I recently wrote a post “Delving into a complex world- helping to keep pace”.……to help us to keep pace, learn apply and adapt.

Finding time to read and extend our thinking is a real struggle and going that extra mile to read thought-leadership views can be a step to far, I know but I can’t help myself, it is part of my job and certainly for me, many are really worth it.

In that post I was recommending Deloitte and their thought leadership as a good place to visit.

Now I’m not sure how many of you actually did, so I thought in this post  to pick out specifically two great articles and make a post summary of these, as I feel both of these might be useful, as they challenge and break new ground in thinking.

So I can’t compete with getAbstract or Soundview or many others, offering the service of learning a book’s key ideas in less than 10 minutes but hopefully the two I’ve chosen will beat the time it takes in this one read to cover what I feel cover two topical and important innovation thoughts of the present for many involved in innovation.

The two thought leadership pieces I have chosen.Each of these are in the field of innovation so hopefully they will be of interest and raise your curiosity to dig a little deeper, if not then you have the key insights (from my perspective) here and that should be maybe enough to become more aware.

The two I have decided to summarize are 1) Beyond Design Thinking and 2) Minimum Viable Transformation.

Beyond Design Thinking

Written by Larry Keeley, president and co-founder of Doblin, Inc., an innovation strategy firm known for pioneering comprehensive innovation systems and the famous “Ten Types of Innovation”. A ‘given’ place to begin framing your innovation.

Beyond Design Thinking – reflecting on its place

Here Larry is discussing another really important system, about Beyond Design Thinking and let me pick out the key thinking within this article:

It opens with “Corporations have grown enamored with design thinking” and although design is in the ascendance, as it is powerful, effective and transformational if practiced or approached right, its trend needs examining. The key to design thinking is it begins by imagining a solution that does not exist yet, and then set about outlining a pathway to realizing it. Normally we make an assessment of a problem and seek correcting it.

What is at the heart of design thinking?

Design thinking has at its heart the generation of (lots of) ideas, build prototypes, try many things, build narratives about them, test everything, do more of what works and all the time show a clear bias for action, looking to shoot for the moon, or even Mars. All exciting, motivating stuff.

The creep is we are beginning to make design thinking a panacea – we start believing it can fix the ‘dry stuff’, the overly rational planning approaches to optimize around predetermined and deeply analyzed market segments, we are actually abusing design thinking. Larry argues that certainly conventional approaches to planning are overdue for reinvention; design thinking is sometimes treated as superficial to truly deliver on grand expectations. It falls down attempting the wrong things or trying to fit design thinking into the events of the day.

Certainly I’ve seen or witnessed many brainstorming or management meetings that have asked along a design thinking expert, who pulled out of the hat, like the magical rabbit, a wondrous show to excite, determine and mostly fill an otherwise boring day. We all got terribly excited until the magic wore off and it didn’t make a scrap of difference. This is not what design thinking should be for.

It is crafting analysis with synthesis, it is expecting divergence and convergence

As business rushes to embrace design thinking, it does move tradecraft beyond simply plain, vanilla analysis, it does embrace synthesis that helps build bolder and more newsworthy things. It can help firms build breakthroughs and contribute to the ‘genesis’ of profound insights and that alone can become the basis for an innovation team to put in the hard work of building (and validating) a breakthrough conceived through design thinking.

It is suggested in the article “put simply, analysis without synthesis is predictable and commonplace, design thinking without deep analysis is reckless.” It is seeking how to do both in integrated, even dazzling new ways.

To quote again: “when we have such highly contested markets….. it becomes a real skill to imagine a better world, make it tangible, build narratives about it and then work through the dozens of obstacles that anything new faces throughout its development”

Even more so “in a world where connectivity, collaboration, interdependence and user engagement all converge to build modern integrated ecosystems, where we formerly thought of industries”.

The quest for elegant integration of our innovation solutions

So Larry Keeley is suggesting within this article beyond design thinking we need to find “elegant integration” as effective innovations today are more about this elegant innovation of the known than the primary invention of the new. This is what is driving industry transformation everywhere.

The road ahead for the design field is three fold: use information deftly to manage complexity, great design is a critical catalyst and acceleration to the overall advance you seek and you should avoid labeling this design thinking as it is informed analysis, seamlessly synthesized into a coherent, beautiful solution.

As we transform from examples like Candy Crush, Alibaba, and countless others have as their shared property: they fuse together insights that come from sophisticated analytics, with experiences that are brilliantly designed to be easy, smart, convenient and entirely understandable.

