Am I the only one getting overwhelmed in choice, underwhelmed in content value?

This is a bit of a long rant, so turn away now those who love all the free choices you currently have, don’t waste your time reading on.

Those a little more curious, as my friend Michael Fruhling always says in his useful blog “then read on, dear friends….”

What do you get of real value when it is offered free?
You are getting experts offering free webinars or short ‘tasters’ with even offers of “fly me to your destination- no fees just cover my costs”, others offering “join my (global) network” as entreaties. Then you are equally getting software providers giving their take on innovation solutions galore, with the “three lessons learnt” mantra as the takeaways.

These all increasingly add up to you being bombarded daily with their knowledge, that often you can’t really decide if it did have value or not, by the end of the hour you had invested.

Then you get the innovation community providers linking up, providing web chats, drawing in different and diverse opinions from practitioners, academics or specialists, under let’s “ask the experts”, all hosted and moved along to stay within the prescribed time period.

Yet even these are so often totally failing to get to solve your solutions, all you end up getting is their experiences or observations, in someone else’s often unrelated situation, that might even be dangerous to extract and simply apply.

Maybe this is a bad day for me.

I am getting really frustrated by this constant ‘streaming’. I know I can ignore it, click the invite off, I can simply tune out and I think this is where many of us all seem to be heading. Are we really getting the value out of these ‘free’ offers?

You can go on and add in the free mix, different academic courses being offered on innovation from one day, to three days, a week or even longer as on-line courses by providers building their brand for the future. Then you are getting the “upgrade or get left behind” messages from all these. Are these really worth the time investment or just self-promoting?

I’m constantly being told I need upgrading on my innovation skills, nudged to check out the latest software update, and enticed to participate in a debate. It simply goes on and on.

Can it stop? Should it? Will it?

Then we have conference and forum providers for anything innovation, be this open innovation, CEO’s, social innovation, digital innovation. Then you have these consistent meetings offered by the European Union or different institutions, non-profit making organizations etc., etc for half-days- are they mad in what this means in invested time, or are we simply mad to go?

We have so much time on our hands, really?

I certainly can’t afford the time. And then for what, some long introductions and a few ‘choice’ bullet points. Thank god for streaming these live events so you can tune out much but being there, can you run and hide? Did I mention the radio talk shows, and book publicity videos?

Then you have the reading material. OMG! That is me included here! We do need a break from all this, we are all progressively tuning out, not actually in.

Can we afford to miss out- our Kiasu fears– many it seems are saying yes and exactly doing that, others seem caught in this fear of missing out.

Real lasting value or just simply filling in our time?

No seriously, we are so far running ahead of ourselves in delivering ‘something’ as service providers but is it of real, lasting value? We have opened up the spigot to allow a deluge of “anyone” who can simply take hold of an idea or a thought, quickly put it together through a host of technologies and social platforms, so as to deliver their contribution to the mountain of advice equally piling on, I mean mountains of advice.

Can we call stop, surely we are all gradually switching off or do we just totally tune out? I believe clients, meaningful decision-makers in clients are tuning out, as they surely do not have the time for all this.

I just feel we are all getting a little frantic in offering free advice

How can we get back to the basics within innovation, those that can put to simplification back in innovation? Well actually getting back to the basics on anything come to think of it?

I was reading a short article from Ron Asakenas over on Forbes (subject innovation) commenting about “It’s time to simplify innovation”. He prompted this post of mine. His opener I liked:

“Innovation is one of the most popular topics in the world these days, with new books and articles on the subject appearing almost daily. (For example, there are over 70,000 book listings about innovation in Amazon). The problem is that nobody quite knows what the word actually means.

Instead, we’ve gotten tangled up in all of the variations, nuances, tools, techniques, models, frameworks, and paradigms of innovation. So what was once a simple concept — the idea of systematically finding, encouraging, and implementing new ideas — has become horribly complex. Unfortunately, by complexifying innovation, we’ve probably started to kill it.

To reverse this trend, we need to simplify how we approach innovation – by better defining what it is (and isn’t), what it takes to carry it out, and what is needed to enable truly new thinking to thrive”

Personally, I really am not so sure we can reverse this trend but we do need new thinking.

