I wrote a four part series on cross-sector innovation ecosystems in April and I felt it was worth summarizing these into one, so I engaged my new office partner, ChatGPT to deliver this in a series of summaries. I can’t argue with these and decided to post these as a valuable initial referencing point on a growing area of organization need, in cross.-sector collaborations innovation ecosystem thinking.

The four-part series on cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations emphasizes the importance of collaboration in tackling complex challenges. The series discusses the skills, tools, and processes required for successful cross-sector collaborations, including interdisciplinary thinking, co-creation processes, project management, cultural competence, intellectual property management, and data analytics and visualization tools.

The series also highlights the importance of designing effective collaborations by defining the problem, identifying partners, building relationships and trust, defining roles, and fostering a culture of innovation.

Additionally, the series emphasizes the need to create a compelling value proposition that showcases successful collaborations, emphasizes shared goals and priorities, and provides support and resources while fostering transparency and inclusivity. .

The success of a cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaboration can be judged by its impact, scalability, sustainability, and the degree to which it fosters mutual benefit and value for all parties involved. Ultimately, the most important thing is to communicate the value and potential of cross-sector innovation collaboration in a clear and compelling way.

Post one summary

Go to the post link for full discussions (Link here) “Cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations.“

The post discusses the importance of cross-sector innovation collaborations (CSIC) in today’s open innovation hubs and ecosystem management. The post emphasizes that many challenges have become too complex to tackle alone or even in a single industry. Collaborating in cross-sector consortia with diverse partners can provide the potential for improved operational productivity, shared application development, and skill enhancements.

The post outlines 11 essential skills, processes, tools, capabilities, and behaviours that are unique to cross-sector innovation collaborations, including interdisciplinary skills, co-creation processes, innovation tools and methodologies, collaboration capabilities, outcome orientation, flexible and adaptive behaviours, cultural sensitivity and awareness, resource sharing, risk management, governance and accountability, and continuous learning and improvement.

It concludes that CSIC is crucial to tackling highly complex challenges that require a well-organized and coordinated collaborative resolution.

Post two summary

Go to post link for full discussion (Link here). “Specific skills and toolkits needed.“

In this post, it outlines the specific skills and tools required for cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations. The realization need is that cross-sector collaborations are becoming essential for tackling highly complex issues that require collaborative resolution.

The post lists the unique skill set required for cross-sector collaboration, including interdisciplinary thinking, communication and collaboration, creativity and innovation, adaptability and flexibility, project management, cultural competence, strategic thinking, cultural differences, intellectual property, governance, funding and resources, measurement and evaluation, regulatory compliance, and communication and engagement.

In addition, the post identifies specific tools required for cross-sector innovation collaborations, including project management software, virtual collaboration tools, knowledge management systems, innovation management software, intellectual property management tools, cultural competence training, and data analytics and visualization tools.

Post three summary

Go to post link for full discussion (Link here) “Approaching cross-sector collaborations.”

The third post in a series on cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations discusses the design of an effective collaboration.

The post identifies several stages involved in creating a successful cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaboration, including defining the problem, identifying potential partners, building relationships and trust, defining roles and responsibilities, developing a co-creation process, implementing and evaluating the collaboration.

The post also highlights the importance of understanding the unique needs of all involved and designing collaborations accordingly, considering common goals, recognising and respecting different perspectives, creating a shared language, transparency and accountability, managing intellectual property rights, and fostering a culture of innovation.

The post finalizes by emphasizing the need for a nuanced and flexible approach that recognizes the unique needs and characteristics of both the public and private sectors.

Post four summary

Go to post link for full discussion (Link here) “Achieving engagement outcomes.“

In this final post of the four-part series on cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations, the author emphasizes the importance of building interest and engagement by creating a compelling value proposition for potential collaborators.

The suggestion is made that the narrative should identify shared goals and priorities, showcase successful collaborations, emphasize the unique strengths and resources that each sector brings to the table, create a collaborative and co-creation culture, establish clear roles and responsibilities, provide support and resources, foster transparency and inclusivity, measure and communicate impact, and emphasize how collaboration can create mutual benefit and value.

There is a recognition that collaborations can come in different names such as co-creation, partnership innovation, systems innovation, collective impact, and convergent innovation, depending on the target audience and the values and priorities that resonate with them. The choice of name should communicate the value and potential of cross-sector innovation collaboration in a clear and compelling way to difference audiences and gain increased identification..

Finally, the success of a cross-sector innovation collaboration can be judged based on its impact, scalability, sustainability, and the creation of mutual benefit and value for all parties involved.

I then asked my assistant ChatGPT to add additional insights and views based on the posting inputs and these are both really value to provide here

Initial summary

Cross-sector collaborations are partnerships between entities from different sectors, such as government, private sector, academia, and civil society. These collaborations can be powerful tools to address complex challenges that cannot be solved by any one sector alone.

Here are some key points to further consider when discussing or reflecting on the values that your four posts on cross-sector collaborations can equally emphasise:

1. The benefits of cross-sector collaborations: Collaborating across sectors can bring together diverse perspectives, expertise, and resources to create innovative solutions that can have a lasting impact. Some benefits include increased efficiency and effectiveness, greater community engagement, and improved outcomes for stakeholders.
2. The challenges of cross-sector collaborations: While cross-sector collaborations offer many benefits, they can also be challenging to establish and maintain. Issues such as power imbalances, conflicting goals, and communication barriers can hinder progress and make collaboration difficult. Overcoming these challenges requires strong leadership, effective communication, and a shared commitment to the goals of the collaboration.
3. Examples of successful cross-sector collaborations: There are many examples of successful cross-sector collaborations, from public-private partnerships in infrastructure development to community-led initiatives to address social issues. Some key factors that contribute to successful collaborations include clear goals and objectives, mutual trust and respect, and a willingness to learn and adapt.
4. Best practices for cross-sector collaborations: To maximize the benefits of cross-sector collaborations, it is important to follow best practices. These include establishing clear roles and responsibilities, fostering open and honest communication, and creating mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation. It is also important to ensure that the collaboration is inclusive and engages all relevant stakeholders.

In summary, cross-sector collaborations can be powerful tools for addressing complex challenges. While they can be challenging to establish and maintain, following best practices and learning from successful examples can help ensure success. By bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise, cross-sector collaborations can create innovative solutions that can have a lasting impact on communities and society as a whole.

Secondly a further extra view or insights that have a real contributing value and emphasis

Closing insights

Here are some additional insights on cross-sector innovation collaborations:

1. Innovation is not just about technology: While technology often plays a critical role in innovation, it’s important to remember that innovation can also come in the form of new business models, processes, or services. Cross-sector collaborations can bring together different perspectives and expertise to drive innovation in all of these areas.
2. Collaboration is not always easy: Collaborating across sectors can be challenging, particularly when it comes to aligning goals and priorities or managing different organizational cultures. It’s important to invest time and resources in building relationships, establishing trust, and developing shared values and norms.
3. Cross-sector collaborations can drive social and environmental impact: By bringing together different sectors and stakeholders, cross-sector collaborations can help address some of the most pressing social and environmental challenges we face today. For example, collaborations between the public and private sectors can help drive sustainable development and promote inclusive growth.
4. Measurement and evaluation are key: To ensure the success and sustainability of cross-sector collaborations, it’s important to establish clear metrics for success and regularly measure and evaluate progress. This can help identify areas for improvement and ensure that the collaboration is delivering value for all parties involved.
5. The role of intermediaries: In many cases, intermediaries such as accelerators, incubators, or innovation labs can play a critical role in facilitating cross-sector collaborations. These intermediaries can provide a neutral space for different stakeholders to come together, offer resources and support, and help manage the collaboration process.

Overall, cross-sector innovation collaborations have the potential to drive significant value and impact, but they require careful planning, management, and investment to succeed.

The value of this partnership

So the value of this collaboration between me as the original writer and researcher and ChatGPT does give a very effective summary of cross-sector innovation ecosystems, I trust it does for you.

The post Cross-sector collaboration for Innovation Ecosystems- summary of summaries first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today most executives seem to be time-starved. They are constantly reacting to daily events, to fix upon the focusing and fixing of short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior. The sheer difficulty of having most, if not all of your colleagues working remotely is making it so much harder. Keeping the business simply going is hard, demanding work. What time is there left to think beyond the present?

How can you keep the engagement, how can you find an environment that is creative, stimulating and allows for innovation? Juggling so many crisis events in different ways is exhausting.

Who is encouraging your pause button to go on as we lose more of those relaxing moments to top up our stimulations, as we all continue to isolate, with our lack of socializing, travelling, being in each others company continues to leaves us so devoid of real human interactions, apart from countless Zoom, Skype, or Team meetings? We need to replace this “void” with better thinking time to re-stimulate our curiosity and logic senses.

