What would force us to change or radically adjust our existing business trajectory? Can we afford to take another period of uncertainty, what are the risks? Does it make sense to alter our existing Business Models?

At some time it is absolutely right for the C-level to ask! It cuts to the core of the Innovator’s Dilemma applied to organizational transformation.

A terrific book, an Innovation foundational one, was “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail,” first published in 1997. It is most probably the best-known work of the Harvard professor and businessman Clayton Christensen. It describes how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appears to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from established business (source Wikipedia). Today’ it is so different, anyone can take market share through applying technology thoughtfully.

This concept today faces far more “dilemmas” that can be more widely applied as the “disruptor” has even more “disrupting tools” at their disposal as they search and connect all the “dots” of opportunity that those incumbents will struggle to adopt though legacy or speed of market reaction. “Higher value” needs to be replaced with “Greatest Connecting Value”.

The issue today is we are in an increasingly distruptive world where Ecosystems in design and thinking are dominating, yet Leaders still hold back from address evolutionary change from “siloed models” to “collaborative models”, Why?

Here’s why, despite the compelling “why not?”, many organizations don’t take the ecosystem journey, it is simply simply hard work full of uncertainties and are they incentivized to pursue a more “disruptive” model? Often they think why not let someone else handle that later “down the line”, as my job within the C-Level board is to maximise what we have, I get rewarded and compensated for that and not open ourselves up to undue risk or transformation until we need too. Fair enough but it can be (incrementally) different to enable a “learning organization” to emerge. Think of Ecosystems in design and thinking as a learning journey.

I get that but Ecosystem thinking and design is just NOT betting the house all in one go, it is a slow, thoughtful journey of experiment, learning and adjustments

Otherwise you are faced with so many questions that simply stop us. Yet what can we learn by planing these into a journey where you build to resolve these?

Addressing the Ecosystem Dilemma

Recognizing the “ecosystem dilemma’s” that need to be faced and (progressively) overcome:

1. Complexity and Ambiguity:
   • There is no Ecosystem Blueprint: There’s no single “ecosystem playbook.” Each one is unique, highly complex, and dynamic. This ambiguity makes it hard for traditionally structured organizations, which thrive on clear roadmaps and predictable outcomes, to get started.
   • Uncertain Short-Term ROI: While the long-term value can be immense, quantifying the direct, short-term ROI of investing in trust, shared infrastructure, or partner enablement is difficult. Quarterly earnings cycles and executive tenures often prioritize immediate, measurable gains. Can we pilot, experiment and carve out “given” parts of the business that do need refreshing or challenging in new collaborative ways?
   • Defining Success: How do you measure “ecosystem health”? It goes beyond simple revenue and often involves metrics like partner engagement, co-innovation velocity, or network density, which aren’t standard KPIs. Start simply with a few basic KPI’s and then broaden these to cover a growing need to monitor and accelerate any experiment into a larger scales that has different business impact.
2. Resource Intensity, Understanding and Time Horizon:
   • Significant Upfront Investment: Building a robust platform, developing APIs, establishing governance, hiring new talent (ecosystem managers, partnership strategists) – this all requires substantial financial and human capital investment before tangible returns are seen.
   • They can be built for limited funds and “measured” awareness- see this post “A Guide for Ecosystem Business Model Building for Mid-Sized Firms” and this one “A Comprehensive Guide Recommending Business Ecosystems for Mid-Sized Firms“
   • Long Time to Value: Ecosystems take years, often a decade or more, to fully mature and deliver their full network effects. This clashes with short-term strategic planning cycles and the pressure for quick wins.
   • Opportunity Cost: Investing in a long-term ecosystem strategy often means diverting resources from existing, proven (though perhaps stagnating) revenue streams, which is a difficult choice for profitable companies.
3. Deep Organizational and Cultural Barriers by overcoming these progressivly:
   • “Not Invented Here” Syndrome: A strong internal bias against external collaboration. Many organizations believe they must own and control every aspect of value creation.
   • Siloed Thinking: Traditional organizational structures (functional silos, P&L ownership) are antithetical to ecosystem thinking, which demands cross-functional collaboration and shared value creation across internal and external boundaries.
   • Fear of Loss of Control: This is profound. Leaders genuinely worry about diluting their brand, losing direct control over customer relationships, intellectual property, and revenue streams to external partners. This perceived loss of sovereignty is a powerful inhibitor.
   • Risk Aversion: Ecosystems involve venturing into uncharted territory, dealing with external entities with potentially misaligned incentives, and navigating complex legal and ethical landscapes. Many organizations prefer predictable, lower-risk growth paths.
   • Incentive Misalignment: Internal compensation, promotion, and recognition structures are often not designed to reward employees for fostering external collaboration or for value created through partners rather than directly.
   • Talent Gaps: A severe shortage of leaders and practitioners with the specific skills needed to design, launch, and scale ecosystems (e.g., platform strategists, API product managers, ecosystem legal experts).
4. Leadership and Vision Gaps:
   • Lack of Strategic Vision: Not all C-level executives fully grasp the fundamental shift required or truly believe in the ecosystem model as the future. They might view it as a “nice-to-have” or a trendy buzzword rather than a core strategic imperative for survival and growth.
   • Short-Term Pressure: Publicly traded companies face intense pressure from shareholders and analysts to deliver quarterly results, making it difficult to justify long-term, complex investments that don’t show immediate returns.
   • Difficulty in Building Trust (Externally): Establishing trust with potential partners, especially when there’s an element of co-opetition, is a significant soft skill challenge that requires strong, empathetic, and patient leadership.
   • Regulatory & Antitrust Concerns: As ecosystems grow, they can attract the scrutiny of regulators concerned about market dominance or anti-competitive practices, adding another layer of risk and complexity.

In essence, while the ultimate rewards of the ecosystem journey are massive, (view Apple, Salesforce, Alibaba, Siemens and many others), the barriers are equally serious to overcome and needs the (total) commitment of the board in vision, mission and operationalizing this. It demands a profound, often uncomfortable, shift in mindset, governance, and operations that many established organizations find incredibly difficult to undertake, especially when their current (though perhaps diminishing) business model is still generating profits.

It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma on an organizational scale of a new ecosystem level: the choice between optimizing the existing (but potentially sunsetting, isolatated) businesses, or investing heavily in a new, uncertain model that promises exponential future growth.

Many choose the comfort of the known, until competitive pressures make the choice unavoidable. We are locked in so many constraints within a business. The right path is to explore, experiment and take “measured” risks that you gain a new learning path and recognition of what is achievable equipped with the right mindset, advisory and mentoring advice

Businesses are full of constraints

I think the emerging Ecosystem Dilemma will come from Gen AI. As we embed AI into our thinking, increasingly into our organizations it will be constantly learning. It will spot constraints, both internally and externally.

What if AI begins to suggest a different system, process or even ecosystem design?

What if it “recognizes” the constraints and starts suggesting or adapting new ways of working to remove existing constraints.

What if it redesigns how you manage your business and eventually how you can expand and broaden out your business into a new integrated solution?

What if we rapidly remove constraints,so we can explore new collaborative pathways.

What if we become the disruptors, disrupting ourselves?

AI becomes the Ecosystem Dilemma. It becomes the disruptor, recognizing the constraints within the existing system and proposes different ways to take a real disruptors position? It provides the integration solutions for you to follow?

There is a need to recognize dilemma’s will be far more in a growing, highly collaborative world. AI is the new disruptor, will you be the one disrupted or be ready to remove those traditional constraints (mostly of protection) and constantly be prepared to disrupt yourself?

Lets chat to find out your appropriate pathway

The post Resolving Today’s Current Innovator’s Ecosystem Dilemma Progressively first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Everywhere you turn it seems to be all about Gen AI and how it will change the world. The fears, excitement, opportunity and the huge amounts of money being invested is mind-boggling. Any fundamental change is exactly that- full of fear and opportunity.

So where does innovation fit within this?

I have read different views but most seem to be simply dressing their existing tools and methods in the those brighter new clothes of Gen AI appeal.

I would suggest we have been given a chance, a real chance, to transform the way we undertake innovation and that is not just a “lick of paint” or a hasty re-fit of the existing, this needs something a whole lot more.

I took a look at 1) how can AI drive innovation in different ways, 2) would this require a new operating model and 3) how the innovation workflow will require a transformational change to the operating model and 4) the outcome of a fundamental rethinking of how innovation is approached and executed.

