The problem or challenge with this focusing upon ‘breaking’ practices or new methodologies, are they can be so much harder to master and build them into established positions and practices, without the right amount of debate, understanding and assessing the implications and impact.

This often needs different perspectives to form the final position. We fail to constantly review and re-engineer the innovation process and tend to layer more upon it, without a consistent reassessing what we are trying to achieve.

The excitement of ‘breaking innovation’ is in the pioneering, experimenting, discovering, sharing and exchanging. If you are always open to this new thinking, it does enrich and advance innovation understanding and that makes it so valuable but so demanding.

Many of these for me have been utterly enjoyable to explore as they advance our understanding of the emerging management practice of innovation but you can’t ‘gloss over’ the basics of innovation.

The ability to translate innovation understanding is a constant challenge. The ‘lead- lag’ time is sometimes very long and tortuous to make the necessary changes within established organizations to achieve the necessary ‘buy-in’ and understanding of the impact and return and establish a certain rhythm and return.

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly?

Often we were missing the constants that are required to ‘set in place’ for innovation, I call these those anchor points, otherwise, we often are simply increasing the layering on, more and more, not giving enough emphasis on how to integrate these into a newly emerging practice of innovation that builds on a solid foundation.

The basics of innovation still form around building the engagement, leadership, and involvement, in constructing a culture, the climate and environment needed, so as to allow innovation to evolve and thrive. Then there is that need for a constant investment in people, in our networks and relationships, that all need to come together. These are the foundation to build innovation capacities.

Then, we have the investments in structures, systems, and governance, making sure these are flexible and robust enough to make what we work upon, as responsive, agile, adaptive, exploitative and exploratory. All coming together so we can end up with great new ideas, things and most importantly, in winning successful concepts that grow our business.

The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

The shifts taking place has been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. how it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs and then, it is forcing us to reconstruct our innovation thinking, so as to gain from all this transformation occurring all around us.

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period have come from a great explosion of Lean Management principles and practices and the incorporating of Design thinking into our work. Both of these are being rapidly embraced by our organizations, large and small. How these are fully and successfully integrated remains a challenge for most to resolve today.

The understanding of relating more to individual customer needs, building new business models has been greatly encouraged by the real need to “get out of the building” and learn to pilot, experiment and build a growing system of prototyping on what we learn from these engagements and testing, many emerging from innovation labs, encouraging an intrapreneur spirit, set up on entrepreneurship principles.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around that are about to massively change the way we collaborate and build solutions that are more complex and require many parties to come together and attempt to solve greater challenges. The movement towards the different crowdsourcing techniques and all the variations (or derivation’s) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’ have changed the game.

Innovation is constantly opening up when you combined  diverse thinking with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much.

The raw power of knowledge needs harnessing and translating

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks that need deeper capture and translation, so as to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the constructing of minimal viable products and rapid experiment and design to increase in focus, so as to accelerate innovation discovery and delivery.

We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before with our innovation concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well into the “how” from the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it certainly still seems. Speed is dominating at present then we all are in need to “Scale” and resolve the constant worries over the “Execution” of the new value proposition.

There is this constant, pressing need, to absorb, synthesize and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovation thinking.  It becomes a constant task to manage just this new understanding, translating it and embedding new practices as difficult, time consuming and tough.

Reflecting on all of this – so what does this all mean?

There is this need to be reacting to this in new framing ways, building this into a new innovation road map for our businesses.

It can be a dangerous assumption that we ‘think’ innovation is well understood; often it is not, it continues to be a serious source of frustration and disappointment, at all levels. This essential ‘fixing the basics’ still needs a clear focus to resolve, coupled with new emerging practices to forge a pathway for others to understand and feel comfortable to use. It needs a constant balance between extolling the old, exploring the new; that blending of practice, existing, new and breaking.

Our need is to ask is how can we blend this emerging thinking into core aspects of the innovating beliefs and structures in place, so they can build and contribute to the ongoing building of innovation capabilities, competencies and capacity, surely a key focal area?

