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.

They might be operating at the two ends of the current internet trading spectrum and are coming from different market maturity positions but it is the asset management that is becoming critical for delivering the profit or dragging performance.

Now Amazon is far from “asset heavy” when you compare them to the Industrial companies like GE but asset orchestration is seemingly getting far greater management time for all companies it seems. The lighter you are, the more likely you are to be more flexible and adaptive to respond to more disruptive challenges being faced by industries that are undergoing the shift to being more “digitally enabled”. Alibaba is very much a good asset orchestrator.

I wrote a post some time back called “Asset Orchestration is required for more Dynamic Innovation” and offered a thought (or two) such as “you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result”. At the time I had been reading some work undertaken to frame this asset orchestration by Sirmon et al during 2007 and 2008 that focused on the different actions of the manager, or asset orchestrator.

In this research they (Sirmon et al) suggest there are three primary stages of structuring, bundling and leveraging resources for the purpose of creating new value for customers and gaining competitive advantages, however temporary in today’s world. It is why this needs to be dynamic, ever evolving, to keep orchestrating your assets continually and it was not until recently I made a further set of connections into asset orchestration. Let me repeat these as they are increasingly important in the world of platforms and ecosystems.

Let me repeat these as they are increasingly important in the world of platforms and ecosystems.

The three primary stages of asset orchestration can be broken down:

• Structuring involves acquiring, accumulating and divesting resources to form the organization’s resource portfolio.

• Bundling of integrating resources to form capabilities, that can stabilize or provide incremental improvements to existing capabilities, or that enrich and extend existing current capabilities and thirdly, pioneer, which creates new capabilities.

• Leveraging involves a sequence of processes to exploit the organization’s capabilities to take advantage of specific market opportunities. This includes mobilizing, offering a clear plan or vision of needed capabilities, coordinating for ways to integrate these necessary capabilities and finally, deploying to achieve a resource advantage (or gain) that promotes market opportunities and instills more entrepreneurial strategies to exploit new resource configurations

A new moment of recognition for me was tucked away in my past research

The catalyst to this recent light bulb moment (well for me) was a thesis written by Javier Busquets, while at the Copenhagen Business School. His paper was “Orchestrating Network Behavior for Innovation“, written in 2010 but becoming increasing relevant to today’s world of managing assets more lightly.

We are seeing a change taking place around the building of networks and the way organizations are forming coalitions through ecosystems and platforms and in combining new technologies and blending business fields. Again I think Alibaba is doing a really good job of that. They are deliberate orchestrators. They are agenda setting, mobilizing, consolidating and coordinating different points of emerging value.

Within the thesis of Javier Busquets, he evaluates much of the published literature that ties up with dynamic capabilities, the network effect and capacity building and the constant way these orchestrators keep extracting more value from the network, that continues to expand.

I have been building my own understanding of these in (yet another) dedicated posting site for building Innovation Fitness Landscape Capabilities into Organizations.  Orchestrators seemingly are keeping pushing the boundaries and moving their relationships into this constant dynamic evolution. Arguable orchestrating, as seen this way, sets a new innovation path we all need to understand and I keep pursuing.

I particularly valued Javier’s Chapter 3: “Orchestrating Network Behaviour for Innovation” as it connected again a part of separating out in the ecosystem and platform work Jeffrey Phillips and I are undertaking, the differences between old economies and new is increasingly coming up.

One highly relevant observation

One comment he made was “orchestrating is a function of (1) changing the rules of the game to keep the game alive and (2) avoiding disruptions, thus ensuring continuity through the connection between the old and the new, or between past behavior patterns and the present and future ones.”  It is balancing the difference forces coming into play increasingly in a world of ecosystems and platforms of leveraging external resources and keeping them highly dynamic.

Shaping new boundaries

So is asset orchestration becoming increasingly critical in the age of ecosystems, platforms and managing technology and data? As we build our understanding of the power of this connectivity we are constantly changing the rules. As Javier Busquet suggests, it is about “shaping new boundaries“, ones of opening up new space, opportunities and sources of innovation, to build new platforms for discovery and collaboration potential and build new, differentiating capabilities to innovate.

Combining views- the three horizons and modes of commitment to innovation

One visual got me excited. It just fitted with my extended view of how the three horizons can be taken out and extended further. In adapting his original diagram I have added this 3H view.

