We really do have this compelling need to have a new cycle of innovation design.

A more integrated solution that takes our understanding of innovation and how to manage it, into the realms of ecosystems and platforms in its design and thinking.

To achieve this we need to recognize a significant change we must undertake in our present innovation management. We need to open up our thinking to embrace a new era of digital innovation

Does it make sense? You judge as you read.

Extract what makes sense for you, explore where there are thoughts that can be applied to your current innovation set up. Just remember a new innovative design needs to be radical, totally connected, and resource-rich.

Firstly, we do need to recognize technology is going to be inseparable in what we are doing in the innovation world, going forward. The blurring of our lives, of the breaking down of the different old industry demarcations, the blending of government, corporate and social engagements are all giving increasing voice to each of us as individuals, all happening due to this exponential set of connections. I sense from many this is‘epic’, exploding and life-changing, with all of us, simply learning to adapt and adjust, moving at speed to align ourselves.

The choice of apps, platforms, the number of connected devices is teaching us new ways of communicating, learning, interacting, and extracting different values and needs out of the technology available which is all constantly evolving.

How does a large business keep pace with this exponential connection?

Where is the starting point or the necessary change inventions one needs to bring in to understand the gaps and fill the voids, can we back-fill as we equally move forward?

The past business decision was based on evidence, validated and then this was justified and sort of evolved at a steady pace. There is something different presently going on, the sheer scale and impact of how technology is evolving at increasing speed will need a massive mind shift and radical redesign of our innovation management systems.
Although each organization is having so many competing priorities, the gap between how it is organized today and building these required digital capabilities is getting wider, unless you work through this transformation plan in a clear, purposeful way. It has to begin with a ground-up approach, small experiments that can quickly be scaled up or revised. It needs very hands-on engagement throughout the whole process.

A key need of this digital transformation is going to be asking the question of how we can build in ‘greater agility’ and what is presently stopping us from achieving this. Then it is the agility to achieve better response times to customers ‘needs, to respond to market changes quicker, to translate insights into knowledge and then into the product and service innovations that meet ever-changing needs.

It is recognizing and then facing up to your present ‘pain points’ and the key competitive places that agility, digital understanding and translating this into outwardly facing outcomes will significantly improve your abilities to compete, in often volatile markets. It is shortening the time between understanding and reacting, and this is where digital transformation offers both the ‘return’ promise or becomes the threat.

We are in real need of connecting innovation and digitalization. Digital innovation is the future, it accelerates our world of possibilities

Forming a strategy, roadmap and business case needs really many new considerations

There are many considerations, each organization will be different. Yet all have a common need; the recognition each organization needs to develop its digital capabilities, organization-wide, not stuck in some IT department. It is a total company-wide set of activities that are affected. It is developing the digital capabilities across the organization by transforming the culture, the people’s digital skillset and the structures to get into sync, not just with newly defined organizational goals but also consistently adjusting to the rapid pace of change occurring in the marketplace, aligned to customers evolving needs.

The critical first points to address are the lack of something, be this the resource to undertake such a task, a lack of digital talent residing in the organization or digital savvy, the ability to make this a corporate priority and not leave this to limited pockets of divisions, functions or channels. It needs this powerful syncing and top-level focus and support.

Then we need to encourage and expand the risk appetite, in rapid experimentation and learning, to accelerate the infusion of digital talent, enhance the understanding of soft skills and the art of collaboration, in new teaming, in-goal, and process identification and solution solving. Also, in developing greater fluidity in structures, exploring, and identification with the needs of new solutions to keep ‘feeding’ this back into the evolving roadmap. All of this needs to establish a new digital rhythm to encourage the flow of knowledge and understanding, to feedback into evolving solutions that will take time to develop and embed.

We are caught up in a technology revolution and the sooner we think “digital innovation” the greater our chances are for some significantly different outcomes that push the boundaries and connect-up to more radical designed solutions. Solutions that our customers will relate to, not because they are more complex, which they will be but because they are connected, adaptive, and anticipatory.

The new age of innovation is dawning. Let’s “seize the day”.

The post A new cycle of innovation design first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How can we bring increasing agility into our innovation work, that requires both stable and dynamic moments to deliver better outcomes?

Where do we focus, what do we recognize as organization practices, that can begin to transform the organization and re-equip it for a different future?

Agility for me is vital, it allows us to increasingly be adaptive in an uncertain world.

As innovation continues to be central to growth far more in the future it is our ability to adapt and adjust to all the uncertainties and this requires the ability to be agile.

A report provided by McKinsey “How to create an agile organization” has been part of a broader ‘agile’ series from them but this one specifically gave me my necessary anchor point, to move forward with my own design thinking for agility and innovation.

McKinsey does point out in this report you do need all eighteen practices to be fully alert to agile, but it is these dynamic ones that hold the real promise in my mind. These are the ones we all should move towards as our projected aim to achieve.

So let me summarize these nine dynamic practices

I have taken the nine dynamic practices outline meaning from this McKinsey report and added my own thoughts and reflections within these summaries.

1. Information Transparency

Today we need to take away all the filtering going on in organizations. Those who fill positions to control and attempt to influence the data. If we can’t unlock the knowledge within the organization, we fail to connect the people working within the organization to its products and related customer needs. Transparency makes the sharing of the knowledge increasingly relevant to connecting up the ‘whole’. There needs to be a very powerful concept of un-filtering, to allow the flow of understanding. It is highly dynamic and powerful in all it can release if encouraged and supported.

2. Rapid iteration and experimentation

The whole emphasis today is on rapid and fast cycles of learning. That testing, learning and adjusting from mistakes and building on these become really valuable progress points. Prototyping is getting so much better, it is creeping into the everyday culture when we innovate, or should. The MVP concept is so right to get features that are potentially better, out there, to test and learn from.

3. Continuous Learning

The moment we stop personally learning, we are the real losers. We need to find ways to ”cut out time” to explore and look for new ways to learn to improve ourselves and what we do within organizations. We need to push for new ways of working and to learn ‘more freely’ from other’s knowledge, in open exchanges and ways to collaborate. We progress by learning from failures and relating to them.

4. Flexible resource allocation.

We need to be adaptive, fluid in any organization and team design. The ability to feel in a position to ‘ramp up or shut down’ initiatives empowers us. We need to want to constantly change teams, seek out joining new ventures. To be always wanting to be redeployed, not because we are hanging on but because any new deployment means new horizons and opportunities. Seek change out, embrace this flexible world and show you are a key resource to help mold and shape it.

5. Open physical and virtual environment.

I often struggle with open planned offices, they provide an environment that distracts and not promote. If you can achieve a way that people communicate and collaborate with each other then great but when you are in a globally dispersed organization it is how you openly ‘react’ in your daily work. For me the virtual environment holds the real future and with so many organizations denying social tools the key to make it ‘purposefully designed’ is to make the activities clearly visible to all that need to know, to constantly show where your intervention and impact has made a difference in building context, content, structure or sharing knowledge. We need to find much better ways to make this a really dynamic, exciting, and rewarding part of agility within organizations

6. Sensing and seizing opportunities.

The value of being proactive, to watch out for signals, to then act upon them, to make your insights valuable to change perceptions, to alter customer bias, to engage with the external environment to shape, influence and contribute into new initiatives makes ‘sensing and seizing’ so important to drive innovation as the catalyst of change.

7. Technology, systems, and tools.

The constant demands being placed on us, to learn and adapt to new technology, systems, and tools as it keeps changing is mega-hard to keep pace with. New organization design in architecture, infrastructure, practices, and ways is tough to integrate the old and the new. How we respond to these is highly dependent on the articulated needs of the business. We can only be ‘responsive’ if we relate to the changing needs. The ability to have a more modular architecture, updates coming in a shorter interval of times can help in a continued updating. It is when the process determines rigid design you can’t change. To ‘react and respond’ you need to keep looking at moving towards technology frontiers. Exploring and exploiting contributes to a better holistic desired business outcome.

