Most of us are very aware that Innovation can be fairly complex in what needs to be pulled together to take an idea or concept into a finished product.. We are also aware innovation often ‘flies’ in contradiction to the normal organization’s ways and wishes, especially the emphasis on working in structured, efficient and productive ways. Innovation can often be rather chaotic and discovery driven, it often is seen as counter-productive to the orderly state our organizations wish to achieve.

Yet it is that randomness, that serendipity, that sudden discovery that needs a different way of thinking and organizing innovation. It can still be well-structured and effective but it needs the opportunity to allow in accidental discovery, by-chance conversation, fortuitous moments that just seem to happen and occur as you are “open” to them. You need to have both structure and unstructured aspects to allow innovation to happen, evolve and eventually shape towards an outcome that changes the current status quo. Innovation should always challenge and question this status quo.

One of the useful ideas of using an external resource is to put additional coordinates into your innovation world, they see contradictions in a different way. They can assist in working through the conflicting signals, so as to help align innovation in helpful and thoughtful ways. Certainly, the innovator’s role is not an easy one inside the structured world of larger business entities.

I like practical advice with evidence, it helps bridge misunderstanding. This can come through a variety of methods:  benchmarking, validating, frameworks and interpreting how innovation can fit with your current or future needs. Often the outside advice can place innovation into a greater context that can accelerate the outcomes you need to gain understanding and achieve increasing identification.

The value of the external  innovation specialist has great value in insights

It has a very powerful combination effect if the advice is right. In my case, I try to offer operational experience drawn from the client’s input and my own understandings of being involved in many different businesses, at varying management levels, in many markets and industries. As we combine experiences, we can open up our thinking. Shutting down someone else’s experience or thinking denies us the opportunity to learn and advance thinking. This is providing a cross-industry experience and gives sometimes detachment from your world. It becomes valuable to explore something different, to take time to compare and contrast, to arm you with greater insights so you can relate your innovation activity and maybe recognize being exposed to something outside your industry might give you a completely different insight to a problem you are working upon, by seeing solutions from another industry as close to the answer you were looking for, even more, it can become even more grounded or questioned. We are better at (pattern) recognition when we “see” something tangible. Often it is hard to visualize something.

The other main contribution comes from common sense and intuition.

Receiving thoughts that feed into your own instinct or conflict with it give a terrific and fast sounding board. It remains outside the politics and constraints of your organization. It gives a different sense of perspective and verification.

It does not matter if these are micro-learning moments (quick answers to immediate need) or those deeper more macro learning ones (to learn specifically a new subset of innovation), it is by having the opportunity to put different coordinates into your thinking that can be offered by the external advisor can bring significant value and save valuable time.

What slips under your personal radar can also partly be picked up

Not just in those moments of need but by having an ongoing relationship with an external coach, advisor or mentor you can benefit from critical updates and insights, that might have slipped under your radar dues to your focus on getting the work done. You can have set up interim reports that focus on a given theme or topic of interest that you don’t have the necessary time to investigate yourself, you can gain from field research, breaking innovation reports on topics of need and interest and you can encourage your team to equally tap into this innovation knowledge vault.

The recognition is in knowing and appreciating

It is recognizing the value of having someone just a call or email away who can provide backup value in insights or knowledge gives you a significant edge.

Why reinvent the wheel when others might already have your wheel size ready and waiting to fit?

Give me a call to see if this might be a valuable supporting service to you and what you are looking to achieve in innovation outcomes. Let me help.

** Originally published on my Advocating and Guiding Dedicated Posting Site

The post Building the Coordinates into your Innovation World first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to know how to unlock the real value of innovation both personally and within the organization, we work for. If we do not fully understand where the innovation capital comes from, how new capital and stock can be provided, innovation will remain tentative, always stuttering along.

Innovation will lack that essential organization innovation rhythm, and it will stay disconnected for many and will be frustrating your own evolution in understanding if it does not become an organizational learning need.

I’d like to offer a fresh view on building your own innovation capital.

There are different building blocks and types of capital. Let’s start with the vast knowledge inside the organization, as this forms learning capital. We’re all expected to combine our existing internal knowledge with the external knowledge that flows into the company these days, mostly intangible, searching for its relevancy and context. The stock we build in our use of this fresh knowledge so we can combine these into new insights that eventually create different sets of advantages – ones that foster value creation.

Then we have the opportunity to build Innovation Capital.

Key elements of innovation capital also, equally, consist of mostly non-technological intangibles, embodied in the organizational routines and employees’ mindset.  So, it is important also to understand the make-up of innovation capital, in its “stock” and these, can be clarified in the following ways:

• Innovation capital as renewal capabilities of our organizations in the form of producing intellectual properties that offer value and are increasingly being extracted from our intangible assets.
• Innovation capital possesses attributes that make it a “strategic” asset. The key to success lies in specifying the nature and application of these assets in relation to the new knowledge flowing into the organization. This generates and commercializes concepts and ideas into new forms of innovation value.
• Innovation capital is made up of the ongoing “dynamic interactions” between intangibles and tangibles. Built up from experience over time, they develop into mostly intangible assets, and eventually into valuable outcomes.
• It is the effective use of different kinds of intangibles that contribute to innovation capital. Only a few of them can be formally captured as they are built on interactions, relationships, applied experience, generally accepted understanding and based on pattern recognition and meaningfulness.
• As we grow our networks and relationships, we increase knowledge sharing. This promotes our understanding and provides increased intangibles inside the organization. As we deepen our knowledge, we gain experience and achieve higher “pattern recognition” and insight.

When we look around we are able to spot the enablers for innovation stock to grow, as they contribute into your experiences and exposure to general principles of understanding. See how you can learn from these:

These elements can be described as follows:

• Innovation strategy relates to strategic choices a firm makes regarding its innovation
• The selection of the type of innovation that fits best to the firm’s objectives and the allocation of resources to different types of innovations
• Innovation culture is a mixture of employees’ innovation-related attitudes, experiences, beliefs, and values
• The integrating function of environment, culture, and climates that stimulate innovation activities
• Innovation structures that are formed to make up the innovation process
• The approach to the organization and the way employees engage in innovation are grouped
• The employees’ knowledge (technological and non-technological) engaged in the innovation process
• The stock of knowledge can be increased by an organization’s internal and external learning

“Internal learning” refers to the creation of new knowledge within the enterprise, while “external learning” pertains to the integration of knowledge from outside. We can model innovation capital and apply different capital needs to different innovation challenges to leverage them in more dynamic ways.

The more we strengthen our knowledge and appreciate the value within our people, the more we can generate new knowledge, build greater narratives, deepen discussions, and establish better connections and interactions across growing communities. In this way, we can turn innovation capital into a highly dynamic and valuable asset, just as we treat financial capital today.

The more we discover, the more knowledge we gain

This enables better decision-making and fosters our value-creating potential. This will, in theory, give us greater confidence, both internally and externally, that today, our invested financial capital is in good hands. We are effectively applying innovation capital to value creation.

Our learning capital needs to emerge and dominate future discussions in improving it’s quality and value contribution. We need to increase incentives for organizations and their people to learn or update their existing knowledge.

The power lies in the linkages we can forge, in the acquisition, in assimilation, and eventually in a transformation that allows the known and the unknown building into new knowledge that fuels our wealth-generating innovation pipeline.

