digital technologies and innovation - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

The chance to think differently about Ecosystems for Innovation

Thinking about ecosystems certainly allows us to go out of our normal scope of invention, innovation and being creative.

The ability to tackle those larger societal problems within an ecosystem, or combine unique resources to overcome a complex challenge you are incapable of solving alone, does have greater potential in a collaborative adaptive system.

Ecosystem co-operations can allow you to align with others, totally outside your existing relationships, so you can enter new markets, explore new concepts and design, that would have been impossible as an individual organization.

Applying ecosystem thinking offers you the collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional channels of delivery, or restricted to only utilizing your existing infrastructure. It allows you to search and build on others specialization that “greater” innovation.

We are all making greater connections within ourselves, as we find and connect, not just into our own “tribes” that all the different social platforms are providing, so as to establish our own personal identity. Crowdsourcing is another example that is offering huge potential to exploit new frontiers, as it can encourage us to forge, and connect, so as to serve and grow whole new communities from ‘simple’ beginning, building on real-time knowledge, collaborations and resolving challenges and problems we know are “out there” but we, alone, did not have the means to solve.

The future of collaborations can increasingly share previously idle or under-utilized assets, it can extend the life, it can extract that ideal knowledge, often locked in one organization. We are seeing the most valuable companies that are emerging today are largely based on sophisticated platform business models where ecosystems are vital to their health and global ambitions (Apple, Amazon, Car Manufacturers are all examples).

Ecosystems built around specific platform designs are the future of innovation that takes designs and solutions into a new realm of opportunity, built on collaborative engagement and common missions. As we learn we adapt, as we share we grow.

But be aware – the challenges are difficult to work through

Continue reading “The chance to think differently about Ecosystems for Innovation”

A really worthwhile report on Innovation not to be missed from Innovation Leader.

There has just been a highly useful benchmarking report released by Innovation Leader with KPMG LLP sponsoring this and providing some of their collective insights into the different aspects of “Benchmarking Innovation Impact 2018″

At present, you can download the report before it might slip behind a paywall at some later stage. I would take advantage while you can. The report provides insights from 270 innovation, R&D and strategy executives and considerable work on structuring the conclusions in highly thoughtful and valuable ways to the reader.

If you are not familiar with Innovation Leader, they were created to be a growing and essential resource for innovation, especially in the bigger organizations. It has a more specific focus on the US scene but much of what it has found is universal in my opinion. It’s editor and Co-Founder Scott Kirsner (editor@innovationleader.com) and his team are building a great point of reference and meeting point for innovators to exchange and learn from each other. Maybe you should join?

Why do I think the report is well worth you investing time to read? The report provides an excellent document that enables good discussions to be drawn from the benchmarking of many organization, to compare with your own organization. The report is laid out into four parts: 1. Creating Strategic Alignment, 2.Funding Innovation, 3 Delivering Impact and 4 Moving forward.

It offers up great suggestions on tactics, relationships and obstacles you can face in any sort of innovation program, be it an early forming one or at a more mature stage. It can allow you to communicate and suggest the needs for a new innovation approach where you need others involved but they would expect to see a validation. This report helps in all these and much more.

I am going to just focus on three parts that really caught my eye Continue reading “A really worthwhile report on Innovation not to be missed from Innovation Leader.”

The Impact Needed From Innovation

The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

There is a lot changing in and around innovation, are we accounting for it as much as we should?

The shifts taking place around innovation are been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. How it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs.

It is forcing us to reconstruct our innovative thinking, so as to gain from all this transformation occurring all around us.

Continue reading “The Impact Needed From Innovation”

The Arrival and Potential of Knowledge Graphs into Our World

Making connections through Knowledge Graphs — https://www.ontotext.com/products/ontotext-platform/

Knowledge Graphs have a real potential to become highly valuable, topical and relevant. If only we can get them prised out of the engineer, data scientists, or software experts hands.

We simply should so we can get this concept fully out into the real world, that of applying as solutions to real client problems, it would really help. I get tired of hearing about “use cases”, where concepts like KG often get caught up in, that never-ending validation.

Is this validation simply because it does not work, it is too much hard work delivering the promise within the concept? Or the approach has too much complexity around it and needs massive resources to undertake?

KG needs a real resource momentum and a determination to break through uncertainty. Its huge value should drive it, and caution should be modified and lets go out and validate it, in the real world.

If any of these “constraints” are the case, then we do need to “hack this” differently, as Knowledge Graphs has what I see an incredible potential, as an application solution that should be deemed as far too important to keep under wraps. We need to instill a sense of urgency into this. Why, well read on. Continue reading “The Arrival and Potential of Knowledge Graphs into Our World”

Learning a new innovation language

We all in the middle of a re-orientation of our ways to undertake innovation as a process and in its design.

The past belief was that a product was your island and pathway to secured profits, today this alone no longer works. We are learning to connect in completely different ways.

We are learning how to interact with a connected system as products move into products services, and digital, all connected and combined.

It is how we design and explores “smart” products and for this we are reliant on others, having a growing dependency on external parties. We are building our innovation in new collaborations and diverse networks of expertise and understanding.

The emergence of platforms and ecosystems within our connected product design are increasingly taking a central role.