My work entails being reactive, reflective and responsive.

Sometimes as we take stock it does surprise you on how the innovation needle had been moved, again and again. This sometimes makes navigation sometimes difficult

It is clear innovation is constantly advancing, yet, offering my reflective thought here, it can have countless layers of fresh paint but if the basic foundation is not solid, it only hides the truth underneath, that much is simply “rusting away¨.  Innovation needs a clear, strong core that needs constantly re-calibrating to the changing market conditions we are finding ourselves in.

We so often miss this fundamental addressing of the urgent need for peeling away these old decaying, rather rusty layers and fixing the basics on a new design, reflecting where innovation is today (not in the past) and where we believe it is heading for in the future by balancing out the portfolio and equipping ourselves with the capabilities and capacities to build these in progressive ways.

May I ask?

Have you ever had an independent assessment of your innovation process simply because the basics around innovation are not common knowledge? I would argue that so often senior teams are somewhat paralyzed in terms of being able to move forward strategically, despite the need and recognition of innovation’s importance

The challenge is how to unlock this often conflicting set of innovation pressures and bring everyone to a common point of understanding of today and where all need to head in the future.

I certainly believe we are in need to conduct some vigorous analysis of the innovation system as we have understood a lot but much does need to be challenged as the future will be managing innovation in a very different way; more collaborative, more open, more reliant on technology and customer involvement

I’d certainly recommend starting with both an Innovation Work Mat discussion and a Three Horizon framing of the future from today’s understanding of where we think it is heading and how can we plan out how to get there, in sensible steps, as part of any comprehensive review.

We do need to not only embed innovation practices we need to strive to update these- can I be of help?

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The post Reflecting on our innovation practices first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Perhaps I have fallen into the very trap I have campaigned about in the past, in recognizing and resolving the disappointing results we achieve from all the work we put into the front end of innovation. The “warm and fuzzy” front end of innovation can make us all a little grumpy.

Let me explain. I recently wrote out a newsletter – termed a thought or two – to my innovation network. This network is split between the advisers and consultants delivering into clients and the clients themselves, that I have a connections into that have built over the years. These are mostly through knowing them, working with them, exchanging or simply connecting in LinkedIn. The subject was the changes occurring at the front end of innovation.

My argument was the results we have obtained from a disconnected set of front end activities was poorer than they should be, and this needs changing. I feel there is a real shift potential happening today through connecting technology and connected solutions to ‘transform’ this front end. My feeling is the front end is often “warm and fuzzy” and it needs to be radically redesigned. I wrote about “hearing all the voices of ideas at the front end and the “two distinct parts of the innovation funnel” building from my original post “the new extended innovation funnel“, written in 2011.

Well I delivered the “warm” in this latest “heads up newsletter” and yes I received back some nice compliments on my thinking, as “nicely put”,”completely agree” “confirmed my thinking for a several years”, one I loved “idea driven innovation does not work.”

I even had a few coming back fairly strongly in delivering ‘grief’ around: “you seem to be telling only half the story” or “did you pay attention to what I have said before” or finally even one suggesting their solution, presented over many years, was really the one to answer my piece, not  provide even more new ones.

So far these comments have come from those advising into clients, not (potential) clients themselves, that are clearly far to busy managing the fragmented front end they are responsible for. I often find it takes time to percolate down breaking those different ideas into organizations, it often tends to be a “wait and see” or what is best practice on this? Then they get ‘caught out’ and chase for instant answers on this or that. I often wonder why that is so? No prizes being offered!

So, some ‘grief’, some compliments, and I ended up feeling ‘warm’ but a little chastened, as I had failed in clearly raising the level of curiosity intended in my mail out for a greater, deeper engagement that I was attempting. A view to prompt the thinking about the front end differently, perhaps I left this maybe far too “fuzzy” for many and not with a clear enough a value statement to build from by engaging me more on a direct, more consultative basis. Partly my intention as I’ll explain here.