** Originally published on my Advocating and Guiding Dedicated Posting Site

The post Innovation Capital Lies Within Organizational Learning first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Nesta is an innovation foundation. They state: “For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality. It also means changing lives for the better. This is what keeps us awake at night and gets us out of bed in the morning” They work in areas where there are big challenges facing society, from the frontiers of personalized healthcare to stretched public services and a fast-changing jobs market. They cover a lot of ground and provide some very sound advice along the way.

One of their team, Bas Leurs, who is their head of learning experience design, has been working on “A Landscape of Innovation Approaches“. I read version one in February 2018 and did not pick up on version 2, published as a blog in December 2018. Hence, why I kicked myself.

Although this was built with government and civil servants in mind asking which tools and techniques they should use, this growing list of approaches to innovation is getting highly impressive and a terrific stimulus to any one of us working across innovation, to explore it and then see how and what might also be added, hence why I thought this needed sharing.

In the version 2 blog 

They climb into the tools and offer some great guidance and clarity to the links they have found, as their reference and introductory information. Just go and explore these, they are such a storehouse of innovation approaches. It clearly has that bias to government and the UK civil service but all innovators, irrespective, in the private or public sectors will extract good value out of this, I know.

Here is the landscape map again (as shown above)

Just stop and think of this, please

They have broken the tools and techniques in a really thoughtful way. It is how we should be thinking about undertaking innovation. Forget the advice offered in the past, based on the more traditional ways of establishing an innovation process, or much of the sage advice and reflect on this structure. It is a powerful way to construct your innovation toolbox.

This becomes the enabler space for innovation for thinking innovation in that wider context. This approach brings innovation far more up to date in how we should group it and build it for delivering the real understanding of innovation and what actually does make innovation up.

The four spaces are intelligence, solution, technology, and talent. Let me quote their brief descriptors of these and the one additional one of Intelligence- Solution crossover space.

Intelligence Space- understanding reality

These approaches help you make sense of reality, understand the causes and effects of issues, and identify opportunities. Activities are driven by an inquisitive and analytical mindset.

Solutions Space- shaping reality

These approaches help you test and develop solutions. Activities are driven by a generative and entrepreneurial mindset, aiming to shape reality.

Technology space- enabling action

Approaches and technology that enable action and change, such as digital tools and data-related methods (at the intersection with the intelligence space).

Talent Space- empowering people

Approaches focused on mobilizing talent, developing technical and leadership skills and increasing organizational readiness to make change happen

The Intelligence- Solutions Crossover space- using both mindsets

The crossover between the intelligence and solution space includes methods built on both mindsets. They aim to understand, as well as shape reality.

In summary, this map is still a work-in-progress as it gets others feeding in their ideas and giving feedback. I really think this “Landscape of Innovation Approaches” is a terrific source of reference for practitioners as well as theorists to work through.

I do recommend you take a look. Link here again and I certainly want to thank Nesta and especially Bas Leurs for the work that has gone into this and being shared with a wider audience.

*** Download this diagram as a PDF.

The post Nesta’s Landscape of Innovation Approaches first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Do you stop and reflect, do you “veg” out, do you seek alternative points of stimulus or find something completely different to go and do, read a book, listen to music, take a walk, climb a mountain or simply tune-out. We need a time out for reflection.

Well, I had a reflective moment on some points I consider within innovation that need re-emphasizing.

So my reflective points were these as we always should consider the whole connected system of innovation.

Extending innovations value – appreciating the whole system.

For me, innovation needs to be treated more like a complete interlinked value chain. We must step back and see the whole value chain system for innovation. It constantly loops back and feeds back-in to add increasing value and experience.  It has many connected parts that need to work together to deliver effectively and efficiently the new ideas and concepts being discovered through to final commercialization.

The innovation value chain needs the following, seemingly obvious but often missed points to consider:

1. An established system that is clearly repeatable to ‘push’ innovation through constantly
2. It needs to be able to scale, scope and quickly adjust according to the concepts being pushed or even pulled through, often by spotting unmet customer needs.
3. It needs flexibility, resilience, and adaptability that constantly adjusts and shaped accordingly and cannot be ‘fixed’, rigid and overly managed or controlled as many seem to try.
4. It needs to have breakpoints for considering the innovation options- carry on, kill off, spin out, send back to rethink, to allow to grow at a different pace, to accelerate more.
5. It needs to ‘capture’ the collective learning and experiences constantly gained from the past and build those into improving the process for future activities
6. The people who have ‘oversight’ need to have some form of option resolution built in for deciding resources, directions, allocations and investments. They need that responsibility.
7. All innovation ideas and concepts entering the extended tunnel need to align to the strategic direction, compliment or extend onto the platforms you are providing (core, adjacent or new) and feed the portfolio’s that drive the businesses growth aspirations.
8. They must have a clear ‘fit’ within the strategy needs and be resourced well.

Designing the innovation pathway- this, for me, is so important to visualize and conceptualize

To achieve increasing value in this, there is an innovation pathway you have to design and be ready to travel. It is highly dynamic and you, as the leader of the innovation activities, are required to constantly add the active innovation yeast by promoting the ‘fermentation’ needed for innovation to succeed, including:

1. Establishing and encouraging a robust set of innovation processes and technologies to support that constantly adapts and adjusts to the needs of the innovation concept, not the other way around.
2. The ability, energy, and commitment to drive maturing ideas and concepts to realization.
3. Create a powerful desire and motivation to innovate by encouraging the environment of what you do makes a contribution to our future.
4. As ideas and concepts mature, you constantly build and restate the business case, again and again, so it remains clear why this concept remains important.
5. You actively seek out the different and often diverse points of connectivity with all the stakeholders so they can engage, contribute and lend their support and commitment.
6. Constantly look for ways to empower individuals and groups to explore, challenge and improve constantly on what they know with what they need to find out and discover.
7. You have to work actively (hard) at clarifying constantly the links of the idea and concepts across the innovation process for all involved to stay committed to the ‘long run’ between idea to commercialization in times of uncertainty and flux.
8. Ensure you are actively working those networking, encouraging collaborating and building on the collective wisdom of many so that you are constantly exploring all the (emerging) options and expanding on the alternatives to extract maximum value.
9. Seek ways to always measure, evaluate and see return through progress and impact so everyone involved or viewing the efforts can constantly ‘see’ the value and where their contribution is helping, not simply once a year in those organized ways and events that fit the calendar or bean counter needs.
10. Strive for execution that builds from the best of the past by knowing what that is; remain open to what is all around you today in the wider world beyond your often more narrow confines and imagine what is really possible with that extra touch of imagination to ‘push’ by seeing beyond the known’s and traditionally accepted.

The concept-to-customer approach is an innovation pathway that constantly narrows down.

We do need a concept-to-customer approach across innovation. My 5C’s of capture, connect, convert, confirm and conclude shown in the extended innovation funnel can move this along.

Innovation is extremely strategic in what it contributes. We often to stop and consider its importance, we strip it of resources, we relegate it down the organization, we let it be subservient to our daily obsessions on efficiency and effectiveness, it should not, it should be constantly challenging and pushing these into new ways and thinking, we forget its value and purpose.

Innovation requires a more thoughtful understanding and we have to accommodate it within organizations by stating that it is often unpredictable, sometimes a chaotic process, it cannot be legislated or totally subscribed, thankfully certain significant parts can. It is by having this complete understanding of the entire innovation process so we can differentiate between the parts that can be made predictable and those that can’t.