It takes the 3H framework into the very need of today, developing the thinking of each of the three horizons to work towards our transformation from the solo organization offering (disconnected) products and services into ones that connect technology by platform participation and ecosystem exploration for greater innovation. Here is my adapted visual and opens up my thinking even further.

In summary

So I do feel asset orchestration is rapidly becoming a critical management need to manage effectively. It is recognizing its potential in managing the asset dynamics to deliver innovation that stays ahead of the curve as we expand out and collaborate on a range of platforms and ecosystem engagements to navigate towards a different future.

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The post The New Game Or Is It? Asset Orchestration 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.

There are so many forces coming together that require this reworking. We are moving from diverging into one of converging, we are at a changeover point for innovation; let me explain each of the contributing factors but firstly, a brief overview.

The Merging Conditions and Forces

The very different political and economic conditions that will be arising in 2017, the continuing shifting social conditions, profound shifts we are undergoing in business and our own personal ones, makes it a world that is moving from being complicated to complex.

Any renewing does need innovation to become more central in our design but it will be managed differently far more collaboratory.

There is a lot of change occurring around our innovation abilities. There is the shift to more open-sourcing, the profound shifts that technology and digital transformation is having upon all our worlds is allowing a very different “connecting” innovation to come into play. We will see a significant acceleration of more innovation ecosystems, we are increasingly recognizing all the different collaborative tools increasingly at our disposal, we are exploring both platforms and forming ecosystems to radically alter the competitive edge previously seen to reside inside the single company.

A more opening out, forming more connections into customers, engaging them in appreciating their needs is leading us to recognize the value and power in the seamless customer experience. All of this comes from achieving a greater access and deepening the connections across networks. It is becoming the network economy

So I am exploring here each of these conditions that I believe are coming together for a really important transforming storm built around a new innovation management, increasingly making it the core to the future for growth. There is a time where each business has to become highly adaptive, agile, open and mutually dependent on others to deliver in this ‘connected’ world to exploit these conditions and explore the opportunities that will emerge.

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. In my last post “We are entering a new innovation era in 2017” I outlined this briefly and spent some time looking back, recognizing many of the points of transformation that have been forming, well at least for me.

So what do I see that is combining to give us the true ability to transform the way we undertake innovation.

Political and Economic Conditions

The surprises of elections and referendums continue to rebound on us all. The new president-elect is looking to make the USA great again. Greatness comes from invention and innovation. “ Brexit means Brexit” and this will require a fundamental rethinking of the UK finding new solutions to their standing independently from the EU. The need to renew is calling for a new innovation momentum.

We have France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, and Italy in a state of flux as we go into the New Year. Each has to find a new model of moving away from austerity in 2017 and find ways to grow as the political tensions are drawing out more extremist views, innovation again is the means for this. The EU is facing a crisis that needs a very different approach to overcome the virtually stagnant growths in most of the 27 countries and the present digital recession that is holding it back in today’s connected world.

There is an increased call to foster innovation at Government level, the need to boost productivity and find different ways of competing on the global stage need to be found as there are this increasing need and demand for real growth and jobs.

The economies in many countries remain weak, the currencies are in a highly fragile state and our banking system has resisted wholesale change and any economic crisis cannot be met by flooding the markets with liquidity but this time around it needs to be on high levels of creativity, collaborations, and innovations. Will we address the EU or China’s Yuan Renminbi that have been ‘artificially’ propped up for long periods? Where will blockchain figure?

Innovation beckons, it is the pathway to begin to get us out of many unsustainable positions caused by political policy and disappointing economic management. Out of crisis, comes renewal and innovation responds to this need.

The Shifting Social conditions

We have seen an amazing transformation in how we socialize through the use of technology and the smartphone. The expectations continue to rise as technology pervades our world. We are more reliant on what it gives us, to undertake our business, social and day-to-day activities. We have more ability to monitor ourselves, our partners and friends and track daily events and be a ‘click or two’ away from our leaders to provide our opinions.

The social effect is influencing government, business, and whole communities. As we learn the value and power of these tools we become more fluid, more flexible and agile but equally more influenced. The whole network effect is changing us, it may be broadening our views or defining them and it is allowing for increased possibilities to influence and materially gain. Innovation will continue to drive this dynamic social condition and demand and expectancies will continue to increase as the connected social phenomenon is in the ascendancy.

