Once in a while you should stop and look back. I have been very focused on justifying Business Ecosystems by providing frameworks, mechanisms or attempting to demystify them with suggested analytical or practical proposals.

I have been grouping my articles covered over two sites of paul4innovating.com and ecosytems4innovating.com. Why two sites? Well I am trying to “hold myself”to focusing on thought leadership and conceptual development on the paul4innovation.com site and providing more the implementation guideline and suggested methodologies on the ecosystems4innovating.com.

Is it working? I’m not sure as the two sites tend to fuse into each other and the distinctive points of differentiating the two is not the way it should be, lets put it down to a “work in progress”

So what has occupied my thinking and research in this last eight months or so?

The Deep Dive and Audited Results- yes audited!

I went to medium.com to pull the different content together and synthesis the key aspects. It partly surprised me in all it “provided”but also confirmed the different aspects of business ecosystems I needs to explore and explain.

After the pause for reflection, a greater emphasis to move from providing the building blocks, there is a time to go build! “Implementation” becomes the mantra for the foreseeable future, far, far more than in the past. The “how, when, why and what to implement” and provide the tools to do the job.

So what have I been “rattling on” about in these past eight or more months?

# The primary focus has been on my core concepts and frameworks of business ecosystems.

The Integrated Interconnected Business Ecosystem offers the framework and mechanisms to unlock value. These components and building blocks outlined do offer an integrated ecosystem to follow. This is my “core” central model where interconnectedness and integration are central to the potential for synergistic value and collaboration creation. Moving this into a truly integration framework will evolve to a multi-layered ecosystem framework to give greater structure and clarity to analyze will give a more focused client approach.

The ability to build an Ecosystem Business Model becomes essential. I have attempted to break down its complexity, provides the foundation elements for constructing a business ecosystem that offers a cohesive, well evaluated structured approach. It brings out your uniqueness to build distinctive solutions as all business ecosystems should be unique in design and their value proposition

Dynamic Ecosystems are the operating core of business ecosystems. It is their dynamic elements that provides agility and organizational resilience as the essential balance. We need an adaptive mindset as change becomes the constant dynamic we need to build into our approach to today’s evolving and challenging landscape

Innovation Ecosystems are where we build the dynamism and most of my view has been the need to recognize the current stagnation and limited thinking that has pervaded innovation. We have been trapped in existing thinking and out of date designs to manage innovation and we need to recognize this

The solution for me to change how we undertake innovation is to consider a different, more connected-up framework. I have proposed the Composable Innovation Framework. This brings innovation planning, tracking, collaborating and coordinating into this century as the technology platform forms the backbone of the integrated approach

Then we have the prevailing influences that are shaping Business Ecosystems

Emerging Technologies in its many forms has had the most influence on shaping the design of ecosystems. There continues to grow a reciprocal relationship between different technology and the formation of unique ecosystems. When you add in the different technologies of AI and Machine Learning, Blockchain and Decentralize Models, Digital Twins and Simulations with Edge Computing and IoT you have a “massive” potential for radical change. It is the unique power of understanding how you combine these for creating entirely new ecosystems structure and dynamics

We also have to consider the “interplay and connected mindsets“that is constantly needed in managing Ecosystems. They are constant and dynamic. We need to seek and build adaptive and evolving mindsets, stepping away from conventional models to having the ecosystem mindset is radical, we need to change and practice leadership and operating differently than in the past. We have to think transformation, what is confronting up and what we need to (radically) change.

I looked at the essential need to consider different ecosystems. No one ecosystem can fit all, it is made up of a interconnected, integrate design. We need to recognize there are interconnected parts each operating and contributing differently in Entrepreneurial, Start-Up, Innovation, Business, Dynamic, Enterprise and Enterprise-to-Enterprise. It is these that make up the integrated ecosystem process.

I feel the Entrepreneurial and Start-up Ecosystem needs to be separated out from being treated as preludes to innovation. Recognizing these have highly distinctive activities within often a contained environment to manage risk and opportunity provides greater scope and encouragement to explore edges and evolving thinking. Today we wrap these up as “start-up hubs” or “accelerator centers” The argue for separation or integration dissipates if you treat these as more distinctive.

Recognition that we do need to look through different lenses, open ourselves up to broader Open innovations as collaborative strategies bring confidence and lead to deepening understanding of how ecosystems can work. These go beyond supply chain agreements into multiple opportunities across the organization. Conventional, siloed thinking, needs to be broken down across entire organizations.

We have to break out different needs in how we scope ecosystems. We have to bring in the Mid-sized organizations and give them practical application and benefits of ecosystems so they can forge independence and contribution in distinctive ways to larger, more “orchestrated” ecosystems.

Then we do need to recognize the distinctiveness of Partner Ecosystems. It is partnerships that when combined give distinct value of ecosystems. Recognizing partner ecosystems can address specific industry or social challenges

Natural Ecosystems do have much to offer Business Ecosystems and I find it valuable to spend time investigating these commonalities and sometimes recognizing greater comparisons, they stimulate approaches and methodologies.

