I have been working through my innovative points of focus, those that have, for me, my innovating purpose that needs constant referencing back and adapting to the future needs of innovation.

So here are my points of focus with a number of reference links that I have selected and written upon in the past. They help build out my narrative for innovation capability building and understanding for the future.

Asset Orchestration the new game around- structuring, bundling, leveraging the complex interactions. Asset orchestration is required for more dynamic innovation.

Dynamic Capabilities – opening up your thinking to dynamic capabilities by spotting and resolving the tensions, gaps, building a greater fitness landscape model that builds agility on a new pathway, strengthening and defining all the different stocks and flows

The multiplicity of Investment – transforming, integrating, identifying, contextual, common language, coherency premium

Value Creation – what is it, value creation resides where, wealth-generating perspective, a narrative to be broken down, integrated framework, impact points in new combinations and discovery

Innovation Capital – defining innovation capital,  the combination of the core sum, learning about, interactions, bundles, future value, recombine.

Innovation Infrastructure–  building-related innovation assets and dedicated resources, the architecture around innovation building, the connected building blocks, the innovation work mat approach.

Knowledge Management– learning how to absorb and translate in common ways the knowledge we need for innovation, recognizing how knowledge flows

Intellectual Capital – building our learning capitals, the importance to us,  the bundle of unique assets, agility and attitudes, collaboration, the building mechanism for organizational learning

Different Horizon Planning –  We need to plan in different horizons, to assign and think in different ways to sketch out the future sustaining pathway to meet the three different voices we need today, of articulating and innovating today’s business, adjusting the business of today to the immediate future by adjusting and update, and the longer-term sustaining one, that will offer a very different future from today, that we need planning and building for, today.

YOUR Business Model Innovation– articulating the value-generating story goes way beyond your organization, for today’s more compelling value propositions, it is becoming a critical interplay.

My final one is emerging as a repositioning towards innovation ecosystems. One of my posts was “Business needs innovation ecosystems” and I have been building understanding and knowledge on the influence of ecosystems and platforms consistently over a number of years.

There are so many points of innovation value, these are just a taster of all the knowledge, understanding and linkages that need to be built in any innovation capabilities for competencies and capacity to innovate.

Dip in, take a look, and go further by viewing the key reference tabs provided on the right-hand side.

The post Linking sense of innovating purpose first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I was recently working through a set of older presentation files and came across this extract concerning innovation again and thought I must share this. Sadly, it rings true as much as it did those  (many) years back.

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

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

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

The Innovation Pathway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The lost innovation pathway first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

You get this increasing sense that the ‘fizz’ has gone out of the innovation bubbly, we are seemingly in a trough of innovation disillusionment. The innovation party presently feels a little flat.

When we turn up at those creative innovative parties today the numerous delicious canapés to choose from are turning up at the edges as we are becoming disillusioned, just being fed on a present unexciting incremental innovation diet, lacking any real substance.

We are not being challenged, we are being constrained, bored and fearful of taking bold risks

People are milling around with that bored look on their faces, some are also slumped down checking their watch or smartphones on when is the best time to cut out and find somewhere else to be, rather than be here. Has the fizz gone from innovation?

Are we being moved by innovation anymore?

Is innovation becoming a boring place to be seen for hanging out and being involved? Are we all feel that there is a less creative buzz going around?

Perhaps, it depends on each of us yet collectively you might agree we do feel something is definitely missing. The excitement has left the room, innovation has become too predictable.
Any thoughts on who to blame?

Innovations have become the next novelty, entertainment or the latest talking point.

Everyone seems to be playing it safe. The truth is we are all to blame, we have over-hyped the word ‘innovation’ and are underdelivering on its potential performance capacity.

That place where the higher innovation value comes from our real need for some radical redesigns of today’s real challenges – global challenges we must solve to survive, let alone thrive.

Who to blame, our lack of organizations wanting to be bold, to find radical, pathbreaking solutions, those involved in innovation staying in the safety zone not prepared to venture out of that place or most markets finds it difficult to accept radical change as they are not geared to it, or find the investment needed to bring about change as too demanding. So we stay bored

We are already in or heading for a trough of innovation disillusionment
Where is the excitement gone? Getting the news first, is it that exciting?

We are fed rumours weeks before launches on what we might expect that when we get to the big event nothing is surprising us anymore. We are witnessing even more incremental creep; we have lost the effect of serendipity, the “wow” factor, the moment something happened that changed our world.

All we get is that feeling, that peer pressure we must upgrade for fear of missing out or being seen without the latest. We are on an incremental treadmill and we are the mouse turning the wheel.

