By incorporating Open Innovation Strategies as the next building block, businesses can create a dynamic and expansive innovation ecosystem beyond internal and partnership and certain collaborative boundaries.

This approach supports a culture of continuous learning, adaptation, and external collaboration, positioning the organization for sustained success in an ever-evolving business landscape that recognizes and learns how to collaborate and co-create, moving towards recognizing the value of Business Ecosystems.

Embracing Open Innovation Strategies as the next building block complements the collaborative nature of Business Ecosystems and broadens the innovation landscape out into a world of new possibilities where collaboration, co-creation and cooperation become realised for building and delivering products, concepts, and services that have new unique value and impact.

What are the building blocks of open innovation strategies building on Business Ecosystem thinking and design:

The Building Blocks Through Open Innovation Strategies

1. Collaborative Ideation Beyond Ecosystem Boundaries:
   • Description: Extend the boundaries of collaborative ideation beyond your existing Ecosystems. Embrace external perspectives, ideas, and insights to foster a culture of continuous innovation.
2. Crowdsourced Innovation Challenges:
   • Description: Design and launch innovation challenges that involve a broader network, inviting external contributors to solve specific business problems or contribute novel ideas.
3. Strategic Collaboration with External Entities:
   • Description: Establish strategic collaborations with external entities, including startups, research institutions, and industry experts, to leverage diverse knowledge and expertise.
4. Technology Scouting and External Technology Integration:
   • Description: Engage in technology scouting to identify cutting-edge innovations externally. Integrate external technologies seamlessly to enhance internal capabilities and stay ahead in the market.
5. Cross-Industry Collaboration:
   • Description: Facilitate cross-industry collaboration, bringing together organizations from different sectors to exchange ideas and explore innovative solutions that may have broader applications.
6. Open Innovation Platforms and Networks:
   • Description: Implement open innovation platforms and networks to connect with a broader ecosystem of innovators. Create a hub where ideas can flow freely, fostering a dynamic environment for collaboration.
7. Co-Creation with Customers and End-Users:
   • Description: Engage customers and end-users directly in the co-creation process. Solicit feedback, preferences, and insights to enhance product and service development.
8. Agile Adoption of External Innovations:
   • Description: Adopt an agile approach to assimilating external innovations. Streamline processes for quick evaluation, testing, and integration of promising ideas or technologies.

So why do open innovation strategies have real potential to take innovation into business ecosystems?

• Expand Innovation Horizons:
  • Rationale: Open Innovation Strategies broaden the scope of innovation by tapping into diverse external sources. This expansion enhances the potential for breakthrough ideas and disruptive innovations.
• Leverage External Expertise:
  • Rationale: Embracing external collaborators, whether individuals or organizations, brings diverse expertise. This collective knowledge enhances problem-solving capabilities and fosters creative solutions.
• Accelerate Time-to-Market:
  • Rationale: Open Innovation allows for faster access to new technologies and ideas. By leveraging external resources, companies can reduce time-to-market for innovative products and services.
• Enhance Competitiveness:
  • Rationale: Staying ahead in the competitive landscape requires constant innovation. Open Innovation Strategies provide a competitive edge by harnessing external intelligence and staying attuned to industry trends.
• Adaptability and Resilience:
  • Rationale: In a rapidly changing business environment, organizations must be adaptable. Open Innovation fosters adaptability by facilitating access to a diverse pool of external resources that can help navigate uncertainties.

Integration thinking leads to Synergistic Collaborations, Shared Resources and Expertise and Unified Community Building, fostering shared purpose and collaborations that build impact, value and greater sustaining returns for those involved.

Moving towards the Integration with Ecosystems central to the thinking and design:

Synergistic Collaboration: Integration: Integrate Open Innovation efforts seamlessly with the existing Ecosystem designs. Extend and collaborate with external entities in alignment with expanding the ecosystem’s goals and strategies.

Shared Resources and Expertise: Integration: Leverage the shared resources and expertise within the Ecosystems built to leverage, extend and enhance further collaborative innovation initiatives.

Unified Community Building: Integration: Extend community building efforts to include external contributors and encourage that spirit of openness. Create a unified community that transcends organizational boundaries, fostering a sense of shared purpose and collaboration.

Open Innovation is a great building block towards Ecosystems in design and thinking.

