In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, innovation is paramount for organizations to thrive and achieve sustainable success.

Traditional approaches to innovation, often isolated and siloed within a single organization, may not be sufficient in addressing the complex challenges and opportunities presented by the modern business environment.

Organizations must embrace innovation ecosystems to harness the power of innovation and drive transformative change effectively.

What are Innovation Ecosystems?

Innovation ecosystems are dynamic and interconnected communities of individuals, organizations, and institutions collaborating to accelerate the development and commercialization of new ideas, products, and services.

They foster open innovation, where participants share knowledge and resources freely, leading to exponential growth in the generation and implementation of innovative solutions.

Why Embrace Innovation Ecosystems?

There are numerous compelling reasons why organizations should embrace innovation ecosystems:

1. Accelerated Innovation: Innovation ecosystems foster a collaborative environment where ideas are exchanged, cross-pollinated, and refined, leading to a rapid pace of innovation.
2. Broader Perspectives: Innovation ecosystems promote a more comprehensive range of perspectives and approaches by bringing together diverse stakeholders from various sectors, enhancing problem-solving capabilities and the likelihood of breakthrough innovations.
3. Access to Talent and Resources: Innovation ecosystems provide access to a pool of talented individuals, experts, and resources that may not be readily available within an individual organization. This can greatly accelerate the development and commercialization of new ideas.
4. Shared Risk and Cost: Innovation ecosystems allow organizations to share the risks and costs associated with innovation, making it more feasible to pursue ambitious projects that may not be viable for a single organization.
5. Reduced Market Entry Barriers: Innovation ecosystems can facilitate access to new markets, customers, and partners, expanding the potential for growth and revenue generation.

Key Benefits for Organizations

By participating in innovation ecosystems, organizations can reap a multitude of benefits, including:

1. Enhanced Innovation Output: Organizations can achieve a higher rate of successful innovation by tapping into the collective intelligence and expertise within the ecosystem.
2. Accelerated Time-to-Market: Shorter development cycles can be achieved through shared resources, expertise, and streamlined processes.
3. Expanded Market Reach: Access to new markets and partners can drive growth and diversification of revenue streams.
4. Improved Competitive Positioning: Innovation ecosystems can help organizations gain a competitive edge by fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability.
5. Enhanced Brand Reputation: Participation in innovation ecosystems can strengthen an organization’s brand image as a forward-thinking and innovative leader.

A Roadmap for Embracing Innovation Ecosystems

To effectively integrate into innovation ecosystems, organizations should consider the following steps:

1. Identify Relevant Ecosystems: Assess the organization’s strategic priorities and identify innovation ecosystems aligned with those goals.
2. Build Relationships: Actively engage with ecosystem stakeholders, establish partnerships, and participate in events and initiatives.
3. Contribute Value: Offer the organization’s unique expertise, resources, and insights to the ecosystem, forging mutually beneficial collaborations.
4. Foster Open Communication: Maintain open and transparent communication channels with ecosystem partners to ensure alignment and collaboration.
5. Continuously Adapt: Adapt strategies and approaches as the ecosystem evolves and new opportunities emerge.

Moving Forward

Innovation ecosystems offer organizations a powerful platform to accelerate innovation, expand market reach, and gain a competitive edge. By embracing the principles of open innovation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, organizations can harness the collective power of the ecosystem to drive transformative change and achieve sustainable success.

Move away from thinking of your innovation solutions only; think about how a collaborative, co-creative, open ecosystem of a rich diversity of knowledge, insights, and different market perspectives can combine into a dynamic innovation ecosystem.

Please find out more by contacting me through Agility Innovation or here, on how we can help you accelerate your transformation to Innovation Ecosystems.

The post Are You Embracing Innovation Ecosystems for Enhanced Competitiveness first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Breaking News

Year after year, this analysis has proven that those firms identified as being the most effective innovators consistently outperform their peers and the market.”

Now is that surprising?

It should not be but sadly for the vast majority of companies that do not treat innovation as seriously as they should, as the growth enabler, it keeps them in a constantly lagging position. It tells a very powerful message, one of investing in innovation seriously and in sustaining levels, you can grow well above others.

Points from this research

I’ve known Tim Jones for some time. Tim is certainly a recognized leader in innovation, growth and foresight – he has always been helping organizations grow and be ready for the future and does some terrific work.

He is a founder and programme director for different initiatives “housed” under 1) the innovation leaders org,- this is the research programme that identifies the world’s most effective innovators  2) the growth agenda org, – that sets about helping companies build new growth platforms and 3) the future agenda – the world’s largest open foresight initiative explores the key issues facing society over the next decade.

Recently Tim has been  announcing the results of the 2016/17 Innovation Leaders research that identifies the companies which achieve the most from their innovation activities and deliver tangible, sustained growth. Now in its 16th year, this annual analysis profiles the global leaders across 25 different sectors, (click this one to see who) highlighting the shifts taking place and identifying new achievements.

