I am presently reading an early release draft of a book written by Mike Docherty of Venture2, on innovation, and I would certainly recommend the read when it comes out.

The book Collective Disruption will be available as of February 2015.

The book as Mike wrote to me, is aimed at corporate leaders, both in large and small companies, charged with new sources of transformative growth and makes the case for co-creating new businesses with entrepreneurial partners.

It builds on a foundation of open innovation, but is focused specifically on new business creation (vs core business support).

I know that Mike is passionate about the intersection of corporate innovation and entrepreneurship for co-creating new businesses and business models. As CEO of Venture2, a consulting and new ventures firm, he works with leading brand companies and start-ups to commercialize breakthrough new products and businesses.

Mike has experienced disruption many times.

This crisis is personal one to Mike, as he has seen and been involved in numerous points of innovation disruption.

As he states in his book: “I have been on both sides of the conference table as it (disruption) has unfolded. In my work inside and outside of big brands, I have come to know, respect, and work alongside the managers who have to make innovation work for both the company and the customer. Theirs is a serious challenge. I know because it has been and continues to be, mine as well”.

Mike was part of the turnaround team at Sunbeam Corporation some years back, who combined became really creative thinkers and they become well respected in pioneering many of the aspects of open innovation. They achieved an impressive delivery of 150 product launches in the second year by leveraging partnerships and the internal creative forces, going from the previous 10 new products in the first year.

This experience took Mike into a new direction and helped form his business evolution in his work with his venture business and boutique consulting practice, Venture2.

In his book, he clearly stated open innovation is not enough.

The core of his book is firstly arguing the old definitions of innovation are dead (this I totally agree with) and as he states new ideas are coming from everywhere, emerging competitors are disrupting established companies every day. Companies need to increasingly focus on new business creation for step-change growth.

Yet as he states, and I totally agree, this is a scary place to go for big companies, as this is transformative innovation and most are simply not good at undertaking this.

His book sets out to address that ‘soft spot’ in the big-company skill set. It is all about understanding, learning ad playing the collaborative disruption game. This he believes comes through a collective disruption model where you engage more with the entrepreneurial ecosystem to create market-disrupting businesses.

That means collaborating earlier and more deeply with partners and that’s the roadmap he’s trying to share with this book.

Mike lays out some practical approaches in each phase of corporate/start-up co-creation: discovery, definition, incubation and integration. And he supports his case with interviews and examples from some leading exponents of innovation

He offers a book for the insider of big organizations but also for the partners found outside, as well as for the many entrepreneurs that will find they are dealing with big organizations.

They need faster scale up and preparation for a successful exit, early engagement of the bigger company into the new value proposition, either threatening them or enabling them to enter into a new area of their innovation.

So this is a book that goes beyond transactional approaches and focuses on the need for relationship-based networks and a solid understanding of the innovating ecosystem, one of collective disruption for future growth.

So we are at the end of the old era of innovation?

That era did have self-imposed walls and traditional (old-fashioned) design. Today we need to build our ecosystems, seeking out partners and entrepreneurs alike. This does call for being far more disruptive, as Mike suggests in his book “Collective Disruption,” we need a new order, where you can navigate, always with some risk, into new growth opportunities by constantly learning and collaborating with others.

I would argue once you become familiar with managing in disruptive times, in working with partners all dependent on each other, in mutual and ever-increasingly ecosystems, you learn to look well beyond your old self-imposed borders.

You will suddenly see this new innovation expanse where you can begin to roam to explore increased innovation opportunities. You recognize that migration of constantly moving and change becomes essential, a necessity that gives you a greater chance to not just survive but feed off of those new innovation opportunities.

A place Mike suggests: “where you’re living the unique challenge of creating transformational and step-change growth”.

Finding that set of collaborating capabilities and competencies that can be successfully unleashed as our new innovation activities, ones that can be radically different- they create real growth. One’s where agility, lean and risk-taking become more of the norm, they are dynamic, ever evolving and changing, and so those innovation activities are richer in eventual outcomes.

A place to keep you healthy and sustaining and growing by traversing constantly across a very different, ever-changing (and challenging) landscape, than the one you left behind that also needs renewal.

For some reason reading this book triggered thoughts of the mass migration of Wildebeests in East Africa

As I was reading through the opening chapters, for some reason, it triggered a thought of the mass migration of the Wildebeest in East Africa. The old-established practices of innovation are exhausted; we do need to change our approaches and mindsets to find those new ‘feeding grounds’ of innovation.