Governance and Orchestration is essential. I have been working on different frameworks and approaches for this as it is so critical to success or failure. The failure recognition needs more work

Each of these topics or focus areas recognize the complexities of Business Ecosystems, they each contribute to the emerging Blueprint that can be designed into a specific business ecosystem approach, tailored to each unique challenge or need. Yes, ecosystems are complex, adaptive and highly dynamic and that is why I consistently emphasize the interconnected and integrated needs as so much is interdependent

So the many tools, frameworks that have been emerging form my work form the way forward, it will be interesting where the next eight to nine months takes me. I have a growing set of quantitative assessment methods, working on failure analysis and need to bring in three specific aspects.

The need for recognizing differences in global/ regional variations where structures, culture and governance will show differences. We have to buid more regulatory considerations and how they so often impact ecosystem formation and operation. Thirdly the whole sustainability integration has the need for deeper alignment with environment and sustainability issues. I need to bring these out more within my integrated thinking

Where I get often a real “nudge” is on content formats. My comfortable space is writing content but I need to build out more visualization tools, assessment diagnostics, practitioners feedback on their direct insights and continue to build on comparative business case studies

Finally I undertook a fairly extensive audit of my work in the last two months

A number of positioning challenges came out. My positioning or balance on 1) Abstract vs Measurable, moving conceptual models into more quantifiable metrics, 2) A sense of Static vs Dynamic where stable structures need to give way to evolving systems, 3) the Theoretical vs Visual where text-heavy explanations need corresponding visual representations and finally 4) moving Technology- adjacencies vs Technology-integrated needs to switch from technology discussed as an external force to its (rightful) position as a foundational element needs greater recognition.

Each of these is already being picked up upon, recent posts on technology for example, the re-emphasis of the application of dynamics within my own work by a tighter integration of thinking and the biggest “switch” of all, moving towards implementation and all that needs to have a comprehensive and measurable approach

The different audits all proposed a (slightly) different focus on my web sites and how they should separate out. These were “healthy debates. Not only do I have the principle two of paul4innovating.com and ecosystem4innovating.com my core site of agilityinnovation.com is the “the central advisory point to integrate and apply ecosystem and innovation knowledge from a commercialization perspective”.

Concluding and Moving Forward

The concluding remarks of the audits undertaken (multiple) “based on the evaluation and subsequent discussions, you are not far off from the goal of building an integrated ecosystem knowledge architecture.

I often feel my own “depth of relating and pursuit” seems to not take me towards achieving this goal of offering an integrated ecosystem knowledge architecture but showing me how really hard articulating and demonstrating Business Ecosystems is, simply because of the complexities that are so interconnected.

The cry “onward and upward” comes to mind.

I did not link these to any relevant articles, too many but just put the highlighted word into the search box on each site and hopefully you find what you are looking for or interested in. Let me know if you did not.

The post Building the Comprehensive World of Interconnected Business Ecosystems first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The post Seeking fresh winds and new directions first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

You often hear of volatile trading conditions, a more complex market and situations changing constantly and moving faster than ever. ‘Much’ seems to be closing in on us.

We do know we need to re-equip ourselves for constant disruption; we are really beginning to see a shift from the classic bell curve into more of a shark fin for adopting change.

One that is characterized by sudden, even violent success or an event, some moments of brilliant dominance, followed by a dramatic change in conditions as others have spotted the same opportunity and you hit a rapid decline, the race to the bottom of competition constantly negating one another.

Market are segmenting, the life cycle is shortening or having an even longer tail of dealing with slow decline and constant erosion of any competitive position. The sharks are arriving even earlier and in a greater need to show their dominance.

It does seem “creative destruction” is a central force in many of our activities. Activities where innovation is continually replacing not just in products and new services but in designing radically different business models, searching to replace less adaptive competitors in the marketplace at faster rates.

The post The sharks that prey are arriving a lot earlier now first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

They are being forced to deal in increasingly complexity and environmental turbulence and ‘adapting the appropriate response’  remains increasingly a difficult one to master, within the existing regime and structures.

On the one hand the value in stability is still essential, working within specific routines and practices gives a clear ‘path dependence.’

This allows for efficiency and effectiveness to be constantly at practice, constantly building the problem-solving processes, so as to master tasks in complex environments to resolve ‘known’ problems in ‘given’ ways.

We need to become increasingly fluid but how and why?

Yet there is considerable discussion around changing structures and models to become more adaptive, agile and fluid, to react and deal with this increasing turbulence occurring all around us.

We need to react and become more responsive, becoming more adaptive to changing environments and business challenges, that are often unknown, unexpected, or not yet explored or exploited.

The need for a different innovation interplay

In a recent series, of introducing the innovation interplay, co-authored with Jeffrey Phillips of Ovo Innovation, we discuss how change needs a higher appreciation and focus within any innovation design.

We go on and suggest the importance of thinking new innovation design is increasingly coming through the business model and this requires increasing undertaking of change.

This change thinking is not just for the innovator, but for the customers and markets that any innovation is channeled towards but also, in how it has a real impact on the dynamics of current competition and the potential effect on competitors.

Designing deliberate change into innovations eventual outcome, increasingly through new business models, is a powerful point of real advantage that needs greater leveraging.