Managing The Profound Deepening Shifts in Business

We are facing more complex challenges than ever before. Innovation is increasing becoming “innovation as a service”. Traditional borders are blurring, business sees more opportunities in merging those past traditional market conditions into new ones, built increasingly on the powerful effect of technology, digital transformation and tapping into the new network means of platforms and ecosystems, exploiting new technologies.

The Business Model seems to have a reduced shelf life, we are witnessing more disruption and transformation of existing formats. The usurper is in the ascendency and will be even more encouraged by the political need to renew, due to the increased funding to undertake this.

There grows a real need to change the enterprise innovation portfolio into ones that take a higher risk-taking position to regain dominating positions. It is the battle of the platforms and the ecosystem selection that will decide the winners and losers. To achieve a repositioning increasingly will require a greater reliance on a connecting into and having knowledge access outside the one business, it will need broader network collaboration

Our Personal Shifts and Growing Recognition of our Influence

We are all in need to personally relearn. Everyone is in need of finding new skills to play in this network economy. We recognize this being always connected and aware is offering increased personal gain. We are becoming far more need driven. The digital tools we have in our hands or at our finger tips are changing all our previous assumptions and attitudes.

Each of us is raising up in our expectations, pushing for answers to our positions, constantly forming alliances that are fluid and adaptive. We expect a more open governance or will dig until we find what impedes it and we are constantly questioning or joining forces to champion what each of us believes in.

Catering to this personal world is getting highly complex and shifts the power away from a few into the crowd. The source of our needs is increasingly coming out in different ways, often a venting of frustration and anger and this can be highly destabilizing. The power of the connected world is shifting to the consumer of ‘connecting’ knowledge and they are voting with their pockets or offering their voice of dissension if the solution does not meet their need. Each of us has a growing voice to influence and change others through our network and opinions, good or bad!

Moving from the complicated to complex

Innovation has to deliver in all these different forces to satisfy the different opportunities in far better, highly connected ways. This becomes a highly interwoven set of interconnected parts. No one party or organization has a complete map, they must learn to rely upon and collaborative with others.

The world is not a linear one anymore, no more predictable, it is becoming everywhere one that needs a non-linearity in approach to markets, ways to solve and solutions offered, it has to be agile and constantly adjusting. The system behavior is fluid, feedback loops are constantly surprising up to adapt in different responsive ways. We need to manage complexity daily and find a pathway through it and be ready to respond and react to the next hurdle immediately.

The feeling of being in (total) control is giving way, we are replacing that self-driven behavior to be increasingly reliant on others, working alongside you, to connect and combine together to find mutual solutions to the opportunities ‘out there’ at increasing “speed, scope and scale” – the mantra I hear increasingly. This needs collaborations and connections to deliver the type of innovation solution expected today – a seamless set of experiences that gives real connected value for the ultimate consumer, rendering what they have as obsolete or dated, as it only achieved one job and not address the multiple jobs that always surround the task on hand.

So What are the Critical Parts of the New Innovation Era?

The World of Collaborative Tools

The explosion of collaborative tools in recent years has certainly been transforming. The communication means, the choice of apps and software, the growing use of the cloud are allowing us to change. Yet for innovation, it has been the transforming effects applied to a very cumbersome innovation system that is undergoing a real force of change.

The adoption of Lean and Agile, of Design Thinking, of being encouraged to invest in rapid experimentation and build prototypes that can quickly advance understanding of customer need, design and how it will provide functionality in the marketplace is accelerating innovation. We are encouraging more innovation hacks, providing different designs of crowdsourcing for funding, ideas, and understanding.

We are designing a host of easy to use canvases or work mat’s to frame the problem or challenge and then go out and work through a whole customer validation journey, testing the hypotheses and learning to pivot constantly to give us a higher level of fluidity and understanding. This is becoming the accepted way to innovate and confirm the business opportunities.

We are establishing living labs, innovation centers of excellence and having increased access to a vast array of collaborative design tools. Technology is allowing us to build through 3D printing, we can synthesize and trial in faster ways through new design and portability. The power of computer graphics, modeling and simulation are moving at a real speed of advancement. We can rapidly design software to capture the knowledge we need and we can exploit the power of “apps” in quick and purposefully designed ways to do a specific job

There is a whole world of collaborative tools that are intent on speeding up the innovation process but we have not yet fully mastered these and built our complete toolkit. It needs a base.

