Innovation is certainly one of those in need of concerted effort to bring up to date within organizations, to make it more inclusive and that can come through delivering it across the organization within the cloud. Highly visible, agile and core to the organizations future, seen by all and truly valued.

Let me outline my initial thoughts here, put the seat belt on for the ride please: making the business case.


The cloud solutions do seem to look promising for those adopting a strategy of increased use of the cloud as a future IT approach. They seems less emphasis on the cost savings but its potential to improve business flexibility and gain access to a wider array of technologies and solutions.

Also there is a growing view that the cloud supports critical aspects required today and in the future, that are more radical in organizational design.

Those that look to run IT processes in the cloud, such as development tools, test tools, development systems, test systems, service management and performance management as well as incorporating SaaS offerings (such as Salesforce) with their internal systems, and with this host of cloud hosted systems to make hybrid architectures that promise radical changes can be realized within our organizations.

If these changes can be delivered, then I think they will be welcome by all sides inside organizations, each grappling with all the changes swirling around the business today and forecasted to become even more volatile in the future.

Clearly organization design and its core processes and systems needs fresh, vastly different approaches, to tackling chronic organizational rigidity that is seen today. Business unit leaders are frustrated with a lack of new, more radical solutions to their needs of being responsive and agile.

Switching into the cloud can transform IT into a provider of on-demand service when the business needs it!

Switching to the cloud can also radically alter the position of IT as a real provider of the services you need to do the job, when it is needed, more on-demand. It can offer those in ITa future role of looking constantly towards being the ‘go to’ service provider, that is constantly adding the supporting structures for supporting new value and impact in flexible systems and processes that can constantly be adaptive to meet the business needs.

Critically the cloud can help significantly in the quest for speed, agility, scalability as well as being designed for the increasing need of having in place support structures for a more ambidextrous organization. These need different solutions than today’s systems and will become the big IT challenge to manager over the next few years.

There is a constant talk in IT circles of “everything is a service” and if this translates as the business expects this can have a real transforming ring to it. Business groups require faster execution, reduced time-to-value and higher levels of flexibility, and perhaps, IT might have a way to deliver these through the cloud. The promise is ‘hanging out’ there it seems.

Bringing innovation fully into the corporate fold

Thankfully, for many perhaps, innovation has been a little out, off on one side of enterprise resource planning. To some degree this has helped but also is rapidly becoming a real performance drag, innovation needs to be more central in core process thinking.

I believe the solution is to buy into ‘innovation in the cloud’ as the next practice idea. Today many innovation processes and systems have been fairly stand-alone, remote from the clutches of IT and not being ‘integrated’ into the Enterprise Resource platforms so far, would all have to go and that will have a few cries of “OMG no!”

On-premise IT solutions for innovation remain highly constrained.
I’m certainly against innovation continuing to stay in the on-premise platform at all. Of course, any migration plans will give the current systems sometime but the cloud just seems to be an alluring prospect that meets many of innovations needs.

Innovation can only really thrive and move considerably up a notch or two in performance and recognition, if it can obtain the integrated flexibility and achieve the more open access to all shades of business agility that can be found, if we have the opportunity.

Innovation runs counter to repeatable processes; it needs to leverage this ambidexterity of having access to all that makes it adaptable– nimble, agile, constant change, and experimentation, prototyping that is tailored to explore incremental innovation in faster, more flexible ways.

Alongside this to allow for more radical innovation that taps into greater needs for mobility, usability, elasticity and yet still be aligned to leverage, exploit and maximise opportunities needs to run in parallel.  It sounds a tall order doesn’t it, yet I’m not sure it actually is, when you stand back and think about this and try to begin to piece together all the pieces of the puzzle.

I think there are multiple ways forward exploit the cloud

There are many thoughts one could explore with a little bit of imagination, alongside a decent knowledge of what is possible today and what can be possible in the future, that is already in our ‘present line-of-sight by using something like the three horizon methodology.

I’ve also written about the need for a “innovation mashup” previously, as well as I can see the clear advantages that all these emerging platforms are providing that are delivering radically new innovative business models. Large organizations need to climb on board to thinking innovation differently.

Large organizations are lagging in the ‘responsive league’ clearly, they need to think beyond holding everything in house and look towards a more radical innovation agenda for change. Growth does not come from incremental dripping techniques; it comes from spotting emerging opportunities and turning those into commercial value as quickly as possible.

The current legacy within any innovation systems is creating such a drag on organizations current innovation performance and why are our organizations not recognizing this?

Putting innovation in the cloud is itself disruptive.

