The work-to-be-done is the need for our future growth and well-being to be derived from innovation activities.

These are so often made up of so many intangible parts that need exploring, investigating and discovering, the exciting parts of work. As we reveal ideas, concepts or new designs we are providing the new wealth of organizations, in the knowledge sharing economy of today and the near future. We are adding discovery.

Today we can share discovery far more easily, we can expand our thinking by exchanging in new collaborations, in growing networks and relationships. Technology is enabling us to look more towards the “work to be done” as the place to be.

As demand and uncertainty are all around, we need to find better ways to manage in this volatile environment. We have a choice (many sadly still do not) to hunker down and just keep repeating the work we are always doing, repeating the work done again and again, or being enabled to think about what needs changing and ask what is the ‘work to be done?’

Surprisingly Adam Smith identified this important difference back in 1776.

This can be explained as the ‘work done’ is the accumulated knowledge, which has built up and been embodied in the firm’s results with the innovations achieved in the past and is seen as the tangible capital.

The work to be done is how well it can adapt to change, how we can make these changes happen.  In the past century, we operated in mass production era, systems with standard goods and stable market conditions the ‘work done’ was equivalent to the ‘work to be done’, yet era has long gone but not our management mentality

In today’s global market, with its rapid technology diffusion, disruptive and constant change with a far greater emphasis on serving the ‘work to be done’ is more important than the ‘work done’ and intangible assets are fundamental to this. It is piecing together what we know, often tangible and “in front of our eyes” or we can explore the fragments of information, pursue some thoughts, chase a notion or simply push the boundaries of what is known.

They provide the intellectual capital, the regenerating force, to react to changing demand for the required future value creation that needs to be sustaining. It is the source for the value-creating that needs to be done.

Work to be done is the need for our future growth and well-being to be derived from innovation activities. These so much made up of intangible parts will provide the new wealth of organizations in the knowledge sharing economy of today and the near future.

We need new forms of evaluation to measure the real asset wealth of the organization to understand the points of intensity, their connected dynamics, and value creating effects. We need to ask what is required to reconfigure the changing capabilities and capacities needed to grow in the future.

We all need to stop and reflect. We need to step off the treadmill. Our need is to find out more of the emerging Work-to-be-done and less on the repeating work going on.

When we can recognize our need to change then our focus becomes one that is far more the dynamic force and place for innovation to happen. Then we are able to seek out ways to reduce the repeating work done into the exciting place of work needed to be done to thrive and prosper, then we need to validate it- that is the hard work, ticking off the ‘work done’

Here is the frontier of great discovery, we “find” new innovation in the exploration of the work-to-be-done, then we have to come back and recognize all of the work to be done to realize it. Happy innovation and discovery. All innovation is hard work!

The post I prefer the work-to-be-done for innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When we are designing innovation for the future, the search is even more centered around strategically connected value creation.

The task of searching to resolve more complex problems allows Design Thinking to step up and become a far more visible component on how we can go about this.

Design thinking needs to work in harmony with many other thinking skills to make its contribution. Here I outline some of my “must go to” frames or tools.

The need when you “cast out” and look into the future we need to make a lot of connections, these can be really different, seemingly disparate in ideas and approaches. The whole search for diversity can generate so much fresh thinking if we open our minds to the alternatives.

We need to draw on insights, creativity but most importantly have a growing sense of the context we are thinking through to search for new ideas, concepts, and eventual new innovating solutions.

We often get caught up in data far too early, looking for the real nugget that can transform our thinking. I would guard against this, we always need the “larger” context. Never allow the “narrow prism” to dominate until any concept is getting clearer in its final design.

Context is so important to understand in any problem solving or future thinking

The power of context shifts everything and then gives it ‘shape’. It provides the conditions and the circumstances of time and place and why we need to find and deliver something different. It provides the innovation marching orders.

If we place innovation in a certain set of contexts, then those setting about the task are more sensitive to the needs and understanding, they can relate or can reject this. It can allow them to work more clearly and effectively, not necessarily efficiently as innovation is inherently messy.