Why platforms, ecosystems, and customer experiences become central in 2017

If we do recognize all the above forces are converging, then innovation does become central to what we do. Yet in a complex world, we need to learn how to collaborate and network among our peers and with our consumers. This needs technology, digital and designs that we are determining are based around platforms and ecosystems.

Platforms become our new operating base, often the connecting brand

This is the technology infrastructure where producers of knowledge can come together and create new value and equally enables the consumer to become plugged in, contribute and then influence and consumer the value. It is how the parties coalesce around the platform gives it its value as it is the place for interactions.

Platforms bring the knowledge exchange together, in its related architecture lies the ability to perform, reducing tensions, exploring opportunities in collaborative ways. As knowledge is shared and exchanged you have the greater potential to leverage the assets. Utilization of the resources becomes essential to coordinate.

The learning process of shifting from a pure linear pipeline thinking into one that recognizes the multiple options available in working on a platform as opportunities to exchange information that is relevant to the goal of the collaborators, it becomes the place for the exchange of goods, both tangible and intangible and finally an exchange of different currencies.

A good platform requires a high quality of liquidity in content, resources, data, the potential for dollar capture and knowledge flow. It is a place designed to scale, adapt and adjust and be easy to enter, engage and interact. It becomes a true exchange source based on technology design. Within any platform design you need your gatekeeping and rules; otherwise, it can quickly lose its value.

Ecosystems are needed to be formed

Today individual organization resources are simply not good enough to compete in what you own it is how, where and what you can access. It is the tapping into new or different skills, deep, specialized knowledge and those fresh perspectives to alter the thinking, changing the impossible into the possible, through these connections.

Ecosystems can provide this connectivity coalescing around a common purpose. Competition and Co-dependency are blurring, what were at one time a major competitor can become a partner to combine different parts of a puzzle to offer increased value to the consumer. It is all about challenging the business model constantly and searching for different possibilities that can provide a new competitive advantage, ecosystems can help in achieving these.

The combination effect provides for a greater value creation, it can deliver a far greater collective impact, it allows companies to have focus zones to explore. Ecosystems open up innovation potential; they can co-evolve if they are dynamic and mutually recognize the collaborative value.

Digital Transformation is Upon Us

To transform is hard at any time. Today we are grappling with digital transformation, changing, adapting and learning what new technologies can provide. This is stretching many organizations in their beliefs, challenging their existing operating systems and pushing the abilities to transform in ways that minimize disruption. The call is every company should become a “digital consumer company” where it can recognize the shifts taking place and take advantage of them, digitally.

There is a magnitude of the speed of change required. We need to think mobile, digital, cloud and social far more. We need to become increasingly comfortable in all the analytics and big data mining expected to yield new innovation opportunities. Digital transformation will keep pushing us to become even more efficient and effective in what we do but it will equally expect a high level of adroitness and innovation outcomes.

We really don’t know the end game, yet we do have to play the game. This is the game theory on speed, where we don’t know where it will all end up as it has some many unpredictable variables all coming into play. What we need to do, to start, is the need to keep believing and pushing in three places of real potential value on where we are positioned today.

Firstly achieving a greatly enhanced customer relationship, where they make greater contributions to the ideas of the future to meet their needs. Secondly, we need any digital transformation to provide this deeper streamlining of operational efficiencies and thirdly, to have in place the structure, system and approaches to handle new connected lines of business, different emerging business models all based far more on this digital connectivity and network potential it can provide.

It will be how you connect, translate the technology challenges into winning models and engage with the outside, this is where it will make or break you. As we think the value of technology and digital transformation, we need to recognize there is no the same, it will be different and offer the real potential to seek out completely new innovation opportunities. You will require a digitally connected fitness.

Seamless Customer Experiences are the Order of the Day

We have been poor at connecting all the touchpoints that customers engage into our organizations, to link them up and provide back more tailored experiences. Customers today expect seamless experiences, supported, maintained and enabled by complex ecosystems of products, services, business models, channels, information, and complementary products and services.

Customers aren’t interested or willing to acquire disparate products and services and integrate them. Increasingly customers prefer to acquire seamless experiences, and this expectation will dramatically change how companies innovate.

For decades, companies have organized around their own products or services. This needs a radical rethink. Rather than “a product produced by us” perhaps we should call the necessary outcome a “whole ecosystem” or “whole experience” as these will have this connected difference.

