We are caught in a real tug of war within much of what we do in business today; in our responses and reactions to many of the dramatic business conditions we are facing, many deteriorating or being challenged by greater global competition.

We are facing a very uncertain future if we base our actions on past practices. We need a new management model, one where we are pushing to seek increasing new knowledge.

We actually are in urgent need of a new management operating model.

A new management model where we are pushing to seek increasing ‘fusion’ but still want degree’s of separation, we are seeking out ‘flows’ through new knowledge to break down barriers that restrict new insights so as to turn these into new value creation, and we are encouraged to seek out and establish a higher ‘fluidity’ in what we do and reduce the rigidity we presently have in place in our current organizations.

There are growing concerns centered around how we need to adapt our management practices to manage in a digital world, we are grappling with the consequences and we need to find new solutions and approaches. We face issues made up of increasing information overload, coming at us at increasing speed and failing in our abilities to fully interpret this. We lack the agility and flexibility to respond to what this all means in both its implications and potential, for sensing and seizing new value creation from understanding this.

We need a new management practice to deal with our digital world. One real need is for increasing knowledge and then being equipped in interpreting this in our learning, daily routines and activities is becoming paramount to break out of a declining performance cycle.

Applying the three horizon lens to develop new management practices

If you apply the three horizon lens we need to construct management and its performance approaches differently you begin to see the pathway for change.

Applying the three horizon lens to new management practices

The idea grew from picking up on Deloitte’s Shift Index that has come out ever year since its first release in 2009 I came across a way for me to frame this.

Our horizon one (extending business as usual) needs a deeper, yet strategic restructuring of firm economics to generate the maximum possible value from existing resources

For horizon three (the future need) we need to develop new management practices to be effectively catalyzing and participating in different knowledge flows, fusing what is gained into new value creation, reducing friction and barriers, constantly refreshing and extracting from the relevant knowledge flows that provide scalable learning pathways.

Our horizon two (transition from old to new) we need significant innovation, learning and experimentation to drive scalable participation in knowledge exploration and exploitation, a duality of fluidity and stability.

See here and here for a fuller explanation of the different approaches needed in three horizon approaches, if you are not familar with this framework approach, they will help.

Let me build this out in why we need to change the way we gain knowledge and translate this.

My three points of reference in researching and framing this post are, firstly, Deloitte’s ongoing work on the Shift Index, providing a longer-term set of indicators to how we can change performance through the flows of knowledge, capital, and talent (their second wave). This is coupled with my own studies and commentary on fluidity and thirdly, the “stock and flow” of knowledge and how we can harness it for our needed sustainability and this new value creation.

The future of managing will be through ecosystems and platforms

I am constantly drawn to ecosystems and platforms as the connecting mechanism that can drive each of the stages of the three horizon view taken here. It is going to be through greater collaboration, sharing and exchanging we can learn a new form of ’emerging’ management practice

In our past management practices, we have operated and exploited the linear world for ever-increasing efficiencies and effectiveness. This relied on stability, predictability and a willing end-user, ready to accept ‘our’ offer of product or service. All three of these conditions are increasingly absent from our world today and will increasingly be challenged in the future. Our increasing connectivity, brought about by our digital world is giving us increasing volume, richness at increasing speed. We are in a hyper-connected world, potentially global for all of us and increasingly we will operate in interdependent ecosystems that allow us to collaborate and share, driving up awareness and performance.

Classic models of management get broken down in any ecosystem approach, that is why it has such an exciting potential. You have to be open, prepared far more to share, to build trust and seek out increasing relationships and diversity of knowledge and much of that comes from external sources of new knowledge. Collaborating in collective ways helps break down complexity. To be ready to respond we must be ready to seek out unexpected outcomes, to be increasingly exposed to new opinions, experiences and learn from all those adjacencies and external connections help to  add and define new potential within our domain of expertise. What will be rewarded in this connecting world is agility to respond, the ability to absorb and learn quickly, and the nimbleness to translate and adapt new learning into insights and eventual outcomes, that build out our businesses, keeping them healthy, growing and sustainable.

Our world is shifting from scalable efficiency to scalable learning

In the work of John Hagel and John Seely Brown and their associates at Deloitte University Press, this scalable change from efficiency to learning is a central tenet of their work. Achieving scale is critical for all in business, be it the entrepreneur or start-up or the large institutions wanting to span the world. If you wanted to scale it had to be “efficient and effective” in our past approaches. Yet as the two John’s point out that is great in the stable, more predictable world or market conditions of the past but not when everything is evolving rapidly or changing before our eyes. The efficiency mantra often allows for applying the “lowest common denominator of need” and reduces the impact of ‘true’ innovation.

But we are now in a world that sees exponential change caused by digital technologies, this is making everything we do as uncertain. We arte experiencing consumers increasingly demanding personalized service and offerings, then the past standardizing approach is significantly under threat. We are seeing increasing friction, deteriorating trust and growing gaps in expectancy between “what we want and expect with what we receive” and institutions need to respond to these pressures. It cannot be the approach “business as usual” it needs a new recognition as outlined in my horizon one frame above.

We are recognizing “existing knowledge is depreciating at an accelerating rate”. To create new knowledge we have to step out of our silo of the one institution into a collaborative world, connecting with others where the physical, virtual and management of systems help accelerate learning. Increasingly these learnings will come through ecosystems and platforms where you can meet and exchange in systematic and holistic ways, building growing trusted relationships, sharing and exploring ‘collective’ knowledge to solve common problems.

You move from the need of conformity to be efficient, seeking out where you fit within a ‘given’ system you look for increasing the ‘flow’ of learning by encouraging increasing fluidity and being highly adaptive. Your role is not to fit as such, it becomes how you can separate, identify and deliver more value, to translate and learn faster, to rapidly connect understanding, ideas and potential outcomes for new value.

Balancing fluidity and stability

The world we live in is relentless, it is demanding and constantly changing. We begin to believe it is in a “continuously unstable state” yet it is this ongoing receiving of contradictions we can build a different, more fluid state that is adaptive, responsive and encourages different thinking to break through our bewilderment.

We need to build far more for countervailing functions and opinions, have greater understandings of pattern recognition and maintenance and be highly adaptive in our outcomes. We must start by establishing a different boundary building understanding (governance, risk-taking, ability to recognize managing exceptions are becoming the rule in individual consumer worlds), have a growing identity formation set of mechanisms and responses (in customer touch points, response alternatives, conflict skills to resolve issues early) and develop the problem-solving architecture to be constantly evolving (shared, reinforcing and breaking down present orthodoxies).

Ambidexterity and countervailing processes need developing and embedding. Achieving a constant duality to manage in our three horizons. It is the horizon two exploration and exploitation that allows this change in managing transit from the old (h1) to the new (h3). We need to re-enforce and extend (h2-), we need to ‘undo’, explore and redesign (h2+).

To become fluid we need to absorb and respond at faster rate and that comes from the increasing flow of new knowledge. We need to be highly adaptive to a constant, multi-faceted world of connections, systems and knowing where the different pieces need to be found, so we can then ‘pieced’ together into the ‘new whole’ you are needing to design, at individual or institutional design level.

To get to a point of being fluid we need to hone our navigation skills, we need to have more assignment driven work, not stuck in repeating work that can be automated far more effectively in today’s digital world.

