Just trying to stay your own course is tough enough but with all the diversity of views, it must be even more overwhelming for others, those who are asked to take on a role within innovation. Where and who do you turn too must be a real dilemma?

In recent years I have found I need to diversify away from one given ‘voice’ on innovation and channel this out into specialized and more focused areas of innovation activity. At present, I have SIX channels open on innovation advice or advisory service that has made my life partly more complicated but more importantly, able to separate my thinking into these parts, as they deserve a ‘deeper’ dive and/or broader exposure.

I thought I’d outline the six here in this post as the sum of the parts that  contributes to the whole

I have two established businesses, one started in 2000 and one in 2008. They are distinct in what they provide as services. Let me illustrate this by a screen lift of their two separate “main menus”:

HOCA International Consultants

It covers many of the adjacencies on innovation. You do need to find out more of the emerging Work to be done as it is a far more the dynamic place for innovation to happen.The Work-to-be-done is focused on connecting to the emerging dynamic future areas that your Organizational is facing today and then how to work through these so as to respond to the rapidly changing markets and diminishing resources. It’s areas of focus:

With the types of offering in HOCA we are looking at the roots of organizations values, build the interactions and strengthen the connecting parts that build a strong ‘network effect’ in relationships; explore the more emerging practices and seek to build the Enterprise Capabilities that place innovation and knowledge as the ‘beating’ heart of your organization.

Agility Innovation Specialists

Everything we want to do is 100% focused on innovating!  Bringing agility, flexibility, adaptability and learning into the innovation equation. We provide the pathways to your future innovation growth through critical focal points of any necessary value creation.

Agility’s primary role is to support and extend innovation, in thinking and developing the capabilities and capacities, to match the client’s ambition and goals, by providing a real depth of innovation insight and advice.

“Our objectives are to identify promising business opportunities, develop innovation expertise and competencies, create value and grow competitive and profitable businesses 100% focused on our innovative support to you”

Agility Innovation Specialists aim is to offer a real “intensity in innovation” at its core.

Then I have broken down my posting on innovation thinking onto four sites.

I took this decision, not to make my life extra complicated, which it partly does, but to focus specifically on critical areas of innovation focus. Innovation thinking is diverse and I felt there was a place, space and need to separate my thinking to allow it to go deeper or wider.

Paul4innovating

The ‘flagship’ of my innovation posting world is this site you are on:

This I launched into blogs and posts in August 2010 and is nearing 500 posts which have built up an amazing library of innovation views, advice, solutions and exploratory work. Some of these I’m really proud of, others were attempts to shift conversations or simply the outlet for my innovation ‘rants’ or passions.  I ‘house’ my blogging intent here, describe my own innovation journey and provide my collection of insights and thinking.

So this is my ‘core’ blog for “building the DNA of innovation” one that is allowing me to wander far and wide, as I see innovation as a living, evolving area of management, discipline, and knowledge. You have to stay open to change, ready to shape as well as rework what know that is in within our existing work, experiences, and activities. I continue to shape and evolve myself, as innovation management is certainly a “living thing.”

Innovation fitness dynamics

This has been the hardest dedicated site to work with. I have been working away on building a methodology for building innovation capability, capacity, and competencies for a number of years. It seems in permanent beta. This blog is about offering you a pathway towards achieving your own innovation fitness dynamics. The end goal of your journey is simply “the greater fitness you can achieve in innovation capability the more it can equate to a new value creation“.

There is, again a journey story, the nine stages to pass through for building innovation fitness and critically how innovation capital becomes the important area of exploration and exploiting. It currently has about 70 posts in the site related to this building of capability and capacity to innovation, through a designed approach to how you can achieve innovation fitness.

Innovation Ecosystems

This is a collaborative site I share with Jeffrey Phillips from Ovo Innovation. This is actually our fourth substantive collaboration together but this time we decided to turn our thinking into a regular viewpoint as the subject is presently evolving before us. We are entering the world of innovation ecosystems where broader, more complex innovation challenges, through greater collaborations can be achieved.

This site includes our thoughts on what makes up innovation ecosystems and the changes these can offer us in innovation opportunity. What is explored is ecosystems, the delivery mechanisms of platforms along with other collaborative methods and push towards the new need of today, to deliver a seamless total solution that provides customers what they are constantly asking for, to solve their needs and give them greater engagement and experiences.

This thinking is driven by a need for new products and services and experiences, otherwise, we believe customers will continue to turn away from discrete, disconnected products and services, increasingly over time. Shaping and introducing new innovation ecosystems is not easy but it has enormous potential to transform competition and in my view, it is ushering in the new innovation era and providing the principles of this shift taking place.

Guide4innovating

Advocating the practice and understanding of innovation

This is my recently launched site, in March 2017, dedicated to providing and advocating innovation advice to individuals, and innovation teams. The starting point is “Building a strong advocacy practice” and providing a learning platform, dedicated to personal innovation learning journeys.

My worry continues, even with all the insights and advice out there on innovation, that it continues to flounder. Innovation still gets treated often as an add-on, often overridden, to the more established practices within organizations.  Innovation does need a different mindset, metrics, and operational practice to be able to yield its true potential.

I have thought for some time about the advocacy of innovation, turning my intent into purpose and positioning, by becoming a more dedicated source of essential knowledge for innovators as a guide, mentor, and catalyst for accelerating performance. Although it is early days for a dedicated site, it has been a significant part of my innovation practice for years. all I am doing is giving it a more dedicated focus for clients to visit, decide and then engage with me.

Innovation Advocacy needs strong guidance.  As I would like to be positioned as a “go to” trusted authority that can influence, argue, advocate new directions, and provide clear options for change, I can push the ‘edges’ of today’s status quo, perhaps be your required catalyst to trigger ideas or offer different insights.

Many executives engaged in innovation are time-starved. They are constantly reacting to daily events, focusing and fixing short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior. My intent is to help reduce this pressure to constantly advance and stay alerted to changing innovation practices. So in my own limited way, with those that want to engage and explore the ‘richness’ within innovation my intent is to help them in their innovation acceleration purpose.

In summary

So these are my innovation playpens or sandboxes. I also often write and contribute to many other innovation businesses in different media channels, specifically for innovation thought leadership. The combined effect of my work has been where this activity has been consistently voted in the top innovation knowledge providers since 2011, something I am incredibly proud to have achieved

I enjoy the returns this provides, in awareness, in engagements or leading through to different offerings, speaking, advising, in exchanges and deepening the contacts that I have gained in the years since I started in the innovation space, that was 2001/02, when innovation come clearly into focus as my path to pursue when I lived in Singapore. It has taken on a life of its own ever since.

I certainly believe I can contribute to the wider innovation community that we are all part of, to support the innovation activities we all need to undertake. Through my advising, coaching, writing and mentoring on innovation, as well as through my ongoing consulting and advisory work I attempt to offer a broad innovation service. My aim is to stimulate others to gain fresh insights and knowledge from these collaborative exchanges and explorations through innovation. Each engagement continues to equally grow my own understanding constantly.

I hope by having this multiple channels available, does give you a real value to explore and engage more with me, as each channel attempts to provide answers to your innovation needs to seek out advancement and different insights in the practice of innovation management.

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The post Covering Innovation My Way first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have written about the new innovation era in 2017 made up of higher levels of needed collaboration, where platforms, ecosystems and customer experience understanding become increasingly central.

I felt I needed to provide a more dedicated perspective on these in a collaboration with my established sparing partner Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation in our website of Ecosystems4innovators.

We do stand at the cusp of a new innovation era but where do you stand?

We need to push well beyond our existing core of (existing) innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design that recognizes the “core” lies at the edges of discovery.

The tenet of each organization in the past has been in protecting its core.

This is changing as the very core is changing to adapt to more volatile conditions, changing landscapes and more disruption. The core is not so much in what we know or own but in what we can learn from all that surrounds our core and this is increasingly found at the edges and externally.

The edge is our new emerging adaptive core

The new core can only be found at the edge, the customer edge. The customer is critical, they are absolutely essential to any innovation. If their needs are not fully understood, to turn the present fuzziness from not fully understanding their needs and unmet needs into opportunity to grow our business, you are at a real disadvantage today.

We need to really engage and have a real depth of understanding of the customer, their needs, their individual journey, by discovering and engaging with them constantly at all their current touch points and experiences of what they are wanting to do, that is different from today and this comes from new combinations.

We are rapidly appreciating the combination effect of technology, the data exchanges, and the analytics we gain from this, the insights and discoveries. The combination effect is changing the starting point of innovation, it is not beginning in idea generation found inside the building, and it is discovery found outside brought in, to then turn into potentially commercial ideas.

The world of discovery is rapidly opening up through software and technology solutions

There is a host of digital solutions that can bring discovery and insight into our innovation thinking.We have a growing selection of innovation software all looking far more at the “edge” to then bring this into the new core.

For example we can automatically identify trends and technologies that might shape our world, we can scan different corporate environments by applying a more disciplined radar scanning approach, we can capture more inspirations and ideas “on the go” through all our mobile options, scanning, sending and collecting in dedicated ‘idea’ repositories.

We have multiple choices of collaborative platforms, we can quickly mount crowdsourcing campaigns, validate different concepts and prototypes, have corporate idealization platforms, construct road maps that can steer discovery, technology, resources and ideas so as to ‘quickly’ translate these into a portfolio of options to judge and decide.