The technology is becoming so pervasive, it just seems to get easier to ‘knock out’ a presentation, offer a webinar, or write an article. We are in a ‘swamp’ of material ‘up to our necks’.

We are making innovation complex, needlessly complicated and increasingly unattractive. We are failing in really “moving that innovation needle” because we are getting more and more people simply “tuning out” and the more we try, the more they reject this and then seemingly tune out even more. We are simply the dog chasing its own tail and enjoying it because we know no better.

The real art of engagement is being lost.
I’m noticing more and more, poorer engagement by everyone, we are in the deteriorating engagement cycle. Where are the meaningful dialogues instead of the ‘like’ symbol?

It is harder to grab someone’s attention, and hold it sufficiently long enough to move through an issue to the next one. We are all becoming so distracted and I’m struggling with an answer to how we collectively can pull back and recalibrate around innovation knowledge and its meaningful exchange?

I’m all for seeking simplification but for innovation to really return and begin to move ahead again it needs this engagement but it needs equally for me, every time, context.

For me Context is King

Maybe it is the one real arbiter of success; it really provides the need to simplify. In an innovation process, context becomes the most important arbiter of success, it is the point we gather around to understand so we can see and understand our role and contribution.

Sorting through for simplification and worthwhile engagement for all concerned

Here is my first attempt to recalibrate all this current flow of (harmful) innovation ‘intensity’. Just an opening suggested context framing, for sorting through this deluge of workshops, and webinars and getting them more personal in simplification, solving needs and offering value.

It needs more work but goes like this for all the multitude of organizations (and individuals) offering innovation advice that needs to reconsider what they are offering and need to ask a set of pre-qualifier questions:

One– If the idea, approach or value proposition isn’t aligned with the needs of the firm or the corporate strategy, (also context) then it will most probably be ignored and tuned out by those we are in need to actually engage with. Do we bother?

Two– How can these ‘open’ webinar sessions be aligned PRIOR, otherwise we end up with a service provider’s generic offering? It is up to the provider to understand the client’s needs, to perhaps work a lot harder on these, otherwise is not time relevant and valuable; it simply stays generic and less valuable. It simply is ‘casting around’ without knowing if there is any catch in this. A scatter-gun approach and not client targeted. Is this really worth all the effort?

Three– Once an idea, theme, the specific need is identified and ‘fleshed out’ and these have to be more client or issue/problem specific for clients to consider then they need clear deliverables not just boring ‘takeaways from mindlessly listening’ – what problem will it solve that is relevant to my issues, how can it be applied, its benefits and impact understanding. Can we deliver on this?

Four– Without this ‘need related’ information on the idea or concept delivered through a workshop, or webinar then it becomes too disconnected to adequately consider, evaluate and convert into useful consideration, then it is not worth it unless you want the simply curious how can afford the time but don’t make decisions. Is that worth all the costs involved?

Five– Surely as service providers if we fail to get through these ‘points of client relevancy’ then there is no new product or service connection or consulting engagement that most of this current activity is trying to generate. Then we should find another, perhaps those that are certainly much harder, to engage, as this easy route is not yielding a ‘reasonable’ return on all the ‘invested’ time. Well is it?

Stepping back to move forward.

There is nothing rocket science here in these five points to be considered but we do need to turn all this innovation advice, this deluge of stuff into something clearer, with a more specific value and context.

We do need to define this upfront far more. It means working on innovation a little harder before we rush to offer these webinars, conferences, half-day meetings.

It might mean less “bums on seat” for the webinar, so be it. If we can get ‘real engagement’ because we are closer to understanding specific needs and not opting for generic solutions, the quality of the material automatically lifts as the group tuning into it has a very specific interest that can have higher chances of leading onto ‘something’.

This automatically raises the engagement game, from the discussion and reduces the ‘also runs’ who don’t have the meaningful insight and knowledge that clients are actually needing to make this engagement really valuable to them.