We need to be more agile, iterative, to be encouraged to be experimenting and exploring. We need to believe and given trust to execute and drive our results into more value-add. We need to seek out empowerment, participate in collaborative endeavors, and most importantly grasp the makeup of value creation. To get to this point we need to build one of those boundary spanning guidelines of a sound conflict resolution pathway for ourselves, our customers and our institutions and these will be ‘living constantly evolving pathways‘ that feed on new learning.

To get to this ‘fluid state‘ we all must strive for authenticity, trust, and recognition. This only will come from a real willingness to seek out diversity in opinion, knowledge and experience, to be highly visible and understanding what that means in risk and reward, looking to constantly enter and exit projects where we can truly contribute to driving up our own confidence and belief, our personal satisfaction and contributing worth.

If we can design a framework that transforms us into being highly fluid and adaptive, we can move through horizon two and its conflicting challenges. We are seeking to balance stability with an ongoing need for dynamism and responsiveness, at agile and fast ‘reaction’ times from our ‘incoming learning’ and ‘outgoing value-added‘ outcome

Seeking out the relevant flows within new knowledge for increasing scalable learning, our new institutional state.

The stock of our existing knowledge is rapidly diminishing, we need to seek out the flow of new knowledge. Our fixed and enduring know-how and sets of experience are being diminished in their value inside organizations. What was once accumulated as ‘stock’ inside the organization was how organizations exploited this for profit. Yet this is under attack from multiple sides.

We are seeing a compression of time in life-cycles, we are not in stable markets but increasingly volatile. New generation replacements, driven along by digital solution power, are pushing innovation through the pipeline faster than before. We are failing to keep up with the knowledge you need. It simply can’t reside in one company, small teams or simply with one person, it requires a network of partners collaborating and contributing their expertise into exploring and exploiting new solutions, tapping into this inter-firm knowledge flow and experience with innovative solutions that are more aligned to customer needs, solving challenges and growing complexity.

The search for knowledge means a higher emphasis on tacit understanding (this link explains tacit knowledge)This understanding comes from relationships and exchanges, from personal stories, experiences, and personal connection. Our ability to tap into this tacit knowledge comes increasingly from these ecosystems and platforms set up to exchange, collaborate, and build a network of common understanding. A common understanding of a problem or challenge, through the diversity and power of the community that works together to find solutions and resolve the multiple issues.

I do think Deloitte’s view that we need to move to scalable learning is essential to achieve. This needs completely new practices to be effectively catalyzing and participating in different knowledge flows, fusing what is gained into new value creation, reducing friction and barriers, constantly refreshing and extracting from the relevant knowledge flows.

Knowledge intensity can risk fragmentation and inequality, it can lead to concentration of market power. It is finding more universal practices can level the playing field. Digital is part of this leveling. We equally have to learn how to create, disseminate and use knowledge differently.

Here I am a particular fan of absorptive capacity that pursues potential knowledge and extracts out its realized value through transformation and exploitation.

As more information comes towards us at increasing volume, we need to find ways to adapt and interpret this. There is a greater set of ‘forces of variation’ for innovation solution selection, all requiring this increased knowledge understanding. To codify and relate to this we need a structure to manage this knowledge flow, hence my belief in us needing to understand absorptive capacity.

In a future post, I will look more at knowledge and all its important components. We totally understate the value and importance of knowledge. It is managing the different types of knowledge that offer us the solutions in our digital age. We need to design a scalable learning approach (horizon 3 outcome) and recognizing all of what ‘makes-up’ knowledge is important to build into this h3 solution.

In summary

We need to harness the capacity of learning through the competencies for new knowledge acquiring. We need to replenish the internal diminishing stocks of knowledge with a constant flow of new knowledge. This comes from outside, it comes through networks, relationships and collaborations increasingly built on ecosystem and platforms.

It is our increasing ability to participate in this growing formation of managing knowledge flows, harnessed through digital solutions, as they will move us to value creation. Ones that are increasingly  collaborative, between partners but also with customers, all increasingly contributing their knowledge, insights, and needs to finding joint solutions and resolving challenges.

To achieve better outcomes and to drive sustained growth we need different management practices. We require scalable participation (ecosystems) to relate too and generate new knowledge flows. We need to be increasingly responsive, adaptive and fluid in any design of structures and solutions.

Performance requires us to quickly learn and translate, that cannot come from the pursuit of efficiency, it comes from learning to be highly adaptive and responsive, to have a high level of fluidity to fuse all the flows of knowledge into new potential value creation.

We do need this new management model to adapt to the digital world and all the uncertainty of our prevailing conditions of more open competitive and challenging markets, more demanding customers and the constant waves of information and ‘forces of change’ raining down on us. We need a new way of working to counter this.

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The post Fusion, Flow and Fluidity are needed in our Management Practices first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Innovation can drive change, change is required.  Without innovation, we progressively die, as we provide no option for change, no prospects of new, different growth. So why does it continually fail to happen?

We innovators certainly need a new model of change, for at least eight important reasons I can think of, that render what we have practiced in the past as obsolete:

1. As innovators we aren’t simply responding to external change, we are creating change, both for customers and for our companies and markets. (the inside, proactive change vs external, reactive impact). The ‘flood’ of data, of customer dialogues is offering us ‘signals’ to explore and seize opportunities by being agile, aware and alert to the new discovery of needs not being fulfilled.

2. External change is far more unpredictable, in global markets new threats emerge from anywhere, at any time and often delivered in totally unexpected ways, through new business models that totally cut through and disrupt the existing positions. They can render the existing obsolete in seemingly rapid time, irrespective of the efforts to respond as they have discovered the unmet need to deliver solutions to it.

3. The pace and nature of change is not slowing down but accelerating and will continue to accelerate at increasing pace, frequency and amplitude of change. Organizations need to pick up the pace, learn to accept a greater risk, experimentation and rapid adjustment on the new knowledge flowing in to build the final outcome to the needs of the market and customer.

4. Sudden rapidly evolving markets make everything needing to be ‘super’ responsive by existing players, to the sudden realization they have missed opportunities, Many existing organizations cannot cope and alter with this demand for agility, flexibility, and responsiveness. They need to (re)learn this and build it into their systems and often this realization comes too late ,they have fossilized.

5. As often demonstrated, most innovation has the potential to be business model innovation, which will require change. As more innovation becomes focused on business model innovation, this will create even more change and challenges.

6. We recognize that change is no longer an occasional threat but a constant companion, so we need to shift from the idea of change as a potential inhibitor into one of developing an ongoing change capacity as part of our unique competitive advantage, evolving and pushing boundaries.

7. The idea that companies can achieve a protected steady state where change won’t affect them doesn’t seem to apply anymore, as long periods of stasis, or standing still, is no longer possible, we must be able to learn to evolve constantly and reflect that more ‘dynamic’ condition.

8. We need to think of change as a capability that we constantly deploy, rather than a threat we typically avoid and fail to understand. We need to develop change as a capability, to build skills, reduce barriers, to extend our capacity and competencies through experimentation and discovery. We need to push out of our comfort zone constantly.

Are we asking ourselves do we recognize our need to change?

How can we focus the energy around the boardroom table on to this linking the future work to the shape and the organization’s needs, making the growing innovation debate as strategic as it can be? One where change becomes a constant, delivered through innovation.