We can collaborate in ecosystems of mutual understanding, working to a desired end or range of new solutions, we have multiple platforms to leverage and work through. We have data inflows, analytic solutions, and insights, all crowding in on us to deliver sometimes overwhelming choices. The ability to reorganize differently becomes paramount to seizing the new potential that lies at the edges of external discovery.

No, our discovery side is so rich in possibility yet we often stay stuck in our existing core.Why?

I can liken it to an old heart, ticking away but not as capable of a great amount of real exertion as it used to be. It has had multiple bypasses, an odd heart attack and plenty of emergency interventions. We need a transformation, a new beating heart of innovation possibilities, recognizing these as continued infusions, becoming the essential (blood) flow that feeds the innovation heart. It has never been as healthy as today, of being able in providing a constant flow of possibilities that circulate and provide the new innovation oxygen.

Forget the past reliance

The old concept of a complete reliance on internally thinking, of “we have the best ideas and understanding” are totally out of date. Believing our growth is simply being reliant on internal product and service extension is failing to move this growth needle apart from limited short-term gains. We can’t rely on simply ‘tweaking’ the existing core anymore. We need to think differently. We need to be utterly outwardly orientated to all of the customer and market dynamics and it is through technology capture we can begin to translate these into new innovation opportunities.

So the edge will radically begin to transform the core

To become more aggressive and combat the disruptive forces at work all around us we must go to the edge. The edge can be still made up of products, services, and market opportunities but we need to consider the underlying forces that are at work within this and these lie outside our own domain of physical building, experience or our existing techniques to exploit the known.

We need to find the unknown, we need to pick up on the weak signals we can only find at the edges and begin to build a very different institutional innovation set of capabilities.

Thinking at the edge can be very transforming.

Edges require different practices from the core; they, over-time impact the core, hence why we need to begin to think through institutional innovation change to accommodate this leading from the edge.

The value of considering platforms and ecosystems within this redesign allows you to accelerate outside learning, leverage the knowledge available across a broader community and can deliver internally new understanding and knowledge in areas where the core lacks, or is inadequately set up in expertise.

What was the internal competence of knowledge inside the organization is becoming increasingly an inhibitor. It only contains the core of the existing business; it does not allow you to tap into opportunities of tomorrow in new, openly shared ways.

Collaborations across organizations can defray the cost; it limits risk but encourages experiment. You achieve ways to gains quickly differently learning opportunities and connect with different areas of specialization not found within the one organization.

A different understanding of stocks and flows that come from our edges.

Today it is not “stocks of your knowledge” as these rapidly lose value, it is the “flows of all knowledge” and these come increasingly within the relationships you form at the edges and platforms and ecosystems can accelerate these flows and leverage knowledge and discovery.

We do need to re-conceive innovation – our new core is found at the edges if growth is important to you. It is how you apply all that is potentially available to you today, to leverage and learn what is valued and needed becomes the critical investment time, you need to put into the discovery of the edge and all it can mean to your existing core.

We simply need to transform our framing and much of this is outside not within. Have you made this recognition that your core is at increasing risk unless you discover the edges that will transform everything you do and you will want to protect as your new connected intelligent core highly connected to the outside world?

We can explore this more if you are interested?

The post We are pushing away from the old innovating core first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I continue to read and explore as much of the thought leadership on innovation, it continually points to a change in how we approach innovation.We need to embrace this need for change.

I have written about the new innovation era in 2017 made up of higher levels of needed collaboration, where platforms, ecosystems and customer experience understanding become increasingly central. We need to push well beyond our existing core of innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design.

We are pushing further away from the old core.

The tenet of each organization in the past has been in protecting its core. This is changing as the very core is changing to adapt to more volatile conditions, changing landscapes and more disruption. The core is not so much in what we know or own but in what we can learn from that surrounds our core and this is increasingly found at the edges and externally.

Let me explain

The customer is critical, they are becoming central to any innovation, and they are our need to fully understand, to turn the fuzziness into opportunity. We need to start constantly at understanding the customer, their needs, their individual journey by discovering and engaging with them. We are rapidly appreciating the combination effect of technology, the data exchanges, and the analytics we gain from this. The combination effect is changing the starting point of innovation, it is not beginning in idea generation found inside the building, and it is discovery found outside brought in, to then turn into potentially commercial ideas. These can only be found at the edge, the customer edge.

The old concept of internally thinking of growth being reliant on internal product and service extension is failing to move this growth needle apart from limited short-term gains. We can’t rely on simply ‘tweaking’ the existing core anymore. We need to think differently

Scale, scope, and speed are becoming dominate in all we need to think through

To become more aggressive and combat the disruptive forces at work all around us we must go to the edge. The edge can be still made up of products, services, and market opportunities but we need to consider the underlying forces that are at work within this and these lie outside our own domain of physical building, experience or our existing techniques to exploit the known.

We need to find the unknown, we need to pick up on the weak signals we can only find at the edges and begin to build a very different institutional innovation set of capabilities.

The value of the three horizons comes into play here even more as an innovating force of change

Horizon 2 and especially horizon 3 are exploring the edges; they should be set up for discovery, for experimenting and learning.

Horizon thinking goes well beyond “just” internal thinking and building a portfolio, it needs to be extended into understanding its growing role in platform and ecosystem design.

As we think beyond the one entity we are moving from the existing products and service in horizon 1, to building a new platform constellation of connected products and services in horizon 2, and looking to form a network of ecosystems to explore these emerging edges in horizon 3. I will be exploring this connecting the three horizons into platform and ecosystem thinking further, at a later time.

Edges, if chosen well become eventually the new core – they give fresh perspective

We need to think about scalable learning, we need to quickly translate potential scope and deliver understanding at new speeds that our present core can’t cope with. The present core is designed for exploitation, for efficiencies and effectiveness and it relies on predictability.

The edge is the opposite; it needs constantly exploring, adjusting, learning and experimenting. Yet this cannot be left to ad hoc design, it needs this institutional design. It functions differently than the core, it requires the dual management practice often discussed around the solutions within the design of ambidextrous organizations. It ‘pulls in’ the understanding

Deloitte Centre for the Edge

I constantly find Deloitte’s thinking as leading edge. Often to absorb this thinking can take time and the appropriate conditions can come later. That is thinking at the edge so you draw in the understanding and this becomes more central to your own core. Deloitte’s often have this impact on me.

They have written about innovating at the edge for some time. They argue an edge opportunity has four distinct characteristics that differentiate.

In the short-term– an edge requires minimal investment to initiate and the edge has to have the potential to grow the pie.

In the longer-term – an edge aligns with the long-term disruptive shifts in the market and has the potential to transform the core.

The design principles of the Edge offered by Deloitte as a framework.

GE, for example, is taking Predix from the cloud to the edge.

Predix is the GE operating system for the Industrial Internet, has been opened up as a platform for outside companies to write apps, have access to collect and harvest data, as well as have access and use of all the tools available for the data collected in the cloud to be analyzed on this Predix platform. GE recently recognized and decided to place machine apps anywhere, literally at the edge of any networks or systems on devices, on controllers, in positioning this analysis capability as a network gateway or router, ultimately connecting back to the cloud.

This change in thinking actually takes innovation to the edge, it delivers knowledge to the customer who has invested in the machine. It changes the relationships, alters the dynamics of managing. Can this thinking of data, platforms, ecosystems and relationships with the actual (human) customer be equally managed at the edge, I think so.

This can give ‘edge understanding’ by each device, by each interaction, by what needs to be completed. The application of thinking at the edge is where you can gain insights faster. Where you can run programs faster, adapt them to local environments and exchanges, develop dialogues by running a quick analysis on or close to the machine or the person using the machine themselves.

As GE claim in their case “the edge is the place where the cloud meets the customer environment”. You can then get a better prediction on the spot, you can make needed personal corrections and over time the machine has the capability to learn over time what is optimal, what is needed to be completed, what will help optimize the process.

So the edge can begin to transform the core

Thinking at the edge can be very transforming, can you imagine the Smart Phone, or other smart devices being the edge, where the exchange takes place, the knowledge collected and shared and the relationship forms to design the innovation future, as close as you can get, in the consumer’s hands. It is a reality already, we just have to reconceive this differently.

Edges require different practices from the core; they, over-time impact the core, hence why we need to begin to think through institutional innovation change to accommodate this leading from the edge.

The value of considering platforms and ecosystems within this redesign allows you to accelerate outside learning, leverage the knowledge available across a broader community and can deliver internally new understanding and knowledge in areas where the core lacks or is inadequately set up in expertise. It contains the core of the existing business; it allows you to tap into opportunities of tomorrow in new shared ways. It defrays the cost, it limits risk, it gains ways to quickly learn and connect with different areas of specialization not found within the one organization.

Today it is not “stocks of knowledge” as these rapidly lose value, it is the “flows of knowledge” and these come increasingly within the relationships you form at the edges and platforms and ecosystems can accelerate these flows and leverage knowledge and discovery.

We do need to reconceive innovation- our new core is found at the edges if growth is important to you. It is how you apply all that is potentially available to you today, to leverage and learn what is valued and needed.

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The post The future innovation core lies at the edge. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I wrote this recently in a post entitled “Bringing New Innovation is Stretching the Mind“. It opened with this view:

“There is a profound shift taking place, relating to innovation. Increasingly we are seeing a growing dissatisfaction on the impact that innovation is having; in growth, in returns, in market and customer impact. There is a search for new solutions.