So we have this dilemma of needing stability but trying to build increasing fluidity

Yet today our organizations are far too rigid, they are not adaptive or agile enough to really exploit innovation to the full. They struggle with this organizational constraint imposed by the singular, or dominating pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness at the cost of ‘fluidity.’

Organizations and individuals see change far to often in negative terms and not in the way innovation can bring positive change that seeks constant, ongoing adjustments to deliver the best, optimal solution.

How can both work alongside each other? Many theorists have suggested, of having in place the ‘ambidextrous organization.’ This would require organizations to be design organizations in their structures, people and processes to either be focused on ‘being efficient’ or being ‘change orientated’.

I have been drawn to this dual system of ambidextrous as it helps resolve one of the consistent stumbling blocks for innovation to ‘take hold’ and evolve.

Innovation is constantly fluid, needing to be adaptive as we learn and adjust to new learning and this is constantly requiring a very change orientated approach. Often innovation comes up against a rigid system and for many “it just seems not to fit” and gets rejected as not appropriate to us.

Innovation struggles as it often remain outside the prevailing system. Innovation constantly challenges the dominant mindset within organizations, who like the idea of innovation but are mostly measured to drive efficiency and effectiveness, keeping highly focused on the short-term performance as their role, reward, advancement and key to ongoing career success.

So innovation ‘sits outside’ their domain of focus. Something needs to change if innovation is really important.

Yet the very essence of our stability in organizations is under threat.

There is so much change being undertaken, the growing call for quick improvisation and ad hoc responses all needs to take us away from those rigid processes into open and far more fluid ones.

The solutions of fluid, agile and adaptive are aiming to develop highly flexible and responsive organizations as an attractive answer to manage in more uncertain times as the way to move forward. The ability to make this very defining and shaping move in any organization does seem very fraught with risk.

We do need to extend our thinking about fluidity far more, so let’s initially step back to see if we can then move forward into a more fluid organization..

There is no doubt a classic change model that needs an update

The classic “unfreeze > change > refreeze” approach to change just does not work anymore. This still remains one of the most classic change models as a three-phase model, introduced by Lewin in 1947, and became the basis for many subsequent change models.

Lewin’s change model seeks to “unfreeze” the existing conditions, in order to allow “change or transition” to occur, so as to then arrive at a new state of hopefully higher capability or competence, at which point the operating model is again “frozen” or “refreezes” into its new state.

Certainly this model is becoming very outdated and somewhat dangerous from an innovation perspective, for two reasons. First, the model anticipates resistance to change rather than engagement with change.

Second, the model assumes an eventual “refreezing” state, where the company remains in stability, without change. Today we are in need of being in a state of constantly improving our operating model and exploring growth through far more business model evolution to influence markets.

Shifting to a different change model needs a high level of transition

We need to ‘unfreeze’ through recognition of our present rigidity > We should make a ‘transition’ through experiment and exploration >

Finally, we should not ‘refreeze’ as the recommendation of past views has suggested, we should build the adaptive, agile and fluid abilities required for today from learning, collaborating and embracing a constant change mentality.

To achieve a more organic fluidity, moving from hierarchies to networks, from formal rules and high levels of coordination into far more spontaneous interactions, improvised processes that resolved specific issues and the constantly forming and dissolving project teams where far more lateral organization-wide communications take place is a set of real challenges.

Everything seems to be flowing faster and we have to respond

We are seeing far more fluidity in relationships where the knowledge is flowing within, across and between organizations. The boundaries are blurring, that increasing fuzziness needs shifting our style of decision-making and solution finding.

There is also this growing sense that innovation is endless, it never stops but simply shifts from one stage to another, often looping back to be re-evaluated and thought through. The old linear process is not working, learning and adjusting is a constant all along the pipeline development process and requires a higher level of fluidness to deal with it.

There is this nagging feeling of relentless destruction or disturbance, the very opposite of the stable equilibrium we seemed to enjoy in the past. Those that become capable of managing the constant change and disequilibrium will thrive.

Yet we need to face this paradox of fluidity and stability.

Those growing conditions of uncertainty and complexity also need boundary building, identity formation and problem-solving architectures that are stable and can provide replication of essential actions or activities.

We need to seek out and maintain yet constantly challenge to “undo” and redesign.

We are still struggling with the dominant linear logic of much of what we do in organizations, and often this constrains innovation, restricts us to provide radically different business models and limits our abilities to change fast enough. We are learning to be far more adaptive in our learning but this is constantly meeting up with the resistance of this linear logic.

What would help us build a higher fluidity into the design of our organizations?

Firstly what makes up the competencies of fluid?

Here we provide a list that has many aspects or enabling attributes to them you might recognize. Embracing all of them is not the answer but taking a more detailed and thoughtful approach to those capabilities, competencies and capacities to build fluid into your organization becomes important.

Today we are all on the search for new adaptive infrastructures. We should be participating in platforms and building our ecosystems to extract outside knowledge to learn how to recombine it in new ways. Nothing today stands still; we are in that need to constantly redefine, to build in flexibility and this adaptive skill.