We can also constantly work at making innovation more predictable, in managing its many parts by making them more efficient and effective wherever possible. The more the deeper in innovation insight and understanding, the more we are adding to the internal knowledge. By often allowing for as much flexibility and adaptability for ideas and concepts as possible to ‘travel down’ and consistently improve the narrowing innovation path, the more it is likely to emerge as the right end-result.

As we progress from discovery to execution we need to offer more guidance and encouragement than prescriptive methods, currently prescribed and handed out in ad hoc doses. We DO need to understand innovation well. We then can manage our core well, expand into any adjacent spaces that strategically fit more comfortably and organize the associated activities to push the right innovation through a pipeline towards a positive commercial outcome., i.e., improves on the existing

We will often have to go a lot nearer to the edge of uncertainty as we build this innovation path but knowing where these edges are is better than being constantly surprised. Innovation expertise inside an organization makes sound sense, it pushes the edges, it questions the core. Please see a previous post on some thoughts on this, for we still fail to connect everyone up to the same innovation cause http://bit.ly/fQW6Jq

One last thing here, we must also rather surprisingly, reduce the many existing tools and processes we try to fit around innovation that ‘stress’ the existing core infrastructure and are confusing us. This is the opposite of their intention, to make our lives easy, they often do the counter, they add more stress points within innovation. I think a further blog on this layering and its negative effect might be better, so that’s for another day.

Well, I just felt like having one of my reflective moments.

Keep innovating please in all you do!

The post Extending innovations value- appreciating the whole system. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are on the brink of a transformation, a global one that connects us into information, knowledge, and insights in ever-powerful ways. thanks to the digital internet. We are also exploring the use of Artifical Intelligence (AI) more than ever.

BCG suggests that nine out of ten companies in their recent survey for the report “The Most Innovative Companies 2019” are investing in AI. BCG also suggests that 30% of those surveyed believe AI will have the greatest impact of any innovation area on their industry over the next three to five years.

We are also seeing the emergence of platforms and ecosystems radically changing how we collaborate and invent, design, solve issues from a changing shift in cooperation understanding. Platforms are fueling new business initiatives as they learn to engage across the whole value chain spectrum, from customer to delivering back the needs of that customer.

It is our technology being applied through new approaches that are galvanizing the new potential within innovation.

As we learn to orchestrate the underlying technologies, learn to build helpful applications, establish these software platforms this is beginning to become attractive as a new place for integrating, exchanging and collaborating. There is the talk of “the network effect” (Metcalfe’s Law) whereas more participants engage on platforms or in ecosystems and exchange, the more the value goes up and the community participating gets increasingly more out of the value of the “combined” thinking, data and insights. It has huge potential to generate new levels of innovation, ones that are more connected, more seamless and more what the customer wants.

So we come to CX + DX, it needs IX

Customer experience (CX) is driving change. The customer is expecting more value in the products or services they buy. They expect connected products, ones that are seemingly simple to then but highly complex to bring together. They will pay for this if the solutions offered are in their “sweet spot”.

To achieve this industry has to go through this digital transformation (DX) that is underway. Adapting a product to the need of one person’s preference has been pushing the final adaptation to that persons need up the chain in production. I wrote recently (here)

“This for me will center around developing the complete suite of transparency between product development and manufacturing and communicating this “connected” story. This is the connected need of IIoT to achieve. The information and knowledge source that connects the customer demand with the delivery of their need with their custom solution. This has been promoted as the new “experience economy”.by Dassault’s CEO Barnard Charles. He suggests this is “the new economy that drives the value of the usage first, as opposed to the value of the product or the things we produce, or even the services we provide” He feels the center of gravity in value creation is taking place to the emphasis on usage as paramount to serve. This makes sense to me.”

So we have the CX and DX being worked upon. What we need now is the Innovation Transformation (IX). I have written consistently on the need for the innovation to be re-equipped to deal with the digital changes coming towards us. Today this is utterly inadequate in dealing with all the change or transformation currently underway. Just, if you have time take a read of my post here of “We require a shift of Innovation Management Solution Providers” as to give you a more detailed background as to why there is such a need. We need ecosystems for innovation to thrive and prosper in faster ways.

I mentioned in that post “Innovation software is no different from the tides of change sweeping industries, digital transformation is opening up the connection possibilities outside single organizations. No one organization can keep pace, or has enough resources, or can cover off solutions that solve “universal” problems, or even ones in a diverse, huge Corporation collaborating across a global business, where functional groups involved are far more diverse than ever before”

This is becoming the nature of the present constraints. We need digital innovation

We can keep moving towards CX and apply DX but unless we recognize and make significant changes in IX we will fail to get the impact we are looking for or the customer is expecting. The flow of insights, of information and knowledge, gets caught up in such a log jam as the innovation system is not designed for such a force of “flow-through” or set up for such co-innovation needed. We lack many innovation open and interoperable tools or systems to speed up the creation process. We are caught in an age of the single solution struggling to make the connections to the new age of innovation.

Innovation actually needs to feed business systems and push all working within the design of solutions the ability to drive outcomes.  This is why the value of digital platforms and ecosystems will gain in the urgency of getting the whole innovation system fit for the 21st century, otherwise, innovation will remain stilted, disappointing and struggling to project what it stands for:  “advancing what we have with better solutions that solve customers problems”

We need this dynamic innovation process.

Otherwise, CX + DX sounds great but if it does not have IX the returns on investment or the growth rates required for this will never materialize. Let’s not forget this IX, it needs to be far more central in the equation today.

The post So CX + DX needs IX for the transformations we need first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I was really pleased to watch the official launch of the Smart Industry Readiness Index (SIRI) with its addition of the Prioritization Matrix at Hannover Messe on Monday 1^st April 2019.

This will become a very useful and relevant management planning tool to help manufacturers worldwide to determine and prioritize their necessary areas of focus with all the digital initiatives, based on an Industry 4.0 Maturity and their current performance.

This tool or readiness prioritization index has a real potential to finally bring organizational wide awareness and common language identification. It can help implementation in a number of significant ways.

This has been pioneered by The Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), a very formidable Government entity within the development of Singapore over the years, and in consultation and growing support, from McKinsey & Co, SAP, Siemens, and TüV SüD.

The framework is a very systematic and I feel, a robust way, to focus on what matters to you in your own Industrial Revolution 4.0 journey (IR4). So often organizations do not have a clear vision, strategy or can develop a systematic roadmap for this form of transformation. It becomes overwhelming and a real challenge of where to start. Often the more you read, seek advice, the more you get confused.

I believe in this Smart Industry Readiness Index Prioritization Matrix you have a really useful framework that can give you the common language, understanding, and sense of direction, backed up with the why, where, what and when of managing out your own Industry 4.0 roadmap. The “how” comes from the advice you can then seek, armed with a greater holistic understanding of where you stand.

The Actual Smart Industry Readiness Index Prioritization Matrix

For me, it has the potential to be as catalytic as the Malcolm Baldridge Quality Aware that become such a movement behind quality that spurred in Europe The European Foundation for Quality Management (later to be renamed simply ‘EFQM‘)

Digital transformation is hugely complex. It is a transformation of epic portions. It is not one of those activities you can afford to leave to IT /OT or selected board members. This is requiring total company engagement as you transform your present physical world into a highly connected digital world, totally dependent on technology. It will have a social impact, significant shifts in talent needs and your workforce. It will require a very different strategy and a deep understanding and appreciation of technology.

