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.

If you are frustrated with your current innovation process then read on. If you are not, then simply “click away” and certainly my best wishes by ignoring a very changing innovation world that we are all undergoing.

The reality is we are all moving towards becoming “Digital Enterprises”. Digital transformation is deepening into an enterprise-wide movement. and is modernizing how companies work.

As these Digital Enterprises effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy, then it is clear that innovation certainly needs to be part of this but is it digitally ready? I think not. Much of the current innovation process you are currently working with is a Dinosaur, it should have disappeared long ago. Can we manage innovation the way many still are?

Innovation, in my view and many others, is rapidly becoming even more complex. Risks are actually rising not falling. Products continue not to meet customer needs in multiple ways. Without the “connected digital difference,” products are remaining limited in their appeal. Innovation is struggling to really perform and unleash breakthrough products due to many ‘inbuilt’ inhibitors. We need a radical redesign of the innovation process and that is becoming full connected up and have a distinct digital thread running through it. We need to think about complete digital innovation solutions in the future.

We are seeing many digitally aware organizations like Apple, Amazon, Salesforce all recognizing their future innovation is reliant on innovation and digital to be tied at the hip, wedded together in a design that builds towards satisfying customer needs. Applying technology application to innovation opportunities needs a platform thinking approach.

Embedded software is becoming more important in value than the physical product

Embedded software is becoming essential within products; from shoes, household appliances, cars, travel etc. The relevance of this innovation plus digital is not just for providing improved customer satisfaction in today’s market and its needs but allows for evolving these digital products for the future.

Future products are increasingly engaging the consumer as they evolve and respond to “data” and knowledge supplied back. It is evolving product solutions that can be more sustaining, delivering increased functionality, usability, and utility and offering greater value to all involved.

According to a past report  “Mastering Product Complexity” some time back from Roland Berger, the complexity of products more than doubled during 15 years and it continues to accelerate. In the quote from Roland Berger “complexity, manifests itself in the demand for a wider variety of specialized products across multiple manufacturing industries”

To deliver on this “digital innovation” without a doubt, the whole process of our innovation management has to be digitally connected up, to manage this from concept through to product end of life. It is evaluating across the full innovation value chain we can extract greater innovation. What is essential is a digital cohesion, not one that maintains our fractured, broken into parts and current innovation process.

As we connect up more, we are accessing the best sources of new business opportunities through gaining knowledge, discovering fresh insights and building increasing relevancy into our product solution understanding. We are in an ever-increasing engaged world of collaborators and customer feedbacks to build concept designs, test prototype reactions, investigate product use and explore customer satisfaction, all helping to improve product application and deliver closer to customer needs or provide evolution in innovation application.

Today we are poorly equipped to handle cross-discipline collaborations,

We do remain siloed on much within the innovation process, our knowledge often stays trapped, we can’t tap into expertise because it ‘remains’ invisible, we struggle to show progress as it is locked into manual processes, all requiring significant effort to be extracted.

If we see the need to change this, then through a digital transformation of the innovation process that works across the complete enterprise needs to be found and put into place. Innovation cannot afford to be excluded from being part of the “digital enterprise” we are moving towards, yet it needs specific solutions for this to happen. We do not offer solutions that achieve a complete solution, we still have a broken innovation system where discreet parts fail to talk to other parts.

We need to think this new digital innovation structure to have both internal disciplines in solutions but also designed for extended enterprise collaborations so “ecosystems of innovations” can finally take hold.

Do the PLM providers hold the innovation key?

At present, the best solution available to deliver a complete, inter-connected innovation process or system seems to be lying in the hands of the product lifecycle players under PLM. Siemens, Dassault, PTC, and a very fast growing Aras. They are talking innovation platforms, even digital platforms but are locked into the legacy mindset of PLM systems that are highly focused on mechanical design. They are struggling themselves to shrug this engineer only mindset off, for one that is thinking broadly, in new ways of complete product systems of hardware. software and mechanical, electrical, and all component parts of a finished product design.

These PLM providers rightly on traditional ‘heavy’ industries like Cars, Plant Design, Complex Products such as Turbines, Electrical Plant, Assembly Lines or Aeroplane designs or manufacturing specific. They are grappling with their legacy of CAD and CAE software and the software tools built up for years. Can we get them to think differently? Can we get them to re-think innovation in a broader domain for all innovation development work?

Why I feel PLM offers the way forward is they are fully aware of much within innovation language and understanding. They work consistently around the concept of complete systems from concept to final design, incorporating the product from all its hardware, software, design capabilities. They are well advanced in the increasing value of visualization (for design improvements, prototyping) and simulation (for testing and assumption management). They are comfortable with assessing risk, knowing the need to build in as much collaboration as possible. It is only in recent years the whole PLM process has gained this digital thread running throughout all. PLM is being transformed and offers the present digital innovation thread that all that innovation is requiring.

They can and do have connected design across R&D, Manufacturing, Developers and commercialization teams and well equipped to deliver smarter, connected products that can be further designed or enhanced for extended life by exploring material design and component fit.

Taking PLM as we know it out of the engineering domain and opening it up to all of innovation activities and needs is certainly a “Sea change” for them so this would happen. The point for me is that the approach of PLM solution providers, is they are steeped in innovation understanding for many essential and significant aspects.

PLM solution providers might offer the best bet for solving the need for providing a complete innovation system that is designed for all innovation needs, not just in specialised manufacturing industries but by offering solutions that have a capability for managing complexity as well as provide (stripped down) versions for many others that do not have the same design or concept delivery needs but require an integrated process that sits on a platform for allowing it to flow and connect all involved. That can only happen in a digital innovation platform in my opinion.

The stand-alone world of ‘Just’ product is rapidly declining

In a new world where software is often defining the product, there is a reversal taking place from our old worlds of the product alone into a software and product one. We do need to manage products far more across the full product lifecycle as we need to be more consciously “sustainable”.

We are seeing more and more possibilities with the use and application of “digital twins”. To achieve this transformation requires us to go digital within innovation. We need a clear, well designed digital thread running through all our innovation processes. It needs an enterprise-wide foundation. To achieve scale becomes more likely if we have our innovation concepts captured, modeled and designed through being fully digital in the innovation process. This gives us a better scope for scale, for exploration of alternatives, for collaboration and faster adaptation as market conditions constantly change.

Yet to achieve this we must overhaul our existing innovation systems and processes.

We do need a more system engineering approach as our products become increasingly complex. We are being pushed to have far more extended lifecycle responsibilities in our end solutions and in our design, build, service and operating stages we have greater potential to achieve this.  Through the digital capture, we can have our innovation digitally mapped, modeled and having in place a clear “system of record” for any design, so we can have a roadmap of design decisions and validation points and the established basis for building out further, due to these digital captured activities.

We have long moved beyond the “simpler era” in innovation Yet we still operate significant legacy in systems, in our thinking on the approaches we take for innovation. Much today is unconnected, inefficient, not visible, unable to provide a cross-collaborating environment inside our enterprise, let alone connected up to other enterprises. We have far from secure closed-loop systems and usually rely on a consistent manual intervention and lack often the serious impetus to push for progress. Too much innovation, god concepts, die inside an Enterprise for the wrong reasons of poor judgment, lack of knowledge or sufficient weight of evidence.