So are you learning a new innovation language? Continue reading “Learning a new innovation language”

So Where Is Innovation Heading?

I have written a fair amount about the new innovation era, offering a view on its future design.

One that is jumping to a fresh cycle of innovative design

We are in the middle of it, some of you may not have noticed its impact and change but it is significant on the understanding of innovation, in it’s future design.

Often this era of change is not as well-recognized or being faced up to, as you would expect.

Many companies are still in denial or not wanting to address the significant legacy and change required.

Innovation has gone from being islands of knowledge, developing new products and services exclusive to that one company, then quickly copied by the competitors, into something radically different.

We are moving into innovation activities that are built more on collaborative and co-creation approaches, where cooperation and exchanges are more built around platforms and formed in ecosystems.These ecosystems gather around a concept or transformation that requires this collective approach and require a more radical design and become very unique in the end result .To achieve this innovation has gone digital, pure and simple. Continue reading “So Where Is Innovation Heading?”

There are Knowns and Unknowns in Innovation: Let’s Manage Them Differently

This quote is from the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Henry Rumsfeld, who mentioned: “unknown unknowns” (Rumsfeld, 2002).

Since then, people have started using quadrants of knowledge, i.e., known known, known unknown, unknown known, and unknown unknown, to understand and explain the nature of risk but also of leading to an opportunity.

For innovators so much of innovation is hard to detect, it needs discovery and working through these quadrants of knowledge as well. We need to treat ideas the same on how anything needs assessing but it needs to pass through a different thinking about knowledge understanding, as there are ‘known knowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ and we need to prepare for both within our innovation activities.

Our pursuit in life is often the same as our innovation efforts, it is in the search for discovery. Often it happens, that we already feel better equipped for exploring and observing by just getting out of our usual everyday working environment.

Continue reading “There are Knowns and Unknowns in Innovation: Let’s Manage Them Differently”

The new ROI for digital innovation

Innovation has had a bigger brother moving into the house next door; Digital Technology and between them, they have been busily knocking the walls down, to share the future going forward. The two have become interlinked, you seem to always need the one to respond to the other. Maybe it is a “digital – innovation twin” that shapes the physical world with digital understanding- think about the current Industrial Digital Twins for IIoT solutions.

Seriously, have you not noticed the more we work in the innovation space, digital and technology have become inseparable and part of any innovation solution. The innovation funds are increasingly being switched to digital or technology solutions and the output of the discoveries from this digital technology need innovation to then be applied. A virtuous loop.

Managing in this shift has become more intense and committing.

The reliance on deeper insights, more data, greater communications is changing the way we undertake innovation. Speed, scale, and scope are greater within the mix than ever before. We are testing uncertainty constantly, validating a part, pivoting more, experimenting and prototyping to work through this deciphering. Data specific, technology-driven, innovation invigorating.

Organizations are spotting opportunities faster than ever. We are cutting across borders, teaming up with start-up’s, past competitors to seize these opportunities. Continue reading “The new ROI for digital innovation”

A new paradigm of focusing on ingenuity lies in work to be done

Much of what we read about artificial intelligence, deep learning and robots can present fear of a new paradigm that our jobs are simply going, or vanish fairly soon, so we should find ways to release our human ingenuity.

Technology, machines and information solutions will take over in this new world of accelerating technology with the concern of “so then, what do we do?

Well, I believe we have a real chance to, at last, celebrate. Yes celebrate, we can finally be liberated! Ever since the industrial revolution, we have been caught up in the productivity and efficiency trap, in the monotony of repeating work.

Today we are on the cusp of changing that. Can you imagine all those boring, repetitive jobs we are faced with today can be simply handed over to machine intelligence, just happy to do the task at hand?

Surely, if we manage this correctly it can release us up, it can enable our ingenuity to thrive and the answer lies in the work to be done Continue reading “A new paradigm of focusing on ingenuity lies in work to be done”

A New Integrated Innovation Engagement System

I have written extensively, certainly over the past eighteen months, about our need to take innovation into a new era, designed for today and tomorrow’s “fit for purpose”. Below you will see my view of how I see this sketched out, as my suggested concept outline. Does it make sense?

We 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.

I wrote a piece “Jumping to a fresh cycle of innovation design” that stated much of what I saw as any design intent.

” We need to increasingly rely on problem-solving techniques that we generate through greater automated discovery and inquiry, those that emerge from analysis and data mining. So, we seek out greater applied science knowledge we will use it to support and develop practical applications based on technology and innovation. Utilitarian in its principles, seeking real-world use and implementation through a more creative, collaborative environment, leading to more discoveries that distinctly ‘blend’ the lab application with the customer discovery of unmet need. Through a blend of pattern recognition, predictive analytics and exploring cognitive computing we can change much with innovation”

“We have been steadily learning to adapt what we knew inside an organization with what we should increasingly listen to outside it. There has been an increasing emphasis on linking concepts in new and novel products and services, increasingly closer to these customer needs and desires.

We need to consider how big data and analytics, technology and a far more creative thinking needs to be applied collectively but in greater constellations of partners. We need to get far more comfortable with working in ecosystems, managed in platform designs to work more collaboratively. Continue reading “A New Integrated Innovation Engagement System”