This article did disturb me, it triggered a number of validations in my own mind. Once you get past the opening rant about the infamous Juicero juicer, that has now been used as an illustration of how investors funded something that automates something that you can do faster by hand.

The article opens up the doors to questioning much that is going on under the Silicon Valley umbrella. The juicer got funding of $120m from a number of blue-chip VC’s but it was not this that actually disturbs me, it was this “ant-innovation” tag the writer was attaching to (North) America.

The article goes deeper in questioning where we are in our innovation thinking. We do have a real innovation growth dilemma that we can’t lay at the door of Silicon Valley alone, it is part of the Western world’s current sickness. It has lost that ability to take a positive risk in so much, ‘kicking the can down the road’ for others to resolve, be these societal, educational, health, infrastructural or institutional reforming and so much more. All really important innovation opportunities.

Has the US become “profoundly anti-innovation” as stated?

The writer suggests

“At the root of the problem is the story we tell ourselves about innovation. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a lone genius disappears into a garage, preferably in Palo Alto, and emerges with an invention that changes the world. The engine of technological progress is the entrepreneur – the fast-moving, risk-loving, rule-breaking visionary in the mold of Steve Jobs.

This story has been so widely repeated as to become a cliche. It’s also inaccurate. Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs typically make terrible innovators. Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risks – something that, myth-making aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for”

I started to identify with the second paragraph of this. Real innovation is very expensive to produce and it is the appetite for risk that has been lost in America as it has been in Europe. That I strongly relate too as we have certainly lost that corporate ‘will’ to pursue much that can provide significant breakthroughs in products and new services, but is this because it is such a volatile, transforming time? Can we be bolder and more determined to differentiate ourselves or do we stay tucked into the pack, like a long distant runner, waiting for something (someone) to break away, hopefully, able to equally ‘kick in’ and stay in touch, still hopeful we will be in a position to win but mostly remain a fast follower only?

Are we committing suicide with a lack of innovation? Are we crushing real innovation?

Is it is suggested in the article, the USA is showing signs of a country committing economic suicide?” The writer’s observation: “Innovation drives economic growth. It boosts productivity, making it possible to create more wealth with less labor. When economies don’t innovate, the result is stagnation, inequality, and the whole horizon of hopelessness that has come to define the lives of most working people today”. 

I certainly can’t disagree with this, that Companies do need the breakthroughs to build their business but they do seem very reluctant to build this risk mentality in recent years. Innovation has been taking a back seat to shoring up our balance sheets, delivering increasing profits and shedding people and ‘unproductive’ assets that do not fit the business today. The longer-term has equally been put into the back seat, alongside innovation.

The sad loss of the real innovation risk investment?

Breakthrough innovation needs heavy investment, the writer reminds us:

“So where does the money come from? The government. As the economist, Mariana Mazzucato has shown, nearly every major innovation since the second world war has required a big push from the public sector, for an obvious reason: the public sector can afford to take risks that the private sector can’t.

Conventional wisdom says that market forces foster innovation. In fact, it’s the government’s insulation from market forces that has historically made it such a successful innovator. It doesn’t have to compete, and it’s not at the mercy of investors demanding a share of its profits. It’s also far more generous with the fruits of its scientific labor: no private company would ever be so foolish as to constantly give away innovations it has generated at enormous expense for free, but this is exactly what the government does. The dynamic should be familiar with the financial crisis: the taxpayer absorbs the risk, and the investor reaps the reward.