Context gives us certain guard rails or borders to help gain a more united focus. Where we go after that, by pushing those borders will depend on those involved by seeing a greater value in an evolving context of mutual understanding. The ‘setting it in context’ allows for dialogue, adding more value to the thinking.

Design Thinking is increasing its role in innovation thinking

Design thinking can play a richer role and be a more powerful contributor to bigger problems but it needs to evolve and be seen in a wider context and not seen as specialized, narrow and limited. It can connect to a wider universe of problems and complexity of design itself, over the centuries has broken out of past confines. Design thinking makes us all design-conscious if we allow it too. It is the human-centered design that can draw out the best of our thinking if we do allow it too.

DT encourages us to abandon the linear thinking and keeps us constantly undergoing that looping circularity as the accepted process and that needs resetting mindsets significantly.  DT to evolve in all our minds, away from those past experiments limited to narrow, linear paths of design thinking understanding is highly liberating, sometimes scary but deeply satisfying when you truly break through a complex problem.

We need to connect multiple thinking, diversity and different experiences that so often diverge initially to then collectively find the path to converge, in a common understanding, to translate the combined creative thinking into real action, achieving valuable outcomes.

Sharing my Four Friends that are good to bring to the party, to align with Design Thinking

I like to refer to four frames or tools that I think should always be available to simply map to when you are in any design thinking phase. These are not in any “magic” order here so assess the value of each and see where and how you would apply these within the thinking you are about to undertake.

I am a great enthusiast for working through the Three Horizon model.

There is a sequence shown here to help aid future thinking. We work through a series of steps discussing what is in the market today, what is changing and then what might take its place in the future. We are structuring discussions based on this visual

You can read about the three horizons by putting “three horizons” in this blog post search box. A useful one to take a quick look at is “The Three Horizons – Providing a Common Language in its Innovation Use” to open up your thinking to this framework and its companionship to design thinking.

 The second view we always need to consider is a “System thinking” one.

I really love this visual for system thinking that outlines the key insights and tools needed to develop and advance a systems mindset for dealing with complex problem solving and transitioning to the Circular Economy. Keep checking if you are connecting your thinking up. Does it go beyond the existing?

“Systems thinking is a context for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots.” – Peter Senge

Our quest should be finding answers to why innovation is often failing to deliver on our expectations and needs. So, for me “System thinking for Innovation, as a whole” should be grabbing more of our attention.

Yet we seem not to get our heads around this “whole” part so we set about redesigning the parts. Nothing wrong with that, it has lots of moving, sometimes unique parts, improvements are certainly happening, replacing past approaches but they still remain discreet parts but overall innovation performance, does it improve?

System thinking looks at ALL the interacting parts, their interdependence and how one part fits and reacts with another. We get caught up in the linear progression of one part and not considering enough the reinforcing loops or balancing the loops to foster stability or understand the impact across the wider system.

If we don’t have a well-understood view of the whole system of the innovative design, it does not matter how many separate parts we design or apply, the end result is this either ends up the same (disappointing), poorer, as it replaces something we failed to improve what was existing from the end-users perspective, or managed some increased ‘spike’ that needs constantly improving upon to get finally right.

Then I find the Divergent / Convergent approach in thinking as highly valuable

You need both to explore and exploit the multiple possible solutions. Divergent thinking is the ability and opportunity to offer different, unique or variant ideas adherent to one theme, while convergent thinking is the (eventual) ability to find the ‘correct’ solution to the given problem. You encourage and ideate many solutions, both possible and impossible, and then use convergent thinking to move towards a realizable resolution or solution.

I use this ‘divergent and convergent’ structure for many of my workshops, it allows for broader engagement and involvement and that eventual drawing together from this process. Once or twice you have to be nimble on your feet to move from one to the other but the discipline comes from timing these as shared spaces but giving each a clear discipline of dedicated time as you do need a very different mindset to think openly then begin to narrow the options down.

Creativity makes use of divergent thinking, which is solving problems with many possible solutions, as opposed to convergent thinking, which is solving problems

The process of figuring out a concrete solution to any problem is called Convergent Thinking. Divergent thinking is the process of thinking that explores multiple possible solutions in order to generate creative ideas. It’s a straight forward process that focuses on figuring out the most effective answer to a problem.

