Going beyond the 5 bold steps offered to Reimagine the American Innovation Agenda

May 5, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, innovation battle plan, Innovation strategy, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation


I have been reading a report written by Stephen J Ezell of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) along with a guru of innovation, John Kao, of ILSi on their concerns that something is amiss with the U.S. innovation system.
The report “Five Bold Steps Towards a Reimagined American Innovation Agenda“, written in February 2021, argues for embracing these five bold steps of story, stewardship, strategy, scaling, and system reimagine innovation for the decade ahead.
In all honesty, it is a little underwhelming, not just the bold but simple five steps but the short document of five pages. It assumes a position, and that is dangerous.
Their argument regarding innovation is that Americans have come to see U.S. leadership as a birthright, as a matter of course. In my view, they lost the leadership mantle for innovation years back. I totally agree it should and needs to come back as a bedrock of future growth, prosperity and dramatically altering today’s landscape.

Five Bold Steps suggested for the American Innovation Agenda

May 5, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Innovation strategy, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation


I have been reading a report written by Stephen J Ezell of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) along with a guru of innovation, John Kao, of ILSi on their concerns that something is amiss with the U.S. innovation system.

The report “Five Bold Steps Towards a Reimagined American Innovation Agenda“, written in February 2021, argues for embracing these five bold steps of story, stewardship, strategy, scaling, and system reimagine innovation for the decade ahead.

In all honesty, it is a little underwhelming, not just the bold but simple five steps but the short document of five pages. It assumes a position, and that is dangerous.

Their argument regarding innovation is that Americans have come to see U.S. leadership as a birthright, as a matter of course. In my view, they lost the leadership mantle for innovation years back. I totally agree it should and needs to come back as a bedrock of future growth, prosperity and dramatically altering today’s landscape.

Human-centred innovation in a digital world.

April 19, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Building Innovation Capability, innovation execution delivery, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Today we are facing many current disruptions where we need to react fast and intelligently. There are many situations we are facing that are a race against time. As we continue to respond to Covid-19, technology has the power to reduce the complexity often faced, speed up and contribute to solutions that help resolve pressing issues.

We recognize that equally as important as the technology are the people using the technology. Having people at the centre of designs enables more intelligent, rapid and lasting innovation.  The Digital Twin is where data from the physical and virtual world come together and is increasingly where people and technology come together to resolve many of today’s challenges.

Applying human-centred innovation

Preparing for Digital within your Innovating Disruption

April 7, 2021Posted in4th Industrial Revolution, Designing Innovation, Digital Innovation, Digital Solutions, Disruption

Four years ago, I downloaded an article that I keep coming back to. It was called “Managing Disruptive Change Be Ready for What Is Coming”, written by Estevao Seccatto Rocha. At the time, Estevao worked for KPMG in São Paulo as a transformation and turnaround advisor. Today according to Estaveo’s LinkedIn, he works for Stone Partners, still in São Paulo.

I think he wrote this article while studying at RWTH Aachen University, and he references Professor Malte Brettel, the head of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Group.

I kept coming back to this and decided to try and pick out some of the points here in this post. The work is either Estavao’s or Professor Brettel. I am trying to translate it in a way that works for me, and hopefully, you as a reader of this posting site to bring disruption far more central in your thinking.

Digital is one of the most disruptive forces we have to face. This is why I decided to summarize some points, remind myself and appreciate what we really mean when we advocate and encourage going disruptive.

Understanding the basics of disruption

Disruption is constant; it simply disturbs all we do. If we ignore it, we lose what we have; if we determine how to meet disruption, we have a chance to survive and even come out better, certainly differently.

Digitalizing has a positive impact on our innovation activities in IIoT

February 4, 2021Posted in4th Industrial Revolution, Achieving Outcomes, Designing Innovation, Digital Innovation, Digital Solutions, New Innovation Era
Image David Reyero

Digitalizing has a positive impact on our innovation activities, it opens up new exciting possibilities. The first question of what, how and why are we doing this, we can start by looking at the data to begin to see there are potential ways to change something existing or improve on our idea or concept. As we gain insights then we can apply that innovative thinking with a greater technology application understanding.

We then begin to make the changes within the process, be those incremental, radical or even revolutionary to change the processes operating today.

We have distinctive ways to treat data and digitalization that leads to distinct new value points for innovation.

Success in any digital transformation is a journey of discovery

January 24, 2021Posted inAchieving Outcomes, Digital Innovation, Digital Solutions, Ecosystems

How do we find answers to knowing what measures give us for success in any digital transformation? Are today’s measures relevant to tomorrow, are they still based on our legacy system of measurement, when a business was operating in a stable, predictable environment?

