Energy transition - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Innovation: the accelerator for the changes in our energy transitions

No energy transition will be achieved without invention and innovation, yet we are currently failing badly to fund research, development and deployment. We are losing the race to stop our planet’s warming as our innovative human endeavours are not at the level they should be, or we lack the “will” to make the changes we so desperately need to undergo to protect our planet.

The sheer scope of the energy transition often pulls me in so many different directions. Still, the foundation stays in place, that of making the contribution of my understanding of innovation as my focal point of contribution- the accelerant to energy change.

Please, we need a different Innovation narrative

(Visual adapted from AFSC explaining a narrative, in this case, social justice)

I have been struggling for quite some time with innovation’s increasing difficulties in influencing growth and achieving real impact.

I see many comments on the failure of innovation, in its inability to be at the core of an organization’s ambitions for growing and changing. Actually it is a long list of issues and concerns that we so often paper over and don’t fully address. There is a time for making a real change and I feel that could be now by shifting our thinking towards innovation ecosystems.

Let’s reflect first on the constraints or barriers that innovation faces, much self-imposed.

Innovation “fights” to attract resources, to gain management attention or to appreciate fully the difficulties and uncertainties in the time it takes, in its potential risks and its need often for a more ambitious and bold commitment of support and belief.

Our innovation processes stay locked in islands of knowledge, stubbornly not flowing across organizations, informing others and giving the right levels of insights, support, or collaboration needed. Innovation software management continues to be sold piecemeal, so often just bolted onto the other selected parts already in place, not being optimized.

Innovation Passion led me here

So many multiple strands constantly need to be pulled together to build a complete innovation picture.

We need to build theories, explore multiple connections, and build continuously on the patterns, the signals, and the interactions by extracting from all the different ‘cells’ of knowledge we all possess, which makes the application of innovation often highly unique to each of us.

Innovation ‘speaks to us all in different ways and has multiple meanings.

Then, when we grasp what we understand, we have to translate these thoughts into practical, workable solutions. By sharing, you learn and continue to build on this knowledge. You actually blend your own creation and learn from others, and that combination effect curates even greater knowledge and application.

To build a comprehensive view of any innovation built in a digital world needs is bringing together multiple strands of understanding, and that is tough, demanding and time-consuming.

Innovation needs to speak to us.

Gaining energy and idea generation

I have been asking myself how a combined effect of innovation and ecosystem design thinking will support the energy transition we are undertaking to give it additional traction and generation.

Let me share my thoughts and proposition here.

The vital “infusion” of innovation in thinking, approaching and building this into the front end of any energy transition provides a greater discovery structure and process that can greatly facilitate the changes, with more informed knowledge, insights and validation of a path to travel.

Finding fresh ideas and momentum Continue reading “Gaining energy and idea generation”

My own transformative dynamics of disruption

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.

Continue reading “My own transformative dynamics of disruption”

The essential five sense-making steps in any innovative transition

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. Continue reading “The essential five sense-making steps in any innovative transition”

Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress

Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress

Building a sustainable competitive advantage

Today’s challenge for me is not only to be building the innovation capacity but also to be establishing clear ways on how we should set about sustaining it. Increasingly, organizations must have the capability and capacity to sustain innovation to provide the stimulus for lasting growth and resolve the complex challenges we face today and in the future.

To get there, though, it does seem this must be through continued learning. Hence, your capabilities become stronger, evolving and more unique, thus making them more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate.

Let me outline an innovation framework that builds capability through a sustained approach.

When you set out to build capability to be sustaining, you need to consider there are two types of capabilities, distinctive, which are the characteristics of the organization which others cannot replicate and reproductive, which can be bought in by the competition but always need to need to be appropriate to any objectives you are trying to achieve. Continue reading “Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress”

Learning to collaborate in a rapidly changing world

visual from www.amle.org collaboration-the-missing-standard/

We clearly need to find ways to navigate ourselves back into some (new) order, to stabilize the chaos we are in, or beginning to feel we are finally moving out of the crisis and chaos of the last 18 months..
What we first need to do is make sense of what is going on around us.
Then, we need to determine what actions to take and the level of action, resource and support each part needs.
For this we need help, we need collaborators wanting to not just navigate back but more to navigate forward.
We are in a period of (great) change. How are we thinking about adjusting, not just to the immediate challenges but the greater ones that are certainly heading our way?
Within business, the present crisis offers a chance to make significant changes to how we operate in the future. However, I am not sure many of you feel the same; it seems disruption is in everything we need to undertake in what is coming towards us in change.
Continue reading “Learning to collaborate in a rapidly changing world”

Are we losing the Energy Transition Battle? Innovation to the rescue?

The growing fears are that we are falling behind the need to meet the Energy Transition required goals to the World has agreed to by 2050, set to meet the Paris Climate Agreement.
The climate is about to get really difficult to predict. We are facing some of the natural consequences of our present inability not to reduce greenhouse gases at the rate they are required. We as humans are the perpetrators of generating all these greenhouse gases, and global warming is ruining this one and only planet we have.
Each part of the world is pursuing its energy agenda, understandably so in many ways, but the shift from the dependence on fossil fuels and recognizing all future solutions should be clean energy.
Our environment is in such a significant crisis when you witness the changing weather patterns increasingly becoming unstable and unpredictable. Then we have the increased frequency and amount of flooding or drought many places in the world are facing, let alone the melting of our ice caps and arctic regions.
Our planet is under great stress. Continue reading “Are we losing the Energy Transition Battle? Innovation to the rescue?”

Thinking sustainability needs a mix of future scenarios.

The accelerating need to build a sustainability pathway

Sustainability is rising to be top or close to the top of a boards agenda. The growing concerns of several intertwined issues need addressing as they will initiate a significant change to the Business and how it operates and presents itself to the world.
Boards are asking where our business fits within and alongside society, both in who we serve and society in general, coupled with realising that the planet is heading towards a critical crisis and what we can do to reduce these pressures?
Not just sustainability forces a sharper need for strategic choices but the ability to undertake the product reinvention. A reinvention that concerns itself with reducing waste, minimizing carbon emissions, valuing the full life cycle and the ability to show the increasingly important end-of-life part of the lifecycle model. To extract precious, rare earth minerals and recycle parts reduces the demand for future mining or heat intensive materials.
Any products need to have a clear understanding of all their stages for the clarity of sustainability. Continue reading “Thinking sustainability needs a mix of future scenarios.”