It offers a real chance to innovate existing business practices, it can give increased visibility. Innovation can be ‘seen’ throughout the organization, not tucked away in dark corners, scrabbling to gain attention. If you take the example of what salesforce.com did in cloud computing to transform the customer end, then why can’t getting innovation on multiple platforms in the cloud really show its potential as well?

Then innovation connects and suddenly the customer becomes a co-creator of value and collaboration really comes to the fore also, as something necessary and needed.

The speed of any innovation implementation process is determined by demand and acceptance though.

Any new design is determined by its adoption, diffusion and usage, all the way through to exploitation and uptake. I’ve written about the need to adopt improved practices for capturing and distributing knowledge through applying absorptive capacity that give greater structure and receptiveness to change that is increasingly needed to cope with growing inflows of information, knowledge and increased big data insights.

We need to find ways to ‘push’ organizational readiness for innovation to change and that comes from the top really pushing harder to achieve real growth from new opportunities but supporting the infrastructural changes this requires, a real place for IT and HR to become more involved in preparing change.

We also need to reflect on what is needed to help assimilate innovation as it will continue to have a complex, non-linear need in processes and this often in the past has simply kept it out of the ERP space, for example.

Equally due to this exclusion, sometimes the constant need to focus on innovation falls out of the corporate line-of-sight daily, as it is not part of this core, organizational supported process, it operates on one side for many to feel not involved. It comes back into the spotlight only when something has not happened, not as promised and that then ‘expends’ lots of negative energy chasing down answers, seeking explanations.

Resolving existing thorny issues need to be brought bring into the innovation cloud equation.

We need to tackle some problems within the innovation that will simply not ‘go away’ but will remain thorny issues until we tackle them ‘full on’.

The greater emphasis on the softer aspects of innovation in skills, attributes and collaborative techniques calls for different thinking on talent development, learning new topics, working in different, far more project related ways that are responsive and agile to ‘seize the opportunity’ by actively seeking the solutions that are available but most probably beyond the walls of the organization and this can be through the cloud.

The art of letting go and opening up to collaboration and co-creation is a growing challenge for all organizations. The pressure is on finding the ‘ways and means’ to enable that to happen.

Another strong argument for promoting the cloud where you have a constant array of collaborative tools and applications to help draft, design, brainstorm, make mock-ups live, share to-do lists in real-time, manage projects, offer concept board development on the fly, provide facilities for all aspects of audio, mind mapping and creative enhancing techniques and on and on.

I’d argue that innovation needs the very best ways to tease out understanding, not locked in selected mindsets of product developers. We need to offer interactive, real-time collaboration tools to make the design and execution of innovation a whole lot better.

Lastly, without droning on more, we need to find ways to orchestrate, monitor, allow for broader performance monitoring, add tools as needed on-demand, to build and deploy capacity management and modelling outcomes against performance within innovation all are needed. We need to change the ways we report on our total innovation activity,  not in the days and weeks these requests can take, but at the speed, the cloud can potentially provide and the business requires, fast.

So I am making my call of innovation and its need to head towards the cloud fast!

We have come a long way in understanding innovation, yet it still stays locked in legacy systems and structures. We need to make future choices on what we want out of our innovation activity, much of the same as today or the ability to move it into a new domain of performance?

To do this we have to navigate through all the hype and mystic surrounding innovation, we have to be bolder in testing out capabilities to experiment and explore the options we have available today in new software, tools, thinking and applications.

We have to take clearer positions on the best applications to do the job and not settle for today’s poor compromises of having one stage-gate system for example, we need to feel comfortable leveraging and extend our resources and capacities to innovate and learn on a continuous basis how to exploit the opportunities in agile, flexible and real-time ways.

Making the business case

For me, to achieve this we must go cloud-based, agile, and moving towards having a more ambidextrous organization design for innovation. This will help innovation to break out of the existing constraints and linear approach we have given it as its straight jacket.

It will not come overnight, a cloud-based innovation capability but I see no reason why it can’t be delivered in less than five years.

I’m sure there are some out there wanting to bring this hugely disruptive potential into realization quicker than that, it has a real business case potential in my opinion. Does it for you?

The post The growing need is to move innovation into the cloud. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Well, only 24 hours later the fog was blown away and powerfully so. Do you believe in serendipity, that gift of making fortunate discoveries? Well it has certainly risen up the “I believe” scale for me. Over the last weekend I was catching up on the emails and I had one sent to me by ISPIM, a network of researchers, industrialists, consultants and public bodies, who share an interest in innovation management.

