As we come closer to the year-end it’s good to look back, and make some dedicated time to take ‘stock’, in this case, on innovation’s progress.
In a just-released “The State of Innovation Management in 2015” that I have authored and kindly provided by HYPE for free, I believe you will find something of interest that you missed during a busy year, coming to a close.
I certainly hope you will find time to go through it.
You’ll gain a valuable and quick insight into critical aspects that innovation managers and CINOs should be aware of. It is in an easy format of thirty-plus pages and offers a reference resource that builds a solid understanding of innovation today regarding relevant factors that will stimulate and support your innovation activity. http://i.hypeinnovation.com/the-state-of-innovation-2015-report
Has consulting changed over the years? Certainly the business model behind them has, big time.
I really do wonder where it is all going inside the business organization.
Consulting has become a huge business dealing with our global and local organizations and governments.
Just take a peek around the board room doors, just who are all those strange faces, bulging muscles, huddled in meetings with the boss? Ready to take on the world.
Following on from my recent post on “the value of the visiting consultative fireman” this further post explores the external reliance on the consultant our organizations have become accustomed too. It got a little long, my apologies for that.
I was reflecting on the value and role of consultants and have written here, here and here on this.
These thoughts have covered the topics of suggesting different consulting models, exploring the shifts taking place in consulting and where consulting can contribute.
So in this post I will reflect and look at the visiting fireman here, the ones I experienced in the corporate world. I still believe they are far from endangered species.
Consultants hold a specific fascination for me, they come in all shapes and sizes, offering a bewildering array of solutions for your business.
For many clients, consultants have become ‘totally essential’ yet for others a necessary evil.
Today with far less resource within our business to call upon and coping with increasing pressure on time there is also this total reluctance to employ someone on the books, it is better to bring it in on an ‘as and when’ basis.
Keep it lean and mean, charge it off against that years operating expenses, don’t bring it onto the longer-term books.
Mostly the consultants knowledge leaves when they do
When you stop and think about how innovation has been managed and understood over the years you soon realize how much has changed in this time. It is very significant, yet there is still much to do. Innovation understanding is changing, certainly for the better and as it shifts our perspectives on where knowledge resides as this is altering.
Today I think we are yet again at yet another crossroads in this innovation understanding and perspective. That is to extract the leading edges required from their innovation activities within organizations. This will require fresh innovation consulting business models to exploit the growing complexity of managing emerging innovation practice to support and extend their understanding.
I’m attempting to get my head around it, let me share some of my thinking here.
There has been a continual shift of where innovation knowledge resides. The external provider, who was the main source of latest insight, hands on practice and leading ideas in the past, I think have been significantly falling behind in recent years, on their contribution and value to organizations.
We are coming up to nearly 10 years since Dr Henry Chesbrough wrote his first book on open innovation as the necessary business imperative. There has certainly been considerable progress in many business organizations to embrace this open collaborative principle.
“Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as their own internal ideas, and explore both internal and external paths to market. Firms need to look to advance their technology, resources, their knowledge and understanding through innovating with partners by sharing risk and sharing reward”.
Isn’t it strange that the very consultants expounding ‘open’ for innovation are as closed as ever? Why is this?
I would argue that the consulting industry specializing in providing innovation services is its own worst enemy today, by not being more open themselves. It is actually failing to recognize that this is inhibiting their own long-term prospects.
Nearly all within the innovation consulting industry seem to be resolutely staying very internally driven, self-promoting, still trying to convey the story of their mastery, when clearly this is so painfully lacking from the results in growth by many of their clients from their existing innovation activities.
Due to this lack of openness, they are failing their clients by not offering them leading and emerging practice advice. Yet the client is increasingly requiring more complete or holistic solutions, not from a ‘piecemeal of innovation offerings’ they are presently receiving.
These separate pieces currently being offered by one group of consultants often don’t dovetail into a complete innovation system because they are supplemented by a variety of different service providers, all having their own ‘pet’ approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools.
In a recent study (see below for details) it seems innovation activities need to change within what consultants are offerings as services to their clients.
The study makes for fascinating reading and answers a number of questions I’ve been recently having.
Let me expand on this:
One: there is increasingly less time available within the mid to large consultants to train, research and development for their services so as to differentiate themselves in innovation, in what is actually becoming even more of a crowded market.
Focusing on maximising utilization and containing overheads and costs leaves less time to think and develop.
Two: equally the cumulative experiences of clients in dealing with consultants, especially through the practice of more central procurement, has added more pressure on consultants not to provide added extra or to take more radical approaches to innovative solutions for the risk of being compared badly, not offering clear returns and then screened out of the bidding process.
Recently I was reminded of an article by Daniel Krauss, writing on the Forrester blog site (http://blogs.forrester.com) about the “Path to Revolution In Management Consulting” which lead me to reply to his question of “what constitutes a management consulting firm 2.0?”
I’ve adapted my view here to reflect where it becomes even more relevant to the innovation consulting companies that I feel are in general struggling in today’s environment, for multiple reasons.
The challenge today lies for many in that they are not providing real consulting value to clients, and unless this will change it will continue to erode the client’s confidence in these service providers.
As we come closer to the year-end it’s good to look back, and make some dedicated time to take ‘stock’, in this case, on innovation’s progress.