Yes, we can measure success in our progress but these are in both multiple and equally personal ways.

Each organization is unique. Never has this become crystal clear that when you face your own transformation journey. You can learn from others, you can adapt but you need to clearly understand where you are in your own evolution and capacity to undertake change as it is simply your journey.

This digitally transforming has not been as well recognized as it is today when we attempt to make any transition, from the old ways of doing business to the new one; that is highly connected, collaborative and based on our growing reliance on technology and ‘everything’ digital. It can become life-changing, changes the scope and opportunities within the business and it is highly individual.

A new cycle of innovation design

December 28, 2018Posted in4th Industrial Revolution, Digital Innovation, Innovation DNA, New Innovation Era

We really do have this compelling need to have a new cycle of innovation design.

A more integrated solution that takes our understanding of innovation and how to manage it, into the realms of ecosystems and platforms in its design and thinking.

To achieve this we need to recognize a significant change we must undertake in our present innovation management. We need to open up our thinking to embrace a new era of digital innovation

Does it make sense? You judge as you read.

Extract what makes sense for you, explore where there are thoughts that can be applied to your current innovation set up. Just remember a new innovative design needs to be radical, totally connected, and resource-rich.

The Rise of Platform Business Models

November 18, 2018Posted inInnovation DNA, Innovation Knowledge Understanding, New Innovation Era

The rise of platform business modelsWe have seen an incredible rise in digital platforms that have become part of our everyday lives.

Whether it’s Apple, Google, eBay, Amazon, Android, Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba, Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal or one of the many others, they all have become some of the hottest companies that consumers value.

These companies have built out their businesses on powerful platforms that drill down on what we value and allow us to connect. They (B2C) have connected the consumer like never before. Now we see the surge of the industrial platforms (B2B), the IIoT world arriving in force.

My 5 S for future Innovation: Smart, Stacks, Scale, Storage, and Software

September 14, 2018Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Molecules, Shifting dynamics in innovation

Technology is radically altering our need for innovation. We see increasingly innovation is feeding off the “digital response rate”

Connecting technology and innovation is altering how we should re-access organizations ability to build out. We are in the middle of a technological-led industrial revolution It is becoming highly dynamic.

****I decided to revise this post as I originally got caught up in “conflation”. Two ideas merging as one and it simply lost the insights of each, simply attempting to fuse different thoughts into one entity. It honestly did not work and I struggled with what to do.  By splitting them up they become separate reads and more digestible and hopefully of better value. I have to admit this is not the first time I get caught in this  (or I expect the last!) and I apologize to you, as the reader *****

So here I outline a 5S framework to trigger some opening thoughts on breaking down technology design complexity. The other post, now over on my other site, deals with the growth of “apps” in IIoT “Great apps will deliver the future business value in IIoT” and is predicting a changing future based on some recent takeover announcements.

So getting that embarrassment behind me lets go back to the 5S idea.

Arriving at a designed outcome is getting complicated. Developers get caught up in the details, rightly so, to deliver on a connected world but you must always ask the “what for?”

The more I was thinking I was trying to cut through all this “unnecessary fog” as a non-techie so I started to build my 5S idea. Let me share it

Optimism in Innovation, Thinking About Risk Differently

September 6, 2018Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Leading innovation, Polymers, Shifting dynamics in innovation1 Comment

For me, there is never enough talked about innovation risk. Innovation is held back so often because the quantification of it’s risk cannot fit into an organization’s current assessment and measurements of risk.

Innovation is often too intangible, full of unknowns as the very nature of anything new and different. Innovation risk leaves many executives very uncomfortable.

Organizations get uncomfortable when the words “radical” “intangible”, “unknowns” and other words like these when they form part of the conversation. It often starts to induce that “risk twitch” where that careful management for short-term performance might become threatened, or the manager feels any decision is ‘going out on a limb’ and possibly career threatening.

That growing uncomfortable feeling that innovation places their bonus at “risk” so they like to ring-fence innovation as much as possible. Now some of that ring-fencing is fine, you contain a risk to keep it manageable but most innovation does not constitute organization risk, yet it gets caught up in that risky fear that innovation seems to induce. Actually, if we were managing innovation at the core, our risk management for it would be very heightened and managed differently, but how many of our companies’ have innovation as their core?

So I always welcome discussion on risk and innovation. The more we talk about it the better for what is coming towards us.