I have found that narratives are becoming increasingly important to explain ‘things’. I’m re-learning this ‘art’ to tell a compelling story.

Our stories can combine much, communities can identify or reject, we can begin to explain complex stories by presenting a well-designed narrative that presents the arguments. It can explain the connections and outline the issues, both in terms of risk and opportunity.

I think business narratives will become essential for our organizations to use to explain where they are and what they see as their future.

A good business narrative should fill a real knowledge gap

Organizations by making this move to open up, to spend more time explaining their ‘fit’ in the world will gain.  Those that stay closed down, secretive and selective in what they reveal will continue to ebb away and not valued as important for our future.

The business narrative is argued as the way to seek increased identity, allows a broader community to enact, to extract better cues for their sense of identity and offer a better way to draw them into this greater sense of identification.

I wrote about visualizing the innovating future through narrative reporting here and placing the business model as central to this narrative movement here.

We are in a constant state of being adaptive

We live in such a fluid world where we are all being forced constantly to be adaptive. It seems nothing is standing still and if it does it simply gets knocked down. We are all learning this new practice of being nimble and increasingly adaptive. Part of the growing complexity we all are grappling with daily is in the multiple voices that are competing for our attention.

Social platforms and having available the so many easy tools to participate are everywhere.  This has liberated these millions of voices wanting to express themselves. Cutting through these competing voices to sort out those that are relevant to you or the ones that will move you to action are tough. We need to go one step further.

We all feel the effects of this ‘sucking of time’ out of our days. We need to build a greater sense of connection, understanding the broader connectivity to put ‘things’ in context.

The story or narrative will increasing make the final connection and cut through this growing distraction noise. Getting more focused on the context and explaining this through a good narrative or story is becoming essential to go beyond ‘just a connection’ into prompting real identification and even action.

Anchoring ourselves through stories will help us regain that lost middle ground.

What we need to do, is anchor all these seemingly competing voices into our stories to explain where we are, where we believe we should be going and what, as we presently know it, will help us get there.

Learning the art of good narratives is becoming essential to tell our story and its place to help reduce conflicts and misunderstandings and help us all to navigate a little better in this more complex world.

We can tell these organizations stories in so many compelling ways, through the business model, and through sustainability reporting. A well-structured business narrative can offer the organization vision, it can enhance communication, it can highlight where the organization is critically capturing knowledge and putting it to work.

We need to spark more.

Narratives can spark our thinking in how this can encourage innovation and growth, so as to build a growing sense of community and identification, of engagement and identification. As new knowledge comes into us we need to increasingly sort it, to identify the relevant ‘tags’ and assign them in importance to us, our community and to the broader context.

Mastering the business narrative is becoming critical, in helping to connect the innovations we need to build our future and these need to be more connected by the power of the story.

Moving beyond just the sound bite or tweet

Our lives must move beyond the ‘sound bites’, they give us a feeling of engagement but this can be fleeting, lost in microseconds, we need to gain a greater sense of community and that comes from connecting the fragments of a story and piecing them together to give more lasting meaning. We need the ‘greater’ context, not just fleeting moments.

Business leaders need to practice the art (and science) of describing aspects that might be complex, into good narratives so we can identify with these and recognize ways we can contribute and support.

The post Describing the future by using the business narrative first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Let me try and bring together this ‘convergence’ that is going on through the different dialogues I had, that in my opinion is bringing together the strands of research and collaborative activity needed for accelerating Business model innovation.

Firstly Technology Strategy Board’s Innovate 10 conference & networking event

I attended the Technology Strategy Boards (http://www.innovateuk.org/) Innovate 10 conference. Innovate 10 is a leading networking, conference and exhibition event for businesses to meet other businesses, government and academia with the aim of making innovation happen – creating opportunity and growth for the future.
Hosted by the Technology Strategy Board, Innovate 10 addresses different aspects of innovation, with a special focus on the commercial exploitation of the DIGITAL economy, HEALTHCARE markets of the future, ENERGY generation and supply and the SUSTAINABILITY economy. The TSB aims for providing a connected environment for challenge-led innovation by connecting and catalysing.

One very exciting new programme – called the Stratified Medicines Innovation Platform – is all about tailoring medicines to patients as a key challenge for the $750 billion global pharmaceutical market.

TSB’s Competition is very specific on developing new Business Models
The Stratified Medicines Innovation Platform will focus initially on therapeutic areas that present a challenge to healthcare providers and  are ready for a stratified approach and that provide a significant market opportunity.

This competition aims to develop a better understanding of where and how value will be created in the stratified medicine value chain, and to develop

Business models that will enable companies to find the best way to capture that value. TSB will be providing funding to enable businesses, such as diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies, to develop and evaluate viable Business Models for the successful co-development of a medicine and a companion diagnostic.