“Divergent thinking” is the process of coming up with new ideas and possibilities. We are more in a creative and intuitive mindset. We explore lots of possibilities and stay more at this point on the conceptual abstractions. We work this through then we go more into  “Convergent thinking”, this is associated with analysis, judgment, and decision-making. We become more analytical, rational, sequential and objective. We begin to explore constraint driven issues. It is the process of taking a lot of ideas and sorting them, evaluating them, analyzing the pros and cons, and making decisions, and exploring options that reveal, over time and discussion emerging value

My fourth frame is Cynefin, a sense-making device

When we are thinking through problems or looking into the future we do need to understand the challenges we are facing. The Cynefin sense-making framework allows you to relate to different domains. The domain where your current problem might lie and then gives you a number of triggers on how you can respond to arrive at a solution or a change.

The Cynefin framework provides a wonderful way to sort the range of issues faced by leaders and us all, into five contexts, defined by the nature of the relationships between cause and effect. Dave Snowden has been explaining these consistently for years. Four of these five are; obvious (formerly simple), complicated, complex and chaotic states and requires us to diagnose situations and then to act in contextually appropriate ways. The fifth one is a disorder, often overlooked or not fully appreciated. It is when something is unclear, it is in a disorderly, highly transitory state and needs to be rapidly stabilized into one of the other four to give it a more orderly state going forward.

Exploring a process of emergent discovery for innovation with the Cynefin framework

The real challenges come from the really ‘new’ in innovation as it becomes greater in new designs, changing functionality, different technology or significant improvements on the existing that involved greater research and development the more you travel around the Cynefin framework.

You often diverge/converge constantly as you work through the potential answers. The mindset here is different and it is more one that is based on the detection. Innovation is far more demanding, pushing frontiers, exploring discoveries, dealing in a series of exchanges and recognizing emerging patterns to piece together as real ‘new to the world’ innovation activities.

We need to recognize different types of innovation need to be managed differently

You need to build flexible systems that adapt, are dynamic and responsive and need that bandwidth for innovation exploration. It is a series of challenges evolving to be exploited, not reduced or eliminated.

It is deciding what complexity your innovation might have within the innovative design and then set about building the right capabilities and framing these appropriately, where they matter.

Taking a Design thinking approach to innovation is great. What I am suggesting we do need to consider the System, we need to place any problems or challenges into the ‘greater’ context. To help we need to reflect upon the different horizons aspects (3H), and we also need to wrestle with what problems we are tackling through the Cynefin sensemaking framework and finally, allow ample time to Diverge and then Converge all the diversity of these multiple perspectives.

To have a good understanding of these different thinking-through frames allows you to explore and exploit far better. Design thinking is well suited to addressing problems, but it is the context and what you are setting out to address, that these other frameworks have great value to explore or understand, equally as well.

The post All things considered for Innovation Thinking first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are seeing a very distinctive advantage in embracing digitalization into innovation. The potential of combining digitalization and innovation insights offers significantly more potential for sustaining growth and building a greater connection into the needs of our customers.

Much of our innovation work today is caught up in out-of-date information, poor and inadequate data, restricted research and limited market understanding. Our innovation insights are badly lagging, with the effect being the solutions offered are not ‘tuned’ into the present and anticipated needs, as they often lack dynamic data. We need to digitize our innovation activities fully.

We need to ditch much of our existing innovation processes and practices, reliant on manual systems and so often trapped in silos of knowledge. Digitalizing innovation processes can potentially liberate us from ‘second-guessing’ customer needs and connect us into real-time understanding. This being ‘digitally connected’ can provide the catalyst to a greater level of innovative solutions that are far more aligned to customer and market needs.

Why does the combination of digitalization and innovation have such a transforming effect?

The need for speed has become paramount in responding to market changes.

We need to increasingly find time to shorten our time to market yet there is this increasing complexity in our products we are designing. They are more connected, embodied and closer to what the customer expects. We have running shoes that can track our fitness, we can monitor our health through connected technology and we can build up personal conversations with our customers. These all rely on connected technology.