8. Role mobility

The movement needs to be constant. When we design we need to always account for achieving a certain fluidity. We need to constantly match our present skills with organizational needs. As we develop a more open talent marketplace we need to have this increasing mobility. Communicating roles, tasks and project outlines need to be demanded, then we have the understanding to change and then deliver to these ‘askes’ of us. These need to constantly match with our own goals, the alignment is the enabler to make this happen.

9. Active partnerships and ecosystems.

Relationships are our trading value. As we build out networks we need to trade. We trade in knowledge, in contribution, in working alongside others to co-develop. We seek out partnering, to invest our intellectual capital with theirs. We look to build the organization’s ecosystem through these engagements, to contribute to new products, services and solutions to look to bring them always to fruition. Our ‘need’ for activity and engagement builds a thriving, more dynamic environment.

In summary.

If we can embrace change by seeking out ways to re-equip ourselves, we encourage our organization to become more dynamic by these actions. We do get stuck in a certain mindset and set of behaviors. We become beholden to them, they eventually ‘freeze’ our progress, we stop learning and experimenting. We need to push for formal mechanisms of change, we need to seek out our own. We need to take hold of our actions, be clear on our organization’s vision and how we believe we can contribute.

As individuals, as members of fluid teams and as an organization we need to be mutually reinforcing. For me, fluidity is equally the growing need of organization’s today.  It is in recognizing that the dynamic practices found for building agility into ourselves and the organization do lie in these nine practices, they give us this level of fluidity. Take them on board, practice them constantly and over time your agility becomes your transformation. It becomes the ‘norm’ and allows for constant adaption.

The post Achieving agility within your innovation work first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I was catching up with my often collaborator and sparring partner on “all things innovating” Jeffrey Phillips  recently, and within our conversation, some of our discussions sort of triggered a reflection back to some fundamental work we undertook some years back.

In revisiting it, I felt it does stand the test of time and does seem to make this “come around” seem true. Let me provide a quick introduction along with some brief explanations :

Innovation for me always needs common reference points

When you don’t have a common approach to something, in this case, the management of innovation, you can have considerable pockets of inefficiency and a high level of ineffectiveness to deal with. Your organizational energies become fragmented as you constantly deal with differences, gap issues & misunderstandings that result in much-hidden costs and ‘spent, unproductive’ capital.

You often find resources are not focusing on advancing innovation; they are often spent on fixing what you have. By not having a clear common approach that everyone understands you fail to establish a common language. By not adopting a common set of innovation reference points you can remain often unproductive, consistently re-adapting, re-working and plugging gaps that could be better invested in managing the many aspects of complexity you always find in a better thought-through innovation management structure, one that focuses on advancing your activity.

A belief that has not changed.

Jeffrey and I believed, even more so today, that the innovation space needs a common starting point – a collaborative reference model.  Certainly, many other large and successful industries have common standards – in technology for definitions and common software and platform building, or in common accounting protocols have significantly advanced business confidence, common understanding, and sharing. We are gathering around the protocols in Industry 4.0 presently to connect and link manufacturing in a more “globalized” world.

So we need to begin to build an Innovation Management Understanding

It is with these shared and transparent frameworks, clients can gain knowledge, have a growing confidence to make an investment and gain a clearer sense of direction. So why don’t we seem to achieve a common approach to innovation, not constantly adjusting and adapting to different ‘standards’ or approaches and feeling innovation just seems to be stuck in a random, ad-hoc approach, left in individual organizations to figure out?

What we all really want is to acquire a common, repeatable, scalable innovation structure that allows us to invest, manage distinctly different innovations on a consistent basis.

 Adopting a common innovation framework has numerous advantages

Clients in partnership with advisors can build from this basic common platform of understanding by the more effective use of applying people with the right skills and capabilities to focus and accelerate the job-on-hand: the need-to-deliver innovation consistently to final clients needs.

If consultants, advisors, and practitioners can demonstrate that their solutions are based on a common framework they set about the creation of their own unique differentiation, based on their unique skills and points of value-add, not hiding behind generalizations, easy to copy quick fixes, spend most of their time on the constant need to firefight and plug gaps, or sometimes add to the mystery that unclear aspects of innovation management or incomplete advice can generate. It degrades efforts in our view.

We constructed a four-layered innovation model building around 1) strategy, 2) different necessary innovation approaches, 3) people and culture and 4) processes and platforms.

Reviewing where we are and recognizing innovation can be approached very differently

Now before I go any further I want to spend a little more time on reviewing this past work, relating it to what we have learned in the recent times on innovation’s advancement and see if we can re-emphasize the depth of analysis and research we undertook and bring it back into our innovation world.

This is the next step in building the common understanding

This is recognizing there are different innovation types and they have unique approaches that can still be incorporated in a common process. Each has its own detailed map but the top-level type denominators are shown below.

As I said, on my recent re-visit it seems to stand a test of time and forms a fundamental bedrock of collaborative innovation in all its different dimensions and guises.

Then we have the Common Process suggested as the adopted process for managing innovation

This is where innovation management software needs to be ‘joined up’. We have two distinct offerings, those that provide software for the front end and those that approach the portfolio management process. These need integrating but as the best, in the class as an integrated robust software offering, one that is available in one software package, not as it is offered today, in one or the other being a stronger piece of software (FFE) and the other staying light (PLM) or the other way round. It needs connecting up in a comprehensive way. Some current software providers might claim this is being offered but I have yet to be convinced any have achieved this as yet. Let me be proved wrong!

Does what I am sharing here make sense to you?

I need another chat with Jeffrey to see if we can open this back up to the scrutiny it requires and, as always, different thinking to improve the approach any argument for a common innovation process requires from others.

We are not usurping the different standards being currently worked upon for any ISO or equivalent proposal. We are in the search for a practical and logical common practice for innovation and its management process.

The post What goes around, comes around, in Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are caught in two states- a need for stability and a need for fluidity. We need to be adaptive, agile and responsive. Often we are trapped in the oncoming ‘headlights’ like a deer caught out crossing the road at night. The deer momentarily ‘freezes’ and we seem so often to be equally caught in this dilemma in our innovation’s creation capabilities

Today our organizations are still far too rigid, they are not adaptive or agile enough to really exploit innovation to the full, they are not responsive to the changes occurring constantly in fluid and dynamic markets.

We stay trapped in the established way of thinking. Organization’s struggle with this organizational constraint imposed by the singular, or dominating pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness at the cost of ‘fluidity.’

Organizations and individuals see change far to often in negative terms and not in the way innovation can bring positive change that seeks constant, ongoing adjustments to deliver the best, optimal solution.

How can both adaptive and fluid and exploitative and efficient work alongside each other? Many theorists have suggested, of having in place the ‘ambidextrous organization.’

The ‘dual’ thinking that we need to work between the two states of consciousness of deciding to be ‘exploitative or exploratory’ to see innovation in these two different lenses of opportunity.

This would require organizations to be often redesigned in their structures, people and processes, measurements and judgments, to either be focused on ‘being efficient’ or being ‘change orientated’.

I have been consistently drawn to this dual system of ambidextrous as it helps resolve one of the consistent stumbling blocks for innovation to ‘take hold’ and evolve.

For me, Innovation is constantly fluid, needing to be adaptive as we learn and adjust to new learning and this is constantly requiring a very change orientated approach. Often innovation comes up against a rigid system and for many “it just seems not to fit” and gets rejected as not appropriate to us. We lose out to opportunity as we are scared of what it might do to challenge what we have already got or achieved

It is a fact, innovation struggles as it often remains outside the prevailing system.