That is where the power of design thinking turns products into platforms, offering deep solutions and your industry evolves into an ecosystem. It is down to getting all the parts right, needing analysis and syntheses to work together.

My second summary: Minimum Viable Transformation

This is written by one of my favorite thought-leaders, John Hagel III, who has written here with Jacob Bruun-Jensen about minimum viable transformation and he has a follow up article of the same name over on LinkedIn focusing more on the edge to create new business value. Let me summarize the two, hopefully enough for it to make sense.

To succeed in today’s networked economy, businesses must participate in dynamic, evolving networks of diverse organizations. And while such networks can be difficult to navigate, they offer companies the opportunity to evolve their business models, deepen skills and knowledge, expand into new markets, and scale operations.

To stay viable amid accelerating change, businesses themselves must change more frequently—and in ways that use their business ecosystems as fertile ground for collaboration and transformation.

As an aside, I am spending increasing amounts of time on understanding ecosystems for innovation and its management, but that’s for another day.

Scaling edges that might become our new core

One method used to scale edges is minimum viable transformation. Scaling an edge is a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.

Here, when we are at an edge, a company pulls together the essential elements of a new business model into a barely working construct, one specifically designed to test key risks.

Acknowledging and embracing minimum viable product principles

Minimum viable products, for example, are like prototypes—except that instead of being tinkered with internally, they’re immediately thrown at the market and subjected to trial by fire.

So why would a company do such a thing? The minimum viable product is all about identifying flaws and working to improve them as rapidly as possible. It’s designed not as proof of concept, but to test hypotheses and unearth unknowns that could sink a new offering.

For companies seeking to reinvent not only their products but their business models, minimum viable transformation allows for rapid iteration on the unknowns of a new business model—anything from minute changes to operational processes to full restructuring of the go-to-market strategy. At its core, it’s a strategy for gathering validated learning about individual business model elements, then assessing how those elements interact and combine to form one cohesive strategy.

The need today is to innovate at the level of the Business Model

Rethinking the fundamentals of how a business creates and captures value has become a priority, we are in a different era, the past one was of slow change and stable industries yet we still saw rapid convergence. The sheer acceleration and changes in technology, customer desires and the need to build ecosystems is making the Business Model far more important to focus on than product and service innovations.

The problem is we are still not clear how shifting business models is supposed to get done. Taking the trend “minimum viable product” populated by Eric Reis and his Lean Start-up methodology – it suggests by pulling together the essential elements of, in this case, new business models, into barely working prototype models, specifically designed to test key risks, you learn from ‘lightweight’ and readily adaptable versions of potentially new business models to take them forward or rethink your original hypothesis.

Both MVP and MVT are like prototypes but they are simply not passed around and tinkered with internally, they are immediately thrown at the market and subjected to trial by fire. In Eric Reis’s view it is all about identifying flaws and working to improve them as rapidly as possible.

This minimal approach must be specifically designed, not as a proof of concept but I repeat, to test hypotheses and gain knowledge about the biggest unknowns that could sink any new offering.

Each change from minute operational change to global restructuring is better understood by iterative discovery but with full disclosure to customers, who surprisingly are very willing to join the journey of learning. This becomes a validated learning journey.

The whole approach to this minimum viable transformation is looking for understanding to reduce the risks of large-scale change. The core principles of MVP – validate learning, rapid prototyping, frugal creativity along with thinking MVT for reducing risks, increasing understanding of scale and speed makes for a potentially appealing approach to working on new Business Models.

Why explore new Business Models at the edge?

Focusing on “scaling edges,” allows for identifying promising “edges” for the organization, then grow that edge until it becomes a viable new core or complementary line of business. Such an approach can make it possible for businesses to reinvent themselves while minimizing potential risks—and maximizing impact.

An edge is a growth opportunity that has the potential to scale—so much so that it can catalyze change, eventually becoming effective enough to replace the core of the business. A true edge should align with larger trends disrupting the industry. Edges involve fundamentally different business models and practices from those of the core.

Edges give the transformation team far more degrees of freedom to test and experiment with new approaches to evolving a fundamentally different business model.