One of the implications is this growing recognition that innovation is rarely succeeding in isolation but it is growing on a more highly dependent type of complementary innovation, a collaborative network, working around this new emerging innovation to deliver a more connected, radical experience, requiring innovation ecosystem management.

This dramatic change we will all be undergoing will have a significant impact on each organization’s innovation management design as it will require new connected thinking, built upon a substantial network of collaborations and partnerships

I believe innovation has been in the need for change for some time and 2017 will be the transforming year.

I sense innovation will change dramatically in 2017 as we are coming very quickly to a refraction point in how it’s going to be managed. The underlying change is the contribution of technology and digital, enabling the opening up of our world of possibility, through ecosystems and platforms that provide the collaborative base for a new, complex, diverse set of connections.

This ‘connected world’ can deliver a new higher’ value set’ of innovation solutions, increasingly based more on understanding the customer’s demand for a seamless connected experience, through a greater set of contact points and the increasing levels of data and analytics gained from theses ongoing engagements

Innovation has for a long time been struggling to gain a new growth momentum for many.

For many years there have only been many disappointing incremental steps in how we innovate. Now innovation will require significant changes as the digital transformation momentum takes hold. This transforming will require a radical overhaul of the innovation management process as we will increasingly be operating in this different world of ecosystems and platforms.

Today I believe we are on the cusp of a new innovation era and it is a powerful set of enablers that are combining to bring us to this point. My next post will lay those out but before this but before we move forward we should look back, to reflect on the many aspects of change that all are part of the radical redesign that will be required.

I have argued consistently innovation required changing. I want to recap here before we move on

There have been many potential innovation change points I felt needing challenging over the last few years. Below I have shown links into previous posts of mine that are part of this innovation transforming journey we all need to undertake. They are here as prompters into our thinking about change.

Each of these is a link to the post itself. If you feel inclined take a dip, if not stay dry.

Bringing New Innovation Together Is Stretching the Mind, Posted on October 25, 2016

The New Innovation Need: Organizing within a Networks of Collaborators, Posted on October 3, 2016

Developing a new framework for risk and innovation. Posted on May 19, 2016

Establishing a new mentality for innovation Posted on April 28, 2016

The New Innovation Value Chain Perhaps?, Posted on September 25, 2015

Moving towards a new innovation service model, Posted on August 12, 2015

A new innovation perspective – change to fluidity, Posted on June 29, 2015

Where are the new feeding grounds of innovation? Posted on January 4, 2015

As new digital technology dawns for innovation. Posted on November 22, 2014

Redesigning the organizations middle for a new innovation shape., Posted on August 15, 2014

Seeking a new middle management’s innovation perspective. Posted on August 20, 2013

Reducing confusion, promoting diffusion of new knowledge in innovation. Posted on November 9, 2012

A new raison d’être for HRM through Innovation. Posted on July 30, 2012

Making the first crucial steps towards innovation renewal. Posted on September 21, 2011

What are the new paradigms in innovation? Posted on August 26, 2011

Impact investing for social good through new innovation- a growing momentum? Posted on July 27, 2011

Renewing Innovation through the Social Innovation Agenda. Posted on July 22, 2011

Learning to absorb new knowledge for innovation. Posted on July 12, 2011

The forming of new structures- the business ecosystem of innovation federations. Posted on July 5, 2011

The new extended innovation funnel. Posted on April 13, 2011

The beginning of a new era for innovation, truly global. Posted on February 13, 2011

Welcome to the brave new world of innovation ecosystems. Posted on February 12, 2011

Orchestrating the new dynamics of innovation fitness. Posted on February 7, 2011

The intervening years between the first “burst of 2011 / 12 and 2015 / 16 were collaborative ones. A short recap on these.

The period of 2012 to 2014 was a far from quiet time, it kept reinforcing my belief that innovation needed to change. It helped me make up the arguments towards a new way of thinking about innovation but through a collaborating relationship with Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation really advanced this thinking.

We initially concluded innovation required a common framework This has included “collaborative-innovation-reference-framework” (paper one) that argues for the establishment of  the-need-for-a-common-framework-model-for-innovation-management (paper two) and they developed this as a Collaborative Innovation Reference Framework. It can be found at http://cirf.pbworks.com and explores the necessary business architecture, provides a detailed innovation reference framework and examines the different innovation types through a unique lens.

Then we recognized a lack of an organizing around an integrated innovation framework, so we went into the second substantive collaboration was around the development of the Executive Innovation Work Mat with the “innovation-executive-work-mat-initial-whitepaper here. In a series of blog posts, articles and an initial Whitepaper, this fills a vital  and often “missing gap” in innovation. Often the leadership at the top of our organization fails to fully engage in innovation, it remains unclear of its pivotal role in drawing together the vision, mission, and goals of the organization and achieving a strong and clear alignment to the innovation activity that can deliver on these strategic intents. The use of this Executive Innovation Work Mat is designed to resolve this “gap”.

The third collaboration we had together was focusing on “the Interplay Surrounding Innovation” where through two whitepapers ( the-critical-interplay-among-innovation-business-models-and-change and why-innovators-need-a-new-change-paradigm)  and a series of blog posts we provided a focus on innovation that requires an interplay with business models and systemic change as essential in today’s more volatile and disruptive world. We argued that innovation almost always impacts three constituents: the customer, the competitors or markets they are in and the innovator themselves. These all have high levels of impact on business models and increasingly an end result of an innovation, regardless of its initial outcome and can become a business model innovation in themselves.

Our latest collaboration is presently around innovation ecosystems and all that it connects into for innovation

So we come to this our fourth substantive collaboration here. We are entering the world of innovation ecosystems where broader, more complex innovation challenges, through greater collaborations can be achieved. So this site is dedicated to building the arguments here on  https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com . We decided to ‘house’ this in a dedicated blog posting site as it can forge a new direction and momentum for innovation to travel, dedicated to the changes occurring.

So a new innovation era is upon us, do you recognize it or simply want to stay ignoring it?

2017 will be a defining year for innovation, well actually it will be a transforming one. Both Jeffrey and I believe innovation needs to enter a new era of prosperity and for me, that requires this recognition we are moving towards a new innovation model, one highly connected, and collaborative and this will come about in 2017 for most organizations to embrace.

The big change will come increasingly around the growing participation upon digital platforms and the being involved in multiple ecosystems of solution providers, all leveraging technology and highly digital. It’s transforming potential will be how it will increasingly connect into the customer needs in collaborative ways, to provide greater seamless experiences.

The ability to form new networks, to collaborate, to connect into others on common cause through technology working through platforms and ecosystems is going to revolutionize the way we think, and certainly manage innovation in the future.

Welcome to the new innovation era, coming your way in 2017.

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The post Why We Are Entering A New Innovation Era In 2017 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Jeffrey Phillips and I have collaborated around different innovation thinking for some years and in a late August discussion over Skype, we realized that what was emerging from our usual exchanges and insights was that the area of Innovation within Ecosystems was gathering pace and what did that mean for innovation in future business and practice implications.

We both have some shared as well as some different views on how this would shape up for the future. As usual in these discussions, we agreed to think about a potential collaboration on this by exchanging some opening thoughts in written exchanges. Those quickly took hold and we realized our need and the greater need was to explore and exploit the key themes of ecosystems, platforms and customer experience far more.

Intersections allow access; they open us up to new possibilities.

As a quick aside one of my favorite books written by Frans Johansson was “the Medici Effect: Breakthrough insights at the intersection of ideas, concepts, and culture.” I see the intersection of ecosystems, platforms and customer experience as one of those exciting path-breaking intersections. This intersection is having the power of networks and relationships forming and cooperating in new unique ways, in different ecosystems of collaboration, with technology connecting all the parts required up in platforms and tapping into real customer latent need, that of expecting more seamless experiences.

In Jeffrey and my latest collaboration what became different, is instead of a series of stand-alone posts or thought papers, we would place this collaboration into a dedicated “ecosystem” posting site and www.ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com was born.

Why the difference in having a dedicated website?

It is our growing understanding that all of ‘the dynamics of the system we all operate within’, is evolving all the time and in this particular intersection that we have chosen, is highly dynamic and fluid, it is evolving in front of our eyes. So to put our thinking and collaborative time into this we felt a dedicated website allowed us to post insights, knowledge, experiences and discoveries on a constant, evolving basis.

Presently, and expectantly this building of our thinking is a slow burn but I’m not uncomfortable with that, actually, it is making me comfortable. How and where this goes will be determined, partly by input and our insights but partly by the readership need and the value they place in this, so early days as we only ‘soft launched this on 22^nd September 2016, a mere four weeks ago . Of course, we would like to publish more, at faster rates, but much of what constrains us is we have separate businesses to run, although this thinking will increasingly become part of these I am sure. We both have clients that need leading edge or alternative thinking and this is understanding Innovation Ecosystems is a growing topic of real interest so the returns and interest will build I’m sure.

My excitement builds as I look through different lenses of discovery

Innovation needs to have a new momentum. We need to learn far more on how we can co-create new value, a new pathway to growth and different ways to tackle vexing, even wicked problems that need this ‘coming together’. To achieve this we have to break out of our personal silos and existing mindset. We do need to learn the art of mutually collaborative innovation.

Innovation ecosystem thinking can help us to navigate away from our ‘normal boundaries’ onto different pathways to improve the existing system (market). Applying this innovation ecosystem thinking can extend our boundaries out in new shared purpose that will certainly push anyone’s thinking, it changes the dynamics from bringing together a diverse range of ecosystem participants, all coming together and altering what we know, into what we prefer, in radically different and valuable ways.