The 2016/7 analysis reveals three notable trends extracted from Tim’s supporting remarks from this recent report:

US Dominance in leading innovators

“After greater European and Asian presence over the past decade, this year 20 of the 25 leaders are US based organizations. This is the highest single country concentration since the research began in 2001 and reflects both the continued global dominance of the West Coast as a centre of innovation and its impact on other sectors across the country, some of which previously had a greater focus on M&A driven growth.

The remaining leading innovators are based in Denmark, Korea, Germany, Spain and the UK. The drop in European presence on the list, down 50% within a couple of years, should be raising some hard questions about the future of innovation across Europe”

My thoughts here: For me this does raise real concerns on innovation across Europe. It consistently is lagging and seemingly not catching up as it does not have all the levers to become more dynamic in growth as we are seeing in the tepid economic growth conditions seen in most European countries.

Partnerships at the Fore – the trend critical to finding new growth

“Although effective collaboration has been a key component of successful innovation for some sectors for some time, it is clear that, today, this is increasingly influential across the board. Organisation’s such as Accenture and Cisco and KT Corporation have positioned themselves specifically to help to drive customer innovation; companies like Adidas, Delta and LEGO are using partnerships to maximise brand impact; and firms including Boston Scientific, Dow Chemical and Lilly are all focused on collaboration across their respective ecosystems. Irrespective of sector, deeper partnership-driven innovation is very much at the fore. This does not suggest that the days of ‘going it alone’ are over, but highlights how, in an ever more interconnected world, delivering high impact change requires new alliances”.

My thoughts here: This is why I believe the power of platforms and working in ecosystems is certainly one of the key ways forward to “innovate for growth”

Big Bets

“While some companies such as FedEx, Inditex, PepsiCo and Reckitt Benckiser, continue to focus on delivering consistent incremental innovation, more radical breakthrough approaches are core to several organisations’ growth strategies. It is clear from both new product launches and underlying patent activity. Alongside Alphabet’s significant ‘Other Bets’ activities, Amazon’s strong moves into AI and Apple’s major R&D investments, others are also raising the stakes. Whether this is Bank of America’s proactive positioning on block-chain, Humana’s investments in digital, LEGO’s movie partnerships or Nvidia’s expansion from gaming into automotive, more established companies seem willing to explore and support a number of major intelligent future growth investments: Tesla’s bold moves continue to capture many headlines but others are not holding back”.

My thoughts here: The radical / transformation bets are beginning to take hold. More companies worried over their poor growth track records are looking to find “growth pathways” but struggle to find the ways to do this as they have failed to make the necessary, sustaining innovation capacity building investments.

About the Innovation Leaders Analysis

In order to gain an insightful and validated perspective on the true innovation leaders on a sector-by-sector basis, the annual Innovation Leaders analysis assesses the performance of 1,500 of the world’s top companies against a number of specific key parameters.

The individual innovation and growth performance of the top companies within each sector are compared against each other and additional research around the differences between the leading organisations is undertaken to ensure that the perspectives gained are fully up to date. This provides what we believe to be the most accurate picture of the companies that are the most effective innovators in each sector, and allows us to highlight the respective key competitive strengths.

The eight areas that we research and input into the assessments across different sectors are:

1      Organisational culture and supporting structure;

2      Strategic focus on innovation driving corporate growth;

3      New product launches and relative success ratios;

4      Growth in revenues, profits and market capitalisation;

5      Average revenue and margin per product or customer;

6      Investment in activities such as R&D and marketing;

7      Brand value and human capital growth; and

8      Peer review from within the sector.

For more information on this research please contact research@innovationleaders.org or to view the recent presentations.

So here is a link to the results of the 2016/17 Innovation Leaders research that identifies the companies and a link to their new website

I’d recommend exploring this as I picked this up on from Tim’s LinkedIn post, as it was only published today, 5th March 2017, and where I have drawn most of this ‘informing’ post.

Essential read for those wanting to build the business case for innovation and see who is leading in innovation and growth returns from their focus on this.

Save

The post Setting yourself apart through Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

With the dizzy array of choices, combined with technical prowess and ‘plugging’ these into ‘seen’ customer needs.

These  are setting about disrupting existing businesses and establishing new ones, on an ever-increasing global scale.

So what and how is the incumbent meant to react if it is an existing market?

What should they do when they realize the traditional markets where they have safely operated for years has suddenly been overtaken by a new market creation, one that has gone outside old borders in industry and product.

Markets that are in the hands of the technically savvy entrepreneur are to be sliced, diced and recombined, are providing totally disruptive approaches to existing business models.

If they get the factors right, hit the needs of customers in their design, understanding, agility in responding to learning and adapting, ability to be fast to market and capable of scaling up really fast, then they transform spaces, leaving the established players desperately struggling to find answers and catch up.

The whole world of business is changing radically.
The existing organizations are failing due to their lack of agility, flexibility and ability to adapt; they always want to manage through existing systems, structures and designs. They constantly want to just simply optimize the existing and not radically redesign these.

Mastering the technology, thinking in radically different ways and harnessing to this customer need is just not built into the DNA of most existing businesses. They can’t let go, they hang on to what they have got and not capable of radically redesigning, in time, to offset this digitally savvy usurper.

Within all the failures to change there still remains inside our existing organizations there is the inability to let go, to open up and share. Control still dominates. There is still this relative reluctance to form broader collaborations that will provide new ways of managing through this technology led revolution.

