The fear of the unknowns explodes upon those not ready
When the established order begins to creak and dismantle, seemingly in front of our eyes, those fears of the unknown can kick in, especially if you have been used to managing in an established (slowly) evolving way for most, if not all, of your business life.
We seem confronted with rapid change, and it is primarily within the business world related to technology and market uncertainty that is driving this. We need to counter “fear” with a different approach, recognizing most of what we feel might be the ‘unknown’ is actually ‘known.’
We need to recognize our unknowns, search out others who might be experts in that point of not knowing and gain their help in piecing the parts that might be fragmented together to bring that need for recognition and clarity in our mind.
Fear can immobilize us.
In a recent exchange I had within one innovation community discussion, it was suggested that Innovation Business Ecosystems did not have the expected uptake because of this “fear of the unknowns”.
What initially prompted this was my post on making the business case for “Thinking about Innovation Ecosystems”Well, we need to address fear to get past this mental blockage of the “fear of those unknowns”.
So this short post is on tackling fear and dealing with the unknowns.
This morning I decided to have an exchange on ChatGPT on the future of Innovation Management Software, I asked a number of questions in a short series and can well-relate to the answers provided incredibly quickly.
What do you think?
Do they make sense and are the suggestions a competitive threat or a trend towards a future that needs fully embracing before others do?
Building blocks towards Ecosystem thinking and designing
Part-way through 2022, I drew up a list of my focal points in researching, stimulating my thinking and finding different validation points on my Ecosystem thinking and design approaches. In early January this year, I took a stop, more a reflective period in these past months, to deepen down even further my knowledge of Ecosystem thinking and design. I aim to achieve, even advancing, Ecosystem understanding for those interested to learn and seeking advice through direct engagements.
My main focus on Ecosystems comes from the innovation perspective. How can we finally combine all the different parts of the Innovation system into one, fully connected up and achieve a far more open design where contributors, both inside and outside organizations, can contribute as it is the diversity of experience needed today to give fresh value and impact on complex and challenging issues, We need that discovery to commercialization fully connected up to be leveraged fully in all the diversity of contributions.
Innovation in its challenges and problems has become more complex and challenging, both in solutions offered and in working out all the connected parts to provide products or services that are superior to the existing ones. The need to provide that essential “dynamic” of having customer engagement in their data, a growing network of connected partners providing their input, their exploring and experimenting so the inventor can learn and seek to improve the product or service accordingly.
Transformational innovation is increasingly needed to cope with the change needed in many organizations to find a new or repositioned value proposition.
Transformational innovation is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, to achieve. When you are required to become (really) different at the core, you face the inherent conflict that making change is where clear leadership can only bring about, guiding the changes required through this highly disruptive period and providing the compelling story of the compelling future that provides a fundamentally better state than the one occupied today.
We have many innovation outcomes to choose from, including incremental, distinctive, radical or disruptive. Today we focus more on open innovation where a greater external diversity combines with internal expertise to generate the potential for something fundamentally different. Today we have technology as an enabler and applying innovation ecosystem thinking in designing open platforms so this network of experience can be exchanged, shared and developed.
Yet transformational innovation does require something really different.
To become different, you have to go beyond adding innovation at the periphery, bolting new concepts onto the existing core, you need to dismantle the core fundamentally.
What an utterly strange year, 2022 has been. We have been confronted, reflective and seemingly having to “kick start” our lives again after the challenges of living through the impacts of a global pandemic.
We go into 2023 far more in personal and business conflict. We do need to find a new way of working. It is not throwing away the technology, tools or established processes, it is transforming these in new and different ways. We have not found the “real-time” to stop, explore and approach concepts and innovative ideas in different ways. Our mindset or conditioning was fairly hard-wired from our past ways of working, we felt unable to justify “permission” to change how we undertook work and have found it challenging with the impact of being remote. Many have simply walked away from their past established ways of working. We are confronting unsettling times for many reasons.
In many ways, it felt all we knew or needed was suddenly not good enough. We have lost our understanding of many things we became used to, and suddenly it all seemed challenged in far bigger ways. War, flooding, famine, shortages, and illness challenges began impacting our lives. We were indeed been confronted with a series of crises and the need for a fast, thoughtful set of responses which we were unprepared or incapable to give as each challenge has been highly complex.
We were beginning to be more open to being more reflective but we have been constantly pushed to take us back to “business as usual”. In many ways, we are struggling with a need for a “reset” but it is far more complex than that as we are in the middle of multiple crises.
This return to the old normal is a non-starter for me, we are in a rapidly changing world
We are in need of recognizing and discerning how much our world is upside down, so we can begin to understand how we need to re-equip ourselves to a new way of working, thinking and responding. We need to “righten” what is wrong with this feeling of much of what we are doing being out of balance.
We are all struggling to transform ourselves. Our businesses are grappling with the current economic difficulties we all presently facing including shortages, disruptions, and dealing with inflation and economic downturns and massive climate change challenges. We are not only confronted with the potential of the toughest downturn in modern times but with all the pressures with the speed of decision-making, and technological advances that seem to ‘suck up’ more of our daily lives instead of helping to resolve it. 2022 was unsettling for me.
Viewing the stages of the Virtual Industrial metaverse journey
The Industrial Metaverse has really “announced” itself this year. For me, it accelerated in my attention once Siemens and Nvidia announced their partnership to explore the Industrial Metaverse in early July.
The announcement came at the launch of Siemens Xcelerator, a digital platform and having both announcements made at the same event had a more extensive “bang” with the more attention-grabbing one, announcing the Industrial Metaverse partnership, in my view, overshadowed the other, the Siemens Xcelerator, which forms the Siemens building block towards this industrial future and the essentials required of a digital platform to accelerate any businesses digital transformation.
“Siemens Xcelerator is an open digital business platform that will accelerate digital transformation. Now companies of all sizes can access the digital technologies to transform how they compete, collaborate and connect“- Siemens website.
Through this open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator is featuring and building a curated portfolio of IoT-enabled hardware and software, a powerful ecosystem of partners, and a marketplace.
The journey is moving towards the Industrial Metaverse and I see it evolving in this way
There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we manage innovation, which needs ecosystem thinking and design. Not only in thinking and design but in how we structure its architecture, one based on platforms, open apps, and a marketplace for selection appropriate for the innovation delivery intention. This needs to be in open, highly collaborative ecosystems.
We need a better conceptual framework to build, one based on knowledge-based intelligence and well-grounded, driven by dynamic and constant interactions, events and processes, so all involved can be engaged in building solutions that have fresh impact and value within the market space identified.
My mind map of the over-arching aims of a new innovation narrative is shown below.
A formula to build a framework for sustainable innovation
Here is my solution that I think is worth working through first to absorb it and its combination. Then apply it to your innovation-building activity as a framework for innovation. Each time you are reviewing innovative activity, run through this formula in your head to see if each of the parts is embedded into the work.
I have worked on the formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE for many years.
In that post, I detail the make-up of the formula, made up of the combination of positive relationships between the following interrelated parts.
We are or need to be, in search of a sustainable future where we can constantly build upon innovation capabilities, capacities and competencies that can be refreshed, strengthened and sometimes reduced to meet the circumstances.
The formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE makes sense to me. How you build out these yourself further adds more uniqueness and source of advantage.
Our existing business organizations need to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical constant change. They need to be ready to meet different challenges that will be consistent, complex and highly challenging, require the ability to be highly adaptive, and need high levels of open collaboration.
Connected technology needs to be central to responding rapidly and enabling this more volatile world we are facing. To achieve this responsiveness, organizations need to organize around ecosystems and platform technology approaches. This approach provides the potential ability to deliver an understanding of constant change. One that recognizes it has to be part of a growing collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected, rapidly changing and challenging world.
We need to transform or be (totally) disrupted; this is where knowing your ecosystem and network comes in as the new thinking and design of how this needs to be constructed and understood.
How and where innovation fits will depend on this transforming effect.
Whenever I get into conversations about innovating, we always hit difficulties on the question, “how can I build this well and be sustainble?” Hence, I often try to build an extended narrative for what makes up the innovation capability building and understanding for the future. I frame this as the linkages of innovation purpose.
This opening narrative becomes increasingly important when you argue the move from our present way of thinking and building innovation systems, often linear and spread across different teams and islands of internal knowledge. into future ones built far more around innovation ecosystems in thinking and design that are integrated and connected, to open up conversations and exchanges, seeking common points of value in a broader network of solution providers.
I outlined in a post in May 2022, “linking sense of innovating purpose“, my ten points of linkage need, and I want to build on this further here in some explanations for each of the linkages..
I want to go deeper into these ten linking parts, breaking them down a little further.