Equally, ecosystems can be powerful to tackle the critical challenges of shortage, illness, population pressures, and climate, as all are continuing to be growing societal issues; the unifying around the mechanisms to tackle these will be partly through this combining ecosystem, platform and solving the customer or end consumer needs. We need to appreciate, understand and participate within these to resolve many pressing problems.

Moving towards the tangible, recognizing many of the intangibles is not easy

I often run the risk of pursuing the theory and not translating these into practical solutions as quickly as I should. I get there but I value the journey of discovery, the voyage.  Jeffrey constantly nudges me here, as I love discovery, researching and that gaining of new knowledge and then translating this into different problem-solving approaches. He pushes harder at the solving end a lot earlier and that is what makes the ‘combination effect’ even better.

We are coalescing well in this collaborating plan, thankfully, will you join us?

The challenge of taking on much here is the thinking through this requires as it is constantly moving, changing, evolving and in mostly still a merging state, going on daily and very much now. That makes it very exciting.

My feeling on why this has growing value. We certainly need to harness, liberate, and make the possible concepts being discussed, into more tangible ones. We need to fuse different thinking into a more practical set of understandings, partly to clarify issues, offer advice, partly to grow our collective knowledge of understanding . We need to leverage on as much of the learning taking place and be well-prepared to let go of much that has shaped our innovation thinking in the past.

The whole dynamics of innovation, Jeffrey and I certainly believe is changing and collectively we all need to prepare and attempt to understand it, in its implications, value and impact.

Our personal ecosystems are dramatically expanding; can we co-create more from this?

We all live in ecosystems, they are actually expanding rapidly in knowledge, insights and value as we connect more, network harder and connect into new innovation solutions that transform our lives.They are expanding our horizons in radically different ways.

The power of the internet, the smart device held in our hand, the transforming effect that is driven by technology are giving us all more individual and allowing us to have collective power. We need to understand the transforming world where ecosystems expand, platforms facilitate and accommodate more data and customer needs all seem to accelerate.

These changes, mostly driven by technology are breaking down those previously established norms. It is causing a blurring of what we have known and fusing it into different, sometimes radically new ways to go about our daily lives, where we need to learn how we can all contribute to different and diverse communities to solve problems, contribute and eventually co-create new value.

Significant changes taking place is causing this blurring effect on much of what we have known and fusing it into different, sometimes radically new ways, to go about our daily lives. We need to learn how we can all contribute to participate in different and diverse communities to solve problems, contribute and eventually co-create new value.

A voyage of discovery can lead to changing our perspectives

I’m excited by the prospect of exploring innovation ecosystems and I hope I can contribute some understanding of why we need to change much within our innovating activities, so our innovations connect far more in the future, to tackle the pain points we all can see around us.

Tune into the new website www.ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com. We are wanting to offer our thoughts, insights, and emerging solutions, along with the ones that many, far more notable people and organizations are providing, in their insights and understanding on ecosystems, platforms and customer experiences from the value these can provide from the innovating perspective.

Our contributing value, we hope is in bringing these together in combining our thinking and experiences, in this intersection of ecosystems, platforms and customer experience, where these ideas and concepts collide and where the ‘combination effect’ is  providing outcomes that can contribute to thinking about the innovation potential and future growth prospects in new, potentially really exciting ways.

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The post The voyages of discovery we all need first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Is this tapping into the increasing desire to be part of creating something new, to grab back the engagement needed, that sense of identity and a growing sense of ownership?

Large organisations sense they are missing out on radically different business opportunities and cast their envious eyes towards the young start-ups, not just coming up with original ideas to solve existing problems and pent-up needs, but seeing the work as potentially disruptive to those managing in the existing space.

This start-up and entrepreneurial spirit are making many senior executives nervous and they want to find ways to harness this within their own organisations, and thus the intrapreneurial movement has been born and is growing fast.

It is tapping into an internal need for everyone involved, to innovate in different and more radical ways. Partly we are seeing a restless younger workforce who want to break out of restricting and confining jobs. They want to find more meaningful ways to contribute, to engage, to find ways where they can be impactful, not just in their careers but in making something happen, that is different and better than the existing.

Driving impact, delivering to scale

Intrapreneurs within large organisations can tap into the amazing ability to drive impact and deliver scale. Starting up a business from scratch is really tough but the high level of failures run at nearly 90% and to emerge from spending 24 x 7 for two or three years may have enormous experience and learning, but it can totally fail in delivering this urge for impact and contribution.

Being part of a larger organisation operating in this intrapreneurial role takes away some of the heavy issues faced by start-ups but replaces these with an equally onerous set of tasks.

Equally beside this younger generational need, those a little older turn to their legacy and sometimes decades of work within their organisation to want to attempt to change part of the culture and deliver some of the ideas that have been ‘frustrating them’ over time.

For the organisation, it is recognising that it has the chance to unleash the talent that lies within. If they can create an environment for some to have a higher level of autonomy, of being creative and getting this clearer sense of meaning, it can help invigorate and renew much that large organizations grapple with daily – the stifling of initiatives, seemingly slow-moving cultures and not seizing on all the opportunities that the market and customers are looking for.

The challenge is in the structure and format and character of those Intrapreneurs

There is no single way to do intrapreneurship. It needs a significant amount of attention, commitment and determination. Each design perhaps is unique to fit individual circumstances.

From the organisations point of view, they need to set up a clear, distinct, more than likely separate business practice that liberates people to build upon their emerging entrepreneurial personalities. They need to build the walls and fences so as to protect the ideas, support the work in progress, nurture the people involved and allow for a higher level of patience to see a return coming ‘down the line’.

The individuals wanting to take on this intrapreneurial role need to think through how to serve the interests of the organization in different ways that break with the existing and normal, learn to exploit and explore all the inner relationships to advance their work and learn to adapt constantly as they go, as they adjust to failure and building upon a series of successes.

The antibodies that lie within any organisation are waiting. Those that fear change and those that feel threatened, jealous or protective of their turf being trampled on. The ones who will want to frustrate, exhaust and determine a pathway towards project death by any means are a constant threat. Intrapreneurs and management alike need to be utterly vigilant in attacking these antibodies if they really see value in promoting this intrapreneurial culture.

The mountains that are needed to be climbed to unleash that Intrapreneur spirit

It all starts with belief, pure and simple. A belief that having Intrapreneurs working within organisations will make a difference in the innovation work needed, and then identifying and encouraging those able to take this task on. Somewhere in this conviction, you can see ideas that can be translated into successful outcomes by unleashing this intrapreneurial spirit. These ideas need to be bigger ideas, perhaps radically different, not the everyday stuff where the organisation should have already set up an innovation process to ‘grind’ these through to successful outcomes.

This needs to send a powerful signal that the official licence to change has been granted, and better support for innovation and growth can partly come from deploying Intrapreneurs. It announces this as a parting of the ways from just the “busyness of business as usual” by exploring new ways to seek out the innovation that can be different but clearly, needs to be managed differently.

So what is different and what does that mean to whom?

Intrapreneurship has to be established as a specific system that can be set up and provided to those wanting to take on a different challenge. It needs to become a solid part of the strategy for innovation otherwise it is quickly seen as ‘just another experiment.’ This would fail to attract the right type of person; it signals a lack of commitment, so those budding Intrapreneurs stay hidden in the woodwork or looking to leave, so as to break free to pursue their personal goals and dreams, even taking away the emerging blueprint to disrupt the very firm that has given them this understanding.

There are many enablers to make this transition happen. The most critical are deep management support, creating a culture for entrepreneurship to thrive and knowing the type of people that can make this happen. The quality of any ideas, the mandate that goes with that idea and the funding and milestones needed to be in place and the clarity of failure and what that means. Each of these becomes a critical enabler to make this concept work.

So then we need to consider values, personalities and the operating conditions.

Firstly not everyone can simply become an intrapreneur you have to possess a certain resilience and toughness. They need high levels of tenacity, this mental toughness and commercial zeal to drive through the concept they are working upon. The optimism, staying ready to adapt, be flexible but also the underlying ‘steel’ to be assertive, creative and determined to push something through, to overcome the many barriers and resistance that comes with exploring more radical innovation.

They must continually make the business case, negotiate and navigate around the system to achieve their ends and that often requires a deep knowledge of the many ‘ins and outs’.

They need to forge their business community, building the identity with what they are undertaking, reaching out to the network both within and outside the organisation. They need to unpick and unlock resources that bring additional ‘scarce’ skills to help, and just fostering this underlying culture of resilience needed both personally and within the project management.

These attributes need nurturing and supporting and this is where a clear sponsor comes in. This person needs to provide ‘air cover’, needs to help the intrepreneur to navigate through the obstacles thrown up within the parent organisation and ensure there is always a high level of trust as the decisions and progress are being made. It becomes more reliant on relationships, not processes being put into place. The job and the relationships need constant engagement.

The shared belief is based on two essential points; as innovation is a discovery process the people involved in finding the solutions are as equal to the ideas they are pursuing. It is toughest at times of setback or failure; it is being agile enough to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty and making a change, even when change is painful. It is about dealing with measured risk and returns.