Why this book triggered this is that disruption is becoming part of our business life, or it should be. To stay alive today or to remain healthy, you have to leverage and extract from the whole innovation ecosystem to create the different conditions; equally, you need to take increasing risks to transform and improve your chances of survival.

Watching the frantic herds of the wildebeest migration crossing the Mara River can be very spectacular; there are often scenes of great panic and confusion as the massive predator crocodiles in the river wait to pounce. Utter disruption yet necessary to survive and prosper for all involved.

For business, are these predators the consultants advising a business with often conflicting messages adding even more panic, or the entrepreneurs, who seize the ‘feeding opportunity’ to fatten up by creating the frenzy that goes with this crossing point?

When you make a significant move away from your established ‘feeding grounds’ you suddenly have such an expanse of new opportunity but it is not without risk, the risk of crossing over, recognizing the other side is essential to be the place for new, real growth.

I could not get this thinking out of my head of migrations as I continued into the book. Strange isn’t it on what sometimes does get triggered as connections as you read a book?

Are we about to witness this mass movement to find new innovation opportunities?

Mike’s book Collective Disruption certainly nudges us along, it does lay out a case for change, a contributing part of the processes and understandings that needs to ‘stir the forces’ we do need to bring about for real innovation change.

Mike, in his book, partly catches that sense of the wind of change, that is blowing and needed for innovation. Mike offers some highly practical solutions and thinking, based on his depth of knowledge and experiences within his work of approaching your need to change, with an imaginative framework to help you navigate the terrain, so as to make the necessary transition for yourself and your organization.

Innovation, certainly is for me, in real need of changing; the global forces and those competing are making the mass within our companies restless for change.

We are on the road to migration; finding new solutions built far more based on collective and disruptive approaches, that will offer far better innovation outcomes for sustaining our futures and opportunities for achieving better levels of growth we need.

The post Where are the new feeding grounds of innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There is still a continued reluctance for exploring new radical innovation opportunities and although organizations ‘talk’ growth, they continue to struggle in achieving it through new innovation.

The incremental commitments to innovation still rule the day to move growth along. Until new sustaining confidence returns to our economies, risk mitigation dominates as markets continue to be more volatile and unreliable in predictive data and executive sentiment remains cautious.

Our organizations are looking for a higher certainty of return and seek sometimes endless validation and justification before they commit, even to small incremental changes. It is no wonder incremental innovation dominates in our innovation decisions; it is where reality sits for many. Are we heading off in a bad innovation direction?
Solidification in organizations seems to be moving towards simplification
As this incremental set of attitudes solidifies within organizations, have you noticed a growing trend of recognizing the processes and systems built up are actually more complex and creating ‘drag’ on performance demands? There is a move to greater simplification that strengthens the incremental mindset. We are perhaps ossifying innovation in our organizations if we elect to take this simplification route.

Risk readiness might be taking a bigger ‘back seat’ than we expect. This has significant implications as organizations continue to lose the ability to be ‘growth ready’ to execute on any sudden change of executive direction if market conditions suddenly change. Many are losing the ability to innovate beyond incremental approaches. It might catch them out badly if markets suddenly change and they are faced with a very different set of challenges demanding a more radical set of innovative solutions.

What signals are showing through?
Often we read of the likely demise of innovation but I think it’s ‘nature’ is changing. At the top of our organizations there continues to be this higher dissatisfaction with the value and returns within innovation and this is possibly being addressed in different ways down below in the organization, to compensate and appease.

Risky projects for the majority are not the place to blaze away in their careers; they want the known reward from keeping ‘steady’ the ship and being part of the incremental growth movement, to be seen as good operators working at constantly offsetting any risks, delivering what is wanted to be heard, not the bearer of bad news.

Do you spot this trend within your organization or industry? That growing movement where the ones intent on developing the routines that increasingly are only focused on incremental improvements are in the ascendency? Those driven by pushing hard for operation productivity to the exclusion of a number of traits associated with more radical innovation or potential breakthroughs.

Driving innovation through productivity has a real drumbeat
Are you in that place where there is this constant attention to improving practices continuously, to the exclusion of enquiry and only investing in the capacities that supports the delivery of this drive for greater productivity. A place where organizations are constantly seeking out those best practices, by wanting to eliminate variation, believing to simply copy others gives them the answer.

Do you gain that sense of impatience to evolve and develop in your own unique ways, as you attempt to short cut your own development in this blind copying? All around you feel that growing sense that the movement of six (sic) sigma is resurfacing, tapping into this quest for greater productivity and the ‘richer’ innovation potential seems to diminish?