So we do need to ask ourselves and question our present innovation processes?

How can we evolve within ourselves when we are keeping our systems and processes “static” in design, still operating on spreadsheets, through emails, shared files that often do not ‘speak’ to each other, or capable for sharing across multiple enterprises systems as they are digitally captured, in common language?

In our current fragmentation process, we continue to “promote” gaps in knowledge, understanding and restrict learning. We need a “dynamic” environment, digitally connected that flows and connects, one that is visible to all, to contribute into.

We do need to move our rather tired innovation needle, it is truly stuck in the past.

Where will it function if we continue to manage innovation in our present ways across the emerging Digital Enterprise, without being radically altered and given a 21st-century digital solution? One that forces new designs, different innovation strategies, through technological solutions that can accelerate new business opportunities and perhaps radically new business models.

Smart connected products that through digitalization can shorten time to market, increase flexibility, improve flexibility and utility, increase our efficiencies, offer the possibilities of new business models and work towards proving the environment for increased security and protection of IP, product design and counter cyber-attacks as we add increasing software to our products.

No, there is a compelling reason to make innovation fully digital. Who can take on this challenge?

So how can we set about to build an extended digital innovation enterprise system? It needs someone to see the opportunity and seize the initiative. Can a Siemens, PTC, Dassault or Aris see the bigger innovation picture or financial pie in the potential returns and engagement? Each is growing as they embrace digital and innovation. Of the four of these, I would put PTC or Aris as the ones that have the entrepreneurial flair and independence of thought, to consider this. They both have the ambition to evaluate this as a valuable addition, by capitalizing on building this broader innovation process opportunity. It surely should be valuable to consider? As for Siemens or Dassault, it is harder to see as they are more specific in their business focus of supporting their own business entities and solutions. It might be hard for them to “look beyond”

I just presently cannot see the existing solution providers of idea management or product portfolio management have the “appetite” for this. Most have failed to evolve, many have actually retreated into being more specialized as crowdsourcing platform providers The financial investment, belief and understanding, a lack and depth of resource to deliver on this. They are all far too small, caught in their own legacy business model system, many still stuck often in the fixation of selling simply more licenses. They do, in my view, miss the bigger picture or opportunity

Can Oracle or SAP be able to step up on this? In theory, the answer is yes but so far they have made a real “hash” of their innovative solution offerings. I would like to see them shift their thinking, perhaps understand innovation beyond their own “nose” or past perspective, ones of just “extracting intelligence” or “fitting innovation into the supply chain” as the thrust of their solutions. I presently doubt either have the capabilities to realize this as they presently simply cannot see it or not motivated to think differently, a pity. No, if anyone has the “credentials” it lies within the PLM players, such as PTC or Aris.

Innovation Management and its process needs to come of age, not stuck in the past.

It can be transformed by lifting our thinking, connecting the technology that is available out there and delivers a digital innovation solution.   Are any of the providers of innovation solutions really listening or prepared to be more radical in their offering? Or are they “wedded” to their own mindset of legacy PLM thinking, mostly manufacturing orientation through the engineering culture this requires or marketing driven, reliant on brainstorming ideas and crowdsourcing as their belief this is innovation?

The post The Need for Digital Innovation Platforms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This report was produced by Dr. Michael Kolk, a partner, Digital  Innovation Lead in Arthur D Little and Heike Woerner, a principal, technology and innovation management.

Now that is music to my ears, a report that provides extra “jest” to my own arguments that digital innovation is going to take over in very significant ways the innovation management process from discovery to delivery.

So many of the current suppliers of software are asleep at the wheel still working the old tired model of how to set about innovation. That will change, it will change and I predict we will see significant movement into having digital solutions specifically for innovation management in 2019. As I know the continuing deepening of insights will eventually compel companies to change their innovation management thinking.

I just want to highlight four visuals from the Arthur D Little (ADL) report that makes the connection of digital and innovation stand out as a place we all must go, as soon as possible. Arthur D Little have copyright to all the visuals shown here.

ADL suggest the most important technologies can be grouped into three families, depending on what they bring to innovators
1. those that boost intelligence, for instance about customer needs;
2. technologies that bring better and faster foresight, e.g. concerning product performance;
3. digital solutions that improve and accelerate collaboration, communication, and learning.

As ADL rightly point out we have had consistent improvement in innovation performance but it still has not been at, in my view, at most organization’s satisfactory levels. They raise some critical “if only” questions and ask “might digital provide an answer”? The answer is not so much what digital can offer, it is what organizations want to (finally) become. Will they become more focused and organized to commit far more deeply to building innovation into their core. I think they will have too, in this digital age or they will be even more disadvantaged, disrupted and struggling to find sustaining growth. Its the call of top management to commit to innovation in more resolute ways.

The fourth one I want to provide from this ADL report gives a really excellent visual of the nine building blocks they (ADL) believe have the potential to transform the way innovation gets down.

ADL clearly have their views on how they will approach this digital innovation transformation. Much of the report breaks down different “persona” or archetypes and offers suggested ways to set about approaching each of their challenges to gain benefit from the transition to digital innovation, “if companies can overcome a wide range of barriers”

ADL offers some helpful opening guidelines to help solve this challenge to move to digital innovation. I think it is going to be very hard, firstly to instal any innovation engine across an entire company and in bridging this lack of capabilities, competencies and capacity without radical overhaul of what is in place today, the legacy systems of innovation, and this deep commitment to making innovation as core as digital will be.

Again, where ADL have gone in identifying how digital technologies will transform the ways that innovation will be managed, signals a positioning that they, as a practice, can continue to build from this research that went into this report. I assume they will further build a practice into advising on the translation, impact, and meaning. To help us all translate this radical redesign of the innovation management system, that we are all struggling to get our heads around. This report contributes in very helpful ways.

ADL in contacting them promised, “there is more to come“. I, for one, will be looking forward to this. The comment was: “We have already deepened and broadened our insights in recent months and will continue publishing on this important and intriguing topic!”

If you go to “search” in this posting site of mine, you will see I have been researching and offering thoughts on this new digital innovation era. If you put into the search one of these (links supplied);  “new innovation age” or “the future of innovation” or “designing the future of innovation” or “collaborating across industries” or finally “digital discovery” you will see how I have been looking at this across multiple strands of thought. All I can offer is some thoughts here: “start reading, start thinking and start transforming”

There is a new innovation era and it is digitally enabled. 2019 promises this to become critical in it’s building and gathering momentum.

The post Innovating in the digital age- a terrific report first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The Whitepaper called “Product Complexity, Digital Transformation, and the Innovation Imperative- The race to reinvent how complex products are developed is here“.

This made me a little jealous and a little wishing that ‘we’, across the whole of innovation management, could not have one of these platforms available today. Some claim that they do this already but seriously they do not.