If you want to explore how open innovation can achieve 1) Improved time to market, 2) increased speed to ROI, 3) increased ROI, 4) Improved market share, and 5) Realize different value propositions, then consider a more robust and open innovation model that moves towards participation in Ecosystems. You gain multiple benefits in understanding the risks and rewards of applying Ecosystems to your business. (Let’s talk)

By incorporating Open Innovation Strategies as the next building block, businesses can create a dynamic and expansive innovation ecosystem that moves beyond the restrictions often found in internal and partnership boundaries.

I suggest you read “Why are we navigating to the new.” As organizations embark on this transformative journey, they move beyond boundaries, adapting to change, fostering resilience, and achieving collective prosperity through collaborative power, providing the catalyst to a different, highly collaborative management paradigm.

This evolutionary approach supports a culture of continuous learning, adaptation, and external collaboration, positioning the organization for sustained success in an ever-evolving business landscape where the value of ecosystem thinking and design emergy..

The post The building blocks of open innovation lead towards Business Ecosystems. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The lack of having a well mapped out customer journey means missing out on opportunities caused by not knowing this complete set of connections being made into you. By not knowing all these connecting points and drawing them together in a cohesive plan, there is a significant chance you are simply restricting the developing of innovation solutions that map back to all the decision-making that is going on in the customers’ minds.

This failure to optimize and seize upon all the possible options to connect with your customers is restricting your ability to broaden out your innovation solutions, making the journey more value creating, it certainly can be really holding your business back.

As you explore the digital transformation path this can become your best opportunity to connect along the total customer experience and see a greater return on this understanding and investment.

With the increasing need to adapt to a digital world, the essential need for understanding customer behaviors of those wanting to engage with your business or brand becomes even more of a challenge if you have not mapped this out. Also, how comfortable are you as new customers start connecting – can you have any certainty of the reasons why they did, what decided this and what might hold them for the future of a repeating business?

The vital map of the customer journey

A recent Altimeter report “the 2016 State of Digital Transformation” discusses these problems, along with many others. The mapping of the customer experience (CX) has become a top driver of digital transformation, yet only half of the companies studied have mapped or are mapping their customer’s journey. So that you are aware, the data and insights in this report are based on the input of more than 500 digital transformation strategists and executives who are leading change within their organizations.

In a good visual, they illustrate the severity of the digital transformation challenges: finding that 71% struggle to understand behaviours or impact of a new customer; 69% cited the lack of data or ROI to justify the value of data transformations; and 67% on the risk management, compliance and /or legal implications. Lacking the essential insights many companies are failing to grasp the potential, with many (alternative) innovation opportunities wasted and perhaps suffering a growing customers churn rate. Knowing the why of your customers is something that keeps many marketing and C-level executives up at night.

The good news is that although half of those surveyed are now mapping the customer experience journey most of these are only just doing this. Back in 2014 at the time of the last survey by Altimeter, only 25% of companies undergoing some form of digital transformation had mapped the customer journey, as now 88% cited CX as the driver of change and why technology was the necessary solution. There is some real catching up taking place to justify any transformation.

I still sense that it still seems IT & Marketing are not working on this together, there are separate initiatives and operating in their own silo’s, often in pursuit of different investment decisions that might be better served by combining forces.

As each organization changes in its modernization with new systems, models, processes and architectures it is this lack of customer-centricity that is a growing problem. The lack of a vital set of insights means the continued investment taking place in front-and-back-office solutions has this lack of the customers’ expectations, preferences and values clearly understood.

There is even more of a warning within the report

Traditional touchpoints, such as websites, contact centers, representatives, affiliates, etc., seem to not meet heightened expectations. In fact, they deter from what’s becoming an on-demand customer experience. Equally Mobile has given way to what Google refers to as “micro-moments,” and they are completely upending traditional customer journeys.

These mobile-first moments play out in common scenarios when someone is intent to do, buy, or learn something. As consumers increasingly use their phones to complete everyday activities, they’re fracturing the consumer journey into hundreds of new “micro” touchpoints where they seek real-time, mobile-optimized content, reviews, shared experiences, and direction online.

Despite all of this, just 20% of digital transformation leaders are studying the mobile customer journey and/or designing for real-time micro-moments in addition to customer journey work. There is a need to understand these ‘micro-moments’ as they increasingly impact on the customer decision-making, behaviors, and values.