How are we going to design our innovation capabilities, competencies or capacity unless we fully recognize the dramatic changes in business that are now underway and what this needs to be addressed, to allow for a more responsive, fluid, agile and adaptive culture, to flourish and respond so as to generate the better innovation of the future we need.

Recognizing differences

There are different traits, actions and activities to think through. Here are some of the needs:

* We need to build far more serendipity into what we do, also random connections, as well as purposeful discovery, by seeking out increasing connections and engaging in networks of learning and mutual exchange.

* We need ‘safe’ places where we are turning curiosity into reality and building our innovation mental abilities for growth, development, and accomplishment, opening up and having others being receptive and then jointly translating this into new innovation.

* We need to embed into our new innovation core new routines and thinking. It is determining the changes needed by those new combinations of fusion by seeking out the chemistry from all the connections and exchanges, pushing for creative collisions, positive tensions and dynamics to engage fully in innovation, so the culture, climate, and environment are vibrant, challenging and exciting.

* We need to constantly seek the new space from knowledge exploitation and exploration, redefining the organization edges, enlarging and enhancing our understanding.

* We need pushing constantly out, constantly evaluating, discovering and aligning growth options and then seeking out those outcomes that potentially offer the right return on innovation

* We need to place learning into the center, to allow our capability building, new competencies to grow and evolve.

* We need to focus on the constant wish to improve, so as to improve performance and capacities by focusing on both our mental and physical abilities to develop our position and function, to explore, expand and exploit. Each contributes to our ability to receive, hold and absorb new knowledge. We measure these by the increased volume and quality outcomes, others provide back to us.

* We need new structures, attitudes, investment and motivation to change, to focus on innovation building that needs being instilled, drive with a dedicated focus from the top, not just as a commitment that must happen but integrated and aligned with the strategic thinking and planning, worked through a clear pathway of change to achieve a different, core innovation capability.

* We need to determine the abilities to deliver in effective, focused, efficient and aligned ways. Knowing what is important, seeking out the actions to support and deliver the part needed to achieve the desired goals. Adjusting as we go, as we learn, ramping up what is working, dampening down what is clearly not.

* We need to build innovation by working it continuously.  On making our environment into this more evolving, fluid and dynamic one, where the climate and culture of innovation thrive and grows from this constant feeding and attention.

Our innovation problem that never seems to change

Innovation requires increasing agility, flexibility and allowing creativity to flourish on a constant, evolving basis. Today, innovation often stays outside the mainstream system and operational structures, most often to the organization’s detriment, as we simply accept innovation work as something that does not fit the ‘norm’.

Innovation needs to be fluid, open, responsive, adaptive; sometimes reliant on the instinct, hunch or powerful insight that is never ‘predictable’ but suddenly emerges from a collision of events, or random thoughts that lead to a new insight, a game-changing one.

Of course it is really hard to turn this ‘randomness’ or serendipity found in innovation into a system but it is certainly not impossible, as the few who recognize the ‘power’ of innovation continually show in their capacities to innovate, as they recognize they have real growth as there need and innovation, however hard, delivers on this

This is today’s innovation problem, tackling the differences in managing innovation, so often we can’t bring innovation into the very core, it feeds the core but it just never becomes the ‘beating heart’, for many, it seems too hard and disturbs the “business as usual” needs until eventually they implode, wiped from existence, lost in a wistful world of “if only.”

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The post Is innovation really important to you? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The problem or challenge with this focusing upon ‘breaking’ practices or new methodologies, are they can be so much harder to master and build them into established positions and practices, without the right amount of debate, understanding and assessing the implications and impact.

This often needs different perspectives to form the final position. We fail to constantly review and re-engineer the innovation process and tend to layer more upon it, without a consistent reassessing what we are trying to achieve.

The excitement of ‘breaking innovation’ is in the pioneering, experimenting, discovering, sharing and exchanging. If you are always open to this new thinking, it does enrich and advance innovation understanding and that makes it so valuable but so demanding.

Many of these for me have been utterly enjoyable to explore as they advance our understanding of the emerging management practice of innovation but you can’t ‘gloss over’ the basics of innovation.

The ability to translate innovation understanding is a constant challenge. The ‘lead- lag’ time is sometimes very long and tortuous to make the necessary changes within established organizations to achieve the necessary ‘buy-in’ and understanding of the impact and return and establish a certain rhythm and return.

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly?

Often we were missing the constants that are required to ‘set in place’ for innovation, 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.

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 a constant investment in people, in our networks and relationships, that all need to come together. These are the foundation to build innovation capacities.

Then, we have the investments in structures, systems, and governance, making sure these are flexible and robust enough to make what we work upon, as responsive, agile, adaptive, exploitative and exploratory. All coming together so we can end up with great new ideas, things and most importantly, in winning successful concepts that grow our business.

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

The shifts taking place has 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 and then, it is forcing us to reconstruct our innovation thinking, so as to gain from all this transformation occurring all around us.

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period have come from a great explosion of Lean Management principles and practices and the incorporating of Design thinking into our work. Both of these are being rapidly embraced by our organizations, large and small. How these are fully and successfully integrated remains a challenge for most to resolve today.

The understanding of relating more to individual customer needs, building new business models has been greatly encouraged by the real need to “get out of the building” and learn to pilot, experiment and build a growing system of prototyping on what we learn from these engagements and testing, many emerging from innovation labs, encouraging an intrapreneur spirit, set up on entrepreneurship principles.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around that are about to massively change the way we collaborate and build solutions that are more complex and require many parties to come together and attempt to solve greater challenges. The movement towards the different crowdsourcing techniques and all the variations (or derivation’s) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’ have changed the game.

Innovation is constantly opening up when you combined  diverse thinking with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much.

The raw power of knowledge needs harnessing and translating

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks that need deeper capture and translation, so as to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the constructing of minimal viable products and rapid experiment and design to increase in focus, so as to accelerate innovation discovery and delivery.

We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before with our innovation concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well into the “how” from the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it certainly still seems. Speed is dominating at present then we all are in need to “Scale” and resolve the constant worries over the “Execution” of the new value proposition.

There is this constant, pressing need, to absorb, synthesize and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovation thinking.  It becomes a constant task to manage just this new understanding, translating it and embedding new practices as difficult, time consuming and tough.

Reflecting on all of this – so what does this all mean?

There is this need to be reacting to this in new framing ways, building this into a new innovation road map for our businesses.

It can be a dangerous assumption that we ‘think’ innovation is well understood; often it is not, it continues to be a serious source of frustration and disappointment, at all levels. This essential ‘fixing the basics’ still needs a clear focus to resolve, coupled with new emerging practices to forge a pathway for others to understand and feel comfortable to use. It needs a constant balance between extolling the old, exploring the new; that blending of practice, existing, new and breaking.

Our need is to ask is how can we blend this emerging thinking into core aspects of the innovating beliefs and structures in place, so they can build and contribute to the ongoing building of innovation capabilities, competencies and capacity, surely a key focal area?

My work entails being reactive, reflective and responsive.

Sometimes as we take stock it does surprise you on how the innovation needle had been moved, again and again. This sometimes makes navigation sometimes difficult

It is clear innovation is constantly advancing, yet, offering my reflective thought here, it can have countless layers of fresh paint but if the basic foundation is not solid, it only hides the truth underneath, that much is simply “rusting away¨.  Innovation needs a clear, strong core that needs constantly re-calibrating to the changing market conditions we are finding ourselves in.