We should encourage thinking and challenging present orthodoxies and explore ways to rewire and rethink much of the prevailing system and processes as it has far too much built-in rigidity.

Today we are losing predictability on much that was a constant within the past, we have a speed of development that needs to constantly be reduced down, for gaining competitive advantage and getting our innovation to market earlier.

So can we identify competencies that would help embed a more fluid way of working?

We need to look for or deliberately design into our thinking the following:
We are all becoming far more digital, fluid and fast, we are absorbing and responding at faster rates and we are adapting to a constant, multifaceted world of connections, systems and knowledge piecing to combine up into different ‘wholes’.

• To get there we need to be far more nimble, we need to learn navigation skills far more, we are increasingly assignment driven, less exploratory in many things, and technology is taking on this role.

• We need to become increasing agile, iterative, be experimenting, and constantly determined to execute to drive our results and value-add.

• We need to seek empowerment, focus on delivery and collaboration outcomes far more resolutely.

• We need to grasp the make-up of value creation and why innovation is becoming new business models in its potential.

• We need to establish within ourselves and the working environment we operate within a sound conflict resolution pathway and strive for authenticity and trust within the places we operate.

• Lastly a real willingness to seek out diversity, to be visible, and be wanting to have this constant entry and exit to our projects and challenges, to drive our personal satisfaction and worth up.

In summary

We need to relentlessly challenge and push out our own boundaries and knowledge and adapt these to be designed to those we seek to exploit constantly. The mantra of “adapting, exploring and quickly responding” to the needs seen in rapidly changing markets and across our customer base of past, present and future needs this fluidity.

The need for being fluid across our organizations is to respond to those different demands being faced today, it requires a far more adaptive and responsive business to work in increasing parallel of balancing stability alongside pushing for dynamism .

This dual need of maintaining stability in the force of resisting shocks and keeping leveraging the existing optimization has to yet work alongside responding to changing markets, resolving increasing challenges.

The end result is in delivering more innovation that meets the changes occurring, these require both fluid and stable thinking and approaches.

Additional material to explore

For a more extended discussion on change, its impact, its force within the interplay of innovation, change and business models, there are two White Papers you can read written jointly by Jeffrey Phillips of Ovo Innovation and myself.

In a White Paper “Critical Interplay Innovation Business Models Change 6-2” we provide a foundation document that highlights the important interplay between innovation, business models and change.

A further white paper “Why innovators need a new change paradigm” takes this even further by looking more specifically at emerging models and the competencies required to react to this change in these more ‘fluid’ ways

Here the paper is laying out more of the discussion for building the case of fluidity as discussed here..

The post Fluidity – the growing need of organizations today. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

These new innovations frequently change or modify operating models and business models, often not by deliberate design.

We’d stipulate that most innovation should be focused on updating and changing business models constantly and with increasing focus. With this focus new products and services become by-products or outcomes that support or sustain new business models for driving greater lasting sustaining competitive advantage.

In short, most innovation should be focused on creating new business models, with new products or services serving as enablers to intentional business model innovation, rather than the other way round. This is what we mean by flipping perspectives.

Critically we have to become far more comfortable with constant, ongoing change and align this into new innovations and business models. This move to positive change is discussed here, recommending a movement that allows the changes we need within our organizations to become more fluid in their adaption, for leveraging and exploiting innovation in new, far more compelling ways.
This is the fourth in a series discussing the interplay around innovation, so to recap

In a recent series, introduced initially on www.innovationexcellence.com with this one being the fourth post, originally published on June 25, 2015, we discussed the importance of the emerging interplays and how all innovation has the potential to be a new business model and creates change.

This series is re-produced here as it is a important concept to consider all the aspects within any innovation interplay.

Both myself, Paul Hobcraft of Agility Innovation and Jeffrey Phillips of OVO Innovation, co-authors of this series, would argue that we are failing to manage the different and multiple interplays that are constantly taking place when innovation occurs. We are often ignoring them and failing to extract the best or optimal value out of the innovation we are introducing.

In a White Paper we have just written called “The Critical Interplay among Innovation, Business Models and Change (6-2)” we provide a foundation document that highlights the important interplay between innovation, business models and change.

A new white paper “Why innovators need a new change paradigm” takes this even further by looking more specifically at emerging models and the competencies required to react to this change in more ‘fluid’ ways. You can find the download links at the bottom of this post.

The Interplay is Demanding Change and New Models

If innovation continues at a high pace, and forces change across customers, the market and the innovator, as well as creating new business models, then we can easily accept that innovators must be good at planning for and executing change. Innovation and change are somewhat symbiotic: sustained innovation cannot occur without good change capability, and innovation creates demand for change.

When we add in the interplay across innovation, business models and change it’s evident that change is a constant, and will only increase. Yet there is a significant problem: existing change models that describe how we think about and implement change no longer seem valid, given the nature and the pace of change.