When you have been weaned on the bottle of excitement when you don’t get it you feel flat, bored and start to blame innovation as simply “innovation is dead.” No, it is simply not being allowed to really work anymore. Much has become totally underwhelming.

Our business organizations are loving the ‘playing it safe’ routine

Over time our organizations are finding increasing reasons to put off the more radical innovation that is needed. Incremental innovation is safe and contains all the risks within acceptable levels, so it allows the organization to keep its fixation on the short-term as its only line of site (and executive pay-off).

“Let others make the investments and ‘we’ can pick them off……hopefully later and we play catch up!”

It is funny how a good few are being caught out on this strategy though and are not learning often you never catch up, you just fall further behind. A fast follower strategy is really hard, think Apple actually.

So do we all have this growing feeling of a lack of real innovation?

We are losing the appetite for adventure, we equally are losing the ability to wait, speculate, experiment and discover. We need to explore and wonder far more than we are permitted to.

Instead, we revert to delivering Innovation up on a plate; old recipe, a few new ingredients and some new social buzz, all we have to do are consume it as long as we can afford it!

This loss of sudden discovery undermines curiosity and excitement
Innovation gets exciting when you stumble across something, totally unexpected.

Researchers in a lab suddenly make a connection, that changes and often challenges their thinking, and perceptions alter.

It becomes “game on”. It all becomes potentially exciting.

We work for moments like this or should do.

Perhaps we should have a course on serendipity, where we are required to seek discoveries by accident, by learning to listen more to others and their problems so we can make the connections to resolve their problems.

No, let’s take out discovery, let’s offer up predictability, it takes out fresh learning through experimentation and trial and error. Let curiosity die in wanting to fix something, to figure it out, let’s just simply throw it away and buy the latest replacement. This is so boring!

The organizations working on innovation love sequential order.

Sequential order, hierarchies, and linear processes all allow for predictability, the ability to see what is coming before you, and you can do rational analysis. This type of thinking ensures innovation can be highly planned out, projects can be well constructed and everyone can fall in line and wait for their part along the incremental innovation production line.

The mantra of it being “that much better than the last version” makes everyone feel part of the innovation roadshow and simply take the incentives being dangled like the carrot to deliver on this “exciting” development.

Innovation is simply missing the big picture, we are stuck in revolving doors.

It is all so marginal, we are back checking our clocks, looking to head out of the door, off to do something else. Again the excitement and buzz around innovation seem to be missing.

Why as we are utterly failing to tackle the really big problems of today and that is not “should we buy another smartphone or which holiday destination to go and book” or whatever we are being fed.

Innovation needs to chase those really big societal issues that are racing towards us, needing global solutions and that is one hell of a party to get stuck into. Those have got fizz and enough to get your innovative teeth into.

We need to lift innovation out of this current trough and recognize we have some major problems of the day, that will impact everyone on the planet.

Innovation can be one significant key to combining with others that unlocks all the creative and inventive forces this will require.

We all need some enlightenment, not the latest gadget. Applying innovation that makes a substantial and radical contribution is the party we all should be wanting to join. Now joining those parties becomes THE place to be not only just seen but to make a real presence and impact.

The post The trough of innovation disillusionment first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Perhaps why innovation feels somewhat flat (well for me) is our organizations and societies are utterly failing to allow us all to step up in innovation to tackle those huge societal issues; those massive, growing problems that are swirling all around us.

We need to shake out of our lethargy and really begin to attempt to solve the real issues of our time. Some organizations are clearly working on and trying to draw attention and gain greater engagement but we need a much greater concerted effort to focus on the big societal challenges.

Global warming, rising health issues, finally cracking cancer, malaria, dementia, finding different solutions to the ageing within society. How are we going to tackle the rapidly depleting natural resources, the future conflicts over water, food, or energy? These are big, hairy, audacious gaps to be resolved.

Are we capable or simply just avoiding these BIG challenges?

Many are avoiding the need to stare hard into the future as we are not re-equipping everyone with skills that combine inventiveness, innovation and creativity that contribute to their communities, we have got stuck in the “me”.

A reality of depletion in many of our essential resources is racing towards us and it is not a pretty sight.

The growing radical innovation activity gap

We are facing the innovation gap as our problems keep growing linearly yet we must find ways to rapidly scale and deploy our knowledge in new, more dynamic ways. This requires society to learn how to apply effective innovation themselves, not just being whipped up, waiting for the latest gadget or incremental advancement to be put into their hands.

We need to build the desire of wanting to be part of rebuilding society; making our contribution to real advancement or feeling they were there, involved, part of the “times” when this shift to societal innovation was happening.