We so often miss this fundamental addressing of the urgent need for peeling away these old decaying, rather rusty layers and fixing the basics on a new design, reflecting where innovation is today (not in the past) and where we believe it is heading for in the future by balancing out the portfolio and equipping ourselves with the capabilities and capacities to build these in progressive ways.

May I ask?

Have you ever had an independent assessment of your innovation process simply because the basics around innovation are not common knowledge? I would argue that so often senior teams are somewhat paralyzed in terms of being able to move forward strategically, despite the need and recognition of innovation’s importance

The challenge is how to unlock this often conflicting set of innovation pressures and bring everyone to a common point of understanding of today and where all need to head in the future.

I certainly believe we are in need to conduct some vigorous analysis of the innovation system as we have understood a lot but much does need to be challenged as the future will be managing innovation in a very different way; more collaborative, more open, more reliant on technology and customer involvement

I’d certainly recommend starting with both an Innovation Work Mat discussion and a Three Horizon framing of the future from today’s understanding of where we think it is heading and how can we plan out how to get there, in sensible steps, as part of any comprehensive review.

We do need to not only embed innovation practices we need to strive to update these- can I be of help?

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The post Reflecting on our innovation practices first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Innovation is certainly one of those in need of concerted effort to bring up to date within organizations, to make it more inclusive and that can come through delivering it across the organization within the cloud. Highly visible, agile and core to the organizations future, seen by all and truly valued.

Let me outline my initial thoughts here, put the seat belt on for the ride please: making the business case.


The cloud solutions do seem to look promising for those adopting a strategy of increased use of the cloud as a future IT approach. They seems less emphasis on the cost savings but its potential to improve business flexibility and gain access to a wider array of technologies and solutions.

Also there is a growing view that the cloud supports critical aspects required today and in the future, that are more radical in organizational design.

Those that look to run IT processes in the cloud, such as development tools, test tools, development systems, test systems, service management and performance management as well as incorporating SaaS offerings (such as Salesforce) with their internal systems, and with this host of cloud hosted systems to make hybrid architectures that promise radical changes can be realized within our organizations.

If these changes can be delivered, then I think they will be welcome by all sides inside organizations, each grappling with all the changes swirling around the business today and forecasted to become even more volatile in the future.

Clearly organization design and its core processes and systems needs fresh, vastly different approaches, to tackling chronic organizational rigidity that is seen today. Business unit leaders are frustrated with a lack of new, more radical solutions to their needs of being responsive and agile.

Switching into the cloud can transform IT into a provider of on-demand service when the business needs it!

Switching to the cloud can also radically alter the position of IT as a real provider of the services you need to do the job, when it is needed, more on-demand. It can offer those in ITa future role of looking constantly towards being the ‘go to’ service provider, that is constantly adding the supporting structures for supporting new value and impact in flexible systems and processes that can constantly be adaptive to meet the business needs.

Critically the cloud can help significantly in the quest for speed, agility, scalability as well as being designed for the increasing need of having in place support structures for a more ambidextrous organization. These need different solutions than today’s systems and will become the big IT challenge to manager over the next few years.

There is a constant talk in IT circles of “everything is a service” and if this translates as the business expects this can have a real transforming ring to it. Business groups require faster execution, reduced time-to-value and higher levels of flexibility, and perhaps, IT might have a way to deliver these through the cloud. The promise is ‘hanging out’ there it seems.

Bringing innovation fully into the corporate fold

Thankfully, for many perhaps, innovation has been a little out, off on one side of enterprise resource planning. To some degree this has helped but also is rapidly becoming a real performance drag, innovation needs to be more central in core process thinking.

I believe the solution is to buy into ‘innovation in the cloud’ as the next practice idea. Today many innovation processes and systems have been fairly stand-alone, remote from the clutches of IT and not being ‘integrated’ into the Enterprise Resource platforms so far, would all have to go and that will have a few cries of “OMG no!”

On-premise IT solutions for innovation remain highly constrained.
I’m certainly against innovation continuing to stay in the on-premise platform at all. Of course, any migration plans will give the current systems sometime but the cloud just seems to be an alluring prospect that meets many of innovations needs.

Innovation can only really thrive and move considerably up a notch or two in performance and recognition, if it can obtain the integrated flexibility and achieve the more open access to all shades of business agility that can be found, if we have the opportunity.

Innovation runs counter to repeatable processes; it needs to leverage this ambidexterity of having access to all that makes it adaptable– nimble, agile, constant change, and experimentation, prototyping that is tailored to explore incremental innovation in faster, more flexible ways.

Alongside this to allow for more radical innovation that taps into greater needs for mobility, usability, elasticity and yet still be aligned to leverage, exploit and maximise opportunities needs to run in parallel.  It sounds a tall order doesn’t it, yet I’m not sure it actually is, when you stand back and think about this and try to begin to piece together all the pieces of the puzzle.

I think there are multiple ways forward exploit the cloud

There are many thoughts one could explore with a little bit of imagination, alongside a decent knowledge of what is possible today and what can be possible in the future, that is already in our ‘present line-of-sight by using something like the three horizon methodology.

I’ve also written about the need for a “innovation mashup” previously, as well as I can see the clear advantages that all these emerging platforms are providing that are delivering radically new innovative business models. Large organizations need to climb on board to thinking innovation differently.

Large organizations are lagging in the ‘responsive league’ clearly, they need to think beyond holding everything in house and look towards a more radical innovation agenda for change. Growth does not come from incremental dripping techniques; it comes from spotting emerging opportunities and turning those into commercial value as quickly as possible.

The current legacy within any innovation systems is creating such a drag on organizations current innovation performance and why are our organizations not recognizing this?

Putting innovation in the cloud is itself disruptive.

It offers a real chance to innovate existing business practices, it can give increased visibility. Innovation can be ‘seen’ throughout the organization, not tucked away in dark corners, scrabbling to gain attention. If you take the example of what salesforce.com did in cloud computing to transform the customer end, then why can’t getting innovation on multiple platforms in the cloud really show its potential as well?

Then innovation connects and suddenly the customer becomes a co-creator of value and collaboration really comes to the fore also, as something necessary and needed.

The speed of any innovation implementation process is determined by demand and acceptance though.

Any new design is determined by its adoption, diffusion and usage, all the way through to exploitation and uptake. I’ve written about the need to adopt improved practices for capturing and distributing knowledge through applying absorptive capacity that give greater structure and receptiveness to change that is increasingly needed to cope with growing inflows of information, knowledge and increased big data insights.

We need to find ways to ‘push’ organizational readiness for innovation to change and that comes from the top really pushing harder to achieve real growth from new opportunities but supporting the infrastructural changes this requires, a real place for IT and HR to become more involved in preparing change.

We also need to reflect on what is needed to help assimilate innovation as it will continue to have a complex, non-linear need in processes and this often in the past has simply kept it out of the ERP space, for example.

Equally due to this exclusion, sometimes the constant need to focus on innovation falls out of the corporate line-of-sight daily, as it is not part of this core, organizational supported process, it operates on one side for many to feel not involved. It comes back into the spotlight only when something has not happened, not as promised and that then ‘expends’ lots of negative energy chasing down answers, seeking explanations.

Resolving existing thorny issues need to be brought bring into the innovation cloud equation.

We need to tackle some problems within the innovation that will simply not ‘go away’ but will remain thorny issues until we tackle them ‘full on’.