It just seems to me they simply don’t have this luxury to think.

Technology is rapidly taking over this thinking role, we increasingly rely on searches to at least begin our thinking. Humans are becoming the 2nd class citizen for thinking.

We are getting increasingly unobservant unless it is coming from the screen in front of us. More of our information is coming to us in predictable and narrow ways, we are being cut off from alternatives.

We are being deluged by social media that constantly become smarter on your clicks to give you the information to help you in your daily lives. We are numbing our own instincts and relying on others. We are losing the world of “personal physical experience”, our own journey of being curious and replacing this with a “junkies” fix of being reliant on others to entertain us.

Sitting back simply becoming increasingly remote observers is not helping us too really think, we often are simply not connecting the dots, we are chasing the moving dots or just moving from one dot to another and never thinking about connecting them up.

We should think more about the gaps, the issues, and most importantly for us, the implications. The more we react and don’t think things through and apply them to our situation, our context, our situation, the more we are more than likely going to foul up somewhere along the way. Equally, the more you fail to project something into a situation you have observed, the more you ignore the opportunity for change or at least challenging a situation.

This time-starved environment has real implications for innovation.

If we don’t sit down and think through issues and implications of our present performance around innovation, how can we close the gaps and improve it? We just simply don’t seem to have a more systematic, connected roadmap within our thinking that points the way to the improving longer-term as we keep doing this ‘reacting’ only.

We have such a limited amount of time to pause, evaluate, or redesign. We equally don’t feel capable to simply assign this over, even to outsiders to help. We are far too challenged and driven, often far to inbreed into thinking “our solutions can only be the only solutions to our problems”.

Often I am caught in finding better solutions to this trap. As an external consultant or advisor, I see a mistake, upon mistake happening. It is not from a lack of trying or a lack of working within the abilities or situation, it is often that lack of alternatives that might be considered. We simply cannot get a different message through, those “in charge” press on regardless.

Tell me, does it really need to be like this?

Often there is no time for thoughtful analysis, a depth of thinking, a platform of knowledge and connectors to bounce this off. Yet there is a growing need to discuss this, the risk of wrongly innovating, of dealing with increased failures all seems to call for solutions to help but where? Where do I quickly go to gain some innovation knowledge or insight, as I simply have no time to sift through it all.

We are losing sight of time, a time where we stop talking, wanting to search for latest events, follow the latest trends, watch something on tik tok or youtube. We need to stop, switch off the distractions and simply learn how to think. To piece different strands of thinking together in new ways and understanding the implications of that. Instead, we push this thinking aside to go back and listen or read about the latest “breaking news”.

If we continue this way, human innovation will be dead in years to come. We will just sit back, explore the artificial intelligence sources we have and never be able to filter out the possible and not possible without the aid of technology as we will have lost our own skills and ability to observe the world, as our experiences get increasingly shut down, to what we are “feed”.

We are often faced with the death of a thousand cuts.

Often that precious lack of dedicated time to investigate, to question, to deepen understanding, simply to relate too and interpret innovation is a key missing ingredient. This is where the external perspective can fill critical gaps; it can become the extra resource, that runs in parallel.

I believe it is the time where the value of external, dedicated innovation thinking has a place within the time-starved innovators thinking, it might help provide more comprehensive delivery of innovation understanding and plugging individual gaps by delivering thinking that bridges many of those current gaps I seem to find. This comes from building up our own experiences, learning from our own failures and getting knocked back and most of all our abilities to create, build and influence others with innovations that are different, creative and have a positive impact on what we have.

Is there space for an “innovation thinking guru?” I believe so, do you? If so…………hello, invest some of your time in (quality) thinking time?

The post No thinking time left- help first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Last week, Siemens had a really valuable virtual event called their “Digital Enterprise SPS Dialog“. Those that missed it you can watch previous sessions on-demand at any time via “Recordings”. They provided an outstanding virtual showroom packed full of innovations, product presentations and use cases are exhibited in an exciting real 3D environment. The platform and all on-demand assets will be available until January 29th 2021.

The “Digital Enterprise SPS Dialog” had 56 3d-exhibits in 12 topic areas, more than 130 product presentations, 3 real factory showcases with 21 stage presentations involving over 38 speakers. By registering you can view “on-demand” selectively or watch the whole event, explore the showrooms and simply learn, evaluate and assess what these concepts would mean for you in your own Industry 4.0 journey, to a more highly automated and connected environment.

I said it at the time, and I repeat it: “The event was, for me, the best virtual event of this very strange and weird year we have all been caught up in“. For Siemens, they also commented this was quite a milestone to be achieved in the field of virtual events. It delivered a lot. My initial post “Siemens SPS Dialog.” might be worth also picking up upon.

By being virtual, the insights provided has advanced my understanding of what is being offered in Siemens Digital solutions significantly and would give any clients a terrific understanding of Siemens combined physical and digital offerings.

An event showcasing critical aspects of the factory of the future

It opened my eyes to the changes within factories that are being currently undergone to get to the factory of the future. I have been learning what has happened in the past 12 months to change our perception of Manufacturing and the factories we need in the future.

Siemens has been focusing on building their ecosystems consistently for years, and this exceptional focus on the connection needs to successfully deliver Industry 4.0 has been central in their Digital Enterprise solutions, consistently offering the solutions for making all things (IIoT) both digital and in the physical, building out on additive manufacturing, motion controls, artificial intelligence, flexible autonomous as well as their more known aspects of Siemens digital offerings of industrial IT as a service with Siemens Mindsphere, the role the Digital Twins are playing in designing, exploring and extending the physical world.

What comes across in the event by Siemens was how significantly the future of production is undergoing an extreme transformation in its combined physical and digital offering. Let’s take four.

• When we reflect on the recent events of the last twelve months, this has been highly disruptive but those industrial companies that had already started their Industry 4.0 journey were in such a better shape to step up to the challenge, they kept production running but is highly adaptable ways. This is where Siemens comes in in the solutions to allow this highly automated, flexible, digitally connected environment to work at all times.
• When we reflect on the remote work, rapid response and agility have all been tested in recent months. The factory that had digitalization and autonomy at its core made astonishing adjustments to its ability to be flexible and even “ramp up” or speedily adjust its production to demands that were unpredictable and requiring immediate decision making. The learning from these last nine to twelve months has been astonishing.
• The shifts from the predictable to managing in (total) uncertainty required a factory of significant flexibility in design understanding, digitally prepared and physically able to be reconfigured.
• The pressures have grown, shorter cycle runs are becoming more normal and necessary. Not just because of the rapidly changing customer demand but as past established supply chains have been disrupted or dramatically altered to adjust to different global circumstances, the shift has become one of production is entirely customer-focused.

Factories are undergoing massive change.

Sequential production has given way to a more autonomous manufacturing approach that has agility at its core. The system is becoming more based on modular, autonomous machines that continuously optimize themselves and operate extremely flexibly and efficiently.

These autonomous, decoupled manufacturing units quickly form new assembly cells and can produce constantly varying products without repeated manual engineering. Each machine is assigned skills based on the product ordered.

The manufacturing steps are engineered by an Autonomous Factory- the factory design of of the future

An AI-based system that performs a producibility check that determines whether all the necessary skills for manufacturing
the product are available in the factory. The requisite production steps are then combined in an optimal sequence, fully automatically and without reprogramming.

Artificial intelligence as the foundation of production. Autonomy in production is made possible by digitalization. Based on a digital twin of the product to be manufactured, AI algorithms enable the system to detect product variants, check material availability, and plan the steps necessary for manufacturing the product. AI also enables sensors and actuators to perform human-like actions like identifying parts and positions for gripping an object.

Production as a whole also makes its own decisions and organizes itself. Many assembly steps can be performed in any order. A central, AI-based system ensures the highest possible output and monitors optimal utilization and compliance with delivery deadlines. The system always knows the status of production at every workstation down to the smallest detail.

The Siemens “Digital Enterprise SPS Dialog” gives massive insights into what is currently being undertaken to connect factories and offer leading-edge solutions. To deliver Industry 4.0 gets a good reality check at this event of why Siemens are regarded as leaders in this evolution across all industries.

The ultimate goal is end-to-end consistency as the foundation of digitalization and physical being combined.

To quote from Siemens literature here:

“A big part of the needs of today’s factory environment is “Totally Integrated Automation (TIA)”. The world’s leading automation concept provides absolute end-to-end consistency in three dimensions.TIA enables seamless interaction between all automation components, the software involved, and higher-level systems and services Integration”

This capability is ensured by consistent data management, worldwide standards, uniform interfaces, and openness – from the field level to the company management level.

Siemens role is to lead tomorrow’s technologies by integrating all the parts today, step-by-step, for a secure investment and end-to-end capability.