Again I feel uncomfortable and I would love to disagree with this but it is true in the majority of cases. Truly innovation breakthroughs have come through Government investments. When you look back or read it does seem true that most of the innovation breakthrough for transforming have their roots in publicly funded research. As the writer puts it (again):

The advances that created what we’ve come to call tech – the development of digital computing, the invention of the internet, the formation of Silicon Valley itself – were the result of sustained and substantial government investment. Even the iPhone, that celebrated emblem of capitalist creativity, wouldn’t exist without buckets of government cash. Its core technologies, from the touch-screen display to GPS to Siri, all trace their roots to publicly funded research”

Getting to the longer-term disturbing part – the decline is in ‘pure’ scientific R&D

Yet, and this is the really disturbing part for me, the truth lies in the declining investments that we see being made in research and development. Both Government’s and the Private Sector has been constantly reducing the research funding for years. Recently in a PwC Strategy & report “2016 Global Innovation 1000 Study”  it was reported that there was a 19.5% decline in allocated funds to products but it is being redistributed it seems into software and the digital transformation journey as the focal point of new investments. The truth is we actually need both for a better transforming future.

Here in Europe, we have seen steady declines in R&D investment. They are at worrying levels as we lose those that are the brightest as they go where the R&D investment seems healthy and for that, we need to look East my friend.  In both the US and Europe we are seeing falls in funding research as a percentage measure of the GDP, it is steadily declining. Science funding is in real decline and that does not auger well for the future prosperity of our societies.

Well, why are we at this point? it is a combination effect in real innovation decline.

It is this combination of Short-termism that businesses have become caught up in. Also, how VC’s are looking for bigger and bigger returns and earlier payouts, pushing to see an exit strategy more towards 3, rather than in the past of 5 years or even more. This adds to the pressure to grow quickly, spending more of those funds to scale, delaying often furthermore groundbreaking breakthroughs that build on the initial insight until the IPO or acquisition by others takes place.

None of these factors are actually helping stimulate real innovation growth, they are relying on geographical expansion or product extension. New companies are also getting insanely overvalued and basic research continues to suffer from this redirecting of funds across the broader spectrum of funding.

Then you have companies like Apple sitting on an absolute mountain of cash, presently over a quarter of a trillion dollars and many commentators constantly asking where is their next big innovation going to come? They have the means but maybe not the innovation desire anymore, it will come externally by acquisition and not internally it seems?

Over 1.2 trillion dollars of overseas cash is sitting outside the USA held by just twenty companies of the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Pfizer, GE, IBM, J&J, Cisco, Merck, Google, Exxon Mobile, P&G, and Citigroup. US companies hold more than $2.4 trillion in profits abroad for various reasons, all supposedly waiting for a tax law change to come back in. Will these be invested in innovation?

The writer of this Guardian article rightly stirs it up even further by asking about Wall Street extracting wealth by companies constantly busy in buybacks. They are paying out increasing dividends rather than invest in risk and their capacity to really grow, apart from picking up the acquisitions of all these insanely overpriced success stories, to keep being seen as “in the share price game” but also transforming, really? Can that change, will that change to wealth creating through innovation, job creation or new capital investments?

The West countries are certainly not growing their economies in new dynamic ways

We are struggling with really bad growth in most of the Western economies, we have seen a hollowing out of the middle class, we have seen real wages drop and wealth constantly heading ‘north’ to the ones already rich.

The writer finished his piece by asking “is capitalism eating itself alive?” I find that challenging, perhaps it is. The article is a disturbing piece for me because much of it is sadly true and that is the most uncomfortable part. We are not investing in real, breakthrough innovation, we are ‘burning’ our resources and money in ways that are leaving us increasingly devoid of a future where real sustaining growth lifts us all up, wealth is being unevenly distributed.

So are we committing just economic suicide or increasingly political suicide for those in power if we don’t change the dynamics of investment? Or is the entrepreneur that promising engine of our growth we all encourage, are they going to benefit broader groups of us all or just a selected few?

I am left wondering

I just sometimes wonder if we are all caught up in the success stories that are occurring but it is like the shop window we all stop and look into, we are simply gazing at what we ourselves are not able to achieve? Innovation can be so much different if we allow it to become part of all our lives. Yet it is not being allowed to become just that, part of our jobs, our way of thinking and evolving.

So, is innovation liberating us or keeping us caught up in a trap because we are investing our innovation dollar or euro in wrong ways or simply just hoarding them? It seems as science declines, technology gains but is the balance getting us all out of whack, delaying any promising future? Any thoughts?