When you have this incremental mindset then you become dedicated to standardization, you focus on real-time performance that can be measured and judged, you promote a more careful evaluation of innovation practices, striving to eliminate variances, you become relentless to reduce the unpredictable activities.

It becomes the prevailing organization mindset, the radical innovator drifts quietly away, disillusioned with where it is all going. Left to the gods of others making market change.

Organizations are more comfortable with improving productivity
There has been so many years of cost cutting, the consultant is also repacking it’s services from the present col-de-sac, largely played out, by housing organizations needs under the appeal for this quest for simplification.

Recently I was reading a report from www.sourceforconsulting.com that simplification is the next step in the evolution of productivity. The argument goes productivity is linked to growth and as our organizations are still very determined to do more with less, rather than simply less, the rise of rationalization grows and the demands to tap into this gathers pace.

Mitigating risk is the easier option
It is the attraction of combining this prevailing risk mitigation mindset with the idea of standardising and simplifying, validating through increased data verification and mining, striving for benchmarking and searching for best practices seems to go nicely with placing the innovation bets on increasing the incremental activities, all to the detriment of seeking out more radical innovation. Less risk, steady growth, fits with the short-termism of the board. Reward and remuneration become increasingly geared to this.

The vicious circle of meeting the board’s demands for immediate return simply tightens the noose and the longer-term building of capabilities for new innovation continue to slide, pushed off to yet another day, somewhere in the future. Does that really matter to the current board executive or his external board? Managing today’s volatility and uncertainties means risk mitigation is dominating. Let tomorrow be managed by someone else.

Are the majority of our organizations becoming the great sustainers?
A recent article by Gary Pisano on the HBR blogs was arguing for the defence of routine innovation. He suggests the vast majority of profit from innovation comes from the stream of routine, or sustaining, innovations that accumulate for years.

He mentions Intel as a great sustainer, with its value proposition of higher-performing, higher-margin microprocessor chips has not changed. Growth is slowing but Pisano’s argument is Intel has generated cumulative operating income before depreciation of $287.4 billion. That is a lot of cash generation to keep investing or distributing back to the shareholders.

Equally, Pisano argues Microsoft that started as a great disruptor but for much of the recent years, it has been following a sustaining path, defending its position. Of course it has perhaps missed out with this prevailing ‘mindset’ on some really key growth areas, yet it has earned $325 billion over three decades.

The article is equally suggesting Apple is a sustaining, more incremental organization today. It has generated $150 billion is cash flow since 2011. The emphasis is perhaps less on the next big disruption and more on aesthetically pleasing designs and versatility in their devices.

Are we leveraging to existing strengths and not grasping new opportunities?

Gary Pisano’s point is as an organization becomes well established, its innovation strategy needs to understand how to leverage distinctive existing strengths to generate and capture ongoing value.
It is about recognizing and organizing innovation around the repertoire of existing strengths to extend increasing the value from innovation, to play to your existing strengths. Or is it?

Are we not putting off our future by not investing in the future? How can we strike a balance on this and what should that allocation of resources be like? What needs to be brought in to add to the existing repertoire of skills?

Is the innovation message today becoming more deliberate in its design?
I wonder what is around the corner. So is the message today the one of trading off the risks of radical, disruptive innovation for the more incremental, sustaining innovation? Is this the period of evolutionary innovation, less revolutionary?

Of course, we all know that oblivion is potential ‘just around the corner’ as there are many competitive forces at work looking to disrupt.

For me, it does seem far too many of our organizations today might be far too focused on protecting and defending their existing positions, they are failing to extend beyond a core. Are our organizations working on incremental innovation to the detriment of more radical and riskier innovation? Is that unhealthy or simply prudent?

I fear the innovation balance seems not right.
Of course the strategic view of sustaining innovation while you explore and experiment the next big potential wave is the best approach but I tend to feel the dominating mindset of risk mitigation today, is driving many to simply just become incremental innovators only and that has a growing risk attached to it.

You continue to lose the skills, the understanding that more radical innovation is very different in time, in placing your resource allocation and building all the different skills and experience you need and these need to be consistently worked at. They can’t simply be turned off and on when changing market conditions are suddenly confronting you.

If incremental innovation dominates we lose the future
If one type of innovation prevails and begins to dominate, the risks of not providing for a healthy future increase, and we are ossifying our innovation.