Innovation constantly challenges against the dominant mindset within organizations, who like the idea of innovation but are mostly measured to drive efficiency and effectiveness, keeping highly focused on the short-term performance as their role, reward, advancement, and a key to ongoing career success, so innovation ‘sits outside’ their domain of focus.

Something needs to change if innovation is really important and you want to explore all the potential that is ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered.

The post Our present dilemma- the dual need for stability and to increase our fluidity first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

It is not just for innovation application, that can determine innovation activities. It has multiple values in any organization thinking and alignment.

The 3H informs the decisions to be taken, by recognizing their importance to the future and ‘frame’ resource allocation, identify current capability gaps to resolve.

It helps to enable the whole organization to “get onto the same page” and move towards that desired future.

This 3H thinking helps break down complex issues. Thinking in different horizons prompts you to go beyond the usual focus of fixing innovation just in the present it provides the connections of the present with the desired future. The 3H builds portfolio design, outline the steps to resolve in any complex challenge, it ‘informs’ strategy and builds the business case for taking a specific direction to that ‘desired future’.

If you want to read more on the three horizons then take some time out to explore the “insights and thinking” resource page shown under the ‘tabs’ above.

I recently applied the three horizons thinking to ‘frame’ a new innovation design

Using the 3H you have to have a ‘reasonable’ framing intent, those essential guidelines that can provide “the Wireframe“ (a concept taken from thinking about a UX backbone) for establishing the basic design and activity process. It forms the foundation to move forward with a ‘united’ purpose, it gives the essential backbone to your future thinking. This is a useful way to think about the initial 3H outcome. We capture those signals around us today that can point to a very different future.

So the thinking intent of searching for a new innovation design had some framing assumptions that can leverage where we are to move towards a new future

• In my view, we must go way beyond “open innovation” as we practice it today. There is a real need for a broader ecosystem approach that taps into a constellation of diverse and specialized players that all come together around a particular challenge, collaborating to deliver growing complex solutions that offer real growth value for the client.

I would argue this fits within a constellation of partners all working towards delivering innovation that is highly valuable, radical, disruptive and distinctive. A network of highly vested ecosystem partners all working towards a common goal on behalf of the organization that holds the principal intellectual property, as the founding partner.

I believe one option to seriously consider is you can project this forward as becoming an ecosystem arrangement with a multitude of agents participating in resolving complex challenges, sharing their individual knowledge. The ecosystem sets about pooling their collective expertise, working in a collaborative creative environment, built on a platform design, where the development and commercialization of the process are established, mutually understood on who shares or owns what and driven to a co-created proposition. The significant outcome being a collective approach to working on creating real value creation, one that delivers on the expertise and passion infused into this.

• We recognize today we need to be highly adaptive in what innovation applications, processes, tools, and frameworks can be used, or possibly “grabbed” then why not perhaps from the innovation cloud and ‘drawn down’  into the individually designed innovation process we believe we need. Applying transformative applications at speed requires the approach to rapid experimentation, frequent iteration, and close collaboration between those involved. Adapting agile management to empower a more dynamic collaborative environment, using all that is available to you, intelligently and appropriately.  Designing a process that looks capable of delivering the challenge or idea but can also be updated and adjusted, as we learn and go.
• We also know today that innovation management itself must become “fluid” in design, in adaptation so the right approach is to be constantly ‘adaptive’ and put together what is needed to tackle the challenge that needs resolution. A constant redesign to meet the circumstances seems to be a goal of what we achieve in any new innovation design.

So we have a series of questions to ask and explore based on this ‘premise’

• It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where people, things, and knowledge understanding that is often fragmented and dispersed, can be combined, and where the mutual value is based on the unique combination and utilizing the different technologies available. This needs designing in unique ways, not in rigid processes and structures, expected to be repeated and only achieving incremental advancement. Each innovation challenge is unique and needs to be treated so.
• I think applying a digital mindset is clearly a transformational phenomenon across much of the existing business today. The unique combining of the cloud, big data, social streaming, the internet of things, mobility, the industrial internet, are all making this the time for new growth opportunities, exploited through this digital economy and require a radical overhaul of the design today, to realize the benefits. Where is innovation within this? Innovation needs to embrace digital fully.
• Can we find ways to be highly adaptable, agile and fluid in grabbing and taking the parts of the innovation system, and then constructing them into that design and process that works for that specific challenge? We build a process that relates to the problem at hand in its structure, offering the suggested process needed in frames, tools, process designs that you adapt to each challenge.

Becoming adaptive in organizations that are often highly rigid and standardized is so conflicting, so different, you must separate the two that many are arguing even stronger today than ever, offering a dual innovation process or organization design to exploit and explore.

• We recognize that Innovation today conflicts with much of our existing organizational designs. We need to separate it out and recognize it can be highly fluid and adaptive to extract the best, not to be constantly forced to be compromised by constraints within the system.
• We also know innovation involves a more abstract thinking, as we are increasingly focused on “engineering our business in new and different ways” and this becomes the new goal of providing a clear uniqueness, a real competitive edge that is purposefully designed in our innovation systems, to meet specific needs.

So there is this growing need to have a new cycle of innovative design.

So in my premise, I believe we need a really radical way forward on innovation, a highly adaptive solution, where all these solution parts are available on demand, constantly adjusting and adaptable to the situation you have to resolve.

Does this recognition of the growing importance of platforms and ecosystems, of designing with more of a digital “eye” be able to shape any future innovation design? What type of innovation intelligence platform can be built so multiple ecosystems can form around it? It needs to be one that is integrated and connected up; in tools, methodologies, frameworks, in solution providers and collaborative clients, all working on common problems with data intelligence, feeding into their decision-making process, evolving the discovery and the needs required through innovation, by what they are “intelligently” learning and exploring

There is a sequence to work through within the 3H thinking, shown here to help in this

So as my initial outputs in thinking I came through this 3H sequence (H1- H3- H2) in establishing my “wireframe”.

You might recall, the aim of understanding the 3H is to recognize differences between horizons; H1 is often seen as the prevailing or dominating system and what it needs to deal with for sustaining those parts that have value, validate the purpose or need a “refit” as the external environment changes over time. With H3 there is a need to build the desired future state, the ideal system we believe will transform and allow us to grow and then begin to explore the options of what and how we get there.

Often that future understanding is clearly present in the existing, as commonly referred too as “weak signals” or blind spots, these are often hidden amid the noise of delivering on today. We need to amplify these signals and harness the ones that have become emerging in practice that challenge our thinking. These help us to figure out what is changing.

H2 aims to draw out often the conflicting tensions and dilemmas between vision and reality and determine differences, distinctions to manage diverse views, that often can collide & diverge. H2 is the place you experiment, build and strengthen the existing (H1) but explore the concepts, prototypes, fill the missing gaps in your capabilities to move you towards H3, validating and adjusting in what you are learning as you go.  Hence why you work H1- H3- H2 as the sequence.

The absolute underscoring of this is to raise “future consciousness with a common awareness of the future potential within the present” It is to gain common identification and sense of purpose, both at an individual, team and organizational level.

Often within our ‘business as usual’ attitudes, there actually lie the seeds of destruction. Today there is a relentless pace; we are facing a relentless change occurring. Yet we actually subvert the future to prolong the life of the existing. We need to frame our innovation needs differently for exploring and exploiting innovation across different time horizons to move beyond the usual.

The underlying need in searching for a future ‘desired state’ in innovation design is we do need to recognize that Innovation is constantly facing disruption; it is constantly going through life cycles and new waves of different activities and business invention, we begin decay faster today than ever. We run increasing risk that we begin to lose any dominance or competitive position increasingly. We need to innovate, to evolve, to sustain ourselves and maintain our market positions in a rapidly evolving world. To cope with this accelerating world we need to ‘go digital’ in any innovation design.