This SPS Dialog provided significant insight into what is possible. To be at the cutting edge of so much innovation in product and digital solutions must be an exciting time. I got a (massive) dose of that Siemens Energy from this event. Take a little time to find out yourself is my recommendation.

A product brochure to support this event showcasing the innovations discussed and presented by Digital Enterprise at this event is available here. Here you can recap innovations, new products and exhibition highlights from #SPSDialog at a glance in this 56-page brochure about #simulation with #TIAPortal, #Mindsphere, #cloud connectivity of PLCs and much more.https://sie.ag/32RT3s8

For me, they got me hooked in so many of the sessions. Within my business, I attempt to combine Innovation, Ecosystems, IIoT and Energy as my core focus. An event like this one that compresses so much gave me such a lot of value into accelerating my own understanding of all that is ticking away under the Siemens Digital Enterprise bonnet.

The post Building our understanding of the factory of the future first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Atos is a global leader in digital transformation. Atos employees 110,000 across 73 countries with annual revenue of Euro 12 billion.

Atos holds the number one position in European advisory companies in Cloud, Cybersecurity and high-performance computing that provides end-to-end solutions to Orchestrate a wide array of Digital Solutions.

Why do I single out Atos for a post? There are several good reasons:

Firstly, I like its stated purpose “to help design the future of the information space” and Atos looks to contribute to the development of scientific and technological excellence.

Secondly, I have worked with, often exchanged views and shared from the work that a wonderfully knowledgeable person so often provides on such a diversity of subjects. I do recommend you should certainly follow Antonio Vieria Santos (@AkwyZ) who works within Atos in a roving, supportive role building community knowledge. We presently meet and participate in the Siemens #SIEx community together, and each time I find the opportunity to talk with him, I learn from him. He is a great teacher to engage with and passionate about diversity in opinion and knowledge sharing.

Thirdly, Atos has recently been ranked number 1 in sustainability performance within the IT services sector for the second year running, and they continue to push social responsibility, and this brings me to why I am writing this post.

Atos has made a significant commitment to achieving net-zero carbon emission for themselves by 2035, as have many others. Still, it is the leveraging of this sustainability journey of their clients towards decarbonization, security and digital inclusion that attracts me in a core purpose and need, that for me, makes for further investigation.

This commitment drew me in to investigate further.

I spent some time taking a deeper look at Atos and its positioning in the decarbonized digital services through its sustainability consulting capabilities. Atos recently completed the acquisition of EcoAct, a climate strategy consulting firm with a team of 160 climate experts. This acquisition further shapes a global Decarbonization Excellent Center to offer comprehensive delivery capabilities for clients and their climate ambitions.

My fourth reason came from my investigations and shared focus.

Fourthly Atos is looking to develop digital solutions to support decarbonization. They rightly state it becomes an important aspect is to challenge the existing and find new innovative ways to solve decarbonization issues across many tough areas. Atos decided this year on an IT challenge seeking out to develop digital solutions that will support multiple decarbonization initiatives to help companies and society as a whole tackle climate change.

I relate strongly to this as the #EnergyTransition is a core focus area for me, and I devote a significant part of my time researching, exploring and explaining this transition. If you are interested, go over to my dedicated posting site of www.innovating4energy.com – a transition in all of our lives. Increasingly our “collective” focus will be on this overarching need to decarbonize the planet.

My own views on the themes for Decarbonizing has been set in my agenda setting post if you care to read it.

Atos offers its first international student competition dedicated to technological innovation.

I really hope this is well supported, the challenge is vitally important to continue to accelerate the energy transition we are all undergoing. This is their first international student competition dedicated to technological innovation. Let me outline this here: Technological innovation to achieve decarbonization is vital.

The challenge closed for entry on 29th November 2020, so registration please go here

Background and challenge

The Paris Agreement sets out a global framework to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases, particularly Carbon Dioxide. This is especially true in the area of energy production and usage; by increasing the share of low-carbon energy sources, especially renewables, with a corresponding reduction in the use of fossil fuels.

They are asking students to develop a functioning application, mobile app, service or simulation to support industry, commerce or individuals in the drive for decarbonization. They are looking for interesting applications that could have immediate and impactful real-world applicability.

• In power generation and demand, how can we support a shift to nuclear, hydro, biofuels, geothermal, solar, wind and tidal forms of generation?
• In the area of power use and efficiency, perhaps local power generation, distribution, storage and community schemes can be investigated?
• In the production of steel and cement, which produces large emissions, are there ways that digital solutions can reduce or optimize the use of these materials?
• In agriculture and farming, we need to solve the large volumes of methane release. The use of inorganic fertilizers releases methane into the atmosphere. Additionally, livestock farming (particularly cattle) produces large volumes of methane. Can we reduce these emissions, or use digital technologies to make better use of waste methane?
• How can digital technology help to prevent the destruction of rainforests or aid in the recovery of deforested areas?
• In transport, how can digital technology support a shift from fossil fuels to electricity or hydrogen, maximise the use of public transport, car-sharing and rental schemes? Can this be extended to shipping or air travel?
• Can digital solutions aid the distribution and delivery networks supporting increased online product and grocery shopping, especially now that we’re living in a world so impacted by coronavirus?

The 2021 winning team will receive €10,000 to help them bring their app to the market and the two finalists respectively €5,000 and €3,000. Also The IT Challenge organizing committee will offer to all the members of the winning team and the two finalist teams the possibility of applying for an IT Challenge-fast track internship to work within Atos on subject areas relating to their projects.

You can follow the competition on Twitter at @atositchallenge

Finally a useful link to more on the competition: on More information about Atos decarbonization ambition

I can only wish Atos and those that take up this challenge good luck. The areas chosen are so vital to have all levels of innovative solutions. Finding imaginative digital solutions to decarbonization is so much part of our needs today in making this energy transition

The post Setting the right innovation challenge first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

 Reflecting on a rapidly changing business world.

The issue we must tackle today, is how we go about adapting to the changing world? One that will be able to take all the advantages of the changes all businesses are undergoing, how societies will be adjusting and responding. We are facing a time of unprecedented economic and social crisis but this is a time equally for seizing and sizing different opportunities.

We clearly need to find ways to navigate ourselves back into some (new) order; to stabilize the chaos we are in. What we first need to do is make sense of what is going on around us, we need to determine what actions to take and the level of action, resource and support each part needs. We are in a period of (great) change. How are we thinking about how to adjust, not just to the immediate challenges but the greater ones that are certainly heading our way.

Within business, the present crisis is offering a chance to make significant changes to how we operate in the future. I am not sure many of you feel the same, it seems disruption is in everything, in what we need to undertake, in what is coming towards us in change. We are challenged but we have ample signals to amplify and explore. 

Disruption actually has a common purpose, often far less sinister than promoted or we suspect, it requires us to re-equip and open up, as we learn to deal in this changing world where connections can emerge from anywhere at any time, offering a new ‘line of sight’ onto an existing problem to begin to break down the barriers and find new fresh ways forward.

These will be through different approaches to designing and extracting the potential value gained and these, in my opinion, will form around ecosystems and their management, through technology solutions provided by platform providers.

We need to respond quickly and in very different, highly collaborative ways. Digital offers unique, new ways to address many of our challenges everywhere. Our need is to explore and exploit, and we have to harness ourseleces, our organizations, through these new technologies and collaborative concepts to take advantage and leverage all that is possible.

 We need to engage in different ecosystems and participate in new platform learning to take advantage of the changes taking place all around us. To quote Chuck Robbins, the Cisco CEO and Chairman “We believe that no one company can deliver the full breadth of technology solutions that customers need at the pace the market requires”. It is through the increasing intensity of using data and a deep analysis where this growing need for broader collaborations becomes so essential.

Technology, innovation and digitalization are the combination effect that will move us forward in our changing business world. We can’t operate in isolation, we need to be far more highly collaborative.

Partnerships abound, not just within a specific industry but in cross-industry collaborations. Ecosystems need to form to take advantage of many rapidly emerging market opportunities. It is not just welcome to a world of ecosystems, it is learning to change from being exclusive owners into open collaborators, that build ‘greater value’ from the common need of working together, and many of these are increasingly cross-industry ecosystems.

Just recognize the changes we are undertaking in cross-industry collaborations are significant

If we recognize what it takes to build new transportation business models, it needs an ecosystem of public authorities, automakers, component suppliers, software providers and infrastructure builders to come together to make this happen

 The travel industry will emerge far differently in the months ahead, in its post-recovery from the ravages of Corvid-19. Within airports, train stations we are seeing a conscious integrating of all that makes up this travel hub, including connecting traffic updates, weather conditions, arrival and departures, airport shops, restaurants, hotels, parking terminals and flight or train understanding and on-line bookings. This will be rapidly advanced, integrated and providing a very different business model proposition. 