We begin to lose our abilities to be responsive and flexible. We lose our agility to respond to changes in our markets.

What is always needed is to strike a good balance in our innovation portfolio, between the immediate and the future.

We need to not forget that we all must manage in all three innovation horizons to have a (greater) chance of achieving a really sustaining future.

The post Are our organizations ossifying their innovation or simply have no clue? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When something suddenly ‘disrupts’ this, it triggers a set of mixed emotions that shakes you and stirs up different feelings that take some time to re-order in your mind.

I try to seek understanding and then simply have to let go, even when they so often stare me in the face. Sometimes you still don’t want to finally let go until you are ‘hit’ by such a disruptive event.

The recent Kodak moment is one of those

One of those has happened to me with the filing of bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 for Kodak.

For so many people those “Kodak moments” make up such incredibly important parts of our lives. Stuffed under the beds, in boxes, in cupboards are those images of youth, family, important occasions and holidays that sit happily in the back of our minds waiting to be prompted by those images captured with the help of Kodak.

Hindsight and that regrettable smugness, that seems to always emerge.
I’ve been reading in the past week or two about all that might have gone wrong at Kodak and you feel that certain smugness that hindsight often gives us. I wish all that I read would make it so simple.

I’d argue you should ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’ before you rush to offer reasons and cause. In Kodak’s case such a fundamentally different technology was unleashed, the ability to see what was coming towards you at such a rush and from so many sides was never easy and I’m sure they tried.

Disruptive technology can be subtle as well as prominent in its impact. Confronting something so enormous in a society’s movement to this change would challenge anyone.

Technology, especially digital technology, has been such a whirlwind of ‘creative destruction’ taking Blockbuster, Borders and other film producers that were caught out in this- Ilford Photo in 2004 & Agfa in 2005. All I know is we can expect that many more will be caught in the new technologies ‘destructive’ path.

Process technology is struggling with the rapid changes
Process technology is under enormous threat. Not just Kodak but similar transitions are being managed (or not) by newspapers, book publishers, movie studios, broadcasters, record labels although some of the issues are different it is technology, new technology, that is reaping the destruction.

Yet the core is stronger than ever- capturing moments digitally, storing and using information and pushing entertainment in new ways.
It might be also premature to fully write off Kodak.

It has this protection and from this a certain time and space to restructure and by all accounts, it has a technology portfolio potentially worth billions. To remake itself though, is going to be really tough, I grant you that.

We all have great emotional attachments

I can think of three really important ‘shock and letting go’ moments for me in recent years. Kodak being the latest one, the other two, for me, was Swissair, the icon of everything Swiss and F W Woolworths, or “Woolies” a real icon for the Brits.

Swissair was special for me

Swissair got so caught out after the terrorist attacks in September 2001 as it was in the middle of a massive expansion plan and was suddenly hamstrung with debt and a wrong strategy of expansive exposure.

Bad ideas, poor top management left the airline in an incredible state of providing large sums of cash to their pilots to purchase fuel at foreign airports. It shocked the Swiss, it shook me also as this was the one airline I had real emotional attachment too when it ceased trading in 2002.

Living in Saudi Arabia, then followed by Kenya and travelling to some less secure countries in Africa and the Middle East, Swissair stood out like a beacon. One you could run too every night, come rain, sun or attempted coup attempt that seemed to occur all too frequently, in the 1980’s, whenever I travelled in these regions.

That tail fin seemingly always illuminated to show the national red flag with a white cross (a bold, equilateral cross) in its centre. On board Swissair simply conveyed those Swiss values such as “personal service”, “in-depth quality” and “typical Swiss hospitality” and “reliability and dependability,” offering a safe haven.

Letting go was hard. I’ve never had the same emotional attachment since with its revised Swiss International Air Lines and part of the Lufthansa Group. I let go of a strong emotional attachment.

Good old Woolies.

I grew up in the UK and Woolworth’s was essential in my life. You entered the store confident you would find that something you needed and many things you didn’t but ended up buying. With over 800 stores at its peak, Woolworths was very much a part of everyone’s lives on the High Street.

You got your basic school supplies (pens, paper, ruler), sometimes a bargain item of clothing, basic house-ware but for me, its magic was the ‘mix and match’ sweet counter. Any selection of sweets for the same price and all you had to do was select them and then take them for weighing.

Did I love that, my parents I think less so, although I can often remember their hands ‘snaking’ into my sweet bag pulling out their favourite sweets well enough.

So when Woolworth closed, some real emotional attachment suddenly detached and floated away into the memory.