Here are my opening thoughts framed in the three horizons thinking I undertook.

Horizon One – keeping the lights on, managing today but moving forward

We have to recognize that innovation will certainly not get any easier; it will be faster, more demanding and a heck of a lot more risky to design, create and execute.

Without a doubt, digital and physical do operate at really very different speeds. We need not only a new innovation management system, we need a modern engagement platform.

At the moment innovation is seriously lagging in its potential as we have failed to “connect it all up.” Yet it is not just a need to simply connect up, we have this need to redesign innovation from the bottom up in its design to ‘account’ for all the changes that have ‘advanced’ our understandings.

 We need to leverage technology in significant ways to automate the process and capitalize on the power of data, intelligence, and flexible design delivered in highly adaptive ways.

We know a lot about innovation and its needs – in culture, environment, treatment, processes, collaboration and aligning to customer needs and being integrated into any strategic intention of the business, going forward, to deliver the new growth ‘called for’.

Horizon Three – confirming future aspects and realities to move towards

I think we need to see a greater advance in multiple Business models, each will not stand alone, they will interlock in intelligent ways, to benefit from scale that becomes the essential need and greater appreciation of sharing services, jointly working towards common outcomes.

These strategic connections will open-up due to collaborating in different partnerships those opportunities for shared cost of new channel developments, building their part of the value propositions, driven through common back office services.

These will increasingly rely on platform management to manage these and partners within ecosystems to come together to achieve more complex solutions that advance customer experience.

The growing pressure will be demanded to find solutions that provide a cohesive and business-focused approach to the new social enterprise where we seek engagement at scale into multiple arrays of communities and advocates that has data and innovation as their operating core.

Horizon Two – the zone of conflict to resolve and work through.

As we recognize that the enterprise will need to move towards a design that is constantly evolving, adapting, adjusting and reacting. We need to design our systems to be highly agile. Systems that allow people to make their decisions based on the data they can access and predict a result.

This needs to be designed so it will be totally redistributed down to the person that is the interface so they can have decision authority, to seize breaking opportunities and achieving customer satisfaction far more quickly than in the past.

It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where ‘people, things and their business offering’ can come together for mutual value based on the unique combination of the different technologies available.

We go and simply ‘grab them’ to fit the innovation we are working upon. We design the innovation system we need after we know what we are trying to achieve the challenge or idea. We “pull down” what is needed. Can we design a totally ‘adaptive’ innovation process to fit the specific need?

Moving from the present H1 into a world of Ecosystems and Platform collaborations, calling for a different innovation design.

There will be a constant evolving evaluation of the assets both internal and externally that make up this digital world (people, the business, and things) that will take this out beyond the control of one company, into a system within a larger system to make it works at a far constantly evolving speed, gaining adoption and appreciation of the value of being connected and collaborative.

We need to adapt our system thinking to the challenge identified, not the other way around, that of trying to fit them into a generically designed process. It should be each real challenge needs the innovation system design that is unique to fit the mission; highly adaptive, designed to the business need and the innovation discovery that helps fulfill the mission. It adjusts and you learn.

The dizzy array of strategic choices will totally disrupt existing business models if they are right in their design. We can scale a concept faster than ever, we can utilize others for resources, we can collaborate in highly agile, flexible and fluid ways. We are partnering more than ever, how can we accelerate that? How can we design innovation purposefully to work within this digital world, where (global) scope, scale, and speed are being demanded?

In summary

The whole world of communicating, transacting and designing all the different negotiations and products that meet the immediate needs of the customer makes this the “digital business era”, where constant redesigning and orchestrating the parts will keep it at the forefront by a constantly evolving set of combinations and leveraging a network of diverse capabilities.

All of this ‘calls for’ a radically new innovative design, built upon the digital age and the technologies available, as well as flexible enough to adapt into the future to provide a more dynamic innovation process, not one that today is very static in its present form. We need to make this case for change, as well as search for the mechanisms of that change.

The post Applying the Three Horizon Thinking to a Fresh Perspective of Innovation Design first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The number of helpful reports, observations and suggestions are constant and becoming overwhelming to translate effectively.

How can we map a new pathway for shifting current practices and transform them?

Where do we focus, what do we recognize as organization practices that can begin to transform the organization and re-equip it for a different future?

After working through a number the one that held my attention and has become central to my thinking to take organizational practices forward was provided by a recent report from McKinsey “How to create an agile organization”. This report has been part of a broader ‘agile’ series from them but this one specifically gave me my necessary anchor point, to move forward with my own design thinking for agility and innovation.

Agility for me is vital, it allows us to increasingly be adaptive in an uncertain world.

As innovation continues to be central to growth far more in the future it is our ability to adapt and adjust to all the uncertainties and this requires the ability to be agile.

I want to separate agile from the software push side, empowering small teams, into this agility for organizations. We all need to learn or hone new skills, be this sense-making, novel, and adaptive thinking, developing deeper social intelligence and managing new media literacy. How we do this will be one of the keys to making progress or sinking due to a growing cognitive overload.

I recall one report suggesting the work environment needs to be redesigned with three goals in mind, so we can tackle increasingly higher-impact challenges, strengthen those higher-impact connections to deliver on these challenges and thirdly, be in the right shape to amplify the impact.

These three suggestions came from the Center for the Edge. I liked these as they fit my innovation mindset and focus and continues to extend my own views, such as these two posts of “Making Agility compatible for you” and “Building Collective Agility for Innovation”

So, let me return to the McKinsey report, it builds out “agility” even further.

They have identified eighteen practices for organizational agility. Have you noticed how many organizations are emphasizing agility in their transformation, yet McKinsey have suggested nine of these practices are more for stability and can give the foundations for the shaping the other nine, those they nominate as dynamic.

Stable and Dynamic Practices of Agility.

A brief summary but I would recommend reading their report

Now within the list of stable practices, I think most organizations are falling into the trap and placing their emphasis on building these. Is this focus wrong? Yes, but it is largely where you are in nay transformation journey. There seem very few organizations have completed any form of agile transformation, they are for many a current work-in-progress.  It is the scope and ambition of organizations real determination to transform, their higher aspiration, that will determine how far along an agile pathway they can go. The stable group reflects significant progress on where most of our organizations find themselves today.

The ability to transform, moderates the ‘higher aspirations’ and my feeling is, unless you aim for the dynamic agility practices from day one, you will not make sufficient progress in delivering agility into the organization. This is why I just want to focus on these more dynamic ones, as they really begin to make a radical difference, one that can separate one organization from another.

McKinsey does point out you do need all eighteen to be fully in practice, but it is these dynamic ones that hold the real promise in my mind. These are the ones we all should move towards as our projected aim to achieve.

So let me summarize these nine dynamic practices

I have taken the nine dynamic practices outline meaning from this McKinsey report and added my own thoughts and reflections within these summaries.

1. Information Transparency

Today we need to take away all the filtering going on in organizations. Those who fill positions to control and attempt to influence the data. If we can’t unlock the knowledge within the organization, we fail to connect the people working within the organization to its products and related customer needs. Transparency makes the sharing of the knowledge increasingly relevant to connecting up the ‘whole’. There needs to be a very powerful concept of un-filtering, to allow the flow of understanding. It is highly dynamic and powerful in all it can release if encouraged and supported.

2. Rapid iteration and experimentation

The whole emphasis today is on rapid and fast cycles of learning. That testing, learning and adjusting from mistakes and building on these become really valuable progress points. Prototyping is getting so much better, it is creeping into the everyday culture when we innovate, or should. The MVP concept is so right to get features that are potentially better, out there, to test and learn from.