We need to leverage speed, scale and impact of Gen AI and delivering this at fast rates for consumer appeal and market development need and growth.

Firstly generative AI will have immense potential to be a true innovation game-changer but not in how we operate or support innovation today. We need a game-changing approach.

In this thinking through of my four questions posed above, I have been added by two views of the very beasts of current Gen AI- Chat GPT and Claude. In different exchanges over a fairly lengthy dialogue “we” arrived at:

Here are some key ways it can drive transformative innovation:

1. Accelerate Ideation and Concept Generation:
   • Generative AI models can rapidly ideate and generate novel concepts, solutions, and prototypes across domains.
   • This can significantly speed up the front-end of the innovation funnel, allowing organizations to explore a much wider range of possibilities.
2. Enhance Creative Capabilities:
   • Generative AI can assist human creatives by generating content, visuals, and ideas to complement and inspire their work.
   • This augmentation of human creativity can lead to more original, impactful, and differentiated innovations.
3. Optimize Product and Process Design:
   • Generative AI can be used to procedurally generate and iterate on product designs, manufacturing processes, supply chains, and other complex systems.
   • This can enable rapid experimentation, identify optimal configurations, and uncover novel design approaches.
4. Personalize and Customize at Scale:
   • Generative AI can create highly personalized products, services, and experiences tailored to individual user needs and preferences.
   • This mass personalization can foster deeper customer engagement and loyalty, driving innovative business models.
5. Accelerate Research and Discovery:
   • Generative AI can expedite scientific research, drug discovery, materials science, and other domains by generating and evaluating hypotheses, models, and experiments.
   • This can lead to breakthroughs that would be extremely challenging for humans to achieve alone.
6. Enable Autonomous Innovation Processes:
   • With advancements in self-supervised learning and few-shot adaptation, generative AI could eventually handle end-to-end innovation workflows with limited human intervention.
   • This could revolutionize the speed, scale, and adaptability of the innovation process itself.

To fully capitalize on generative AI’s innovation potential, organizations must invest in the necessary talent, infrastructure, and governance frameworks that draws from existing innovation thinking and designs and “test” that the above (opening) list can be validating the question ” By embracing generative AI as a powerful innovation enabler, companies can gain a significant competitive advantage and drive transformative breakthroughs“.

Does this need a new innovation operating model?

Yes, effectively leveraging generative AI for innovation will require a new, more integrated innovation operating model. Here are some key elements that should be considered. Many are applied today but the recognition of the leveraging of speed, scale and impact this needs to bring brings these into a sharper focus to resolve :

1. Agile Innovation Processes:
   • Rapid ideation, prototyping, and iteration cycles enabled by generative AI will demand more flexible, adaptive innovation processes.
   • Agile methodologies, design thinking, and other iterative approaches should be embedded throughout the innovation lifecycle.
2. Multidisciplinary Innovation Teams:
   • Integrating generative AI into innovation will require diverse teams with expertise in areas like machine learning, creative design, engineering, and domain-specific knowledge.
   • Fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing across these disciplines will be critical.
3. Scalable Innovation Infrastructure:
   • Leveraging generative AI at scale will necessitate robust cloud-based platforms, high-performance computing resources, and secure data/model management.
   • Modular, API-driven architectures can enable seamless integration of generative AI tools into the innovation workflow.
4. Intelligent Automation and Orchestration:
   • As generative AI capabilities advance, the innovation process itself could become progressively more autonomous.
   • Automating ideation, experimentation, and optimization tasks can free up human innovators to focus on higher-level strategy and decision-making.
5. Continuous Learning and Adaptation:
   • The rapid pace of AI advancement requires a learning-oriented innovation culture that can quickly adapt to new tools and methods.
   • Ongoing training, knowledge sharing, and mechanisms for continuous improvement should be embedded into the operating model.
6. Ethical AI Governance:
   • Responsible development and deployment of generative AI for innovation must be a core tenet, with clear guidelines, oversight, and accountability measures.
   • This includes addressing issues like bias, privacy, security, and alignment with organizational values and societal impact.

By adopting a new innovation operating model that strategically integrates generative AI, the question to validate is “will organizations can unlock tremendous value, drive sustainable competitive advantage, and position themselves as true innovation leaders“. The keys will be balancing automation and human creativity, while upholding the highest standards of ethics and responsible innovation.

The really big change is in innovation workflow, to manage at this greater speed, scale and impact.

So how does that impact any operating model so it can be effectively captured and realized

Any integration of generative AI into the innovation workflow will have a transformative impact on the operating model, requiring a fundamental rethinking of how innovation is approached and executed. Here are some key ways the innovation operating model needs to adapt:

1. Accelerated Innovation Cycles:
   • With the ability to rapidly generate ideas, prototypes, and experiments using generative AI, the pace of the innovation lifecycle will dramatically increase.
   • The operating model must be highly responsive, with streamlined decision-making, resource allocation, and go-to-market processes to capitalize on these faster innovation cycles.
2. Scalable Ideation and Experimentation:
   • Generative AI empowers organizations to explore a much broader range of innovative concepts and solutions at scale.
   • The operating model needs to support parallel experimentation, high-throughput testing, and efficient knowledge capture to maximize the impact of this ideation firepower.
3. Adaptive and Autonomous Workflows:
   • As generative AI capabilities advance, innovation workflows can become increasingly automated and self-optimizing.
   • The operating model must evolve to integrate intelligent orchestration, seamless human-AI collaboration, and mechanisms for the AI systems to learn and adapt over time.
4. Specialized Innovation Roles and Teams:
   • Effectively leveraging generative AI for innovation will require cross-functional teams with specialized skills in areas like machine learning engineering, data science, creative design, and domain expertise.
   • The operating model should define new innovation roles, reporting structures, and team composition to facilitate this level of specialized collaboration.
5. Intelligent Innovation Analytics:
   • Gathering and analyzing vast amounts of data generated by generative AI-powered innovation workflows will be critical for identifying patterns, optimizing processes, and driving continuous improvement.
   • The operating model should incorporate advanced analytics capabilities, including predictive modeling, simulation, and AI-assisted decision support.
6. Ecosystem-Centric Collaboration:
   • Generative AI’s ability to enable rapid, secure innovation across organizational boundaries suggests a shift towards more open, ecosystem-driven innovation models.
   • The operating model should facilitate frictionless partner integration, data/IP sharing, and co-innovation workflows to maximize the collective innovation potential.

The really big change is in innovation workflow, to manage at this greater speed, scale and impact. So we need to answer the question “how does that impact any operating model so it can be effectively captured and realized“

By adapting the innovation operating model to fully leverage the speed, scale, and impact of generative AI, organizations can position themselves as true innovation leaders, delivering groundbreaking products, services, and business models at an unprecedented pace. The key is to strike the right balance between human creativity and machine-driven efficiency, all while upholding robust ethical and governance frameworks.

The outcome will need a fundamental rethinking of how innovation is approached and executed

We do need to recognize we do seem stuck to be in Design Thinking, Agile Innovation and Innovation Lifecycle Management but these are “old” innovation process school, are these the best we can do for any new Gen AI Innovation Process? Surely not?

While these are still valuable, they are not be enough to fully capitalize on the transformative potential of generative AI. They stand alone. We need to explore more innovative and forward-looking approaches to innovation processes that are truly designed for the generative AI era.

We require some very forward-looking approaches to the innovation process, designed specifically for this generative AI era. These outlined below do need further exploration, definition and collaboration to be recognized, explored and developed for innovations greater need so as to leverage speed, scale and impact of Gen AI and delivering this at fast rates for consumer appeal and market development need and demand.

The core elements of this model should include.