The Ownership mindset still prevails, that of managing the assets, real estate, resources, value chain ‘as ours’ still dominates most board members thinking. Eventually this reluctance to not let go of large swaths of their possessions will be the death of the organization.

Changes that need to be faced in many situations need to be radical and most existing board members are ill- equipped to understand this, as they have not gained through their own experiences the skills to manage in highly fluid, entrepreneurial ways.

Their careers has been built in their era of rising through the organization ranks. Growth was found through expansion, through being efficient and effective, in leveraging ‘owned’ assets, not in seeking radical reinvention.

The business world as it seems to be radically changing is exposing this weakness within established organizations. Growth has slowed significantly, it is coming from exploring risk far more, with the world the entrepreneur enters and accepts is part and parcel of the ‘play to win’ entrenched within their mentality.

The established corporate executive is poorly equipped to compete in this technology age, where lean, agile and flexible are required to explore risk and new visions, increasingly critical to build and operate under.

This not only is the age of the digital savvy entrepreneur but it needs to the age where connectivity and collaboration will determine new business models that provide growth and scaling in ways not seen before and this is where the large, existing companies should be in the ascendancy here. It is where the analytic and physical meet and combine.

Managing in different ways in large organizations
Existing companies need a different game plan. A more open one built on collaborating, on leveraging, on tapping into low-cost capital presently available and pushing really hard for radically different business model design.

The closest I have as an example is GE , do really see this video, at least the 1st 15 minutes where Jeff Immelt sets about explaining the changes and how GE is currently undergoing a radical redesign. GE is radically designing its approaches around all these different links to explain their positioning on 1. digital, 2. the industrial internet of things, 3. the connected cities, 4. software and 5. an ecosystem of different partners and connected into 6. the industries they work with, all participating in this radical redesign of business and finding different solutions.

In GE words for instance “GE is transforming itself to become the world’s premier digital industrial company, executing critical outcomes for our customers”

External collaborations built on emerging platforms of shared need are becoming vital to change the dynamics of existing industry or service to extract growth.

Addressing the needs of a global customer, demanding not just a certain uniqueness in their solutions but a recognition that their partners really work on improving the business in more connected ways where innovation and technology combine with traditional effectiveness and efficiency needs.

This is requiring this partnership of global organizations to come together and provide solutions where all involved have ‘skin in the game’ and outcomes that can be measured in real growth and savings.

Large organizations all collaborating and leveraging their assets can respond effectively to savvy entrepreneurs.

This collaborative imperative need acquiring the ability to manage platforms, operate in different ecosystems simultaneously to form a significant part of forming the competitive response position to counter the young usurper, the technology savvy entrepreneur, who lacks scale, resources, existing established partnerships all vested in finding solutions and access to vital capital.

The customer is making this the “digital business era based on their needs”, where constant redesigning and orchestrating the parts will keep ‘things’ fresh and relevant.

It will be consistently offering new sets of combinations and leveraging a network of diverse capabilities that businesses will grow and these come through the exploitation and exploration of technologies and diverse partnerships.

New combinations can led to real competitive advantage

It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where ‘people, things and their business offering’ can come together for mutual value based on the unique combinations that serve identified customer needs with all the different technologies available and the innovative way these are combined as the value offering.

There will be a constant evolving evaluation of the assets both internal and externally that make up this digital world (people, the business and things) that will take this out beyond the control of one company. This will evolve into a system of connected ecosystems working at a constantly evolving speed to gain identification and partnership adoption.

Innovation will certainly be one significant part of this, so it will not get any easier; it will be faster, more demanding and a heck of a lot more risky.

Managing within collaborative platforms the innovations that are needed to ‘work and deliver’ will be complex and demanding.

Innovation is hugely caught up in this transformational change.
To be an innovator, you are always restless but the present structures and frameworks that innovation operates within have been often highly constraining and heavily reliant on existing operations. Innovation as a system has often conflicted within the approaches taken by our present organizations.

There is an urgent quest in finding different approaches to allow the human side to shape, interpret and extract the value not just in what they want to see but through different lenses. It will be through the effective leveraging of all the different technologies that will fuel the innovation activity but in these new platforms of collaboration and ecosystems required to deliver game changing or game reversing innovation offerings to counter the usurper.

What needs changing is the innovation process to accommodate these changes that are occurring all around us. We will need to transform much within our systems but more importantly to orientate our skills to receive, translate and diffuse new knowledge, in significantly different ways.

The balance in innovation activity is changing
Whole new business propositions are emerging, where technology drives the change and many established organizations we know today are powerless to stop as they are unable to adapt fast enough to transform their business model, it is far to ‘vested’

They will need to adjust radically to a new collaborative model that leverages the assets they have and combine these with partners that can deliver global solutions that can scale, require large investments and resources, something the entrepreneur struggles with and is less capable to build, unless they have such a radical set of solutions heavily protected by IP and technology prowess. Time and resources to scale can be a wicked inhibitor unless you really have a unique offering, unable to be replicated.