Innovators need a new change model

We, innovators, need a new model of change, for at least seven important reasons:

1. As innovators we aren’t simply responding to external change, we are creating change, both for customers and for our companies and markets. (inside, proactive change vs external, reactive).
2. External change is far more unpredictable, in global markets new threats emerge from anywhere, at any time and are often delivered in totally unpredicted business models.
3. The pace and nature of change aren’t slowing but is accelerating and will continue to accelerate. (increasing pace, frequency and amplitude of change).
4. As we’ve demonstrated, most innovation has the potential to be business model innovation, which will require change. (As more innovation becomes focused on business model innovation, this will create even more change).
5. We recognize that change is no longer an occasional threat but a constant companion (shift from the idea of change as a threat to change capacity as a competitive advantage).
6. The idea that companies can achieve a protected steady state where change won’t affect them doesn’t seem to apply anymore (long periods of stasis, or standing still are no longer possible. Must be able to change/evolve constantly).
7. We need to think of change as a capability that we constantly deploy, rather than a threat we typically avoid. (Need to develop change as a capability, to build skills, reduce barriers).

For these reasons the concept of unfreezing and refreezing does not seem appropriate anymore. As change becomes more constant, and as we ourselves create change through innovation and business model development we must be much more open to, and welcoming of, change.

Rather than viewing change as an occasional nuisance or hurdle, we must build capabilities that allow us to implement change constantly, building barriers for other companies that don’t embrace change or can’t change quickly and capably.

Factors that must change

Perhaps the biggest change to status-quo thinking about change is the concept of a protected steady state where the organization can “freeze” and resist or deflect change for a long period of time. The nature of competition is so fierce that we cannot wall off a market, a segment or a company and avoid change.

Rather we need to create capabilities, systems and knowledge that allows us to embrace change and use it to our advantage, whether we create the change through new innovation or the change is thrust upon us from external factors or competitors.

Another concept that must be rejected is the idea that change is difficult, distracting and problematic. In the older unfreeze-refreeze model the goal is to experience a significant amount of change in the shortest amount of time, moving as quickly to the new steady state as possible.

This signals a lack of engagement, resistance to change and avoidance. Why would we reinforce avoidance of change when the winners in the future markets will be the firms that can embrace and manage change, who are constantly creating change through new innovation?

We need to create the belief that change is a positive experience and change capacity creates a positive differentiator for those who invest in the skills and methods.

The old change model indicates signals that a company must endure a brief change activity to win a long period of quiet in the new operating state. This promise of eventual stability is misleading and based on historical data, not future trends and indicators.

The older model makes promises that competitive forces contradict. New realities suggest that we need to be constantly adapting to emerging opportunities and threats, and building change capabilities. Perhaps a new model for change is:

Unfreeze the Rigid – Build change capabilities/reduce cultural barriers – Create change/Promote Fluidity

In this suggested change model we recognize that rather than adapting to a new reality, we need to build and sustain change capabilities to be prepared for any eventuality. In the new “state” we don’t expect to sustain a new status quo but to create change and remain capable and be constantly fluid, embracing change and innovation consistently.

To succeed in future markets that will possess far more change, at a much higher rate than before, with far more innovation, we need a new model for change that shifts the concept of change from an occasional, painful interruption to a consistent, evolving capability.

First, we need to understand the existing barriers and challenges associated with change. Then we’ll need to build change capabilities, and finally create a new operational and cultural structure to sustain change.

Fluidity is becoming our growing need of understanding today

There is considerable discussion about changing structures and models to become more adaptive, agile and fluid. With such an increasing level of complexity and environmental turbulence that organizations are having to master, most of their existing systems, processes and approaches are facing increasing challenges.

The solutions of fluid, agile and adaptive are aiming to develop highly flexible and fluid organizations as an attractive answer to move towards.

There is so much change being undertaken, the growing call for quick improvisation and ad hoc responses all needs to take us away from those rigid processes into open and fluids ones.

To obtain BOTH White Papers you can DOWNLOAD by going to
https://ovoinnovation.wordpress.com/thought-leadership/ or
http://paul4innovating.com/insights-thinking/

The original post was published on www.innovationexcellence.com on June 25, 2015

The post A new innovation perspective – change to fluidity first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

As we consider the interplay between innovation, business models and change, it becomes clear that many companies have a definition of innovation that’s far too narrow.

Increasingly we need to rethink the scope, depth and breadth of innovation possibilities, as well as the secondary implications of innovation.

Ignoring this broader definition of innovation means we can never achieve all of the possible benefits innovation has in store.

We believe ignoring the breadth and depth of innovation can also allow competitors and new entrants to disrupt your position or industry.

Fortunately, some of these definitions have been created for us.

Our responsibility is to understand the definitions and their implications, not stay constrained but seek and explore the broader options this can provide.

The post Most Innovation is Becoming Business Model Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The post The Interplay in 3 Essential Change Points for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Yet why is it we often ignore the power of change when we design innovation?

We often fail to fully appreciate the changes that are occurring from the innovation we produce, it often seems an afterthought, there is this lead and lag effect and needs, firstly recognition and then addressing in how we manage innovation going forward.

In a recent series introduced initially and given a feature of the week prime spot on www.innovationexcellence.com on June 7, 2015, we discussed the importance of the emerging interplays.

This series will be re-produced here as it is an important concept to consider all the aspects within any innovation interplay.