3. Continuous Learning

The moment we stop personally learning, we are the real losers. We need to find ways to ”cut out time” to explore and look for new ways to learn to improve ourselves and what we do within organizations. We need to push for new ways of working and to learn ‘more freely’ from other’s knowledge, in open exchanges and ways to collaborate. We progress by learning from failures and relating to them.

4. Flexible resource allocation.

We need to be adaptive, fluid in any organization and team design. The ability to feel in a position to ‘ramp up or shut down’ initiatives empowers us. We need to want to constantly change teams, seek out joining new ventures. To be always wanting to be redeployed, not because we are hanging on but because any new deployment means new horizons and opportunities. Seek change out, embrace this flexible world and show you are a key resource to help mold and shape it.

5. Open physical and virtual environment.

I often struggle with open planned offices, they provide an environment that distracts and not promote. If you can achieve a way that people communicate and collaborate with each other then great but when you are in a globally dispersed organization it is how you openly ‘react’ in your daily work. For me the virtual environment holds the real future and with so many organizations denying social tools the key to make it ‘purposefully designed’ is to make the activities clearly visible to all that need to know, to constantly show where your intervention and impact has made a difference in building context, content, structure or sharing knowledge. We need to find much better ways to make this a really dynamic, exciting, and rewarding part of agility within organizations

6. Sensing and seizing opportunities.

The value of being proactive, to watch out for signals, to then act upon them, to make your insights valuable to change perceptions, to alter customer bias, to engage with the external environment to shape, influence and contribute into new initiatives makes ‘sensing and seizing’ so important to drive innovation as the catalyst of change.

7. Technology, systems, and tools.

The constant demands being placed on us, to learn and adapt to new technology, systems, and tools as it keeps changing is mega-hard to keep pace with. New organization design in architecture, infrastructure, practices, and ways is tough to integrate the old and the new. How we respond to these is highly dependent on the articulated needs of the business. We can only be ‘responsive’ if we relate to the changing needs. The ability to have a more modular architecture, updates coming in a shorter interval of times can help in a continued updating. It is when the process determines rigid design you can’t change. To ‘react and respond’ you need to keep looking at moving towards technology frontiers. Exploring and exploiting contributes to a better holistic desired business outcome.

8. Role mobility

The movement needs to be constant. When we design we need to always account for achieving a certain fluidity. We need to constantly match our present skills with organizational needs. As we develop a more open talent marketplace we need to have this increasing mobility. Communicating roles, tasks and project outlines need to be demanded, then we have the understanding to change and then deliver to these ‘askes’ of us. These need to constantly match with our own goals, the alignment is the enabler to make this happen.

9. Active partnerships and ecosystems.

Relationships are our trading value. As we build out networks we need to trade. We trade in knowledge, in contribution, in working alongside others to co-develop. We seek out partnering, to invest our intellectual capital with theirs. We look to build the organization’s ecosystem through these engagements, to contribute to new products, services and solutions to look to bring them always to fruition. Our ‘need’ for activity and engagement builds a thriving, more dynamic environment.

In summary.

If we can embrace change by seeking out ways to re-equip ourselves, we encourage our organization to become more dynamic by these actions. We do get stuck in a certain mindset and set of behaviors. We become beholden to them, they eventually ‘freeze’ our progress, we stop learning and experimenting. We need to push for formal mechanisms of change, we need to seek out our own. We need to take hold of our actions, be clear on our organization’s vision and how we believe we can contribute.

As individuals, as members of fluid teams and as an organization we need to be mutually reinforcing.For me, fluidity is equally the growing need of organization’s today.  It is in recognizing that the dynamic practices found for building agility into ourselves and the organization do lie in these nine practices, they give us this level of fluidity. Take them on board, practice them constantly and over time your agility becomes your transformation. It becomes the ‘norm’ and allows for constant adaption.

The post The Dynamics within Agility. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

One that is jumping to a fresh cycle of innovative design

We are in the middle of it, some of you may not have noticed its impact and change but it is significant on the understanding of innovation, in it’s future design.

Often this era of change is not as well-recognized or being faced up to, as you would expect.

Many companies are still in denial or not wanting to address the significant legacy and change required.

Innovation has gone from being islands of knowledge, developing new products and services exclusive to that one company, then quickly copied by the competitors, into something radically different.

We are moving into innovation activities that are built more on collaborative and co-creation approaches, where cooperation and exchanges are more built around platforms and formed in ecosystems.These ecosystems gather around a concept or transformation that requires this collective approach and require a more radical design and become very unique in the end result .To achieve this innovation has gone digital, pure and simple.

There are significant shifts underway towards digital innovation in R&D and new-product development. They are all becoming digital endeavors. Of course, this shift requires really big changes in strategy, operations, the organization and in each individuals orientation. Executing this shift to digital is central and very complex, as it is involving the whole Enterprise.

Nowhere have I come across such a confirmation, then in the annual BCG report, the one released in January 2018 “The Most Innovative Companies 2018: Innovators Go All In On Digital“. The focus of the report is specifically on the state of digital innovation and what it is taking for companies to refocus their innovation programs around this digital imperative.

BCG rightly is pointing out from their research that digital innovation is just taking over everywhere.

They point out that since 2014, only four types of innovation and that are all related to digital, have grown increasingly in importance in their pursuit by companies. These are big data analytics, the fast adoption of new technologies, mobile products and capabilities and digital design.See the above for the complete list on where innovation is heading, it makes interesting viewing from BCG.

Even though this is a trend for all, there is a growing digital divide. Those that have firmly established a coherent, connected and effective digital innovation program are getting stronger, while those that are lagging are increasingly getting weaker. The ability to possibly catch up might come from exploiting technology platforms but this needs some equally careful thinking through and does not avoid the internal need to change and re-orient to this new digital innovation world. The key lies in opening up, both internally and externally and that is a sea-change of difference for many companies to undergo.

So the need to innovate comes from digital as the source

The importance of big data, the speed of technology adoption, mobile products, digital design, and technology platforms are at the heart of innovation. It will fundamentally change the type of resources innovation requires. Another of the visuals from the BCG report is indicating the huge differences between leading and lagging companies in how they are leveraging digital to help the following aspects of innovation

The whole point for innovation today is digital has altered our understanding. We are seeing blurred boundaries, digital is raising the stakes and fear of missing out, it is upping the speed at which others are competing with new concepts, ideas, and engagement with customers. Traditional methods and approaches to innovation are completely breaking down, hence my total belief we are in the new era of innovation.

We so often hear about a transformational mindset, but we do need one.

We need to short-circuit our innovation development process, we must have as much visibility (and controls) into our value chain, we need to develop a riskier mindset to explore, validate and experiment to bring our products and services to market.

The whole operational process has to reorient away from being internally driven into being externally lead. To re-equip whole organizations is a long transforming journey, the breaking down of siloed thinking to one of being more open-sourced one requires new communicating tools. The encouragement of having open feedback loops, both internally and externally, engaging the customer needs exploiting. The push for constant points of “predictive and actionable insights” needs to be engrained in the collective thinking of all within the company. There are needs to explore the ways of working, collaborating and engaging and that alone is a massive undertaking.

Digital is demanding so much in new processes that need to be more agile, responsive, reflective of new insights at increased speed and fluid in the design of those undertaking the solution to react. This needs significant process redesign and the redesign into small, nimble teams and cross-trained groups who collectively gather around a problem to solve it and then disperse and reform in different shape and form to address the next need. This agility needs the tools of testing, feedback, and adaptation to accelerate the innovation process.

I liked the suggested digital design principles that BCG outlined in their report.