Breaking complexity down

The changes will need to be new solution-driven ones, as much human-centric as ever, achieving increasing machine connection and offering a sustainable and inclusive approach as the final outcome. That makes this transformation the revolution it is seen to be, Industry Revolution 4.0. It has scale, scope, and complexity unlike what we have ever experienced before, as it requires us all to be more integrated and collaborative. To achieve this it is necessary to be all-embracing and comprehensive in our digital connecting up to leverage the gains this means.

The main effects of this IR4 are the shifts in customer expectations, on product enhancements, on collaborative innovation, and in different organizational forms. The merging of physical with digital will simply enhance value in some many different ways.

IR4 will have a huge impact but it needs framing and this is where the Smart Industry Readiness Index Prioritisation Matrix comes in.

Why I personally am relating to this framework and Singapore

Why do I see this Industry Readiness Matrix as important to put a significant level of support behind it?

Personally, a very strong identification. I lived in Singapore for 12 years followed by a further 3 years moving back and forth from Europe into Asia. I grew up in my consulting and advisory work on eight years of working with different Singapore Government Agencies and plenty of companies operating in Singapore and across S E Asia especially.

Singapore has a unique way to galvanize the resources and energy required to succeed. I worked with their EDB, MICA, MOE, Mindef, Spring, IE, the Prime Ministers PS21, often through the framework adopted to galvanize change and growth. These different frameworks included i-quality circles, scorecards, assessments, and audit approaches. They were based increasingly on the Business Excellence Assessment, I-Award for innovation.

That work of mine when in Singapore was also contributing to National Innovation Policy papers, building consortium studies, developing and contributing to different audit and public service innovation frameworks. I would certainly say “I cut my consulting and advisory teeth on innovation work” within Singapore and in S E Asia.

I really learned the value of organizing frameworks to help in this even when bureaucracy sometimes got in the way. You witness first hand how theses frames do truly galvanize change, as well as to allow you to benchmark, compare entities, their robustness and ambitions and then this gets others to relate.

A new initiative developed by the EDB, Singapore

So when you hear of the announcement of this Smart Industry Readiness Index Prioritization Matrix, as announced on Monday 1^st April 2019, you certainly sit up and become alert to what this can bring.

The smart part is how the Singapore EDB has drawn in and collaborated with McKinsey & Co, SAP, Siemens, and TüB SüD. This can have the real potential to go well beyond the borders of Singapore, through S E Asia and well beyond in its organizing framework to manage Industry 4.0. My respect for the EDB is significant, I kept approaching them constantly while I was in Singapore. I will always remember the Golden Egg, Buttons and Threads, but that story is for another day.

I have worked with SAP and am working with Siemens so this makes it even more compelling to understand and relate too. They are very serious to advance the Industry 4.0 revolution.

Siemens can leverage this framework in multiple ways

Siemens has made a massive investment in their Digital future and also has a dedicated business unit, effective 1^st April 2019, renamed Digital Industries. with about 78,000 employees worldwide and businesses generated revenue of around €14 billion within the Business Unit. They are firmly fixed on providing as many solutions towards Industry 4.0 as they can. Where they presently struggle is in its complexity, the ability to communicate this holistically for recognition and adoption at the client level, to what this change really does mean. This SIRI Prioritization matrix is a great place to start and engage with their clients.

They, Siemens are rapidly building use cases, have experienced technicians, engineers, and solutions to enable the client to relate too and argument their understanding of what needs to be in place and clearly, where Siemens can play a very active contribution in solutions.

Recently, Joe Kaeser, Siemens CEO, has been appointed recently as Chairman of the Asia-Pacific Association, the Asia-Pacific Conference of German Business (APK), the place where German and Asian business interests meet. I certainly believe this Industry Readiness Index would be one initiative that can eventually become “showcases” of member organizations to Asian companies, as a further collaborative space of the association as a value-add.

Relating South East Asia, Siemens and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

I recently wrote four articles for the internal Siemens Ingenuity Knowledge site focusing on different aspects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution specifically in S E Asia, although many of these can be universally applied. These were highlighting challenges, realities and the need to adapt differently. If you have a chance to read them I’d appreciate it.

The main question in these posts was this: Are South East Asia ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

Part 1: How big is the challenge really?

Part 2: The application of innovation, the Asian way

Part 3: What are the real opportunities to invest in S E Asia

Part 4: The Roadmap for the Digital Revolution

These posts give a greater outline of the challenges relating to companies in South East Asia. Putting to use the framework offered by the EDB and its partners. Actually they tie in fairly well,  it will help them considerably to manage the challenges and achieve a more collaborative environment where Government, Society, and other organizations work far more together in forming and exchanging on Industry 4.0 challenges.

The Smart Industry Readiness Index Prioritization Matrix is aimed to go global

I think the Prioritization Index will be highly welcome to organize around, for all organizations grappling with the complexities and challenges 4IR requires, not just in Asia but for all organizations anywhere in the world.

For example, Siemens have some incredibly talented engineers but the ability to communicate the Industry 4.0 story is one that needs to be communicated across an organization, that has the real need to resolve this global challenge.  I really believe this organizing framework significantly advances they story and positioning, if they fully take this on, in their own adoption services.

This framework, if seen in the way I see it, can become highly central to Siemens transformation story and association/collaboration and service provision into clients or potential ones. It gives a more holistic story across the organization. A common language and awareness frame.

The ability to assess manufacturers to focus areas of transformation and bring these four inputs yields an impact value which represents the relative benefit that a company will gain from progressing across the 16 index dimensions, by a single band of each dimension. Different bands will show different impact levels so the Manufacturer will be able to quantitatively identify the focus areas of prioritization they should take.

This Prioritization Matrix enhances the Index with a computational tool with many algorithm references of hundred of use case studies available. ones that help companies identify and recommend focus areas and digital initiatives to prioritize, based partly on their individual readiness score, and current financial performance, part of the SIRI tool.

So this collaboration of partners is coming together around the Smart Industry Readiness Index Prioritization Matrix to enable customers to start their assessment, to identify gaps and where the opportunities are to work upon. It has both a technical and practical application.

What I like it does not prioritize on technology, a place a specialist would focus, it balances this out with Process the OT specialist with Organization. The three need to be recognized as the THREE core building blocks. It works on evaluating EIGHT pillars and SIXTEEN Dimensions.

In classic Singapore ways it suggests four pragmatic steps of 1) Learn key concepts and build a common language for alignment, 2) Evaluate the existing state and readiness level for Industry 4.0, 3) Architect the transformation strategy and implementation roadmap that works for you and finally 4) Deliver that is offering impact and sustaining transformative initiatives.

In Summar: Industry 4.0 has multiple challenges

I certainly believe this Smart Industry Readiness Index and its Prioritization Matrix provides an interesting management planning tool. In summary, it provides a real acceleration towards becoming IR4 ready. Including:

• Readiness, speed, the scope of technological and digital change will spur very different business models and opportunities within the Region.  Singapore through the EDB in promoting this initiative, does provide a really valuable contribution in a diagnostic tool, to the challenges of Industry 4.0, across the whole organization.
• There are layers of complexity that need peeling away and given more focused attention with so many challenging tasks in developing industrial enablement across the Region, that need to continue to promote productivity, growth, and inclusion. Through taking this SIRI approach of evaluating the different three Building Blocks, eight Pillars and sixteen Dimension approach, they help break down much of the complexity
• The “paradigm shifts” from the type of manufacturing of lower value add, to those that “add” and can be leveraged to build national capability is possible for many, through taking this combination route of industry 4.0, infrastructure enhancement, through digitalization and innovation means a well-structured and thought through the journey.
• If the framework delivers on its promise it stands Singapore and others in a strong forefront to deliver Industry 4.0 to gain a real competitive advantage and hopefully scale up in new ways.
• We have questions of scale and complexity but helping to construct a clear vision, strategy and a systematic roadmap reduce the challenges. This framework delivers the start point and quantifies impact and gaps.
• Knowing where to start, what to scale and be able to sustain are all great but to get a tool that can show you the impact on the bottom line and the effects this has on your profit makes it highly valuable and then having diagnostics that are pointing to the best positioning where this change progression needs to take place makes it exciting to determine
• For Siemens, and the other partners, it is to find the right balance for being a critical enabler of this transformation through providing their services, their vast insights to clients across the globe and a rapidly growing use case database will offer a powerful acceleration. To be a critical and essential partner in this transition and through this framework, they can play a significant part in accelerating Industry 4.0.