The emerging concept of “interplays”

Jeffrey Phillips of OVO Innovation and I, Paul Hobcraft, through my consultancy work at Agility Innovation Specialists, the co-authors of this series, would argue that we are failing to manage the different and multiple interplays that are constantly taking place when innovation occurs. We are often ignoring them and failing to extract the best or optimal value out of the innovation we are introducing.

In a White Paper we have just written called “the critical interplay among innovation, business models and change” we provide a foundation document that highlights the important interplay between innovation, business models and change.

In this whitepaper we discuss the dynamics and focuses of its impact on all three constituents involved when innovation occurs; that of the customer, the market or industry itself and on the innovator itself.

We used the “lens” of the three horizon model to demonstrate the interplay between innovation, business models and change.

The concept of the interplay – a brief introduction

In this post we introduce the concept of the interplay of innovation to provide a short understanding of this emerging thinking between us and hopefully this encourages you to read the different White Papers that are available on both our web sites (Agility and OVO) to download and read, with my link opening these up directly as pdf’s of one and two here.

We both feel outlining this has only started our thinking to begin our journey to find new ways to frame this ‘interplay’ so it becomes a management discipline, to think far more broadly about the innovation you are designing today.

A series of subsequent posts will delve deeper into specific interplays going on following this introduction which link further with the whitepaper (links for downloading are shown below).

There are interplays constantly at work around innovation that we are failing to fully recognize, manage and leverage.

The vital interplay between innovation, business models and systemic change isn’t fully appreciated; we are failing to appreciate the amount of change that is occurring by innovation and as such failing to leverage it to its most optimal.

We specifically chose the word ‘interplay’ as it means “reciprocal actions, reactions or interactions” and that is exactly what innovation imposes in potential change, to something new, and in altering the existing state, with new business model potential.

It is ‘exerting an influence’ and it is this potential for ‘reaction’ comes from thinking more about the recognition of the value within change and looking to design new business models. One affects the other or has the real potential too, if it becomes an integrated part of the innovation execution process

Any innovation creates change but we have constantly failed to recognize each of the constituent parts this can and does have an impact upon.

Understanding the interplay and why it matters

We tend to understand more and more about a capability as we work with it and learn its capabilities and power. Over time humans have mastered many technologies, from fire to the splitting of the atom.

We believe we are still in the first stages of fully understanding the scope of innovation. Until we recognize the interplay between innovation, business models and change, we cannot fully grasp the potential impact innovation has across horizons, to customers and markets, and most importantly, to the innovator themselves.

Corporate innovation has, to date, been relegated for the most part to incremental improvements, which have little impact on the market or the innovator.

We know this because of how much emphasis we place on the few stories of true disruption – the iPod for example, or how NetFlix destroyed Blockbuster. Increasingly, however, many people are realizing how much power and capability innovation has to offer, and how innovation can create exceptional change, for each of the three constituents noted above.

Further, as we expand the scope and breadth of innovation outcomes, we’ll quickly see that many innovations aren’t simply products, but also new channels, new services, new processes and new business models. As these new innovations emerge more consistently, they will create great change. This becomes part of our need for the interplay

We see different interplays

The first interplay is between innovation, business models and change

As innovation increases, we will see far more variation in the impact and outcomes, which will force business model changes. As industries and competitors adapt to the increasing pace of innovation, the pace and scope of change will increase as well, leading to more business model shifts and more potential innovation activity.

These three factors create a virtuous (to some) or vicious (to others) cycle, depending on the organization’s ability to sustain innovation, change and evolve business models.

The second interplay is between the three primary constituents involved

Innovation has an impact on at least three constituents: customers, the markets and the industries themselves but also internally on the innovator themselves.

1) The customer as the first constituent
These are at the customer, where the ‘job’ your product or new service is seeking to resolve often requires very different actions, behaviours or beliefs, firstly to adopt the innovation but then to ‘extract’ the advantage gained in making the change.

We believe we fail to provide enough of the positives of this change, often they are discovered through trial and error or through a newly forming community that shares their knowledge. Customers experience change from any innovation they adopt.

2) The Market and your competitors as another constituent
Each industry has established ‘norms’ that are increasingly under attack from new business models, and new competitive threats that are not bound by these norms.

We are seeing many conventions previously established being challenged not just by innovation itself but by the clear use of the business model to explore all the options available. New innovations often create change for competitors or the industry at large.

3) Then we have the innovator themselves
What is so staggering to us is how many innovators are refusing to recognize that innovations always create change that has a significant effect on the innovator themselves. We must ask – why is that the case? Often by not understanding the scope of change, they are attempting to create they totally miss the business opportunities that could come with it.

Change is still seen internally as something to be avoided, often at all costs, but we would argue most strongly to embrace change before a lack of change destroys you. Innovators are not immune from the change they create.

The third interplay is the three horizons to manage innovation and change

To explain the impacts of innovation and the change it creates, we’ll use an accepted framework (the Three Horizons) to consider the impact innovation has on change capabilities and business models.

What’s important to understand is that every innovation creates change, and the amount and impact of change scales out across each of these three horizons into different business model opportunities

Change today is, without doubt, a constant

We need to create a new interplay design. Before we can embrace constant change we need to see the effect of change certainly in more positive ways.