 Many of the changes that will emerge in the next twelve to twenty-four months will become more cross-industry and service ecosystems. The search is for synergies. It requires a host (platform provider), different apps, weblinks and consistent ways to integrate these so those using the airport or train station can navigate their way around their personal needs. It needs an ecosystem and platform management to bring this together.

We are increasingly expecting as consumers, uninterrupted connectivity, and virtual integration and that need for continued connectivitity will spur new value propositions for trechnology and AI to take over and manage more of your daily, repeative tasks . It is this constantly connecting-up that is constantly layering mini-ecosystems onto each other so experiences improve as these ecosystems connect and work out what is needed to be delivered.

If we look around we are seeing increasingly the cross-industry ecosystem exploding.  

We have new ecosystems that are building new value in offering mobile commerce, building digital into all that we undertake increasingly in retail, banking, and entertainment. We are seeing new energy solutions emerge in Agriculture, Energy, Utilities. We are seeing a ‘connected difference’ in the Automotive, Driving, linking to Postal services, electronic transfers, blockchain transactions, purchasing across most of our goods, both personal and in business and exploring concepts in Health solutions that require cross-industry collaborations.

We see electronic capital trading getting faster and faster by the application of data flows, analytics and software that automates the trading decision. We are connecting into Public Services to gain insight and seek new value. Manufacturing is connecting up through its Industry 4.0 drive. We have Artificial Intelligence increasingly working, either in the background or foreground for decision-making. We are building platforms and connecting up the individual ecosystems of (internal) knowledge into these new creators of value, based on collaboration, mutually shared interest and vision and in the co-operation that emerges around the extensive use of platforms and technology application.

The smartphone is to date, our greatest ecosystem, and platform, as individuals as it is all wrapped up into one personalized connected ecosystem and the phone is the platform. It is rapidly becoming the source of information, value generator and our personalized “dual world” as it learns what we need and is increasingly responding to mirror our world.

Just image the ecosystem of connectors we require within our daily lives, living in “smart” cities.

The opportunity to connect the providers of ‘hard’ services (energy, equipment, construction, utilities, etc) with our ‘soft’ needs (where to go, what we can do, order, where to park, what to do and see) requires huge collaborative efforts but the reward has significant benefits. Smart cities attract ‘smart’ people that attract ‘smart’ institutions and eventually ‘smarter’ business entities.

The connecting brainpower allows everything to manage their own personal speed of things, a flow that can potentially reduce redundancy and enhance engagement. The connections begin to reshape everything through the data; communications, public services, responses to crisis and opportunity, being aware. The smarter in the use gets increasingly channelled, as this increasing flow of data to analyze, target and coordinate life in the city, can allow for a better way for all to connect to that city and personally identify. It changes urban life as it involves citizens increasingly in shaping the future.A connected city.

This is a very different potential in the new business models for all involved. The period ahead is going to be hugh “reset” within ourselves, within the way we go about and organize work. A world built on increasing collaboration, cross-industry cooperations that has technology, digitalization and innovation at its core.

The post Adjusting to a changing world first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

An innovation value proposition (IVP) is not the easiest place to go. It must build meaning and purpose and provide that unique identity that enables innovation to flow. Building your innovation value proposition is critical to your innovation success.Value propositions are essential always in my opinion, innovation is no different.

Thinking about my own identification with the IVP took me back to when I started out on my innovation journey 18 years ago. That now seems like ages ago, and a lot has changed in how we manage innovation since then. But, strangely enough, a lot has also stayed the same – especially the fact that delivering good innovation is hard work.

Yet, the one thing I firmly believe reduces the “pain” comes back to how you design and relate to your value proposition – your meaning of what innovation needs to do.

Understanding the innovation value proposition

Back in 2003, I came across a two-page document written by a U.S.-based consulting firm, called Macroinnovation Associates. Though the company seems no longer around today, back when I was beginning to switch my focus to advising, consulting, and learning about innovation, their innovation value proposition struck me as excellent. I kept it, shaped it to my own emerging thinking, and it still has as much value today as it did 15 years ago. Some of its parts may have fallen away or need rephrasing, but its basic frame holds good. I will expand on those later.

The other important part of my learning about value propositions comes back to its critical focal point in the Business Model Canvas, conceived by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (and the basis of HYPE’s Collaborative Innovation Canvas). I found the idea of a one-page business canvas brilliant.

This sought out of our thinking “to describe the bundle of products and services that create value for a specific customer segment.” Osterwalder and Pigneur argue that the value proposition is the reason why customers turn to one company over another. They suggest that the value proposition “is an aggregation or bundle of benefits that a company offers customers.” It creates value “through a distinct mix of elements catering to that segment’s needs.” That value can be quantitative (e.g., price, speed of service) or qualitative (e.g., design, customer experience).

Osterwalder and Pigneur further teamed up with other writers to generate the book “Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want,” which explores the value proposition in a highly structured way and explains how to write a business model. The book opens with three messages that will resonate with anyone who has given thought to a value proposition. These are:

1. Understand the patterns of value creation
2. Leverage the experience and skills of your team
3. Avoid wasting time with ideas that won’t work

These three points ring equally true for innovation.

Four parts to consider when building your value proposition

There is a lot of advice out there that deals with value propositions, but there’s not as much that focus on innovation value propositions.

The starting point in designing an IVP is “what will bring it to life?” Does it reflect the mission? Does it “paint” the innovation initiative? Does it indicate where value creation lies? Well, all three and then some.

The IVP needs to state the most important point of “how it serves others.” That comes back to solving a problem, its relevance, its benefits, and its differentiation. If you can capture those four main aspects, you are shaping your IVP in a unique way.

An IVP also is a “statement of intent.” It is beginning to provide why your innovation needs to be compelling, to make it valuable to those that have a clear and vested interest.

This “vested interest” part is why the initial value proposition I came across in 2003 hit home. It sought to break down the IVP into four constituents that needed consideration, which include:

1. The Value Proposition to the Management and Staff
2. The Value Proposition to Shareholders
3. The Value Proposition to Customers
4. The Value Proposition to Other Stakeholders

So, tell me how often do we consider all four in their distinctive ways? Or do we tend to merge and blur these into one?

Let’s look at these four critical entities separately as your triggering points to build out in your specific meaning and validation.

There are four distinct groups to consider when you build an IVP, and each wants to see and hear differently. Take your time to separate out your IVP for each of these stakeholders. In separating these out, you are confirming each of these stakeholder groups is mutually reinforcing and being rewarded.

1. The Value Proposition to Management and Staff

• Improves the rate and quality of innovation: to detect problems and opportunities and to address them effectively
• Enables earlier and more thorough detection of problems and opportunities: so early responses reflect the continually changing environment to capture ground-breaking valuable additions
• Expands the range of business solutions available to management: through diversity, seeking out worldview perspectives and how to translate these
• Enhances the quality of inventive thinking: share entitlements to innovations with employees
• Raises employee satisfaction and morale: all employees need to be actively engaged in organizational learning
• Leads to richer “communities of communities”: communities are essential to learning and innovation in a firm
• Amplifies knowledge sharing and integration: by focusing on the policies and programs for knowledge sharing
• Results in “sustainable innovation”: supports, strengthens, and reinforces the self-organizing tendencies of organizations to innovate in their own endemic ways

2. The Value Proposition to Shareholders

• Enhances the quality of information about a company’s operations: the “open enterprise” approach
• Lowers risk in investments: decisions are more open to scrutiny from stakeholders
• Improves financial performance: enhanced capacity to detect and solve problems and opportunities
• Increases the value of intellectual capital: the social capacity to learn and innovate is the most valuable form, building a company’s intangible “assets”

3. The Value Proposition to Customers

• Advances the quality of fit between a supplier and its customer: responding to individual expressions of customer demand, thereby increasing the value and fit of their offerings – and themselves – to their customers
• Lowers risk to the customer: the risk of disruption can be mitigated by choosing to do business with suppliers whose operating environments are “open” and innovative

4. The Value Proposition to Other Stakeholders

• Enhances the quality of relationships with trading partners: for all of the same reasons as customers
• Reduces risk of irresponsible social behaviors by companies: in broader social responsibility efforts and in the conduct of business affairs

Now, imagine this was written in 2002 or thereabouts. Taking my thinking into these does it not hold true for today? Or maybe even more so? It establishes dialogue and openness.

If we can build out our IVP on these value-adding parts, we are making a compelling statement of innovation’s contribution. Can you see why I liked this and often refer to its ideals? I think the customer value-adding can be built out in stronger, value-adding ways for example, same as we can build our intent into each of these.

Also, as you reflect, you can perhaps make it more personal and more compelling to project out your innovation ambition.

Over time, I took the concept of innovation value propositions into my consulting work. I was looking to turn the need to convert IVPs into new business results by promoting the meaning (to the client) on the following positioning:

Innovation services consulting – additional value proposition statements that drive a value proposition to arrive at a bundle of benefits.