I think the Smart Industry Readiness Index Prioritization Matrix can fundamentally change the “tipping point” in more rapid adoption and acceptance of the need to embrace and convert to Industry 4.0. It offers something highly valuable, I want to engage more with this as it evolves.

*****

The Prioritization Matrix is available to all manufacturing companies globally and interested parties should contact EDB or their respective parties t learn how to utilize the application for their facilities. A downloadable copy of the matrix can be found here.

The post Finally a framework to manage holistically Industrial Revolution 4.0 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I think with the recognition that innovation occurs across the whole organization the innovation management (IM) providers have to radically alter their business model or recognize they need to broaden out their target market inside organizations.

Innovation is occurring in all corners of the organization today. Secondly, if open innovation has gone way beyond a one to many relationships into a many-to-many then does the reliance on single entity software provision makes sense, focusing on single point of entry into companies? No, we have to think total enterprise software for our innovation management solutions.

Far too much IM solution providers think their models, components, upgrades and yearly showcase upgrades, as the big event. No question any “staged” release is welcomed by clients as they either have been asking for it for long enough, or have been finding their own ways of completing “workarounds” to overcome gaps, then updates are always welcome, as long as they are relevant, not just cosmetic changes. So often client solutions and their needs have considerable lag.

Innovation software is no different from the tides of change sweeping industries, digital transformation is opening up the connected possibilities outside organizations. No one organization can keep pace, or has enough resources, or can cover off solutions that solve “universal” problems, or even ones in a diverse, huge Corporation collaborating across a global business, where functional groups involved are far more diverse than ever before.

The IM software market is stirring

I feel one IM software provider so far is making a well-considered move towards a change in their business model and that is Sopheon. Their enterprise software approach is moving the innovation management market in a very positive way, they are connecting it up progressively. They have taken the view of closing the strategy- execution gap. Their approach to solutions are designed to keep strategy visible and continuously aligned with operational execution, throughout the initiative life cycle and that makes total sense. In my opinion, that connecting up becomes vital so I hope they push this thinking as hard as they can. What they still seem to lack is their need to actually offer a more robust end-to-end innovation software solution as something of a real need. They might feel they have this, I don’t. The idea management side is still light.

Sopheon is delivering the right “on-market” message that they “provide support for speed, agility, and adaptability – all are critical enterprise capabilities in the digital era”. They are claiming they are actively building business partner ecosystems. They want to navigate the new world order of digital disruption. Sounds right.

For me, Sopheon has the right vision. They claim it is solid, I would say perhaps rigid and cautious might be the constraining factor for them. I think the execution is a carefully managed one as they do have a very small business base (revenue of $34million at the end of 2018) . Actually all honesty I think all specialised innovation management software providers, operating in the classic idea management and portfolio space of innovation software solutions do have limited size businesses. Why is that when innovation is occurring in all companies. Is it the business model, is it so much still reliant on spreadsheets and internally designed systems.  It is a very fragmented market, constrained by the existing designs in place and that is the option to grasp.

Can Sopheon break out of the pack or will others make the leap? They, Sopheon, have been generating good cash and have presently a net cash position of $16.7 million. Healthy to begin to accelerate and attract the traction necessary but will they? They are taking a creative lead but is it bold enough? How they accelerate in the coming 12 months will determine this. Platform solution is extremely expensive, building ecosystems equally complex, even in this world of Innovation.They seem not to have a scaling business model or enough representation and conversion appeal.

Here lies the “rub” for Sopheon and all other Innovation software providers “The majority of their license revenue continues to remain perpetual in nature” and that, alone, holds evolution back. It is a rapidly outdated model, it constrains not accelerates.All are very proud of who they hang onto as clients and offering solutions in the cloud, just might alter this model significantly. I think there is enough evidence to say that switching cost is as much as a barrier as the original “one time” purchase. The nature of the business model needs to change to get thid traction, that the markert needs to gain real open innovation exchanges and connectivity both inside and outside the single organization. There is this real need to master product complexity. Stand alone product is fading fast, we have service, digital and changing business models to consider when it comes to todays innovation. Customers are expectinig this within their solutions.

The nature of the present constraints

The whole evaluation of the Business model rests on the decisions in this area for “traditional” IM software providers needs challenging and changing!  In the PLM market they have been wrestling with this for some time and have made significant shifts in their revenue models. If you look at PTC or Aras for example you get a real sense of pre-occupation and effort they have invested in making significant business model changes towards a “pay as you go” model shifting their model from one focused on perpetual software licenses into a more “modern” cloud-focused subscription-based revenue model, in the hope of smoothing out their revenue model from a reliance on achieving constant “big wins” that are not as well understood by the investor, fixated on quarterly results.   I have written about the different changes occurring in PLM here “The Need for Digital Innovation“, here in “Can We Have One of These? A Product Innovation Platform”

The universal software market for innovation solutions is huge.

The part of the market that has significantly moved is in the PLM solution providers domain. The ability to connect, to share, to save and adopt and adjust drafts of complicated designs in digital ways significantly improves through the use of offering a platform solution.

The PLM part that has been connecting engineers, designers, researchers derived out of CAD where electronics, software, and machine or structure drawing needed to be undertaken. This whole area has been rapidly modernizing into a product innovation platforms to support key elements of sustainable solutions that maintain, adapt, upgrade, integrate and keep multiple systems of record for designs that due to the platform approach can be easily shared within, across and outside the old environment.

PLM is undergoing a real architecting of PLM enabling solutions that are flexible, adaptable and capable of working with other solutions that are forming into an Enterprise Application Environment. Take Aras and its solutions.[1]

The whole redesign to collaborate around a single set of processes spanning systems engineering, hardware and software development, variant and options management, part release, manufacturing planning, quality, technical documentation, program management, and more. It delivers end-to-end lifecycle management at the enterprise level, along with cross-functional collaboration capabilities and through-life configuration management.

Adjusting direction can be difficult for companies that are traditionally slow to change and reliant on legacy products that have historically been successful. Outdated enterprise solutions used to support engineering and manufacturing of these products further compounds this problem, holding back the innovation needed to develop the next generation of products required to keep pace with customers’ quickly changing needs.

There is a growing recognition of adapting different types of software that enables the ideation stage and can integrate into all the other parts of the innovation value chain. There is growing specialization and client need for tracking trends, exploring technology solutions, IP patent searches, road mapping, portfolio management, foresight and scouting, collaborative ideas management, crowdsourcing, simply collecting inspiration or market intelligence, scanning environments to detect opportunity. All these have been growing in their focused specialty.

We have to demand Innovation Management Software Providers make some bold decisions

It is time to pull together many different fragmented choices and draw in the many creative tools and methods to generate and help people to help sort and give relevancy.