We finish this with five guidelines for transformation on the edge

Today corporate transformations must be designed and executed quickly and routinely—not as once-a-decade events. Management teams are looking for best practices that increase speed and reduce the risk of pursuing business model innovation and change. That’s where minimum viable transformation comes into play. Before diving in, management teams should consider these five principles:

1. Learn how to learn. The central goal of minimum viable transformation is to learn from a true field experiment.

2. Pick up speed. There’s a reason this approach starts with the word “minimum”: The learning has to happen fast. As soon as a company executes the idea it’s pursuing, it shows its hand to competitors— who will quickly respond with their own strategies.

3. Embrace constraints. Much has been written about the counter-intuitive effect of constraints—they don’t foil creativity, but fuel it. It’s worth noting that the very constraints we’ve been talking about here—few bells and whistles and scarce time—take real creativity to address. At the very least, they compel a focus on the goal—the need to learn and reduce risk around the key objective.

4. Have a hypothesis. To succeed, transformation initiatives must clearly articulate both the need for change and its direction. Such a statement of direction helps identify key assumptions driving the change effort (assumptions that will need to be tested and refined along the way). Leaders will also need to develop metrics that measure short-term progress.

5. Start at the edge. Find an “edge” of the current business—a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.

In short, these five key principles can help bypass traditional barriers to transformation, ultimately supporting more effective response to mounting performance pressures.

In Summary

Both of these articles come from a significant report, the full report is “Business ecosystems come of age“. The notion of business ecosystems is now a crucial focal point for innovation, analysis, and strategic planning. Businesses are moving beyond traditional industry silos and coalescing into richly networked ecosystems, creating new opportunities for innovation alongside new challenges for many incumbent enterprises.

The world is entering an era in which ideas and insights come from everywhere, and crowds, clouds, collaborators, competitions, and co-creators can fundamentally help define our shared future. The business environment is being permanently altered as a result.

We require the thinking of thought leaders to emphasize and point us to ideas that we can adopt, experiment with and learn to our own benefit. For this learning, you need the time to read, explore and experiment.

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

The post Deeper read or quick summary- finding the time first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Organizations are struggling to forge a new path in innovation function and design that captures opportunities fast and also exploits the increasing need of being adaptive and flexible.

Organizations are looking at structures for their innovation activity that are taking a more agile and focused approach, wanting to push for constantly accelerating the process. New practices are emerging.

This is demanding more radical redesigns of the function, processes and structures around innovation. Innovators are being more challenged.

Against this need for new, more radical designs there still lies that underlying concern, often at the top of our organizations, on how to manage innovation risk without significant organisational disruption.

There is this lingering fear that pushing for more radical innovation can create significant upheaval within the organization. Innovation is being challenged by the view of “we want predictable innovation but radical enough to make sure we grow.”

Innovation has to manage within this conflicting message. It is through the well-designed system, processes and function that this can happen but this needs redesigning fairly radically to adjust to today’s world of wanting innovation faster than ever.

This is the sixth post centred on the executive innovation work mat

Within this post I focus upon the function, design, structure and processes needed for successful and sustaining innovation within organizations. In a recent series of articles I have looked at the seven components to raise questions, to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations around building innovation that sustains and delivers to the strategic need.

The lexicon of today’s existing management of innovation needs rebuilding.
You can read an incredible variety of advice on designing the innovation process.

These can include managing through idea management system software to reverting to simple ‘pen and paper’ brainstorming environments and spreadsheets.

Simply having in place some structured processes is essential to managing innovation. These can become very complex that go from idea all the way to final execution.

Then we get into the approaches to designing a portfolio to balance your innovation activity, the use of stage-gates to manage this, the whole product life-cycle process, the need for robust pipelines and well-designed platforms all enter the lexicon of managing innovation. It has become part of the lexicon of the innovator but not yet the common language we speak of, that a whole organization can talk and gather around.

Many of these systems we have become comfortable with, by working with them every day but I believe there is the need of some radical challenging and redesign needing to take place around these. Much within the innovation system needs designing out.

We need to rebuild a new common language surrounding innovation that is broader and more inclusive to all within our organizations. We need to recognize the changes taking place in competition, the need for a sense of urgency for growth and a ‘breaking out’ of the incremental mindset, that is still prevailing in many organizations.

There is a new chase for growth and even more through purposeful design.

This end choice is not which system or process has the best functions, the sexiest piece of software or the coolest design for its platform.

The choice is about going back and asking the basic of basic questions to the organizations top leadership: “what do you want innovation to achieve?”
You will get the simple answer: “growth” and also “innovation delivery needs to speed up in new products and services”.

You will also get “we need to outperform or at least keep us competitive in the market place” and then perhaps “innovation is expected to deliver what the market wants”.