Moving from warm and fuzzy into bubbling to the surface.

Clearly in the ‘heads up’ newsletter I was not as specific as I should have been, it got a little buried in the build up, the context setting. So I need to spell out a little more on that I am seeing / appreciating a greater clustering of software solutions that feed into and out of the idea management process and I’ll start this a little more here.

The ‘thing’ that is new is the technology is beginning to really link all this external and internally generated knowledge or insights, and this is coming from software solutions. I am not claiming ideas from outside, roadmapping, technology search, idea relating are new in themselves, it just has not been CONNECTED as it can be now – that is the new part.

That inflow and outflows makes it more dynamic, structured and capable of getting ideas that have potentially greater impact and relationship – relationship to people engagement, to criteria set or defined and alignment into the goals / objectives of the organization with its innovation.

Providing the ‘heads up’ newsletter here. It builds a common story on our failing at the front end of innovation

So let me provide the newsletter here also, it still does build the argument for change even if it seems “warm and fuzzy” for a number of people within my network. The software solutions I allude too, well those clients interested or curious enough can contact me. The consultants that want to know, well they will equally find out soon enough.

So here is the newsletter, I will be explaining the impact and change potential that can be made in a future post.

The front end of innovation is undergoing considerable change, is it for you?

Ideas need to be even more connected both within the organization and outside coming in. Why? With all the multiple forces at work that seem to be challenging and transforming so much in this age of increasing disruption, we are requiring a bolder set of innovation solutions than ever before.

The need to see beyond incremental products as the ‘safe’ solution is being questioned today, ever-more so and that is driving the big shift at this front end. Innovation needs to deliver far more.

The value of ideas is not valuable unless connected.

We are long past “ideas for ideas sake” although I’m still told I’m very wrong here with all the continued calls to create those ideation ‘hotspots’ as that seems to engage those within organizations or so many think.

How mistakenly wrong this call for simply ideas really is. Failure remains still as high as, or even higher, than ever where precious resources get consistently side-tracked. Most of this “cause and effect” you can point towards as being purely internally created, in generating the innovation without that real market awareness or client understanding. Broader engagement in innovation creation is presently hampered by this narrow view. One solution is that we need to deepen the front end of understanding and I believe solutions are in plain sight.

Having an Idea Management system, as a stand-alone, is fine for incremental innovation but if your organization is really looking for industry spanning outcomes that yield radical, more distinctive and sometimes disruptive innovation, this does require a greater commitment well beyond aspects of open innovation, selective crowd-sourcing or hackathons. It needs greater front end connection than just relying on purely internally generated ideas, ones that seem so often provided to fit specific and narrow agenda’s. Many innovations emerging from this internal orientation are lacking real market and customer awareness.

Resources within innovation are often highly constrained and can get so easily distracted due to poor scoping or disciplines or chasing idea rainbows. We have so much wasted effort, demoralizing and counter-productive inputs and outputs generating poor final outcomes that don’t fit the current needs of customers, or transform the landscape sufficiently by picking up all the signals that are all around us.

There is a real need to challenge what we have been doing and re-evaluate it. We have come a good way towards more strategic innovation, less operational necessity as this point of time.

The big shift potential at the front end of innovation

The big change in my mind is that organizations need to shift from idea generation being simply generated from inside the organization as the starting point. For me the shift to trends and market signals coming into the organization to kick-start the internal generation, to connect the dots, develop far more cross-industry awareness, this is becoming the real and current ‘buzz’ and enabler to getting closer to finding innovation, that can offer a higher impact and return.

It is within the clustering of software solutions around idea management that changes the dynamics, enables greater engagement, higher quality and relevant inputs and provides the outcomes to be more structured and impactful.

Coming from the outside-in offers so much fresh stimulus yet it is recognizing those signals as value is become the innovating challenge, translating these into innovation deliverables.

How do you organize around all the changes that are coming from cross-industry awareness, determining the trends that taking place before our very eyes as the potential dots that might connect with the internal thinking? Yet we remain stubbornly blind to them while we conduct internal idea generation as our starting point and then go outside. We need to rethink the front end totally differently.