Additional: My sparring partner on Innovation, Jeffrey Phillips, added this observation which I can only agree with: “The government does a lot of early ground breaking research but needs the private sector to turn it into usable products and services. Then other parts of the government create regulations and compliance issues that slow adoption of the new product”.

It seems commercialization is everybody’s problem.

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The post Are We Crushing Real Innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

An article from Bloomberg reports that companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index are “poised to spend $914 billion on share buybacks and dividends this year, or about 95 percent of earnings.”
95% of earnings – Doug rightly says “wow” and offers a thoughtful set of observations

“Every organization that enjoys free cash flow makes a decision on where to allocate that resource. If the opportunity available to the organization meets or exceeds the hurdle rate—the desired, expected rate of return—then, in theory, they invest in that opportunity. If not, then no: the organization returns the cash to the investors. Of course, earnings come after investments the organization makes in innovation—research & development expenses, for example. Many do invest a lot in R&D”

He then remarks “And yet…..and yet” ….

“This offers the implicit message from the firm to the investment community: “we do not have a better use for this cash (i.e., the ideas we might pursue do not seem as promising and as compelling as we would like).”

“We know that we cannot cut, or cost save, our way to growth. By extension, we know that we cannot grow a business for the long-term by returning all profits to the investors. Doing so suggests a lack of vision—a lack of acuity into what the customer wants and what the market demands”.

Then you begin to read through the Bloomberg article

“Companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index really love their shareholders. Maybe too much!  Money returned to stock owners exceeded profits in the first quarter and may again in the third”

The Bloomberg article goes on “Buybacks have helped fuel one of the strongest rallies of the past 50 years as stocks with the most repurchases gained more than 300 percent since March 2009. Now, with returns slowing, investors say executives risk snuffing out the bull market unless they start ploughing money into their businesses”

Some further quotes from the Bloomberg article
“You can only go so far with financial engineering before you actually have to have a business with real growth,”

“Buybacks are something corporations can take control of and at low borrowing costs, they’re a viable option,”

“If management can’t unearth future opportunities for growth, as a shareholder, I lose confidence.”

“Buybacks have become sort of the low-risk medicine in the C suite,”.

“The reality is capital expenditure comes with risk, a significant amount of risk, especially in a slow-growth world. Buybacks offer a lot of flexibility.”

So you do have to ask the really hard question: where is the future REAL growth going to come from?

So why are our companies not ploughing additional money back into their business, partly it serves the interest of top management who are often compensated on EPS. Businesses today remain utterly reluctant to buy new equipment, build factories or hire more workers, while management regards the recovery as uneven, it has regarded the buyback strategy as the best bet. How totally wrong!

Clearly the view that your own stock is under-priced, you believe your strategy is the right one and you are certainly not going to sit on hordes of cash, it is perhaps value-destroying to “our” shareholders. Yeah right including mine!

This is where the whole compensation of management has gone off the rails. If tenure at the top is shortening- as it is- then pushing your stock price performance helps for a two to three-year period helps you as the manager.

Yet it really is simply “kicking the future down the road” for others to deal with, if it is not too late. It is very unlikely these buybacks will help the performance of the company over a decade but then again most management has ‘cashed in their chips by then.

Simply too much cash and buy-backs are stopping innovation and new growth

Now of course if this ‘bull market’ does come to the end of its run this year as many are predicting then the ‘game’ of improving financial ratio’s gets so much harder. Buybacks do reduce the assets on the balance sheet (cash is an asset), the return on assets (ROA) increases and if the shares bought back are ‘retired’ the return on equity (ROE) equally goes up.

Today our markets and the investors view higher ROA and ROE as the greater positive over the need to invest in the promise of a better future.

