Building Your Innovation Intelligence
Bringing my thinking and solutions to your problems
I have been working through my innovative points of focus, those that have, for me, my innovating purpose that needs constant referencing back and adapting to the future needs of innovation.
So here are my points of focus with a number of reference links that I have selected and written upon in the past. They help build out my narrative for innovation capability building and understanding for the future. Continue reading “Linking sense of innovating purpose”
I was recently working through a set of older presentation files and came across this extract concerning innovation again and thought I must share this. Sadly, it rings true as much as it did those (many) years back.
“Strategy is useless without innovation; innovation is directionless without strategy”.
Below is an extract from “Reinventing Innovation” by John J Kao. For me, it is sadly as relevant today as when I first came across it, some years back. Are we making real progress in our innovation activities? Continue reading “The lost innovation pathway”
You get this increasing sense that the ‘fizz’ has gone out of the innovation bubbly, we are seemingly in a trough of innovation disillusionment. The innovation party presently feels a little flat.
When we turn up at those creative innovative parties today the numerous delicious canapés to choose from are turning up at the edges as we are becoming disillusioned, just being fed on a present unexciting incremental innovation diet, lacking any real substance.
We are not being challenged, we are being constrained, bored and fearful of taking bold risks
People are milling around with that bored look on their faces, some are also slumped down checking their watch or smartphones on when is the best time to cut out and find somewhere else to be, rather than be here. Has the fizz gone from innovation? Continue reading “The trough of innovation disillusionment”
Perhaps why innovation feels somewhat flat (well for me) is our organizations and societies are utterly failing to allow us all to step up in innovation to tackle those huge societal issues; those massive, growing problems that are swirling all around us.
We need to shake out of our lethargy and really begin to attempt to solve the real issues of our time. Some organizations are clearly working on and trying to draw attention and gain greater engagement but we need a much greater concerted effort to focus on the big societal challenges.
Global warming, rising health issues, finally cracking cancer, malaria, dementia, finding different solutions to the ageing within society. How are we going to tackle the rapidly depleting natural resources, the future conflicts over water, food, or energy? These are big, hairy, audacious gaps to be resolved.
Are we capable or simply just avoiding these BIG challenges? Continue reading “Tackling Societal Challenges through innovation ecosystem application”
As demand is more volatile today what becomes more important is the work to be done, not the work done.
Surprisingly Adam Smith identified this important difference back in 1776.
This can be explained as the work done is the accumulated knowledge, which has built up and been embodied in the firm’s results with the innovations achieved in the past and is seen as the tangible capital.
The work to be done is how well it can adapt to change. In the past century, we operated in the mass production era, with systems with standard goods and stable market conditions, the work done was equivalent to the ‘work to be done.
In today’s global market, with its rapid technology diffusion, disruptive and constant change with an emphasis on servicing the work to be done is more important than the work done and intangible assets are fundamental to this. Continue reading “Transforming What? Delivering Future Impact”
Making Sustainability central to our future innovation capability building will be through the adoption of taking on a new open ecosystem approach.
Broader collaborations will become central for future organizations to find ways to cooperate, network and build relationships, that recognize the partnership value, to achieve a sustainable, future business that offers impact and connected design for customers to value, that meets their changing needs.
Today’s challenge is to build the capacity to be different, to sustain and accelerate the critical aspect that innovation, ingenuity and creativity can provide, with the additional stimulus for sustaining lasting growth.
Our thinking needs to reflect a longer-term horizon, beyond just achieving immediate results. The dividend of thinking for a sustainable future has the promise of greater value and recognition. The reward by customers comes from the value of resolving growing complex problems, which is increasingly coming through this understanding of ecosystem design and collaborative endeavours.
We need to build far more collaborative environments for exchanging knowledge and sharing. To achieve this the recognition of the value of ecosystems as central to any future design is becoming central to this need, to co-create and capitalize on a wider knowledge only available in an open approach. Continue reading “Sustainability will increasingly come through innovation ecosystem designs”
Value creation is highly dynamic, it is going on all the time and can increase, decrease or transform, in different ways, when you exploit your different capitals that will be in constant change and adjusting to reflect your organization’s business activities and eventual outputs.
This is when you can begin to see the value created by the use of deploying all the capitals to build new growth and what I call “stock” that along with “flow”.
Robin Sloan does a brilliant job of explaining this. I loved this explanation of the two:
“There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy – too easy.”
“Flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein. And the real magic trick is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. It’s the hybrid strategy.”
Value is not just from within, it is the links our organizations are constantly making with others, in the interactions, relationships and the combining of the activities. The important need is to manage the stocks and flows of the capitals Continue reading “So what is value creation?”
I always find it interesting when different though-strands seem to collide. You can put that down to serendipity, fate, luck or just being in the right spot at that time. I have always been a fan of the book “The Medici Effect; breakthrough insights at the intersections of ideas, concepts and culture” by Frans Johansson.
I like to think I am often colliding at the innovation intersections where I keep finding lots of synergies that feed my research and innovative curiosity to support others.
For the past six or so weeks I have been looking into Ecosystems and one of those (famous) strands took me to “Natural Language Understanding” and I read an article by Mark Seall, Head of Digital Communications at Siemens called “How AI is shaping the future of marketing communications” and it got me curious.
Continue reading “Innovation Ecosystem Understanding through an AI-driven approach”
Four years ago, I downloaded an article that I keep coming back to. It was called “Managing Disruptive Change Be Ready for What Is Coming”, written by Estevao Seccatto Rocha. At the time, Estevao worked for KPMG in São Paulo as a transformation and turnaround advisor. Today according to Estaveo’s LinkedIn, he works for Stone Partners, still in São Paulo.
I think he wrote this article while studying at RWTH Aachen University, and he references Professor Malte Brettel, the head of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Group.
I kept coming back to this and decided to try and pick out some of the points here in this post. The work is either Estavao’s or Professor Brettel. I am trying to translate it in a way that works for me, and hopefully, you as a reader of this posting site to bring disruption far more central in your thinking.
Digital is one of the most disruptive forces we have to face. This is why I decided to summarize some points, remind myself and appreciate what we really mean when we advocate and encourage going disruptive.
Understanding the basics of disruption
Disruption is constant; it simply disturbs all we do. If we ignore it, we lose what we have; if we determine how to meet disruption, we have a chance to survive and even come out better, certainly differently. Continue reading “Preparing for Digital within your Innovating Disruption”
Digitalizing has a positive impact on our innovation activities, it opens up new exciting possibilities. The first question of what, how and why are we doing this, we can start by looking at the data to begin to see there are potential ways to change something existing or improve on our idea or concept. As we gain insights then we can apply that innovative thinking with a greater technology application understanding.
We then begin to make the changes within the process, be those incremental, radical or even revolutionary to change the processes operating today.
We have distinctive ways to treat data and digitalization that leads to distinct new value points for innovation. Continue reading “Digitalizing has a positive impact on our innovation activities in IIoT”