I have argued we do need to change the way we undertake innovation and its development. I am really frustrated by the legacy we have in our processes, systems and the ways we approach innovation, and its development lifecycle. We still break it up into separate parts, dealing with the pre-ideas stage, collecting insights, the idea management, then into a pipeline or portfolio system, that all has so such manual and siloed approaches built into this. These are tue legacy systems.We do need to bring innovation management into the 21st century where everything is transformed through a platform that allows total integration.

So as I read about the solution that Aras provides to the designers within Manufacturing to manage PLM complex systems and products, you have to wonder why this cannot be extended into all innovation’s management. Of course what “sits” on the platform will be different but it has much that can adapted and aligned in the principles of any design.

What is clear anyone that does develop a fully integrated platform designed for innovation will certainly disrupt the current way products are managed. We can actually get into true lifecycle management across not just one business but within collaborations across functions, companies, and entire ecosystems, to contribute.

This whole idea of a unified environment for innovation simply solves so much of our current constraints within this area. It allows all involved, those within the management of innovation and those who are actively supporting or needing to be well-informed, to all operate within the same environment. We can for the first time build a system of record, we can through “open” technology provide an approach that is flexible, scalable, upgradeable, and fully visual to all. A truly open innovation platform. The whole momentum of collaboration becomes accelerated.

The idea of platforms today is they can be overlayed over your existing systems (well most) if they have some level of digital interface. This allows for some levels of migration from older systems as they migrate to this innovation platform.

The ability to connect across functions, across different domains, different environments and entities really make this a highly valuable proposition. We really do need an innovation management platform and does the way that Aras has set about this, give us a working concept design?

Just take a look at the visual from the Whitepaper from Aras

Now think of the whole innovation management need. Can you visualize all our separate systems feed up and onto the platform to form the much-needed end-to-end lifecycle management across all the innovation management design, or need

I like the way Aras are designing their PLM platform system in broad functional designs.

This gives food for thought in designing functionality into a broader innovation management platform.

Function one is connect teams to contextual information, much like idea management software today undertakes. It is designed for pulling together the fragmented architecture and present information in immediately usable ways. We often need to collect ideas from multiple sources and channels and then attempt to translate these into value concepts to be explored across different functional groups. The design is working across system and functional boundaries.

Function two is focused on managing configurations across disciplines and functions complexity, often what is (poorly) attempted by portfolio management software. Here they are opening up for all to access, they can build this system of record in hand-offs. contributions, build functionality for design reviews and establish traceability. All involved can view progress, design and view all the necessary linkages

Function three is designed to enable collaborations across teams, functions, and disciplines. The platform provides open access at different levels and supports both formal and informal collaborations and exchanges. Established processes and rules can be built in, you can create an audit trail that records decisions etc. Now I know this sounds like some of the current idea management software providers attempt to provide but is this on a platform? Is this in a cloud? Is this potentially open to others outside one organization? Is this easily scalable without significant rework or cost? is this going from idea all the way through to commercialization?. The answer for all operating in our present space is an emphatic no!

Function four supports all phases of the product lifecycle. We lack functionality within today’s product development process to go beyond certain stages of the process. The effect is silos of trapped information that become buried, forgotten or simply not passed on. We cannot design one system for managing across the full product lifecycle design. To have the capability for modeling, designing, simulation all are requiring separate systems. Why? Let’s get out of the 20th century and get into this digital century in how we manage innovation, please

The design outcomes we need to determine

The whole ability is to see beyond just producing a physical product as the end result, we can move concepts into the exciting realm of having digital twins. Digital twins offer the new exciting way of seeing products in a virtual environment. One where you can draw in the final consumer, into contributing to these designs far more earlier, having a consistent reiteration environment. This gives us a far more extended prototype capacity for all to see and improve upon without expensive mockups or reworks, smetimes only offering crude ones that do not represent the finish product in so many ways. Because we can’t provide better prototypes or designs we can miss vital feedback. Having digital twins within the innovation development process can change that. We can design the concept digitally for people to see and get a digital “feel” about what it can mean in the final form

The other good things if we move over to a dedicated innovation platform we can consistently upgrade tools, methods, commuinicating mediums, repositories for access and recording. Just like the present software offerings this can still be managed and deployed supporting on-premise, hybrid or in cloud installations as your system of choice that can then be simply changed if and when needed or you become comfortable in opening up to others, to collaborate and build in a secure platform space.

Finally, we might finally get to adopting an open standards approach to innovation management to achieve integrations across other enterprises and we finally begin to establish a common language of innovation understanding. We really do break down barriers and build our trust in an innovation system built on data and a system of record and that, for all involved, puts a higher level of trust into the innovation management system. Even board members can become more engaged- oh careful, that is for many a dream or a nightmare!

In conclusion.

Am I dreaming or is this a reality? If it is a reality then how long? Innovation Management needs to come of age, a digital age where platforms form the connected future. Who is willing to take up this challenge and radically alter the innovation landscape forever? Be the disrupter that innovation actually needs to inject a sea-change of how we manage innovation and view it, as an integrated design system, all can see and work within. A true corporate system closer to the heart of the Enterprise to belief in, draw confidence and support for the value it can provide.

The post Can We Have One of These? A Product Innovation Platform first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Much of the innovation discovery journey is a disappointing one. A hunch or insight becomes a dead end. A promising idea did not foresee a roadblock that cannot be resolved. Resources constantly “churn” and get depleted, waiting for others to be brought up to speed. Those not involved directly within the innovation project constantly remain skeptical or require more proof. The status quo of the existing places an increasing drag on the forces of change.

Then we have that often-delusional aspect; where the organization has this total belief they are well ahead of their competitors and simply point to their financial performance as the justification that their innovation is superior when it is so many other factors that have determined that. Superior is often so transitory.

When they are constantly scanning reports on the “state of innovation” it can often lull them, to give some that warm glow, others quickly being dismissive, disregarding many of the key messages as “not applicable to me”.

Then disruption suddenly hits. The cries of “Where did that come from” and a doubling down occurs firstly on costs as that is easy to stop things, fire a bunch of people or plunge into a reorganization that “actually been in the works for months” A quick ramping up of innovation to counter the attacks, to regain the initiative is simply not possible, as the resources are not there, the systems not in place, the more radical innovation unobtainable. Simply there has been a lack of sustained investment in the exploration and exploitation of the “pursuit of innovative ideas,” that are pushing new concepts, that often lie at the edge of the organization.

I mean anyway, come on: “we really don’t believe in innovation, it all is full of risk, uncertainty and all those unknowns and that is the last place to go when you are fighting in a different set of market conditions, isn’t it?” Cut costs are the recognized solution not thinking your way out within innovation. Thinking about innovation implies the longer-term and that is not so welcome at board level in today’s volatile world.

So where does innovation sit within your organization?

Two reports recently came out. Both are, I feel, “painting” a realistic picture of where innovation does sit within organizations. Am I happy with either of these, no of course not but in my view “nothing can change until something does change” What do I mean by that? When innovation becomes paramount to the future at board level then a change can occur. I don’t mean lip service to innovation, I mean deep, defining and structured thinking on innovation

The two reports, one from CB Insights, who I believe do a consistently brilliant job at “tear downs” and evaluations of industries, markets or topics. The other reflection on innovation comes from a most dependable source, researchers moving towards their doctorates at the Harvard Business School and the necessary research support to get them there.