Yet change is stirring, new business models are revolutionizing industries, crazy ideas will be creating new markets and this call of the unknown holds an interesting promise of future ‘higher’ returns. The Darwinian effect is raising its head and innovation holds one big key to evolving differently to manage in these changing times.

Are these prop-up ratios providing short-term relief, holding strategies to what would otherwise be an ailing stock from poor investment in innovation or new assets or helping them get out of excessive dilution? These signal a company struggling.

The reluctance to raise capital investment has left companies with the oldest plants and equipment in almost 60 years. The average age of fixed assets reached 22 years in 2013, the highest level since 1956, according to annual data compiled by the Commerce Department.

Do you recall the Capitalists Dilemma?

I am sure many of you can recall the article in the HBR “The Capitalist’s Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen and Derek van Bever from the June 2014 Issue.

This is where they outline the three types of innovation 1) Performance-improving innovations replace old products with new and better models 2) Efficiency innovations help companies make and sell mature, established products or services to the same customers at lower prices and 3) Market-creating innovations, our third category; transforming more complicated or costly products so radically that they create a new class of consumers or a new market.

We are today often failing to create the market-creating innovations. Market-creating innovations need capital to grow—sometimes a lot of capital and risk and this is deemed unhealthy in today’s more uncertain environment but you are ‘creating’ lots of cash by running lean.

Buybacks are safer, the risks lower and top management projects their confidence that this is better for shareholder wealth. Shareholders take the money but over time I would certainly argue lose confidence in a lasting future and constantly switch shares to chase the cash! So shares get propped up even more and the circle starts again and the future gets sacrificed just that little bit more.

The Capital Dilemma article was suggesting the need for a New Orthodoxy of New Finance.

It does recommend the emancipating of management. “Many managers yearn to focus on the long-term but don’t think it’s an option. Because investors’ median holding period for shares is now about 10 months, executives feel pressure to maximize short-term returns. Many worries that if they don’t meet the numbers, they will be replaced by someone who will. The job of a manager is thus reduced to sourcing, assembling, and shipping the numbers that deliver short-term gains”

Re-evaluating differently

While we value innovation alongside non-innovation in the same way the demands for returns on investment place unfair demands on internal innovation projects. Investing in the future is so much harder and while there is this lack of confidence in new innovation, alongside this lack of external pressure for different judgements, we are looked into that diminishing short-term viewpoint dominating our boardrooms.

Hopefully, if this present bull market does end, innovation, the source for new growth, alongside greater mergers and acquisitions (M&A) suddenly gets its ‘growing’ voice back in the boardrooms. Suddenly corporate behaviour moves from financial prudence and cash becomes released for accelerating real expansion.

We have lacked the right type of investment in the future

I just wonder if those at the top really understand that it is not just cash that will ‘create’ innovation when they require it when they have that sudden need to chase for real growth if the stock markets suddenly turn against them? This acceleration and sources of new growth come from driving new innovation.

If they have not been sustaining investments in their resources; their assets and their people and we know these have been far more diluted through this pursuit of lean management, dispersing most of the gains with the cash piles achieved, then the company is in real trouble.

They might soon realize that real innovation and the skills needed have been running on ’empty’ or just the past fumes of low-octane incremental fuel, with little sustaining power, apart from this propping up the short-term.

This sudden realization might create a sheer sense of scrabbling. A scrabble just to regain those forgotten skills and bring real lasting health back into our companies where people are valued again for what they can bring.

It would be nice to see a pursuit of growth back on the agenda, through pushing all the buttons needed surrounding innovation, and to see top management really earning their place, unearthing future opportunities for real growth, something shareholders will be increasingly looking to see.

Risk and opportunity are the ‘yin and yang’ for innovation and when you are looking to really grow to give really valuable shareholder return then top management is going to have to re-learn much.

“Recognizing the power of ‘yin and yang for innovation’ can give you the order of things and how and why they relate to each other. Complementary and conflicting opposites do contribute to a greater innovation understanding but they do need consistent attention to manage”

It is critically important to have this ‘flow and balance’ and allow it to constantly evolve.