The greater emphasis on the softer aspects of innovation in skills, attributes and collaborative techniques calls for different thinking on talent development, learning new topics, working in different, far more project related ways that are responsive and agile to ‘seize the opportunity’ by actively seeking the solutions that are available but most probably beyond the walls of the organization and this can be through the cloud.

The art of letting go and opening up to collaboration and co-creation is a growing challenge for all organizations. The pressure is on finding the ‘ways and means’ to enable that to happen.

Another strong argument for promoting the cloud where you have a constant array of collaborative tools and applications to help draft, design, brainstorm, make mock-ups live, share to-do lists in real-time, manage projects, offer concept board development on the fly, provide facilities for all aspects of audio, mind mapping and creative enhancing techniques and on and on.

I’d argue that innovation needs the very best ways to tease out understanding, not locked in selected mindsets of product developers. We need to offer interactive, real-time collaboration tools to make the design and execution of innovation a whole lot better.

Lastly, without droning on more, we need to find ways to orchestrate, monitor, allow for broader performance monitoring, add tools as needed on-demand, to build and deploy capacity management and modelling outcomes against performance within innovation all are needed. We need to change the ways we report on our total innovation activity,  not in the days and weeks these requests can take, but at the speed, the cloud can potentially provide and the business requires, fast.

So I am making my call of innovation and its need to head towards the cloud fast!

We have come a long way in understanding innovation, yet it still stays locked in legacy systems and structures. We need to make future choices on what we want out of our innovation activity, much of the same as today or the ability to move it into a new domain of performance?

To do this we have to navigate through all the hype and mystic surrounding innovation, we have to be bolder in testing out capabilities to experiment and explore the options we have available today in new software, tools, thinking and applications.

We have to take clearer positions on the best applications to do the job and not settle for today’s poor compromises of having one stage-gate system for example, we need to feel comfortable leveraging and extend our resources and capacities to innovate and learn on a continuous basis how to exploit the opportunities in agile, flexible and real-time ways.

Making the business case

For me, to achieve this we must go cloud-based, agile, and moving towards having a more ambidextrous organization design for innovation. This will help innovation to break out of the existing constraints and linear approach we have given it as its straight jacket.

It will not come overnight, a cloud-based innovation capability but I see no reason why it can’t be delivered in less than five years.

I’m sure there are some out there wanting to bring this hugely disruptive potential into realization quicker than that, it has a real business case potential in my opinion. Does it for you?

The post The growing need is to move innovation into the cloud. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

One of my favorite books is “Dealing with Darwin– how great companies innovate at every phase of their evolution” written by Geoffrey Moore. It is well worth a read.

When you work through his other books and connect thinking of “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado” you really appreciate the learning stories coming out of Roger Moore’s studies of the Technology Adoption Life-Cycle.

We all need to rethink a lot as the new challenges come rushing towards us.

In his work, Geoffrey Moore talks about ‘traction’ and I think this is a great word for thinking about how to gain diffusion and adoption in product, service or business models, to gain market and customer acceptance.
Over three posts I am looking at different aspects of “diffusion and adoption”

The first post outlined the different theories and establish their value in our thinking.

The second post relates these theories into their to achieve success in penetrations of our target markets and increasing sales through growing adoption.

This is the third and final post in this series, it looks at how Rogers’ theories relate to us in today’s connected world, and in particular with reference to Apple and finally offers up some of the reasons why diffusion can fail to occur.

Seeking even more than ever, the One-2-One (1to1) of many
Marketing departments talk penetration, “message penetration, market penetration” and so often ‘force’ customers to become aware and then buy. Does this really work today? I doubt it.

Also many organizations hang on to old media ways to get their message across when the use of technology, the internet and social engagement may seem harder but I believe is far more rewarding to engage with the customer on a more personalized basis. I regard this as 1 to 1 of many.

Today we are in an ever-faster world

Connectivity is driving the diffusion rates of nearly everything. Just take a look at the following table:

Even this table is already out of date on the speed to reach critical mass. Companies are not just setting hurdle rates on launch dates but demanding innovations that have critical mass in revenue and when they achieve critical mass.

It is not unusual to set 18 months to achieve critical mass from the inception to settling on the critical factors that make a value proposition to drive penetration. This can only come through engagement and that comes through technology making the connection to the user.

Just study how Apple manages its diffusion and adoption cycle

There are lessons for us all to learn here. Apple has not been the first in markets, they are a classic fast learner and follower.

Yet they master the convergence of ‘breaking’ technology, design, user experience, pushing materials used and providing ease of use within the make-up of the product, and deliver this ‘bundle’ through the sheer generation of excitement and buzz.

The huge difference is their deep understanding of what can be put together that achieves this diffusion and adoption. What can others learn from this integrated approach to product and people?

Take the iPod for example

The first digital music player entered the US market in 1998 and it was not until 2001 Apple released the iPod.

The market had already shown signs of plateauing at the time of Apple’s launch, which must have been worrying.

Yet it was the unique factors of Steve Job’s clear vision of what a musical experience should have, Apple’s superb understanding of design and usage of materials, and its building upon the growing brand recognition and reputation as front edge.

Yet Apple also benefited from previous product releases because the behaviours and expectancies were being understood and were able to be articulated far more to validate and confirm Steve Jobs emerging view on what customers actually wanted- their own unique choice of music in the palm of their hand.

Steve Job’s innate sense of driving a solution to a winning value proposition by demanding all the parts to be incorporated, often taking uncompromising positions, was the additional factor. For example, being determined to offer a progressively growing store of downloadable music provided that incredible ‘complete’ usage experience. It met an un-articulated need but saw the different signals in its convergence of a total package.

Apple gave everyone in the adoption curve something that set their imagination alight.

Recommendations compounded so even late majorities and laggards felt compelled to buy, and the sales simply exploded.
The basic criteria with the theories of Roger’s Diffusion and Adoption were met.

Then look at the Apple iMac

For the consumer, Apple took away complexity. The learning gap became dramatically reduced.

It was quickly understood you took your computer out of the box and plugged it in.

The complexity of most of our past experiences in complicated set ups, the need to download and fiddle with conflicting software, had been taken away.

Apple set about integrating the system and providing a better user experience. It did away with proprietary connections, set USB and CD-Rom drives as their standard, dragging along most in the industry. It again focused on pushing to the maximum from Rogers characteristics of innovation.

The iMac proved to be phenomenally successful, with 800,000 units sold in 139 days. It’s translucent plastic case, originally Bondi blue and later various additional colors, is considered an industrial design landmark of the late 1990s.

Again design, attention to details, focusing on user needs to reduce complexity, offer relative advantage, make the way forward as compatible and integrated, allowing a fast set up to gain immediate experience and a great design or observability ticked all the boxes of Rogers Five Factors.

Then we get to the iPad

Where do you start? The iPad had built-in Wi-Fi and, on some models, cellular connectivity.

An iPad can shoot video, take photos, play music, and perform Internet functions such as web-browsing and emailing.

Other functions—games, reference, GPS navigation, social networking, etc.—can be enabled by downloading and installing apps. As of October 2013, the App Store has more than 475,000 native apps by Apple and third parties.

There have been five versions of the iPad. The first generation established design precedents, such as the 9.7-inch screen size and button placement, that have persisted through all models.

The iPad second generation  added a dual core Apple A5 processor and VGA front-facing and 720p rear-facing cameras designed for FaceTime video calling.