Lets briefly look at both.

I’ll start with the one from Yo-Jud Cheng supported by his professor Boris Groysberg and a co-author, Michael Slind from HBR. The article was “Innovation Should Be a Top Priority for Boards. So Why Isn’t It?” The survey was conducted asking over 5,000 board members from around the world asking “do they do enough to support innovation?”

The outcomes cover more than innovation but provide a good overview of board thinking and priorities for areas such as strategic challenges companies face, governance activities and processes that boards are good at, expertise sitting on the board, and the hard aspects of being a board director. Innovation gets caught up in so many, sometimes conflicting issues but in many respects does not get the attention it deserves, especially as it is the most important catalyst for growth.

Innovation is well behind many other issues being focused upon by directors. The survey exposes the myth that innovation is not one of the three top challenges, innovation ranks fifth as it follows the more conventional concerns of managing talent as the top (and that did surprise me) and regulatory and competitive threats. Technology trends lay in the seventh position in this “biggest strategic challenges.”Reading through the responses, the lack of faith in their processes was disturbing. Risk management is rated far more than innovation as a better process.

To quote “When we asked directors about the effectiveness of their board’s processes for supporting innovation, 42% rated their processes as above average or excellent. In contrast, 70% of respondents think their boards have effective processes for staying current on the company”

Both, for me a little damming for preparing for a disrupting world or positioning innovation as the future catalyst for growth.

The other valuable point for me was another insight from the survey

“We also found that a focus on innovation tends to go hand in hand with longer-term time horizons. Companies that are organized around creating and enhancing value over the long term were more likely to have boards that prioritize innovation, as compared with companies that are primarily focused on achieving short-term results. Laying the foundation for innovation requires a forward-looking mindset throughout the firm and the board”

The two major takeaways for me

The report can be viewed here but finishes up with a good quote (correct insight in my opinion or validation of many):

“As one director noted, “We spend a lot of time on operational strategy — growth, acquisitions, etc. — [and] not much on risk, people, innovation.”

Now that is very disappointing but what do we expect from innovation?

In one final quote from this article: “when boards seem to have a “widespread lack of board-level engagement in innovation processes (that) could be a major blind spot and a potential liability”

My second report is the one from CB Insights

CB Insights recently released a report on the “State of Innovation” where they surveyed 677 corporate strategy executives. It does fit or correspond to the HBR researchers thinking, it gives a closer fit of what is going on with innovation in today’s organization. You do need to provide your email for access and to download of this report.

The report is a visually very easy read but gives a clarity to the big issues constraining innovation. I do like this style of reporting, offering up one page per insight. It brings them specifically into “stark relief”. This approach is really good to bring out the impact of that particular point. A good lesson in presentation, certainly for me!

I picked out these as my specific takeaways:

1. 41% of executives said their companies are extremely at risk or very at risk of disruption
2. Corporate strategists talk the talk but don’t walk the walk
3. Companies focus on incremental innovation with 78% of innovation portfolios allocated to continuous innovation instead of disruptive risks
4. Customers and employees are driving innovation. My thought is what do you expect if boards are not as engaged as per the HBR report above stating?
5. 57% of respondents said their companies do not follow formal innovation processes and executing remains mostly ad hoc and unstructured. Even the majority don’t have processes for ideation and development phases. Now that is shocking!
6. Companies lack confidence in their ability to innovate and it progressively gets “less effective” in each of the phases of innovation. Idea Generation, Development/Design, Commercialization/ Launch, Optimization/ Management and Product Retirement
7. Companies take an insular view of how they will attack innovation
8. Finally: Because they prefer to build (themselves), corporate innovation is slow.

When I look at this list I really do go “oh dear”. There are some clear positive takeaways also in this report such as “high performing companies build cultures of innovation across functions” and achieve a 5X increased performance due to this and “high performing companies invest in disruptive projects”.

The issue for most is “how do they become high performing? Until we treat innovation as a core process, disciplined, structured set of activities that are managed in different ways than the existing business, we will struggle. Embracing the aspects of a high performing business within innovation offers significantly increased performance. The ability to grasp all that this entails and establishing a set of innovation management disciplines, most will simply “bounce” along on a very unsatisfactory innovation projection of mediocre growth and return.

So to download the CB Insights report go here “State of Innovation“. It is well worth reading and is in such an easy, digestible format

In Summary

I would suggest you go and take a look at both of these reports. They reaffirm that innovation is not the priority it should be at board level, both offer a devastating reality of poor innovation processes and structures and a lack of corporate design for salvaging innovation out of its current mire of incremental, ad hoc and risk constraints due to this lack of top focus.

Innovation is full of rhetoric and hot air. Those in the trenches are believers but they are battling forces that make it doubly hard to make a success of innovation. The internal forces are as much against them as the external unknowns.

As I opened with as my title “What do we expect from Innovation? Mostly disappointment.” We can only dream that we are still moving towards my view of that “New Innovation Era”. It still lies ahead if we want to recognize the valuable contribution innovation does make to the future growth and, more importantly, to their ongoing sustainability.

These two reports reflect the potential of where innovation can go but do offer a snapshot of the present reality of why it cannot until multiple aspects of innovation management are addressed and accepted. These changes are essential to underpin innovation with a clear focus, dedicated resources, recognized as a functional discipline, well thought-through processes and a top to bottom recognition and focus on its importance. Will something change? I seriously wonder although I’ll keep banging the innovation drum, hoping some will (eventually) listen.

The post What do we expect from Innovation? Mostly disappointment first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Three years back I took a view on what to focus upon in my innovation activities to meet client needs, they did seem to make sense at the time.

In many ways, I was fairly happy with the outcome, as many of the places I would put my required but limited resources behind, in providing a depth of understanding, were highly relevant, topical and needed, so were good spaces to offer my thinking, advice and solutions into.

Fast forward these last few years and I often wonder where that focus has actually gone – the focus has been a little ‘bounced’ around but for good reason, I feel, yet, it needs a fresh re-calibrating on my approaches going forward.

Innovation has been rapidly changing and much of its basics have been swallowed up by some defining issues that have raced up to the top of the innovation agenda and it is right to respond to these.

‘Breaking’ practices or new methodologies are much harder to master and advise upon, to determine clear positions and propositions.

This certainly involves investing a lot into getting a certain clarity and perspective, through researching constantly, finding fresh insights, sifting through comparisons, discussing and exploring them, so as to eventually determine the value to specific challenging environments and different organisational maturity levels.

Not only that, it is how to related these to different market conditions, so as to offer thoughtful advice to a broad audience of practitioners and leaders within the corporate world. This advisory world on ‘breaking practices’ is necessary yet often undervalued.

The excitement of ‘breaking innovation’ is in the pioneering, experimenting, discovering, sharing and exchanging. If you are always open to this new thinking, it does enrich and advance innovation understanding and that makes it so valuable but so demanding. Many of them have been utterly enjoyable to explore.

