Seeing innovation differently through ecosystem thinking and design

September 23, 2022Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Knowledge Ecosystems, Platforms, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing1 Comment
Thinking of innovation as an innovation ecosystem in design

We need to re-think innovation and provide a new level of innovation integration and optimization.

What we see increasingly is the need to change to a different thinking, one of what “innovation ecosystems.” can provide.

In designing these innovation ecosystems, we might have the potential answer to overcoming and giving innovation that chance to be more central to the core of the business. It might offer us the ability to connect much of the rich internal knowledge with that outside one, that other organizations and individuals can provide, in diversity, or thought or contribution.

I envisage an ecosystem of working upon like-minded goals and ambitions, by collaborating for delivering a new form of innovation value. Collaborating in ecosystem thinking and design I would suggest opens up significant potential and combinations, that provide added value and significant opportunity for improvement on the existing offerings.

Approaching innovation on a common, shared technology platform can significantly enhance the discovery, experimentation, exploring and exploiting diverse skills and expertise through to commercialization.

Applying innovation thinking to Affordability versus Sustainability

October 18, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability2 Comments

I recently wrote a post, “Affordability versus Sustainability – a cause to be addressed.”

That post looked at the shifts that I felt were underway in moving from a society that accepts where it is heading, in expecting “affordability” is changing as our “choice” gets constrained.

I argued there is this growing recognition that a consistent amount of crisis points are causing growing anxiety and stress, and these tensions and pressures are not sustainable, they are shifting our attitudes.

Are we appreciating that there is a fundamental change happening, and we have to have an increased sustainability focus, one that is becoming a much larger part of our thinking in the future?

So how do you vote?

So if you are voting for a continuance of affordability expecting an abundant world, then our innovation stays locked into incremental improvements to keep forcing the price down and demand up. But we are deluding ourselves.

Presently we drive efficiency and effectiveness but progressively into a crisis of our own making. Demand outstrips supply. We are consuming more than we can sustain, and something, really soon, will have to give.

Choosing Sustainability then innovation has that real chance of being radical, distinctive and providing breakthroughs that can revolutionise and change our world. It can allow us to begin the pathway back to getting our planet and its limited resources into some semblance of balance.

China the story of innovation and disruption.

October 6, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

part Image credit Knowledge @ Wharton

Disruption is all around us; it never seems to go away; it simply appears in a different and often entirely new form. The result is the same; it disrupts what we know and often in how we suddenly need to set about doing it differently.

Much of the innovative disruptions seem so obvious; you wonder why we were not doing these before. They connect up lots of the “dots” we have previously been focusing upon and make them blur into one bigger dot that becomes the new norm. Think Amazon, Airbnb, Uber. Think China.

Many of these are defined today as marketplaces, where innovation has pushed the boundaries and stretched thinking to combine aspects of multiple transactions into connected and seamless ones.

My own transformative dynamics of disruption

September 17, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Shifting dynamics in innovation1 Comment

The Gordian Knot We Are All Facing

I can honestly say I have been back at school for the past months. This remote learning stuff has been hard, challenging but stimulating.

Let me tell you about this as it recognises how things are changing in our world and certainly in my world, in particular. It is a very disrupting, disturbing world.

We often make what amounts to a series of mistakes, constantly extrapolating the present and layering it onto a way we see the future, based on what we know or are reluctant to give up. I’m afraid that’s not right, sometimes painfully wrong in lost time, investment and sudden realisation.

We are doing nothing but constraining the change occurring all around us at a limited pace and speed by placing the wrong lens on this.

The essential five sense-making steps in any innovative transition

September 6, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, innovation execution delivery, Leading innovation, Shifting dynamics in innovation1 Comment

Today’s call is for more ‘search, scope, speed, stretch and scale’ irrespective of the challenge being worked upon. These are essential steps in any transformation work, in any innovation undertaken to take discovery through to commercialisation.

Applying the innovation lense to the energy transition requires a significant need for innovation in all it does to undertake the transformation needed. It needs to apply these five steps within any innovation thinking.

The five aspects of search, scope, speed, stretch and scale are highly relevant to the success of any innovation introduction.

So we need to think through the five essential needs within innovation when applying innovative thinking to the Energy Transition, a growing focal point of my work.

My multipliers for innovation at the Front End of Energy

September 1, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation1 Comment

Following my last post, “I aim to put more innovation into the front end of Energy“, I want to outline why I am focusing increasingly on this front end of the energy transition (FEE) within my innovation work.

For me, it is the ability to apply the “multiplier effect” to any discovery and validation that accelerates the understanding of where the potential growth and impact points of a new business opportunity can occur.

Today, we are all trying to piece together the Energy Transition.

The claim is that there are solutions abound to move us towards the Energy Transition we all need of clean, reliable, energy built upon renewables, but I honestly don’t share that current optimism; we actuaölly have an awfully long way to go in discovery, application and adoption.

I aim to put more innovation into the front end of Energy

August 22, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability3 Comments

I see the front end of energy as the critical feeding-in point for the energy transition. So what does this mean exactly?

The front end of energy for me is the point of discovery and validation. It is the place I feel I can make the best contribution within the energy transition. The discovery is where the stimulus and catalyst point to take an idea to commercialization. 

The value of three horizon mapping for a Sustainability Journey.

August 4, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability

Sustainability is one of the hottest topics in the business world at present. There is a hunt to find a new growth engine for a business and fundamentally show the pathway to a sustainable future.

A sustainable future that mobilizes action in searching for new economic thinking. One which incorporates a more circular model of management that builds a more purposeful recycling approach that has the objective to reduce the pressures on our use of precious minerals and resources and current consumption patterns.

East meets West in understanding Innovation Cultural Orientation

July 27, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Sustainability1 Comment

East and West- the different meeting points in understanding

I lived for about fifteen years in Asia and the before, and in the in-between period, I travelled around the region a fair amount.

Today less so, but ask me where I want to go, and it is back to my city for twelve plus of those years, Singapore.

Some events today set me thinking that resulted in re-issuing this post, shortening it down a bit. Often we do not stop and think of the real differences culturally in how we want to0 engage and build relationships between the East and the West

Participating in business and engaging socially with Asia, watching how Asia has evolved has been a real experience that stays with you as something hugely valuable. It partly shapes your thinking and how you look at things going on in the world.

The Cascading Innovation Effect.

July 13, 2021Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Tackling innovation

Visual source; http://www.adaptivecircularcities.com/

We need to think about a choice-cascade integrative model for innovation. Often we fail to understand our role in contributing to innovation; we need a cascading effect. Here I want to explain my thinking behind this and provide the visual cascading steps I feel help us succeed in innovation.

For me, the “cascading effect” for innovation is “a sequence of events in which each produces the circumstances necessary for the initiation of the next”.

It presents an idea, a concept, a prototype, a piece of knowledge that provides the catalyst to be exploited in a broader community as the next step and so on. It cascades. It is where we fit understanding and fresh knowledge within the innovation web.

Getting innovation through any process of understanding is hard. Knowing what is required to generate innovation throughout an entire organization is even more so.

We need to deploy the cascading effect on innovation to support this supporting “effect.”