This ‘dizziness’ for many is being caused by a growing unease with the continuing changing dynamics of today’s business landscape and uncertainty over the path forward. This is forcing leaders to think differently about how they will achieve growth.

The good news though is it does seems that many are beginning to embrace this complexity by exploring new and sometimes unexpected opportunities to innovate.
According to Beth Comstock, the senior vice president and chief marketing officer of GE, “leaders are betting big on more unconventional approaches to innovation to unlock growth”.

It seems GE are trying to stay ahead of the pack in unlocking innovation by exploring different markets, partnership structures and business models.

Big data is accelerating up the inside as we have seen both GE and P&G, placing increasing emphasis on this, as a potential source of innovation insight they feel is presently missing.
The most important point comes back to these tensions or vertigo being felt, that is showing through in this report, between the desire for globalization and protectionist temptations that organizations sometimes tend to favor.

It seems as our leaders are being pushed outside their comfort zones they are having this uneasiness with the pace of change and confusion over the best path forward.

I’d hazard a guess  on what they feel as ‘vertigo’ does go beyond the usual symptoms of light-headedness and dizziness and is possibly far more: that of a chronic lack of solutions beginning to creep into their  psyche as their worlds are spinning out of their control, to stay managing in the ways they have been. Perhaps welcome to our world Mr Leader.

As many of them will be gathering in Davos, Switzerland between 23^rd to 27^th January 2013 (http://tinyurl.com/afde4w5) I think the higher than usual altitude, will not help their brains or nervous systems as the whole economic system is still out of balance, so having “Innovation Vertigo” is part of a bigger malaise I would expect.

Still, here are the top line summary points of the report

The protectionist debate

There seems a growing undercurrent of wanting protectionism but making sure it works in their favour. This could be trying to get Governments to prioritize promotion of domestic innovation rather than imported but many others continue to feel markets need to be opened even more to promote the imported innovation and attract the (domestic) investment that goes with this, or should.

A growing number of leaders see growing challenges for innovation within local economies, believing that the increased competition and accelerated pace of technological advancement has a negative impact. So this is a growing set of policy paradoxes, leaders want clearer decisions through local governments to determine this and bring it under control.

The wish to go beyond just product innovation

There is also a growing recognition that incremental innovation is simply just not enough as organizations are suffering from this lack of growth momentum, causing much of the “vertigo”. Business model innovation is becoming more and more the solution with a growing view that a new business model may offer businesses a less risky and resource-intense path to reach customers over the current ‘traditional’ methods.

I read an awful lot into this but top of mind does come the word ‘naivety’ and a chose this word due to its definition: “being naive is often lacking developed powers of reasoning and criticism.”  They might look far more at the “within” and come down from their often lofty heights and recognize they are the ones that inhibit and constrain the existing structures to perform in so many ways, far too many to start to outline here.

I welcome new business models of course, I teach the methodologies associated with them, so they are needed but are these organizations equipped to design, construct and execute new business models?  Also what happens to all the resource-intense ones, do they continue, only to wither and die as new ones are pushed by their own leaders?

No, this might be fanciful but it needs a far more robust debate and thinking through.  Of course focusing on the right forces for growth mentioned to master innovation is the real need for innovating successfully, business needs to master customer and market insights, talent and technology development.

Grasping new business models alone does not change that inherent weakness seen today in existing organizations. Theory and desire might be one thing, reality and sunken investment might be another –  maybe more vertigo then?

Collaborations continue to feature

According to the report, it is the belief that collaboration between businesses is emerging as a means to surpass competitors, enabling faster access to new technologies and markets particularly in emerging markets.

Yet despite global acknowledgement of partnership’s power, concerns over revenue sharing, IP protection, trust and talent poaching pose barriers to action. Germany, China, Brazil and Sweden seem to have the most experience at partnerships.

It does seem collaborative innovation has plenty of global appeal as a key to business success, and momentum are accelerating in developing markets and seemingly slowing down in developed ones.

The reasons for collaborations are given as access to new technologies, access to new markets; improve existing product and service and speed up time to market.

The downsides are a lack of trust and policy protection underpins much of the anxiety over business collaboration and the continuing “old chestnut” of IP protection, which all fit with developing country lag issues on legislation protection.

Government as stewards of the innovation environment

This one also gets me intrigued – stewards – umm. We are in such a “fog” from lack of dynamic leadership at government level, partly due to the complexity and tangled knots we have got ourselves into but also the underwhelming mandate delivered at the ballot box leaves the politics of politics in stalemate.