These statements are all helpful but quite simply not enough. To deliver on innovations ‘promise’ you need to go deeper. Besides having a clearer strategic vision, for innovation, there needs this greater alignment to the strategic aspirations. For that, innovation needs explicit links and all of these points back to the strategic needs, goals and visions. The innovation work mat aids this exploration.

Achieving a well-designed design, function, structure and process is utterly dependent on the organization to translate the innovation needs and aims, define the workflow that ‘this will follow and how and where this will take place. Then it needs fully supporting and resourcing.

Today we need to think innovation outcomes differently.

The higher demand from innovation requires the system to respond far quicker to breaking opportunities.
Innovation needs to have a system that is constantly adaptive and flexible. Most of the rigidity needs to be designed out.

Organizations are requiring structures and processes that are far more agile, nimble, constantly recognizing speed as the essence of today’s competitive worlds.

The challenges that need to be addressed are replacing a linear system with a spiral one, where you constantly loop back to refit your innovation understanding back into the idea-to-launch system from the new knowledge you are gaining.

The system needs resetting around shorter bursts of high intense activity that factor in risk-based contingency, are encouraged to keep exploring and adapting.

The criteria to measure innovation passing through development, needs to become more open-ended. This can allow greater discovery periods to go where it is needed and not what the system is forcing it squeeze through a gate. The ‘go/kill’ criteria needs to change.

The system becomes a learning process to reduce uncertainty but keeps advancing on improving insights and physical demonstration that what is being investigated. This is through constant prototyping exploring and meeting customer or market needs with these stakeholders involved. As innovation discovery advances, the outcomes become more tangible, risks reduce.

We need to reduce where Innovation often sits waiting.

We need to challenge the constant waiting within the development processes for innovation.

This can be achieved through better designed systems of management perhaps a more value-stream analysis, accelerating by overlapping stages, encouraging concurrent activities, ensuring dedicated teams are assigned to properly resource projects.

We need to challenge and reduce the built-in slack within the innovation development system, wherever we can.

Today the emphasis is to maximize speed, working really hard on scoping the front end in greater detail really helps, and asking key questions on where the right track is and what this needs in resource, time and development and committing dedicated teams to the tasks.

We need to find better ways to incorporate lean principles, even six sigma into reducing the non-added value out of our innovation system. We need to provide succinct deliverable packages that tell the ‘advancement’ and learning story as the innovation concept moves along its development path.

Changing the milestone dependencies by using canvas techniques has exciting potential
We need to reduce the dependencies on financial milestones and make these more physical, with constantly evolving and functioning prototypes that demonstrate new value, so stakeholders can understand and provide even greater inputs on ‘seeing’ new value creation.

The principles that are being built up around the Business Model canvas within our business organizations offers much to be re-evaluated within our development life-cycle.

The introduction of new thinking such as the value of starting with a complete blank canvas or allowing the radical reworking of existing canvases of innovation concepts can offer new concepts to begin to be tested and evolve for products, and services as well as new business propositions.

The physical activities of testing, validating, and clarifying a more integrated design across all the parts do allow for exploring the uncertainties and risks in potentially imaginative ways. Taking a different design thinking to the development process can challenge old assumptions and processes.

We can constantly determine the critical but evolving assumptions and then work at delivering updates that can advance the development process through a dashboard approach of informing when critical assumptions or learning change.

We can take a more imaginative approach to the business model canvas to adopt many of its emerging tools and methods but this calls for a completely different mind-set in larger organizations in my opinion to their whole development process.

We are in real need to reinvigorate our innovation systems.

As I have stated in past posts, our legacy systems are holding us back today. We need to challenge our innovation functions, our existing design of the structure and processes to bring innovation into the core design of the organization, to align its value to present business conditions, where growth is required.

These do need to be more agile, adaptive and accelerated to meet the challenges and uncertainties organizations are facing. Innovation needs to step up to the plate and respond differently than in the past.

Innovation must be applied as a must to rethink and challenge what we have

Our processes and structures to manage innovation have become too linear, too rigid and far too planned, grinding through the innovation system.

Rethinking our innovation in function and designs calls for a more integrated approach offered in the Executive Innovation Work Mat.

Each of the seven components needs carefully designed to bring innovation far more into the core design of the organization and fully understood by all.

The post Are you evolving the innovation function and design first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The combined capitals determine and drive organizations’ destinies.

