A truly integrated innovation solution that sits in our organization to allow innovation to be fully leveraged and exploited.

We need to recognize innovation has many touchpoints and a myriad of dimensions that need to be aligned and integrated. I genuinely believe we need a solution provider, who takes a more holistic view of innovation management that can make a significant advancement on where we are today, in our processes and systems.

These need a total integrated solution as the approach. this has its complexities in the challenges but we do have the potential through technology deliveries, platform constructs, and using the flexibility and adaptability found in the cloud.

If we combine these technology enablers with our innovation management understanding, then we can begin to construct this systematically and thoughtfully. It is very achievable and necessary for our organization’s abilities to absorb and translate knowledge into innovative growth, something missing for many.

Innovation is certainly one of those in need of a real concerted effort to bring our approach to the management of innovation up to date within our enterprises, to make it more inclusive and that can I believe come far quicker through delivering it across the organization and all their partners by operating within the cloud.

An Enterprise Innovation Process (EIP) that is highly visible, agile and core to the organization’s future, seen by all, used by all and truly valued by all, as integrated and highly valuable to engage with.

The formal management of innovation is not resolved today, it is a collection of pieces.

To quote these statistics from an Innovation Leadership Study in March 2012 for example:
• *Only 30% of respondents agree they have an effective organisational structure for innovation.
• *45% do not have a well‐defined governance structure for innovation.
• *40% lack clear roles and responsibilities for innovation.
• *39% state they do not have an effective decision‐making process for innovation.
• * 54% of those surveyed indicate they do not have a formal KPI system for promoting innovation.
• *49% are not having a well‐defined process to prioritize and allocate time and funding to innovation projects.

If innovation management can be integrated into the organizations systems, I would suggest many of the current problems and frustrations we face today, in our innovating efforts, in barriers and issues surrounding innovation, might begin to melt away or change the existing unsatisfactory result game of today.

We need to strive towards making a more radical attempt at integrating innovation into our systems and structures. It is needed, as we need to all engage through innovation far more, to tackle growing issues and problems that are complex challenges that really need integrative thinking and connected processes.

Making the business case

Innovation management today is often standing outside any integration structure.  Some people, I am sure, would argue that it should do, yet I do often see and certainly feel innovation is often missing the critical top management line of sight and suffers accordingly.

Often this is in numerous resource constraints that ate becoming a real performance drag against expectations. To resolve this and many other issues innovation needs to be more central in core process thinking and managing throughout the entire organization.

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

• Alongside this to allow for more radical innovation that taps into greater needs for mobility, usability, elasticity and yet still be aligned to leverage, exploit and maximise opportunities needs to run in parallel.

We need not just a new innovation management system; we need to build this on a modern engagement platform. As constant change happens we will need to accommodate new technologies and its realization of enterprise value will need an even greater evolution than ERP, the present backbone of organizations.

We need a new outward-focused orientated system that can be delivered through this suggested Enterprise Innovation Planning (EIP) system.

As outlined earlier here, to achieve this I think we must go cloud‐based, agile, and moving towards having a more ambidextrous organization design for innovation.

This will help innovation to break out of the existing constraints and linear approach we have given it as its present straight jacket.

Integrating the innovation process and system is needed more today than ever.

We are in a really evolutionary period, with the explosion of change taking place in the post‐digital world of cloud, big data, social and interconnected devices. External insights and Intelligence will not become Enterprise knowledge that flows without real, deep integration.

Receiving the knowledge alone will not turn these into ‘higher scales, richer, more innovation business outcomes’ that have real growth value, unless we realize the massive ‘mismatch’ between digital flowing in and the physical attempting to cope with this.

The discovery of insights from all this embedded intelligence, social activity and data analytics is leading us to potentially manage a significant wave of new innovation opportunities from this growing digital knowledge and activity.

Insights and ideas will form a real log jam attempting to enter the innovation pipeline

As it stands I can see a potentially damaging build‐up, or a log jam of promising concepts all desperately trying to work themselves through the innovation funnel.

Either decisions or the existing disciplines have to be radically altered, where we take on a much higher risk profile to enable these to move from idea to finished product or new service, or we accept the consequences of different failures, growing frustrations or variable revenue metrics against the cost invested.

The innovation pipeline today is very manual; it will always need human intervention, in decisions, in inputs, in what is communicated, and what is approved or dropped. Yet innovation often gets far too weighed down by the wrong type of human intervention.

What changes are needed, who will be willing to invest in this radical redesign of the innovation system?

It is through searching for and seeking engagement in the ‘wider’ world we will begin to make greater connections and receive potentially enormous amounts of (raw) data, about interactions, performance, possible issues and connecting that previously fragmented and dispersed information, through analytics so it can be turned this into emerging valuable knowledge.

Innovation needs a radical redesign and update to accommodate the changes occurring in the present digital evolution of mobility, social and big data.

• We will need to transform much within our systems but more importantly to orientate our skills to receive, translate and diffuse new knowledge, in significantly different ways.

• It is through this combination of people and ‘things’ connecting into our businesses that we will be able to extract new observations, to give us insights that can lead to completely different innovation opportunities.

• Market trends are changing faster and becoming shorter, so opportunity windows are narrowing. Risks of missing out are constantly increasing for those who are not focusing intently on that critical ‘time to market’ and not constantly streaming their innovation system, looking to automate it where ever they can.

Today we are still too reliant on manual systems for much of our innovation work.

What is needed is to push the thinking on how to automate the innovation process even more.

We need to think about our innovation system designs a whole lot deeper to allow these new digital technologies and the insights to be worked through the innovation process.

Speed is becoming ever more important, for new solutions to be turned out to the other end as new innovations.

We need to design a complete innovation system otherwise we will be investing in a front-loaded area alone, limiting digital impact and that will not deliver the power of actual growth expected or needed from our innovation activities so as to deliver new valuable outcomes.

Approaching the innovation process holistically would certainly help instead of bolting further onto our present ways as our innovation challenges become even more complex.

Offering an Enterprise integrated solution would really offer innovation and its management a real opportunity to become fully embedded within our organizations.

Innovation gains a real line of sight and across organizational engagement to move closer to its promise of delivering sustained growth, new business and impact.

So it would be a real achievement if we saw real hard physical evidence that innovation was moving towards this integrated system in 2015, so our Enterprises can leverage all the knowledge and insights that can be harnessed into new innovation growth.

The post My innovation wish for 2015 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The protectionist debate

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

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

The wish to go beyond just product innovation

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

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

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

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

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

Collaborations continue to feature

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

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

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

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

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

Government as stewards of the innovation environment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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