The solution lies in a radical adoption of ecosystem thinking where collaboration and networks build the level of innovation relationships and trust to combine and seek to address these big challenges.

We need to be collectively moved by innovation and what it can offer.

Technology does hold a vital key, so does the emerging social media for reaching out to critical masses but let’s face it, today we are deploying the best resources (the best and the brightest) not in the area of solving big societal problems but in slavishly churning out the next technology or gadget.

These actually mean nothing unless they become increasingly part of the solutions we really do need urgently, to tackle the big societal issues.

We certainly need communications, platforms, different media techniques and mobility as part of the initial global building blocks to put in place the infrastructures to solve these societal problems.

We need the tools, infrastructure, methods, and techniques to scale for solving societal problems not the latest incremental improvement for Apple, Facebook or Google. How about providing innovations that can deliver the parts that give us the power to tackle the problems of our time?

We need innovation tools, structures and methods that will allow each of us to invent, innovate, and be creative in finding our contributions and solutions to societal problems. To go and apply these in practical solutions not just simply adopt them.

Dealing with value creation and growth but in radically different ways
We seek value creation, most usually by creating demand and pushing for increasing consumption. Growth is measured by our productivity gains. Is this the right way to measure ourselves and how we set about preserving our precious resources? No, we need to challenge this, a real paradigm shift that alters our lenses looking out on the world.

Changing our thinking for a new world of preserving our precious resources
Today’s modern economic activity does need challenging and it is through rethinking much of our view of judging success.

Success in preserving, achieving effective trading and the reuse of our precious resources needs a fresh set of thinking, a new economic understanding.

This thinking is way beyond my preserve, there are far better-qualified people to offer suggestions than me on this. All I know is that innovation, creativity and invention must all play their part.

Yet we need a new platform to form relationships around to build this innovative capability in highly collaborative, trusting ways.

For me the solution lies in a radical adoption of ecosystem thinking. Creating the environment where collaboration and networks build the level of innovation relationships and trust to then combine and push their ingenuity out to address these big challenges.

The post Tackling Societal Challenges through innovation ecosystem application first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Delivering Future Impact on Performance

As demand is more volatile today what becomes more important is the work to be done, not the work done.

Surprisingly Adam Smith identified this important difference back in 1776.

This can be explained as the work done is the accumulated knowledge, which has built up and been embodied in the firm’s results with the innovations achieved in the past and is seen as the tangible capital.

The work to be done is how well it can adapt to change. In the past century, we operated in the mass production era, with systems with standard goods and stable market conditions, the work done was equivalent to the ‘work to be done.

In today’s global market, with its rapid technology diffusion, disruptive and constant change with an emphasis on servicing the work to be done is more important than the work done and intangible assets are fundamental to this.

The work-to-be-done provides the intellectual capital to react to changing demand for the required future value creation that needs to be sustaining, to be done.

Work to be done is the need for our future growth and well-being to be derived from innovation activities. These so much made up of intangible parts will provide the new wealth of organizations in the knowledge sharing economy of today and the near future.

We need new forms of evaluation to measure the real asset wealth of the organization to understand the points of intensity, their connected dynamics and what is required to reconfigure the changing capabilities and capacities needed to grow in the future

You do need to find out more about the emerging Work to be done approach as it is a far more dynamic place for innovation to happen.

The Work-to-be-done is focused on connecting to the emerging areas of Organizational need being faced in today’s rapidly changing markets and diminishing resources

We need to focus on the points of value that come from growing understanding

* The new Work-to-be-done in organizations

* The future of work is through exploiting the systems of engagement.

Connecting Dynamics

We are entering the world of innovation ecosystems where broader, more complex innovation challenges, through greater collaborations can be achieved. So to help, there is a dedicated site to building the arguments and exploring options for your future here in collaborative designs and you have found it! This is where the future of work will be undertaken. The need to learn to collaborate, to extend and exchange knowledge is of vital importance

Collaborative Ecosystems are forging a new direction and momentum that requires the capabilities of more than one to deliver what is becoming increasingly possible through technology and the network effect we see through our growing connections.

For many today, business is simply not working, it remains a disappointment for a variety of reasons, especially for those leading organizations required to be seeking out new growth, operating in increasingly volatile and tough markets where disruption and copying are increasing the pressures. Something has to change and it is this recognition that it can come from managing in highly collaborative ecosystems that can provide part of the answer.

We are finding ourselves in a race to the bottom when it comes to maintaining a competitive edge. As soon as the product is available within an ever-decreasing time, it is being copied and any advantage has vanished. Can we continue to chase our tail?

We require a different way of thinking.