We are caught in a constant focus upon our achieving a return on our (financial) capital as our measuring criteria. Organizations strive for improving their ROCE, RONA, IRR,  EVA and a host of other financial measures.

As Clayton Christensen has been arguing the agenda of organizations begins and ends with the “search for numbers”. I think there is a time for changing this, we need to search for the knowledge that makes-up eventually the numbers.

There has been a distant voice for some time putting forward the need to appreciate and value the other capitals sitting within organizations.

Much of the discussions have been housed under the term “intellectual capital” which denotes the sum of knowledge made up and contributed by our human assets, our organizational structures and our relationships that are developed.

These are the ‘capitals’ that transform into economic value through organization action. It is the financial capital that simply finances this.

Financial capital dominates any discussions

Yet financial capital and all its associated aspects rules, no, it utterly dominates. It totally fails to tell us in numbers alone where and what creates the value, it simply reports it. It is this financial capital through our profit and loss, our balance sheets hides the value, or spreads it out in ways no one really understands its make-up.

Certainly those attempting to judge an organization just have to rely on a ‘history of numbers’ and some ‘selective’ market view to make investment judgements. Equally those often running our organizations have a restricted view of where their real capital lies, as they focus on the numbers and then work down.

Today, in a rapidly changing world, the reliance of financial capital being the absolute measure is being challenged thankfully. Our business world is facing considerable disruptions from the accepted past practices, performance has become more volatile, more dynamic, more reliant on understanding that knowledge is where the value lies.

“Business as usual” is thankfully in steep decline, the necessity today is to be constantly evolving and learning and that comes from knowledge acquisition, assimilation and then transforming and exploiting this into new value. These ‘absorptive capacities’ are where we need to direct our understanding of new, value creating capital. We need to report on these far more as they offer the ‘residing’ value.

Learning capital needs to emerge and dominate future discussions

We need to give increasing incentives for organizations to learn. We need to judge the quality of this learning, not listen to ‘bland’ statements often presented. We need to know where this knowledge is targeted in narrative, discussions, spillovers and interactions. What is being exploited, what is being determined in the decision-making process to give greater confidence that our invested financial capital is “in good hands”.

Keeping reliant on just discussing the financials within organizations we know is not enough. We have to force better discussions on the make-up of the other capitals, as these are still poor, left to individual interpretation and variable and we need to change this.

As organizations become more open (open innovation for instance) the strength of linkages, of knowledge exchange, the translation of these activities is becoming really valuable to understand and focus upon more.

Through many of our activities we actually ‘borrow’ and it is then the ‘dynamic linking’ that we bring into the process, gives up the increased potential of innovation. It is the ease of learning, the ability to acquire and apply knowledge that creates the potential for innovation.

How many organizations really articulate their knowledge capital in acquisition, assimilation and transformation? Do we know how ‘path dependent’ they are- are they lagging in the market, are they simply opportunistic, are they locked-in far too much in potential downside risks.

Do they suffer from cognitive failure, do they lack the appropriate competencies to meet the constant challenges occurring around them. How much of this can you really extract from cold, hard numbers? Not a great deal.

Recognizing where our true value resides

The real problem we have is the lack of appreciation of what makes up our value, the real underlying wealth creating value, the one that truly ‘generates’. The tangible part is easier to appreciate (plant, land, material etc.) but is becoming a significantly declining part of the total sum of value of our organizations- sometimes it is only making up 30 percent..

It is our difficulties of understanding the intangibles as it is a very challenging task. Yet this has huge implications on the ‘health’ of the organizations we continue to invest in. Most organizations resort to “inferring” the value. This needs to change.

The value today is in the interactions between the different components that make up our intangibles, out intellectual capital.

We are in need to identify what ‘drives’ organizations for gaining and sustaining real advantage, and showing why it has the potential for creating new wealth. This needs to be far more forwards looking; it needs to be more open and more transparent.

The call is growing increasingly for a new valuation model. Static knowledge where we view financial numbers is just not good enough, we do need to understand the underlying dynamic capabilities that make-up the organization.

Conflicting signals of what makes up intellectual capital dominate still

The same old problem exists today that has plagued the concept of intellectual capital and its promotion. The community that has been arguing for this as a measuring of the real value of an organization remain divided, locked in their own interest and models; the conflicting nature of these different views has held intellectual capital back.

Organization management will never invest the dedicated time and interest unless they see some level of coherence and understanding that can be translated into an actionable framework.