Today we need outside-in first in organized, structured ways, before we internally generate and then either go back outside or develop from within. A greater need for engagement and enablement requires different solutions at this front end.

We need to open up to what is going on all around us, daily and allow that ‘greater’ external thinking in prior to idea management, so we can relate the ‘known’ from within, with the becoming-known or the “we were unaware,” the unknowns, from outside to connect the unconnected for some dramatically different innovation outcomes.

Are you changing your front end of innovation?

You should be redesigning your front end radically differently from today. Why don’t you talk to me on exploring this shift taking place, before your very eyes, a little more to relate or clarify these changes? The front end is shifting, are you making plans? You should be. I am an email or phone call away.

In summary here within this post.

I got some grief, I got some compliments on raising the difficulties that we still struggle with, at this front end of innovation, one or two got annoyed that I was not providing them the solutions I was alluding too.

Did I fail in communicating a growing shift at the front end of innovation – no!. Sure I’m going to gift wrap the whole story am I not? Yeah right! I need to live and through my research, and work through Agility Innovation Specialists I’m around to provide my innovation expertise and service in my advocacy practice.

I come back to a lovely comment made by a good friend and inspiration thinker I knew in Singapore, Dilip Mukerjea and his brain dancing thinking:  If you wish to have value for money would you give money for value?

So there is a shift. Connecting the front end through software that integrates the inside, the outside, the capturing process, the translating process, the registering and the plotting going forward process I think is different, radically different through its connecting possibilities. If we can replace more of the ‘fuzzy’ at the front end that it is beyond the simple fact that the front end is all about needs, insights, different perspectives, it is about breaking down and connecting up all the silo’s that have held the front end up, we might achieve a greater connection and engagement, that can deliver better results.

I believe is absolutely necessary for innovation to fulfill its promise and be more central to our growth plans within organizations and we, it seems are getting closer, in terms of creating an integrated end2end innovation system as something that is finally beckoning, at least at the front end initially!

That is the ‘breaking’ story – warm and fuzzy but connecting the front end of innovation. More will come soon.

The post Warm and Fuzzy at the Front End of Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Well, only 24 hours later the fog was blown away and powerfully so. Do you believe in serendipity, that gift of making fortunate discoveries? Well it has certainly risen up the “I believe” scale for me. Over the last weekend I was catching up on the emails and I had one sent to me by ISPIM, a network of researchers, industrialists, consultants and public bodies, who share an interest in innovation management.

ISPIM had sent me their latest “Innovation Watch- issue 1-2013” and in this there was a timely (well clearly for me) article from Karl-Heinz Leitner, a Senior Scientist with the Austrian Institute of Technology, entitled  Innovation Futures: How Will We Innovate in the Future?
The article reminded me of his work that he had been co-ordinating between 2009 and 2012, funded by the EU FP7 on a foresight project on the future of innovation (INFU). It can be explored under the web page www.innovation-futures.org where I then spent a few hours reminding myself of this work that I had picked up upon in the past but somehow had forgotten or become buried under other innovation activities that help pay my bills.

So fast-forward into the innovation future

After my comments about hearing different “weak signals” here was a report blowing the whistle directly into my ear. So I climbed into the report, all 144 pages of it (well almost) and emerged out of this journey sometime in the middle of this week after I had completed much of my work-on-hand.

The clear message was the “evidence was there, all around us, that there was changing innovation patterns, more evolutionary than radical”. There are new forms of innovation, novel emerging concepts, ideas and strategies of how innovation is organized or possibly will be.

The report had a very systematic approach with the team looking out across the possible future innovation landscape so this could raise awareness and allow for a debate on these possible innovation patterns and their implications and might give a ‘momentum of change’. Lets work through some of its findings.