Now, the innovator must define the totality of the seamless experience and then determine which components or portions his or her company can provide, which of the components or solutions that other companies or partners will provide, and work to ensure that these disparate components, services, business models and information will work seamlessly for the customer.

Our Need in Building Our Own Portfolio of Innovation Ecosystems

We are recognizing in multiple ways that ‘innovation ecosystems’ are denoting a departure from an old reality and system of working into a new one. It is often requiring an underlying shift in organizations mainstream thinking from an existing to a new paradigm.

Innovation ecosystems have been ‘constrained’ to date in more geographic, economic, industrial or entrepreneurial terms, often part of economic policy. We have seen successful value in having innovative regions (Silicon Valley, Bangalore), successful ICT platforms (iPhone, Android) or in combining technology companies for establishing new industries (cloud computing) and entrepreneurs clustering together in centers deliberately built up and funded.

Innovation ecosystems are being established that fundamentally are challenging the way we are managing currently and in the future our innovation activities, setting about our innovating of “doing things” in very radically different and more connected ways.

These are threatening to dismantle the way innovation is being managed today, and due to this, we require a radical adjustment in our approaches to achieve a far more collaborative one built on innovation ecosystem thinking.

Purposeful Innovation Ecosystems through can liberate, accelerate and realize business options, that can have a radical effect on the organization. They can radically shift the core, they can tap into the edge of discovery. We need to recognize ecosystems accelerate learning for innovation and where collaborators will be ‘seeing’ increased value in what can be offered by combing resources, to sustain and grow their businesses.

Innovation ecosystems today seem to offer a more focused approach to the management of a more radical but highly collaborative form of innovation.To help a new dedicated site has been created here on:

https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com .

This is a dedicated blog posting site, for ecosystems, platforms and customer experiences, as it can help you understand and forge a new direction and momentum for innovation to travel, dedicated to the changes occurring.

In Summary

It is the powerful effects of different conditions, solutions and forces combining that will deliver the new innovation era in accelerate forms in 2017.

We have a perfect merging of conditions that will have a transforming storm effect on innovation based on the ones outlined here. They are converging rapidly so please be ready to clear that existing agenda of innovations within your present (very) linear pipeline and be prepared to rework the entire innovation space. It will be radical as the forces coming to bear are exactly that, disrupting forces and they will require an awful lot of management’s attention in 2017 to steer and manage.

What we will be seeing I am suggesting that the changes will be radical, as all the forces coming to bear are exactly that, disrupting forces. They will require an awful lot of management’s attention in 2017 to steer and manage for tapping into real growth that is not just expected but required.

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The post The Perfect Conditions for Entering A New Innovation Era in 2017 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.

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 organizations innovation management design and it requires new connecting’ thinking.

Here is my first view of the pieces that are forming around the new innovation approaches we need to consider

This is a visual of what I feel is forming to usher in new innovation. On first view, it looks overwhelming but I am not so sure when you explore each of the pieces.

Today we are seeing all the separate pieces being sketched out constantly by different parties, explored and explained as we are learning.  Some other parts are beginning to be established and understood by experimentation and different applications.

It is the piecing together that is stretching the mind at present or actually it is more the breaking of this map down, into first, second and third order relationships. My next task.

This new innovation thinking has distinct challenges and implications that need thinking through. Now it is the how this can be combined. The intersection of innovation ecosystems, platforms and customer experience are just beginning to be explored over at www.ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com to be part of this new thinking in exploring essential parts yet as this is being discussed it seems to trigger much more, as I have attempted to capture in this above visual, a big challenge that does need this piecing together.

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The post Bringing New Innovation Together Is Stretching the Mind first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How and where does innovation fit will clearly depend on this transforming effect. We are fairly clear that incremental innovation is just not cutting through to give the types of growth expected. There are many outside our existing organizations, standing impatiently at the gates, waiting to come in and take over with market breaking concepts through different business models .

We need to transform, be disrupted or certainly re-imagine and this is where knowing your ecosystem comes in.

Our existing organization needs to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical change. To meet different challenges, to be highly adaptive it needs to begin to organize around ecosystems to deliver on a vision that recognizes it has to be part of a greater collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected world.

Today larger organizations are having to face the stark truth.

Either they adapt or die. Technology offers them the transforming means but can they, as leaders, take their people with them? It needs bold leadership. The structure of our  business today cannot afford to try and stand alone, it needs to extend beyond its traditional supporting partners, it needs to learn to collaborate with  a whole new range of partners, even some previously competitors, to radically adapt to the different world we live in.