The need is to transform into radically different form of entity that have intelligence, innovation, customer understanding of their real needs, deep connections, global reach in technology and capability to meet market needs, delivering to each customer’s specific needs.

Managing digital knowledge that adds value and growth

Digital technology is about to become the precursor for all the changes we have put off for years within our organizations. We need to radically improve our abilities to engage, relate and discover new innovation opportunities at a completely different level of faster performance.

Technology is presently moving way-ahead of the systems our organizations have presently in place, it is failing to extract the value and insights that others are beginning to clearly see and capitalize on through the connection of technologies and market insights.

Unless larger organizations fail to see the significant changes occurring then we will see the disruption of existing organizations will simply accelerate.

Today’s established organization needs to be fundamentally redesigned.
We are in a new age, the technology age and much needs to be challenged. This is no different from the arrival of the industrial age, it changes society dramatically.

We are dealing with a completely different set of mindsets, skills, procedures, governance, processes and responsibilities. To gain from the digital evolution taking place we need a robust, comprehensive and radical overhaul of much of what is going on within our organizations or they will not survive the current revolution occurring all around us.

It requires radical thinking in new design, leveraging technology and collaborations. I watch GE and how it is radically redesigning itself, it is significant “full-on, full load” . Presently it is the top of GE that is engaged in the huge change required, driving this down the organization, yet it is the organization underneath that is presently struggling to come to terms with this and the ongoing approach to business.

The level of change might be underestimated within GE but these next two to three years will determine this. Many other organizations must be watching with fascination and real interest but should be citing this as an example t learn from

In summary

I believe that many existing larger organizations will need to follow in their own ways this example of GE, by placing really big bets on connecting technology so it ‘runs through everything’  to not only stay in existence but to discover new growth paths built on technology, innovating prowess and established business that can be reassigned (realigned) to meet changing market and customer needs.

The revolution of business as we know it today is undergoing radical redesign in front of our eyes, are you watching from a safe distance, in the back seat in for the ride or in the front, driving this radically re-designed model in the real-time conditions that all pioneers face to prove it is the model of the future.

The post We are transcending traditional industry and product boundaries first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are opening up our thinking about where and with whom, to collaborate.

We are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into one that is having a far more open stance. We are searching for more collaborative innovation (external orientation) combining external partners into more ‘collective thinking’.

The shifts taking place are offering us the promise of “extra acceleration” that is needed to improve our innovation performances from concept to market delivery. Or, we hope it is!

Collaborative innovation is also leading us to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success, as nearly all novel ideas lay are mostly outside the organization’s domain of understanding. We need to always bring the knowledge inside and build from it.

As we increasingly include the customer and their more exacting needs within our understanding, these multiple collaborations and dialogues are building this better internal understanding to align our innovation with specific opportunities, relevancy and needs.

There also seems that many organizations are presently searching for new business models of innovation delivery or architecture.

Equally, we are constantly moving from managing in linear innovation processes and making these more adaptive, constantly looping back when new information or data is being discovered, increasing this knowledge and insight in highly dynamic, constantly evolving and informing ways.

I’d say we are presently in a state of flux on adjusting to all of what this might mean, in customer and market offerings, as well as internally adapting our structures to the new forms required in these business model changes.

Adjusting to many different forms of external relationships

We are forming external relationships in many different ways as this increased diversity does matter to each organization for building different competitive positions in their innovation offerings.

We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services through new business models that would not have been enabled by only having one organization attempting it. Collaborations are definitely adding value to the innovation equation.

Also, we are seeing complexity rising significantly. The search for finding greater value is shifting even further, increasingly forming around innovation ecosystems, loose federations of vested interest, forming and dispersing when the job is complete.

Our innovation exploration will become far more evolutionary and requires a completely different way to think and manage these ‘relationship contracts that are forming around a given concept of platform engagements.

As we tap into all the expertise up and down the value chain we will become far more aware and will need to explore all the depth in thinking, contributing and making available through extending our connections in deeper and broader ways. Knowing how to adjust, accommodate and shift our thinking requires us to become more agile, finding new ways of connecting and working.

Do you notice how the single industry focus is seemingly in decline?

Opportunities exist everywhere. We need to look well beyond our own industry to evaluate different perspectives and seek out the potential of different concepts that can be adapted to our own industry.

Many companies are exploring the value of becoming involved in a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries to build new communities that have the capacity to transform existing environments.

As an example, let’s take the “battle of mobile devices” has now become a war of building a better ecosystem. It is not one single product it is chasing an increasing share of minds, preferences, changing habits and tastes and to achieve this ‘paradigm’ shift the search is on for forming the ecosystem that can deliver this ‘transformation’. This is coming through apps, technology, and different value propositions built into a platform of offerings that combine through your mobile device.

We are seeking out relationships, not just within given industry sectors but into partnerships that allow us to deliver different offerings, that would not be possible without broader collaborations.  The relationship between NGOs and the private sector used to be combative rather than collaborative.

However, that is rapidly changing

Take for instance the Oxfam and Unilever partnership have been working together since 2010 to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Also the External Alliances department of the Nestlé Research Center(NRC) manages external collaborations and partnerships to complement the internal Nestlé R&D pipeline and innovation process. Currently, NRC participates in more than 200 external scientific collaborations worldwide.