I used the below as my triggering points for opening discussions.

Building a more effective innovation transformation system, which:

• Leads to higher conversion rates
• Increases business volume throughput
• Improves business quality and evaluation techniques
• Uncovers the unmet needs of customers (clients become marketing resources)
• Enhances perception of professionalism in the marketplace and by other stakeholders

Achieving a higher integrated development program for innovation, which:

• Allows individuals to develop at their own pace but in structured ways
• Increases workforce effectiveness and engagement
• Links competency with rewards/recognition
• Provides empowered career paths due to higher motivation and identification
• Integrates strategy, vision, and governance within embedded practices
• Offers greater value from your business process, systems, and their design

Searching for and building a robust management evaluation toolset, which:

• Generates on focused customer needs (data mining/management)
• Explores priority analysis (individual/grouped/clustering)
• Promotes developmental analysis (benchmarking and best practices)
• Improves strategic forecasting/planning and alignment capability
• Advances resource management capabilities
• Enhances internal mechanisms (resources/business transactions)

Establishing the levers for a motivated workforce focused on innovation, which:

• Seeks out and resolves concerns with clear adoption techniques
• Emphasizes organizational and team focus
• Stimulates individuals’ desire to participate and share
• Evaluates candidate capabilities (attitude, reasoning, and learning capacity)
• Reduces organizational “risk” with improving profiles and learning experiences

Then, I wanted to force the IVP thinking even more to explore the “differentiation” points of seeking competitive advantage.

Amplifying the value proposition (and rethinking it every 12 months)

Delivering a set of innovative solutions in these changing market environments needs to focus on your resources to provide you with clear freshness on a constantly-updated basis. Markets don’t stand still, nor do competitors. We are constantly “disrupted,” so any future innovation results need to lead to significant competitive advantage within your offerings. You and your firm should also evaluate your IVP every 12 months by asking the questions below.

How can we…

Increase operational effectiveness (channeling your resource management)?

• Build more effective and systematic management frameworks to grow a more adaptable, flexible business
• Improve the rate and quality of our innovation
• Gain an early warning system of detection to stop or accelerate opportunities
• Create a robust innovation process that moves concepts to market faster

Achieve greater people retention and productivity returns (focused more on outcomes and needs)?

• Grow the use of networks and knowledge necessary for value creation
• Encourage a more engaged and motivated workforce wanting to innovate
• Foster confidence across self-forming, motivated teams
• Improve the quality of inventive thinking and knowledge exchanges

Drive innovation across the organization (through different tools and techniques)?

• Use the innovation integrated framework
• Define and align on the innovation choice cascading model
• Create a clear innovation process across all its stages
• Know the right evaluations to measure value and success

Provide a return on innovation (ROI)?

• Reduce costs through a better idea or project development structure
• Increase revenue by spotting new business opportunities, realizing new products/service in faster delivery, extending existing lifecycles
• Align goals and business objectives to intangible benefits that generate our make up of much of our innovation capital
• Build your intangible assets as the core capabilities to generate market advantage

I provided these points above to strengthen the innovation value proposition

Conclusion

Every day our innovation is being eroded. We must continually seek out new positioning, differences, and points of value – those new value pools that build and sustain our business.

By crafting a well-thought-through IVP for all its constituent parts, we are giving innovation a robust and dynamic framework to build out and point back as validation.

Building your innovation value proposition is critical. It forms a bedrock of your actions and your big picture of your innovation intent. We often must restate the value of innovation. If you work through some of the above suggestions, then those that “might doubt” will see the compelling value that makes innovation central to your company’s future. Innovation creates value, but it is by stating these value propositions in clear and highly visible ways that you are held to the “innovation flame.”

Get this right and innovation burns bright.

*** This post was first published through Hype. and is republished here.

The post I would recommend applying the Innovation Value Proposition first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Throughout the past couple of years, I have been constantly arguing about the need to put innovation management on a digital platform.

These have come in different thoughts on digital platforms, ready for cross-industry and having in place, a rapid digital innovation process that scales and evolves on new technology and insights.

We need a radical design, universal in design and approach.

What if you could manage your innovation in the ways shown in this diagram?

This is the way PLM innovation platforms are progressing and currently being assessed by CIMdata in a PLM Innovation Assessment Scorecard shown further below. Link to the position paper

The argument about what any innovation management system provides goes on and on and still, we seem not to be at the universal acceptance point that an innovation management process is critical and needs a better system of management.

What we should finally accept, a platform connects all users, both internally and externally in their ability to share their knowledge and information in exchanges, in one environment to cultivate collaborations and continuous collaborative creativity. The more we design and need to deliver smart, connected and innovative products the more we have this innovation platform need.

The majority of the present software providers fail to grasp this.

Those that do, grasping the incredible value of offering a digital innovation platform, will be, it seems, coming more from the Product Lifecycle Management perspective (PLM) where product design has always been complex. Those that don’t come from the old traditional thinking about innovation idea management or managing a single product portfolio. Both of these older solutions to managing innovation are approaches urgently requiring a radical change. Solutions should not come out of a box, loaded on your machine but readily accessible in a cloud environment built on a digital innovation platform design.

It is in recent years that the whole need to emphasize collaboration and constant ongoing exchanges become essential to speed up the response to customer needs and competitive advantage. This constant demand for improvement and digitally connected products is a constant “dynamic”, demanding ever-changing needs, additional tools, software updates, adoption of new technologies, and expects the constant change in how you manage your innovation environment differently. Innovation management, at present, stays in the last century.

The requirement has been growing around the understanding to make innovation work, we need to make sure our tools, people, information and departments of expertise all work in sync, increasing throughout the whole lifecycle, not just in ideation, or execution of a launch. Innovation today requires, no it actually demands, more connectivity to stand a chance of building (really) innovative solutions

The whole need is for functional domains (silo’s of knowledge) can work outside of their specific domain so others can link the information and knowledge up and apply the orchestration to bring this together in “better” products. We move from specific owners like marketing into organization engagement and enterprise ownership contribution.

Platforms perform really good jobs of making this enterprise engagement happens.

The platform becomes the conduit for connectivity, you begin to build a certain gravity in finding, securing and exploring data. You achieve a greater flow, you see traceability and configuration, you begin to evaluate iterations of design, you encourage openness. You make these platforms available, accessible and above all, provide a stable environment for all to appreciate end-to-end innovation lifecycle evolution.

So why don’t many software providers within innovation provide us this connectivity, so as to make sharing and accomplishing tasks easy? Most provide the tools to do this but they are often labored, manual, controlled for those that need them, not for all to see and participate.

We simply liberate connections on a platform.

Software providers want to sell licenses, that is the source of their gravity, of their measure of success. But gravity, in my view, comes from building compelling interfaces, designed to build positive experiences and collaborative efforts. Of course, designing software out of a box (many of today’s models) attempts this but “gravity” comes from making connections and offering great platforms in tools, connections, apps etc gives innovation management a whole new dimension, that software limited out of a box can’t. It keeps evolving and being dynamic.

Then we have this magic word of “flow”– the activity where innovation is fostered, encouraged and building momentum. It is understood today as the need to have interoperability, seamlessness, and traceability as the core of our solution needs. We know that the flow is essential to innovation. To make this gravity and flow to happen we need openness, in collaborations, in support, in continuingly improving our design systems to galvanize and connect innovation work.

Two platform authors Mark Bonchek and Sangeet Paul Choudary often talk of the building blocks of platforms and any platform success is built on this connection, gravity and flow thinking.

The other keys of a platform are its ability to scale. It can offer sustainability in being adaptive in interfaces and workflows, far more dynamic and evolving that solutions out of a box. They can be extended via constantly updated configuration than awaiting modification or updates on the next release or software upgrade you are forced to pay for. Then you have maintainability as it seeks to stay current, relevant and response as technology and application are evaluated and changed.

For me, I have become increasingly impressed with where the PLM providers are going.

One stands out for me in giving that significant focus on innovation management, not just product is Aras.

Now Aras I have written about before (herein “Can We have one of These- A product Innovation platform?“) as they are laying out their PLM product innovation platform so it is open, flexible, scalable and upgradeable powered by digital solutions.

Specifically, and interestingly, Aras has no upfront software licensing fee’s, enabling the ability to seek out as low as the possible total cost of ownership, company-wide, not restricted to a few. This challenges most of the conventional business models of upfront license models currently offered by Innovation software providers.

Aras provides a range of services that sit on the platform allows for dynamic workflows, plenty of visual collaborations, reporting all in different variants to fit your (entire) business, not one specific part, choosing separate solutions.