The design needs to be customer-centric, agile, experimental, lean, standard as much as it can be, with simplicity and adaptive as being central to this. They need to focus on operational excellence that has high degree’s of organizational discipline that seeks out continuous improvement and the people are empowered, accountable and encouraged to be cross-functional in expertise, both in digital and business-specific expertise.

They suggest within the digital leader some specific traits, I think this resonates with me for the whole digital design and team environment. It needs breadth of understanding, it stays clear on its purpose and in its vision to undertake jobs that constantly change, be culturally adapt, to embrace the digital world, internally and externally, be highly adaptive and flexible to adjust to relevant and emerging information and learning and lastly be as collaborative as they can be in a dynamic network of collaborators, informers, and doers.

To finish BCG provided this visual to outline the processes and cultures that can govern disruptive and radical innovation projects, as digital innovation transformation is certainly that

The road you take will decide where innovation is heading for you

Do you stay on the innovation pathway in its design, built up over many years or recognize, the ground has shifted to one of digital reliant innovation. So each company needs to decide the road they want to take. BCG suggests one road is the measured and deliberate transformation journey but change is a constant to be increasingly more adaptive or the other is applying a “leapfrog approach” where rapid identification, massive external help to scale-up in-house technology linked to technology platforms where culture becomes a significant place to manage, as you manage the old and the new and where there are real clashes.

It does seem we all need to pursue disruptive and radical innovation designs. It seems we can’t keep hiding behind incremental improvement today, others are racing to get ahead and they see digital innovation as the chance to make this happen. Time is not on anyone’s side, it is how you use it and the wisest are going digital as fast as they can.

The post So Where Is Innovation Heading? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This quote is from the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Henry Rumsfeld, who mentioned: “unknown unknowns” (Rumsfeld, 2002).

Since then, people have started using quadrants of knowledge, i.e., known known, known unknown, unknown known, and unknown unknown, to understand and explain the nature of risk but also of leading to an opportunity.

For innovators so much of innovation is hard to detect, it needs discovery and working through these quadrants of knowledge as well. We need to treat ideas the same on how anything needs assessing but it needs to pass through a different thinking about knowledge understanding, as there are ‘known knowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ and we need to prepare for both within our innovation activities.

Our pursuit in life is often the same as our innovation efforts, it is in the search for discovery. Often it happens, that we already feel better equipped for exploring and observing by just getting out of our usual everyday working environment.

It is through this positive action, the need to search and explore, we can discover something that had previously been unknown, a new opportunity to give it a new value. Converting something previously unthought of (those unknowns) gives the potential for far greater value.

If you would like to read this paper where the above came from, then go to this link

For me, a good idea management system needs to be set up for all known and unknown possibilities to capture their potential. The front end of innovation has the challenge of generating ideas, but these come from these two distinct avenues – improving the known and discovering the unknown. Let me explain why breaking down our thinking into knowns and unknowns helps us.

Some links provided here take you to what one provider of idea management software can provide. There are a number of choices and I would always recommend a good, comprehensive evaluation before you finalize your choice, then it really needs to be well-embedded within your innovation process, to extract the best value out of it and give you a consistent return on its costs.

The knowns are those products, services, processes, etc. that we know we can improve upon.

The ‘knowns’ are usually tangible in what we already see. We are often specifically asked to improve on them by finding cost savings, improving their functionality or design. It becomes our task in delivering alternatives, in new varieties, updates, technology enhancement, or simply recognizing the lifecycle of the existing needs refreshing, changing or altering. Much of this work is incremental or distinctive in innovation. This is where a good, well-designed idea management system is ideal, being able to deal with capturing and translating the idea and turning it into something realizable and offering improved value on the existing (knowns). This is managing the innovation portfolio in a systematic and focused way.

Idea management software can offer a structured approach that provides a full concept lifecycle management process, directly built into it. It takes the management of ideas to implementation planning as its hand-over point is when the concept moves into commercialization entering usually a portfolio and pipeline management system.

We need to sustain and nurture the incremental

The constant challenge is coming up with ideas that are not simply one-offs, they need to be continuous in their pursuit. Most of our innovation in organizations is based on incremental improvements that need a sustaining capability. One of the most important parts of any sustaining capability is having access to software that allows for multiple activities to build. This capturing needs a more sustaining routine, a certain familiarity, including an idea management software that can be customized constantly to your ongoing needs, being ideal for managing most of our business needs, that of protecting and building the core.

When you are dealing with assessments of the known, there is a need to have a good evaluation process. Ideas need to be opened up to a greater stimulus, to an audience as wide as possible to contribute and gain their best insights or suggestions. It is encouraging and capturing that additional knowledge, that additional piece of the jigsaw that was missing, that someone else can provide in the development process.

Your job is to improve on the nascent idea you have, to get others involved and build upon this further. The last thing you need to do is spend large parts of your time on the mechanics because you are directing your creative energy away from improving your ideas into winning ones. Solutions need to focus on value, need and growth outcomes and often the reason why we settle on the knowns far more is that we are seeing ways which are seemingly easier to advance, to make improvements on the existing. Thankfully having a good idea management system can greatly support this.

The real value of any software capturing system is more for the unknowns as it requires greater collaboration, observation, and awareness. Unknowns need open, questioning minds and this requires a place to capture them and encourage others to collaborate and equally work on moving them from the unknown to the known and eventually highly valued.

The unknown becomes very different in approaching idea generation.

It needs a different type of approach. It needs to have a different level of innovation idea funnel. I wrote about this some time back, discussing the extended innovation funnel (here) and used this visual. It begins to break down the complexity we find in managing the two ends of the innovation process, discovering and driving concepts through the system.

The unknowns require a wide usage of capturing tools and techniques.

Observation is most probably one of the most important skills to have. It is highly valued in the idea management process. Thankfully technology made available many of these observing techniques and became ‘bolt-on’ modules or are offered in the idea management software solution out of the box – meaning you can automate this “fuzzy” front end.

All the different capturing solutions available allow you to get comfortable in their use, so you are free to do this observing, opening your mind to new possibilities, to find a relationship to what you are doing. The more you can turn unknowns into knowns that are validated through different identification tools. They feed the idea pipeline. For instance:

I always believe the more your organization is exposed to common tools, the more they form a common basis for building a communicating language, protocol, and common purpose.

A common tool I consider as highly valuable within the idea to commercialization process as it frames dialogues in time, resource allocation and the complexity of approach is the three-horizon-framework. If we have a good frame to frame uncertainty within innovation then you can begin to describe this to others while managing the unknowns.  The three-horizon framework has terrific value for considering options, discussing uncertainty and framing the business of today with the challenges you might be facing of the future.

For instance, when it comes to ideas:

For example, you can take the knowns and unknowns and recognize these have different discover needs and time horizons. They need different resources and thinking through to manage. This early recognition can change the very tone of innovation conversations and recognize what it takes in managing ideas that are partly incremental to service today’s business needs and more transforming, to help support the needs of the future.

In both cases, incremental and transforming, are taking ideas through to commercialization but in radically different ways. The value potential of those unknowns, pointing to the future, can grow in understanding over time, in exploring and experimentation.

All ideas that are ‘projecting’ change on your existing products, services or business models implicate the same – you must ensure you have the right conversations about time, resource allocation, expectancies and the ‘stark’ difference between exploitation and exploration when dealing with managing different types of innovation.

The pressure lays always on: how to quickly turn an unknown into a known?

The ability to prototype, changing an intangible concept into a working model, transforms the idea management stage. I would argue that prototyping needs to be in the idea management thinking from as early as it can be. It accelerates understanding, it validates and builds the experience, it allows valuable new insights to ‘play out over time’ to give increasing value. The more we prototype, the more we provide ‘hard’ evidence of the value of an idea turning into a concept to eventually arrive at a commercialized proposition.