The report warns even further: Mobile is just the beginning of disruption in the customer journey. With the runway for disruptive technologies still ahead (e.g., wearables, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality), companies will need a resilient infrastructure that adapts to not only mobile’s “micro-moments,” but also the impact of all these trends and new devices over time.

There is also a change taking place on the primary catalyst

While CX was initially the primary catalyst for digital transformation, innovation, agility, and the pursuit of digital relevance are the new factors driving companies along the maturity model. For executives and senior leadership, the need to accelerate innovation (81%) was at the top of the digital transformation agenda.

Right behind this was the need to modernize the IT infrastructure with increased agility, flexibility, management, and security (80%), and the third priority for enterprise transformation is improving operational agility to more rapidly adapt to change (79%).

Altimeter argues it is through these priorities, businesses are developing a roadmap that helps them compete for the present while building a next-generation business model to compete for the future.

For this report, Altimeter, a Prophet Company worked with Phronesis Partners to conduct a survey of 528 qualified digital transformation strategists and executives leading change within their companies. Respondents were from companies in varied industries, with more than 250 employees, in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

In summary

As Altimeter state in their opener in this report and I repeat here in my closing:

“Digital Darwinism continues to impact businesses as technology and societies evolve. As a result, organizations are moving away from “business as usual” as they pursue digital transformation to compete”

We are all aware (or should be) that customers are increasingly choosing products and services based increasingly on the quality of the experiences they have with them. The pressing need is to address a competitive risk if you are not mapping and understanding the channels, touchpoints and shifts taking place in technology solutions that capture, evaluate and determine customer experience.

Are you meeting your customer needs, do you fully understand their motivations, associated behaviors to design a better range of innovation solutions?

Link to the Altimeter Report “The 2016 State of Digital Transformation”

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their agreement, I have added this to my own site.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

The post Mapping the customer journey is the top driver for digital transformation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Working through these as essential combinations can become the real enabler.

Here is my solution that I think is worth working through, to firstly absorb and then consider for applying to your own innovation building activity. Try it!

I have worked on a formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE for this. I have never published the make-up of this in the public domain before, although I had briefly outlined it in a past post here.

In that post I outlined my thinking and I do not think it needs repeating, does it? So onward…….

The formula is the combination of positive relationships between the following interrelated parts:

Seeking out a working Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA)
What do you want to achieve from selecting the expected SCA  outcome choices? What do you need to frame as the SCA by using the parts of the formula?

• The extent of market advantage (posses distinctive advantage)
• Competitor’s difficulties to duplicate this, where the unique advantage is often found
• Strategic leadership is prevalent and nurturing and valued
• Understanding “superior” marketplace position (in revenue and cost advantage)
• Creating it, capturing it and keeping it distinctive
• Facilitating, accelerating and sustaining the diffusion process across the organization
• How do you seek relative advantage, achieve compatibility, reduce complexity, encourage trail-ability and ensure observe-ability?
• Advancing the clear “line-of-sight” new business always requires to execute upon.
• Looking to achieve better visibility, flexibility, extending collaborations and advancing concepts through technology and structured approaches.
• Other strategic objectives require distinct capabilities to be built into these 5 groups

Innovation Intensity (II) and the degree of adoption

• The extent of product, process, managerial and business innovation
• A mix of technological and non-technological innovation
• Impact of innovation expected through strategic leadership
• The magnitude of change capacity required through innovation
• The scale of innovation impact desired
• Plotting out the roadmap for innovations evolution
• Exploring the different types of innovation and their potential
• The use of Business Model innovation to change the proposition
• The essential linkage between strategy and innovation outputs and outcomes
• Investment x activity x focus x disruption = return on innovation expectations