All this new complexity challenges the speed to the market concept. To overcome this we are reaching out and working more on platforms of collaborators and building up ecosystems of like-minded solution providers to jointly come to market with products that have technology designed into them

The increasing need to build-in flexibility

The pressures are to gain increased flexibility by personalizing products to fit individuals needs and that requires some radical redesigns of the supply chain and manufacturing process. The final personalization has been pushed further down the production line, closer to the final product. This has required major redesigns in the design of the manufacturing process to enable it to become more flexible. We are automating the plants far more so the “change over” is at a push of a switch and the pre-programmed software directs the robot to alter their routine.

We also have far more “responsive supply chains that are fully visible and adaptive to demand and directing the finished product to the appropriate distribution channels. By automating demand throughout the process we can reconfigure and reorganize manufacturing closer to demand, this shortening down the response time between a customer ordering and receiving the good. These fully integrated manufacturing and supply chains are increasingly reliant on a dedicated ecosystem of partners, all working towards shortening response time and delivering to customer needs, as quickly as possible.

Focusing on improving quality

Automation has become essential to lifting up and maintaining the consistency of quality, combined with being more responsive. The potential in fixed, programmable and flexible automation, provides options simply impossible, in past manufacturing. Automation is improving quality in so many ways that are helping to eliminate human error, allow for greater consistency and accuracy. This automating the process is giving us the flexibility and new capabilities to create more complex goods. We can identify far more errors quicker, thereby pushing production into a high-quality cycle that is delivering quality consistently in the finished product.

Also, the introduction of robots has significantly lifted the level of quality. The level of mistakes drops, the automation of the process allows for a highly repetitive process and digitalization and advanced technological solutions are delivering the consistency of quality, right away and every time. This ‘allows’ the innovation to be valued, as industrial automation yields increased safety, reliability, and profitability. Digitalizing the process allows for Smart Manufacturing that is giving us the ability to solve existing and future problems, via an open connected infrastructure that is highly visible and responsive. Having the environment where digital connects up everything and everybody, this has the potential that allows solutions to be implemented at the speed of business, visualized, assessed and modeled, to allow for increasing responsive rates of change, creating an advantage in new value opportunities.

We are seeing increasing efficiency  

The ability to think more about the environment and design the product as more sustainable has risen in everybody’s thinking as a real market need to focus upon. The concept of product lifecycle has added more meaning and value as the product need needs extending and having more opportunities to extend life through upgrades, revisions, add-ons, etc. We have a much higher level of awareness of the progress through a sequence of stages from introduction to growth, maturity, and decline and by combining the use of digital and innovation enables that far more. Products that can be upgraded through software upgrades add greater “service” value.

Technology can extend products or services by upgrading the software, by changing the composition of the product. Within this digitalization is enabling more monitoring of efficiency in the use of material, in product and as this has a huge *thumbs-up” with many of the customers the ability to reduce the environmental impact, is yielding real competitive advantages. As manufacturers manage the lifecycle it opens up more options for innovation. As we learn to proactively manage products throughout their lifetime, applying the appropriate innovative solutions, depending on what stage products are at in the cycle we can leverage more options within our innovation activities.

Digitalization is allowing for new business models

The ability to generate, collect and analyze appropriate data the more trends can be spotted, engagements with customers made, and investigations and evaluations analysed, to clarify their usage, needs, and feedbacks. As we record and exploit data, we can open up that data and reconfigure it into different “what ‘if’s” or come across new nuggets of opportunity, that can give rise to potential new business opportunities. To often deliver to these new concepts you need to redesign supply chains, change product specification that makes them different from existing business models in channels of delivery, value offerings or pricing options. Digitalization has combined with innovation to make product and services more dynamic.

The more you develop new, data-based business models the more you can explore alternatives in product design, and delivery.  Imagine how Airbnb crunches data and learns trends, demand and destination needs. This valuable information can be sold to the travel agents to tailor packages that meet this demand.