The third generation added a Retina Display, the new Apple A5X processor with a quad-coregraphics processor, a 5-megapixel camera, HD 1080p video recording, voice dictation, and 4G (LTE).

The fourth generation added the Apple A6X processor and replaces the 30-pin connector with an all-digital Lightning connector.

The iPad Air added the Apple A7 processor, the Apple M7 motion coprocessor and reduced the form factor for the first time since the iPad 2. iOS 5.1 added Siri to the third and fourth generations and the iPad Mini.

There have been two versions of the iPad Mini.

Apple were delivering wave upon wave of new technology in a rapidly accepted format.

A story of design, combining technology, understanding the unmet needs of the market, combining revolutionary materials. It filled a need, and it ticked all the boxes again of Rogers Five Factors of Product.

Yet we had by this time the real effect of the People Difference.
Apple have such a powerful body of innovators and early adopters creating such a pre-launch noise, it draws in early and late majorities.

Apple has been a fashion ‘must have’ statement.

Demonstration of products in Apple stores are ready to be put to any user test, the staff are providing you a ‘user experience’ and support structure that understands our needs and provide all your personal reasons to adopt.

The advocates of Apple products are phenomenal. They are nurtured, engaged with and pampered, as they generate such chatter and noise it can’t be ignored. It delivers the powerful messages Apple want to get out there for accelerating sales at mind-boggling speed.

Apple has institutionalized its product and people diffusion, and adoption process – can you?

We can all take away some powerful learning from this by aligning the theories of Rogers, articulated originally in 1962 and see how they seem highly relevant to Apple’s approach to its thinking.

They have added triggering (conversations, user experiences) with contagion and have been working the different tipping points to gain market traction, penetration and constant appeal to stay up to date and in tune with the latest and greatest.

Lastly let’s remind ourselves why diffusion often fails to occur

1. Getting the price wrong and staying stubbornly rigid with it
2. The wrong identification of the target markets
3. The poor selection of channels often because they are known, and they’re the sales forces’ most comfortable point of contact
4. A really poor communication of the product or service benefits
5. The unique attributes are over-hyped and quickly not seen
6. The new product really does not give many benefits over existing products
7. It simply has no innovative advantage, it was more of a cost-reduction exercise
8. The ease of access to the relevant information about the product is complex, difficult, time-consuming and unclear. It becomes complex
9. The real needs and expectations of the consumer were actually ignored, never discovered or just not met
10. The product or service offers no really clear value proposition to switch and buy.
I’m sure you could add a few more but I leave those to you.

The principles of diffusion and adoption I believe are both important in innovation.

Working the diffusion and adoption theories and putting these into your practice is something that needs an integrated approach, it might develop over time, perhaps through serendipity but knowing its principles helps you begin to map out the pathway.

This is the third and final post within the discussion on exploring diffusion and adoption for innovation.

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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 Exploring Diffusion and Adoption for Innovation – Part 3 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The future within our engagements will determine diffusion and adoption

It is all about letting go but also grabbing more at the same time, and then finding ‘it’.

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.

We are needing to confront the new questions that are emerging
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?

Are we really bothering to learn the power of networks, cultivating communities, fostering co-creation and optimizing shared value, instead of just creating and selling things?

Are our structures and processes still stuck in the past or are you transitioning to managing a more social business that operates in more dynamic ways?

There are a huge number of new rules and ways to manage. It is the ones that master these that will succeed in diffusion and adoption at very different speeds than we can imagine today.

In three posts I am discussing different aspects and challenges within diffusion and adoption for innovation

The first post outlines the different theories and establish their value in our thinking.

The second post, this one, relates these theories into their to achieve success in penetrations of our target markets and increase sales through growing adoption.

The third and final post in this series looks at how Rogers’ theories relate to us in today’s connected world, and in particular with reference to Apple and finally offers up some of the reasons why diffusion can fail to occur.
Back to this blog……..

We are all in need of answering numerous questions and finding our way.

Social media is for many business organizations, the new kid on the block

It is relentlessly chipping away at the fabric of how organizations have been organized. In less than half a decade societal and cultural shifts through technology, the transfer to global open digital networks have taken us way beyond “just the internet” for connecting.

We are in need to engage in totally different ways. It is really not good enough to sell just products and services anymore. These are basic value propositions. Customers are looking on how these are connected into different “bigger pictures”. 

The questions of your sustainability approaches, environmentalism, corporate social good and responsibility and a growing interest in governance are shifting their thinking.

Your customers are wanting to connect and establish a different level of trust than simply those invested in a brand name, that is becoming table stakes or even irrelevant.

We are moving into a very different territory. Grasping the changes to your business are highly challenging.

Large organizations are being challenged by the sudden rise of self-organizing communities where people come together online and create shared value that often forms an immediate organization to challenge the existing. Traditional business models need to learn to adopt in different ways themselves.

In an era of high-velocity online start-ups, where the next generation of digital businesses are taking up the space as they focus increasingly on the dynamics of social business where does this leave our existing organizations?

Everything has sped up, we diffuse and adapt in seconds

There is an urgent need to “letting go and grabbing more”. Traditionally “we” provide products and services and many of our existing organizations are slowly coming to grips with providing on-line services.

The belief is this is enough to satisfy customers, keep them buying and using the product or service. Is it?

The social connected economy has reversed the relationship. Consumers just want to use and have provided product and services on ‘their’ demand and seek increasingly the platforms where they can easily go to find out and then use the required products and services. Often they don’t want to buy these, they just want to rent them to do the appropriate job.

The whole movement of jobs-to-be-done, identifying customer needs is yet again a place of increased focus. The larger organization still struggles with this as it wants to fit this ‘seen’ need into their structure and system.

They are spending growing time adapting while others are pivoting quickly to capture this fluidness in need.

In many ways diffusion and adoption lies more in the organizations inabilities than the customers. Perhaps the theories of Rogers have reversed.

It is the power of people and how organizations react and determine differences that will determine diffusion and adoption, as explained by Everett Rogers. Dion Hinchcliffe, an expert on next-generation enterprises suggests an Engagement Fabric.

Are we in a reverse situation for diffusion and adoption?

Consumers race to diffuse and adopt, it seems our larger business organizations struggle. The organizations are the ‘laggards’.

We need to think about the organizations ability to engage at scale. Perhaps we need a further theory to add to Rogers ones. The interpretation of the Engagement Fabric goes like this for aiding diffusion and adoption:

The organization as one does need to engage to any, not many. It is the ability to allow information to flow; we learn to aggregate stories or decipher trends to engage back to new groups of audiences that see your diffusion as valuable to their adoption.

The organization continues to throw open its store. The ability to engage and promote self-organizing communities to exchange and extend around our product and services and keep them as engaged stakeholders who you work to keep involved in the evolution that triggers better innovations.

Simultaneous engagement that is constantly synchronized with the evolving story, built more on business and social value, less on your product or service. Constant insights and thinking get captured for its ongoing community value and ability to keep improving on the product or service offered.

Making the space highly visible and user-friendly. By ensuring ‘ease of access to knowledge you are allowing conversations to build and become increasingly valuable to all involved in the community.

The ability to analyse, interpret and filter. Offer the place that captures the many good insights so as to set about the continued building of value into your products and services.