1. Autonomous Innovation Loops:
   • Truly autonomous innovation workflows, where generative AI models can independently generate ideas, experiment, and optimize solutions with minimal human intervention.
   • This would require advanced AI capabilities in areas like causal reasoning, self-awareness, and ethical decision-making to ensure the AI-driven innovation process remains aligned with organizational goals and values.
   • The innovation operating system would need to seamlessly integrate these autonomous AI capabilities, providing the necessary governance, monitoring, and control mechanisms.
2. Collaborative Innovation Ecosystems:
   • Moving beyond traditional siloed innovation to truly decentralized, open innovation ecosystems facilitated by generative AI and Web3 technologies.
   • Enabling secure and transparent sharing, combining, and co-development of generative AI models across organizational boundaries.
   • Developing new business models, incentive structures, and governance frameworks to foster equitable collaboration and value creation within these ecosystems.
3. Simulation-Driven Innovation:
   • Leveraging highly realistic, generative AI-powered simulation environments to rapidly test and validate innovative concepts, products, and business models.
   • Applying advanced AI techniques like reinforcement learning, digital twins, and generative adversarial networks to optimize these virtual prototypes and scenarios.
   • Seamlessly integrating the simulation-driven innovation process with physical prototyping and real-world experimentation for a truly holistic approach.
4. Continuous Adaptation and Learning:
   • Designing innovation operating systems that can continuously adapt and improve themselves based on real-world data and user feedback.
   • Incorporating generative AI models that can learn and evolve, constantly expanding their ideation capabilities, prototyping skills, and optimization strategies.
   • Establishing feedback loops and self-improvement mechanisms to drive this perpetual innovation learning cycle.
5. Ethical AI Governance Frameworks:
   • Developing comprehensive governance models that ensure the responsible, transparent, and accountable use of generative AI in the innovation process.
   • Incorporating ethical principles, impact assessments, and human oversight mechanisms to maintain trust and alignment with organizational values and societal well-being.
   • Establishing clear guidelines, auditing procedures, and escalation protocols to address AI-related risks and incidents. Underpinning this model to ensure responsible, transparent, and accountable use of generative AI in the innovation process

To truly rethink the innovation process from the ground up, leveraging generative AI’s transformative capabilities will require a paradigm shift in how we conceptualize, structure, and execute innovation within organizations.

The biggest question of all “This represents a fundamental shift away from the linear, incremental, highly disconnected innovation approaches of the past and present, shift to unlocking unprecedented speed, scale, and impact, at fast rates for consumer appeal and market development need and growth.

Can we really grab this opportunity?

Will the CEO’s and board be prepared for the significant impact this will have? You decide, chase or leave others to lead and then pull away. Where does Gen AI figure in your innovation thinking?

The post Recognizing that Gen AI will be the innovation game-changer first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This article did disturb me, it triggered a number of validations in my own mind. Once you get past the opening rant about the infamous Juicero juicer, that has now been used as an illustration of how investors funded something that automates something that you can do faster by hand.

The article opens up the doors to questioning much that is going on under the Silicon Valley umbrella. The juicer got funding of $120m from a number of blue-chip VC’s but it was not this that actually disturbs me, it was this “ant-innovation” tag the writer was attaching to (North) America.

The article goes deeper in questioning where we are in our innovation thinking. We do have a real innovation growth dilemma that we can’t lay at the door of Silicon Valley alone, it is part of the Western world’s current sickness. It has lost that ability to take a positive risk in so much, ‘kicking the can down the road’ for others to resolve, be these societal, educational, health, infrastructural or institutional reforming and so much more. All really important innovation opportunities.

Has the US become “profoundly anti-innovation” as stated?

The writer suggests

“At the root of the problem is the story we tell ourselves about innovation. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a lone genius disappears into a garage, preferably in Palo Alto, and emerges with an invention that changes the world. The engine of technological progress is the entrepreneur – the fast-moving, risk-loving, rule-breaking visionary in the mold of Steve Jobs.

This story has been so widely repeated as to become a cliche. It’s also inaccurate. Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs typically make terrible innovators. Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risks – something that, myth-making aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for”

I started to identify with the second paragraph of this. Real innovation is very expensive to produce and it is the appetite for risk that has been lost in America as it has been in Europe. That I strongly relate too as we have certainly lost that corporate ‘will’ to pursue much that can provide significant breakthroughs in products and new services, but is this because it is such a volatile, transforming time? Can we be bolder and more determined to differentiate ourselves or do we stay tucked into the pack, like a long distant runner, waiting for something (someone) to break away, hopefully, able to equally ‘kick in’ and stay in touch, still hopeful we will be in a position to win but mostly remain a fast follower only?

Are we committing suicide with a lack of innovation? Are we crushing real innovation?

Is it is suggested in the article, the USA is showing signs of a country committing economic suicide?” The writer’s observation: “Innovation drives economic growth. It boosts productivity, making it possible to create more wealth with less labor. When economies don’t innovate, the result is stagnation, inequality, and the whole horizon of hopelessness that has come to define the lives of most working people today”. 

I certainly can’t disagree with this, that Companies do need the breakthroughs to build their business but they do seem very reluctant to build this risk mentality in recent years. Innovation has been taking a back seat to shoring up our balance sheets, delivering increasing profits and shedding people and ‘unproductive’ assets that do not fit the business today. The longer-term has equally been put into the back seat, alongside innovation.

The sad loss of the real innovation risk investment?

Breakthrough innovation needs heavy investment, the writer reminds us:

“So where does the money come from? The government. As the economist, Mariana Mazzucato has shown, nearly every major innovation since the second world war has required a big push from the public sector, for an obvious reason: the public sector can afford to take risks that the private sector can’t.

Conventional wisdom says that market forces foster innovation. In fact, it’s the government’s insulation from market forces that has historically made it such a successful innovator. It doesn’t have to compete, and it’s not at the mercy of investors demanding a share of its profits. It’s also far more generous with the fruits of its scientific labor: no private company would ever be so foolish as to constantly give away innovations it has generated at enormous expense for free, but this is exactly what the government does. The dynamic should be familiar with the financial crisis: the taxpayer absorbs the risk, and the investor reaps the reward.

Again I feel uncomfortable and I would love to disagree with this but it is true in the majority of cases. Truly innovation breakthroughs have come through Government investments. When you look back or read it does seem true that most of the innovation breakthrough for transforming have their roots in publicly funded research. As the writer puts it (again):

The advances that created what we’ve come to call tech – the development of digital computing, the invention of the internet, the formation of Silicon Valley itself – were the result of sustained and substantial government investment. Even the iPhone, that celebrated emblem of capitalist creativity, wouldn’t exist without buckets of government cash. Its core technologies, from the touch-screen display to GPS to Siri, all trace their roots to publicly funded research”

Getting to the longer-term disturbing part – the decline is in ‘pure’ scientific R&D

Yet, and this is the really disturbing part for me, the truth lies in the declining investments that we see being made in research and development. Both Government’s and the Private Sector has been constantly reducing the research funding for years. Recently in a PwC Strategy & report “2016 Global Innovation 1000 Study”  it was reported that there was a 19.5% decline in allocated funds to products but it is being redistributed it seems into software and the digital transformation journey as the focal point of new investments. The truth is we actually need both for a better transforming future.

Here in Europe, we have seen steady declines in R&D investment. They are at worrying levels as we lose those that are the brightest as they go where the R&D investment seems healthy and for that, we need to look East my friend.  In both the US and Europe we are seeing falls in funding research as a percentage measure of the GDP, it is steadily declining. Science funding is in real decline and that does not auger well for the future prosperity of our societies.

Well, why are we at this point? it is a combination effect in real innovation decline.

It is this combination of Short-termism that businesses have become caught up in. Also, how VC’s are looking for bigger and bigger returns and earlier payouts, pushing to see an exit strategy more towards 3, rather than in the past of 5 years or even more. This adds to the pressure to grow quickly, spending more of those funds to scale, delaying often furthermore groundbreaking breakthroughs that build on the initial insight until the IPO or acquisition by others takes place.

None of these factors are actually helping stimulate real innovation growth, they are relying on geographical expansion or product extension. New companies are also getting insanely overvalued and basic research continues to suffer from this redirecting of funds across the broader spectrum of funding.

Then you have companies like Apple sitting on an absolute mountain of cash, presently over a quarter of a trillion dollars and many commentators constantly asking where is their next big innovation going to come? They have the means but maybe not the innovation desire anymore, it will come externally by acquisition and not internally it seems?

Over 1.2 trillion dollars of overseas cash is sitting outside the USA held by just twenty companies of the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Pfizer, GE, IBM, J&J, Cisco, Merck, Google, Exxon Mobile, P&G, and Citigroup. US companies hold more than $2.4 trillion in profits abroad for various reasons, all supposedly waiting for a tax law change to come back in. Will these be invested in innovation?

The writer of this Guardian article rightly stirs it up even further by asking about Wall Street extracting wealth by companies constantly busy in buybacks. They are paying out increasing dividends rather than invest in risk and their capacity to really grow, apart from picking up the acquisitions of all these insanely overpriced success stories, to keep being seen as “in the share price game” but also transforming, really? Can that change, will that change to wealth creating through innovation, job creation or new capital investments?

