I want to relate adoption back to business platforms and anchor it in the process.
Today business platform adoption is a struggle. It needs a clear revisiting of the theory of diffusion and adoption to extract the relevant points of necessary practice.
What is vitally needed is the recognition that deciding on adopting a business platform approach has five stages or decision points to go through.
So often, platform providers automatically go to the assumption that their platform will be adopted. It simply will not without working through and gaining confirmation the five stages of adoption are clarified.
The Combination Effect for Adoption in today’s world
The level of interest in business platforms in the B2B space has rapidly grown. Platforms are more viable and relevant today than ever. The platform’s ability to offer multiple values will influence many of the client’s adoption decisions over the choices their business will engage with.
I suggested in this post, “Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.”
Recently in Stanford Social Innovation Review, an article on the “Adoption of Innovation” by Benjamin Kumpf & Emma Proud is well worth the read as adopting any innovation process is a tough, slow one.
They take a position on looking at behavioural approaches suggesting when behavioural insights have been adopted, innovation has ceased to be “innovative.” When a method, technology, or approach to a problem has moved from the experimental edges of an organization to the core of its work: no longer a novelty but something normal and institutionalized. My fear here is this becomes “static” and losses its dynamism.
Business Platforms provide the backbone of the Network.
Today we are still caught up in the validation and relevance of managing a business through platform thinking by making the business case of its value and impact. We should not be; it is time for you to hop onto the train.
The ability to present a compelling business case for the use and application of platforms is overwhelming. I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact and application.
For me, platforms are needed as we face a very different economic landscape.
We need to choose where to focus in the future, where to concentrate our resources and attempt to bridge the fragmentation that is occurring. The world of collaboration, where we can find partners to share and reinforce what we do, is leading to new dynamics of combining.
Platforms are more viable and relevant.
Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.
Choosing new innovative approaches to counter the fear of Business Contagion
What has been changing in how we approach innovation, and have we taken the opportunity to radically revise the innovation system and process accordingly?
Many of our innovative approaches or systems are based on very often just an internal perspective, restricted in available resources and limited knowledge and insights, often constraining the evolving new solutions and then limiting the impact and outcome.
For many years open innovation has been encouraged to be adopted to break out of this very narrow internal focus. Having a real diversity of opinion with this greater access to different knowledge and experiences does open up our thinking, but it is, on its own, not enough to make a real difference, especially in times of acute change. We need to put to use a different innovation model or approach.
We are at the cusp or already into significant changes to how the world, society and we as individuals will manage or engage going into the future.
This is my second post discussing the belief that we are being to see a real contagion breaking down how we have been operating and living in the world.
We are facing the potential of unprecedented change, and we need to recognize how a different approach to innovation can help offset or mitigate many of the destabilizing aspects and provide a pathway to managing differently in a new environment that will inevitably come from this contagion.
Business contagion requires different innovative responses.
We are presently facing a profound set of changes in the conditions that businesses operate within the immediate years ahead, that of the fear of business contagion; these will need a different set of innovation shifts and responses to counter this and seize new opportunities.
Over two posts, I want to lay out the underlying concerns (here) and the new dynamics we can deploy by changing how we undertake innovation as my second post.
This first post discusses what is changing, and there is a growing argument in what I am seeing that we are facing one of those contagion periods where one set of conditions is triggering another, followed by another.
Innovation requires a more dynamic, systematic approach
All companies talk about innovation and its growing importance, but why is it that still so few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale?
What inhibits innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to achieving such innovative growth? Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities?
The difficulty for many is that innovation is a complex process that has many intangibles within the total mix to manage. Management today is far happier managing the ‘harder’ aspects of business, the current physical ones of everyday organization, not the ‘softer’ more intangible ones, where innovation often lies or emerges from.
I want to find a new way of approaching innovation, a new positioning, and these are my opening statements to be questioned and built upon Chasing dedicated focal points, looking…
Applying the three horizon framework to innovation and change
I will always recommend this three horizon framework for shaping innovation. So much of our need to think about innovation is about managing differently the today, the tomorrow and the future, these need to be thought through in very distinct ways, to clarify the innovation levels of intensity, resources and outcomes required.
To explain the impacts of innovation and the change it creates, we’ll use an accepted framework (the Three Horizons) to consider the impact innovation has on change capabilities and business models.
Here we introduce the three horizon concept to better understand the range of innovation outcomes and the potential change requirements.
The three horizon framework has distinctive horizons for specific outcomes, management and approaching change
The three degrees of ecosystem design- the innovating equation
In any ecosystem thinking and design, we do need to find this “sweet spot” for encouraging more innovation. For me, it is the ability to build the dynamics within the involvement required.
We live in a world where we are having greater connectivity than ever before. We are increasingly engaged in far greater interactivity with easy access to social and organizational tools than ever before.
We are encouraged to share what we know increasingly so others can build on this, or shape its original concept into a different value proposition simply by having that triggering idea and seeing the ‘possibilities’ to build upon it.
Applying the Three Horizon Methodology is an Evolutionary Perspective
Innovation is the key driver to turning our world from a fossil-led one into one based on renewables and technology is the enabler.
For this to happen, our focus today should be fully on low-carbon technologies and their technical realization.
We should be looking at applying the three horizon methodology here to determine a pathway from today through to 2050 to achieve our goals of having a world free of man-made carbon emissions.