So we need to transform our own internal design to better diffuse and gain increasing adoption

To quote from Dion Hinchcliffe whose future thinking I have drawn heavily upon for this post makes this comment:

We need to rapidly move to an engagement platform

Diffusion and Adoption are even more of a business organization’s challenge to adapt to the most significant set of changes since the internet.

It is the power of all the disruptive technologies, the power of social business and the incredible impact of all the connected networks are accelerating acceptance or rejection.

Diffusion and Adoption is so far more complex but the principles of Rogers theories, offered nearly fifty years ago, can help to understand a single innovation perhaps.

It is today the way you build your platform for engagement which will determine where you stand in any adoption race for the health of your business and its model in the future.
It is the business organization that is in its race for adoption.

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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 Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of Innovation – Part 2 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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 published by 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.

Going back to Christensen “good theory provides a robust way to understand important developments, even when the data is limited. “Theory helps to block out the noise and to amplify the signal”.

Diffusion of Innovation Theory is important for our innovation understanding
One set of theories I believe we simply cannot ignore even more today lies around the work of Everett. M. Rogers where he outlined his thinking in his book Diffusion of Innovations the first edition was published in 1962.

The fifth edition (2003, with Nancy Singer Olaguera) addresses the spread of the Internet, and how it has transformed the way human beings communicate and adopt new ideas.

Over three posts I will look at different aspects of “diffusion and adoption”

The first post, this one, outlined the different theories and establish their value in our thinking.

The second post, relates these theories into their to achieve success in penetrations of our target markets and increase sales through growing adoption.

The third and final post in this series looks at how Rogers’ theories relate to us in today’s connected world, and in particular with reference to Apple and finally offers up some of the reasons why diffusion can fail to occur.

First we need to have a clear grounding or reminder within the theories
By developing our understanding of why some products seem easier to diffuse while others can take longer or often fail, innovators can improve their likelihood of understanding the differences through exploring these different diffusion and adoption theories.

Besides the classic “S-shaped curve” associated with diffusion, it is useful to also reflect on this tougher curve to manage from its development costs into profit requires a greater focus on the commercialization stages.

Product and People determine diffusion and adoption
According to Rogers, the rate of diffusion can be attributed to a combination of “product differences” and “people differences”

Product differences
Research suggests that up to 87 per cent of the variance in an innovation rate of diffusion can be attributed to the following five product characteristics. These are known as Rogers’s Five –characteristics of Innovation.

Relative advantage refers to the degree perceived to be better than the product (or service) it replaces.

Compatibility is the extent to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with the values, past experiences and needs of potential adopters.

Complexity is the degree to which the new innovation is perceived as being difficult to understand or use.

Trialability is the degree to which the new innovation can be experimented with, piloted and used on a limited basis.

Observability is the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible, observed and communicated to others and where the rate of adoption can often be determined.

People differences
Once the product’s position in relation to the Rogers Five Factors is known, the diffusion process is best managed by focusing on the people’s difference.

The classic bell curve is broken down in the five categories of adopters. 

It is from this initial work of Rogers we then got Geoffrey Moore’s classic on “Crossing the Chasm” which recently has been significantly updated in a recently released book around the Technology Adoption Lifecycle.

The chasm can happen throughout the early adopter’s phase, you have to be alert and responsive enough to find solutions quickly enough to bridge this and ‘cross that chasm.’ Pivoting on the parts that are good, exploring the parts that are needed.

The five adopter categories are:

Innovators– venturesome, risk-taking, information seeking, early seeking status and very experimental, enjoy the degree of early challenge or even uncertainty involved.

Early adopters– Often respected opinion leaders within their social groups, seen often as role models for others.

Early majority – more deliberate before adopting new ideas; interact frequently with peers and trendsetters. They like to merely stay ahead within the curve from that more informed decision-making.

Late majority – Tend to be sceptical, cautious to adopt but ‘feel’ pressure of peers to adopt, tend to need intervention strategies to overcome barriers and see their ‘needs’ resolved by the innovation

Laggards – Traditional , last in the social system, often they pay little attention to opinions of others, they have more a clear point of reference in the past to overcome, are often suspicious of new innovations and their decision process is often lengthy.

Then we have the decision process or stages of adoption:

Awareness and Knowledge – refers to a customer’s acknowledgement of the presence or existence of the new innovation and where they form a general perception of what it might entail and is often driven by the intersection of need recognition through marketing communications. This is the point of being inspired to find out more.

Persuasion and Interest – this occurs when a consumer processes the available information associated with the innovation and considers the product or service’s appeal on this. This positive or negative attitude tends to be based on the five characteristics mentioned above. Here the consumer actively seeks out information and details.

Decision and Assessment – Having considered the persuasion factors the consumer will come to a decision about whether to adopt or reject the innovation. Their activity in seeking out advice, data gathering, comparing or making different assessments happen clearly here. They consider the switching costs and weigh the advantages up. This is the hardest stage to understand.

Implementation and Exploration – These are the series of activities to put the innovation to use. The consumer employs the innovation to a varying learning degree. The usefulness is determined and they may search for further information about it.

Confirmation and Adoption– is mostly concerned with post-adoption behaviour exhibited by the adopter, reinforced by the innovation’s actual delivery against the relative advantage ‘claims,’ its complexity and compatibility on their understandings. The individual finalizes their decision to continue using it or searches for extending its use to its full potential.

So in summary for this opening post:
Diffusion is the manner in which innovation spreads. It is the degree how we facilitate, accelerate, and sustain it.

There are constant difficulties in exploiting these different theories within organizations, the questions are where to place the emphasis and the means of communicating these. The process is contingent upon the structural, cultural and size and scope considerations.

You have to watch for that constantly changing the implementation requirements and lack of sufficient resources or application, as they considerable constrain the innovation outcomes and often you don’t spot these until it is too late

The execution or commercialization stage of any new innovation often fails to address the theories offered by Rogers adequately enough, then organizations often suffer poor diffusion and adoption rates, unaware of the considerable efforts this stage of understanding diffusion and adoption needs to address.

The second part of this post will deal with….

My second post in this diffusion and adoption discussion will deal with managing within a far more fluid set of conditions than we have seen to be facing previously.

The combination of technology, social media and the internet gained a ‘closer’ relationship with final consumers encouraging engagement and feedback has introduced a far more dynamic environment.

Innovation adoption or rejection is getting riskier, and far more complex and we need to bridge the learning gaps far better and smarter. Are Roger’s theories still relevant or even more so today and in the future?

Then the third post provides different examples of diffusion and adoption and offers a starters list of why diffusion can often fail to occur.

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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, it’s well worth the visit.

The post Exploring Diffusion and Adoption for Innovation – Part 1 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

He discusses adoption, team practices, ubiquity, networks, language actions, the practice of innovation and other related topics. All are stimulating and worth finding the time to read but one caught my eye and

I’ve gone back to it at least four, maybe five times. It intrigues me.  It is entitled “The idea idea” written in early 2011 and asks the question “What if practices rather than ideas are the main source of innovation?”

I think we all agree “ideas pervade our professional work” and as Professor Denning points out “we borrow them, we apply them, we solve problems with them, we create new ones, and we try to foster more of them in our teams”.

We do put a disproportionately greater emphasis on ideas yet as he points out, all these great ideas and the energy applied to them we still end up with really poor adoption rates, he suggests our success rate in business are around 4%.