Let’s get back to investments that are about the future and that need a healthier appetite for innovation investments.

The post Is all investment about the future? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I wrote at the time we can have a surprisingly strong influence on impact, as we are in a highly connected world. It is through our organizing and influencing abilities we can all partly determine our innovation future.

I suggested we have nine impact points to consider:

1. What are the triggers to growth
2. How do we deal with our legacy issues
3. What will offer us improving performance
4. The place of tacit knowledge
5. Our ability to build platforms and road-maps to build engagement.
6. The absolute skill of execution
7. How we set about adapting to change
8. What is important to empower and provide trusting environments
9. How should we measure success in appropriate impact.

So let me take this one step further.

For me the book “The Medici Effect” written by Frans Johansson holds an important place in my thinking. “Our breakthrough insights are at the Intersections of ideas, concepts and cultures” and it is the potential of exploring these intersections comes our high points of impact.

Impact has to have reasons, it has to unite and it has to have understanding of what gives it that different ‘impact’.

Our leadership today has tended to forget “positive” impact within their chase of the short-term; they are contributing more “negative” impacts in the pursuit of immediate gain. We need to institute a change in thinking.

Recently a new book came out, called “Moments of Impact” written by Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon. It is a wonderful book in that it describes the pathway to how too “design strategic conversations that accelerate change”. It tackles the way to deliver complex questions in clear ways and brings back that critical understanding of “empathy” for broader groups to relate to, by listening, detecting patterns and then they can be deciphered in what needs changing.

So our ability to listen, to discern patterns and to seek out new impact points through more intersection points does offer for a real potential to really change the game. These can be at global, organizational, social, competitive and personal levels of impact.

Where do we start to deliver positive impact though?

Besides reading the two books mentioned above let me lay out the purpose in a group of ideas where one feeds off of the other, they mutually reinforce each other. The strength is in the combining forces.

There are a group of ideals I like to offer up as ones to ‘gather around’ for higher impact returns, to ‘enable’ our potential. These are:

• We need to connect new knowledge with increasing good emerging practice
• We need to foster increasingly the trust and identification needed to explore and exploit
• We need to strengthen our alignments and look to offer appreciation more
• We need to build within ourselves more responsiveness and agility
• We need to understand the impact of our actions and decisions and what these really mean to our business, the society and the people within it
• We have to reduce leakage- that constant knowledge loss that leads to depreciation within our performances, we need to constantly renew ourselves.
• We need to sharpen our minds and gain more confidence in the choices we are making, the avenues of our creation to lead towards a new wealth, growth and set of values.

Where I put my focus is on the intersections of combining four value building vectors

Firstly we have innovation

Innovation needs a sharper meaning and focus within our organizations, it needs to be ‘crafted’ far more, and it needs to have a greater alignment and validation. It needs increased facilitation and understanding. We need to change many of our existing innovation practices that we perform into ones that deliver this increasing impact.

We need to look simply beyond ‘just’ innovation in product and services, we have to link this more into our social needs, to design different business models that give opportunity for different organization design, agility and vitality.

We are far too often stuck in the incremental mode and must find ways to get out of this rut or we never achieve ‘real impact’ and move the growth needle to a stronger value point.

Secondly we need to seek out more value-based relationships.
These need to be broader, closer and allowed to be more imaginative in cooperation and outcomes. We need to seek out different ‘pools’ of knowledge and complementary expertise.

We should leverage for all it’s worth our collaborative, network, technology skills to explore and push boundaries for discovery.

We need to have in place some mechanisms that allow for a greater choreographing of specific events and growing knowledge understanding to be able to come together due to this value-based set of relationships so we provide for more moments of impact.

Third, we need to enhance economic value as our business goal

This comes through clarity of purpose, alignment and collaboration. We need to scan our markets, our competitors and the changes constantly happening in our market environments to gather increased insights. We need to hone our selection and design of new solutions by better scanning and investigating,

We need to think of impact in different ways, ways like containment, improvement, reduction, improvements and efficiency. We need to consciously seek strategies that DRIVE growth.