It also stops the random roaming, the needless cruising around, the mindless listening to the droning on, that is taking place today. We begin to simplify as the context is clearer for us, the value exchange higher and the potential to advance from ‘free anything’ moves into showing that you (we), the provider of the service, have real value to bring into the conversation.

Today, finding good innovation insights that can be applied to a relevant situation that might be coming from general webinars, is a little like ‘panning for gold, it is back-breaking work in your investment in time and eventual application. Knowing the ‘needs specific’ means we can all ‘pan smarter’.

Where is the exchange point of money and value?

I always remember a lovely throwaway comment I heard years back when it came to client and consulting / advisory engagement

“If you wish to have value for money, would you give money for value”

Offering anything free I believe you are not offering any real value equation or much in my mind. Does Apple give anything away for free? No, it builds value through its offering or its partnerships and we need to go back and do this for the knowledge we are offering to prospective clients.

Where we are today with this “free” approach provides very little apart from sucking up an awful lot of everyone’s time and screwing up client-provider engagements into this “race to the bottom”.

We are sacrificing much in quality and carefully considered advice. I believe real decision-makers are tuned out from this channel to market approach mostly.

Now I’ve had my little rant I better go back and check out the value of my own webinars. Do they stack up to offering real value, in addressing specific needs? I’d like to believe so but this also does give me my own pause for thought and by the way, they are actually not free.

The post Tuning out, a need for simplification and better value first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The combination of technology, the internet, resource constraints and the opening up of innovation to the outside world has changed the shape and content of conversations.

Shaping conversations can be either intentional or through serendipity. Ideas are usually never fully formed but emerge over these conversations, from fragments that need nurturing, encouraging, aligning and developing through ongoing conversations. Often the fragments need a wider network to come together and form around.

The push today is the ability to sharpen the ideas quickly and move into some early testing and validation, ideally with the final customer somehow engaged and then from this ‘interaction’ the idea shapes and its final understanding deepens onto a concrete delivery.

There is a growing need for more radical, out of the existing box innovation to tap into. Collaborators help here.
Collaborations are far more complex and I suggest our thinking this through might be managed in three phases of understanding:

Identification, definitions and then diffusion.

1) The first part is identification

Here we are looking to maximise our connections, we are searching for diversity to help explore and then reframe emerging ideas. The search for different perspectives always needs to be brought in.

• The hardest part is defining the problem to tackle and then be adaptive enough to make changes as you learn and discover. We need to constantly expand our networks through partners. The level of trust within these partners needs establishing, testing and constantly reaffirming.
• The search to engage: we need to find the brightest, the best, the more engaged to get the quality of conversation in both breadth and depth. We should not be quick to dismiss but actually seek out reciprocal learning, perhaps working on a ‘pay it forward’ approach.
• The often over used ‘win-win’ does need our constant attention because if we all are focused on the value-creation opportunities for all involved and less on the value capture for one we are going to grow our collaborative efforts over time in far better ways. These become true partnerships.
• Knowing who you are dealing with, their level of knowledge, experience, the track record behind them and their organization allows for a growing compatible level of commitment as each value the other, within any collaboration. Each appreciates the other and values them for what they bring.

2) The second part is definitions and delivery

Projects today are always looking for speed, who you bring on board needs to possess the right capabilities but you need to be clear on what these need to be.

• You need to search for the complementary in any collaborative innovation, you want to avoid or minimise the duplications.
• The working out of contributions and rights in any collaborative project need addressing early. The search for striking the balance, achieving equitable assignment is tough when it comes to IP but it needs addressing as early as possible.
• The motivation for collaborating needs better understanding. Reputations and credibility are made or broken on structuring collaborations correctly as ‘good partners’ become known fairly quickly in areas where there are limited players or potential partners. Establishing this credibility ‘stock’ gives significant advantage.
• Compatibility comes in all shapes and sizes but culturally compatible in style, openness, sharing and possibly management outlook are important to establish.

3) Diffusion has to be mutually supportive and is moving towards building established ecosystems

We’re increasingly looking towards ecosystems to build around us. These have completely different needs to manage and reflect upon, and why I have separated this into a clear phase. Managing the diffusion through ecosystem collaboration is often highly complex for more radical innovation.