The innovation future project process

The process first undertook the identification of these emerging signals of change that were coming through current innovation patterns (the weak signals) with the aim of identifying newly emerging apparent and visible ones that may not have reached mainstream but may have disruptive impacts for industry, the economy and society in the future.

The work identified 68 signals of change pointing towards emerging innovation patterns and were already visible but not in the mainstream but had a positive trending to them.  Out of this the INFU research team generated and visualised twenty (20) innovation visions. They arrived at these by formulating, amplifying and combining some of the original signals.

After this the team provoked discussions across a community, conducted interviews with industrial and academic experts, provided an on-line survey to discuss and access the innovation visions.

The end results through clustering and consolidating the twenty even further down ended up with a final result of eight (8) final visions or nodes of change.

These eight visions were confronted with different socio-economic framework conditions and global mega-trends to finally synthesize scenarios of these final and possible innovation futures.

So the report views these as the drivers they presume to have the most decisive influence on the future evolution of the innovation process. Of course this future landscape will be shaped by individuals, society, organizations, the eventual economics, and by policy but these final eight seem to be emerging.

Firstly the dimensions of change – the consequences and implications
Before we get into this final eight there are seemingly common opportunities, risks and consequences that were observed coming out of this work. These can be summarized in seven statements offered as having consequences and implications to manage:

• There will be new forms of coordination and mediation – existing models will be challenged by growing coordination mechanisms, such as self-organizing communities or web-based co-design platforms. These today are seen to be on the rise. The emerging ones will present challenges on who is in control of these. The present reality is that our business organizations are not well set up in the emerging competencies required, suffer considerable inertia and in-grained difficulties and barriers to changing their cultures, learning and adapting.

• There will be a wider participation with the increasing trend of citizens and customers gaining increasing relevance to influence innovation, both in deciding the priorities and contributing to the innovation process. Co-creation will require more instruments, tools and techniques to enable this effectively. They are warning too much participation and too little coordination may slow down the innovation process and this growing consensual solution ends up offering even lower innovativeness.

• The motivation for innovation will be changing. The dominant aspect up to now has been company profits but with growing and complex societal and environmental problems becoming increasingly important, these will influence and become far more the driving force to innovate. This will push organizations to develop even more new (hybrid) business models to integrate all the parties making up part of these complex solutions, in the balancing out of the monetary with the non-monetary returns. We will also test the limits of participation.

• The increasing use of technology and software will seek ways to automatise innovation far more, where the current “creep” of algorithms, web crawler technology or simulation techniques to access market potential and others, will have the increased implication on the place and what’s left in space for human creativity. Equally the increased security issues and maintenance of these will be equally at some degree of variance with human imagination.

• There will be a growth of grand challenges but as eco-innovation pushes up the agenda we will likely see a growing movement towards sustainable solutions balancing production and consumption far more, or imposing constraints so more circular flows of cradle-to-cradle innovation becomes the possible model to control. Again we need to reflect on where scaling, transfer and standardisation come into play. Seeking optimisation becomes one of the biggest challenges to tackle.

• A possible move towards an innovation society? We will also begin to change within society on the perception of creativity? Do we become more of an innovation society but as we explore this we might have growing negative aspects of innovation fatigue or heaviness in the leadership expecting innovation.

• Lastly the significant shifts taking place of where innovation will eventually reside. Will the West become more of the fast follower, the adapter to the innovations emerging from the East? Where will the regional shifts take innovation, and how will this evolve? Is the current innovation approach regarded as too ‘Western’ and the East modifies or changes our thinking and approaches to how we innovate? We are equally moving more towards GLocalisation in design, approaches and solutions. The race to anchor ‘specific capabilities’ into a country or a region will become more intense.

I think these all have growing implications for thinking through innovation. They each offer challenges, risks and opportunities. What is sure the pace and direction of innovation will change as the pressure to consider societal needs become increasingly important.

We need to also look far more at the unintended and negative consequences of the consistent, increasingly relentless demand for innovation. It risks having a growing undesirable aspect that needs increasing awareness and factoring into the push for “anything new”.