To do this the move towards ecosystems and platforms, this is becoming essential. The need is for a deeper platform thinking as the first part of this. Designing for platforms around ecosystems is radically different from existing linear designs along the classic innovation process of development.

Innovation needs to help people connect with each other, with ideas out there, to form different associations and it needs to leverage technology in far greater ways than keep talking about the “on-premise only” within one company and those new license wins or renewals. That is so 20th century talk.  We are in a world where open innovation is in the ability to connect across to other organizations and in this mutual collaboration look to generate significant advancements on present generation products, offered by the single company

There is a time to change the metrics. These companies should not be “tapping into technology” in tentative fashion, they should be embracing it full on like the major PLM platform providers!

We need to put in place the solution set that can make that happen. Explicate in design and intention to evolve as the understanding is recognized. Each within an ecosystem can learn from each other, they can improve what they offer, they can form new relationships and learn from each other as ideas move to greater acceleration in action and impact.

The potential addressable market for this opportunity is very substantial but will anyone presently in the market be fully prepared to really break with the pack, in a race to the potential this market has? Let’s hope so, at least the market is finally stirring.

[1] https://community.aras.com/b/english/posts/a-product-innovation-platform-the-foundation-for-product-success

The post We Require A Shift of Innovation Management Solution Providers first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

An innovation value proposition (IVP) is not the easiest place to go. It must build meaning and purpose and provide that unique identity that enables innovation to flow. Building your innovation value proposition is critical to your innovation success.Value propositions are essential always in my opinion, innovation is no different.

Thinking about my own identification with the IVP took me back to when I started out on my innovation journey 18 years ago. That now seems like ages ago, and a lot has changed in how we manage innovation since then. But, strangely enough, a lot has also stayed the same – especially the fact that delivering good innovation is hard work.

Yet, the one thing I firmly believe reduces the “pain” comes back to how you design and relate to your value proposition – your meaning of what innovation needs to do.

Understanding the innovation value proposition

Back in 2003, I came across a two-page document written by a U.S.-based consulting firm, called Macroinnovation Associates. Though the company seems no longer around today, back when I was beginning to switch my focus to advising, consulting, and learning about innovation, their innovation value proposition struck me as excellent. I kept it, shaped it to my own emerging thinking, and it still has as much value today as it did 15 years ago. Some of its parts may have fallen away or need rephrasing, but its basic frame holds good. I will expand on those later.

The other important part of my learning about value propositions comes back to its critical focal point in the Business Model Canvas, conceived by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (and the basis of HYPE’s Collaborative Innovation Canvas). I found the idea of a one-page business canvas brilliant.

This sought out of our thinking “to describe the bundle of products and services that create value for a specific customer segment.” Osterwalder and Pigneur argue that the value proposition is the reason why customers turn to one company over another. They suggest that the value proposition “is an aggregation or bundle of benefits that a company offers customers.” It creates value “through a distinct mix of elements catering to that segment’s needs.” That value can be quantitative (e.g., price, speed of service) or qualitative (e.g., design, customer experience).

Osterwalder and Pigneur further teamed up with other writers to generate the book “Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want,” which explores the value proposition in a highly structured way and explains how to write a business model. The book opens with three messages that will resonate with anyone who has given thought to a value proposition. These are:

1. Understand the patterns of value creation
2. Leverage the experience and skills of your team
3. Avoid wasting time with ideas that won’t work

These three points ring equally true for innovation.

Four parts to consider when building your value proposition

There is a lot of advice out there that deals with value propositions, but there’s not as much that focus on innovation value propositions.

The starting point in designing an IVP is “what will bring it to life?” Does it reflect the mission? Does it “paint” the innovation initiative? Does it indicate where value creation lies? Well, all three and then some.

The IVP needs to state the most important point of “how it serves others.” That comes back to solving a problem, its relevance, its benefits, and its differentiation. If you can capture those four main aspects, you are shaping your IVP in a unique way.

An IVP also is a “statement of intent.” It is beginning to provide why your innovation needs to be compelling, to make it valuable to those that have a clear and vested interest.

This “vested interest” part is why the initial value proposition I came across in 2003 hit home. It sought to break down the IVP into four constituents that needed consideration, which include:

1. The Value Proposition to the Management and Staff
2. The Value Proposition to Shareholders
3. The Value Proposition to Customers
4. The Value Proposition to Other Stakeholders

So, tell me how often do we consider all four in their distinctive ways? Or do we tend to merge and blur these into one?

Let’s look at these four critical entities separately as your triggering points to build out in your specific meaning and validation.

There are four distinct groups to consider when you build an IVP, and each wants to see and hear differently. Take your time to separate out your IVP for each of these stakeholders. In separating these out, you are confirming each of these stakeholder groups is mutually reinforcing and being rewarded.

1. The Value Proposition to Management and Staff

• Improves the rate and quality of innovation: to detect problems and opportunities and to address them effectively
• Enables earlier and more thorough detection of problems and opportunities: so early responses reflect the continually changing environment to capture ground-breaking valuable additions
• Expands the range of business solutions available to management: through diversity, seeking out worldview perspectives and how to translate these
• Enhances the quality of inventive thinking: share entitlements to innovations with employees
• Raises employee satisfaction and morale: all employees need to be actively engaged in organizational learning
• Leads to richer “communities of communities”: communities are essential to learning and innovation in a firm
• Amplifies knowledge sharing and integration: by focusing on the policies and programs for knowledge sharing
• Results in “sustainable innovation”: supports, strengthens, and reinforces the self-organizing tendencies of organizations to innovate in their own endemic ways

2. The Value Proposition to Shareholders

• Enhances the quality of information about a company’s operations: the “open enterprise” approach
• Lowers risk in investments: decisions are more open to scrutiny from stakeholders
• Improves financial performance: enhanced capacity to detect and solve problems and opportunities
• Increases the value of intellectual capital: the social capacity to learn and innovate is the most valuable form, building a company’s intangible “assets”

3. The Value Proposition to Customers

• Advances the quality of fit between a supplier and its customer: responding to individual expressions of customer demand, thereby increasing the value and fit of their offerings – and themselves – to their customers
• Lowers risk to the customer: the risk of disruption can be mitigated by choosing to do business with suppliers whose operating environments are “open” and innovative

4. The Value Proposition to Other Stakeholders

• Enhances the quality of relationships with trading partners: for all of the same reasons as customers
• Reduces risk of irresponsible social behaviors by companies: in broader social responsibility efforts and in the conduct of business affairs

Now, imagine this was written in 2002 or thereabouts. Taking my thinking into these does it not hold true for today? Or maybe even more so? It establishes dialogue and openness.

If we can build out our IVP on these value-adding parts, we are making a compelling statement of innovation’s contribution. Can you see why I liked this and often refer to its ideals? I think the customer value-adding can be built out in stronger, value-adding ways for example, same as we can build our intent into each of these.

Also, as you reflect, you can perhaps make it more personal and more compelling to project out your innovation ambition.

Over time, I took the concept of innovation value propositions into my consulting work. I was looking to turn the need to convert IVPs into new business results by promoting the meaning (to the client) on the following positioning:

Innovation services consulting – additional value proposition statements that drive a value proposition to arrive at a bundle of benefits.

I used the below as my triggering points for opening discussions.