There have been many attempts but nothing has really changed our traditional reporting of financials with some (restricted) board discussions. Organizations are hiding under rocks, taking cover from the potential relentless sun that would force them to adapt. We need to change this.

Some change might’ be in the reporting air

One organization attempting to radically alter this current (one-eyed) reporting we have today is the www.theiirc.org  proposing their integrated reporting mechanism, where they are shifting the focus more to where value creation lies.

They argue this will improve the quality of the information available to provide for a more efficient and productive allocation of capital. It promotes a more cohesive and efficient approach to corporate reporting that draws on different strands that cover more fully, the factors that are materially important.

The focus is future orientated; it pushes to gain a connectivity of information, in all the capitals and their dependences, and seeks the ability to have integrated thinking that account for the (changes in) connectivity and interdependencies.

It expects a greater understanding of how the organization tailors its business model through its activities, performance and outcomes in its use of all the capitals.

The key for the IIRC has been to seek out the connectivity of information flows into the management reporting, analysis and decision-making so internal and external reporting has this integrated reporting as required.

Are we on the cusp of a real change in reporting?

Are we going to see this initiative gathering momentum in the coming years?  It does seem so as the detailed guiding frameworks in understanding all an organizations capitals, of the thinking behind business models and capital have been piloted and tested and recently published.

I have written on it here in my “shifting attitudes, thinking responsibly” post.

All I hope, no fervently wish, is that the intellectual capital community comes together and can find the same determination to provide greater understanding of the capitals, so this integrated reporting gains even greater momentum and paves the way for improved understanding of the real value that resides in our organizations.

There is a time, and that surely is now as the right time, in coming together over a recognized ‘standard’ definition of intellectual capital and its organization measurement.

What must stop is the continued pushing individuals narrow views of what makes up our capitals but to focus on what our customer needs. Those measurements, which may not be perfect but ones our business organizations will engage in, invest their time and establish the structures to capture those aspects that make up the Intellectual Capitals (IC).

Organizations need to feel utterly comfortable in deploying emerging guidelines so as to understand, test, develop and talk about their capital and the residing values it offers by deploying it through their ecosystem of connected parties.

Offering conflicting ideas or frameworks is never welcome within organizations, they want to feel comfortable in investing and backing in the one that they ‘feel’ the winner.

We urgently require a common standard in approach for measuring all our organizations capital.

Measuring often many intangibles is for many very uncomfortable territory, until the approach becomes ‘standard’. If those within the IC community continue to offer conflicting advice, organizations are very reluctant to commit.

Can the IC community come together and give them a clear model to work from? Please, or will it be eventually taken out of those existing hands, passed into the hands of a new, more business-savvy group of individuals that can ‘piece together’ capitals in a way organizations will actually welcome and adopt.

To encourage acceptance you need clarity, a common understanding and an approach, then the value potential begins to emerge with any adoption because it offers clear language and common measurement instruments that organizations understand and can work with.

It is a growing imperative to gain a common framework to measure the sums of all our capitals.

The post Struggling with the sums of our capital first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Here are some of my thoughts, some a little raw, others well-baked, even some half-baked!.

Running your own business is full of uncertainty, doubt and risk. Equally, though, you have a level of independence and this does permit you to respond quickly.

It can offer higher degrees of flexibility, allows you to pursue what you think clients really want, not what others above you are imposing as template solutions, or their personal views.

Finally, you can explore the options to deliver, as in my case,  services, in your own unique style that often work far better for clients needs.

You are not accountable to anyone, apart from the wife and the bank manager, always looking a little harder at you, that small business owner needing to deliver.

In between these two ends of independence and the uncertainty from the dependence a few clients you might be relient on constantly moving the goal posts, there are quite frankly, lots of raw emotions.

The best part, for me, is a growing confidence that I am operating many times in the ‘zone’ of client needs, that they require out of innovation.

The downside I have to admit is there is an awful lot of hard work that needs to go into this so as to get you there.

My Business Model gets a constant bashing.

I really believe in working the business model hard but as you initiate your execution, not only is it about “getting out of the office” (the Steve Blank cry) but trying to constantly work the relationships that are growing trying to understand what potential customers want. Equally you do need to look hard at what Steve suggests is the customer development manifesto .

Steve also suggests we can get caught up in the 9 deadliest start-up sins and although this is written specifically for start-ups I think many of theses can apply to all businesses. These ‘sage’ pieces of advice are not just for start-ups as I’m well beyond a start-up but I find them incredibly useful as critical reminders as I evolve and change my business model.