Increased protection and security

There is a growing fear that as we increasingly rely on digitalization, we are opening ourselves up for some level of cyber-attack. Realistically that will happen from all indications but we need to prepare for this. Not digitalizing is holding back progress. We have to be ready for this often-daily occurrence in our institutions, on our banks and security, at all key locations where people and machines can be vulnerable.

Business organizations must continue to protect their strategic assets, defend their intellectual property today and in the future. Although this has a huge cost in compliance with the cost of downtime, or attacks that make a business vulnerable has a much higher cost. Digitalization has downsides but it also has higher ones in this increased protection and security in a world where we all are feeling increasingly vulnerable.  We look to being protected, not just in the technology reliance within our lives but for our physical well-being. The ones that provide this assurance or confirm they are taking necessary precautions to gain far more from customers feeling re-assured. As we increasingly rely on our data, it becomes central to our innovation insights and essential to customers feeling confident in their protection and security, in their investments in product and services. You build a circle of trust.

Each of these changes from digitalizing has a positive impact on our innovation activities

We have distinctive ways to treat data and digitalization that leads to distinct new value points for innovation and the IBM Institute for Business Value identified five distinct opportunities where digital innovation provides additional value:

1. We gain new insights that augment products and change our thinking by the generation of real-time or constant flows of market and customer-driven data
2. We improve our assets by digitalizing them. We can connect up machines, whole plants and complete organizations can be designed around the flows of data. This has an enormous impact on the potential to collaborate, to liaise, learn and build from this data, a new fresh knowledge insight. This can trigger ideas and new concepts to be evaluated as well as gain from having full oversight over the assets generating data or that coming into the company.
3. The ability today is to combine data within and across different industries. Within our move towards platforms and ecosystems the exchange of data allows for a “greater whole” to view it, add insights and knowledge and from this combined effect those within the ecosystem can gain a commercial and competitive advantage to build appropriate products, services, and business models in response
4. Each party is building up its own data. We are in times where trading data has become a highly valuable new source of revenue. Knowing weather patterns helps farmers, utility and those dependent on delivery to know and plan far better. We can trade audience data, interest in articles or newsworthy stories so others can associate with these to build more of a profile of who is engaged so they can offer products and services more tailored to their possible needs. The business of trading data is the new oil in the economy
5. Lastly, we can begin to organize data into more distinctive patterns, service capability options and build more sustainable systems where you build increasingly an accepted language that becomes codified in some way that gives new value. We can systemize thinking through data that allows for uniformity and allows multiple systems to exchange and see patterns. This is where algorithms have increased value. They can predict change.

Each of these new ways to use the evolution of digitalization to add completely different levels of innovation potential. Seeing this value is one thing, achieving the connecting aspects it requires is another.

Innovation and digitalization are as powerful as innovation and knowledge in their combination. They both combine to give new insights, new options to generate significant new and greater value. The sooner we can bring in digital solutions and processes into the innovation process, the better to realize some of the real potentials that this combination can give us, as fresh opportunities to add new value

The post Valuing digitization alongside innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The Barometer has explored the actions or constraints that senior business executives are worrying over in their pursuit of innovation.

The fieldwork was undertaken in April and May, 2014 and covered 3,200 phone interviews to people directly involved in the innovation strategy or process. It covered 26 countries and was conducted by Edelman Berland on GE’s behalf.

The supporting website provides the GE view of how this report reflects and provides an overview, an interactive, resources and key point headings sections to explore.

I  personally think GE have actually been a little too low-key on this report and frankly far too conservative on the potential takeaways in reading their ‘take’ in the overview.

It has significant implications for our organizations to grapple with but each is certainly not alone, it is a collective need to move innovation forward or you place much at risk if you don’t find solutions to the issues raised in this report.

This year the Barometer broke out of its past and steamed ahead.

The GE Barometer report for 2014 does seem to have broadened out its assessment on innovation, in my opinion, into a more comprehensive one around three aspects: 1) What are today’s drivers and barriers, 2) what are the trends, practices, myths and realities and 3) the country and public policy issues to tackle for supporting innovation.