Building a more effective innovation transformation system, which:

• Leads to higher conversion rates
• Increases business volume throughput
• Improves business quality and evaluation techniques
• Uncovers the unmet needs of customers (clients become marketing resources)
• Enhances perception of professionalism in the marketplace and by other stakeholders

Achieving a higher integrated development program for innovation, which:

• Allows individuals to develop at their own pace but in structured ways
• Increases workforce effectiveness and engagement
• Links competency with rewards/recognition
• Provides empowered career paths due to higher motivation and identification
• Integrates strategy, vision, and governance within embedded practices
• Offers greater value from your business process, systems, and their design

Searching for and building a robust management evaluation toolset, which:

• Generates on focused customer needs (data mining/management)
• Explores priority analysis (individual/grouped/clustering)
• Promotes developmental analysis (benchmarking and best practices)
• Improves strategic forecasting/planning and alignment capability
• Advances resource management capabilities
• Enhances internal mechanisms (resources/business transactions)

Establishing the levers for a motivated workforce focused on innovation, which:

• Seeks out and resolves concerns with clear adoption techniques
• Emphasizes organizational and team focus
• Stimulates individuals’ desire to participate and share
• Evaluates candidate capabilities (attitude, reasoning, and learning capacity)
• Reduces organizational “risk” with improving profiles and learning experiences

Then, I wanted to force the IVP thinking even more to explore the “differentiation” points of seeking competitive advantage.

Amplifying the value proposition (and rethinking it every 12 months)

Delivering a set of innovative solutions in these changing market environments needs to focus on your resources to provide you with clear freshness on a constantly-updated basis. Markets don’t stand still, nor do competitors. We are constantly “disrupted,” so any future innovation results need to lead to significant competitive advantage within your offerings. You and your firm should also evaluate your IVP every 12 months by asking the questions below.

How can we…

Increase operational effectiveness (channeling your resource management)?

• Build more effective and systematic management frameworks to grow a more adaptable, flexible business
• Improve the rate and quality of our innovation
• Gain an early warning system of detection to stop or accelerate opportunities
• Create a robust innovation process that moves concepts to market faster

Achieve greater people retention and productivity returns (focused more on outcomes and needs)?

• Grow the use of networks and knowledge necessary for value creation
• Encourage a more engaged and motivated workforce wanting to innovate
• Foster confidence across self-forming, motivated teams
• Improve the quality of inventive thinking and knowledge exchanges

Drive innovation across the organization (through different tools and techniques)?

• Use the innovation integrated framework
• Define and align on the innovation choice cascading model
• Create a clear innovation process across all its stages
• Know the right evaluations to measure value and success

Provide a return on innovation (ROI)?

• Reduce costs through a better idea or project development structure
• Increase revenue by spotting new business opportunities, realizing new products/service in faster delivery, extending existing lifecycles
• Align goals and business objectives to intangible benefits that generate our make up of much of our innovation capital
• Build your intangible assets as the core capabilities to generate market advantage

I provided these points above to strengthen the innovation value proposition

Conclusion

Every day our innovation is being eroded. We must continually seek out new positioning, differences, and points of value – those new value pools that build and sustain our business.

By crafting a well-thought-through IVP for all its constituent parts, we are giving innovation a robust and dynamic framework to build out and point back as validation.

Building your innovation value proposition is critical. It forms a bedrock of your actions and your big picture of your innovation intent. We often must restate the value of innovation. If you work through some of the above suggestions, then those that “might doubt” will see the compelling value that makes innovation central to your company’s future. Innovation creates value, but it is by stating these value propositions in clear and highly visible ways that you are held to the “innovation flame.”

Get this right and innovation burns bright.

*** This post was first published through Hype. and is republished here.

The post I would recommend applying the Innovation Value Proposition first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Throughout the past couple of years, I have been constantly arguing about the need to put innovation management on a digital platform.

These have come in different thoughts on digital platforms, ready for cross-industry and having in place, a rapid digital innovation process that scales and evolves on new technology and insights.

We need a radical design, universal in design and approach.

What if you could manage your innovation in the ways shown in this diagram?

This is the way PLM innovation platforms are progressing and currently being assessed by CIMdata in a PLM Innovation Assessment Scorecard shown further below. Link to the position paper

The argument about what any innovation management system provides goes on and on and still, we seem not to be at the universal acceptance point that an innovation management process is critical and needs a better system of management.

What we should finally accept, a platform connects all users, both internally and externally in their ability to share their knowledge and information in exchanges, in one environment to cultivate collaborations and continuous collaborative creativity. The more we design and need to deliver smart, connected and innovative products the more we have this innovation platform need.

The majority of the present software providers fail to grasp this.

Those that do, grasping the incredible value of offering a digital innovation platform, will be, it seems, coming more from the Product Lifecycle Management perspective (PLM) where product design has always been complex. Those that don’t come from the old traditional thinking about innovation idea management or managing a single product portfolio. Both of these older solutions to managing innovation are approaches urgently requiring a radical change. Solutions should not come out of a box, loaded on your machine but readily accessible in a cloud environment built on a digital innovation platform design.

It is in recent years that the whole need to emphasize collaboration and constant ongoing exchanges become essential to speed up the response to customer needs and competitive advantage. This constant demand for improvement and digitally connected products is a constant “dynamic”, demanding ever-changing needs, additional tools, software updates, adoption of new technologies, and expects the constant change in how you manage your innovation environment differently. Innovation management, at present, stays in the last century.

The requirement has been growing around the understanding to make innovation work, we need to make sure our tools, people, information and departments of expertise all work in sync, increasing throughout the whole lifecycle, not just in ideation, or execution of a launch. Innovation today requires, no it actually demands, more connectivity to stand a chance of building (really) innovative solutions

The whole need is for functional domains (silo’s of knowledge) can work outside of their specific domain so others can link the information and knowledge up and apply the orchestration to bring this together in “better” products. We move from specific owners like marketing into organization engagement and enterprise ownership contribution.

Platforms perform really good jobs of making this enterprise engagement happens.

The platform becomes the conduit for connectivity, you begin to build a certain gravity in finding, securing and exploring data. You achieve a greater flow, you see traceability and configuration, you begin to evaluate iterations of design, you encourage openness. You make these platforms available, accessible and above all, provide a stable environment for all to appreciate end-to-end innovation lifecycle evolution.

So why don’t many software providers within innovation provide us this connectivity, so as to make sharing and accomplishing tasks easy? Most provide the tools to do this but they are often labored, manual, controlled for those that need them, not for all to see and participate.

We simply liberate connections on a platform.

Software providers want to sell licenses, that is the source of their gravity, of their measure of success. But gravity, in my view, comes from building compelling interfaces, designed to build positive experiences and collaborative efforts. Of course, designing software out of a box (many of today’s models) attempts this but “gravity” comes from making connections and offering great platforms in tools, connections, apps etc gives innovation management a whole new dimension, that software limited out of a box can’t. It keeps evolving and being dynamic.

Then we have this magic word of “flow”– the activity where innovation is fostered, encouraged and building momentum. It is understood today as the need to have interoperability, seamlessness, and traceability as the core of our solution needs. We know that the flow is essential to innovation. To make this gravity and flow to happen we need openness, in collaborations, in support, in continuingly improving our design systems to galvanize and connect innovation work.

Two platform authors Mark Bonchek and Sangeet Paul Choudary often talk of the building blocks of platforms and any platform success is built on this connection, gravity and flow thinking.