This is the present assessment of Aras and its platform score for its product innovation platform assessment

I keep hoping Aras recognize innovation is not just emerging from those older CAD days, or limited to certain industries that needed heavier industrial engineering solutions, but able to grasp the greater potential; to offer an innovation platform to everyone that needs one.  Innovation comes from everywhere and through the adoption of the Aras design, I believe can offer a total innovation management solution across the entire enterprise, irrespective of industry or service focus.

This visual shows the existing Aras PLM platform. It can be adapted to all of the innovation we undertake today, quickly and fairly well, if the value is seen and the parts needed to be added are made, especially relating to innovation deriving from marketing initiatives.

The significant advantage of having tools integration, integrated workflows for all to participate (R&D, Engineering, Marketing, Designers etc), to be able to track and trace the evolution of the product concept throughout its entire lifecycle. Also in having selective parts being able to be reused for a product family or variant design has significant time, and cost savings. You can minimize rework or build out from past work.

Can the present application overview of Aras be extended to incorporate all types of innovation that require collaboration, exchange and constant on-going evaluation?

In Summary

Can you imagine a fully integrated product design development for innovation management, one that enables global, cross-industry, an open collaborative approach built into the platform design? One that is still built on your rules and structure suitable to your task and vision, of what a product needs to achieve? One that is giving you the potential for not just the digital thread but higher levels of digital twin design to prototype, share and engage customers with, throughout a product and its service design. One that manages the entire end-to-end design to eventual market, how it evolved, was validated and update. Then why are we not screaming for this solution?

Tell me why we continue with a pen, paper, excel spreadsheets, silo’s of knowledge, dependency on opinion and not fact. Why do we keep restricting our innovation to move across our organizations due to limitations on software-out-of-a box or licenses as the go-to-market business model? Why are we not talking to the PLM providers, especially it seems to me, Atas, and getting some level of movement out of their traditional PLM box, into the innovation world? A world for all, to finally have the potential to connect up innovation across the whole enterprise and beyond?

The post Building the Single Innovation Digital Platform Environment first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I can honestly say, it never fully works out as the year progresses, there are distractions, subjects that attract my eye, hold my attention or simply ones become bigger in my wish to pursue as important to understand or become more focused upon.

Innovation is constantly shifting in customer needs and issues to absorb, relate too, build into our thinking, in a world where many within the business community are “time-starved, often knowledge poor” I look to help them on different innovation insights.

What about you? Here are my thoughts coming from 2018 that are leading me into 2019

Firstly in the year just closing I have been taking a look back at what I wrote about in 2018.Digital and innovation dominate.

On this site paul4innovating, I wrote 34 posts, a drop on past years, but increasingly with the shift into the constant integrating of digital into all things innovation, continuing as the emerging trend and theme, I seemed to spend the most time upon. On my other main site focusing specifically on ecosystems and platform related work, I wrote 25 posts.

Also in this year I began to put some fresh  life on two new posting sites, one focusing specifically on coaching and mentoring “guide4innovating” and the other “connecting digital and innovation” looking more at the critical part of digital and innovation that is forming most of my posting and researching work in recent months to break it out. My one other continues a very tortuous journey of building the dynamics when linked, become the connecting points in building innovation in the needed capacity, capability, and competence, that I term the pursuit of “innovation fitness dynamics“

Why do I run so many posting sites?

Some people just look at me, rolling their eyes until I explain that each has a specific innovation purpose or focal point that needs this separating out, as more specialized reference sites for the work I do, it is easier to “point” to these. Well, that’s my excuse! I post to deliver specific content and context that I want to inform.

They are simply clear “points of reference” specifically focusing on building blocks, based on my work focus.

So let me provide my leading posts in 2018 on  this site: www.paul4innovating.com

The stand-out posts were”Shifting our thinking within the 4th Industrial Revolution“, followed closely by  “The arrival and potential of Knowledge Graphs into our World”  then followed by Applying the Three Horizon Thinking to a Fresh Perspective of Innovation Design and close behind “A New Integrated Innovation Engagement System“

The one that consistently performed at or near the top, has been every single year since I published it in late 2010, eight full years of posting has been “The Three Horizon Approach to Innovation”

The one that disappointed me?

I had expected this to do as well as the others mentioned above.  “There are Known’s and Unknowns in Innovation”  For some reason it did not but this could be that it was published first over on another site, at Hype Innovation.

Then on my other main posting site www.ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com

The three most popular published this year were “The Emerging World of Connected Industrial Ecosystems” followed by “Platform Providers need to think more about Ecosystems Principles and Design” then“When is a partner not a partner?”

The one I was disappointed with as it did not get as many reads as I would have expected was “Defining Ecosystems in Industry” I really thought that offered a lot of insight into the developments of IIOT ecosystems and their platforms

So an interesting mix, I get the impression that innovation posts as stand-alone tend not to be as popular, they do need to be attached to something else (digital, platforms) or help sove a problem, offer a solution or otherwise they simply get caught up in the “mass” of these “helpful suggestions of useful lists” that are constantly coming out daily. Nothing wrong with those, they remain popular and I do a fair share if I feel I can add some new level of insight or help.

So as for 2019?

I have been contemplating a shift of tack. Again innovation runs through them all but it continues to be linked into the bigger picture and the power of technology and all things digital.

Here is my mind map as my starting point. Will I succeed in covering off all of these, actually should I? Let’s see.

Innovation is in a constant shift in emphasis, in placing it in context and the context-specific work that I am looking to post about to give better learning value. The value creation emphasis is critical anytime but I feel in my coming year of advisory, mentoring and coaching it will have an even more central place alongside the constant “Interplay” between digital and innovation as the dominant factors..

I can’t get away from the belief we are in a “new innovation era”. It runs through all of the different focal points outlined in the above mind map.

I certainly wish you, my reader, a really great 2019. It is going to be a very tough year, unrelenting in change and innovation pursuit.

So onto 2019. I wish everyone that does invest their time in reading my posts a really big thank you.

I would like to do, even more, invest more in my thinking about innovation but these themes, outlined above, come more from the work I undertake or look to advise upon, on behalf of others, or in pursuit of my own researching interest. I hope they offer you some level of interest.

I laid out my original blogging intent here and so are attempting to be laying out my agenda for 2019. With this, I have hoisted my innovation flag, laid out my themes and put that proverbial ‘stake’ in the ground on my posting intent for the coming year.

My best wishes for a successful, productive and great innovating year ahead of you in 2019.

The post Entering 2019 – What Do Each of Us Need to Focus Upon? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

If you are frustrated with your current innovation process then read on. If you are not, then simply “click away” and certainly my best wishes by ignoring a very changing innovation world that we are all undergoing.

The reality is we are all moving towards becoming “Digital Enterprises”. Digital transformation is deepening into an enterprise-wide movement. and is modernizing how companies work.

As these Digital Enterprises effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy, then it is clear that innovation certainly needs to be part of this but is it digitally ready? I think not. Much of the current innovation process you are currently working with is a Dinosaur, it should have disappeared long ago. Can we manage innovation the way many still are?

Innovation, in my view and many others, is rapidly becoming even more complex. Risks are actually rising not falling. Products continue not to meet customer needs in multiple ways. Without the “connected digital difference,” products are remaining limited in their appeal. Innovation is struggling to really perform and unleash breakthrough products due to many ‘inbuilt’ inhibitors. We need a radical redesign of the innovation process and that is becoming full connected up and have a distinct digital thread running through it. We need to think about complete digital innovation solutions in the future.

We are seeing many digitally aware organizations like Apple, Amazon, Salesforce all recognizing their future innovation is reliant on innovation and digital to be tied at the hip, wedded together in a design that builds towards satisfying customer needs. Applying technology application to innovation opportunities needs a platform thinking approach.

Embedded software is becoming more important in value than the physical product

Embedded software is becoming essential within products; from shoes, household appliances, cars, travel etc. The relevance of this innovation plus digital is not just for providing improved customer satisfaction in today’s market and its needs but allows for evolving these digital products for the future.

Future products are increasingly engaging the consumer as they evolve and respond to “data” and knowledge supplied back. It is evolving product solutions that can be more sustaining, delivering increased functionality, usability, and utility and offering greater value to all involved.

According to a past report  “Mastering Product Complexity” some time back from Roland Berger, the complexity of products more than doubled during 15 years and it continues to accelerate. In the quote from Roland Berger “complexity, manifests itself in the demand for a wider variety of specialized products across multiple manufacturing industries”

To deliver on this “digital innovation” without a doubt, the whole process of our innovation management has to be digitally connected up, to manage this from concept through to product end of life. It is evaluating across the full innovation value chain we can extract greater innovation. What is essential is a digital cohesion, not one that maintains our fractured, broken into parts and current innovation process.

As we connect up more, we are accessing the best sources of new business opportunities through gaining knowledge, discovering fresh insights and building increasing relevancy into our product solution understanding. We are in an ever-increasing engaged world of collaborators and customer feedbacks to build concept designs, test prototype reactions, investigate product use and explore customer satisfaction, all helping to improve product application and deliver closer to customer needs or provide evolution in innovation application.