There are two reports, one is a summary that can stand alone to quickly grasp the issues but does not really do the real justice that the full report provides in 68-odd slides. I’d recommend you explore both.

So what do I  have as my takeaways from this GE Barometer 2014?

I have summarized thirteen points that make some more than helpful insight into what is holding innovation back. In some ways by not cracking some of these it will kill off some businesses and this increased anxiety and fear I sense runs through many presently engaged in innovation, it is these that ‘reveals’ these tension points within this report. Take a read and see if you agree?

These are my thoughts summarized in these thirteen points gathered from the report:

1. Inequality, caused increasingly by technological innovation, will have a growing impact and fears on the ability to innovate, if innovation within countries or regions is not recognized as a real wealth creator or destroyer and its enablers are not effectively put into place and leveraged. The ability to resolve this or not, will have significant impacts on the lives and country positions within the global race for innovating competitiveness.

2. It is interesting to see a fairly equal view on the challenges being presented by a technological shift is either a revolution (52% think so) or an evolution (42%) and it does seem a number of emerging countries are rising to the challenge. Whereas the established ones might be less caught up in this, seeing this as part and parcel of radical changes going on. I think there seems an underlying complacency in some, a determination in others to shift the dynamics of how their country is seen and invested in.

3. The effect of this multifaceted change going on where greater collaboration convergence of technologies, the place of Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) seems to be leaving many of our organizations ill-prepared to embrace these.

4. External collaboration is a confirmed reality, the world over and it seems most organizations have passed through the downsides and see open collaborations as “risks worth taking” to innovate successfully today.

5. Big Data seems to be dominating many people’s minds today. 94% accept the reality of Big Data as something here to stay but the fears; constraints and impact, are far from worked through. Naturally you would understand this as Big Data is very emerging in its redefined concept but you gain a really clear sense of significant resistance to focus on this and how organizations are (totally) lacking in their abilities to capitalize on this. Some are actually “dreading the challenges and impact” it will have.

6. The Internet of Things (IoT) is seen to likely have a positive impact on jobs but 44% of those surveyed surprisingly had not heard of the “Industrial Internet” notion when asked. As this is a ‘GE-speak’ view of the more popular IoT it might not be a surprise as I can’t believe these level would not have heard or thought about IoT surely? There are clear ‘lead and laggards’ in different industries, with many indicating they are “not quite prepared” or “not at all prepared” for what this means on their business. (OMG!)

7. There is a review of how the global game of innovation is being played out with the balance required to localise the needs. ‘Glocal’ still resounds for many but I think this catch phrase might be not reflecting the true inability to tap into specific market needs and from this, local innovation might be significantly constrained. Like to understand this more to see if I might be right here, I think so.

8. The focal point of GE’s press release was entitled “Disruption Ready” yet there seems a huge anxiety here. The difficulties of changing mind sets, behaviours and processes is potentially going to “kill the business” is suggested, unless the ability to quickly adapt and implement emerging technologies is not undertaken. I think this needs a greater all-encompassing reflection as disruption itself is getting a lot of ‘airing’ at the moment. In this report 72% state they will protect their core business profitability and believe (mistakenly in my opinion) successful innovation (62% of responders) will come from planned innovation. Perhaps but not in the present way we structure innovation.

9. There is a strong continued worry over (a lack of) internal agility was acknowledged but the citing of “internal inertia” is seen as a critical challenge that can equally “kill their business” rings some real alarm bells for me.

10. Speed-to-market is split right down the middle. 50% believe getting to market as quickly as possible is key, 50% argue “not to rush” and take the time to perfect their innovation (another mistake in my opinion)

11. 60% of all interviewed still deem it difficult to define an effective business model and yet another seen challenge that is “killing the ability to innovate”. The scaling of innovation is equally seen as a concern and part of this real underlying Business Model issue.

With all the progress on BM’s you would think organizations would be working this defining and experimenting with different BM’s well through? The understanding, concepts and frameworks are out there but the board room seems to be blind to embracing this. It will change that is for sure.