So to intrapreneurially tango you have to have a clear mandate

1. To ensure the team has degrees of freedom to create, design and innovate
2. The mandate that they can question and challenge the existing mould to achieve success
3. Knowing the break points to being commercially courageous against being foolhardy, to know the confines of risk but the chance to grab a real opportunity
4. To find the ways to keep all involved energised, incentivised and focused on the prize, the opportunities and the contribution to the goals
5. To keep informing, to make the work transparent and open for others to contribute, help and support.
6. Knowing the difference between timely updates and keeping the head down just that little longer as the breakthrough ‘ahh’ is just around the corner
7. Design in consciously the methods and ways the organisation sees’s the value and the alignment
8. Be constantly aware that performance will be judged, more than likely under a harsher spotlight than for others and recognise what you are working on is commercially critical and decisions will often be based on pragmatic, rather than opportunist or idealistic criteria. Live with it as part and parcel of the job.
9. Consciously stay out of the everyday stream, even challenge if this should go through a typical ‘stage gate’ process as it is really hard for most to understand what makes up a great idea and that it is not a linear process but an iterative one, full of loops, failures, experimentations and revalidating and retesting.
10. Make sure the governance is highly dynamic and agile, trading off the progress of insights, learning, discovery and experimentation in a journey that recognises iterative and flexible decision making that favours adaptation and informing. Making sure there is a right to make mistakes as long as people learn from them and they were contained within the confines of the risk profile.

Intrapreneurship offers the potential of being a vital part of your innovation strategy

As organisations seek growth they need to encourage higher levels of impact. Those that take the route of becoming an intrapreneur share in this desire to build something that has a valuable contribution and impact.

To take on this challenge requires a different mindset and most probably set in a ring-fenced environment. One that conveys flexibility and agility but a need for pace and speed, have higher levels of risk-taking and a clear realisation that failure is part of the learning, a commitment level sometimes beyond ‘belief’ and simply don’t take existing procedures, barriers and established rules of engagement as a reason not to do something, they are true ‘bunker busters’.

In summary

More and more value creation is coming from start-ups, they search for dynamism and points of significant competition, to deliver those more radical, sometimes disruptive solutions. To overcome the built-in risk-adverse and general slowness in large organisations, intrapreneurs need amazing energy to ‘push the obstacle and barriers’ out of the way and still stay ‘fixated’ on the opportunity to bring it to commercial fruition.

Not an easy task but one that is running in parallel to the entrepreneur outside, demonstrating they can deliver on a dream and opportunity that does make a clear contribution and impact.

So are you tapping into this real momentum behind the idea of Intrapreneurship within your organisation? Are you seeking out validated learning?

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

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The post Exploring the Intrapreneurial Way in Large Organizations first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Three years back I took a view on what to focus upon in my innovation activities to meet client needs, they did seem to make sense at the time.

In many ways, I was fairly happy with the outcome, as many of the places I would put my required but limited resources behind, in providing a depth of understanding, were highly relevant, topical and needed, so were good spaces to offer my thinking, advice and solutions into.

Fast forward these last few years and I often wonder where that focus has actually gone – the focus has been a little ‘bounced’ around but for good reason, I feel, yet, it needs a fresh re-calibrating on my approaches going forward.

Innovation has been rapidly changing and much of its basics have been swallowed up by some defining issues that have raced up to the top of the innovation agenda and it is right to respond to these.

‘Breaking’ practices or new methodologies are much harder to master and advise upon, to determine clear positions and propositions.

This certainly involves investing a lot into getting a certain clarity and perspective, through researching constantly, finding fresh insights, sifting through comparisons, discussing and exploring them, so as to eventually determine the value to specific challenging environments and different organisational maturity levels.

Not only that, it is how to related these to different market conditions, so as to offer thoughtful advice to a broad audience of practitioners and leaders within the corporate world. This advisory world on ‘breaking practices’ is necessary yet often undervalued.

The excitement of ‘breaking innovation’ is in the pioneering, experimenting, discovering, sharing and exchanging. If you are always open to this new thinking, it does enrich and advance innovation understanding and that makes it so valuable but so demanding. Many of them have been utterly enjoyable to explore.

There are so many thinkers, experimenters and explorers contributing, that it makes innovation a terrific space to be part of, it is always evolving and challenging much already established but it means a constant attention to understanding it, sifting through often conflicting voices, translating the new practice that others, time-starved, can then appreciate and can relate too, and then see how they can deploy this into their innovation structures.

The ‘lead- lag’ time is sometimes very long and tortuous to make the necessary changes within organisations and get the necessary ‘buy-in’.

Recently I felt it would be useful to complete a re-assessment to recalibrate my position.

A good starting point was to go back and see what I have been writing about in the past three years. I often write down and capture my initial thinking, then it evolves through different steps, experiences to consolidate my thoughts and work through what I felt was my position on a given subject. It gave me a clearer set of possible outcomes and an essential foundation to build upon.

There is this constant, pressing need to absorb, synthesise and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovation thinking.  My focus has been to blend this emerging thinking into core aspects of my innovating beliefs as well as contributing to building innovation capabilities, competencies and capacity, my key focal area.

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly?

So increasingly as I looked back I noticed that I have been providing different sets of posts that were more reactive, reflective and responsive. Sometimes taking stock it does surprise you on how the innovation needle had been moved, again and again. This sometimes makes navigation sometimes difficult, you do need clear anchor points.

Often we were missing the constants required to ‘set in place’ innovation, those anchor points, otherwise, we often are simply increasing the layering on, more and more, not giving enough emphasis on how to integrate these into a newly emerging practice of innovation but recognising the essential basics that are constantly needed, irrespective.

The basics of innovation still form around building engagement, leadership, involvement, in constructing a culture, the climate and environment needed, so as to allow innovation to evolve. Then that constant investment in people, networks and relationships, that need to come together and, finally the structures, systems and governance that are flexible enough to make what we work upon as responsive, agile, adaptive, exploitive and exploratory, to end up with great new ideas, things and finally, winning successful concepts.

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

The shifts taking place has 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 and then we need to reconstruct our innovation thinking so as to gain from this transformation occurring all around us.

Also, there is this growing concern, actually it never went away,  perhaps more enforced than ever today, over the issue of ‘risk and return’ as innovation becomes increasingly complex. As we push to increase the need to push for breaking out of many of our incremental innovation mindsets to tap into real growth opportunities, the pressures continue to build. More help is needed here to make these more of a robust risk / return structure that ‘accounts’ for all the uncertainty in new innovation development.

We seem to be stumbling towards breaking out our innovation activity in more radical, distinctive and adaptive ways. We are certainly treating innovation differently, depending on the sense of opportunity and the desire to work towards the solutions these need. You see progress but it still seems maddeningly slow as dedicated innovation resources are still very ‘thin’ on the ground.

Other real changing forces influencing innovation

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period, have come from a greater explosion of Lean Management principles and incorporating Design thinking into our work. Both being rapidly embraced within our organisations, large and small. How these are fully integrated remains a challenge for most.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around, the continued onward movement of crowdsourcing and all the variations (or derivation’s) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’, combined with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much,

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks, that need deeper capture and translation to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the constructing of minimal viable products  and rapid experiment and design. Then we have the growing value of experimental labs and establishing ‘pockets’ of entrepreneurs-in-residence, both have increased in focus.  We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before our innovation concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well beyond the “how” into the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it still seems. Speed is dominating at present then “Scale” and  the constant worries over the”Execution” of the new value proposition.

Reflecting on all of this – so what does this all mean? Reacting to this in new framing ways.

Within my numerous posts responding to breaking practices, I have wanted to capture the changes occurring. What is clear, we are seeing a growing momentum towards more ‘collective’ agility, higher fluidity,  adaptive enterprises with a growing mantra of adjusting, exploring and quickly responding, to the needs seen in rapidly changing markets and equally across our shifting customer base, to service present and future needs, bringing together a growing interplay around innovation, offering a fluidity in its perspective.

This we have termed the new interplay surrounding innovation and centres around the interplay in three essential change points we need to focus upon. I attempted to capture these initially in this post a visual of nine primary components as the framing point to gather around. The final point of change in emphasis has been on measuring innovation, we need to shift to successful and ultimate outcomes and rethink our measures, in my view, on a new innovation balance sheet thinking.

There has certainly been a lot of innovation change, requiring fresh thinking and this has been the main reason why I have responded accordingly over the past few years.

Even with all this advancement in innovation, you do have to stop and ask are we just layering on more content, more complexity than organisations can honestly cope with?

Are we any clearer about what we do and why and how and where we do it?

We often skip over the basics, ignore that many that need to understand innovation within our organisations fail to understand its parts, its process and its different timing. We still lack a common language of understanding and this is still holding us back. In many ways, it is ‘freezing’ much to move innovation forward strategically.

I feel the most important contribution to building a common framework of understanding and through this, a common language has been in the work Jeffrey Philips of Ovo Innovation and I collaborated upon. This has been in determining the importance of alignment between innovation and the strategy of the business and formulating an approach that engages the leadership into establishing the vital innovation connections needed to be put into place. This we called the Executive Innovation Work Mat and makes the critical connections required for innovation to have a clear corporate identity and offer the conditions to build and thrive from this framework.

Our continued failure to manage risk correctly for innovative concepts

Then, the one really big elephant always rumbling around in the board room is how do we manage risk. Risk management for innovation is still a really uncomfortable area and we often fail to appreciate the ‘risk differences’ and due to this, many promising ideas for innovation investigation or progress get ‘canned’ because it is hard to make the returns, in our obsession with hard numbers, especially in the early stages, to meet the corporate hurdle rates. The risk management for innovation needs urgently addressing in far more imaginative ways, to allow for greater innovation activity and exploration to contribute into a greater growth phase than we currently are struggling to provide.