There are so many thinkers, experimenters and explorers contributing, that it makes innovation a terrific space to be part of, it is always evolving and challenging much already established but it means a constant attention to understanding it, sifting through often conflicting voices, translating the new practice that others, time-starved, can then appreciate and can relate too, and then see how they can deploy this into their innovation structures.

The ‘lead- lag’ time is sometimes very long and tortuous to make the necessary changes within organisations and get the necessary ‘buy-in’.

Recently I felt it would be useful to complete a re-assessment to recalibrate my position.

A good starting point was to go back and see what I have been writing about in the past three years. I often write down and capture my initial thinking, then it evolves through different steps, experiences to consolidate my thoughts and work through what I felt was my position on a given subject. It gave me a clearer set of possible outcomes and an essential foundation to build upon.

There is this constant, pressing need to absorb, synthesise and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovation thinking.  My focus has been to blend this emerging thinking into core aspects of my innovating beliefs as well as contributing to building innovation capabilities, competencies and capacity, my key focal area.

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly?

So increasingly as I looked back I noticed that I have been providing different sets of posts that were more reactive, reflective and responsive. Sometimes taking stock it does surprise you on how the innovation needle had been moved, again and again. This sometimes makes navigation sometimes difficult, you do need clear anchor points.

Often we were missing the constants required to ‘set in place’ innovation, those anchor points, otherwise, we often are simply increasing the layering on, more and more, not giving enough emphasis on how to integrate these into a newly emerging practice of innovation but recognising the essential basics that are constantly needed, irrespective.

The basics of innovation still form around building engagement, leadership, involvement, in constructing a culture, the climate and environment needed, so as to allow innovation to evolve. Then that constant investment in people, networks and relationships, that need to come together and, finally the structures, systems and governance that are flexible enough to make what we work upon as responsive, agile, adaptive, exploitive and exploratory, to end up with great new ideas, things and finally, winning successful concepts.

The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

The shifts taking place has been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. how it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs and then we need to reconstruct our innovation thinking so as to gain from this transformation occurring all around us.

Also, there is this growing concern, actually it never went away,  perhaps more enforced than ever today, over the issue of ‘risk and return’ as innovation becomes increasingly complex. As we push to increase the need to push for breaking out of many of our incremental innovation mindsets to tap into real growth opportunities, the pressures continue to build. More help is needed here to make these more of a robust risk / return structure that ‘accounts’ for all the uncertainty in new innovation development.

We seem to be stumbling towards breaking out our innovation activity in more radical, distinctive and adaptive ways. We are certainly treating innovation differently, depending on the sense of opportunity and the desire to work towards the solutions these need. You see progress but it still seems maddeningly slow as dedicated innovation resources are still very ‘thin’ on the ground.

Other real changing forces influencing innovation

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period, have come from a greater explosion of Lean Management principles and incorporating Design thinking into our work. Both being rapidly embraced within our organisations, large and small. How these are fully integrated remains a challenge for most.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around, the continued onward movement of crowdsourcing and all the variations (or derivation’s) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’, combined with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much,

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks, that need deeper capture and translation to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the constructing of minimal viable products  and rapid experiment and design. Then we have the growing value of experimental labs and establishing ‘pockets’ of entrepreneurs-in-residence, both have increased in focus.  We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before our innovation concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well beyond the “how” into the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it still seems. Speed is dominating at present then “Scale” and  the constant worries over the”Execution” of the new value proposition.

Reflecting on all of this – so what does this all mean? Reacting to this in new framing ways.

Within my numerous posts responding to breaking practices, I have wanted to capture the changes occurring. What is clear, we are seeing a growing momentum towards more ‘collective’ agility, higher fluidity,  adaptive enterprises with a growing mantra of adjusting, exploring and quickly responding, to the needs seen in rapidly changing markets and equally across our shifting customer base, to service present and future needs, bringing together a growing interplay around innovation, offering a fluidity in its perspective.

This we have termed the new interplay surrounding innovation and centres around the interplay in three essential change points we need to focus upon. I attempted to capture these initially in this post a visual of nine primary components as the framing point to gather around. The final point of change in emphasis has been on measuring innovation, we need to shift to successful and ultimate outcomes and rethink our measures, in my view, on a new innovation balance sheet thinking.

There has certainly been a lot of innovation change, requiring fresh thinking and this has been the main reason why I have responded accordingly over the past few years.

Even with all this advancement in innovation, you do have to stop and ask are we just layering on more content, more complexity than organisations can honestly cope with?

Are we any clearer about what we do and why and how and where we do it?

We often skip over the basics, ignore that many that need to understand innovation within our organisations fail to understand its parts, its process and its different timing. We still lack a common language of understanding and this is still holding us back. In many ways, it is ‘freezing’ much to move innovation forward strategically.

I feel the most important contribution to building a common framework of understanding and through this, a common language has been in the work Jeffrey Philips of Ovo Innovation and I collaborated upon. This has been in determining the importance of alignment between innovation and the strategy of the business and formulating an approach that engages the leadership into establishing the vital innovation connections needed to be put into place. This we called the Executive Innovation Work Mat and makes the critical connections required for innovation to have a clear corporate identity and offer the conditions to build and thrive from this framework.

Our continued failure to manage risk correctly for innovative concepts

Then, the one really big elephant always rumbling around in the board room is how do we manage risk. Risk management for innovation is still a really uncomfortable area and we often fail to appreciate the ‘risk differences’ and due to this, many promising ideas for innovation investigation or progress get ‘canned’ because it is hard to make the returns, in our obsession with hard numbers, especially in the early stages, to meet the corporate hurdle rates. The risk management for innovation needs urgently addressing in far more imaginative ways, to allow for greater innovation activity and exploration to contribute into a greater growth phase than we currently are struggling to provide.

Do we still have a rotten innovation core? Possibly…….I think yes, well, it is still immature.

It is clear innovation is constantly advancing, yet and this is my reflective thought here, it can have countless layers of fresh paint but if the basic foundation is not solid, it only hides the truth underneath, one that needs fundamental addressing that innovation has a rotten core until you peel away these layers and fix the basics.

Fixing the basics comes back to much within my initial focal points that I worked through some years back. The trouble is I do so often get worried that a reoccurring theme gets a little, dare I say it, boring.

Yet if we do not fix the foundations it might seem boring to keep going back to resolve these but the fundamentals of anything, including innovation, is getting these built on a solid platform, otherwise, it becomes a very expensive vanity ride for many. So should I feel guilty, worried or concerned by continually reverting back?

The attraction of riding the new wave

Like most caught up in innovation I do get often caught up in the wave of new innovation, actually, I love it, it keeps the passion burning brightly in discovery, curiosity and intrigue, in learning, experimenting and exploring, as these are often the clients need to understand and evaluate against.