12. The area that seems more ‘ripe’ for engaging and collaborating is between public sector and private industry on working through the needs for innovation and laying in the right policies and frameworks. The growing recognition that SME’s are leading the recovery charge, the encouraging of more start-ups and attracting into the country the multinational is tough to get into the right balance.

The public sector ‘reaction and responses’ lag more than lead and taking too much time to bring into place the factors for promoting innovation but within this report are some great slides on issues that can frame some healthy discussions and allow all the sides within the country innovation debates to engage and work out the evolving frameworks. I liked this section to help in this.

13. Lastly I liked the self-evaluation of each respondents view of their own countries innovation improvement or not, around that countries innovation framework. The developed countries are in need of waking up and listening, it seems.

My summary of the report.

So a rich report with lots of issues that do, it seems, need to be unlocked, unblocked and further uncovered to allow innovation to deepen and take hold. There are so many warning signals that I feel cannot be left much longer to tackle.

When you see “fear, anxiety, dread, killing our business, inertia, not prepared, not heard of, and killing the ability to innovate” it might raise one or two alarm bells somewhere.

Perhaps the alarm bells should be going off within the boardrooms, they need to start paying closer attention here, clearly they are still reluctant to understand and embrace innovation, they are not getting the multiple messages as it has far too many ‘disruptive forces’ to deal with but avoiding addressing these is far, far worse.

I think GE and their Barometer 2014 has some really helpful clues in not only what is “holding innovation back” but more in pointing up to “what needs to change” to allow innovation to really move forward. Please take some time to read it.

I would finally like to congratulate GE for investing in this initiative, it helps serve their global business by knowing more of what is the present thinking across many of their customers and across broad industries and public bodies they work with and it is proving thought leadership.

It also allows us all to understand the issues surrounding innovation

I certainly do look forward to where they take their GE Barometer 2015 on innovation as they have raised numerous issues that can be further followed up just from this 2014 report alone.

The post So what is holding innovation back? A new GE report first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Is Innovation finally moving beyond the previous constraints and boundaries we have been recently applying? As organizations really start to ‘ramp up’ their efforts for growth what will this mean?

Today and in the future we certainly know that innovation is about open, inclusive, full of exploration and harmonization to extract the best results across all that are engaged within their organizations. Getting engagement up in organizations is going to be top of the agenda and innovation can be a significant contributor.

We seem to have really grasped and recognized the combination-effect that comes from the myriad of different linkages that is propelling innovation activity and bringing increasing confidence within the boardroom. Innovation is within all our grasps, if we really want to grab hold of it.

Let’s look at some of the possible top-level trends I think we might see in 2014

The good news is, we are finally seeing innovation maturing.

We are certainly seeing innovation has moved well beyond just products. It is exploring the value of combining or even separating services, changing value propositions on a more consistent basis and exploring new business models far more openly.

Organizations are far more open to the search for their future growth than before. Each avenue for innovation to be traveled will be explored far more in our innovation activities in 2014.

As growth comes increasingly back on the agenda for most organizations, it will come far more from exploiting through a greater organic growth approach. Yet to achieve the ambitious growth targets that many organizations are seemingly talking about, there needs to be a radical overhaul of internal innovation understanding and structures.

Mindsets are ripe to make significant change, we can’t stay fixed in our ways in a far more agile and adaptive world, we are all facing. Cost cutting can only take us so far, being cautious and risk averse has longer term consequences. Organizations will finally make those efforts to established innovation as a competence all must learn and understand.

One innovation struggle is around ‘rigidity’ within the organizations.

Innovation requires a more fluid, adaptive and agile environment. This will require some significant changes within the approaches within managing within these structures and this takes a significant and dedicated approach to achieve.

The end result is changing the way people are managed and valued. There is a need to draw in, to engage, more open to diversity in opinion and thinking and increased emphasis on fluid teams tackling issues and challenges in unique ways, not through standard processes and approaches.

The shifts in innovation activity, seeking simplification

We are also seeing increasingly the disruptive era of simplification, which captures far more of the imagination and where the increased movement of future wealth generating opportunities lie by meeting targeted customer need.