Do we still have a rotten innovation core? Possibly…….I think yes, well, it is still immature.

It is clear innovation is constantly advancing, yet and this is my reflective thought here, it can have countless layers of fresh paint but if the basic foundation is not solid, it only hides the truth underneath, one that needs fundamental addressing that innovation has a rotten core until you peel away these layers and fix the basics.

Fixing the basics comes back to much within my initial focal points that I worked through some years back. The trouble is I do so often get worried that a reoccurring theme gets a little, dare I say it, boring.

Yet if we do not fix the foundations it might seem boring to keep going back to resolve these but the fundamentals of anything, including innovation, is getting these built on a solid platform, otherwise, it becomes a very expensive vanity ride for many. So should I feel guilty, worried or concerned by continually reverting back?

The attraction of riding the new wave

Like most caught up in innovation I do get often caught up in the wave of new innovation, actually, I love it, it keeps the passion burning brightly in discovery, curiosity and intrigue, in learning, experimenting and exploring, as these are often the clients need to understand and evaluate against.

Yet it does seem to me many innovators within the business organisation do simply miss the basics within their own thinking or organisation and fail to fix these. They keep moving on, restless, wandering the innovation plains looking for these new feeding grounds but are they just feeding themselves, or actually failing badly in feeding all those ‘left on the reservation’ that make up the larger organisation? Not securing their futures by sustaining the innovation forces, seeing innovation as their personal adventure and not a sustaining organisational one?

Those that do pay attention to the basics in innovation and its management become so much better placed to be the disruptors. Why, simply because they have their people’s engagement and identification as central to their innovation activity, they know the basics, they have experimented and learnt, they make the connections, they get it, work it and shape it. Just like the potter at a wheel, innovation is like clay, temperamental; it has a tricky relationship of the shaping, defining, applying lots of practice to get just right with plenty of practice and some ‘learning’ from failure.

So am I cresting or riding the waves? What is the difference?

So perhaps many of my past messages or focal points are as relevant today as when I drew them up, yet as we continue to introduction improved methods, different approaches and more adaptable and flexible practices, my biggest fear becomes an increasing reality that many executives are simply not any clearer on how to manage their innovation.

Cris Beswick founder of thefutureshapers, put it nicely to me a couple of weeks back: “because the basics around innovation are not common knowledge so senior teams are somewhat paralysed in terms of being able to move forward strategically, despite the need”

It can be a dangerous assumption that we ‘think’  innovation is well understood, often it is not, it continues to be a serious source of frustration and disappointment, at all levels. This ‘fixing the basics’ still needs a clear focus to resolve, to forge a pathway for others to understand. It needs a constant balance between extolling the old, exploring the new. Blending practice.

I hope I can keep attempting this translating and embedding innovation practice, I keep trying, yet it is for other people to judge if this has paying value to their innovation understanding. I believe it does.

* This post was updated and amended on 12th July 2016.

The post Are you having fun riding the innovation waves? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to increasingly deliver better end results; as more distinctive, bolder and creative, delivering greater value to our customers’ needs. Can we change our thinking to achieve this?

Let me offer some of my thoughts on why we need to reinvent our innovation management.

The power of technology, software and the use of the cloud is combining in new powerful ways. We are looking for greater data capture and analytics and this is offering us a very different set of options than in the past. The framing of the innovation potential has to be altered. Altered in different products. services and business models. But will it?

Yet many organisations still stay locked into their established ways, systems and structures. Many organisations are failing to renew themselves. Innovation seems to be trapped in the past, we need a new framing to break it out and make it more dynamic and adaptive to meeting constantly changing needs.

Innovation needs to become far more responsive and dynamic, to respond with imagination and intent of purpose.

To achieve this innovation requires a greater organisational engagement than ever before. It needs mobilising differently, in radically different ways; to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways.

Often we look at innovation through a single lens but it does need to accommodate different dimensions that can be exploratory or exploitive, we need to both widen the aperture of the lens and simultaneously change lens to view things differently.

We certainly need far more “mission-orientated” innovation, that is both converging and synergistic, strategically aligned, building on the back of past work and ‘sunk’ investment but equally, pushing out in new ways. Innovation should be constantly renewed and refreshed, it needs investments for its future.

Rapidly changing market conditions are challenging us more

Our portfolio of innovation offerings is facing different market conditions. Some of our products and services are in stable and predictable market conditions, others are being subjected to significant change, caused by technology, adapting to new emerging trends or changing demands and shifting regulations. All of these can challenge the existing business and we need to respond in different ways and at different speeds.

This also seems a time where there is increasing opportunity to shape industry evolutions through multiple ways and use of the many technology enablers, in exploring new relationships, investing in networks and platforms to collaborate and extend beyond our own restricted abilities. All of this requires a greater adaptive and shaping capability. For this, we need a far greater innovation translation canopy to explore. A new framework. Actually ‘multiple’ frameworks.

Applying The Strategy Palette to our Innovation Needs

Initially provided by BCG as a strategy palette, I have set about adopting this framework to innovation.

I initially wrote in “Shining a powerful innovation light into the Corporate board rooms” about the application and value of this frame differently. The difference is that mine is an Innovation Strategic Palette by applying its use in developing the innovation strategic content that  boardrooms need to build better, clearer and far more comprehensive innovation strategies.

We can apply this to change our innovation thinking, to make it more versatile to what we need from our innovation today. It can open up our thinking and allow us to gain a revised understanding of how innovation can be mobilised in different ways.

By applying this framework through four archetypes alternatives, you can  see emerging different design options to innovation. Choices that can provide the catalyst that can drive innovation’s renewal. It really can be used as a problem recognition diagnostic tool or a starting point for innovation opportunity dialogues .

We are in need of finding innovation frameworks that can guide, seize and respond to emerging opportunities quicker, at today’s new innovation speed in agile ways. Exploring this palette framework has to be valuable, to offer a new flexible approach to dealing with these multiple forces of upheaval and threat with clear intent and design in response.

Why this call for innovation renewal? Why do we need to re-think our approach to innovation?

Firstly the need for consistent renewal

We need to constantly renew within ourselves, that seem a constant today and our innovation efforts need a serious renewal for many reasons. We are facing unprecedented challenges, complexities and competition. We are mostly facing sluggish growth and find an increasing new competition from unexpected sources, looking to disrupt established markets, probing to change the game, innovation has an urgent need to adjust to a whole new set of different business dynamics.

Where and when do we invest, why and how? The need for different handling and thinking

Knowing when and where to invest in an innovation renewal and organising for it is a tough call. It tends to fly in the face of excepted practices, based on constantly attempting to improve the efficiencies and effectiveness of the processes. Often innovation discovery is unique, the pursuit of bringing innovation from discovery through to commercialization has many unknowns and inconsistencies of practices.

Innovation and its management are hard to align into much of the established practices and this is one of its toughest tests; to be treated differently not attempted to be drawn into other organizational activity by applying a mixture of routines and linear handoff, it needs mobilizing in different ways, to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways.

Innovation needs a different handling, more adaptive, more discovery-orientated, more exploratory, testing and probing to validate concepts and ideas.

Addressing the changing market conditions through different innovation design.

Why I think this BCG strategic palette has it ‘bang on’ is in the fact they recognize that business environments have three discernible dimensions: predictability and how you can forecast it, malleability and how you shape it, alone or in collaborative ways, and the harshness of the existing market conditions and how you set about surviving this. It is how you set about executing innovation outcomes within these three dimensions will give that greater distinctive need to the design and execution of your innovation solutions. Just thinking about the prevailing conditions can alter perceptions.

The framing of our innovation does have serious strategic consequences.

Those that are honest enough to admit that what they have achieved to-date in innovation activity is just not going to ‘cut it’ for the future, will be making a  very ‘tough’ call but it might be one of the best ones they are about to make. It opens up the thinking to let alternatives in.

I think we all need to constantly look at a renewal of innovation as essential in our thinking, as the conditions we operate within are more volatile than ever before. Over shorter times many things have evolved, suddenly changed, altered and moved on. So by not constantly refreshing we have allowed systems and tools to stay stuck in the past, we stay ‘bound’ to innovation in a current format often far too long. We need to shake out the cobwebs and renew ourselves.

The innovation spirit needs rethinking by taking a more versatile and shaping approach

We fail to constantly refresh and challenge our understanding. We need not just to adjust to our goals but more importantly to adjust from our knowledge of understanding of how we are managing innovation. We simply do need new and different framing mechanisms to be applied constantly as we set about innovation design if we believe in growth and fresh value creation.

It takes a real innovation zeal to renew, thinking this through in different new ways. Renewing innovation needs recognition. Focusing on renewal offers much. Don’t just rip-up or simply dispose of what we have, think through what renewing can give us in improved solutions, often at much lower cost and customer acceptance but most critically to decide and balance the different speeds and challenges innovation development has. Innovation and its management need to be thought through afresh.

Framing our thinking towards our future needs of innovation relates to the conditions we face today and can possibly foresee coming towards us. These conditions of ‘being’ predictable and unpredictable’ begins to determine the type of innovation approach to take.

We need to be fluid, flexible and have different mindsets of thinking innovation.