Yet it does seem to me many innovators within the business organisation do simply miss the basics within their own thinking or organisation and fail to fix these. They keep moving on, restless, wandering the innovation plains looking for these new feeding grounds but are they just feeding themselves, or actually failing badly in feeding all those ‘left on the reservation’ that make up the larger organisation? Not securing their futures by sustaining the innovation forces, seeing innovation as their personal adventure and not a sustaining organisational one?

Those that do pay attention to the basics in innovation and its management become so much better placed to be the disruptors. Why, simply because they have their people’s engagement and identification as central to their innovation activity, they know the basics, they have experimented and learnt, they make the connections, they get it, work it and shape it. Just like the potter at a wheel, innovation is like clay, temperamental; it has a tricky relationship of the shaping, defining, applying lots of practice to get just right with plenty of practice and some ‘learning’ from failure.

So am I cresting or riding the waves? What is the difference?

So perhaps many of my past messages or focal points are as relevant today as when I drew them up, yet as we continue to introduction improved methods, different approaches and more adaptable and flexible practices, my biggest fear becomes an increasing reality that many executives are simply not any clearer on how to manage their innovation.

Cris Beswick founder of thefutureshapers, put it nicely to me a couple of weeks back: “because the basics around innovation are not common knowledge so senior teams are somewhat paralysed in terms of being able to move forward strategically, despite the need”

It can be a dangerous assumption that we ‘think’  innovation is well understood, often it is not, it continues to be a serious source of frustration and disappointment, at all levels. This ‘fixing the basics’ still needs a clear focus to resolve, to forge a pathway for others to understand. It needs a constant balance between extolling the old, exploring the new. Blending practice.

I hope I can keep attempting this translating and embedding innovation practice, I keep trying, yet it is for other people to judge if this has paying value to their innovation understanding. I believe it does.

* This post was updated and amended on 12th July 2016.

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We need to increasingly deliver better end results; as more distinctive, bolder and creative, delivering greater value to our customers’ needs. Can we change our thinking to achieve this?

Let me offer some of my thoughts on why we need to reinvent our innovation management.

The power of technology, software and the use of the cloud is combining in new powerful ways. We are looking for greater data capture and analytics and this is offering us a very different set of options than in the past. The framing of the innovation potential has to be altered. Altered in different products. services and business models. But will it?

Yet many organisations still stay locked into their established ways, systems and structures. Many organisations are failing to renew themselves. Innovation seems to be trapped in the past, we need a new framing to break it out and make it more dynamic and adaptive to meeting constantly changing needs.

Innovation needs to become far more responsive and dynamic, to respond with imagination and intent of purpose.

To achieve this innovation requires a greater organisational engagement than ever before. It needs mobilising differently, in radically different ways; to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways.

Often we look at innovation through a single lens but it does need to accommodate different dimensions that can be exploratory or exploitive, we need to both widen the aperture of the lens and simultaneously change lens to view things differently.

We certainly need far more “mission-orientated” innovation, that is both converging and synergistic, strategically aligned, building on the back of past work and ‘sunk’ investment but equally, pushing out in new ways. Innovation should be constantly renewed and refreshed, it needs investments for its future.

Rapidly changing market conditions are challenging us more

Our portfolio of innovation offerings is facing different market conditions. Some of our products and services are in stable and predictable market conditions, others are being subjected to significant change, caused by technology, adapting to new emerging trends or changing demands and shifting regulations. All of these can challenge the existing business and we need to respond in different ways and at different speeds.

This also seems a time where there is increasing opportunity to shape industry evolutions through multiple ways and use of the many technology enablers, in exploring new relationships, investing in networks and platforms to collaborate and extend beyond our own restricted abilities. All of this requires a greater adaptive and shaping capability. For this, we need a far greater innovation translation canopy to explore. A new framework. Actually ‘multiple’ frameworks.

Applying The Strategy Palette to our Innovation Needs

Initially provided by BCG as a strategy palette, I have set about adopting this framework to innovation.

I initially wrote in “Shining a powerful innovation light into the Corporate board rooms” about the application and value of this frame differently. The difference is that mine is an Innovation Strategic Palette by applying its use in developing the innovation strategic content that  boardrooms need to build better, clearer and far more comprehensive innovation strategies.

We can apply this to change our innovation thinking, to make it more versatile to what we need from our innovation today. It can open up our thinking and allow us to gain a revised understanding of how innovation can be mobilised in different ways.

By applying this framework through four archetypes alternatives, you can  see emerging different design options to innovation. Choices that can provide the catalyst that can drive innovation’s renewal. It really can be used as a problem recognition diagnostic tool or a starting point for innovation opportunity dialogues .

We are in need of finding innovation frameworks that can guide, seize and respond to emerging opportunities quicker, at today’s new innovation speed in agile ways. Exploring this palette framework has to be valuable, to offer a new flexible approach to dealing with these multiple forces of upheaval and threat with clear intent and design in response.

Why this call for innovation renewal? Why do we need to re-think our approach to innovation?

Firstly the need for consistent renewal

We need to constantly renew within ourselves, that seem a constant today and our innovation efforts need a serious renewal for many reasons. We are facing unprecedented challenges, complexities and competition. We are mostly facing sluggish growth and find an increasing new competition from unexpected sources, looking to disrupt established markets, probing to change the game, innovation has an urgent need to adjust to a whole new set of different business dynamics.

Where and when do we invest, why and how? The need for different handling and thinking

Knowing when and where to invest in an innovation renewal and organising for it is a tough call. It tends to fly in the face of excepted practices, based on constantly attempting to improve the efficiencies and effectiveness of the processes. Often innovation discovery is unique, the pursuit of bringing innovation from discovery through to commercialization has many unknowns and inconsistencies of practices.

Innovation and its management are hard to align into much of the established practices and this is one of its toughest tests; to be treated differently not attempted to be drawn into other organizational activity by applying a mixture of routines and linear handoff, it needs mobilizing in different ways, to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways.

Innovation needs a different handling, more adaptive, more discovery-orientated, more exploratory, testing and probing to validate concepts and ideas.

Addressing the changing market conditions through different innovation design.

Why I think this BCG strategic palette has it ‘bang on’ is in the fact they recognize that business environments have three discernible dimensions: predictability and how you can forecast it, malleability and how you shape it, alone or in collaborative ways, and the harshness of the existing market conditions and how you set about surviving this. It is how you set about executing innovation outcomes within these three dimensions will give that greater distinctive need to the design and execution of your innovation solutions. Just thinking about the prevailing conditions can alter perceptions.

The framing of our innovation does have serious strategic consequences.

Those that are honest enough to admit that what they have achieved to-date in innovation activity is just not going to ‘cut it’ for the future, will be making a  very ‘tough’ call but it might be one of the best ones they are about to make. It opens up the thinking to let alternatives in.

I think we all need to constantly look at a renewal of innovation as essential in our thinking, as the conditions we operate within are more volatile than ever before. Over shorter times many things have evolved, suddenly changed, altered and moved on. So by not constantly refreshing we have allowed systems and tools to stay stuck in the past, we stay ‘bound’ to innovation in a current format often far too long. We need to shake out the cobwebs and renew ourselves.