All of this ‘idea’ energy seems to be wasting so much time, resources and money. He puts this so well “we are idea rich, selection baffled and adoption poor”

The whole thrust of the article is perhaps that innovation is not ideas generated and I agree so much on this, but practices adopted. We need to spend more efforts on the skills and adoption of new practices and as he suggests “as the framework for new practices”
The two schools of thought
He suggests the two schools; if you believe ideas are the key to innovation you will put your efforts into generating, analysing, selecting and publicizing ideas where the emphasis is on creativity, imagination, borrowing and recombination.

The other is adopting new practice as the key to innovation- the efforts go into selling others the value of doing new practice by building credibility it works, teaching people how to do it, furnishing tools to help them and providing the guidance and leadership to overcome obstacles and resistances.

I’m sitting more and more in the second school, I enjoy the first school of believing in ideas but I feel, well actually place my focus on the second school- the process of new practice. This is why and where I earn my living (or try too) or increasingly so. Also this is why I just keep going back to this article, it resonates so much for me, a confirmation of a confirmation.

He puts both cases well- outlining that “the diffusion model and the pipeline model share this common feature that they both put idea generation as their source. They differ on how ideas move from source to market”

The case of practices he starts by rightly stating “an idea that changes no one’s behaviour is only an invention, not an innovation”. He talks briefly of “the prime innovation pattern” as part of a new theory where innovators goal is to bring about changes of practice to change that “sense of disharmony” detected and they go through different activities to achieve this change.

This gets to the point that the practice suddenly becomes adopted, someone starts doing something different, often in the early stages as improvisation, to overcome something blocking them from doing the job they need to meet. When it is seen as superior others imitate it, the practice spreads.

Where I feel Absorptive Capacity fit here

Many people have offered views on this adoption and promoting its practice as it is aiding making things better for others. I very much wish more people would look a little harder at Absorptive Capacity for many reasons, some of those I’ve previously outlined.

The more we access, anchor and diffuse capability the greater chance for innovation. This links into Absorptive Capacity and for instance Zahra and Georges work on acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation as the four phases of Absorptive Capacity.

Professor Denning rightly suggests it is finding the right balance between cultivating ideas and cultivating (new) practices. Maybe we should all question our balance on this?

He offers three thoughts

The iceberg theory- the visible top part (about 10%) is analogous to the set of ideas, the invisible submerged part (about 90%) relates to the practices of innovation. The practices keep the ideas afloat.

He suggests you beware of the idea- pursuing ideas for the sake of them- and you keep deferring adoption until the idea is perfected. He suggests you need to put 10% of your efforts into explaining the value and principles of your ideas and 90% into fostering the new practices you advocate and it is the work of adoption is from the beginning.

Lastly, it is how  and what you learn from experiments and trial practices. It is then later  how you distil the knowledge gained into the pursuit of the emerging ideas, these emerging new practices. This makes for less value placed on ‘crude’ ideas, more on ‘refined’ ones that do raise the chance of market adoption significantly.

You just keep filtering and improving, experimenting and exploring not just pushing ‘ideas’ simply through the innovation process. You seek to raise the adoption rates of not just translating the idea but the very new practices that get you to that success.

So, it is the connections between ideas and adoption, the idea adopted into practice, and it is the focus on the “dispersing” and “adapting” that accelerates innovation, simply not just the ‘idea’ alone worked through in ‘established’ ways.

What are your thoughts?

The post Making innovation practice spread first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Tell me what did we learn from 2010 from an innovation perspective that we can build upon in 2011?  Here are some of my thoughts

For me, a number of important lessons or impressions come out of 2010 that I’ll continue to build upon in 2011 as areas of opportunity for changing, challenging or clarifying. These I simply summarize in ten points for this blog:

I felt 2010 was a ‘crossing point’ in innovation maturity to position us in 2011. We began to consolidate what we know, explore with growing confidence what we didn’t know and experiment in-between.

That was healthy in such a tough year of uncertainty. Now we need to build on this in different ways.

1. Firstly, “ideas and alternative solutions coming from everywhere” is now fixed in most peoples’ minds, unless you have freshly arrived from Mars. What we all need to work through is the significant implications, the different structures and the management approach for opening up organizations to this ‘rush’ of diverse thinking.

2. The single-fix solutions are collapsing in adoption; organizations are recognizing the ‘harder road’ of sustaining innovation takes more than one fix to solve all. It involves complex work, yet to be undertaken and is painful to complete without a clear, comprehensive roadmap and depth in innovation understanding.

3. The delivery and speed of innovation seem unrelenting but the time to market still seems stuck internally in conflicting issues and personal agendas. When will this change? 2011? All involved really need to be (seriously) challenged.

4. ‘Defend & Extend’ seemed to rule the roost of 2010 but the early signs are ‘Disruption’ will come sweeping back in more industries to chase the elusive growth needed. Are you ready for the roller coaster effect of going over the top with your stomach in your mouth, screaming and pumped up?

5. Capabilities, competencies and capacity all had a mixed review for progress in 2010, did we advance or stay trapped as many organizations struggled to keep or lay off people. Along the way, many organizations lost their creative people, their mavericks and now they struggle to recreate that ‘buzz’.  Stability and growth need to come back somehow so it ‘allows’ for a positive build of skills, trust and knowledge retaining and 2010 was not one of those years!

6. Social media & design thinking have raised their heads in 2010 and demanded to be integrated with innovation. The way ahead still needs to be defined for many to understand this but they have moved up in top-of-mind in 2010 and we will see some of this emerging in 2011 that will have the ‘rush to copy’, irrespective of effect.

7. The chance to throw away much of the innovation legacy in old approaches, structures, processes etc that we have built up ‘piece meal’ prior to the downturn was not cleared out and replaced- what a real pity! We still are trying to manage 21st problems with 20th-century tools. This has just got to change soon! We lost a golden opportunity in the past year of much restructuring to address this ‘full on’.

8. Innovation leadership got lost somewhere in 2010 to a host of crisis management issues- understandable but regrettable. Will leadership in innovation come through more in 2011? I suspect it all depends on the crisis either ‘within’ or the forces outside and the rallying call of “all hands to the innovation pump” will mean different things to different circumstances. We do need strong bolder innovation leadership to come through in 2011. Will we get it, do they, our leaders, get it?

9. The ‘rush’ of ‘how-to’ innovation books really was plentiful, yet strangely there was little pioneering work within these, with the notable exception of the books on Business Model Innovation and Design Thinking, the majority were more to substantiate and confirm existing thinking. I certainly hope this really does change in 2011; we need fresh bolder thinking with a future perspective and imaginative thinking not just a confirming look in the rear mirror or just consolidating (part) of innovation practice.

10. Finally, 2010 saw many restructuring, write-offs and layoffs but little new emerged that I felt was highly imaginative to change our fundamental thinking about ‘business as usual.’ 2010 was a year to survive but sadly not to re-engineer, perhaps this is for 2011? Those that do confront change in innovation thinking will pull ahead as a business is certainly not ‘as usual after these past few years, it is getting (or is) very different and demanding on all of us to think and react differently.

Nothing seems to stand still, it demands ‘agile’ minds.  We do need to start ‘managing’ differently from the past and that is one big leap to make.

Any thoughts you might have had on reflections from 2010 that give us the basis of learning and optimism (and work) for 2011?

The post Reflections from a tough 2010 for innovating differently in 2011 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.