The approach we take is offering up this mix of the classical, the visionary, the adaptive and shaping and from these first we need to decide the tools, frameworks, resources, structures and systems that best work in each case, the what is applicable to bring to fruition different ideas within each of these dimensions offered in the palette.

We also need to recognise that innovation is different each time, for each opportunity, where it needs resourcing and managing differently. This  BCG strategic palette approach can offer a framework that does offer us a broader variety of options in our innovation thinking.

We also need to recognise that innovation is different each time, for each opportunity, where it needs resourcing and managing differently. This  BCG strategic palette approach can offer a framework that does offer us a broader variety of options in our innovation thinking.

Shifting our thinking

We must move away from a one-size fit all mentality, one where all innovation ‘chugs’ along, within the same process and pipeline. At present this copnstraining approach is killing so much of the potential within innovation. How can all those distinctive, radical and breakthrough concepts, all trying to be measured, squeezed and determined by one processing lens of innovation, all being constrained by traditional thinking, never ever seeing the light of day, as commercial outcomes because we ‘kill them off’?

Exploring different framing mechanisms are necessary

We not only need to apply the three horizons thinking for building and allocating our innovation to different time horizons but I would suggest we need to apply this BCG palette approach for our innovation approaches.

We need to break out of this current mindset trap of one-dimensional thinking, into that dual one of wanting to be simultaneously exploring and exploiting, managing the known and seeking out answers to the unknowns, keeping a balance between today’s business and those concepts that can grow for our future and that will need constant renewal, questioning and evaluation.

We do need new framing mechanisms to be applied to our innovation design and I just feel this palette frame can make a useful contribution as we apply different thinking to redesigning innovation in need of this renewal.

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If we ‘subject’ all of our innovation thinking to go through the same process we lose so much. How can you treat incremental innovation in the same way as radical or breakthrough innovation? You need to apply a completely different thinking and approach to the type of innovation you are thinking through. You must be prepared to abandon established thinking if it is not resolving the problems you are facing.

Beginning any journey is never easy, you stumble a little until you find a certain rhythm

I wanted to start somewhere and it is breaking our existing mentality of how we manage innovation as the first critical point to challenge. Due to this has become a much longer post than I would like and I apologize for that but I wanted to get the mentality issue well ‘aired’ and I needed to cover off a number of bases to frame this.

Funnily enough as I was thinking how to begin I came across two short verses from the Bible, both from Matthew 9.16 & 9.17. and wanting to start here on why we should be Shining a powerful innovation light into the Corporate Boardrooms. It might be a strange place to start for many, yet it somehow allows me to begin my journey.

“No one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the wine would burst the wineskins, and the wine and the skins would both be lost. New wine calls for new wineskins.” – I believe we need to find a new framing position for innovation as the disruptive forces and challenges we face today are growing and call for new ways of managing.

“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse.” – We have been renovating our innovation process until it becomes unrecognizable by all the patches we have been applying and is it really providing the results we want?

Innovation today disappoints

We are not achieving the impact from all our innovation endeavors that we should. There is a time to radically redesign our innovation. We need to shift our thinking as innovation is providing disappointing returns and we are in urgent need to find a new re-framing position of the organization’s innovation engagement.

Innovation needs to become far more responsive and dynamic, to respond with imagination and intent of purpose. To achieve this innovation requires a greater organizational engagement than ever before. It needs mobilizing differently, in radically different ways; so as to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways

If we do need to re-present innovation to our corporate boards to engage in more, we need to offer them a compelling set of arguments on why innovation needs a fundamental rethink, a renewed focus on building the capabilities, competences and capacities that are possible if you engage in a comprehensive innovation management.

Shifting the innovation mindset, resolving a present day dilemma

I’ve written about this need for fluidity and taken this part to frame this post

“Stability and fluidity – how can both work alongside each other? They are opposites yet we need both to thrive in today’s world. Many theorists have suggested, of having in place the ‘ambidextrous organization.’ This would need organizations to design their organizations in their structures, people and processes to either be focused on ‘being efficient’ or being ‘change orientated’. An increased level of duality. The mindset of exploiting or exploring but can we have both, I certainly think so, it mostly depends on what we are about to do to get this mental picture of which frame of thinking should dominate but not be exclusive.

I have been drawn to this ‘dual’ system of ambidextrous as it helps resolve one of the consistent stumbling blocks for innovation to ‘take hold’ and evolve. Innovation is constantly fluid, needing to be adaptive as we learn and adjust to new learning and this is constantly requiring a very change orientated approach. Often innovation comes up against a rigid system and for many “just seems not to fit”

Innovation struggles as it often remains outside the prevailing system. Innovation constantly challenges against the dominant mindset within organizations, who like the idea of innovation but are mostly measured to drive efficiency and effectiveness, keeping highly focused on the short-term performance as their role, reward, advancement and key to ongoing career success, so innovation ‘sits outside’ their domain of focus”

Something needs to change if innovation is really important.

We innovators need a new model of change, for at least eight important reasons I can initially think of:

1. As innovators we aren’t simply responding to external change, we are creating change, both for customers and for our companies and markets. (inside, proactive change vs external, reactive).
2. External change is far more unpredictable, in global markets new threats emerge from anywhere, at any time and often delivered in totally unexpected ways, through new business models that totally cut through and disrupt the existing positions, they can render the existing obsolete in seemingly rapid time, irrespective of the efforts to respond as they have discovered the unmet need to deliver solutions to it.
3. The pace and nature of change isn’t slowing, but is accelerating and will continue to accelerate. (increasing pace, frequency and amplitude of change). Organizations need to pick up the pace, learn to accept a greater risk, experimentation and rapid adjustment on the new knowledge flowing in to build the final outcome to the needs of the market / customer.
4. Sudden evolving markets makes everything needing to be ‘super’ responsive by existing players, to the sudden realization they have missed opportunities, Many existing organizations cannot cope and alter with this demand for agility, flexibility and responsiveness. They need to (re)learn this and build it into their systems and often this realization comes too late. Some industries have been undertaking a responsive approach, for example in their supply chain thinking. Think Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer and how it changed the game.
5. As often demonstrated, most innovation has the potential to be business model innovation, which will require change. (As more innovation becomes focused on business model innovation, this will create even more change).
6. We recognize that change is no longer an occasional threat but a constant companion (shift from the idea of change as a threat to developing an ongoing change capacity as a competitive advantage).
7. The idea that companies can achieve a protected steady state where change won’t affect them doesn’t seem to apply anymore (long periods of stasis, or standing still are no longer possible. Must be able to change/evolve constantly).
8. We need to think of change as a capability that we constantly deploy, rather than a threat we typically avoid. (Need to develop change as a capability, to build skills, reduce barriers).

We need to ask of ourselves if we recognize our need to change

How can we establish Innovation as the vital link to a process of change and strategic direction options, that lifts the debates of managing today’s business by linking it into the future and then turning this thinking into a series of plausible and coherent set of activities?

How can we focus the energy around the boardroom table on to this linking the future work to the shape and the organization’s needs, making the growing innovation debate as strategic as it can be?

Four articles that help shape the change in mindset making it far more of a dual one.

For a start I would recommend you read the four articles I have summarized in my own way below,  to provide a greater depth of understanding in some of our starting points of changing the existing mindset within the boardroom. Here is my brief summaries of these, partly re-affirming but extending thinking to ’embrace’ these:

Two articles are from Scott Anthony or his Innosight team or in collaborations.

Firstly, Two Routes to Resilience

“Sooner or later, your company will probably need to transform itself in response to market shifts, ground breaking technologies, or disruptive start-ups”. Read about this here

“First, major transformations need to be two different efforts happening in parallel. “Transformation A” should re-position the core business, adapting its current business model to the altered marketplace. “Transformation B” should create a separate, disruptive business to develop the innovations that will become the source of future growth.

Second, the key to making both transformations work is to establish a new organizational process we call a “capabilities exchange,” through which the parallel efforts can share select resources without changing the mission or operations of either”

Dividing the effort in two allows leaders to develop a new strategy for the core that doesn’t need to make up for all the business lost to disruption”

Secondly, What Do You Really Mean by Business “Transformation”?

“When executives say transformation what do they really mean? Often, the word confuses three fundamentally different categories of effort”. Read the article here

“The first is operational, or doing what you are currently doing, better, faster, or cheaper. Many companies that are “going digital” fit in this category — they are using new technologies to solve old problems.

The next category of usage focuses on the operational model. Also called core transformation, this involves doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way.

The final usage, and the one that has the most promise and peril, is strategic. This is transformation with a capital “T” because it involves changing the very essence of a company. Liquid to gas, lead to gold”

Defining what leaders mean when they drop the word transformation matters, because these different classes of efforts need to be measured and managed in vastly different ways.”

Two further articles are from Ralph-Christian Ohr

Ralph writes under his blog http://integrative-innovation.net/

The first is “A Model for Integrative Innovation Management”

In his view sustainable successful innovation management systems in organizations are required to be based on a couple of essential premises – all of which can be considered necessary conditions. Read his article here

Innovation management follows a balanced portfolio approach. The entire innovation portfolio is divided into exploitation-oriented and exploration-oriented innovation initiatives, where following characterizations hold:

Exploitation-oriented initiatives are related to running core business by executing and enhancing existing business models or technological capabilities. The primary direction of impact is value capturing (commercialization). Examples: Product, service or process innovation, portfolio extension, innovation of selected business model components (e.g. channel or operations), market research.