Organizational Capabilities (OC) in developing their distinct differences

• New knowledge acquired and embedded, exploring the new contexts and ways
• The ability for value-creating activities to be accumulated, integrated and transferred
• Adaptive learning (leads more to incremental innovation)
• Generative learning (willingness to question long-held assumptions)- favours radical
• Relational learning (collaborative linkage, networking for open innovation)
• Distinctive learning of new knowledge to create added value directly.
• Experimental learning tolerance with new ways of doing things
• Learning from both internal and external knowledge focused positions
• Encouraging co-production of concepts (ideas, components, systems, R& D)
• The ability to also unlearn (long-held assumptions, group-think)
• Structural evaluations into routines, procedures, systems, culture etc
• Releasing latent capabilities- discovery and exploitation- as capital in waiting
• Linking the three capitals- human, structural and relational- for interactive leverage
• Combining complementary assets and dynamic capabilities to configure & reconfigure
• Build the technology skill sets focusing on collaboration
• Encourage techniques for formalization, exploitation and generation
• The value of Absorptive Capacity in acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation.
• Seeking out the buy-in from the cross-functional business units

Entrepreneurial Energy (EE) promotes and generates

• Entrepreneurship facilitates generative-learning activities as the focus
• High tolerance of risk-taking, exploring the unproven, seeing patterns and shifts
• Pro-activeness in new directions, new capabilities, dynamics and mindsets
• Use of accumulated capabilities (coordinating, preserving and supervising)
• Key decision makers’ traits to investigate and encourage change, risk-taking propensity
• Positive outlook towards diversity & different behaviours, discovery and experimentation
• Providing a learning environment through trials and pilots that can scale quickly

Market Learning Competence (MLC) for establishing a clear awareness

• Through marketing capability and market understanding vigour
• Market focused to acquire, disseminate and use the knowledge acquired
• Exploit through sensing & scanning conditions for diverse and unrelated opportunity
• Possessing a close interaction with customers, users and suppliers
• Ability and speed to react to the variability of the environment
• Possess a high level of competitor awareness
• High levels of customer orientation and “over-served”/ “undeserved” insights.
• Always orientated towards innovation, not just new product development
• Building agility and responsiveness to constantly changing market conditions
• Getting to the “heart of the customer” in outcome-driven ways for their needs.

Relationship & Networking Effects (RNE) and its support to enhance

• Building greater exchanges of knowledge through interactions
• Encourage the constant practice of sharing
• Promote systems of relationships and the structures needed
• Strengthen alignment and appreciation of value-adding activities
• Connecting Knowledge Management with finding ongoing Business Value
• Combing Knowledge with constant practice & sharing
• Support to enhance the needs and guidance through good governance
• Resolve actively the barriers and concerns
• Build trust, connectedness and belonging
• Build a common purpose and share the vision
• Build an identity and offer difference to stop the leakage of knowledge
• Actively connect people to people, people to knowledge
• Gain alignment, be transparent, build identity and encourage networking
• Support the patterns of exchange, their impact on value,
• Assess the dynamics and new value potentials in the different exchanges
• Linking the collaborative efforts to define, align and stimulate innovation targets, strategies and initiatives to support ongoing and sustaining success
• Measure robustness, diversity and renewal
• Searching for defining and designing complementary platforms.

Brief background and some thoughts
On first take all this seems to be a long list, actually, this is offered on purpose. You add your own distinct needs within this formula but take care not to dismiss any suggestions offered here, without ‘good cause’.

The challenge is how you see it, how you value its ability to connect context and the content or aspects you want to focus upon. These structures or building blocks you can start individually adding your unique “flesh to the bone”.

Let this become an innovation capability formula that stays in your head and you constantly ‘walk around’ its parts to get an increasing connection and momentum to build its value from others needing to relate to what is important to building sustaining capabilities.

I got the original idea of this framework a number of years back by reading through some different thoughts that JayWeerawasdena had put together in a number of assorted papers. These assorted ideas and concepts partly fueled my idea that led to this ‘combining’ concept of mine, finally published here.

I feel we need to provide a framework that can be worked in ways that build your own unique capabilities. By focusing on these key components that do tend to make-up innovation that leads to sustaining ongoing competitive advantage you can frame and measure activity.

The other formula to measure this against

The one other formula I use with this is measuring its return on investment. This is

So a framework and a formula to measure innovation’s impact. Does this make sense to you? It has to me for years. I just thought I’d publish it a little wider than limiting it to a chosen few.

Really do think about it, experiment with it and see if it does not give you the increased intensity and focus you are needing for building greater capabilities.

I think you will find it does give you a powerful framework to build those capabilities around, needed to deliver real advantage going forward.

The post Building an innovation framework that has real capabilities as its formula as its heart. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.