The West countries are certainly not growing their economies in new dynamic ways

We are struggling with really bad growth in most of the Western economies, we have seen a hollowing out of the middle class, we have seen real wages drop and wealth constantly heading ‘north’ to the ones already rich.

The writer finished his piece by asking “is capitalism eating itself alive?” I find that challenging, perhaps it is. The article is a disturbing piece for me because much of it is sadly true and that is the most uncomfortable part. We are not investing in real, breakthrough innovation, we are ‘burning’ our resources and money in ways that are leaving us increasingly devoid of a future where real sustaining growth lifts us all up, wealth is being unevenly distributed.

So are we committing just economic suicide or increasingly political suicide for those in power if we don’t change the dynamics of investment? Or is the entrepreneur that promising engine of our growth we all encourage, are they going to benefit broader groups of us all or just a selected few?

I am left wondering

I just sometimes wonder if we are all caught up in the success stories that are occurring but it is like the shop window we all stop and look into, we are simply gazing at what we ourselves are not able to achieve? Innovation can be so much different if we allow it to become part of all our lives. Yet it is not being allowed to become just that, part of our jobs, our way of thinking and evolving.

So, is innovation liberating us or keeping us caught up in a trap because we are investing our innovation dollar or euro in wrong ways or simply just hoarding them? It seems as science declines, technology gains but is the balance getting us all out of whack, delaying any promising future? Any thoughts?

Additional: My sparring partner on Innovation, Jeffrey Phillips, added this observation which I can only agree with: “The government does a lot of early ground breaking research but needs the private sector to turn it into usable products and services. Then other parts of the government create regulations and compliance issues that slow adoption of the new product”.

It seems commercialization is everybody’s problem.

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The post Are We Crushing Real Innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Just trying to stay your own course is tough enough but with all the diversity of views, it must be even more overwhelming for others, those who are asked to take on a role within innovation. Where and who do you turn too must be a real dilemma?

In recent years I have found I need to diversify away from one given ‘voice’ on innovation and channel this out into specialized and more focused areas of innovation activity. At present, I have SIX channels open on innovation advice or advisory service that has made my life partly more complicated but more importantly, able to separate my thinking into these parts, as they deserve a ‘deeper’ dive and/or broader exposure.

I thought I’d outline the six here in this post as the sum of the parts that  contributes to the whole

I have two established businesses, one started in 2000 and one in 2008. They are distinct in what they provide as services. Let me illustrate this by a screen lift of their two separate “main menus”:

HOCA International Consultants

It covers many of the adjacencies on innovation. You do need to find out more of the emerging Work to be done as it is a far more the dynamic place for innovation to happen.The Work-to-be-done is focused on connecting to the emerging dynamic future areas that your Organizational is facing today and then how to work through these so as to respond to the rapidly changing markets and diminishing resources. It’s areas of focus:

With the types of offering in HOCA we are looking at the roots of organizations values, build the interactions and strengthen the connecting parts that build a strong ‘network effect’ in relationships; explore the more emerging practices and seek to build the Enterprise Capabilities that place innovation and knowledge as the ‘beating’ heart of your organization.

Agility Innovation Specialists

Everything we want to do is 100% focused on innovating!  Bringing agility, flexibility, adaptability and learning into the innovation equation. We provide the pathways to your future innovation growth through critical focal points of any necessary value creation.

Agility’s primary role is to support and extend innovation, in thinking and developing the capabilities and capacities, to match the client’s ambition and goals, by providing a real depth of innovation insight and advice.

“Our objectives are to identify promising business opportunities, develop innovation expertise and competencies, create value and grow competitive and profitable businesses 100% focused on our innovative support to you”

Agility Innovation Specialists aim is to offer a real “intensity in innovation” at its core.

Then I have broken down my posting on innovation thinking onto four sites.

I took this decision, not to make my life extra complicated, which it partly does, but to focus specifically on critical areas of innovation focus. Innovation thinking is diverse and I felt there was a place, space and need to separate my thinking to allow it to go deeper or wider.

Paul4innovating

The ‘flagship’ of my innovation posting world is this site you are on:

This I launched into blogs and posts in August 2010 and is nearing 500 posts which have built up an amazing library of innovation views, advice, solutions and exploratory work. Some of these I’m really proud of, others were attempts to shift conversations or simply the outlet for my innovation ‘rants’ or passions.  I ‘house’ my blogging intent here, describe my own innovation journey and provide my collection of insights and thinking.

So this is my ‘core’ blog for “building the DNA of innovation” one that is allowing me to wander far and wide, as I see innovation as a living, evolving area of management, discipline, and knowledge. You have to stay open to change, ready to shape as well as rework what know that is in within our existing work, experiences, and activities. I continue to shape and evolve myself, as innovation management is certainly a “living thing.”

Innovation fitness dynamics

This has been the hardest dedicated site to work with. I have been working away on building a methodology for building innovation capability, capacity, and competencies for a number of years. It seems in permanent beta. This blog is about offering you a pathway towards achieving your own innovation fitness dynamics. The end goal of your journey is simply “the greater fitness you can achieve in innovation capability the more it can equate to a new value creation“.

There is, again a journey story, the nine stages to pass through for building innovation fitness and critically how innovation capital becomes the important area of exploration and exploiting. It currently has about 70 posts in the site related to this building of capability and capacity to innovation, through a designed approach to how you can achieve innovation fitness.

Innovation Ecosystems

This is a collaborative site I share with Jeffrey Phillips from Ovo Innovation. This is actually our fourth substantive collaboration together but this time we decided to turn our thinking into a regular viewpoint as the subject is presently evolving before us. We are entering the world of innovation ecosystems where broader, more complex innovation challenges, through greater collaborations can be achieved.

This site includes our thoughts on what makes up innovation ecosystems and the changes these can offer us in innovation opportunity. What is explored is ecosystems, the delivery mechanisms of platforms along with other collaborative methods and push towards the new need of today, to deliver a seamless total solution that provides customers what they are constantly asking for, to solve their needs and give them greater engagement and experiences.

This thinking is driven by a need for new products and services and experiences, otherwise, we believe customers will continue to turn away from discrete, disconnected products and services, increasingly over time. Shaping and introducing new innovation ecosystems is not easy but it has enormous potential to transform competition and in my view, it is ushering in the new innovation era and providing the principles of this shift taking place.

Guide4innovating

Advocating the practice and understanding of innovation

This is my recently launched site, in March 2017, dedicated to providing and advocating innovation advice to individuals, and innovation teams. The starting point is “Building a strong advocacy practice” and providing a learning platform, dedicated to personal innovation learning journeys.

My worry continues, even with all the insights and advice out there on innovation, that it continues to flounder. Innovation still gets treated often as an add-on, often overridden, to the more established practices within organizations.  Innovation does need a different mindset, metrics, and operational practice to be able to yield its true potential.

I have thought for some time about the advocacy of innovation, turning my intent into purpose and positioning, by becoming a more dedicated source of essential knowledge for innovators as a guide, mentor, and catalyst for accelerating performance. Although it is early days for a dedicated site, it has been a significant part of my innovation practice for years. all I am doing is giving it a more dedicated focus for clients to visit, decide and then engage with me.

Innovation Advocacy needs strong guidance.  As I would like to be positioned as a “go to” trusted authority that can influence, argue, advocate new directions, and provide clear options for change, I can push the ‘edges’ of today’s status quo, perhaps be your required catalyst to trigger ideas or offer different insights.

Many executives engaged in innovation are time-starved. They are constantly reacting to daily events, focusing and fixing short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior. My intent is to help reduce this pressure to constantly advance and stay alerted to changing innovation practices. So in my own limited way, with those that want to engage and explore the ‘richness’ within innovation my intent is to help them in their innovation acceleration purpose.

In summary

So these are my innovation playpens or sandboxes. I also often write and contribute to many other innovation businesses in different media channels, specifically for innovation thought leadership. The combined effect of my work has been where this activity has been consistently voted in the top innovation knowledge providers since 2011, something I am incredibly proud to have achieved

I enjoy the returns this provides, in awareness, in engagements or leading through to different offerings, speaking, advising, in exchanges and deepening the contacts that I have gained in the years since I started in the innovation space, that was 2001/02, when innovation come clearly into focus as my path to pursue when I lived in Singapore. It has taken on a life of its own ever since.