The innovation spirit needs rethinking by taking a more versatile and shaping approach

We fail to constantly refresh and challenge our understanding. We need not just to adjust to our goals but more importantly to adjust from our knowledge of understanding of how we are managing innovation. We simply do need new and different framing mechanisms to be applied constantly as we set about innovation design if we believe in growth and fresh value creation.

It takes a real innovation zeal to renew, thinking this through in different new ways. Renewing innovation needs recognition. Focusing on renewal offers much. Don’t just rip-up or simply dispose of what we have, think through what renewing can give us in improved solutions, often at much lower cost and customer acceptance but most critically to decide and balance the different speeds and challenges innovation development has. Innovation and its management need to be thought through afresh.

Framing our thinking towards our future needs of innovation relates to the conditions we face today and can possibly foresee coming towards us. These conditions of ‘being’ predictable and unpredictable’ begins to determine the type of innovation approach to take.

We need to be fluid, flexible and have different mindsets of thinking innovation.

The approach we take is offering up this mix of the classical, the visionary, the adaptive and shaping and from these first we need to decide the tools, frameworks, resources, structures and systems that best work in each case, the what is applicable to bring to fruition different ideas within each of these dimensions offered in the palette.

We also need to recognise that innovation is different each time, for each opportunity, where it needs resourcing and managing differently. This  BCG strategic palette approach can offer a framework that does offer us a broader variety of options in our innovation thinking.

We also need to recognise that innovation is different each time, for each opportunity, where it needs resourcing and managing differently. This  BCG strategic palette approach can offer a framework that does offer us a broader variety of options in our innovation thinking.

Shifting our thinking

We must move away from a one-size fit all mentality, one where all innovation ‘chugs’ along, within the same process and pipeline. At present this copnstraining approach is killing so much of the potential within innovation. How can all those distinctive, radical and breakthrough concepts, all trying to be measured, squeezed and determined by one processing lens of innovation, all being constrained by traditional thinking, never ever seeing the light of day, as commercial outcomes because we ‘kill them off’?

Exploring different framing mechanisms are necessary

We not only need to apply the three horizons thinking for building and allocating our innovation to different time horizons but I would suggest we need to apply this BCG palette approach for our innovation approaches.

We need to break out of this current mindset trap of one-dimensional thinking, into that dual one of wanting to be simultaneously exploring and exploiting, managing the known and seeking out answers to the unknowns, keeping a balance between today’s business and those concepts that can grow for our future and that will need constant renewal, questioning and evaluation.

We do need new framing mechanisms to be applied to our innovation design and I just feel this palette frame can make a useful contribution as we apply different thinking to redesigning innovation in need of this renewal.

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If we ‘subject’ all of our innovation thinking to go through the same process we lose so much. How can you treat incremental innovation in the same way as radical or breakthrough innovation? You need to apply a completely different thinking and approach to the type of innovation you are thinking through. You must be prepared to abandon established thinking if it is not resolving the problems you are facing.

Beginning any journey is never easy, you stumble a little until you find a certain rhythm

I wanted to start somewhere and it is breaking our existing mentality of how we manage innovation as the first critical point to challenge. Due to this has become a much longer post than I would like and I apologize for that but I wanted to get the mentality issue well ‘aired’ and I needed to cover off a number of bases to frame this.

Funnily enough as I was thinking how to begin I came across two short verses from the Bible, both from Matthew 9.16 & 9.17. and wanting to start here on why we should be Shining a powerful innovation light into the Corporate Boardrooms. It might be a strange place to start for many, yet it somehow allows me to begin my journey.

“No one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the wine would burst the wineskins, and the wine and the skins would both be lost. New wine calls for new wineskins.” – I believe we need to find a new framing position for innovation as the disruptive forces and challenges we face today are growing and call for new ways of managing.

“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse.” – We have been renovating our innovation process until it becomes unrecognizable by all the patches we have been applying and is it really providing the results we want?

Innovation today disappoints

We are not achieving the impact from all our innovation endeavors that we should. There is a time to radically redesign our innovation. We need to shift our thinking as innovation is providing disappointing returns and we are in urgent need to find a new re-framing position of the organization’s innovation engagement.

Innovation needs to become far more responsive and dynamic, to respond with imagination and intent of purpose. To achieve this innovation requires a greater organizational engagement than ever before. It needs mobilizing differently, in radically different ways; so as to capture different opportunities in more agile, adaptive and shaping ways

If we do need to re-present innovation to our corporate boards to engage in more, we need to offer them a compelling set of arguments on why innovation needs a fundamental rethink, a renewed focus on building the capabilities, competences and capacities that are possible if you engage in a comprehensive innovation management.

Shifting the innovation mindset, resolving a present day dilemma

I’ve written about this need for fluidity and taken this part to frame this post

“Stability and fluidity – how can both work alongside each other? They are opposites yet we need both to thrive in today’s world. Many theorists have suggested, of having in place the ‘ambidextrous organization.’ This would need organizations to design their organizations in their structures, people and processes to either be focused on ‘being efficient’ or being ‘change orientated’. An increased level of duality. The mindset of exploiting or exploring but can we have both, I certainly think so, it mostly depends on what we are about to do to get this mental picture of which frame of thinking should dominate but not be exclusive.

I have been drawn to this ‘dual’ system of ambidextrous as it helps resolve one of the consistent stumbling blocks for innovation to ‘take hold’ and evolve. Innovation is constantly fluid, needing to be adaptive as we learn and adjust to new learning and this is constantly requiring a very change orientated approach. Often innovation comes up against a rigid system and for many “just seems not to fit”

Innovation struggles as it often remains outside the prevailing system. Innovation constantly challenges against the dominant mindset within organizations, who like the idea of innovation but are mostly measured to drive efficiency and effectiveness, keeping highly focused on the short-term performance as their role, reward, advancement and key to ongoing career success, so innovation ‘sits outside’ their domain of focus”

Something needs to change if innovation is really important.

We innovators need a new model of change, for at least eight important reasons I can initially think of:

1. As innovators we aren’t simply responding to external change, we are creating change, both for customers and for our companies and markets. (inside, proactive change vs external, reactive).
2. External change is far more unpredictable, in global markets new threats emerge from anywhere, at any time and often delivered in totally unexpected ways, through new business models that totally cut through and disrupt the existing positions, they can render the existing obsolete in seemingly rapid time, irrespective of the efforts to respond as they have discovered the unmet need to deliver solutions to it.
3. The pace and nature of change isn’t slowing, but is accelerating and will continue to accelerate. (increasing pace, frequency and amplitude of change). Organizations need to pick up the pace, learn to accept a greater risk, experimentation and rapid adjustment on the new knowledge flowing in to build the final outcome to the needs of the market / customer.
4. Sudden evolving markets makes everything needing to be ‘super’ responsive by existing players, to the sudden realization they have missed opportunities, Many existing organizations cannot cope and alter with this demand for agility, flexibility and responsiveness. They need to (re)learn this and build it into their systems and often this realization comes too late. Some industries have been undertaking a responsive approach, for example in their supply chain thinking. Think Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer and how it changed the game.
5. As often demonstrated, most innovation has the potential to be business model innovation, which will require change. (As more innovation becomes focused on business model innovation, this will create even more change).
6. We recognize that change is no longer an occasional threat but a constant companion (shift from the idea of change as a threat to developing an ongoing change capacity as a competitive advantage).
7. The idea that companies can achieve a protected steady state where change won’t affect them doesn’t seem to apply anymore (long periods of stasis, or standing still are no longer possible. Must be able to change/evolve constantly).
8. We need to think of change as a capability that we constantly deploy, rather than a threat we typically avoid. (Need to develop change as a capability, to build skills, reduce barriers).

