Please, we need a different Innovation narrative

September 16, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Business Platforms and Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems1 Comment
(Visual adapted from AFSC explaining a narrative, in this case, social justice)

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation Passion led me here

September 6, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Building Innovation Capability, Business Platforms and Ecosystems, Fresh thinking, Innovation Ecosystems, Integrated Innovation Thinking2 Comments
Having an innovative passion

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation needs to speak to us.

Gaining energy and idea generation

August 29, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Sustainability

Gaining energy and idea generation

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

Let me share my thoughts and proposition here.

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

Finding fresh ideas and momentum

Establishing an innovative business platform adoption approach

August 24, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Business Platforms and Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The Combination Effect for Adoption in today’s world

The level of interest in business platforms in the B2B space has rapidly grown. Platforms are more viable and relevant today than ever. The platform’s ability to offer multiple values will influence many of the client’s adoption decisions over the choices their business will engage with.

I wrote a recent article on my ecosystem and platform posting site, “Exploring points of value in adopting business platforms.”

I suggested in this post, “Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.”

Recently in Stanford Social Innovation Review, an article on the “Adoption of Innovation” by Benjamin Kumpf & Emma Proud is well worth the read as adopting any innovation process is a tough, slow one.

They take a position on looking at behavioural approaches suggesting when behavioural insights have been adopted, innovation has ceased to be “innovative.” When a method, technology, or approach to a problem has moved from the experimental edges of an organization to the core of its work: no longer a novelty but something normal and institutionalized. My fear here is this becomes “static” and losses its dynamism.

New innovation approaches to counter the fear of Business Contagion

August 11, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Innovation Ecosystems, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Choosing new innovative approaches to counter the fear of Business Contagion

What has been changing in how we approach innovation, and have we taken the opportunity to radically revise the innovation system and process accordingly?

Many of our innovative approaches or systems are based on very often just an internal perspective, restricted in available resources and limited knowledge and insights, often constraining the evolving new solutions and then limiting the impact and outcome.

For many years open innovation has been encouraged to be adopted to break out of this very narrow internal focus. Having a real diversity of opinion with this greater access to different knowledge and experiences does open up our thinking, but it is, on its own, not enough to make a real difference, especially in times of acute change. We need to put to use a different innovation model or approach.

We are at the cusp or already into significant changes to how the world, society and we as individuals will manage or engage going into the future.

This is my second post discussing the belief that we are being to see a real contagion breaking down how we have been operating and living in the world.

We are facing the potential of unprecedented change, and we need to recognize how a different approach to innovation can help offset or mitigate many of the destabilizing aspects and provide a pathway to managing differently in a new environment that will inevitably come from this contagion.

The fear of business contagion requires different innovation response

August 8, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation1 Comment

Business contagion requires different innovative responses.

We are presently facing a profound set of changes in the conditions that businesses operate within the immediate years ahead, that of the fear of business contagion; these will need a different set of innovation shifts and responses to counter this and seize new opportunities.

Over two posts, I want to lay out the underlying concerns (here) and the new dynamics we can deploy by changing how we undertake innovation as my second post.

This first post discusses what is changing, and there is a growing argument in what I am seeing that we are facing one of those contagion periods where one set of conditions is triggering another, followed by another.

Innovation requires a more dynamic systematic approach

July 28, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Foster Performance, gaining innovation momentum, innovation execution delivery, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Innovation requires a more dynamic, systematic approach

All companies talk about innovation and its growing importance, but why is it that still so few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale?

What inhibits innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to achieving such innovative growth? Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities?

The difficulty for many is that innovation is a complex process that has many intangibles within the total mix to manage. Management today is far happier managing the ‘harder’ aspects of business, the current physical ones of everyday organization, not the ‘softer’ more intangible ones, where innovation often lies or emerges from.

Positioning my innovating approach

Positioning my innovating approach

July 22, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Innovation Ecosystems, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation
I want to find a new way of approaching innovation, a new positioning, and these are my opening statements to be questioned and built upon Chasing dedicated focal points, looking…

Most corporations don’t understand how much change is created by innovation. 

July 19, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The Value of the Three Horizons of Seeing Beyond

Applying the three horizon framework to innovation and change

I will always recommend this three horizon framework for shaping innovation. So much of our need to think about innovation is about managing differently the today, the tomorrow and the future, these need to be thought through in very distinct ways, to clarify the innovation levels of intensity, resources and outcomes required.

To explain the impacts of innovation and the change it creates, we’ll use an accepted framework (the Three Horizons) to consider the impact innovation has on change capabilities and business models.

Here we introduce the three horizon concept to better understand the range of innovation outcomes and the potential change requirements.

The three horizon framework has distinctive horizons for specific outcomes, management and approaching change

Innovations Degrees of Connectivity, Interactivity and Sharing for Ecosystem Design

June 24, 2022Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Innovation Ecosystems, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

The three degrees of ecosystem design- the innovating equation

In any ecosystem thinking and design, we do need to find this “sweet spot” for encouraging more innovation. For me, it is the ability to build the dynamics within the involvement required.

We live in a world where we are having greater connectivity than ever before. We are increasingly engaged in far greater interactivity with easy access to social and organizational tools than ever before.

We are encouraged to share what we know increasingly so others can build on this, or shape its original concept into a different value proposition simply by having that triggering idea and seeing the ‘possibilities’ to build upon it.