I certainly believe I can contribute to the wider innovation community that we are all part of, to support the innovation activities we all need to undertake. Through my advising, coaching, writing and mentoring on innovation, as well as through my ongoing consulting and advisory work I attempt to offer a broad innovation service. My aim is to stimulate others to gain fresh insights and knowledge from these collaborative exchanges and explorations through innovation. Each engagement continues to equally grow my own understanding constantly.

I hope by having this multiple channels available, does give you a real value to explore and engage more with me, as each channel attempts to provide answers to your innovation needs to seek out advancement and different insights in the practice of innovation management.

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The post Covering Innovation My Way first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have written about the new innovation era in 2017 made up of higher levels of needed collaboration, where platforms, ecosystems and customer experience understanding become increasingly central.

I felt I needed to provide a more dedicated perspective on these in a collaboration with my established sparing partner Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation in our website of Ecosystems4innovators.

We do stand at the cusp of a new innovation era but where do you stand?

We need to push well beyond our existing core of (existing) innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design that recognizes the “core” lies at the edges of discovery.

The tenet of each organization in the past has been in protecting its core.

This is changing as the very core is changing to adapt to more volatile conditions, changing landscapes and more disruption. The core is not so much in what we know or own but in what we can learn from all that surrounds our core and this is increasingly found at the edges and externally.

The edge is our new emerging adaptive core

The new core can only be found at the edge, the customer edge. The customer is critical, they are absolutely essential to any innovation. If their needs are not fully understood, to turn the present fuzziness from not fully understanding their needs and unmet needs into opportunity to grow our business, you are at a real disadvantage today.

We need to really engage and have a real depth of understanding of the customer, their needs, their individual journey, by discovering and engaging with them constantly at all their current touch points and experiences of what they are wanting to do, that is different from today and this comes from new combinations.

We are rapidly appreciating the combination effect of technology, the data exchanges, and the analytics we gain from this, the insights and discoveries. The combination effect is changing the starting point of innovation, it is not beginning in idea generation found inside the building, and it is discovery found outside brought in, to then turn into potentially commercial ideas.

The world of discovery is rapidly opening up through software and technology solutions

There is a host of digital solutions that can bring discovery and insight into our innovation thinking.We have a growing selection of innovation software all looking far more at the “edge” to then bring this into the new core.

For example we can automatically identify trends and technologies that might shape our world, we can scan different corporate environments by applying a more disciplined radar scanning approach, we can capture more inspirations and ideas “on the go” through all our mobile options, scanning, sending and collecting in dedicated ‘idea’ repositories.

We have multiple choices of collaborative platforms, we can quickly mount crowdsourcing campaigns, validate different concepts and prototypes, have corporate idealization platforms, construct road maps that can steer discovery, technology, resources and ideas so as to ‘quickly’ translate these into a portfolio of options to judge and decide.

We can collaborate in ecosystems of mutual understanding, working to a desired end or range of new solutions, we have multiple platforms to leverage and work through. We have data inflows, analytic solutions, and insights, all crowding in on us to deliver sometimes overwhelming choices. The ability to reorganize differently becomes paramount to seizing the new potential that lies at the edges of external discovery.

No, our discovery side is so rich in possibility yet we often stay stuck in our existing core.Why?

I can liken it to an old heart, ticking away but not as capable of a great amount of real exertion as it used to be. It has had multiple bypasses, an odd heart attack and plenty of emergency interventions. We need a transformation, a new beating heart of innovation possibilities, recognizing these as continued infusions, becoming the essential (blood) flow that feeds the innovation heart. It has never been as healthy as today, of being able in providing a constant flow of possibilities that circulate and provide the new innovation oxygen.

Forget the past reliance

The old concept of a complete reliance on internally thinking, of “we have the best ideas and understanding” are totally out of date. Believing our growth is simply being reliant on internal product and service extension is failing to move this growth needle apart from limited short-term gains. We can’t rely on simply ‘tweaking’ the existing core anymore. We need to think differently. We need to be utterly outwardly orientated to all of the customer and market dynamics and it is through technology capture we can begin to translate these into new innovation opportunities.

So the edge will radically begin to transform the core

To become more aggressive and combat the disruptive forces at work all around us we must go to the edge. The edge can be still made up of products, services, and market opportunities but we need to consider the underlying forces that are at work within this and these lie outside our own domain of physical building, experience or our existing techniques to exploit the known.

We need to find the unknown, we need to pick up on the weak signals we can only find at the edges and begin to build a very different institutional innovation set of capabilities.

Thinking at the edge can be very transforming.

Edges require different practices from the core; they, over-time impact the core, hence why we need to begin to think through institutional innovation change to accommodate this leading from the edge.

The value of considering platforms and ecosystems within this redesign allows you to accelerate outside learning, leverage the knowledge available across a broader community and can deliver internally new understanding and knowledge in areas where the core lacks, or is inadequately set up in expertise.

What was the internal competence of knowledge inside the organization is becoming increasingly an inhibitor. It only contains the core of the existing business; it does not allow you to tap into opportunities of tomorrow in new, openly shared ways.

Collaborations across organizations can defray the cost; it limits risk but encourages experiment. You achieve ways to gains quickly differently learning opportunities and connect with different areas of specialization not found within the one organization.

A different understanding of stocks and flows that come from our edges.

Today it is not “stocks of your knowledge” as these rapidly lose value, it is the “flows of all knowledge” and these come increasingly within the relationships you form at the edges and platforms and ecosystems can accelerate these flows and leverage knowledge and discovery.

We do need to re-conceive innovation – our new core is found at the edges if growth is important to you. It is how you apply all that is potentially available to you today, to leverage and learn what is valued and needed becomes the critical investment time, you need to put into the discovery of the edge and all it can mean to your existing core.

We simply need to transform our framing and much of this is outside not within. Have you made this recognition that your core is at increasing risk unless you discover the edges that will transform everything you do and you will want to protect as your new connected intelligent core highly connected to the outside world?

We can explore this more if you are interested?

The post We are pushing away from the old innovating core first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I continue to read and explore as much of the thought leadership on innovation, it continually points to a change in how we approach innovation.We need to embrace this need for change.

I have written about the new innovation era in 2017 made up of higher levels of needed collaboration, where platforms, ecosystems and customer experience understanding become increasingly central. We need to push well beyond our existing core of innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design.

We are pushing further away from the old core.

The tenet of each organization in the past has been in protecting its core. This is changing as the very core is changing to adapt to more volatile conditions, changing landscapes and more disruption. The core is not so much in what we know or own but in what we can learn from that surrounds our core and this is increasingly found at the edges and externally.

Let me explain

The customer is critical, they are becoming central to any innovation, and they are our need to fully understand, to turn the fuzziness into opportunity. We need to start constantly at understanding the customer, their needs, their individual journey by discovering and engaging with them. We are rapidly appreciating the combination effect of technology, the data exchanges, and the analytics we gain from this. The combination effect is changing the starting point of innovation, it is not beginning in idea generation found inside the building, and it is discovery found outside brought in, to then turn into potentially commercial ideas. These can only be found at the edge, the customer edge.

The old concept of internally thinking of growth being reliant on internal product and service extension is failing to move this growth needle apart from limited short-term gains. We can’t rely on simply ‘tweaking’ the existing core anymore. We need to think differently

Scale, scope, and speed are becoming dominate in all we need to think through

To become more aggressive and combat the disruptive forces at work all around us we must go to the edge. The edge can be still made up of products, services, and market opportunities but we need to consider the underlying forces that are at work within this and these lie outside our own domain of physical building, experience or our existing techniques to exploit the known.

We need to find the unknown, we need to pick up on the weak signals we can only find at the edges and begin to build a very different institutional innovation set of capabilities.

The value of the three horizons comes into play here even more as an innovating force of change

Horizon 2 and especially horizon 3 are exploring the edges; they should be set up for discovery, for experimenting and learning.

Horizon thinking goes well beyond “just” internal thinking and building a portfolio, it needs to be extended into understanding its growing role in platform and ecosystem design.

As we think beyond the one entity we are moving from the existing products and service in horizon 1, to building a new platform constellation of connected products and services in horizon 2, and looking to form a network of ecosystems to explore these emerging edges in horizon 3. I will be exploring this connecting the three horizons into platform and ecosystem thinking further, at a later time.