Meeting up finally with Stephen Newbury of IIGglobal for Business Model Research (http://www.iigglobal.com/)

Stephen is striving to be the leading provider of Business Model Research and Development. IIGglobal are looking to explore how successful businesses work today and highlighting those emerging strategies that will provide the research foundation for the fast-growth companies of the future.

He and I have been in a number of different exchanges for some time so it was good to finally meet up with him, to take our combined thinking of surprisingly mutual future needs required to support Business Model Innovation, that little bit further.

Stephen  summarized where he is in the following way with his work:

• The building of a Case study research library that will tell us a lot about business model success and failure.
• He emphasises it is not good enough to just look at present day models; a) You need to look at timeline within the results and the clear context of BMI, b) How model breaks the convention and clearly are different and c) Business model type and mechanism that works for the consumer.
• His team have been constructing a BMI Research process – multiple source cross-reference research, KOL and company interviews and bringing this together for developing a leading support practice for BMI.
• IIGglobal are currently very focused on Health, with mobile e-Health as a special area of interest, also  the Hotels & the Leisure Industry but are equally discussing numerous different industry and academic opportunities as well at this present time.
• They are presently looking to build evaluation tools to draw conclusions / provide threads from research that will speed up the thinking that leads to new development opportunities.
• Working on different mechanisms, design methodologies, explore adjacency opportunities, evaluate where disruptive innovations fits, and provide blind-spot analysis
• Building and exploring novel tools you can apply to BMI.

Our collaboration together accelerated each other’s understanding of BMI

In a broad set of discussions between us, we laid out some future thinking for BMI and what needs to be brought into place that links our two mutual objectives, so as to have available what we both see as the solutions for accelerating and establishing this better BMI environment:

• Ongoing focus on building more cases of BMI and providing the performance analysis of published cases to mutual clients.
• Our mutual belief that there is a real need of deeper structured research to help discover new perspectives on challenges, also new perspectives on solutions.
• These perspectives can include new insights, new customers, new resources, new channels
• Research can underpin / justify the Business Case through different analysis
• Research & investigation can define needs – identifying the possible solutions needed to problems that often remain hidden without a methodology of discovery.
• Tools and methods that can investigate value proposition (ranking, impact, capability, competition).
• Provide structure to help investigate higher impact propositions (value-based, enhanced economic, applications etc).
• Methods that can model potential profit, evaluate competition.
• Solutions that can help companies look at their business in the eyes of the customer before and after change.
• Research that is vigorous enough that it can uncover business opportunities and validate them.
• Developing rules with control mechanisms and framework for an integrated BMI process.

IIGglobal is open to growing its network

IIGglobal already has coverage set up in Mexico to service the American markets, a base in the UK for Europe and a small  team in Shenzen, China for Asia. We both saw significant ways to build on this initial contact for collaboration ideas that offer research, consulting, advisory services and support to organisations in all sectors- government, social, business and institutions- that are beginning to understand the power of Business model innovation.

My third event was with FutureAgenda
(http://www.futureagenda.org/)

The Future Agenda provides a forum to discuss how to address the challenges we face and gives you the opportunity to share ideas, visions and solutions and ultimately seed change. I met up with Dr Tim Jones – Tim is Programme Director of the Future Agenda.

He is a recognised leader in innovation and future growth with specific expertise in bringing together unique collaborations and helping organisations identify new opportunities. I see this as a fertile area for future BMI.

Briefly the Future Agenda is a unique cross-discipline programme which aims to unite the best minds from around the globe to address the greatest challenges of the next decade. In doing so, it is mapping out the major issues, identifying and debating potential solutions and suggesting the best ways forward.

They hope, as a consequence, that it will provide a platform for collective innovation at a higher level than has been previously been achieved, so as to gain clearer and more informed views of the future so that they can place intelligent bets in terms of business strategy and innovation focus.

My final contact was with 100open
(http://www.100open.com/)

100%Open is a new open innovation agency spun out of NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Roland Harwood and David Simoes-Brown lead this and I had some good opening discussions with Roland.

I see their work in opening up company thinking leading to the need for innovation through Business model re-designs.

100open focus on open innovation through their jam and discover approach for finding collaborations and the discovery of unmet needs through mediation and catalysts, all about helping you to co-innovate better, cheaper and faster.

Opening up innovation challenges makes eminent sense from the large company perspective to begin to rethink their business directions not just for the existing core, but leading to adjacencies and possible ‘white space’.

A very connected week for me across an innovation that offers real convergence.

It is the convergence of research, platforms and collaborative environments along with other emerging activities that will accelerate the understanding and use of Business model innovation.

These will form critical support to finding new growth opportunities as well as those different value propositions that are waiting to be discovered as current unmet needs, jobs-to-be-done or opportunities to discover through these activities surrounding the Business Model concept.

So for me, a week was well spent in my own areas of innovation activity.

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