• Firstly, these ecosystems might already be available to tap into, or we may need to build a new one. This calls for true catalysts to handle the growing complexity that needs consciously managing and drawing in others to the cause.
• Partly these ecosystems might need to be built as the idea is radical or architectural. We need a clear ‘define the cause’ to which we can group around. Ecosystems need that symbiotic relationship to work. Knowing what makes this is important to keeping the relationships and collaborative efforts flowing and building in sometimes difficult circumstances.
• The level of early identification of the interdependences within the collaborative partners is important. Organizations are increasingly looking to fully integrate partnerships that will work not just at the front end but throughout the innovation value building process right through to final execution.
• The compatibility of the partners and the people working within the ecosystem need the same identification. Who has critical impact on its success? The dealing with potential ‘choke points’ where you may need additional partners can lead to stability or crisis in complex partnerships. The project leader needs to continuously identify and drive towards solutions.

Problem solving always causes its own friction
Any ecosystem should remain transparent and have this constant re-affirming mapping back to the collective value-creation proposition identified at the stage or as adapted as the ecosystem learns, it becomes updated and recommitted as it evolves.

Often a more radical innovation platform takes some of the participants outside their comfort zones, the importance of a visionary insight about the potential becomes key to help contain and manage this.

The emphasis on emerging compatibility or extending core within their existing business often needs to be conveyed to dampen this concern down.

Working in complex ecosystems is not easy, the partner selection, the managing of the system usually requires clear and well-honed project and management skills.

Engagement will thrive or flounder on the mutual understanding of the benefits and these may be very different as an end goal.

Identifying what makes up your collaborative design early is important
The key thread that is consistent during these three phases of different collaborations of identification, delivery and diffusion is that it is challenging the existing behaviours usually found in closed systems.

The need is to replace ‘competing’ with ‘collaborating’ and that is not easy.
Collaborative innovation is about exploring the dispersed knowledge by attracting; foraging and experiencing that can make up collaborations.

These more open, external collaborations will enable organizations to discover, sharpen and shape innovation in very different ways than being reliant on ‘just’ themselves. Yet collaborating requires a real growing specialisation within any organization.

The earlier you can identify the critical aspects, the more likely you are to ‘allow’ collaborative innovation to work but it is hard work.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Exploring the criteria for collaborative activities within innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

It is a pathway I want to continue to travel along and will constantly try to encourage others to equally take the walk.

I was working through a set of presentation files today and came across this extract again and thought I must share this. It rings true as much as it did those years back.

“Strategy is useless without innovation; innovation is directionless without strategy”.

Below is an extract from Reinventing Innovation by John J Kao. For me, it is sadly as relevant today as when I first came across it, some years back. Are we making real progress in our innovation activities?

Read it slowly, can I ask you to linger over its implications, its questioning and its suggestions. The extract offers much for any innovation pathway we might be considering.

The Innovation Pathway
” Innovation fits with a designer’s definition of design: the ability to move from the existing to the preferred.

Innovation is the path by which we seek the future we prefer. Not the future that we’re going to get, but rather the future we want.

Today, there is a vast gap between the aspiration for innovation and its reality. Innovation practices that are in step with the speed, uncertainty, and volatility of the new economy are still a promissory note, in this day and age.

Until we have practices that go beyond brainstorming on the one hand or simply tweaking a new product development process on the other, we will never arrive at the promised land of strategic innovation. Few if any can point to systematic practices that realize corporate innovation in a reliable and continuous fashion.

If you take innovation seriously within an organization, it touches every aspect of how business is done. It’s about leadership, organizational structure, knowledge management, corporate purpose and values, norms regarding collaboration, and strategic foresight processes.

Innovation touches everything. An innovation system requires an examination of the organization in a holistic kind of way, which is why most organizations have a tough time grasping the agenda.

We have to talk about the hard work of creating deep capabilities within the organization, capabilities that once established with tremendous effort don’t go away and confer a competitive advantage over long periods of time

The economies of scale organization are hierarchical and control focused, as is the mindset of its managers. Economies of discovery, on the other hand, which in my opinion are characteristic of the new economy, work quite differently.