Kodak is up there in emotions for me.

It simply has played a role in my life, my family’s life throughout most of the 20^th century. Those slides, those prints hold our most treasured possession- our memories. I’ve already lost far to many in my countless moves, rashly thrown away. Digital images just do not seem the same, no feel, that tactile effect.

Digital certainly triggers reactions but not that moment but they are certainly easier to store. But for me nothing evokes more emotion than a faded, slightly out of focus picture that you are forced to focus upon to make out the details.

Would I have preferred these on digital, perhaps, but having that print in your hands, passed down from parent to parent or from a friend who took the picture, not to post it on Facebook for all to see but to hand it to you, so you could both relive that moment and what it meant, a tangible connection- a real provenance.

Emotional attachment is important for brands to build into our lives.

As we work through innovation we often forget the emotional aspects of people, emotions and relationships. Today Apple stands out in achieving that.

One real trigger that Kodak prompted in me was revisiting the ten commandments of emotional branding suggested by Marc Gobé as they need to be revisited when we go about our innovating business for business, products and services.

Ten commandments of Emotional Branding

1. From consumers to people
   Consumers buy, people live
2. From product to experience
   Products fulfil needs, experiences fulfil desires
3. From honesty to the truth
   Honesty is expected. Trust is engaging and intimate. It needs to be earned
4. From quality to preference
   Quality is the right price a given today. Preference creates the sale
5. From notoriety to aspiration
   Being known doesn’t mean that you are also loved
6. From identity to personality
   Identity is recognition. Personality is about character and charisma
7. From function to feel
   The functionality of a product is about practical or superficial qualities only. Sensorial design is about experiences
8. From ubiquity to the presence
   Ubiquity is seen. Emotional presence is felt
9. From communication to dialogue
   Communication is telling. Dialogue is sharing
10. From services to relationship
    Service is selling. Relationship is acknowledgement

Based on the book Emotional Branding, written by Marc Gobé and updated recently as “Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People” as fully revised paperback edition.

This is a terrific list about brand feeling which can be defined as peoples emotional reactions and responses to brands. These brand feelings also relate to the social currency induced by the brand which can be positive, negative, intense or mild. Identification is still so important for lasting relationships between company and customer.

So why do big companies suddenly fail?

The reason is that while big companies are often good at fostering “sustaining” innovations – ones that enhance their positions in established markets – they are generally hopeless at dealing with innovations that completely disrupt their market.

They fall into that trap of consistently looking at solutions through their lens of the market; they want to always put existing assets into the new business.

They fall victim to their history and this baggage becomes an increasing liability that gives huge drag at the very time you need to be bold. This is their emotional attachment.

Schumpeters “Creative Destruction”

When you have something iconic, full of emotional investment, something that defines an industry, standard or practice, it simply is not easy to let it go. Companies can in theory live forever but today if you are not willing to cannibalize yourself, it does seem others will do it to you.

Applying Innovation today is often like being in a fight to the death or struggling on a path to survival, it is a constant march searching and sensing for possible change points, investing in the creation of new and often untested ideas, to learn and discover and to shed those that can’t match this new ‘creative destruction’ going on around us. Innovation is absolutely essential so we have to embrace it, like it or not in what it disrupts that is all around us.

Kodak was well aware of the future; it failed to confront it with a strategy that needed to be more ‘transformational’, ‘revolutionary’ or ‘evolutionary’. Sustaining innovation must be either ‘discontinuous’ or ‘continuous’.

Today it is expected, big companies simply disappear if they don’t do great things, executed well and on time to stop destruction hammering at their door but please don’t tell me this ‘letting go’ of what we have is easy or simple, it is not. It is full of emotion.

The reconstructive rides we face.

Sustaining does not come from incremental innovation; it comes from embracing amazing things and letting go often faster than you like in what you have built up in legacy and getting that right is really, really hard. No wonder there are more and more successes coming from startups with no emotional baggage, they don’t need to deal with these harder emotional issues.

Emotional attachment, we all have them and to simply let go is not so easy and this should not just happen when we are facing those disruptive moments, we need to equip ourselves a lot earlier.

The issue is seeing the challenge early and plunging into it headfirst, confronting it, taking the wild ride that comes from such destructive forces and hoping you come out the other side better.

I think there are going to be more and more of these ‘destructive to reconstructive rides’ I feel in our present challenging times. Sometimes we simply have to let go, hard as it is, it simply becomes in our past and we need to look towards the future..

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