Then Unilever created  The Unilever Foundry, a new platform that unites and expands the company’s existing efforts to work with startups.

The Foundry will serve as Unilever’s flagship, global tech collaboration and investment program, providing an accessible mechanism for startups to interact with them in their “pitch to pilot” approach.

Offering more one-stop, connecting places to go about your business
Interesting examples are how Autodesk and Adobe are building the environment for others to join, build and participate within. The focus is on rapid prototyping in collaborative environments. They are offering one-stop shops where technology, 3D printing, software design, their engineering services can be combined to work on your ideas, all ‘housed’ in one location.

For start-ups, small and medium-sized organizations are given even more chances to bring their concepts to life and find the opportunity to compete with larger organizations through this approach. They are helping you to bring your prototypes to life and create real functional end-use parts with additive manufacturing, production processes and software applications.

For instance, Autodesk facilities at Pier 9, in San Francisco is a place for design and fabrication, it includes a cutting edge digital fabrication lab, a woodworking shop, a metalworking shop, a 3D printing lab, laser cutting and printing capabilities, an electronics workshop, a commercial test kitchen, and an industrial sewing centre as well as smaller speciality project areas.

Stepping out is stepping up

Today there is a growing realization that thinking ecosystems can allow us to have a new framing of possibilities and offer us different mindsets that tap into different and diverse relationships, partnerships, alliances and collaborations.

This was unthinkable until recently, without the enablers to make these connections through technology and more open platforms where you can come together and collaborate.

The increasing value of participating in ecosystems or collaborative environments allows for large and small organizations to come together, share, exchange, create, scale and serve markets in ways that were not thought of before as we did not have the ‘ways and means’ of how technology connects us in so many different ways to new possibilities.

We are having the increased ability to interact and co-create in increasingly sophisticated and novel ways opens up new opportunities. These ecosystems form a bond of shared interest, of recognition and purpose which quickly becomes established as the new ‘commons’ in sharing and contributing.

Opening up to being supported should accelerate your innovation

Any opening up should be clearly designed to accelerate new innovation but as you build these external relationships or participate in these innovation centres, it can often equally ‘complicate’ the original intention by this different layering in of complexity.

Keeping it initially simple, exploring and exploiting, building and adding increasing value as you grow, enables an evolving value proposition that keeps you keen to extend beyond your borders from the increasing returns and more distinctive offerings you can provide.

We do need to open up, learn from others, look for and engage in far more collaborative ways across more diverse groups than ever before, each vested in a better outcome and then build this ‘acquired’ knowledge into your thinking and offerings for delivering better outcomes.

The post Opening up our innovation to stay relevant first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

They are pressured for time, to think, to fully engage and these mounting pressures are simply squashing out the opportunity to explore, it is actually squeezing the middle managers’ ability to build a more flexible, responsive organization. Innovation is in direct ‘tension’ with much that is being undertaken at the middle management level.

Changing the focus can provide a different mentality and energy force
Flipping the thinking on capabilities around for the Middle Manager

• Primary becomes the base, not the pinnacle. What they do in efficiency and effectiveness remains as their primary capability – you don’t alter this, it is too ingrained. This can only change over time and through their inner awareness and recognition that innovation needs to be embedded, alongside the existing ‘fixation’ on efficiency and effectiveness.
• Don’t try to radically change, make progressive step changes. Efficiency and effectiveness clearly remain the inventory repertoire of solid capabilities so as you set about to build a new platform, based on innovation, it layers and interlocks

• You target selected critical capabilities to learn and explore. You provide the MM with a new clarity of the emerging critical capabilities they need to build up for innovation to become a more sustaining, more in-built core. These are the capabilities that will provide the greatest impact for sustaining competitive advantage, not internal in focus but external in all its orientation to become closer to the real customer’s needs.

• At the top of the pyramid are the core capabilities they need to possess. This cluster of capabilities is centred on the critical capabilities to make innovation main stream, to become a daily part of their thinking, their make-up, and their intent to ensure innovation happens and flows throughout the organization.
• These differ according to the role, area of focus and contribution but are ones connected to innovation – design thinking, networking, motivating creative activity, encouraging experimentation, offering a more safe-to-fail environment, seeking better and more rewarding outputs and outcomes from the activity generated.

The middle manager carries through connection and identification as facilitators

Middle manager’s tasks should increasingly become more about performing the role of connectors and facilitators, not the guardians and gatekeepers for the decision-makers. Their work should include the encouragement that everyone is engaged in innovative work.

Making sure everyone has a ‘sight-line’ and identification into their contribution for any organizational innovation framework so they stay well-connected and engaged. The art of communicating and looking to build new relationships constantly becomes the key.

We need to find that new high ground for middle managers to be seen as the real connectors and enablers and not the current view as more often than not the blockers on innovation in gaining access to the knowledge to help us do a better job.

We all need to think about flipping our thinking of what is needed in the middle of our organizations and it does need to recognize the middle manager’s position, one that is more under threat than ever, needs fresh thinking, it needs new core capabilities.