By turning to a structured system of managing emerging ideas can allow you to capture your nascent idea, explore and then collaborate around them. Framing them even further in the context of value needs to be highly adaptable, robust and able to be scaled out. One of the best ways is to use a good, reliable and well-developed Idea Management software, for example, Hype does provide this, as well as a few others.

Innovation always has the best chance to flourish when people become engaged and really want to actively engage in searching out new ideas that have value and worth, but they need a place where this can be captured and shared. To achieve that ‘engage and exchange’ culture, you need a well-structured management system that can respond. Good idea management software systems give you a far better chance to innovate well, managing both the knowns and unknowns by capturing your discovery and exploration journey in effective and efficient ways, that gives you a clear system of record and the source of your organization’s collective knowledge to explore and exploit constantly.

 

**adapted and revised from an original post written for Hype Innovation, used an example within this post as a good Idea Management Software provider.

 

The post There are Knowns and Unknowns in Innovation: Let’s Manage Them Differently first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Seriously, have you not noticed the more we work in the innovation space, digital and technology have become inseparable and part of any innovation solution. The innovation funds are increasingly being switched to digital or technology solutions and the output of the discoveries from this digital technology need innovation to then be applied. A virtuous loop.

Managing in this shift has become more intense and committing.

The reliance on deeper insights, more data, greater communications is changing the way we undertake innovation. Speed, scale, and scope are greater within the mix than ever before. We are testing uncertainty constantly, validating a part, pivoting more, experimenting and prototyping to work through this deciphering. Data specific, technology-driven, innovation invigorating.

Organizations are spotting opportunities faster than ever. We are cutting across borders, teaming up with start-up’s, past competitors to seize these opportunities.

Let’s take the emerging Health Care changes going on in the U.S.

Let’s take Amazon, the “golden child” or “big hairy and scary brute”. They see a market is in that specific need of the Amazon treatment, then they are onto it. The recent announcement that J.P.Morgan Chase, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway are teaming up in a joint venture to do “something”  about the high cost, complexity, and bureaucracy of U.S. HealthCare, becomes one of those announcements that must have struck a real fear into all the prescription-drug middlemen. It is ambitious, yet the combined clout really makes you sit up and take notice. It is announcing the existing ways of conducting business, in silo’s of activity not visible to others, is going to be changed fairly dramatically. The change will be based on technology, data, and interactions, applying a digital solution alongside innovative applications and linkages, are going to be central to the solutions.

Then we heard that Apple was launching medical clinics, for delivering the “worlds best healthcare experience” for its employees Once it has mastered this, we can expect technology solutions will be applied on their learning for more universal solution application to the US health care, to offer out to the market. Now, this gets very intriguing.

The main purpose is to rein in the runaway health care costs, which are 18% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). The size of the “health care beast” is around $3.3 trillion and it is going to take considerable new investment and concepts to tame this and make it become a little leaner, less duplication and more efficient. Who better to search for creative solutions than these companies, watch as others join in this new battleground.

Yet again we are seeing a business decision made on spotting an opportunity and not concerned, at the present, on the classic financial measure of ROI- return on investment. If you look at Amazon they provide shareholder return on the value in the share, less in the bottom line. They see financial management differently. They chase growth and opportunity for their value.

How that will stack up with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway view on financial management will be interesting to watch. As Warren Buffett has stated “it won’t be easy or quick” to solve healthcare. The current search is on for a “terrific CEO” and in Mr. Buffet’s words “to apply lots of commitment, probably make some important mistakes, lots of time. I’m not interested in lots of time. At 87, I want to keep it moving”

Each of these companies; J.P. Morgan, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, along with Apple have lots of cash to invest, they have access to some of the best and brightest talent and technology solution presently known. This will produce concepts, solutions, and innovations that have high levels of radical change that will be built into them. It will potentially alter the way healthcare operates in ways we currently can’t imagine.

Now why did I raise ROI and entitle this “the New ROI for digital innovation”

Simply the focus on the bottom line might still be the place to focus upon for many but when you have a significant access of cash, technology and talent you have such an amazing confidence in exploiting existing and exploring new markets in ways beyond most organizations ability to comprehend or undertake.  The fact you keep investing your cash into that continuously and relentlessly investing cycle of growth, built on technology and innovation always being shaped by digital understanding, then the traditional ROI (return on investment) seems not as important as my new ROI, one of being Relevant, based on Outcomes and Impact as the new bottom line of investing judgement.

Relevant

It is this merciless and unremitting quest to grow, to expand, to seek out opportunities and disrupt much if what looks to be inefficient, still operating mostly in a manual world, lacking a digitally connected and highly connected value chain there is a real opportunity for technology and innovation to be creatively applied. We are constantly seeing creative solutions in new ways, in combinations of technologies, coming together to change our perception of our worlds (Smartphone, Online books, Uber, Airbnb, Device Management). These are significantly changing our environment, both in our personal lives and increasing in the Industrial world, of connecting up as they show us their relevancy and value. Relevance is today having a direct bearing on the matter, that an opportunity spotted as one that is pertinent to pursue, rigorously. The activity we focus upon in finding solutions must be relevant, ones that are solving real social and economic problems.

Outcomes

It is no more inputs or outputs, it is all about outcomes. The ability to apply, recognize and demonstrate knowledge and understanding. We need to constantly take our experiments from a theory that needs constant testing, adjusting into final validation. Outcomes are looking for new space. It is inventors, researchers and analysts need to achieve outcomes. We have the need to have both extrinsic and intrinsic outcomes, in healthcare solutions for example. We need to always define, build and gain identification with our outcomes as they show the new space and potential opportunity to build. Innovation outcome can be incremental, evolutionary and revolutionary. Outcomes are the new meaning point

Impact

J.P.Morgan Chase, one of the partners with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway, have spoken fairly often around impact investing. The need for scaling, access to sizable capital and exploring different business models. It is the right conditions when capital, talent and social challenge come together to resolve a challenge. The U.S.Heath is just one of those challenges that might be right for the JPMC treatment.

When we map problem spaces (U.S.Healthcare) we are looking for impact investing. The “impact economy” has been defined by the Aspen Institute as the “twin forces of supply and demand, impact investing and social entrepreneurship, that is driving systemic change in the US and around the world.”

Quoting from different papers on the “impact economy”: Part of the aim is to recalibrate supply and demand that looks harder at social impact. The need is to build a new social contract that may develop into a social impact bond- investors provide capital to fund community-based programmes whose successful implementation lessens long-term public expenditure and improves social outcomes. Clearly, this emerging concept will not be easy, but it does bring together all parties to attempt to drive impact and innovate in different fields where we have bigger social challenges. The key is it does need to generate shared value for all and that is going to be a hard road to travel.

Let’s look at some of the critical success factors for this to succeed.

The Monitor Institute wrote a report released in 2009 on impact investing and it provides an excellent overview of what needs to happen.  Their list of critical success factors was to view this from different parties’ perspectives but let me provide the list of significant issues to be resolved. So taking their suggested list and adapting it:

This is an evolutionary path. One that Healthcare solutions might need to travel, so all become highly engaged

• Developing a range of different but creative packaging instruments that make it possible to gain sufficient returns and bring the different parties together in this project.
• Most probably have some infrastructure especially suited to manage opportunities (separate stock exchanges, intermediaries, and specialists)
• Form a clear network/ community to enable linkages between investors and explore common goals.
• Encourage sufficient commercial capital to participate in joint deals by involving all possible investors that see this as critical to contribute funds too.
• Build sufficient submarket funds or grant capital that might have different investment rates so a more ‘blended’ rate is attractive and resolves different ‘benefit’ criteria between parties to underpin the risk/cost investment within the solutions.
• Achieve a common approach for assessing social/ environmental elements of investment from research and valuation aspects that allow new technology related solutions to emerge.
• Structure a viable market for investment opportunities where competitive returns can be demonstrated that yield attractive returns and reverse current cost acceleration
• Impact rating systems can be developed that offer acceptable minimum standards to certify companies and verification and are not actually equally destructive.
• Achieve a growing standard of metrics that set out goals of achieving social or environmental objectives that bring the supply/demand sides into a better, more equitable balance.
• A real push will be needed for more product innovation that meets the challenges, is able to be scaled up and overcomes potential (parts of) society’s objection or concerns with accepting the changes it might bring.