We need to ask of ourselves if we recognize our need to change

How can we establish Innovation as the vital link to a process of change and strategic direction options, that lifts the debates of managing today’s business by linking it into the future and then turning this thinking into a series of plausible and coherent set of activities?

How can we focus the energy around the boardroom table on to this linking the future work to the shape and the organization’s needs, making the growing innovation debate as strategic as it can be?

Four articles that help shape the change in mindset making it far more of a dual one.

For a start I would recommend you read the four articles I have summarized in my own way below,  to provide a greater depth of understanding in some of our starting points of changing the existing mindset within the boardroom. Here is my brief summaries of these, partly re-affirming but extending thinking to ’embrace’ these:

Two articles are from Scott Anthony or his Innosight team or in collaborations.

Firstly, Two Routes to Resilience

“Sooner or later, your company will probably need to transform itself in response to market shifts, ground breaking technologies, or disruptive start-ups”. Read about this here

“First, major transformations need to be two different efforts happening in parallel. “Transformation A” should re-position the core business, adapting its current business model to the altered marketplace. “Transformation B” should create a separate, disruptive business to develop the innovations that will become the source of future growth.

Second, the key to making both transformations work is to establish a new organizational process we call a “capabilities exchange,” through which the parallel efforts can share select resources without changing the mission or operations of either”

Dividing the effort in two allows leaders to develop a new strategy for the core that doesn’t need to make up for all the business lost to disruption”

Secondly, What Do You Really Mean by Business “Transformation”?

“When executives say transformation what do they really mean? Often, the word confuses three fundamentally different categories of effort”. Read the article here

“The first is operational, or doing what you are currently doing, better, faster, or cheaper. Many companies that are “going digital” fit in this category — they are using new technologies to solve old problems.

The next category of usage focuses on the operational model. Also called core transformation, this involves doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way.

The final usage, and the one that has the most promise and peril, is strategic. This is transformation with a capital “T” because it involves changing the very essence of a company. Liquid to gas, lead to gold”

Defining what leaders mean when they drop the word transformation matters, because these different classes of efforts need to be measured and managed in vastly different ways.”

Two further articles are from Ralph-Christian Ohr

Ralph writes under his blog http://integrative-innovation.net/

The first is “A Model for Integrative Innovation Management”

In his view sustainable successful innovation management systems in organizations are required to be based on a couple of essential premises – all of which can be considered necessary conditions. Read his article here

Innovation management follows a balanced portfolio approach. The entire innovation portfolio is divided into exploitation-oriented and exploration-oriented innovation initiatives, where following characterizations hold:

Exploitation-oriented initiatives are related to running core business by executing and enhancing existing business models or technological capabilities. The primary direction of impact is value capturing (commercialization). Examples: Product, service or process innovation, portfolio extension, innovation of selected business model components (e.g. channel or operations), market research.

Exploration-oriented initiatives are related to developing future business by searching for novel, and often disruptive, business models or technological capabilities. The primary direction of impact is value creation (configuration). Examples: Business model development, platform/ecosystem innovation, basic technology research & development, startup engagement, innovation intelligence.

Ralph and I share the belief that the three horizons is a distinct playground for innovation initiatives

Exploration- and exploitation-oriented innovation initiatives can be assigned to three strategic horizons. As outlined below, the horizons address different proximity to the core business with regard to business model or technological capabilities – and therefore indirectly time scale. The horizons’ strategic objectives can be put in a nutshell:

H1 – Core: Optimization of existing business models and technologies, addressing of existing markets

H2 – Growth: Acceleration and scaling of new business models and technologies, adaptation of existing business models

H3 – Future: Discovery and validation of new business models and technologies, shaping of future markets

A lot of my own work goes into developing the understanding, usage and practice of working with the three horizon methodology. Ralph and I share a lot on this as core to a way forward. Here is my White Paper and short presentation opener to this 3H thinking to capture, translate and combine the innovation for today and leading towards the future.

Ralph’s second article is equally making the Case for Dual Innovation

This is revisiting the need for a higher level of organizational ambidexterity to be built into the organization. So often something is dismissed without it being fully worked through. Ralph puts up the case for revisiting “dual innovation” equally suggested within the Innosight articles. Read his article here.

“In the past, systematic dual innovation management approaches have often been discounted due to falling short of expectations or lacking prevalence across the sum of companies. Both reasons, however, don’t necessarily imply the basic concept is inappropriate or even wrong”

“Adequate buy-in on part of executive/senior management and proper implementation of these approaches are mandatory prerequisites in order to make them live up to their potential and – as a consequence – increasingly trusted and applied. The above studies clearly reveal: Organizational ambidexterity proves to be a necessary condition for outstanding corporate innovation capability. Company boards may ignore it at their peril.”

The need is for us to get thinking in ‘dual’ minds for ‘greater’ innovation delivery.

Exploitation  <=> core transformation, i.e. doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way

Exploration <=> strategic transformation, i.e. changing the very essence of a company

The thinking in dual ways is a really important part of bringing innovation thinking into the boardroom, framing this through a three horizon approach that can provide a common language, a different thinking mindset and build future discussions in appropriate time horizons and impact assessments. Also take a read of “Mapping innovation across the three horizons” to link this powerful concept into any board rooms thinking over the present and future for placing different innovation activities.

Dogma, mindsets and conflicts often dominate our boardrooms

I wrote about Lingering dogma, fixed mindsets and conflicting needs and wrote at the end “I can’t promise it can stop all the unhealthy debates around innovation in the boardroom by adopting the Three Horizon framework. What it might change is the perspective of where to focus the expertise and energy to make innovation far more the strategic bedrock, that organizations are looking to achieve, the link towards a healthier future. It’s not personal any more, its considering options in a future-orientated way for their business, to find better ways to thrive not just survive”

In summary, as the first post of why innovation must reside in the boardroom

The first thinking ‘out loud’ ( a long one I must admit) of moving innovating thinking far more into the corporate boardroom comes from the need to establish a “thinking mindset” within our boardrooms, a duality of mindset. One where they ‘collectively’ within the boardroom needs to think in dual ways, exploring and exploiting, to establish distinct types of transformation efforts, and innovation initiatives, combined with the use and application of embracing the three horizons, this becomes the first group of thinking for “shining innovation into the corporate boardrooms”.

Footnote: Where I seem to be heading is in my intent of making innovation itself a transformational journey, perhaps even a “renaissance” as we all are facing and needing to tackle all the disruptive forces around us.

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