I always get the sneaky feeling business leaders keep pushing government to lead and make policy and then scream and shout, another vertigo moment, if they don’t like the decisions that go with this.

Of course policy environments affecting innovation are caught up in this and the usual call to safeguard business interests adds to the tensions. Business worries over the lack of talent, of loss of knowledge, in IP issues and fear bureaucracy (besides their own) and over regulation (beside their own again) but often we can’t see our business leaders heading the charge to hang onto talent already in place, reduce the knowledge we all have by insisting on many brain-numbing daily activities, called specialisation and filling in information called for by the “system” etc.

Our business leaders want to see “a stronger entrepreneurial culture in the education system through stronger linkages between students and business savvy individuals” but sitting on their hands and wallets until this comes through any changed education system does not solve our immediate and next ten years of problems –  does it? I suspect more vertigo moments for them.

Lastly, guess what, talent is not in the right place

Leaders want to have access to the creativity and technical prowess within their workforce but the lack of preparedness and access to this ‘talent’ is holding them back in “unlocking innovation”. I find it hard here to not become a little cynical on this.

Matching jobs and people is hard, no doubt and lining up the right skills to meet the economic needs required today is correct but if all the millions of messages of caution in the past about investing in people, in nurturing what you have, holding onto what you have in experienced people, instead of simply letting them go, many on early retirement packages or just leaving out of continued frustration, I do have a hard time on their concerns. They made the bed……..

Perhaps another symptom of “Innovation Vertigo” is “Innovation knee-jerking”, turning it off and on for the short-term needs and abandoning the notion of continuous, sustained investment in the skills, along with developing the experience base through challenging environments and leading edge investments.

Well at least if new business models come into serious ‘play’ then the skills, experience base and challenging environments will all equally be in ‘play’ but not in the controlled ways they would want to see but at the edges of much discomfort for some white knuckle rides.

Thanks GE for providing this, it is certainly helpful to see inside leaders minds.

I enjoy the GE Global Innovation Barometers they often do raise the blood pressure and that of course is a certain tell, tell sign that I might be suffering “Innovation Vertigo” as well.

Can I go to Davos as well, please? I do live in the country but more at a solid ground(ed) level, I’d like to be a little light-headed above the clouds as perhaps all that attend are.

The report is at http://www.ge.com/sites/default/files/Innovation_Overview.pdf
or with different views here: http://www.ideaslaboratory.com/projects/innovation-barometer-2013/

The post Leaders are feeling the effects of Innovation Vertigo says GE first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Then this week an article “Over-innovation makes US firms suck at Sustainability because they are too innovative” by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen (http://bit.ly/oGDObX).

Each makes me stop and come back to my deepening view we have to decouple growth and consumption through innovation.

This is not an easy subject but let me lay out some opening views and thoughts. Why bother? Well, I really do believe we need to radically change our approaches through the use of applying innovation in new ways.

These two articles added further to my personal concerns that we do need to (quickly) come out of the denial we seem to have in all societies. Innovation needs to be radically applied in new ways that alter the present mindsets of politicians, economists and business people who feel that the only path is continued consumption and growth.

This approach is simply not sustainable and we need to find a radical alternative that still offers all of us progress but in a radically altered world.

The two articles in summary first

Try to imagine a world with three Americas- three giant economic super powerhouses with citizens all pursuing their equivalent American type dream of buying, selling and just consuming more.

It is a prospect that excites many business people hell-bent on growth as their yardstick. Can we deny Asian governments and their people after decades of poverty, struggle and hard work to be on the brink of obtaining a greater degree of abundance?

The answer is our planet will become unimaginably stressed; we have already passed the earth’s regenerative capacity. We all would be condemned not blessed by this. The world does not have enough for two more consumption-driven Americas. Yet we stay in denial and the spin of innovation is all about achieving more.

Equally America today is an amazing consumer. Some argue the US is the biggest environmental sinner as the economy is based on consumption, throw-away consumption. The argument is that American company is innovative, entrepreneurial, and intensely competitive and they tend not to look at sustainable solutions, only the next big thing.

Getting any change here is challenging those deep-founded and engrained beliefs and that is seemingly unlikely to happen, especially when the Government and the parties wrangle on increasing the debt ceiling. It seems we are not addressing the long term problems that are hurtling toward us.