Edges, if chosen well become eventually the new core – they give fresh perspective

We need to think about scalable learning, we need to quickly translate potential scope and deliver understanding at new speeds that our present core can’t cope with. The present core is designed for exploitation, for efficiencies and effectiveness and it relies on predictability.

The edge is the opposite; it needs constantly exploring, adjusting, learning and experimenting. Yet this cannot be left to ad hoc design, it needs this institutional design. It functions differently than the core, it requires the dual management practice often discussed around the solutions within the design of ambidextrous organizations. It ‘pulls in’ the understanding

Deloitte Centre for the Edge

I constantly find Deloitte’s thinking as leading edge. Often to absorb this thinking can take time and the appropriate conditions can come later. That is thinking at the edge so you draw in the understanding and this becomes more central to your own core. Deloitte’s often have this impact on me.

They have written about innovating at the edge for some time. They argue an edge opportunity has four distinct characteristics that differentiate.

In the short-term– an edge requires minimal investment to initiate and the edge has to have the potential to grow the pie.

In the longer-term – an edge aligns with the long-term disruptive shifts in the market and has the potential to transform the core.

The design principles of the Edge offered by Deloitte as a framework.

GE, for example, is taking Predix from the cloud to the edge.

Predix is the GE operating system for the Industrial Internet, has been opened up as a platform for outside companies to write apps, have access to collect and harvest data, as well as have access and use of all the tools available for the data collected in the cloud to be analyzed on this Predix platform. GE recently recognized and decided to place machine apps anywhere, literally at the edge of any networks or systems on devices, on controllers, in positioning this analysis capability as a network gateway or router, ultimately connecting back to the cloud.

This change in thinking actually takes innovation to the edge, it delivers knowledge to the customer who has invested in the machine. It changes the relationships, alters the dynamics of managing. Can this thinking of data, platforms, ecosystems and relationships with the actual (human) customer be equally managed at the edge, I think so.

This can give ‘edge understanding’ by each device, by each interaction, by what needs to be completed. The application of thinking at the edge is where you can gain insights faster. Where you can run programs faster, adapt them to local environments and exchanges, develop dialogues by running a quick analysis on or close to the machine or the person using the machine themselves.

As GE claim in their case “the edge is the place where the cloud meets the customer environment”. You can then get a better prediction on the spot, you can make needed personal corrections and over time the machine has the capability to learn over time what is optimal, what is needed to be completed, what will help optimize the process.

So the edge can begin to transform the core

Thinking at the edge can be very transforming, can you imagine the Smart Phone, or other smart devices being the edge, where the exchange takes place, the knowledge collected and shared and the relationship forms to design the innovation future, as close as you can get, in the consumer’s hands. It is a reality already, we just have to reconceive this differently.

Edges require different practices from the core; they, over-time impact the core, hence why we need to begin to think through institutional innovation change to accommodate this leading from the edge.

The value of considering platforms and ecosystems within this redesign allows you to accelerate outside learning, leverage the knowledge available across a broader community and can deliver internally new understanding and knowledge in areas where the core lacks or is inadequately set up in expertise. It contains the core of the existing business; it allows you to tap into opportunities of tomorrow in new shared ways. It defrays the cost, it limits risk, it gains ways to quickly learn and connect with different areas of specialization not found within the one organization.

Today it is not “stocks of knowledge” as these rapidly lose value, it is the “flows of knowledge” and these come increasingly within the relationships you form at the edges and platforms and ecosystems can accelerate these flows and leverage knowledge and discovery.

We do need to reconceive innovation- our new core is found at the edges if growth is important to you. It is how you apply all that is potentially available to you today, to leverage and learn what is valued and needed.

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The post The future innovation core lies at the edge. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I wrote this recently in a post entitled “Bringing New Innovation is Stretching the Mind“. It opened with this view:

“There is a profound shift taking place, relating to innovation. Increasingly we are seeing a growing dissatisfaction on the impact that innovation is having; in growth, in returns, in market and customer impact. There is a search for new solutions.

One of the implications is this growing recognition that innovation is rarely succeeding in isolation but it is growing on a more highly dependent type of complementary innovation, a collaborative network, working around this new emerging innovation to deliver a more connected, radical experience, requiring innovation ecosystem management.

This dramatic change we will all be undergoing will have a significant impact on each organization’s innovation management design as it will require new connected thinking, built upon a substantial network of collaborations and partnerships

I believe innovation has been in the need for change for some time and 2017 will be the transforming year.

I sense innovation will change dramatically in 2017 as we are coming very quickly to a refraction point in how it’s going to be managed. The underlying change is the contribution of technology and digital, enabling the opening up of our world of possibility, through ecosystems and platforms that provide the collaborative base for a new, complex, diverse set of connections.

This ‘connected world’ can deliver a new higher’ value set’ of innovation solutions, increasingly based more on understanding the customer’s demand for a seamless connected experience, through a greater set of contact points and the increasing levels of data and analytics gained from theses ongoing engagements

Innovation has for a long time been struggling to gain a new growth momentum for many.

For many years there have only been many disappointing incremental steps in how we innovate. Now innovation will require significant changes as the digital transformation momentum takes hold. This transforming will require a radical overhaul of the innovation management process as we will increasingly be operating in this different world of ecosystems and platforms.

Today I believe we are on the cusp of a new innovation era and it is a powerful set of enablers that are combining to bring us to this point. My next post will lay those out but before this but before we move forward we should look back, to reflect on the many aspects of change that all are part of the radical redesign that will be required.

I have argued consistently innovation required changing. I want to recap here before we move on

There have been many potential innovation change points I felt needing challenging over the last few years. Below I have shown links into previous posts of mine that are part of this innovation transforming journey we all need to undertake. They are here as prompters into our thinking about change.

Each of these is a link to the post itself. If you feel inclined take a dip, if not stay dry.

Bringing New Innovation Together Is Stretching the Mind, Posted on October 25, 2016

The New Innovation Need: Organizing within a Networks of Collaborators, Posted on October 3, 2016

Developing a new framework for risk and innovation. Posted on May 19, 2016

Establishing a new mentality for innovation Posted on April 28, 2016

The New Innovation Value Chain Perhaps?, Posted on September 25, 2015

Moving towards a new innovation service model, Posted on August 12, 2015

A new innovation perspective – change to fluidity, Posted on June 29, 2015

Where are the new feeding grounds of innovation? Posted on January 4, 2015

As new digital technology dawns for innovation. Posted on November 22, 2014

Redesigning the organizations middle for a new innovation shape., Posted on August 15, 2014

Seeking a new middle management’s innovation perspective. Posted on August 20, 2013

Reducing confusion, promoting diffusion of new knowledge in innovation. Posted on November 9, 2012

A new raison d’être for HRM through Innovation. Posted on July 30, 2012

Making the first crucial steps towards innovation renewal. Posted on September 21, 2011

What are the new paradigms in innovation? Posted on August 26, 2011

Impact investing for social good through new innovation- a growing momentum? Posted on July 27, 2011

Renewing Innovation through the Social Innovation Agenda. Posted on July 22, 2011

Learning to absorb new knowledge for innovation. Posted on July 12, 2011

The forming of new structures- the business ecosystem of innovation federations. Posted on July 5, 2011

The new extended innovation funnel. Posted on April 13, 2011

The beginning of a new era for innovation, truly global. Posted on February 13, 2011

Welcome to the brave new world of innovation ecosystems. Posted on February 12, 2011

Orchestrating the new dynamics of innovation fitness. Posted on February 7, 2011

The intervening years between the first “burst of 2011 / 12 and 2015 / 16 were collaborative ones. A short recap on these.

The period of 2012 to 2014 was a far from quiet time, it kept reinforcing my belief that innovation needed to change. It helped me make up the arguments towards a new way of thinking about innovation but through a collaborating relationship with Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation really advanced this thinking.

We initially concluded innovation required a common framework This has included “collaborative-innovation-reference-framework” (paper one) that argues for the establishment of  the-need-for-a-common-framework-model-for-innovation-management (paper two) and they developed this as a Collaborative Innovation Reference Framework. It can be found at http://cirf.pbworks.com and explores the necessary business architecture, provides a detailed innovation reference framework and examines the different innovation types through a unique lens.