 

*****

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Redesigning the organizations middle for a new innovation shape. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There is still a continued reluctance for exploring new radical innovation opportunities and although organizations ‘talk’ growth, they continue to struggle in achieving it through new innovation.

The incremental commitments to innovation still rule the day to move growth along. Until new sustaining confidence returns to our economies, risk mitigation dominates as markets continue to be more volatile and unreliable in predictive data and executive sentiment remains cautious.

Our organizations are looking for a higher certainty of return and seek sometimes endless validation and justification before they commit, even to small incremental changes. It is no wonder incremental innovation dominates in our innovation decisions; it is where reality sits for many. Are we heading off in a bad innovation direction?
Solidification in organizations seems to be moving towards simplification
As this incremental set of attitudes solidifies within organizations, have you noticed a growing trend of recognizing the processes and systems built up are actually more complex and creating ‘drag’ on performance demands? There is a move to greater simplification that strengthens the incremental mindset. We are perhaps ossifying innovation in our organizations if we elect to take this simplification route.

Risk readiness might be taking a bigger ‘back seat’ than we expect. This has significant implications as organizations continue to lose the ability to be ‘growth ready’ to execute on any sudden change of executive direction if market conditions suddenly change. Many are losing the ability to innovate beyond incremental approaches. It might catch them out badly if markets suddenly change and they are faced with a very different set of challenges demanding a more radical set of innovative solutions.

What signals are showing through?
Often we read of the likely demise of innovation but I think it’s ‘nature’ is changing. At the top of our organizations there continues to be this higher dissatisfaction with the value and returns within innovation and this is possibly being addressed in different ways down below in the organization, to compensate and appease.

Risky projects for the majority are not the place to blaze away in their careers; they want the known reward from keeping ‘steady’ the ship and being part of the incremental growth movement, to be seen as good operators working at constantly offsetting any risks, delivering what is wanted to be heard, not the bearer of bad news.

Do you spot this trend within your organization or industry? That growing movement where the ones intent on developing the routines that increasingly are only focused on incremental improvements are in the ascendency? Those driven by pushing hard for operation productivity to the exclusion of a number of traits associated with more radical innovation or potential breakthroughs.

Driving innovation through productivity has a real drumbeat
Are you in that place where there is this constant attention to improving practices continuously, to the exclusion of enquiry and only investing in the capacities that supports the delivery of this drive for greater productivity. A place where organizations are constantly seeking out those best practices, by wanting to eliminate variation, believing to simply copy others gives them the answer.

Do you gain that sense of impatience to evolve and develop in your own unique ways, as you attempt to short cut your own development in this blind copying? All around you feel that growing sense that the movement of six (sic) sigma is resurfacing, tapping into this quest for greater productivity and the ‘richer’ innovation potential seems to diminish?

When you have this incremental mindset then you become dedicated to standardization, you focus on real-time performance that can be measured and judged, you promote a more careful evaluation of innovation practices, striving to eliminate variances, you become relentless to reduce the unpredictable activities.

It becomes the prevailing organization mindset, the radical innovator drifts quietly away, disillusioned with where it is all going. Left to the gods of others making market change.

Organizations are more comfortable with improving productivity
There has been so many years of cost cutting, the consultant is also repacking it’s services from the present col-de-sac, largely played out, by housing organizations needs under the appeal for this quest for simplification.

Recently I was reading a report from www.sourceforconsulting.com that simplification is the next step in the evolution of productivity. The argument goes productivity is linked to growth and as our organizations are still very determined to do more with less, rather than simply less, the rise of rationalization grows and the demands to tap into this gathers pace.

Mitigating risk is the easier option
It is the attraction of combining this prevailing risk mitigation mindset with the idea of standardising and simplifying, validating through increased data verification and mining, striving for benchmarking and searching for best practices seems to go nicely with placing the innovation bets on increasing the incremental activities, all to the detriment of seeking out more radical innovation. Less risk, steady growth, fits with the short-termism of the board. Reward and remuneration become increasingly geared to this.

The vicious circle of meeting the board’s demands for immediate return simply tightens the noose and the longer-term building of capabilities for new innovation continue to slide, pushed off to yet another day, somewhere in the future. Does that really matter to the current board executive or his external board? Managing today’s volatility and uncertainties means risk mitigation is dominating. Let tomorrow be managed by someone else.

Are the majority of our organizations becoming the great sustainers?
A recent article by Gary Pisano on the HBR blogs was arguing for the defence of routine innovation. He suggests the vast majority of profit from innovation comes from the stream of routine, or sustaining, innovations that accumulate for years.

He mentions Intel as a great sustainer, with its value proposition of higher-performing, higher-margin microprocessor chips has not changed. Growth is slowing but Pisano’s argument is Intel has generated cumulative operating income before depreciation of $287.4 billion. That is a lot of cash generation to keep investing or distributing back to the shareholders.

Equally, Pisano argues Microsoft that started as a great disruptor but for much of the recent years, it has been following a sustaining path, defending its position. Of course it has perhaps missed out with this prevailing ‘mindset’ on some really key growth areas, yet it has earned $325 billion over three decades.