Lastly, we have the application of knowledge to learn and apply

We need to learn how to trade in the new economy, the one called the idea economy. This is the place where we learn, grow, seek out impact and grow. It is the intelligence within our broader capitals, those often called the intellectual capitals made up of social, human, structural, relationship and learning.

It is by finding new combinations within these different capitals we learn to combine resources, capabilities and competencies in new and different ways. To achieve a growing positive impact we need to develop problem-solving abilities, we need to be allowed to visualize far more and to explore these ‘concepts’ more freely.

We need to focus on the creation, exchanging and acquisition of new knowledge. We need to release all the ‘idle capital’ that lies all around us to bring it back into contributing value.

We need to combine these four intersections for seeking out the positive impact.
It is finding the future value-creating points where you can extract the hidden values waiting to be discovered.

We need to promote the “thinking experience” and develop in us all the three parts, firstly of inductive thinking through direct observation, then the use of deductive thinking from analysis and logic and finally, the abductive thinking of determining what could be possible and valuable

We need to relearn how we work, how we think and how we search to combine. Our knowledge learning capacities provide the solutions to the delivery of high impact areas where we all gain in growth and wealth creation.

A time to re-equip ourselves in new ways is way overdue.

It is time we learn how to combine these intersections within our organizations. It is partly a rediscovery but it is far more a growing discovery of what is simply all around us, waiting for the right way for it to be found.

This comes from a ‘greater’ combining of different ideas, seeking out new combination, exploring different intersections that can lead to new insights for breakthroughs for innovation to happen, and then delivering these higher-value impact points we need to prosper and thrive.

The post Combining the higher-value impact points for innovation intersection. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today and in the future, innovation is about open, inclusive, full of exploration and harmonization to extract the best results.

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.

According to a recent PwC report, optimism has dramatically been raised around innovation, so much so the vast majority within the survey of 1,757 c-suite or executives respondents believe their aggressive growth plans will be driven by organic growth (93%) and not by previous means of M&A activity.

They are talking more radical and breakthrough innovation. BCG in its 2013 report on most innovative companies is equally far more bullish on innovation.

My only wish is this all this optimism is grounded in reality and recognition of what significant changes are required in structures, processes and supporting mechanisms that this increased innovation focus will really require.

They will have to address the existing organizations constraints as well as rework the emphasis away from the efficient and effectiveness focus that has become engrained. This will require a very dedicated focus on understanding innovation management and what it really means, to translate this organic ‘wish’ into reality over the next five years.

The good news is, we have seen 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.

All these approaches to innovation are challenging and demanding far more constant reorganization around changing the innovation activities to meet the ‘breaking’ opportunities.

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.

Research led or technology – based standing alone is not enough in pursuing greater functionality or breakthroughs, we need to cooperate with all the relevant people and partners that can bring the innovation idea or concept to fruition.

The opening up to greater networks, exploring relationships and allowing them to deepen becomes vital. Allowing time for these to work and build the essential trust needed equally will take time.

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

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.

Exploring 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.

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.

As growth comes increasingly back on the agenda for most organizations, it will come far more from exploiting through this 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.

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 sizeable changes they must achieve to ‘allow’ organic growth to deliver.

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 to be learnt to extract the ‘promise and value’ from the innovation needed.

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

Innovation needs positive translation in its management

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?

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?

For me, in the next twelve months, it will be the level of activity to  begin to re-equip organizations will determine if this is a reality or just C-level rhetoric, worried over the alternatives of low or no growth prospects but staying risk-averse.

The post Beyond the previous boundaries of innovation long gone first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The top line news is how companies are seeing innovation transforming their businesses and their need to take a more sophisticated approach to innovation, so as to achieve the growth plans they are setting for the next five years.