Instead of efficiency, we strive for originality, for what will change the game. Instead of hierarchy and control, the focus of management must be on collaboration and enabling what is new.

There must first be an intimate connection between strategic thinking and innovation. Strategic planning must co-exist with strategic foresight. Innovation becomes an answer to a set of strategic questions. Strategy is useless without innovation; innovation is directionless without a strategy. Second, we must develop robust innovation processes

We also need a new sense of the scope of innovation, to look far beyond products and services of seeing things and shifting perspective, so that a new vision, a new set of possibilities can emerge.”

The extract is from “Reinventing innovation” by John J Kao, The Idea Factory.

This simply needs re-reading and recognizing what John said then, which still applies today. Do you agree?

The post The Ability to Move Innovation from the Existing to the Preferred first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

It now needs a deeper understanding than ever. Are we achieving that?

My viewpoint on observing different innovation dilemmas:

• Innovation used to be about product, technology and R&D but it is far more now about value and anything that carries value. It is about creativity and entrepreneurship and it is even more tied to a clear vision today than ever, so it does become a vital part of the culture of the company.
• Innovation and its potential value generation have certainly broadened out in options and needs even more to be tightly integrated with the strategy- how different types of innovation are aligned is really critical. I think many organizations are failing badly on this alignment recognition.

• The growing appreciation that richer opportunities are to be found across the entire value chain by how we manage and view this. Making the strategic choice of what should remain in house as a contributor to the core and which can be outsourced to specialists better equipped and more focused on that part.
• This is making innovation far more complex and will challenge everyone but it can be very liberating and more rewarding providing the value can be recognized and leveraged effectively …in faster and more relevant innovations that deliver from the core or adjacencies or through others better equipped to add their value. The key to outsourcing is resolving the questions of can this be effectively coordinated on who manages what, and who owns what, and how it is exploited, for the added value and impact this can offer each party.

• There is a clear recognition that defining real value lies more at the customer point and not within an organization in the R&D lab, as has been the past practice. Getting the customer involved as early as you can from discovery to delivery- the end to end of innovation- extracts greater potential value.
• There has been a growing shift for innovations to meet exact customer needs and also discover their unmet needs and then working back to developing the solutions. This increased customer focus will continue by making them more central in any web of co-creators and co-creation activities that needs to be undertaken around innovation discovery and its final delivery.

• External parties are seeking more involvement in a ‘joint’ innovation processes and the development process as early as they can. Partners are becoming increasingly reliant on each other to become a critical contributor or component provider to resolve more complex problems. Understanding these mutual dependencies is important to be recognized and actively managed in new collaborative ways.

• We have seen some really dramatic shifts in research techniques to know more of what ‘pulls’ and ‘connects’ with consumers. Customers are also looking to become more engaged and involved in their products and services, in what they expect and wish to be associated with. Managing these dynamics and often the emotional mix is hard and often frustratingly complex, to decipher and interpret.
• The new work is to be positioned as the ‘orchestrator’ of these dialogues across the organization and in drawing in through collaboration with the partners, by constructing the conduits and business platforms where the flow of exchanges takes place where new concepts evolve.

• The shift in emphasis to the customer makes a really compelling case for increased emphasis to be made on trend spotting, scouting, aligning and recognizing behavioural changes so as to make insights a real core of your business, more the source of those ideas than leaving ideas simply emerging from within an organization.
• Stringing together an often diverse set of signals calls for higher capability in pattern recognition and appreciating more about complex adaptive systems and the part they play. These are where dynamic networks of interactions and relationships merge and adapt differently, so individual and collective behaviour changes as a result of the experience, leading to emerging new opportunities to explore.

• There is an increasing need to manage a diverse group of collaborators across a common process. Often these parties might not want or need the same end-result but do need each other to ‘combine’ for a given result. This will benefit their individual businesses and add new dimensions in this collaboration space, to then deliver different outcomes than the existing solutions in place today fail to do.
• There is a real value of combining and working through a common business platform, to achieve individual and collective aims and equally, enhance the total delivery experience (Delivering Applications around Android are a good example here or Apples developer platform). Platforms bring together developers, providers and customers that can scale or contract accordingly and if well managed can drive business strategy in dramatically new ways.