So, we need a different way to evaluate ROI

For me, if you begin to look around at the type of complexities we are trying to resolve we need to dampen the old school of “Return on Investment” and look to the new school of “Relevant, Outcome and Impact” as our new measuring stick.

If we continue to solve solutions through ingenuity from innovation, alongside digital and technology solutions, we will continue to challenge incumbents with new, better value propositions that continually innovate and evolve, as innovation, digital and technology form together giving a very different set of opportunities for value return to the ultimate consumer.

So Relevant, Outcome and Impact might just become our new ROI for business evaluation, born out of innovation, digital and technology application coming together to tackle tough challenges. Worked upon by harnessing talented people and analytical understanding. seizing new opportunities to resolve many of our inefficient areas.

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Much of what we read about artificial intelligence, deep learning and robots can present fear of a new paradigm that our jobs are simply going, or vanish fairly soon, so we should find ways to release our human ingenuity.

Technology, machines and information solutions will take over in this new world of accelerating technology with the concern of “so then, what do we do?

Well, I believe we have a real chance to, at last, celebrate. Yes celebrate, we can finally be liberated! Ever since the industrial revolution, we have been caught up in the productivity and efficiency trap, in the monotony of repeating work.

Today we are on the cusp of changing that.  Can you imagine all those boring, repetitive jobs we are faced with today can be simply handed over to machine intelligence, just happy to do the task at hand?

Surely, if we manage this correctly it can release us up, it can enable our ingenuity to thrive and the answer lies in the work to be done

Scary, yes, if you fear using your creative mind and actually enjoy repetitive work, where you switch off and become the robot equivalent, leaving decisions to others, just getting on with the work in hand. The productivity perspective of having robots and artificial intelligence constantly repeating, improving and doing the work to be done is liberating, isn’t it surely if we manage it properly?

Back in 1776 Adam Smith wrote a famous book “the Wealth of the Nations” and discussed the “work to be done“. This caught my interest, we all get so caught up in the repeating stuff we find little time for the “work to be done“. It is this that generates the new, pushes the boundaries beyond the existing, it gives us the chance to explore new possibilities. It allows us to apply our human brains to more creative work.

Let us designate the constant repeating “work done” to our new friends the robots and machines. Let’s find the time to learn new things, develop a new level of dexterity, adaptiveness and ‘hone’ our senses to actively go out and seek.

I made this “work to be done” shift as part of my advisory business some years back and it is even more relevant today, more than ever, focus forward not constantly tracking back.

“Work to be done” is searching for our future growth through human ingenuity. It is working through the data, collected intelligence can provide to connect the dots, see different possibilities, use our creativity, our originality, our inventiveness, our adaptable skills to do new work.

That is the power of “work to be done“, the place we humans do need to find as much time as we can to explore the needs to be resolved, unraveled and find solutions to increasingly complex challenges to be worked upon and eventually resolved.

As we are fed increasing knowledge at a faster rate, we need to learn to absorb more. The more active we become engaged in knowledge sharing, in building outcomes from the networking between machines and humans, the more potential we can to release new insights, if, again if, we are released from the constant work done world.

The more we shift from physical ‘work done’ to more intellectual ‘work to be done‘ we can grow our future in the best ways, the future does come into our hands. It is searching for the necessary ‘work to be done‘ that is so important for innovation insights, and today much of that remains hidden, waiting to be discovered. Yet we so often never find the time as we are so caught up in the repeat in our lives of the ‘work done’, that constant drumbeat of repeating tasks as part of our job. What if we designed our future that released the human from this repetitive work?

Can you imagine secretaries, administration assistants, operations, many managers positions, first-line supervisors, cashiers, industrial engineers, customer service representatives, lawyers, helpers, laborers and material movers, positions that can can all be automated and then “released” to become far more wealth creating, not value defending, as their new role?

As we gain more understanding of what automation and information technology can give us we can channel that “data-driven innovation” (DDI) in different, new ways. If we spend time on innovation that creates real new business value by structuring different technologies to “define and capture” to a more specific context we can accelerate outputs and outcomes. We can enhance research and development, focus on searching for products that meet “need” better than existing ones.

We can find more time to optimize processes and our production processes, from what WE learn from placing our robots and intelligence gathering at Our disposal, by using what they gain in intelligence and work productivity to put to our good use to constantly innovate.

We might be in the position of putting the human race into being finally released for real economic and social growth as their job, the “work to be done“. We form around new rules and work and we actually expect from our new assistants our measurement of technologies, social and economic success, for us to make new advances we know we all need in this world.

For instance, the OECD highlights the value of data is needing to be context dependent. Read my view of Innovation discovery as context dependent.

The OECD suggests there are seven dimensions of data quality, well how about these become “OUR” demands or output expectancies from our new robot friends on all that “raw” intelligence, as a new world order of what we expect from “them”. Let me put my expected rules I want from becoming more data-dependent based on the OECD seven they suggest.

• Relevance of the data provided to address a purpose that allows me to advance my “work to be done“
• Accuracy to describe the characteristics we require to advance on what we have
• Credibility to give us confidence that what we are getting to know, is really going to help us in what we do need to know not what is simply data, for data sake.
• Timeliness not based on the availability of the data (today’s fixation) but permits the information to be of value and can be acted upon when it works for us. It does not necessarily have to be ‘real-time’ but timely to our need for the “work to be done“
• Accessibility by knowing where to look so it can be accessed when we need it, not ‘pushed at us (today) but ‘pulled out’ when we need it
• Interpretability is the ease of our understanding this gets replaced by us exploring its value in the context of what we have set up to build our understanding of the “work to be done” by spending more time in testing, validating, experimenting and seeing the connections to turn it (all) into new value
• Coherence is the logical path and where we want ‘work done’ to be consistent to our needs so we can spot variance, seek out new logic and make it reconcilable to what we are wanting to do.

I wrote an article “Work to be done is innovation’s invisible hand” back in 2013. It is an earlier “take” on the value of “work to be done”.

Let’s build from this, can you imagine our new extra pair of hands, unbelievable computing intelligence and technology potential all focusing on what needs to be done and feeding us what we require, to build something different, to advance on what we have, to crack more complex problems.

If we can now harness much of the data and repetitive work to release us from that world of “productivity and effectiveness” into one of “creativity and ingenuity” it might be a more stimulating and satisfying world where our contributions are actually making a difference.

The choice is ours on how we deploy what is around us.

The end outcome should be one where we all can be redeployed into the “work to be done” where new growth can be explored with a freer mind and an array of new assistants releasing us to undertake this new work. Now that is a revolution I feel is worth wanting.

The only fear you might have is knowing you are going to spend more time on exploring the unknowns and leave the knowns to others to deal with, as long as we still have human oversight managing this.

Let’s look to “work to be done” as a wonderful chance of finally being liberated, to be more innovative and creative, adaptive and something we are actually designed to do. Remember intuition and foresight, our ability to connect random thinking should play to our strengths lead to ingenuity.

The post A new paradigm of focusing on ingenuity lies in work to be done first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.