Exploration-oriented initiatives are related to developing future business by searching for novel, and often disruptive, business models or technological capabilities. The primary direction of impact is value creation (configuration). Examples: Business model development, platform/ecosystem innovation, basic technology research & development, startup engagement, innovation intelligence.

Ralph and I share the belief that the three horizons is a distinct playground for innovation initiatives

Exploration- and exploitation-oriented innovation initiatives can be assigned to three strategic horizons. As outlined below, the horizons address different proximity to the core business with regard to business model or technological capabilities – and therefore indirectly time scale. The horizons’ strategic objectives can be put in a nutshell:

H1 – Core: Optimization of existing business models and technologies, addressing of existing markets

H2 – Growth: Acceleration and scaling of new business models and technologies, adaptation of existing business models

H3 – Future: Discovery and validation of new business models and technologies, shaping of future markets

A lot of my own work goes into developing the understanding, usage and practice of working with the three horizon methodology. Ralph and I share a lot on this as core to a way forward. Here is my White Paper and short presentation opener to this 3H thinking to capture, translate and combine the innovation for today and leading towards the future.

Ralph’s second article is equally making the Case for Dual Innovation

This is revisiting the need for a higher level of organizational ambidexterity to be built into the organization. So often something is dismissed without it being fully worked through. Ralph puts up the case for revisiting “dual innovation” equally suggested within the Innosight articles. Read his article here.

“In the past, systematic dual innovation management approaches have often been discounted due to falling short of expectations or lacking prevalence across the sum of companies. Both reasons, however, don’t necessarily imply the basic concept is inappropriate or even wrong”

“Adequate buy-in on part of executive/senior management and proper implementation of these approaches are mandatory prerequisites in order to make them live up to their potential and – as a consequence – increasingly trusted and applied. The above studies clearly reveal: Organizational ambidexterity proves to be a necessary condition for outstanding corporate innovation capability. Company boards may ignore it at their peril.”

The need is for us to get thinking in ‘dual’ minds for ‘greater’ innovation delivery.

Exploitation  <=> core transformation, i.e. doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way

Exploration <=> strategic transformation, i.e. changing the very essence of a company

The thinking in dual ways is a really important part of bringing innovation thinking into the boardroom, framing this through a three horizon approach that can provide a common language, a different thinking mindset and build future discussions in appropriate time horizons and impact assessments. Also take a read of “Mapping innovation across the three horizons” to link this powerful concept into any board rooms thinking over the present and future for placing different innovation activities.

Dogma, mindsets and conflicts often dominate our boardrooms

I wrote about Lingering dogma, fixed mindsets and conflicting needs and wrote at the end “I can’t promise it can stop all the unhealthy debates around innovation in the boardroom by adopting the Three Horizon framework. What it might change is the perspective of where to focus the expertise and energy to make innovation far more the strategic bedrock, that organizations are looking to achieve, the link towards a healthier future. It’s not personal any more, its considering options in a future-orientated way for their business, to find better ways to thrive not just survive”

In summary, as the first post of why innovation must reside in the boardroom

The first thinking ‘out loud’ ( a long one I must admit) of moving innovating thinking far more into the corporate boardroom comes from the need to establish a “thinking mindset” within our boardrooms, a duality of mindset. One where they ‘collectively’ within the boardroom needs to think in dual ways, exploring and exploiting, to establish distinct types of transformation efforts, and innovation initiatives, combined with the use and application of embracing the three horizons, this becomes the first group of thinking for “shining innovation into the corporate boardrooms”.

Footnote: Where I seem to be heading is in my intent of making innovation itself a transformational journey, perhaps even a “renaissance” as we all are facing and needing to tackle all the disruptive forces around us.

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This seems an appropriate time to begin to rethink and explain innovation, partly in this need to fight these “immune systems” in fresh ways and partly to redrawn, re-frame and renew the value of innovation; in how it can help organizations going forward in very volatile times.

So let’s shine some light on new ways or even recognized paths for innovation to re-enter the thinking within our corporate boardrooms, in different ways that might resonate more in these more ‘dynamic’ times.

I like this organizing framework shown above, it can  allow us to gain a revised understanding of how innovation can be mobilized in different ways, to give value in dealing with these different forces to help move you towards a growing level of renewal.

So I want to begin a series of posts around positioning innovation frameworks, tools or approaches that build the boardroom “innovation toolkit” to deal in both the predictive and unpredictive environments. The suggestions that will be offered are designed to help tackle the disruptive forces swirling around the business that are rising, increasing the uncertainties to future invest. It is attempting to address the concerns on how to organize the “forces of innovation” to combat them, to raise the confidence level in the boardroom to ’embrace’ innovation far more than seemingly the case today.

Firstly the background to this attempt to re-frame the innovation value proposition.

What prompts this has been a spate of recent reports raising concerns largely about innovation uncertainty in our boardrooms. This made me draw back and reflect, now it is time to re-frame and renew the message of innovation and its management..

The three previous posts that reflected this ‘dark period’ for innovation come out of different reports. My posts are here, here, and here. I did got fairly emotional in firstly reading the reports, and then in these three reviews – my dark period but rightly so, I believe.

The story so far if you have not read my previous three posts

The case has been made that our boards are risk-adverse, experimentally shy and digitally inept. They are struggling to adjust to the disruptive forces attacking the core of their businesses.Can that be challenged and certainly changed?

Boards feel their organizations are slow to respond, far from agile and flexible, delivering up a series of poor levels of innovation performance in the solutions to grow the business. Our boards are equally not encouraged to change the business models and offer a new way forward, to get these significant threats ‘contained’ in different ways.  In many ways innovation is moving backwards due to a risk-adverse approach, missing numerous opportunities, or just not wanting to learn from past mistakes.

You might feel this has a level of abdication and quiet acceptance to it, that the inevitable is coming towards them at higher speeds and complexity than they can ever imagine. This has left them poorly equipped to manage this growing set of disrupting forces in ways they have been used too, it is creating a high level of uncertainty and uneven attempts to undertake the changes necessary. Increasingly this management rigidity within the present management style, continues to favor efficiency and effectiveness through repeating practices, processes and highly structured systems. Those are designed to extract the maximum from constantly reducing the minimum needed to get the job done.

Well you are right, many of our boards are simply incapable to think beyond their past management experiences, one that is focusing on leveraging a return for each quarter to yield ever-improving short-term results, pushing  ‘incentives’ that everyone is encouraged to sign up too, for supporting this approach and their participation gets rewarded. Yet it can be also so different, perhaps liberating if they took a different tack.

Heading towards a promised land through innovation is certainly possible

Can we lead them out of this ‘dead end’ they seem to have found themselves in, a cul-de-sac,one they continue to drive along as this cost-driven, short-term road? Yet it can be very different, pursuing a more open freeway or highway seeking out growth, if you allow imagination, beliefs, determination and character to find that alternative pathway by having that real desire to make all the changes necessary, and there are many, let’s be clear upfront.

It is a journey not for the weak-willed or one undertaken half-halfheartedly but with real innovation intent and purpose.Each journey is unique but full of commonalities and these need to be revisited or explored in fresh ways. Embracing innovation fully can propel you forward, in often many unexpected ways but also in some bold and thoughtful ones.

So where do we start?

So in a series of blog-posts, I want to “shine innovation into the corporate boardrooms,” I am hopefully offering a way forward for those time-starved or presently not as well-equipped to pull this innovation structure together into a more cohesive ‘whole’ that can raise their confidence in innovation and grow in their engagement to this emerging discipline.

The framework here, I will be breaking down in my own innovative way, as my approach to strategic innovation thinking. This is different from the way that BCG is suggesting using this framework although their title “Your strategy needs a strategy” certainly brought me to their Strategy Palette as my framing concept.

The difference is that mine is an Innovation Strategic Palette by applying its use in developing the innovation strategic content that  boardrooms require to build better, clearer and far more comprehensive innovation strategies. So I am adapting it specifically to innovation and the outcome is through these four archetypes that is leading to ‘arriving’ at renewal, for a greater chance of survival in today’s more disruptive world.

This frame will determine most of the content of the posts going forward.

The management of innovation needs organizing.

The intent of applying this innovation palette is to encourage, through the proper management of innovation, to provide and convince the boards’ they can develop a greater appetite for growth, even in increasingly disruptive times. Innovation should have a very high strategic importance on the board’s agenda, I am hopefully this contribution can help.

We need to change the thinking around the present attitudes to innovation engagement at boardroom level, in changing the risk profiles and tolerance of failure. The options to innovation should be made up of a healthy mix of extending the existing business, strengthening and extracting from this core, to find the time and resources so as to provide a greater strategic intent to find more distinctive innovations, that give a confidence in the future, as well as be fully supportive, provide encouragement and determined commitment to explore the future, where more radical and breakthrough innovation potential ‘resides.’

From what I have seen and read there seems a clear need to address the skill-set at board level to handle innovation, to equate to digital disruption and technology differently. The real urgency is to encourage board members to act far more proactively through managing innovation, to evolve and utilize a Boardroom innovation toolkit that can be built.

The business world is far more risky today, far more complex, we are becoming more failure tolerant or ultra defensive. Innovation thrives in the unknown and undiscovered innovation territory, waiting to be explored and exploited.

Noble aim, willing intent. Lets see if I can make a dent in the innovation universe for corporate leaders.

It is being equipped with the right toolkit of innovation management that  perhaps board members can then start seeing themselves as new business development leaders, that has innovation at the heart of their future decisions.

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