• Building a more robust ‘activity system’ into managing innovation, beyond just simply pipelines and portfolio’s needs thinking through. It requires a more open logic model to be articulated and built around so as to allow for more early ‘open’ thinking, exploring and investigating multiple options.
• Far too often an idea is screened out far to early and not explored in a wider context of ‘seeing things differently’. Equally the lack of flexibility of concepts simply moving through the innovation system with a one dimensional end result of ‘just’ product without exploring the value of services, or even combining them, can miss huge growth opportunities .

• The value and growing appreciation about exploring different Business Models has increasing value. Providing the necessary space to explore emerging opportunities with new business models is becoming a must for accelerating growth through innovation and experimentation. Showing that increased willingness to separate and develop more ‘spin offs to encourage the concepts to flourish is more frequent from larger organizations that will increasingly challenge the young upstarts.
• Showing more commitment to separating off exciting new concepts to bear fruit quickly and to be allowed to more highly focused, so as to deliver the ‘seen’ result will allow larger organizations to be more nimble and responsive than in the past. This growing willingness is altering the competitive landscape even more.

• The constant ’quest for growth’ will need an even deeper connection between Marketing and Innovation as they will continue to be two ‘twins’ as the strongest drivers of margin and revenue growth. What is required is to re-equip marketing executives with new skills in design appreciation, research expertise, deeper customer engagements and an even stronger voice at the C-level to drive innovation through its different avenues of opportunity (service, product, social, business model generation).
• Innovation needs to be a core capability within Marketing, not just given a cursory understanding or working through a narrow view, it needs deep appreciation of what and where it can provide this growth.

• The recognition that adopting someone else’s best practice is not the ideal way to go, it has been the ‘lazy man’s’ solution for far too long and really does need even more rigorously challenging. Defining your specific emergent or good practices that fit your culture and context are clearly better, adopting blindly others is not, yet still far too many do this.
• Your context, your culture, your resources are uniquely different and other peoples ‘best practice’ is not the right starting point. Somehow best practice needs a radical overhaul in what it provides and what it can inhibit. Far too often adopting best practice can be a disaster. Emergent practice should be the watch world.

• The art of spending wisely today is even more vital. The choices between experimentation, trial and error internally and learning from external expertise for understanding innovation needs to be worked upon. There needs to be a better appreciate of each other’s contribution. It still seems not be well managed, far to ad hoc and not well thought through.
• Admittedly external expertise has often failed to provide innovation leadership and the deeper thinking that internal expertise on its own simply cannot deliver. External advisors simply took over and then left at the end of their consulting engagements, leaving much simply not embedded within the organization.

• Contracting hands-on consultants should be seen differently from using external knowledge providers-they offer a distinctly different service and for me, the difference between consulting and advising. With growing complexity innovation specialization has increasing value, often this is not sitting on the teams bench, it needs bringing in and being valued for what this can give in greater appreciation. Greater external expertise needs to be injected into the innovation equation of many organizations for deepening individuals, teams and organizational understanding of what innovation can provide in its different potential.
• There is today even more of a business case for a deep innovation dive with external facilitation to graps new understanding and latest developments from a party that is 100% focused on the subject. The internal executive is often left badly equipped to recognise innovation’s complexities as it seemingly doesn’t fit their lens of the world and due to this organizations can discount much to their peril in the longer term.

There is a lot evolving in the name of innovation, all very healthy but all very challenging. Innovation needs to be treated as a critical discipline, to be built up, to be called upon where necessary.

It is often not as well understood as it should be, on how it often works but it needs establishing far more within the fabric of each organization. It should be treated no different than the IT specialist, the accounting specialist, the strategic advisor, PhD researcher or sales specialist, innovation has a critical place and needs clear representation at the top table.

Place more trust in the specialists that have innovation as their expertise, internally and externally but give this the necessary ‘head room’ to be understood.

It is time innovation as a recognized discipline should be fully embraced, ambiguities and all! There is a new wave of emerging innovation practice going on.

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