These are not ‘layering’ on features that have been the approach of the past, this is stripping away and rapidly breaking these back down into targeted applications that do the job, we the consumer or client wants, often willing to pay a premium upon.

Complexity is also changing, taking out the pain for customers

Complexity should not be about customers having to work out how to understand something; it is using the smart complexity that sits behind the solution to allow us to focus on what we need to achieve, to then help us significantly deliver on our required needs.

Smarter searches, algorithms, designing your own options all are giving us the complexity we need. Simpler, interactive interfaces to do the job we wish to do, not forced to spend time learning and doing.

The continued exploring of the effects of reverse innovation and lean approaches.

Reverse innovation, jugaad or frugal innovation is where there is  a huge potential – still largely untapped in developed countries offering new avenues to real targeted growth.

What about the strong underlying movement in start-ups that is far more ‘needs related’ or serving ‘unmet needs’ through lean approaches and customer development techniques.

These are so much better understood than the approaches in the past, of simply cruising along for opportunity with a vague business concept.

Sharpening the minds, changing the mindsets.

Everything has become so much sharper in why we have to focus our minds down, it is far more on what and where innovation can give us the next growth opportunity and that comes from all the diversity we can muster.

Managing in the global innovation space is no different; we can get far more quickly at answers on a global basis than at any time in the past. We are learning to tap into this global knowledge in different ways, it needs a dedicated focus and understanding, to find the unique mix that suits your needs and knowledge accessing and translating and then we are closer to the solutions that have the global unlocking key.

The increasing value of data – its collection and understanding

We are using the ability to engage, to explore and exchange through a variety of social mediums, we can collect and interpret larger amounts of data than ever before. Collecting this data is the easier part, interpreting what it all means is a lot harder.

We will continue to improve our abilities to find the patterns, the trends, the underlying meaning of what this data is telling us. Then we get into decisions from this new understanding.

We will need to have far more adaptive, agile, responsive organizations that can quickly pivot to seize on these opportunities. The skill sets for managing data will become more established, discussed and quickly adopted as emerging practice.

Revisiting past practices

All of what has gone on previously needs to be revisited and in many cases reworked through new practices, new systems and new measures. Organizations are coming rapidly to the point of needing to be innovation re-engineered to make the sizable changes they must achieve to ‘allow’ organic growth to deliver.

We are forced to look harder for attracting growth into our business and innovation can provide this force if there is the commitment backing the rhetoric; the one of needing organic growth to be the primary driver of over the next five years.

Re-engineering the existing innovation is not a bad place to start, maybe in 2014 the innovation renovation movement might come more into force.

Innovation needs positive translation in its management practice

I am sensing a really positive shift in innovation practice. It does seem to have gone up a notch or two in its maturity and adoption within our organizations in recent months.

Can you feel the changes or are we still at the intent stage? Are organizations fully commitment to what shifting to an innovation emphasis will mean? Or are we only at a recognition stage?

Of course, there are significant sets of issues needed to be addressed to really allow innovation to drive growth. Organizations need to consider very radical shifts in approaching innovation and its management to gain any momentum, so intent can meet these organic growth ambitions as suggested?

Innovation needs to become fully integrated into organizations

 Innovation challenges much that is presently established within organizations, there is potential higher risks, significant changes required to be enacted within the organizations, with a whole raft of different competencies and capabilities are to be learned to extract the ‘promise and value’ from the innovation needed.

I predict the next twelve months will advance innovation understanding significantly

For me, in the next twelve months will be seeing an increased level of activity around innovation. The difference will be it will be at a much higher, strategic level to begin to re-equip organizations differently.

What will decide if this is a reality or just C-level rhetoric? C-level management is deeply worried over the alternatives of facing further low or no growth prospects, staying risk-averse or recognizing finally that the operating conditions need to change to search for real growth and that comes through more radical innovation.

Organizational innovation will have to change fairly dramatically to regain the momentum most organizations need and have lost for far too long. I think the focus on strategic innovation thinking will emerge stronger as we enter 2014 to give innovation that dramatic push, the ‘magic’ tipping point.

A collection of thoughts from recent observations and research.

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