Today we are poorly equipped to handle cross-discipline collaborations,

We do remain siloed on much within the innovation process, our knowledge often stays trapped, we can’t tap into expertise because it ‘remains’ invisible, we struggle to show progress as it is locked into manual processes, all requiring significant effort to be extracted.

If we see the need to change this, then through a digital transformation of the innovation process that works across the complete enterprise needs to be found and put into place. Innovation cannot afford to be excluded from being part of the “digital enterprise” we are moving towards, yet it needs specific solutions for this to happen. We do not offer solutions that achieve a complete solution, we still have a broken innovation system where discreet parts fail to talk to other parts.

We need to think this new digital innovation structure to have both internal disciplines in solutions but also designed for extended enterprise collaborations so “ecosystems of innovations” can finally take hold.

Do the PLM providers hold the innovation key?

At present, the best solution available to deliver a complete, inter-connected innovation process or system seems to be lying in the hands of the product lifecycle players under PLM. Siemens, Dassault, PTC, and a very fast growing Aras. They are talking innovation platforms, even digital platforms but are locked into the legacy mindset of PLM systems that are highly focused on mechanical design. They are struggling themselves to shrug this engineer only mindset off, for one that is thinking broadly, in new ways of complete product systems of hardware. software and mechanical, electrical, and all component parts of a finished product design.

These PLM providers rightly on traditional ‘heavy’ industries like Cars, Plant Design, Complex Products such as Turbines, Electrical Plant, Assembly Lines or Aeroplane designs or manufacturing specific. They are grappling with their legacy of CAD and CAE software and the software tools built up for years. Can we get them to think differently? Can we get them to re-think innovation in a broader domain for all innovation development work?

Why I feel PLM offers the way forward is they are fully aware of much within innovation language and understanding. They work consistently around the concept of complete systems from concept to final design, incorporating the product from all its hardware, software, design capabilities. They are well advanced in the increasing value of visualization (for design improvements, prototyping) and simulation (for testing and assumption management). They are comfortable with assessing risk, knowing the need to build in as much collaboration as possible. It is only in recent years the whole PLM process has gained this digital thread running throughout all. PLM is being transformed and offers the present digital innovation thread that all that innovation is requiring.

They can and do have connected design across R&D, Manufacturing, Developers and commercialization teams and well equipped to deliver smarter, connected products that can be further designed or enhanced for extended life by exploring material design and component fit.

Taking PLM as we know it out of the engineering domain and opening it up to all of innovation activities and needs is certainly a “Sea change” for them so this would happen. The point for me is that the approach of PLM solution providers, is they are steeped in innovation understanding for many essential and significant aspects.

PLM solution providers might offer the best bet for solving the need for providing a complete innovation system that is designed for all innovation needs, not just in specialised manufacturing industries but by offering solutions that have a capability for managing complexity as well as provide (stripped down) versions for many others that do not have the same design or concept delivery needs but require an integrated process that sits on a platform for allowing it to flow and connect all involved. That can only happen in a digital innovation platform in my opinion.

The stand-alone world of ‘Just’ product is rapidly declining

In a new world where software is often defining the product, there is a reversal taking place from our old worlds of the product alone into a software and product one. We do need to manage products far more across the full product lifecycle as we need to be more consciously “sustainable”.

We are seeing more and more possibilities with the use and application of “digital twins”. To achieve this transformation requires us to go digital within innovation. We need a clear, well designed digital thread running through all our innovation processes. It needs an enterprise-wide foundation. To achieve scale becomes more likely if we have our innovation concepts captured, modeled and designed through being fully digital in the innovation process. This gives us a better scope for scale, for exploration of alternatives, for collaboration and faster adaptation as market conditions constantly change.

Yet to achieve this we must overhaul our existing innovation systems and processes.

We do need a more system engineering approach as our products become increasingly complex. We are being pushed to have far more extended lifecycle responsibilities in our end solutions and in our design, build, service and operating stages we have greater potential to achieve this.  Through the digital capture, we can have our innovation digitally mapped, modeled and having in place a clear “system of record” for any design, so we can have a roadmap of design decisions and validation points and the established basis for building out further, due to these digital captured activities.

We have long moved beyond the “simpler era” in innovation Yet we still operate significant legacy in systems, in our thinking on the approaches we take for innovation. Much today is unconnected, inefficient, not visible, unable to provide a cross-collaborating environment inside our enterprise, let alone connected up to other enterprises. We have far from secure closed-loop systems and usually rely on a consistent manual intervention and lack often the serious impetus to push for progress. Too much innovation, god concepts, die inside an Enterprise for the wrong reasons of poor judgment, lack of knowledge or sufficient weight of evidence.

So we do need to ask ourselves and question our present innovation processes?

How can we evolve within ourselves when we are keeping our systems and processes “static” in design, still operating on spreadsheets, through emails, shared files that often do not ‘speak’ to each other, or capable for sharing across multiple enterprises systems as they are digitally captured, in common language?

In our current fragmentation process, we continue to “promote” gaps in knowledge, understanding and restrict learning. We need a “dynamic” environment, digitally connected that flows and connects, one that is visible to all, to contribute into.

We do need to move our rather tired innovation needle, it is truly stuck in the past.

Where will it function if we continue to manage innovation in our present ways across the emerging Digital Enterprise, without being radically altered and given a 21st-century digital solution? One that forces new designs, different innovation strategies, through technological solutions that can accelerate new business opportunities and perhaps radically new business models.

Smart connected products that through digitalization can shorten time to market, increase flexibility, improve flexibility and utility, increase our efficiencies, offer the possibilities of new business models and work towards proving the environment for increased security and protection of IP, product design and counter cyber-attacks as we add increasing software to our products.

No, there is a compelling reason to make innovation fully digital. Who can take on this challenge?

So how can we set about to build an extended digital innovation enterprise system? It needs someone to see the opportunity and seize the initiative. Can a Siemens, PTC, Dassault or Aris see the bigger innovation picture or financial pie in the potential returns and engagement? Each is growing as they embrace digital and innovation. Of the four of these, I would put PTC or Aris as the ones that have the entrepreneurial flair and independence of thought, to consider this. They both have the ambition to evaluate this as a valuable addition, by capitalizing on building this broader innovation process opportunity. It surely should be valuable to consider? As for Siemens or Dassault, it is harder to see as they are more specific in their business focus of supporting their own business entities and solutions. It might be hard for them to “look beyond”

I just presently cannot see the existing solution providers of idea management or product portfolio management have the “appetite” for this. Most have failed to evolve, many have actually retreated into being more specialized as crowdsourcing platform providers The financial investment, belief and understanding, a lack and depth of resource to deliver on this. They are all far too small, caught in their own legacy business model system, many still stuck often in the fixation of selling simply more licenses. They do, in my view, miss the bigger picture or opportunity

Can Oracle or SAP be able to step up on this? In theory, the answer is yes but so far they have made a real “hash” of their innovative solution offerings. I would like to see them shift their thinking, perhaps understand innovation beyond their own “nose” or past perspective, ones of just “extracting intelligence” or “fitting innovation into the supply chain” as the thrust of their solutions. I presently doubt either have the capabilities to realize this as they presently simply cannot see it or not motivated to think differently, a pity. No, if anyone has the “credentials” it lies within the PLM players, such as PTC or Aris.

Innovation Management and its process needs to come of age, not stuck in the past.

It can be transformed by lifting our thinking, connecting the technology that is available out there and delivers a digital innovation solution.   Are any of the providers of innovation solutions really listening or prepared to be more radical in their offering? Or are they “wedded” to their own mindset of legacy PLM thinking, mostly manufacturing orientation through the engineering culture this requires or marketing driven, reliant on brainstorming ideas and crowdsourcing as their belief this is innovation?

The post The Need for Digital Innovation Platforms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have often been returning to scaling, struggling with finding the best answers. Many organizations struggle with scaling. This can be scaling their organization, their capabilities or more often, taking an idea into a fully scaled delivery.

Maybe I have been looking at it all wrong?

The complexities of scaling can’t be lightly dismissed. You need very often, size to scale. This could be in a new plant, in where production should be situated, so it can be allowed to scale at a later date, in resources able to achieve scale or more importantly you scale according to the type of goods or demand so they can be readily available, closer to the market they are needed.

When you work in a global organization, scale takes on even greater set of dimensions, one that needs coordinating and managing.

So I was thinking through some points on scaling a little differently. They are partly ‘open questions’ or some thinking out loud. You can say they are “half-baked”, perhaps in more than one way!

Can we make scaling up more systematic? I know that a good colleague and friend of mine, Ralph-Christian Ohr spends significant time on this to crack. He is a joint facilitator to “Scaling-up: From Corporate Startup to Business Impact” along with Frank Mattes. You can follow their work over on innovation-3,  where they help companies to set the Scaling-Up of a fully validated innovation concept up for success.