There is really no “steady state” anymore, change through innovation will become the predominant state. Change and innovation become constants, as business models continually evolve. It is reducing the fear and uncertainty of change by taking a totally different view of the value of innovation that we can alter today’s change perspective.

Organizations need to become more excited about pursuing new business opportunities, looking for new business models to change the existing dynamics.

It is totally energizing to try out new things, design a more holistic innovation experience that accounts for the customer and the market and constantly experiment with all that does ‘interplay’ around innovation.

Managing the interplay of innovation, business models and change

You do need to pass through different phases of understanding, of awareness and recognize the increasing interplay undertaken by combining innovation, business models and change across all three constituents of the customer, the market and yourself as the innovator, through a lens that sees emerging opportunity across different horizons.

In our white paper “the critical interplay among innovation, business models and change” we provide a foundation document that highlights the important parts of a new interplay that needs recognition, framing even more and a fresh approach to building the competencies, capabilities and capacities to manage the interplay of future innovation opportunity.

A place where you are seeking the power and impact of innovation lies in the interplay between change and new business designs.

To obtain the White Paper you can DOWNLOAD by going to

https://ovoinnovation.wordpress.com/thought-leadership/ or

Insights & Thinking

The original post was published on www.innovationexcellence.com on June 7, 2015

The post The Interplay Surrounding Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

It is either in the external market place in new products, services and even new business models, yet we often ignore the amount of change we should be considering within our own organization.

As we ‘learn’ to innovate we ourselves change but often we are poor at recognizing these changes and the greater impact this might have on on all that is around us.

We miss opportunities to alter our processes, systems, structures or methods. We often fail to ‘advance’ in all the positive change innovation can bring.

We tend to ignore the change part of innovation
I believe we need to rethink this and evaluate the significant changes that should be taking place within our internal organizations as we expand our innovation activities.

As I have mentioned in a previous post I have been thinking about the managing of change significantly in recent weeks. It continues well into the next few weeks as Jeffrey Phillips of OVO Innovation and I have co-authored a White Paper called “the critical interplay among innovation, business models and change” as it rolls out.

Take a read by downloading this whitepaper on this site within my newly created “Insights and Thinking” tab. 

A classic change model needs an update

We need to ‘unfreeze’ through recognition of our present rigidity  > We should make a ‘transition’ through experiment and exploration > Finally we should not ‘refreeze’ as the recognition of past views has offered, we need to build the adaptive, agile and fluid abilities required for today from learning, collaborating and embracing change.

We need a ‘C’ change to always sit side-by.side with innovation.
Innovation is always like a change project, it needs to be mapped, it needs thinking through in its impact so as too relate and identify with all that does occur within any innovation adoption.

For the moment lets take a “lighter” look at the importance of  the ‘C’ of needed changes throughout innovation’s need.

So thinking “C” is central to innovation

This is made up of the search to build a common language, to put innovation in its appropriate strategic and operational context, to work on communicating and cascading this throughout the organization, so as to build the culture, climate and conditions innovation needs to work on challenging and sometimes complex issues.

We consistently need to provide the clarity that all need to contribute so this ‘broader universe’ can spark the distinctive aspects of cultivating curiosity and creativity that has the greater potential of being converted into the innovation that delivers on its capital in the potential promise to captivate our customers.

The ultimate aim is building identification and understanding so as to build up the capabilities, capacities and competencies required to deliver on the integrated approach taken.

This is led from the top through a well-designed approach and then fully conveyed down on the needs throughout the organization for all involved to align and bring innovation to life, to spark curiosity, cooperation and collaborative exchanges, to combine ideas, to be capable to build on these and take them forward in coherent, thoughtful ways, offering calculated returns.

What we design needs to seeks out to capture and encourage engagement, we need to crystallize new concepts, construct and commercialize solutions and be the providing catalyst for sustaining change and growing confidence, connecting our people, converting and clarifying, convincing all our respected communities of innovations value, of its growing critical importance and vital contribution to influence and determine future growth as well as creating the conditions for sustaining and improving the organizational longer-term prospects of lasting competitive advantage.

So have you had your daily dose of the critical vitamin C compound that comprises much of what we need for our innovation good heath?

Just a light hearted Friday afternoon comment. Ciao from Southern Switzerland.

The post The "C" change within innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The opening post is entitled “the interplay surrounding innovation”. Please take a read

Our opening argument revolves around the recognition of change as part of an interplay

We argue that we are failing to manage the different and multiple interplays that are constantly taking place when innovation occurs. We are often ignoring them and failing to extract the best or optimal value out of the innovation we are introducing. The change effect is often being ignored.

You can download this whitepaper on this site within my newly created “Insights and Thinking” tab on this site.

In this paper we discuss the dynamics and focuses of its impact on all three constituents involved when innovation occurs; of the customer, the market or industry itself and the innovator itself. We used the “lens” of the three horizon model to demonstrate and frame the interplay between innovation, business models and change.

We are providing a series of posts on this through Innovation Excellence in the coming weeks which build from and on this White Paper. We both feel this has far more to explore in practices, frameworks and thinking and we hope you share this view, as it builds.

