Formula- Intensity and Purpose”

Risk Aversion Makes Us Feel Ordinary

When did we lose the appetite for risk? Innovation is suffering badly from our present risk adverse approach. Risk-taking has become threatening, we are all ‘fixated’ on covering all the downsides of risk, looking more at the possibilities of loss and less so at all the possibilities of success

So, we end up with “mediocre work within a mediocre company” yet it was not previously like that. Risk aversion had become dominating and the organization’s leadership was signaling “they were really more comfortable being ordinary”.

How does that square off with “we want to be highly innovative, it is important to us, our growth and delivering ongoing value to our shareholders and to our customers depends on us being innovative”.

Continue reading “Risk Aversion Makes Us Feel Ordinary”

Extreme Edges- Tough Choices

Within our present business, we are being many ‘transforming’ questions around technology. For instance, the cloud asks a lot of questions for us to determine and decide what ‘resides’ where, what stays inside, what can be dispersed out. Decisions we make will alter our performance ability and how we compete, how we connect and interact.

Are we smarter, can we download the software seamlessly, can we determine what data stays where? What is valuable, what is not, can we layer on increasingly complexity but at the same time strip away unnecessary activities or analytics?

Each of us is making tough technology-related decisions that will determine our abilities to evolve or simply fade away due to this set of evolutionary questions we are all facing.

Continue reading “Extreme Edges- Tough Choices”

The Impact Needed From Innovation

The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

There is a lot changing in and around innovation, are we accounting for it as much as we should?

The shifts taking place around innovation are been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. How it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs.

It is forcing us to reconstruct our innovative thinking, so as to gain from all this transformation occurring all around us.

Continue reading “The Impact Needed From Innovation”

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly

Shifting the Needle

Often we are guilty and ignore many of the constants that are required to be overcome in our innovation organizations. We need to ‘set in place’ many aspects of innovation to work. I call these those anchor points, otherwise, we often are simply increasing the layering on, more and more, not giving enough emphasis on how to integrate these into a newly emerging practice of innovation that builds on a solid foundation. Let’s reflect on the changes occurring innovation.

The basics of innovation still form around building the engagement, leadership, and involvement, in constructing a culture, the climate and environment needed, so as to allow innovation to evolve and thrive. Then there is that need for constant investment in people, in our networks and relationships, that all need to come together. These are the foundation to build innovation capacities.

Continue reading “Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly”