Sometimes, we need to go back to our original roots of thinking to remind ourselves and sometimes refresh the areas of focus we need to emphasise. Today, I focus increasingly on how innovation and ecosystem thinking and design need to combine in the Energy Transition.
I believe Ecosystems in design and thinking must form the future path to travel for innovation, collaborations, invention and growing cooperation. We need to think through more demanding challenges today that are highly complex and to do this with a higher degree of success in valuable outcomes. We need to open our thinking and minds and share knowledge to learn from each other.
A fundamental question to ask: “What do I need to consider for entering into an innovation ecosystem design?”
I wrote a post in June 2012 on thinking about the dark side of the innovation moon. As India quite rightly celebrates its first landing in lunar exploration, near the south pole of the moon, the dark side, it prompted me to look back at this post and decide to republish this again here.
Have you ever wondered what is on the other side of the moon when you look up towards it? Do we need to look beyond our horizons in our daily lives? Should we question beyond our existing horizons in how we innovate, explore, and push ourselves into the unknown?
What about the other side, the darker, unknown side of the moon? Are you ever curious about what lies behind what we can see? I certainly am.
Innovation is perhaps like the moon. We only see a part of it wherever we stand; we appreciate that part and value what we see and work within. It is even better if we can repeat it again and again. It can even offer something reassuring and comfortable; we grow comfortable within our known borders of innovation activity.
Within the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework lies the core, the different innovation stacks, and the learning components. Here, I want to briefly talk about the importance of the learning components that support the innovation design and especially the different innovation stacks.
The elements of the innovation stack are designed to support innovation’s core tasks, including learning, absorbing, assessing knowledge management, creativity, design, experimentation, and testing. By modularizing these tasks and their interfaces, organizations can assess their innovation progress by having a complete innovation system available to them, designed on specific stack elements to address knowledge operation requirements in the stage of development to commercialization.
The Innovation Stacks are ready to support different steps in the innovation engagement process
Additionally, with the upgrade in technology and platform approach, we can support the rapidly emerging human-AI collaboration needed for each building block and component and provide a step-by-step validation.
Yet it is the sequence of how we learn that becomes vital to “feed” and build the innovation stacks.
Much of business today is caught up in managing short-term change that is growing in complexity and challenges.
So the challenges in the past year have been highly focused on supply chain disruptions, plugging gaps in technology solutions that can provide a higher flexible, agile, and advanced planning and production environment and continue to keep moving towards securing a more sustainable future that reflects the need to become carbon neutral, net zero.
Yet disruption is increasing; weare in a volatile world of constant change.
Today’s systems are highly stretched and have been designed and built for a steady, repeating business, the era of yesterday. Flexibility, agility, and adaptability have yet to be addressed sufficiently in design or mind shifts for our present and future operations to provide a different, more agile operating environment. Consistently has been the norm, whereas today it reacts to constant change coming from multiple, often unpredictable situations.
During May and June 2023, I worked through and concluded my thinking on why we needed to change our Innovation approach from far to often a linear one, and consider a new, more up-to-date, and dynamic solution for managing innovation, one that recognises the non-linear nature of so much of our undertakings today in innovation, from discovery to commercialisation.
I have called this the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework– here is why and what went into this proposal that I feel should be adopted for managing innovation in the future.
As the investigation, validation, and viewpoints were built up over several posts, I felt summarising the series here gives you the appetite to delve into the posts themselves.
We need to shift our innovative thinking from static to dynamic.
We have been in very static, traditional approaches to innovation, very segmented and often insular, and as so often happens in innovation, it has complexities that seemingly grow and multiple changes, partly from what we discover in the development of new solutions but partly from far more rapid changes in the business landscape and our current innovation process often breaks down and limits the ability to manage this across the whole development to delivery lifecycle.
We need systems and processes that are flexible, adaptable, and can enable continuous improvements but are fully connected, transparent, and integrated across the entire business. We need to approach innovation differently through connected agility, have speed and automation more central, and provide roles for a great diverse set of participants.
A system that encourages forming strategic alliances, partnerships, and knowledge sharing to drive innovation and create shared value in open, thoughtful, and collaborative ways. This is where technology enables these connections and triggers different thinking in the quest for moving toward more extraordinary valuable solutions—the “connected” value of behaviours thinking ecosystems and operating on collaborative platforms.
I believe that innovation ecosystems transform how we approach and manage innovation. The value is in developing them out and here is why By embracing the power of ecosystems, we…
I can remember getting completely “hooked” on Business Ecosystems by a series from Deliottes and one specific report, introduced and coordinated by Eamonn Kelley, with many contributors including Kelly Machese, Anna Muoio, John Hagel, and Larry Keeley. It was called “Business ecosystems come of age” and maybe it did not change my life, but it gave it a clearer focus- innovation ecosystems. Take a read, it is well worth it, its value then, 2015 has only matured in my mind.
I was also looking at another great piece by Deloitte on tapping into the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem under a report called “How to Innovate the Silicon Valley Way” that came out in 2016. Another great motivation for focusing on innovation ecosystems.
One question asked in the Silicon Valley piece was “Why should enterprises give up transactional approaches in favor of dynamic, ecosystem-led innovation?
Today I would reverse that question “Why would any company still be locked into transactional approaches only functioning on its own resources?”
Today the struggle is to deal with increasing complexity, undoing the “knot” of difficult challenges and these cannot be undone or solved without collaborations outside one organization’s walls. We need to push this even further and totally accept that the hardest but best collaborations come from being involved in cross-industry or sector innovation systems.
I completed a series of posts in April 2023, published on this posting site, on cross-sector needs when considering or working in innovation ecosystems.
To get to a good understanding of cross-sector innovation ecosystems collaborations, you need to take a very considered holistic view of what is needed in any collaboration, let alone cutting across sectors to generate a successful outcome. All the elements of skills, processes, tools, capabilities, and behaviors are essential in supporting an effective collaboration across sectors that need to be involved.
I have summarized the key points of these four posts; click on the links referred to. I have outlined the multiple needs to consider so you are more aware of the differences and needs of managing within an ecosystem of collaborators.
After a series of posts introducing and explaining the thinking and design behind the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework, I thought it would be a good idea to put this into a sequence of visuals that should take you through this to provide a decent understanding of its make-up and logic.
Organizations in today’s business environment need to adapt rapidly and dynamically, have the need to bring the innovation management process into a constant technological advancement, and be more tailored in its design by their own specific needs and not “offered” as a rigid set of solutions. We need to embrace a significant change in the way we “set about” innovation.
If you are interested in reading more in the series I have been posting then here are the links in the order of posting.
The importance here is recognizing the shift in mindset and thinking towards a Building Block approach to build up the Innovation Stacks. Each stack “sits” on a technology platform. Thinking through what this means requires understanding, relating, and putting a clear context of innovation, what you want to achieve, and how to set about this.
As I mentioned in a previous post, for any innovation enterprise change, I do not recommend a “big bang” solution; it should be phased to validate and grow to understand, build up validation, justify making the changes, bedding in the thinking needed and approaches to provide the level of returns and the growing understanding of cost/ benefit conversion.
The potential returns, including increased agility, improved innovation outcomes, enhanced collaboration, and long-term competitiveness, make this radical change worthwhile for organizations aspiring to thrive in today’s dynamic business environment. The ability to build the context and show its (ongoing) value makes the difference. You need a systematic approach and project staging plan.
The importance here is recognizing the shift in mindset and thinking towards a Building Block approach to build up the Innovation Stacks. Each stack “sits” on a technology platform. Thinking through what this means requires understanding, relating, and putting a clear context of innovation, what you want to achieve, and how to set about this.