Then we recognized a lack of an organizing around an integrated innovation framework, so we went into the second substantive collaboration was around the development of the Executive Innovation Work Mat with the “innovation-executive-work-mat-initial-whitepaper here. In a series of blog posts, articles and an initial Whitepaper, this fills a vital  and often “missing gap” in innovation. Often the leadership at the top of our organization fails to fully engage in innovation, it remains unclear of its pivotal role in drawing together the vision, mission, and goals of the organization and achieving a strong and clear alignment to the innovation activity that can deliver on these strategic intents. The use of this Executive Innovation Work Mat is designed to resolve this “gap”.

The third collaboration we had together was focusing on “the Interplay Surrounding Innovation” where through two whitepapers ( the-critical-interplay-among-innovation-business-models-and-change and why-innovators-need-a-new-change-paradigm)  and a series of blog posts we provided a focus on innovation that requires an interplay with business models and systemic change as essential in today’s more volatile and disruptive world. We argued that innovation almost always impacts three constituents: the customer, the competitors or markets they are in and the innovator themselves. These all have high levels of impact on business models and increasingly an end result of an innovation, regardless of its initial outcome and can become a business model innovation in themselves.

Our latest collaboration is presently around innovation ecosystems and all that it connects into for innovation

So we come to this our fourth substantive collaboration here. We are entering the world of innovation ecosystems where broader, more complex innovation challenges, through greater collaborations can be achieved. So this site is dedicated to building the arguments here on  https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com . We decided to ‘house’ this in a dedicated blog posting site as it can forge a new direction and momentum for innovation to travel, dedicated to the changes occurring.

So a new innovation era is upon us, do you recognize it or simply want to stay ignoring it?

2017 will be a defining year for innovation, well actually it will be a transforming one. Both Jeffrey and I believe innovation needs to enter a new era of prosperity and for me, that requires this recognition we are moving towards a new innovation model, one highly connected, and collaborative and this will come about in 2017 for most organizations to embrace.

The big change will come increasingly around the growing participation upon digital platforms and the being involved in multiple ecosystems of solution providers, all leveraging technology and highly digital. It’s transforming potential will be how it will increasingly connect into the customer needs in collaborative ways, to provide greater seamless experiences.

The ability to form new networks, to collaborate, to connect into others on common cause through technology working through platforms and ecosystems is going to revolutionize the way we think, and certainly manage innovation in the future.

Welcome to the new innovation era, coming your way in 2017.

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The post Why We Are Entering A New Innovation Era In 2017 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How and where does innovation fit will clearly depend on this transforming effect. We are fairly clear that incremental innovation is just not cutting through to give the types of growth expected. There are many outside our existing organizations, standing impatiently at the gates, waiting to come in and take over with market breaking concepts through different business models .

We need to transform, be disrupted or certainly re-imagine and this is where knowing your ecosystem comes in.

Our existing organization needs to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical change. To meet different challenges, to be highly adaptive it needs to begin to organize around ecosystems to deliver on a vision that recognizes it has to be part of a greater collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected world.

Today larger organizations are having to face the stark truth.

Either they adapt or die. Technology offers them the transforming means but can they, as leaders, take their people with them? It needs bold leadership. The structure of our  business today cannot afford to try and stand alone, it needs to extend beyond its traditional supporting partners, it needs to learn to collaborate with  a whole new range of partners, even some previously competitors, to radically adapt to the different world we live in.

Yet  moving from the present position of offering specific products and services into a collaborating one, where they are part of an ecosystem of partners, that are ‘connecting  experience’ as against discrete products building upon the delivering of totally different value propositions for the ultimate consumer, is a highly daunting challenge. It ‘upends’ much, if not all, of how our business organizations have been organized around, mostly within themselves, it is needing radical change. It calls for bold management to instigate such a transformation.

Ecosystems that produce ultimately new business models often rest on a large capacity for agility, openness, and mutual dependency, sharing and appreciating the values amongst a peer group that all relate to this ‘need for change’ and buys into that collective vision outlined.

An ecosystem that is made up of a broad, diverse group of partners, who all value each other and where each can bring to a final set of solutions added value that has the combined potential to redefine new markets can be exciting and empowering. Ones that transforms current offerings within the participating organizations each contributing and working on a designated platform, pushing each other’s ‘edges’ of understanding, to radically alter the value proposition and deliver new customer experience. A tantalizing prospect, full of innovation

Network collaborators that work towards transforming current offerings within each of the participating organizations, each contributing their piece and working on a designated platform, pushing each other’s ‘edges’ of understanding, to radically alter the value proposition and deliver new customer experience.

Today we do have this  tantalizing prospect, full of innovation promise, well within our reach with today’s technology potential. We are living in a connected, constantly adapting, world where networks and relationships are the essential wiring connections we all need to construct.

Adapting to collaborating never fully in control can be unnerving.

In the past, we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process, they dictated the value chain and determined the end result they felt was the right one, not anymore.

Today you can argue differently, why what you see as needed is not the best managed alone, it needs a collaborative effort, as the final arbitrator is the consumer and they have increasingly demanding needs.  As any idea or concept evolves the more you ‘flesh this out’, it changes by this fresh input, energy, and understanding but it needs greater engagement and collaboration to meet these increased customer experience demands.

The Status Quo is history

The promise needs to be clear, it allows for far more breakthrough innovation, greater challenging of the existing status quo to gain that substantial competitive advantage but it will constantly take organizations out of their existing comfort zones. It needs a very different level of focused leadership that see’s the real value of a connected future and is willing to drive through the changes this will take and the risks it can mean. The status quo offers no hiding place.

Setting about changing any status quo is tough, seeing something totally different, in a larger context and in a more sharing partnership calls for radical shifts in thinking. We have to develop those “sense and respond” capabilities, build a greater capacity to “read and react” far more, and then we need to “learn and leverage” what this all means in new potential by placing this into a context that has greater value than the existing ways.

The end result we are needing to deliver is increasingly calling for constructing innovating solutions in distinctly different highly connected ways, that are built from contributions from a broader ecosystem of vested parties, into solutions that offer really different, radical new customer experiences they really can value and meets their needs.

If we think ecosystems, we need to think differently.

Think carefully through any move to join innovation ecosystems, they do have potentially a high, immensely attractive return if managed well, and highly valuable to the participants; yet they are nearly always disruptive to the existing markets and require immense focus and resourcing to make a transformation. Yet the prize can be a sustaining competitive position unable to be matched due to this ecosystem lock-in of vested parties

I certainly believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery. Platforms, strategic partnerships, new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and ecosystems are the organizing environment to enact these.

Innovation ecosystems are clearly not for everyone but this type of innovation thinking around ecosystems and platform thinking will be a growing source of disruption across many, if not all, of our industries as well as the organizing means to tackle those complex societal problems needing radical solutions.

Welcome to the transforming world of Innovation Ecosystems

To this end, a new dedicated site discussing ecosystems, platforms and our need in forming seamless customer experiences has been created in a further collaboration with Jeffrey Phillips. The collaborating purpose is described here in this opening post that “innovation is not working anymore” and then Jeffrey picks up on the rising expectations of customers in “using ecosystems to build seamless experiences”  A further post on extending the seamless experience thinking  of “widen the aperture, narrow the focus” has just been published also.

We are at the early stages of discussing the changes coming our ‘innovating way’ on this new site. Why not come and join us as we travel this journey. A new innovation era is at hand and we all have the wish to understand it. Innovation ecosystems become essential.

START HERE:

https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com/

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The post The New Innovation Need: Organizing within a Networks of Collaborators first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Jeffrey Phillips of Ovo Innovation and I wrote a White Paper, we called our foundation document, on “Accelerating or inhibiting innovation – understand your role for innovation success”. You can read the full paper here

We strongly believe there is a real Innovation leadership gap

My last article “Developing talent to drive innovation” was questioning the spending of new funds on developing talent for innovation, unless the organization and its leadership is not clear on what it is specifically looking for, or how it is prepared to back their words with specific actions beyond ‘just’ new funding levels, then this might not be money well spent.

Developing talent for innovation requires commitment across a whole range of structure, creating conditions, adapting or designing new systems, processes and providing clear governance. Senior executives need to understand innovation is often far more frustrating than most executives imagine it to be and a awful lot of hard work. Innovation is very demanding but the rewards can be spectacular in new growth, improved earning and organizations ‘sense of pride and identification’.