This is more centred on building a more robust, sustaining value undertaken through ecosystems.

We all need to explore ecosystems, understand the delivery mechanisms of platforms along with other collaborative methods and push towards the new need of today, to deliver a seamless total solution that provides customers what they are constantly asking for, to solve their needs and give them greater engagement and experiences.

This thinking is driven by a need for new products and services and experiences, otherwise, we believe customers will continue to turn away from discrete, disconnected products and services increase over time

Shaping and introducing new ecosystems in thinking and design is not easy but it has enormous potential to transform competition and deliver on this ‘seamless experience’ that will be valued and recognized by its unique set of offerings. It can become the unique competitive positioning due to this connected ecosystem of collaborators, it offers an advantage to all engaged in its potential as it has diversity, dynamics, differentiation and distinctiveness in its  design and delivery

Future Building

Why ecosystems have come of age in the business world.

To explore and exploit ‘the new,’ we have the opportunity to combine technology and leverage relationships to extract ‘greater’ meaning. Building a network of contacts, we are scaling and developing a more productive potential for something new.

We can, through data and exchanges, link up the real world and relate the physical and data worlds. Actually, we are building a digital-physical twin as we understand what is going on, explore how we can change it, and then compare this back in the digital world, that mapping back for all participants to work upon and extend it out. We are creating value by combining technology and relationships in any ecosystem design.

The value of Ecosystems thinking is critical today

I focus on Ecosystem thinking, many of my thoughts can be found on a dedicated posting site ecosystems4innovators, where I explore much around ecosystem thinking and platform designs

The ability to delve into or broaden our thinking gives us these opportunities to extend what we have or create something new. In any ecosystem evolution, ‘something’ or ‘someone will exploit a gap, a niche, and utilize this. It takes time if it cannot build on its capabilities in that space, it needs to build up its environment around it.

We often limit our capabilities and capacity because we do not ‘stray’ from the knowns into the unknowns. Ecosystems that encourage pushing frontiers lead us often to find that unexplored point. The combined realms of digital and physical meeting points allow us to do this in faster ways than ever before. We can reach wherever we want to go.

Taking the time to focus on the critical resources for our future will determine the impact you can achieve- in the marketplace, for shareholder return, for a vibrant future

–The impact areas need to address:

– New structures, skills and competencies

– The need to network and have greater collaborative sharing

– A climate that fosters constant, ongoing learning

– A real intellectual capital understanding of the value and its worth

– The ability to seek out value creation and extraction activities so as to provide the impact areas for future competitive performance

We can help in exploring these with you. We all need to dive deeper to expand our hidden horizons and open our thinking to new possibilities.

Undergoing any transformation must be for a reason as it can incur a lot of pain before you get to the real gain. Moving closer to this future coming faster to us need we can see digital transformation everywhere, it is actually all around us.

Customers today feel growing empowerment, in choice in personalization, in knowing the products or services they are buying are meeting their needs and they are becoming increasingly intelligent to meet these choices they are making.

Companies need to increasingly interact with customers, as close or actually in real-time to learn, adapt and deliver to their evolving needs. This requires a company to become far more ‘highly automated and adaptive’ than a listening organization.

The alignment of technology, the use of increasing levels of connectivity and evaluations can deliver significant news ways to assess what is valuable and what can be innovated to provide increasing value back to your customers.

Learning to be responsive and adaptive becomes key

To get to this transforming point we need to build in a faster adaptation of business strategies and turn out faster innovative and creative outcomes that meet these needs as the key to this.

Our transformation journey needs to embrace the cloud, mobile, data and networks and increasingly reliant on higher levels of analytics to interpret and translate information, turning this into insights, into ideas, into innovation that delivers fresh growth and adds a greater impact that delivers increased value to your customers.

Relationship and Network Management

Today we need to build more alliances and networks to enhance our abilities to ‘connect’ to the world so we can tap into the sources of knowledge that lie outside our own organization.

By looking outside we open up. More and more demands are being placed on us via our customers, suppliers, our regulators and a host of other stakeholders all wanting to contribute to our existing knowledge.

We struggle to adapt to these new external pressures but our structures, processes and systems need to adapt and support these changes. We need to acquire, anchor and transform this flow of new knowledge into future new worth.

We all need to be more flexible, adaptable and agile so our resources grow their capacity to absorb and strengthen the competency and capability in new more dynamic ways.

Providing Future Thinking

I provide future thinking as part of my advisory work. My dedicated website www. hocaconsulting.com takes the positioning of “the future of work starts here” and these views expressed here form part of the offering to position organizations for a different “future impact”

The post Transforming What? Delivering Future Impact first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.