The other keys of a platform are its ability to scale. It can offer sustainability in being adaptive in interfaces and workflows, far more dynamic and evolving that solutions out of a box. They can be extended via constantly updated configuration than awaiting modification or updates on the next release or software upgrade you are forced to pay for. Then you have maintainability as it seeks to stay current, relevant and response as technology and application are evaluated and changed.

For me, I have become increasingly impressed with where the PLM providers are going.

One stands out for me in giving that significant focus on innovation management, not just product is Aras.

Now Aras I have written about before (herein “Can We have one of These- A product Innovation platform?“) as they are laying out their PLM product innovation platform so it is open, flexible, scalable and upgradeable powered by digital solutions.

Specifically, and interestingly, Aras has no upfront software licensing fee’s, enabling the ability to seek out as low as the possible total cost of ownership, company-wide, not restricted to a few. This challenges most of the conventional business models of upfront license models currently offered by Innovation software providers.

Aras provides a range of services that sit on the platform allows for dynamic workflows, plenty of visual collaborations, reporting all in different variants to fit your (entire) business, not one specific part, choosing separate solutions.

This is the present assessment of Aras and its platform score for its product innovation platform assessment

I keep hoping Aras recognize innovation is not just emerging from those older CAD days, or limited to certain industries that needed heavier industrial engineering solutions, but able to grasp the greater potential; to offer an innovation platform to everyone that needs one.  Innovation comes from everywhere and through the adoption of the Aras design, I believe can offer a total innovation management solution across the entire enterprise, irrespective of industry or service focus.

This visual shows the existing Aras PLM platform. It can be adapted to all of the innovation we undertake today, quickly and fairly well, if the value is seen and the parts needed to be added are made, especially relating to innovation deriving from marketing initiatives.

The significant advantage of having tools integration, integrated workflows for all to participate (R&D, Engineering, Marketing, Designers etc), to be able to track and trace the evolution of the product concept throughout its entire lifecycle. Also in having selective parts being able to be reused for a product family or variant design has significant time, and cost savings. You can minimize rework or build out from past work.

Can the present application overview of Aras be extended to incorporate all types of innovation that require collaboration, exchange and constant on-going evaluation?

In Summary

Can you imagine a fully integrated product design development for innovation management, one that enables global, cross-industry, an open collaborative approach built into the platform design? One that is still built on your rules and structure suitable to your task and vision, of what a product needs to achieve? One that is giving you the potential for not just the digital thread but higher levels of digital twin design to prototype, share and engage customers with, throughout a product and its service design. One that manages the entire end-to-end design to eventual market, how it evolved, was validated and update. Then why are we not screaming for this solution?

Tell me why we continue with a pen, paper, excel spreadsheets, silo’s of knowledge, dependency on opinion and not fact. Why do we keep restricting our innovation to move across our organizations due to limitations on software-out-of-a box or licenses as the go-to-market business model? Why are we not talking to the PLM providers, especially it seems to me, Atas, and getting some level of movement out of their traditional PLM box, into the innovation world? A world for all, to finally have the potential to connect up innovation across the whole enterprise and beyond?

The post Building the Single Innovation Digital Platform Environment first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I can honestly say, it never fully works out as the year progresses, there are distractions, subjects that attract my eye, hold my attention or simply ones become bigger in my wish to pursue as important to understand or become more focused upon.

Innovation is constantly shifting in customer needs and issues to absorb, relate too, build into our thinking, in a world where many within the business community are “time-starved, often knowledge poor” I look to help them on different innovation insights.

What about you? Here are my thoughts coming from 2018 that are leading me into 2019

Firstly in the year just closing I have been taking a look back at what I wrote about in 2018.Digital and innovation dominate.

On this site paul4innovating, I wrote 34 posts, a drop on past years, but increasingly with the shift into the constant integrating of digital into all things innovation, continuing as the emerging trend and theme, I seemed to spend the most time upon. On my other main site focusing specifically on ecosystems and platform related work, I wrote 25 posts.

Also in this year I began to put some fresh  life on two new posting sites, one focusing specifically on coaching and mentoring “guide4innovating” and the other “connecting digital and innovation” looking more at the critical part of digital and innovation that is forming most of my posting and researching work in recent months to break it out. My one other continues a very tortuous journey of building the dynamics when linked, become the connecting points in building innovation in the needed capacity, capability, and competence, that I term the pursuit of “innovation fitness dynamics“

Why do I run so many posting sites?

Some people just look at me, rolling their eyes until I explain that each has a specific innovation purpose or focal point that needs this separating out, as more specialized reference sites for the work I do, it is easier to “point” to these. Well, that’s my excuse! I post to deliver specific content and context that I want to inform.

They are simply clear “points of reference” specifically focusing on building blocks, based on my work focus.

So let me provide my leading posts in 2018 on  this site: www.paul4innovating.com

The stand-out posts were”Shifting our thinking within the 4th Industrial Revolution“, followed closely by  “The arrival and potential of Knowledge Graphs into our World”  then followed by Applying the Three Horizon Thinking to a Fresh Perspective of Innovation Design and close behind “A New Integrated Innovation Engagement System“

The one that consistently performed at or near the top, has been every single year since I published it in late 2010, eight full years of posting has been “The Three Horizon Approach to Innovation”

The one that disappointed me?

I had expected this to do as well as the others mentioned above.  “There are Known’s and Unknowns in Innovation”  For some reason it did not but this could be that it was published first over on another site, at Hype Innovation.

Then on my other main posting site www.ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com

The three most popular published this year were “The Emerging World of Connected Industrial Ecosystems” followed by “Platform Providers need to think more about Ecosystems Principles and Design” then“When is a partner not a partner?”

The one I was disappointed with as it did not get as many reads as I would have expected was “Defining Ecosystems in Industry” I really thought that offered a lot of insight into the developments of IIOT ecosystems and their platforms

So an interesting mix, I get the impression that innovation posts as stand-alone tend not to be as popular, they do need to be attached to something else (digital, platforms) or help sove a problem, offer a solution or otherwise they simply get caught up in the “mass” of these “helpful suggestions of useful lists” that are constantly coming out daily. Nothing wrong with those, they remain popular and I do a fair share if I feel I can add some new level of insight or help.

So as for 2019?

I have been contemplating a shift of tack. Again innovation runs through them all but it continues to be linked into the bigger picture and the power of technology and all things digital.

Here is my mind map as my starting point. Will I succeed in covering off all of these, actually should I? Let’s see.

Innovation is in a constant shift in emphasis, in placing it in context and the context-specific work that I am looking to post about to give better learning value. The value creation emphasis is critical anytime but I feel in my coming year of advisory, mentoring and coaching it will have an even more central place alongside the constant “Interplay” between digital and innovation as the dominant factors..

I can’t get away from the belief we are in a “new innovation era”. It runs through all of the different focal points outlined in the above mind map.

I certainly wish you, my reader, a really great 2019. It is going to be a very tough year, unrelenting in change and innovation pursuit.

So onto 2019. I wish everyone that does invest their time in reading my posts a really big thank you.

I would like to do, even more, invest more in my thinking about innovation but these themes, outlined above, come more from the work I undertake or look to advise upon, on behalf of others, or in pursuit of my own researching interest. I hope they offer you some level of interest.

I laid out my original blogging intent here and so are attempting to be laying out my agenda for 2019. With this, I have hoisted my innovation flag, laid out my themes and put that proverbial ‘stake’ in the ground on my posting intent for the coming year.

My best wishes for a successful, productive and great innovating year ahead of you in 2019.

The post Entering 2019 – What Do Each of Us Need to Focus Upon? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.