There are no best practice solutions to fall back on for your specific organizations to seed and cultivate innovation, a trap many fall into. You don’t switch innovation on or off to meet short term needs, it is certainly not faddish, innovation is simply, a or the, core driver of growth, future performance and your valuation barometer.

The innovation buck in responsibility for innovation is firmly at the top.

The innovation buck stops at the top, it will not work in just being ‘pushed down’ the organization. It is the role senior executives  must fill for achieving a greater innovation success.

If the leadership of the organization fail to formally integrate innovation into the core of any strategic- management agenda where it ‘constantly runs through’ the decision making process innovation will remain disappointing in its impact. Our leaders need to explicitly lead and manage, they need to close the gap between aspiration and execution where everyone up and down the organization can feel more confident that innovation is a core focus and needs developing.

It is against this clear observation from our and many others research initiatives, that the place to focus is getting the leadership to fully understand their key role and engage in innovation, to make it a central core to their own destiny, in top and bottom results.

So our opening thoughts in the white paper on this leadership void.

Here’s a vital question to answer that will make a difference to your organization’s survival: which individual in your organization is most important for innovation success? Many people will argue it is the most creative person in the company, the individual with the best ideas. Others will argue that it is the person who can make the idea a reality.

Perhaps these answers are true in entrepreneurial companies or very small firms, but these responses aren’t true in larger organizations. In larger organizations we believe the CEO or another empowered senior executive is the most important person for innovation success, since they have the ability to:

• link innovation to strategy, and
• create focus, engagement and passion for innovation, and
• direct funds and resources to good innovation programs, and
• speed good ideas to market as new business models, products and services, and
•  ensure the processes and metrics exist so innovation is sustainable.

In mid-sized and large companies, leadership and engagement from CEOs and senior executives are vital to innovation success. What’s more, these leaders want innovation to happen, more consistently, more purposefully and with better result.

Not only do CEOs and executives want innovation, they demand innovation to drive organic growth, profits and create differentiation. We know this because you’ve made it clear. In survey after survey the vast majority of CEOs report that innovation is one of their top three priorities. Yet the gap between “saying and doing” indicates a gap between vision and implementation. The consequences of this gap are significant:

• Poor execution of innovation goals
• Failure to achieve strategic goals
• Limited organizational design to sustain innovation
• The growth of disbelief or cynicism when innovation isn’t pursued.

We also believe CEOs and senior executives play a vital role in the success or failure of innovation.

Unfortunately, those roles haven’t been well-defined. Since the roles are poorly defined, they are rarely well executed. It’s not enough for executives simply to demand more innovation – senior executives must demonstrate links between corporate strategy and the work of innovation, between their vision and the activities necessary to create new products and services and between their expectations and the actual culture of the organization.

Executives fail to fill this vital role when they:

• are unaware of the role,
• don’t understand the importance of their role,
• delegate the role to others who don’t have the power to execute the role, or
• under-perform in the role.

Understanding the importance of innovation, and the barriers that innovation will encounter, helps define key activities an innovation senior executive must undertake, and what he or she must do to fill the role effectively. This leads to an important question: if innovation is strategically important, and if engaged senior executives are critical to innovation success, what keeps executives from filling the role effectively?

There are a number of reasons why executives have difficulty filling an innovation leadership role,including:

• Lack of innovation experience
  • Concern about short-term financial reporting goals
  • Difficulty managing “important” versus “urgent” tasks
  • Difficulty converting their vision into reality
  • Lack trusted innovation tools and frameworks
  • Unaware of the level of resistance and inertia
  • Concerned about upsetting the status quo

Many senior executives lack innovation experience. They often move into their positions through excellent financial management, cost cutting or other demonstrated operational successes. Thus, they lack innovation experience and are unfamiliar with its methodologies, tools and frameworks and often have few trusted sources for well-tested methods and insights.

Innovation is especially challenging because it is so unfamiliar, so potentially disruptive and yet so important. Innovation requires change that can impact the status quo and disrupt the firm’s ability to achieve short-term financial goals. Only an engaged, committed senior executive can create a sustained innovation capability or discipline, yet many lack experience, tools and awareness of the importance of the role.

The seven essential capabilities for innovation leadership

Understanding the innovation environment critical to innovation success led us to identify seven essential capabilities that senior executives must provide in order to fill those roles effectively. These relate to skills, capabilities and the capacities for innovation to thrive.

These include:

• creating alignment,

• deploying trusted methods and tools,

• effective communication and engagement,

• empowering people, providing skills,

• refocusing attitudes, perspectives and rewards ,

• defining a corporate “governance” for innovation

Leaders can drive innovation through thoughtfully designing the strategic innovation framework.

This initial White Paper became the prelude to the Executive Innovation Work Mat. The Work Mat, which provides a unique examination of the executive’s role in innovation, it helps executives understand the vital role they must play for innovation to succeed, and provide a framework that companies can adopt to ensure linkages between strategy and innovation, innovation and capabilities, innovation and culture.

More can be read on this website to extend your understanding of the work mat, for example.

For innovation to really take hold and become a sustaining and systematic function, it is for the leadership of our organizations to become strategically engaged, by providing the framework, the guidance, the direction and necessary top management commitment to ‘make this happen.’

Lastly leaders in organizations, big or small, need a lot of help in working all of the implications through, believe me……and many others fed up with leaders disappointment when they fail to fully engage in strategic framing approaches and making the time and the commitments themselves !

The post The role senior executives must fill for innovation success first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

So the annual meeting in Davos is currently taking place. Those of us who are peering through the barbed wire trying to understand and pick up on current thinking by many of our global leaders are scratching our heads, wondering

We hope we can deepen our understanding of these trends, wanting Global leaders to turn their talking into real action and also be ready with applicable supporting  solutions or at least readying  ourselves for these possible changes. Our leaders do need help.

Listening and watching you do question who is actually tuned-in to the current trends or not. Oh yes, Davos is back full of conflicting signals and potential promises.

PwC have produced their annual global CEO survey (download here) and lead with this as the suggested conclusion from interviewing 1,344 CEO’s across 68 countries:

“The global economic recovery continues to be fragile, but with immediate pressures easing. CEO’s are feeling more optimistic and gradually switching from survival mode to growth mode.

As the latest PwC Annual Global CEO Survey shows, the changes they’re making within their organisations now have less to do with sheltering from economic headwinds and more to do with preparing for the future”

So how are CEO’s responding?  

“They feel there are more seismic shifts that loom on the horizon. CEO’s told PwC that three global trends – technological advances, demographic changes and shifts in economic power – would have a huge impact on their businesses over the next five years. And the interplay between them will be as significant as the trends themselves”

PwC view is organisations must overcome three particular challenges in their race to become fit for the future. They’ll need to harness technology to create value in totally new ways; capitalise on demographic shifts to develop tomorrow’s workforce; and, just as important, understand how to serve increasingly demanding consumers across the new economic landscape.

They go on and suggest “Quite simply, everything is now in flux – from where and how people live and work, to the wider social and political contexts in which companies interact with their stakeholders. These developments will create many new opportunities for innovation and growth. But to seize these opportunities, companies must be ready to radically reassess how they function.

In this new world, the very purpose of business– not just its practices – will come into question”

Yet this next part of the summary is the real challenge and key:

PwC suggest:“CEO’s recognise that as these trends unfold, the demands placed on them will increase exponentially.

1)  They will have to encourage innovation that’s both radical and methodical;

2)  Connect with employees and consumers who look, think or act like them;

3)  Experiment with new operating models while preserving existing efficiencies; and

4)  Deliver value without compromising on quality or integrity.

 In short, CEO’s will have to become hybrid leaders who are comfortable straddling two worlds – drawing on the best of the old while operating at the frontiers of the new.”

So how quickly will they react?

There is a short video introduction to this report from Dennis. M. Nalley, the Chairman of PwC Global Dennis. M. Nalley along with a recorded discussion from Davos. He poised the critical question of it is not any more “ if the CEO should act” but “how quickly they will react” to act upon these trends and challenges.

I sense the leaders of most of our business organizations are still caught, trapped and imprisoned in their existing business models. They are still behind their own self-imposed “barbed wire” still struggling to make these moves into new operating models and placing the increased emphasis on innovation.

Let’s hope we gain some ‘traction’ in the coming year.  Davos is back, the same “talking shop of lost promise” or somewhere where leaders regain courage to “act decisively”.  Time will tell.

The post When to Act? Davos is Back! first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.