I am thinking scale differently here, So let me explore this, it is only emerging for me. I have found much on scaling-up as specific to a certain point of need, such as a startup to a new business outcome. Can we think of scaling-up differently?

So a series of questions first.

Are we placing the emphasis of “scaling-up” too far down the delivery chain? Should “scaling” be broken down and modernized? Can we scale-up firstly in the digital world and then take this into the physical world. I am questioning scaling-up and much of this might be simply mumble jumble or is it? So some of my opening thoughts and I will also want to come back to this at a later time.

When we decide to scale

As we scale and become more outward in chasing global trade, issues move from being simply complicated to be far more complex. Past experience can be enough to assist complicated but complex becomes more problematical as it is ambiguous, uncertain and presents a uniqueness in its challenges. Scaling-up does have the potential of opening up new places to play, or the dark holes many of us often fall down into. Getting scaling right is hard and having it available at the right time even harder. How can we reverse engineer scaling up to reduce complexity?

This growing uncertainty we face in the world that has become (overly) reliant on the continuance of open borders, will add to our scaling up dilemmas. We are seeing risk management become increasingly important in any assessment on where, how and why we need to scale-up and more importantly when. This growing complexity to manage is increasingly moving organizations towards the very traits innovation also requires. Those of dealing with greater ambiguity, of building in the needs of agility, higher levels of flexibility, curiosity and the willingness to explore and experiment, and take increasing risk.

Dealing in agility

For many, it is a very uncomfortable place to go, when they have invested millions in their supply chain. They naturally want to channel everything into their supply chain to optimize and utilize it. They have obtained high levels of visibility but in this pursuit of optimization traded off many levels of flexibility. Supply chains have become reliant on high levels of predictability. This reliability has been working well for the established organization, set up to extract maximum efficiency and effectiveness out of the investments they have made in predictable markets. Careers have been made previously on stability, exploitation, and extraction, not risk and exploration. Yet, what if this changes? Scale will be dealt with differently if unpredictable conditions come towards us.

Yet, as markets become increasingly uncertain, new competitors entering the markets with very different ways that they see the supply chain and delivering their solutions, will be better positioned to leverage on a more volatile set of market conditions. Emphasizing delivering on customer needs will be placing uncertainty back into the previously honed supply chain model or production model of many companies stuck in the old model of generating demand for their solutions, not those of the marketplace. The risk of being highly scaled is fast becoming a point of disruption for others. Scaling up needs a different lens than in the past perhaps.

The shedding of legacy can equally liberate innovation

Legacy, leadership, cultures, and processes, are inherited from the past industrial economy of standalone businesses, where the scale was achieved through mass production, tailored to the producer’s needs, of providing products that worked but not necessarily in alignment to the customer’s needs. That was fine when you had a limited choice available. There is a shift going on today.  Supply is exceeding demand and demand has simply become that, demanding. That is reversing part of the thinking towards scaling up, the consumer expects and demands a solution to their own specific problems, and organizations have to adjust accordingly.  This is where innovation comes into play. Supply has become more tailored and focused. It needs to be more agile and flexible. It is being forced back in the production process to meet rapidly changing demand. The scale has to respond accordingly.

To get supply closer to demand, you need to be closer to your ultimate consumer, in the market and through a more personalized, focused dialogue to shorten “the response to change,” to keep in pace with customer requirements. In many ways we need to scale-up understanding, the front end of innovation, drawing in the knowledge and insights quickly enough and then process these at speed to keep pace. Today scaling-up has a different point of resource emphasis, it is not so defined as the end point but more as “adaptive” scaling, at the appropriate point of need. We are shifting from applying standardization and searching for increasing flexibility. Scaling needs a more modular set of solutions.

So standardization is giving way to customization. Large-scale product runs are being adapted to meet more specific opportunities; response rates and customer engagement are being hugely advanced by technology and constant exploring the full customer journey with data and analytics helping the understanding. Hierarchy and delegation are flattening out and seeking engagement. The whole doing and thinking, is based far more on this dependency on growing real-time feedback and ongoing knowledge flows. Digital application throughout the organization to speed up understanding and provide visibility, where ever it is needed to shorten ‘response’ time.

The changes we are undergoing play towards innovation outcomes seen differently

Strategy today, is far more on grasping the essence of a constantly changing situation and equally on anticipating the future. It is forward looking not backward filled. A primary goal of growth requires innovation to be the catalyst to create the future. For this to happen we do need to recognize that innovation must become a greater instrument of strategy, far more central or core, in organization application and understanding. It is the best means of gaining a strategic advantage and often the basis of survival in how innovation creates, leading to new growth and profits.

So by us recognizing innovation as the means of gaining an advantage, we need to think more creatively on where and how we scale.

Unfortunately, innovation is primarily made up on “Knowns and Unknowns in Innovation: Let’s Manage Them Differently and much of the innovator’s job is to make these “known” as soon as possible. Any plan of future actions needs to be designed in different ways. We need more modular thinking and this is where scaling can be achieved differently. We are seeking emergence; this is the key.

Today we are struggling due to these legacies. We are attempting to scale out, often on a current path of decline, or organizational design; one that is too rigid, and static, and we chose to ignore many warning signals as the understanding is not well connected up. The route to new scaling needs to be built on a fluid design, dynamic and based on constant discovery so we can be in this ’emergent mode’ as quickly as we can, to translate this.

The value of the digital twin may offer some resolution to scaling up (of everything)?

The smaller the component to build, the quicker you can scale it and optimize it. In the age of the digital twin, we can build the virtual product by specifying and validating it, we can prototype it for increase verification and greater digital/physical engagement and interaction. Then we can go into a virtual production to simulate, to map product concepts out, to validate and begin to commission and structure the physical as you can provide better understanding, structure, and behavior your innovation concept will have increasingly “down the innovation concept/validation” process.

We are moving the front-end of design into a virtual one, more and more, to enable products and then eventual production to simulate, test and optimize concepts in a virtual world before it enters the real world. As we work in this digital twin world we continually gain new insights from concept designs, from customer feedback and then when it does enter the real physical world there is a well-established continuous loop of improvement.

We can design production, facilities and a host of other things through digital twins. I wrote “have you got your digital twin strategy sorted out yet? This thinking more holistically about how and where digital twins can be applied does make a significant contribution to thinking “scaling-up” accordingly in very digitally connected ways.

Scaling up comes from focusing on real points of value, these being optimizing, enhancing, digitalizing and streamlining, on a continuous basis and digital process design, might do this well. It is for me, the combinations we can achieve from engineering the innovation value chain through connectivity, through increasing intelligence and feedback, and by constantly validating this, by automating this innovation process of design in this digital (virtual) world, as well as in its physical one.

We need to build more into our front end to model different scenario’s so we can “scale” and ask “what if?” accordingly. We are surely building designs that by going through this digital /physical process that gives us flexible, are scalable and upgradable as the designs evolve. We then adapt our scale as we validate.

As put forward by some of the suppliers of PLM software, we do need to think far more about Product Innovation Platforms that offer enterprise-wide foundations to build and design the concept, to scaled out the solution. To achieve this we do need to creatively think where a digital twin can play their part, recognizing the digital thread that is occurring in all our future innovation activity. Going fully Digital offers us an evolutionary path if we choose to take it. It connects much more than we have connected today.

We must recognize “just” physical assets are actually less important, they are becoming increasingly dependant on digital being part of their offering, an increasingly valuable part, as more of our solution components are software related. It is in the software we have the potential to scale out in different ways, less in the physical assets that house them. The value of software giving outcomes and insights is increasing the value of the assets. The physical assets are the delivery mechanism, the host, and it is the value “extracted” from data that is rapidly giving the “return on investments”. So what should we be thinking about to “scale-up?”

Many “stand-alone” manufacturers would gain by considering platforms and joining forces in ecosystems that can design and share more complex solutions. This allows for a shared scaling up design. This fresh thinking of ecosystem design gives different scope, architecture, and capabilities. Having smart, connected products offers the ability to scale differently.

Innovations and Strategy need to be tested constantly in a different time and space.

Re-thinking design, applying digital solutions can provide the connecting mechanism to explore, relate and test assumptions, to relate your context to the higher level ones. You have brought back “scaling up” to the front end.

By designing your innovation through greater visualization and digital “twinning”  you can cascade your innovation views quicker. By building innovation concepts digitally, you can to make better assumptions, predictions, solutions, and decisions; it is drawing in all involved, specifically customers into the strategic process. It allows for conscious awareness, it becomes the method to examine, test, validate and improve on the assumptions. Then you can scale-up with increased levels of confidence.

The post The problem of scaling can confuse those innovating. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.