Yet  moving from the present position of offering specific products and services into a collaborating one, where they are part of an ecosystem of partners, that are ‘connecting  experience’ as against discrete products building upon the delivering of totally different value propositions for the ultimate consumer, is a highly daunting challenge. It ‘upends’ much, if not all, of how our business organizations have been organized around, mostly within themselves, it is needing radical change. It calls for bold management to instigate such a transformation.

Ecosystems that produce ultimately new business models often rest on a large capacity for agility, openness, and mutual dependency, sharing and appreciating the values amongst a peer group that all relate to this ‘need for change’ and buys into that collective vision outlined.

An ecosystem that is made up of a broad, diverse group of partners, who all value each other and where each can bring to a final set of solutions added value that has the combined potential to redefine new markets can be exciting and empowering. Ones that transforms current offerings within the participating organizations each contributing and working on a designated platform, pushing each other’s ‘edges’ of understanding, to radically alter the value proposition and deliver new customer experience. A tantalizing prospect, full of innovation

Network collaborators that work towards transforming current offerings within each of the participating organizations, each contributing their piece and working on a designated platform, pushing each other’s ‘edges’ of understanding, to radically alter the value proposition and deliver new customer experience.

Today we do have this  tantalizing prospect, full of innovation promise, well within our reach with today’s technology potential. We are living in a connected, constantly adapting, world where networks and relationships are the essential wiring connections we all need to construct.

Adapting to collaborating never fully in control can be unnerving.

In the past, we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process, they dictated the value chain and determined the end result they felt was the right one, not anymore.

Today you can argue differently, why what you see as needed is not the best managed alone, it needs a collaborative effort, as the final arbitrator is the consumer and they have increasingly demanding needs.  As any idea or concept evolves the more you ‘flesh this out’, it changes by this fresh input, energy, and understanding but it needs greater engagement and collaboration to meet these increased customer experience demands.

The Status Quo is history

The promise needs to be clear, it allows for far more breakthrough innovation, greater challenging of the existing status quo to gain that substantial competitive advantage but it will constantly take organizations out of their existing comfort zones. It needs a very different level of focused leadership that see’s the real value of a connected future and is willing to drive through the changes this will take and the risks it can mean. The status quo offers no hiding place.

Setting about changing any status quo is tough, seeing something totally different, in a larger context and in a more sharing partnership calls for radical shifts in thinking. We have to develop those “sense and respond” capabilities, build a greater capacity to “read and react” far more, and then we need to “learn and leverage” what this all means in new potential by placing this into a context that has greater value than the existing ways.

The end result we are needing to deliver is increasingly calling for constructing innovating solutions in distinctly different highly connected ways, that are built from contributions from a broader ecosystem of vested parties, into solutions that offer really different, radical new customer experiences they really can value and meets their needs.

If we think ecosystems, we need to think differently.

Think carefully through any move to join innovation ecosystems, they do have potentially a high, immensely attractive return if managed well, and highly valuable to the participants; yet they are nearly always disruptive to the existing markets and require immense focus and resourcing to make a transformation. Yet the prize can be a sustaining competitive position unable to be matched due to this ecosystem lock-in of vested parties

I certainly believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery. Platforms, strategic partnerships, new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and ecosystems are the organizing environment to enact these.

Innovation ecosystems are clearly not for everyone but this type of innovation thinking around ecosystems and platform thinking will be a growing source of disruption across many, if not all, of our industries as well as the organizing means to tackle those complex societal problems needing radical solutions.

Welcome to the transforming world of Innovation Ecosystems

To this end, a new dedicated site discussing ecosystems, platforms and our need in forming seamless customer experiences has been created in a further collaboration with Jeffrey Phillips. The collaborating purpose is described here in this opening post that “innovation is not working anymore” and then Jeffrey picks up on the rising expectations of customers in “using ecosystems to build seamless experiences”  A further post on extending the seamless experience thinking  of “widen the aperture, narrow the focus” has just been published also.

We are at the early stages of discussing the changes coming our ‘innovating way’ on this new site. Why not come and join us as we travel this journey. A new innovation era is at hand and we all have the wish to understand it. Innovation ecosystems become essential.

START HERE:

https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com/

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The post The New Innovation Need: Organizing within a Networks of Collaborators first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.