It is also about managing the incredible ‘flow’ of knowledge, insights and latest thinking that comes into you constantly every single day.  You struggle to read, absorb, relate too and translate these often breaking thoughts, into your own thinking and propositions.

Of course, much as you find out is not so much leading edge but simply a rehashing of existing ideas, yet still even in these, they have specific experiences attached to them and these are useful to learn from or be reminded.

The innovation forge to shape and form

I’ve been working in the innovation forge arena for fourteen or more years, designing, shaping and learning about innovation, trying to translate this into value for clients and their innovation challenges.

I seem to know where I want to go for my future innovation work but balancing the ‘inflow’ of knowledge with the necessary customer ‘insights’ is not easy, especially when you want to have as much paying work as you can.

No, running your own business is hard. The ‘fun’ is managing the inputs, working the absorption process, producing your own distinct outputs, let alone achieving the required outcomes you need through attracting  clients and achieving engagement.

Over the years my own business model has evolved

My business model has increasingly moved more towards a ‘trusted’ adviser, where I coach, council and mentor on innovation. I constantly look beyond today and work at identifying leading practice, methods and tools.

Of course pure consulting features but I genuinely believe working with a good counselor or confident have a vital roles to play for understanding the value generating and impact points.

This works towards addressing certain problems or challenges being individually faced, yet you are consciously seeking out the dynamic linkages within the broader innovation work.

This is to partly strengthen what is available and already in place, partly to accelerate resources into applying innovation knowledge, at a different, more organized, coherent level.

So I’m working far more towards a facilitator and adviser by design and choice to those responsible for building innovation capacities, so as to promote, stimulate and exchange thinking in innovation thinking and design.

The end result, is to contribute to exploring emerging and leading practice understanding for integration into an organizations thinking and innovation models.

To this end I have ‘contained’ my service offerings deliberately. These I can sum up this way, as:

Agility’s focus of innovation work (unpaid advert)

• I look to provide leading edge advice on the premise you want to improve your present innovation performance.
• The focus is all about bringing new forms of innovation competency or capability into the world of everyday thinking for clear impact and return on the investments made.
• The result is to deliver a more holistic, understanding of what is required in innovation, unique to each client & their challenges, tailored to their needs to accelerate performance
• These are based on finding solutions for the future, deliberately forward looking to overcome today’s challenges & supporting the future innovative growth, not looking to stay caught in a legacy of past, out of date design.

The pivoting we need in any emerging business model is really hard to do.

I often get caught in the customer segment pivot. You believe you have the solutions to solve real problems within innovation but actually identifying often the ‘hidden’ real customer that this is planned for, then getting them engaged is the hardest part.

As Eric Ries nicely puts it in his lean start up methodology, the hypotheses are confirmed but only partly, until you can find more of those often ‘hidden’ customers within the organizations, that are needing these solutions and applying them.

It does get frustrating when you believe you can make a positive contribution to many organizations, still struggling to articulate, frame and determine their needs and  understanding for innovation.

Applying a selection of solutions to one, does not mean it will be valid to another, as often the context is significantly different. It is a process of reiteration, of understanding the differences and reworking solutions, blending in and capitalizing on the DNA that reflect the uniqueness.

Searching for learning, growth and impact

Hence, well for me, the constant need is for exploring all the different streams of new understanding, these become essential, these become learning milestones and new building blocks.

These can also play mind games on you though, as they can  confuse me at times, on what is offering those real engines of growth, as I adjust to these new learning’s.

Clients have a growing need for ‘leading edge’ not old past ‘best practices’, that are often never really applicable to their circumstances anyway. I much prefer to focus on ’emerging’ practices’ as these tend to be more forward looking.

The growth comes from the need to reflect where the potential challenge is for the client but it also has to be more future-orientated enough to move challenges through to decent lasting solutions. Looking at solutions that are often not working for many others is not the answer.

This changing and building a new business model is no walk in the park, especially when you are in such a crowded competitive market space of consulting and advising on something like innovation as it is constantly evolving.

Actually I’ve found that the catalogue of pivots suggested by Eric Ries I must have somehow worked though most of his suggested pivots. It is no fun this pivoting lark! It often hurts when you want to push thinking and concepts that seem to be highly relevant and needed in the market place, pivoting and adjusting as solutions are nearly all unique.

I know I need more validation, more conversations, more observations to keep the engine humming well. Come on all you hidden innovators searching for a resolution to your current problems and barriers within innovation, show yourselves, I really think I can help!