The eight elaborated innovation visions and open questions arising

I have not discussed the 20 innovation visions here, I will do that in a further posting but for now we focus on the eight consolidated innovation visions labelled under the “nodes of change” that achieved a degree of consensus-

These were then explored in “mini- panel visions” to indicate a depth in the details associated with each, their drivers and barriers to begin to sketch out a desirable future based on these innovation futures. The eight selected were:

Deliberative Innovation
It seems widely expected that citizens will play a greater role both in governing and implementing innovation activities. How will the new type of “deliberative innovation” be governed, what will be the outcomes?

Innocamp Society
Innovation Camps where people gather for specific innovation tasks of a certain duration are becoming increasingly popular. Many experts see a high potential for such camps as key enablers of creative solutions both in a business and civil society environment.

Often the idea is linked to the open-source society where a number of products and services are developed in close interaction with users source society where a number of products and services are developed in close interaction among users

Social Experimentation
Social innovation is becoming more recognised as highly relevant for developing innovative solutions addressing societal challenges. New modes of innovation are required to align social and technological innovation activities.

Participatory experimentation will play a key role but what are the right instruments and levels required for successful solutions?

Automatised Innovation

A number of new techniques such as semantic web analysis allow for automating parts of the innovation process from idea generation via design and testing. What are the implications for the economy and society?

Widespread Innovation

Innovation is becoming mandatory for more and more people in companies and other types of organisations. How can we avoid “innovation overload” and “innovation divide”? What does it mean to live in an environment that is constantly innovating?

Open Innovation City

Cities are increasingly expected to play a major role as innovation drivers. In particular systemic sustainability innovations may best be implemented on a city level. What are adequate mechanisms for cities to reap the benefits of this potential?

Global Innovation Chain Integration

Innovation is expected to become globally dispersed. But what will be the mechanisms to integrate all the distributed and diverse elements and to match ideas and solutions with problems and needs?

Waste-Based Innovation

The establishment of innovation patterns that are fully consistent with a circular flow of resources was unanimously assessed as top priority in the INFU experts’ dialogue. However, many challenges are associated with this vision. How can novelties emerge out of used products, what kind of consumer types are associated with the pattern?

I’ll leave the summing up to Karl-Heinz Leitner, the coordinator for the project

“To summarise, the future of innovation will be more open, socially, and environmentally driven, while being faster and global at the same time. However, it would be too easy, too simple and too generic a conclusion to leave it that way.

INFU (the study) has revealed a much more diverse and broad future for innovation, indicating some tensions and ambivalent developments. We will see more participation, even though the question arises as to when the limits of participation are reached and when too much participation just results in lukewarm solutions, or may slow down the innovation process altogether.

Due to the enormous acceleration of innovation, companies tend to “over-engineer” their products in order to be competitive and thereby lose track of their main objectives: to be able to reap the benefits of their innovativeness and to meet their customers’ real needs at their best”

My final thoughts

For me, of course there are many futures but innovation is clearly “top of mind” to seek out growth, to create future wealth, with many of the forces we are seeing today as those that will shape the long-term future of innovation.

Yet there is going to be increasing tensions different than the ones we are discussing today. The questions of saturation, of tackling pressing societal issues, the growing trend for community or crowd participation can have negative effects on generating worthwhile innovation that is truly beneficial to society.

The whole issue of unintended and undesirable consequences gets largely brushed aside, sacrificed on the positive hype of the good of innovation. Are we going to see increasing ambivalence, and mixed emotions as surely much of our current innovation remains misdirected and purely profit-motivated?

Will the pace of innovation slow down or continue to speed up? Who will decide?

Innovation to be managed for societal good needs a far more coordinated effort from all those involved: our business organizations, their customers and what they really need, from our citizens, scientists, from communities we belong to and finally through policymakers.

It is through policy shaping that innovation can be directed but will it be forced or go willingly?

Future uncertainty can also bring on a certain new fog can’t it? Oh boy!

The post Fast-forward into the Innovation Future first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.