The article is equally suggesting Apple is a sustaining, more incremental organization today. It has generated $150 billion is cash flow since 2011. The emphasis is perhaps less on the next big disruption and more on aesthetically pleasing designs and versatility in their devices.

Are we leveraging to existing strengths and not grasping new opportunities?

Gary Pisano’s point is as an organization becomes well established, its innovation strategy needs to understand how to leverage distinctive existing strengths to generate and capture ongoing value.
It is about recognizing and organizing innovation around the repertoire of existing strengths to extend increasing the value from innovation, to play to your existing strengths. Or is it?

Are we not putting off our future by not investing in the future? How can we strike a balance on this and what should that allocation of resources be like? What needs to be brought in to add to the existing repertoire of skills?

Is the innovation message today becoming more deliberate in its design?
I wonder what is around the corner. So is the message today the one of trading off the risks of radical, disruptive innovation for the more incremental, sustaining innovation? Is this the period of evolutionary innovation, less revolutionary?

Of course, we all know that oblivion is potential ‘just around the corner’ as there are many competitive forces at work looking to disrupt.

For me, it does seem far too many of our organizations today might be far too focused on protecting and defending their existing positions, they are failing to extend beyond a core. Are our organizations working on incremental innovation to the detriment of more radical and riskier innovation? Is that unhealthy or simply prudent?

I fear the innovation balance seems not right.
Of course the strategic view of sustaining innovation while you explore and experiment the next big potential wave is the best approach but I tend to feel the dominating mindset of risk mitigation today, is driving many to simply just become incremental innovators only and that has a growing risk attached to it.

You continue to lose the skills, the understanding that more radical innovation is very different in time, in placing your resource allocation and building all the different skills and experience you need and these need to be consistently worked at. They can’t simply be turned off and on when changing market conditions are suddenly confronting you.

If incremental innovation dominates we lose the future
If one type of innovation prevails and begins to dominate, the risks of not providing for a healthy future increase, and we are ossifying our innovation.

We begin to lose our abilities to be responsive and flexible. We lose our agility to respond to changes in our markets.

What is always needed is to strike a good balance in our innovation portfolio, between the immediate and the future.

We need to not forget that we all must manage in all three innovation horizons to have a (greater) chance of achieving a really sustaining future.

The post Are our organizations ossifying their innovation or simply have no clue? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Organizations are struggling to forge a new path in innovation function and design that captures opportunities fast and also exploits the increasing need of being adaptive and flexible.

Organizations are looking at structures for their innovation activity that are taking a more agile and focused approach, wanting to push for constantly accelerating the process. New practices are emerging.

This is demanding more radical redesigns of the function, processes and structures around innovation. Innovators are being more challenged.

Against this need for new, more radical designs there still lies that underlying concern, often at the top of our organizations, on how to manage innovation risk without significant organisational disruption.

There is this lingering fear that pushing for more radical innovation can create significant upheaval within the organization. Innovation is being challenged by the view of “we want predictable innovation but radical enough to make sure we grow.”

Innovation has to manage within this conflicting message. It is through the well-designed system, processes and function that this can happen but this needs redesigning fairly radically to adjust to today’s world of wanting innovation faster than ever.

This is the sixth post centred on the executive innovation work mat

Within this post I focus upon the function, design, structure and processes needed for successful and sustaining innovation within organizations. In a recent series of articles I have looked at the seven components to raise questions, to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations around building innovation that sustains and delivers to the strategic need.

The lexicon of today’s existing management of innovation needs rebuilding.
You can read an incredible variety of advice on designing the innovation process.

These can include managing through idea management system software to reverting to simple ‘pen and paper’ brainstorming environments and spreadsheets.

Simply having in place some structured processes is essential to managing innovation. These can become very complex that go from idea all the way to final execution.

Then we get into the approaches to designing a portfolio to balance your innovation activity, the use of stage-gates to manage this, the whole product life-cycle process, the need for robust pipelines and well-designed platforms all enter the lexicon of managing innovation. It has become part of the lexicon of the innovator but not yet the common language we speak of, that a whole organization can talk and gather around.

Many of these systems we have become comfortable with, by working with them every day but I believe there is the need of some radical challenging and redesign needing to take place around these. Much within the innovation system needs designing out.

We need to rebuild a new common language surrounding innovation that is broader and more inclusive to all within our organizations. We need to recognize the changes taking place in competition, the need for a sense of urgency for growth and a ‘breaking out’ of the incremental mindset, that is still prevailing in many organizations.

There is a new chase for growth and even more through purposeful design.

This end choice is not which system or process has the best functions, the sexiest piece of software or the coolest design for its platform.

The choice is about going back and asking the basic of basic questions to the organizations top leadership: “what do you want innovation to achieve?”
You will get the simple answer: “growth” and also “innovation delivery needs to speed up in new products and services”.

You will also get “we need to outperform or at least keep us competitive in the market place” and then perhaps “innovation is expected to deliver what the market wants”.

These statements are all helpful but quite simply not enough. To deliver on innovations ‘promise’ you need to go deeper. Besides having a clearer strategic vision, for innovation, there needs this greater alignment to the strategic aspirations. For that, innovation needs explicit links and all of these points back to the strategic needs, goals and visions. The innovation work mat aids this exploration.