ISPIM had sent me their latest “Innovation Watch- issue 1-2013” and in this there was a timely (well clearly for me) article from Karl-Heinz Leitner, a Senior Scientist with the Austrian Institute of Technology, entitled  Innovation Futures: How Will We Innovate in the Future?
The article reminded me of his work that he had been co-ordinating between 2009 and 2012, funded by the EU FP7 on a foresight project on the future of innovation (INFU). It can be explored under the web page www.innovation-futures.org where I then spent a few hours reminding myself of this work that I had picked up upon in the past but somehow had forgotten or become buried under other innovation activities that help pay my bills.

So fast-forward into the innovation future

After my comments about hearing different “weak signals” here was a report blowing the whistle directly into my ear. So I climbed into the report, all 144 pages of it (well almost) and emerged out of this journey sometime in the middle of this week after I had completed much of my work-on-hand.

The clear message was the “evidence was there, all around us, that there was changing innovation patterns, more evolutionary than radical”. There are new forms of innovation, novel emerging concepts, ideas and strategies of how innovation is organized or possibly will be.

The report had a very systematic approach with the team looking out across the possible future innovation landscape so this could raise awareness and allow for a debate on these possible innovation patterns and their implications and might give a ‘momentum of change’. Lets work through some of its findings.

The innovation future project process

The process first undertook the identification of these emerging signals of change that were coming through current innovation patterns (the weak signals) with the aim of identifying newly emerging apparent and visible ones that may not have reached mainstream but may have disruptive impacts for industry, the economy and society in the future.

The work identified 68 signals of change pointing towards emerging innovation patterns and were already visible but not in the mainstream but had a positive trending to them.  Out of this the INFU research team generated and visualised twenty (20) innovation visions. They arrived at these by formulating, amplifying and combining some of the original signals.

After this the team provoked discussions across a community, conducted interviews with industrial and academic experts, provided an on-line survey to discuss and access the innovation visions.

The end results through clustering and consolidating the twenty even further down ended up with a final result of eight (8) final visions or nodes of change.

These eight visions were confronted with different socio-economic framework conditions and global mega-trends to finally synthesize scenarios of these final and possible innovation futures.

So the report views these as the drivers they presume to have the most decisive influence on the future evolution of the innovation process. Of course this future landscape will be shaped by individuals, society, organizations, the eventual economics, and by policy but these final eight seem to be emerging.

Firstly the dimensions of change – the consequences and implications
Before we get into this final eight there are seemingly common opportunities, risks and consequences that were observed coming out of this work. These can be summarized in seven statements offered as having consequences and implications to manage:

• There will be new forms of coordination and mediation – existing models will be challenged by growing coordination mechanisms, such as self-organizing communities or web-based co-design platforms. These today are seen to be on the rise. The emerging ones will present challenges on who is in control of these. The present reality is that our business organizations are not well set up in the emerging competencies required, suffer considerable inertia and in-grained difficulties and barriers to changing their cultures, learning and adapting.

• There will be a wider participation with the increasing trend of citizens and customers gaining increasing relevance to influence innovation, both in deciding the priorities and contributing to the innovation process. Co-creation will require more instruments, tools and techniques to enable this effectively. They are warning too much participation and too little coordination may slow down the innovation process and this growing consensual solution ends up offering even lower innovativeness.

• The motivation for innovation will be changing. The dominant aspect up to now has been company profits but with growing and complex societal and environmental problems becoming increasingly important, these will influence and become far more the driving force to innovate. This will push organizations to develop even more new (hybrid) business models to integrate all the parties making up part of these complex solutions, in the balancing out of the monetary with the non-monetary returns. We will also test the limits of participation.

• The increasing use of technology and software will seek ways to automatise innovation far more, where the current “creep” of algorithms, web crawler technology or simulation techniques to access market potential and others, will have the increased implication on the place and what’s left in space for human creativity. Equally the increased security issues and maintenance of these will be equally at some degree of variance with human imagination.

• There will be a growth of grand challenges but as eco-innovation pushes up the agenda we will likely see a growing movement towards sustainable solutions balancing production and consumption far more, or imposing constraints so more circular flows of cradle-to-cradle innovation becomes the possible model to control. Again we need to reflect on where scaling, transfer and standardisation come into play. Seeking optimisation becomes one of the biggest challenges to tackle.

• A possible move towards an innovation society? We will also begin to change within society on the perception of creativity? Do we become more of an innovation society but as we explore this we might have growing negative aspects of innovation fatigue or heaviness in the leadership expecting innovation.