Can America become more standard to allow more recycling, greater re-usage and shared systems? Can America actually slow down and optimize and not chase consumption by encouraging change in a throw-away society? Can America redefine consumption by adding extra value and prolonging product life cycles?

What would it take to make such dramatic changes?

Clearly, innovation thrives when there is a crisis. We seem to be heading for many, like rolling thunderstorms building up until they are so over our heads we just jump. Jump in real fear but jump in responding with a desire to survive by changing our habits and supposed consumption needs.

The main need is in finding fresh ways in taking those first big steps to radical change.

We must find ways to constrain consumption that do not continue to stress, deplete, degrade or waste our natural resource base. We need to reward and reward heavily those “more is less” activities that put natural resource management in the centre of our thinking. Governments will be looking more at carbon taxes (Australia has just announced one), resource taxes and ensure producing organizations use far fewer materials and far less energy in their products and these can only be radical not incremental as it is today.

This will slowly change consumption habits. We have to get multiple-fold increases in resource efficiency that don’t move the problem from one stressed aspect to another or trade off mutual dependencies.

We must REDUCE dramatically fossil fuels, fisheries, grain stock consumption and forest products by applying disruptive intervention by Governments that impose taxes on the people that ‘pollute’ and don’t want to face the radical change necessary that continue to ‘consume’ more than they really need  .

We will have to “name and shame” the ones that have vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Leadership, global leadership is needed but re-orientating innovation away from consumptive growth can be one of the major enablers to support this need.

Managing in an uneven world

There is a good book called “What’s mine is yours? Collaborative Consumption”  by Rachel Botsman & Roo Rogers that tracks and explains the rise of a fascinating new consumer behaviour they call “collaborative consumption.”

Driven by growing dissatisfaction with their role as robotic consumers manipulated by marketing, people are turning more and more to models of consumption that emphasize usefulness over ownership, community over selfishness, and sustainability over novelty.

Although it focuses more on exploiting the ability of the Internet so as to create networks of shared interests and trust and to simplify the logistics of collective use it offers some further thought to managing change in consumption.

Collaborative Consumption appears in three “systems” suggest the authors, product-service systems, redistribution markets and collaborative lifestyles.

The movement described in collaborative consumption helps but it is not radical enough. We need to constrain consumption, to channel this into smarter solutions that continue to create value for both the business and society so the consumer sees extending use as critical.

Out of this shift can come entirely new industries that manage product life to extract, extend and enhance and the consumer gets rewarded by constrained consumption in different imaginative ways -getting sent consumption tax paychecks for instance, to continue to invest and fuel the consumption of them wanting to consume less because they get paid for it.

Radical but necessary and this would be needing every ounce of innovation ingenuity and reshaping of whole industries, government approaches and

our mindsets. A tough one that!
There is no easy path but we have to take the right one.

I like the idea of these three parts- systems, markets and lifestyles. We do need significant breakthroughs in innovation that allows for ideas that feed off of novel life-changing concepts that meet cultures different adjusting needs of expectation.

One that values a more sustaining lowering of consumption and does not add deepening conflict and strife but allows for a more balanced consumption for all to share. Call me an innovation idealist!

Recently Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams famous for their Wikinomics book commented recently “the rate of business model innovation has not accelerated” since they wrote their book in 2006.

They are beginning to understand the reason as “it is becoming difficult or even impossible for companies to achieve breakthrough success without changing their entire industry’s modus operandi”

I would suggest we have to go even further on this observation, we have to change entire society modus operandi over to ‘more is less’, away from constantly increasing consumption and growth. Otherwise in the 21^st century of a very crowded planet, already highly stressed in its resources we will be facing a very tough, bleak world.

Taking off the blinkers

It is time to take off the blinkers and find alternative ways to put innovation to work. Are you an optimist or pessimist? Can innovation be put to work and be so radical to alter habits of lifetimes?

Can societies recognise and reward ‘more is less’ as a viable alternative to today that pushing consumption is simply not sustaining- higher growth through increased consumption is a road to depletion?

Seemingly necessary is a huge shift away in how we manage in society in what we seem to be told of our current planet’s problems. I have to admit, privately, sometimes I wonder where it will all end?

It is time we made one of those extraordinary steps on how we value progress and put to work innovative solutions in completely radical new ways, of more, is less as the sustaining and rewarding path that societies all have to work towards.

The post How can we decouple growth and consumption through innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.