Achieving a well-designed design, function, structure and process is utterly dependent on the organization to translate the innovation needs and aims, define the workflow that ‘this will follow and how and where this will take place. Then it needs fully supporting and resourcing.

Today we need to think innovation outcomes differently.

The higher demand from innovation requires the system to respond far quicker to breaking opportunities.
Innovation needs to have a system that is constantly adaptive and flexible. Most of the rigidity needs to be designed out.

Organizations are requiring structures and processes that are far more agile, nimble, constantly recognizing speed as the essence of today’s competitive worlds.

The challenges that need to be addressed are replacing a linear system with a spiral one, where you constantly loop back to refit your innovation understanding back into the idea-to-launch system from the new knowledge you are gaining.

The system needs resetting around shorter bursts of high intense activity that factor in risk-based contingency, are encouraged to keep exploring and adapting.

The criteria to measure innovation passing through development, needs to become more open-ended. This can allow greater discovery periods to go where it is needed and not what the system is forcing it squeeze through a gate. The ‘go/kill’ criteria needs to change.

The system becomes a learning process to reduce uncertainty but keeps advancing on improving insights and physical demonstration that what is being investigated. This is through constant prototyping exploring and meeting customer or market needs with these stakeholders involved. As innovation discovery advances, the outcomes become more tangible, risks reduce.

We need to reduce where Innovation often sits waiting.

We need to challenge the constant waiting within the development processes for innovation.

This can be achieved through better designed systems of management perhaps a more value-stream analysis, accelerating by overlapping stages, encouraging concurrent activities, ensuring dedicated teams are assigned to properly resource projects.

We need to challenge and reduce the built-in slack within the innovation development system, wherever we can.

Today the emphasis is to maximize speed, working really hard on scoping the front end in greater detail really helps, and asking key questions on where the right track is and what this needs in resource, time and development and committing dedicated teams to the tasks.

We need to find better ways to incorporate lean principles, even six sigma into reducing the non-added value out of our innovation system. We need to provide succinct deliverable packages that tell the ‘advancement’ and learning story as the innovation concept moves along its development path.

Changing the milestone dependencies by using canvas techniques has exciting potential
We need to reduce the dependencies on financial milestones and make these more physical, with constantly evolving and functioning prototypes that demonstrate new value, so stakeholders can understand and provide even greater inputs on ‘seeing’ new value creation.

The principles that are being built up around the Business Model canvas within our business organizations offers much to be re-evaluated within our development life-cycle.

The introduction of new thinking such as the value of starting with a complete blank canvas or allowing the radical reworking of existing canvases of innovation concepts can offer new concepts to begin to be tested and evolve for products, and services as well as new business propositions.

The physical activities of testing, validating, and clarifying a more integrated design across all the parts do allow for exploring the uncertainties and risks in potentially imaginative ways. Taking a different design thinking to the development process can challenge old assumptions and processes.

We can constantly determine the critical but evolving assumptions and then work at delivering updates that can advance the development process through a dashboard approach of informing when critical assumptions or learning change.

We can take a more imaginative approach to the business model canvas to adopt many of its emerging tools and methods but this calls for a completely different mind-set in larger organizations in my opinion to their whole development process.

We are in real need to reinvigorate our innovation systems.

As I have stated in past posts, our legacy systems are holding us back today. We need to challenge our innovation functions, our existing design of the structure and processes to bring innovation into the core design of the organization, to align its value to present business conditions, where growth is required.

These do need to be more agile, adaptive and accelerated to meet the challenges and uncertainties organizations are facing. Innovation needs to step up to the plate and respond differently than in the past.

Innovation must be applied as a must to rethink and challenge what we have

Our processes and structures to manage innovation have become too linear, too rigid and far too planned, grinding through the innovation system.

Rethinking our innovation in function and designs calls for a more integrated approach offered in the Executive Innovation Work Mat.

Each of the seven components needs carefully designed to bring innovation far more into the core design of the organization and fully understood by all.

The post Are you evolving the innovation function and design first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Can we reset the clock? Or do we look afresh? How can we plug innovation back in? How does Agility figure in this? Knowing the answer to evolve innovation in an increasingly open world is never easy.

Can you drawdown and still rely selected parts from the past or do you need to step back and see emerging patterns in different ways? Can you make new connections but recognise the value of past learning but combine these differently? I think yes.

I’ve been taking some time out of the daily innovation business to look towards where I’d like my future direction for innovation to head. These are early days and as I learn, I sure I’ll pivot to emerging market needs within the innovation advisory market place.

I feel there are nine primary components that are making up my shift in my innovation focus for my future focal points. These are not, at present “written in stone” but I feel can move my innovating work towards a higher maximization of value for my advice to clients. Perhaps this will also allow me to have a sharper focus.

Let me share these:

Are these the best, do they push enough?

 innovation deeper into the organizations I am targeting? What do I need to attach to these primary components to make them as recognized needs?

I need to think deeper – any thoughts would be welcome to help in this shifting I believe is absolutely necessary for me?

The post Agility and Innovation in an Increasingly Open World first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.