• Lastly the significant shifts taking place of where innovation will eventually reside. Will the West become more of the fast follower, the adapter to the innovations emerging from the East? Where will the regional shifts take innovation, and how will this evolve? Is the current innovation approach regarded as too ‘Western’ and the East modifies or changes our thinking and approaches to how we innovate? We are equally moving more towards GLocalisation in design, approaches and solutions. The race to anchor ‘specific capabilities’ into a country or a region will become more intense.

I think these all have growing implications for thinking through innovation. They each offer challenges, risks and opportunities. What is sure the pace and direction of innovation will change as the pressure to consider societal needs become increasingly important.

We need to also look far more at the unintended and negative consequences of the consistent, increasingly relentless demand for innovation. It risks having a growing undesirable aspect that needs increasing awareness and factoring into the push for “anything new”.

The eight elaborated innovation visions and open questions arising

I have not discussed the 20 innovation visions here, I will do that in a further posting but for now we focus on the eight consolidated innovation visions labelled under the “nodes of change” that achieved a degree of consensus-

These were then explored in “mini- panel visions” to indicate a depth in the details associated with each, their drivers and barriers to begin to sketch out a desirable future based on these innovation futures. The eight selected were:

Deliberative Innovation
It seems widely expected that citizens will play a greater role both in governing and implementing innovation activities. How will the new type of “deliberative innovation” be governed, what will be the outcomes?

Innocamp Society
Innovation Camps where people gather for specific innovation tasks of a certain duration are becoming increasingly popular. Many experts see a high potential for such camps as key enablers of creative solutions both in a business and civil society environment.

Often the idea is linked to the open-source society where a number of products and services are developed in close interaction with users source society where a number of products and services are developed in close interaction among users

Social Experimentation
Social innovation is becoming more recognised as highly relevant for developing innovative solutions addressing societal challenges. New modes of innovation are required to align social and technological innovation activities.

Participatory experimentation will play a key role but what are the right instruments and levels required for successful solutions?

Automatised Innovation

A number of new techniques such as semantic web analysis allow for automating parts of the innovation process from idea generation via design and testing. What are the implications for the economy and society?

Widespread Innovation

Innovation is becoming mandatory for more and more people in companies and other types of organisations. How can we avoid “innovation overload” and “innovation divide”? What does it mean to live in an environment that is constantly innovating?

Open Innovation City

Cities are increasingly expected to play a major role as innovation drivers. In particular systemic sustainability innovations may best be implemented on a city level. What are adequate mechanisms for cities to reap the benefits of this potential?

Global Innovation Chain Integration

Innovation is expected to become globally dispersed. But what will be the mechanisms to integrate all the distributed and diverse elements and to match ideas and solutions with problems and needs?

Waste-Based Innovation

The establishment of innovation patterns that are fully consistent with a circular flow of resources was unanimously assessed as top priority in the INFU experts’ dialogue. However, many challenges are associated with this vision. How can novelties emerge out of used products, what kind of consumer types are associated with the pattern?

I’ll leave the summing up to Karl-Heinz Leitner, the coordinator for the project

“To summarise, the future of innovation will be more open, socially, and environmentally driven, while being faster and global at the same time. However, it would be too easy, too simple and too generic a conclusion to leave it that way.

INFU (the study) has revealed a much more diverse and broad future for innovation, indicating some tensions and ambivalent developments. We will see more participation, even though the question arises as to when the limits of participation are reached and when too much participation just results in lukewarm solutions, or may slow down the innovation process altogether.

Due to the enormous acceleration of innovation, companies tend to “over-engineer” their products in order to be competitive and thereby lose track of their main objectives: to be able to reap the benefits of their innovativeness and to meet their customers’ real needs at their best”

My final thoughts

For me, of course there are many futures but innovation is clearly “top of mind” to seek out growth, to create future wealth, with many of the forces we are seeing today as those that will shape the long-term future of innovation.

Yet there is going to be increasing tensions different than the ones we are discussing today. The questions of saturation, of tackling pressing societal issues, the growing trend for community or crowd participation can have negative effects on generating worthwhile innovation that is truly beneficial to society.

The whole issue of unintended and undesirable consequences gets largely brushed aside, sacrificed on the positive hype of the good of innovation. Are we going to see increasing ambivalence, and mixed emotions as surely much of our current innovation remains misdirected and purely profit-motivated?

Will the pace of innovation slow down or continue to speed up? Who will decide?

Innovation to be managed for societal good needs a far more coordinated effort from all those involved: our business organizations, their customers and what they really need, from our citizens, scientists, from communities we belong to and finally through policymakers.

It is through policy shaping that innovation can be directed but will it be forced or go willingly?

Future uncertainty can also bring on a certain new fog can’t it? Oh boy!

The post Fast-forward into the Innovation Future first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.