As new digital technology dawns for innovation

New Technology Dawns 1Digital Technology is significantly challenging for organizations to re-think and re-equip due to the emergence of big data, smart mobile connectivity, social media, cloud, analytics and the growing commercialization.

These are all driving external technology change, all clearly pointing towards a significant disruption of the existing ways we conduct business internally. So we need to ask “how are we going to take advantage of the potential business transformation?

The issue is how to capitalize and create the value from all this change for innovation and performance enhancement?

***This is the first of a seven-part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These will be published daily over the next week. The intent at this stage is more about raising our thinking on what might need changing or at least re-orientation within our innovation management approaches.***

The proliferation of transitory moments are ahead

Digital DiscoveryRecently I was reading that up to now, each digital technology change was a separate era but today we are facing something seemingly different, a collision, a proliferation of transitory moments.

A whole mash-up of disparate technologies and systems, that seem to be heading for such an explosion of change, a post-digital transformation.

This merging of cloud, big data, social, and the internet of things is becoming the new system of discovery according to some. Others call it the crossroads where the post-digital reality of bringing together the cloud, mobile, interconnected devices, data analytics and embedded intelligence are pointing us to a hyper-connected world, less tomorrow, more speeding towards us in the here and now.

It is through people and things (IoT) we will get new innovation potential

Smart, Connected Products Will Radically Alter the Value Proposition.

Smart connected prize 1Marketing has worked for years in framing the marketing mix on the classic 4P theory of product, price, promotion and place for finding its value proposition, today it is becoming smart by being connected.

Then this was extended for the need to bring in the service aspect, by becoming the 7P,  adding physical evidence, people and process onto the original 4p.

Then this was updated in the nineties to become people, process, programs and performance.

Great as this may be in its  ‘progressive’ evolution these are totally inadequate to ‘serve’ today’s world of smart, connected products. Product design has become hyper, connected and needed to be well-designed. It is more to do with what is embedded or how it is connected and less on the product as the value-generating a proposition.

Getting a deeper understanding of the smart, connected world

The Arrival of the Digital Monsoon for Innovation

tropical monsoon 2 If you ever have lived in the tropics you know of the arrival of the monsoons.

Skies darken, clouds gather, often thunder and lightning combine, the wind picks up and the rain ‘announces’ its arrival in sheer torrents of heavy, drenching, wave-upon-wave of unrelenting force.

It is hard to stand upright or know what to do. Everything around you transforms. Dry, often parched land quickly turns to rivers of water, seeking out everything to shift and move along and eventually going everywhere to transform the landscape.

We are presently being told we are at the beginnings of a digital revolution; it has been likened to a tsunami in its eventual (devastating) effect on our organizations and by inference, the impact it will have on each of our lives.

The transforming tide in digital for innovation.


Digital Discovery 2Can you imagine the CEO sitting opposite the consultant, explaining the organization’s present difficulties to regain growth.

They explain no matter what they are doing through the existing practices and the assorted business approaches they have taken for many years, they still seem to be ‘treading water’ or even losing ground. They are beginning to worry seriously about their future.

The consultant has heard this already so many time before  across many worried organizations. He looks right into the CEO’s eyes and (sort of) snarls back: “You can run but you can’t hide”. This was a famous quote attributed to Joe Louis before one of his boxing fights back in 1946.That might get a CEO’s attention! We are in a digital transformation evolution.