We initially chose change over transformation.

Clearly the emphasis is to encourage transformation to meet the unrelenting disruptions going on all around us makes sense. I certainly believe we have to become far more comfortable with change, before we attempt anything transformational and that in itself is not easy at all.

We seem hard-wired to resist change until we are forced to accept it and that is a real pity and loss within ourselves. We need to see a change in different ways, through the lens of discovery and learning, and then we transform.

Change always feels painful.

Change is notoriously hard to achieve both within ourselves and especially in organizations. The reality is we want to resist change, it makes us feel uncomfortable, often raising the fear of the unknown. We form habits that we find hard to shake free of.

Often we invested a fair amount of time in learning, it then becomes even tougher to start unlearning but that is what we must do, unlearn, to then open up our minds to relearn. We worry about are we losing something of value, is the change going to feel better or just increases our insecurity even further.

The level of failed change or transformations undertaken has been put at somewhere between 70 to 80% in falling short on the initial targets or aspirations that drove change. The value generated from change often falls below the expectancies visualized when the organization embarked on the change program. So why do we put ourselves through this level of pain, disruption, uncertainty and potential risk of failure?

We do get caught up in interchanging change and transformation and believe it is the same.

It is not! In my research on change, I altered my own understanding with a range of thinking I explored.

Change tends to focus on making the existing system better.
You use this as your framing point and the level of efficiencies and improving effectiveness is judged as the success or not of the end result.

You actually are ending up with a reconditioned model of your past as you have mainly dealt within the boundaries and constraints to make this (often) well-defined shift in the way things have worked.

Transformation is a different matter. You are attempting something far more radical and disruptive.

It is aiming to reinvent the organization, and significantly challenge and change the practices that are in place. It places far more at a higher risk as it is more unpredictable, iterative and often a series of experiments to learn and adapt. It often feels you are entering the unknown as it can become a real process of discovery, experimentation and adjusting execution.

Transformation is far more dynamic and far-reaching. It is often looking to design for the future as you release the shackles of the past, bound up in existing processes, behaviours and thinking. You are looking to invest far more as you learn, clearly more radical new business models would have this ‘transformational’ effect.

Both change and transformation need to deeply understand the “as is” and those committing to make a change or transformation need to share the goals and understand the reasons for undergoing such a conversion from the existing state to a different one. There are considerable risks associated with both.

What might help flip the odds?

I would argue that most change or transformation initiatives attempted are far to piecemeal, they address only certain known parts and fail to address the ‘whole’ that is actually affected by the change.

Any change program needs a far more holistic approach than often we give this, we get caught up in the project management, we focus too much on one side of the change equation and either get caught up in the people side or favour the structural side of processes and functional design.

Undergoing any change required dramatically rethinking the reasons for this, the effects this will seem to have on the operating and business model. Will the effort yield a more positive result?

We are facing unprecedented disruption

Externally we are seeing increased volatility, complexity in regulations, the impact of geopolitics, constant pressures in public spending and shifts in demand, the digital disruptions and social media influences forcing a greater need to dialogue with stakeholders, customers and new entities and finally, our employee base is questioning and demanding in unprecedented ways.

All of these are having a significant impact on our organizations and they have not responded and are often stuck in those past times where these forces of real change were simply not built into the system.

Equally most organizations are losing any significant competitive advantage as the competition has intensified, the design and adaptability of others to challenge the existing incumbent is being made easier through the internet, reducing global barriers and high level of mobility, operating often at much lower operating costs, free from legacy.

The final imperative for change comes from our present poor levels of growth and innovation.

Innovation requires managing differently, to function and yield those higher results we would like and this becomes part of the dilemma within organizations. Yet innovation is also badly constrained because change is not considered as having this symbiotic relationship with innovation.

Innovation being designed and produced are mostly new to the world (or should be) and these confront customers, markets and the innovator themselves in making change.

The higher the scope of impact of innovation the more we do need to address change yet we can’t often grasp the nature and amount of change that the innovation unleashes. We should think about innovation and change together.

This is where Jeffrey and I are focusing our thinking at present

Change is all around us as a constant-  we need to simply get used to it
We can’t escape change; we can’t transform ourselves without a clear holistic model of its impact across the whole organization.

Change and transformation require us to be dynamic, constantly exploring, adapting and learning, it cannot be refrozen as was the thinking of the past. Nothing is stable; we need to build it as fluid, agile and constantly adapting through our learning.

We need to generate a far more highly dynamic environment, one where we are constantly being challenged and seeking out answers through discovery, experimentation and constant execution.

We need to become excited about change, each of us becoming innovation change leaders.

Change today is about building a change capacity that is constantly evolving.

We need to see change as pursuing new opportunities, exploring different horizons and thinking. We need to become far more energized in trying out new things, in experimenting or prototyping, to learn and advance.

We must retool ourselves as change not only leads to transformation but it will allow us to explore all the interplays we can find within and around innovation and those can lead to great things.

To obtain the White Paper you can go to my insights-thinking page, where you can download or view the paper “the critical interplay among innovation, business models and change”

The post The ongoing challenge is making change our constant first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.