So in moving forward I’ve been actively revamping my work

Today I have ‘settled’ for two business entities both relating around innovation advisory provision.

www.agilityinnovation.com – “the focus is upon bringing out the new forms of innovation competency or capability into clients work”.

www.hocaconsulting.com – a focus upon the Work to be done that is needed for our future growth and well-being to be derived through innovation activities.

My supporting activities are critically important

I complement these by what I discuss under this blog  www.paul4innovating.com  or have been able to get published on leading innovation sites. I want to explore and build the DNA of innovation as part of this need to understand innovation (my way) and offer a more (comprehensive) picture of what is needed for innovation to work well.

I have even gone off and created a dedicated website which is exclusive to my evolving ‘fitness dynamics for innovation’ as a theory I believe allows us to capture and relate to the capabilities and capacities needed to achieve innovation within each organizations unique ways to pursue innovation. This is under www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com  

To sum up

For me, establishing the ‘new’ often means moving beyond often the already ‘known’, it is to experiment with sometimes the untried, so as to learn, too achieve faster and improving results, too evolve. This needs fresh perspectives and dedicated innovation knowledge. I attempt to provide those insights and guidance in the emerging areas of innovation.

The issue is still the classical one of convincing clients to explore, to experiment and apply some of these, as they really need too get out of specific ‘ruts’. I think far too often innovation as they have designed it or managed it, is failing to deliver on its initial promise.  

Risk is the partner to innovation so I’d argue (as you would expect) that you need to push the existing boundaries a little more.

Yes, I’m aiming for transformational in results, from my own learning to relate into clients’ challenges and problems, yet I’ve often reminded this evolving practice of innovation is equally applying more and more to my own innovation design.

Innovation is an uncomfortable place to be yet it is exciting as it evolves and keeps pushing us towards the future.

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The post Finding our true purpose first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

It is about the power of design and interaction to make something new happen fast.

Tackling messy problems

“A pressing question for more established economies… is how to foster more entrepreneurship and innovation despite greater stability and predictability.

One method that companies and individuals are adopting is design thinking—the approach of scaling or “group-sizing” the way that solo designers have always worked to enable to cross-functional teams tackle messy problems that don’t fit neatly into any one person’s job description or academic discipline.

Design thinking is one way to simulate some of the extremely dynamic conditions of an emerging economy and foster entrepreneurship in the US.

Forcing direct contact with users

The idea is to put teams in situations where they are forced to synthesize meaningful opportunities out of a lot of highly subjective data about the world and the needs of end users.

At the Stanford d.school, for example, classes are all project-based, and require students to have direct contact with users to gain empathy and test ideas, including the use of ethnographic research to quickly gain insight into unfamiliar environments, communities, and systems.

Imposed constrained timelines

The projects also force students to operate under highly constrained timelines. This can effectively replicate the whirlwind conditions that entrepreneurs in emerging markets experience – consumer needs and the whole ecosystem are changing so rapidly that they have to adopt an iterative approach to nearly everything.

Cultivating skills in quickly assessing complex situations with fresh eyes – and swiftly getting prototypes out into the world to test ideas concretely are what allow design thinkers to conquer uncertainty and create concrete opportunities from open-ended project mandates.

A wonderful example of  taking a ‘raw’ idea into a fast prototype

Two graduate students taking a d.school course this past spring used design thinking to go from idea to revenue-generating product in just 6 weeks. That product is Pulse, which quickly shot up the iPad app charts to become the number one selling app. Pulse is a newsreader that allows users to rapidly toggle between multiple sources and articles.

Once they had the original seed of the idea from conducting user research, the Pulse founders sat in a café and tested a low-resolution version of their product with potential users. They quickly iterated in response to feedback, coding new aspects of the software in the time it took to drink a latte.

Unconcerned with whether the next version was 100% ready or “right,” their bias was to learn from low-res prototypes as quickly as they could.
By using design thinking to collaborate and innovate, these two students were able to upend what seemed like an established market for digital newsreaders and compete with major incumbent players like the New York Times.

Skills in design thinking are a foundation for finding hidden patterns and making something real and actionable emerge from an uncertain environment.”

My comment: this is such a great illustration of the power of design interacting with potential users, so as to discover if the idea firstly ‘gels, meets a need and can be worked on really fast in prototypes to deliver on that.

The post Placing Design into the Innovation Equation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.