PwC are suggesting there is an innovation transformation under-way: “Companies are changing the way they innovate“. They further state that “innovation is becoming a competitive necessity, if it’s not, then executives need to be asking themselves what they could do to improve their innovation process.”

All I am providing here are my initial takeaways from a report I would recommend does provide really good value in working through. It seems innovation is becoming far more the central driver of the organization’s agenda than in the past, where geographical expansion along with mergers and acquisitions were more dominating.

It seems the future focus is far more on leveraging organic growth as organizations view the increasing dynamic and volatile business environment will  intensify and be even more risky but to achieve their growth objectives they will be needing to look beyond the traditional options they have explored so far to-date, through their innovation activity.

Firstly the transforming taking place around innovation

The five key transforming aspects with leading innovators taking a more advanced approach to innovation:

1. Seventy nine per cent of the most innovative companies in their study have well-defined innovation strategies,
2. Top innovators treat innovation just like any other business or management process that can be disciplined and successfully scaled.
3. The leading companies are targeting a higher proportion of breakthrough and radical innovations, particularly around products, services, technology and business models.
4. They are planning a wider range of innovation operating models.
5. They collaborate more than their less innovative peers.

The factors setting the innovation leaders apart

Within the report findings, PwC are suggesting what clearly is setting the leaders apart can be summarized as they:

• innovate with purpose,
• have a well-defined innovation strategy,
• take a more formal and structured approach to innovation,
• are concentrating on a greater proportion of breakthrough and radical innovations,
• are planning a broader range of business model innovation,
• are exploring a wider range of innovation operating models,
• are planning to collaborate much more to generate a greater proportion of revenue from new products and services

The close of the report asks seven great key questions in the role executives do need to play in supporting  the innovation efforts.

1. Are you paying enough attention to innovation? Innovation is quickly moving up the agenda for all businesses, becoming a competitive necessity and the main driver for growth. When was the last time that innovation was discussed at your management board?
2. Do you have an innovation strategy? Innovation needs to be thought of as process which can be disciplined. A coherent innovation strategy aligns all elements of an organisation to its corporate goals. How do you plan to harness innovation to accelerate growth?
3. Is your innovation portfolio right? Innovation portfolios are evolving, including a greater proportion of breakthrough, radical, and non-product innovation and a much broader range of areas to innovate. How well-balanced is your portfolio and where are you prioritising your innovation resources and investments?
4. What is your innovation timespan? Companies too focused on the short-term never challenge existing thinking, while those too focused on the long-term overlook immediate delivery. A balanced perspective is needed. Are you creating the business of tomorrow while running the business of today?
5. Is innovation an integral part of the executive and organisational mindset? Are operational efficiency and innovation metrics part of all management meetings?Are the resources, investments,processes, organisation and governance sufficient to provide the space for innovation to thrive?
6. Do you know how to explore and find the really great innovations that drive unprecedented levels of growth? Is exploration something that people are incentivised to do?Do the innovation processes use leading practices to ensure high speed prototyping, exploration,and learning?
7. Are you an innovation blocker or enabler? Executives too comfortable with the status-quo are one of the greatest barriers to greater innovation. Do you have the mechanisms in place to commercialize and scale your innovations? The last mile of turning innovations into significant revenue growth is often the hardest.

For me, this has been a report well worth working through, so thank you PwC for providing these valuable sets of insights. They offer encouraging news for innovation and its critical role within the current thinking within leading innovating organizations and the changing treatment that innovation is receiving.

This is certainly good news from any innovators perspective and a more than valuable report to put under the noses of the leaders of the organizations that are more within the ‘innovation laggard’ camp.

Those ‘ innovation laggards’ that are  failing to appreciate the changes  that are taking place within innovation practice and recognizing how they can leverage their future growth in broader and significantly different ways. Exploring different, more radical innovation practices, that have the potential for offering a real impact on their future growth potential, far more than the existing ones they are presently undertaking and supporting.

www.pwc.com/innovationsurvey © 2013 PwC. All rights reserved.

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