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.

This concept caught my imagination and a number of important people in the Singapore authority the Economic Development Board , as well, as those responsible for providing the focal point in economic development where business, innovation and talent are nurtured. The “button and thread” concept was considered, partly for its simplicity in concept but its significant underlying value.

Regretfully the proposal died around the boardroom which was such a pity as it would have been years ahead of others. The idea was the more buttons you had connected, the more threads were created. It was through the integration of technologies and market creation, the missing ingredient is the means of designing them to help shape (and speed up) more effectively business evolution.

The idea was working on harnessing the intelligent use of the growing connections through better ‘adaptive’ agents to co-evolve, building connected relationships, adding to better judgement and decisions, positioning the organization into far more adaptive enterprise working in a thriving ecosystem.

At the time I wrote ““The existing dilemma is how to find, attract and build new sources of competitive positions within an innovative eco-system. This is how to set about and organize the environment to capitalize on the existing (and new) resources within a rapidly changing opportunity environment those investors will prefer to existing eco-systems?

Moving into Nodes and Networks

Recently I remembered this “buttons and thread” concept and if we replace this with “nodes and networks” it brings it right up to date.  The initial idea was well ahead of its time, to be honest I don’t think the technology or networking practices were yet in place to validate the concept but today it is totally different.

So ten years later what is different? The time has finally arrived

The question often asked is “as we embrace new ideas, new methods and new processes for innovation and for accelerating growth what’s going to hold them together for extracting and providing new value? So we seem to be moving from “buttons and threads” to “nodes and networks”

There are some exciting activities working on ecosystems, connections, harnessing people and their sources of knowledge to generate the potential for greater innovation activity.

As we achieve improved visualization-driven methods for analysis, and work through the methods and how they may be applied in the context of innovation ecosystems, it makes for a ‘sea change’ of our need in understanding. I’m only picking back up and re-learning and discovering some interesting areas of activity.

I’m going to summarize just a few

These are just the tip of the innovating iceberg that make this a very exciting time were innovation will evolve in dramatic new ways.

Open Data Institute launches global network of big data innovation nodes

The ODI was founded in London in December 2012 with the aim of incubating start-ups and researchers fostering innovation through the use of publicly available data sets like those that can be accessed via data.go.uk, a UK government-funded initiative to make over 9,000 data sets collected by public sector organisations available to the general public and research communities. Just three days ago this was described:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/29/web-inventor-open-data-institute-new-global-network

Just one year after its foundation in London, an organization created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt to stimulate economic, environmental and social innovation through a system of open data sharing and analysis, has announced rapid global expansion of its ambitions.

“We have borrowed from the design principles of the web itself to bring people and organizations together, and will use open data both to collaborate with each other, and as the primary output of the network,” Starks said, in a nod to ODI co-founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Internet while at CERN, The European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1989.

CEO Gavin Starks said: “I have been amazed at the energy and enthusiasm of people looking to align around a global network of ODIs … the speed at which we have been able to collaborate, and the shared thinking about the approach and the scale of the potential.

We have borrowed from the design principles of the web itself to bring people and organizations together, and will use open data both to collaborate with each other, and as the primary output of the network.”

Berners-Lee and Shadbolt described their motivation for the ODI: “We recognised there was a great opportunity to enhance transparency, improve efficiency, and create social, environmental and economic value.

The best way that open becomes the new default is demand: from businesses and organizations, both public and private, from individuals and corporations. There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

The newly announced open data network will extend those efforts to 13 new regions and cities, where organizations and joint-ventures between universities, NGOs and the public sector will come together to form “nodes” – research and innovation hubs facilitating research and collaboration on technologies using large publicly licensed data-sets.

ODI nodes will also be set up in Moscow, Buenos Aires and Gothenburg, though for the time being these three will act to communicate and amplify open data case studies in their respective regions. All thirteen nodes will sign up to an ODI charter, which codifies the organisation’s open source principles.

“The Open Data Institute – the first organization of its kind – grew out of our belief in the power of open data to foster innovation, drive economic growth and create prosperity,” said Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and one of the leading proponents of what some are calling the “open data movement.

It will help embed an open data culture in communities, and bring the economic benefits of new and innovative data-led businesses that will help the UK compete in the global race.”

http://www.innovation-ecosystems.org/nodes/

“Following the principles of open innovation, IEN invites partners – for data federation, for analysis, and for sharing best practices. A stated research objective, membership fee, or in-kind contribution, and participation agreement are required.

Integrated in their focus on applied studies about innovation ecosystems, IEN collaborators include academic and professional researchers, drawing on diverse research disciplines including network analysis, information visualization, semantic data integration and mining, regional development, technology transfer, and knowledge management”.

http://www.arch.umd.edu/research/University%20Center/innovation.cfm

“In summary, we are working on linking innovation, industries, the workforce and the “buzz” at the county level in a highly visual, interactive and dynamic network model, along with a suite of analytical tools that are clearly grounded in the appropriate social science theory and a user interface that is accessible to researchers, practitioners and policy-makers interested in driving economic development through innovation.

A second addition that will be incorporated into the Maryland application is the integration of UMD’s Science and Technology Innovation Knowledge-Base (STICK) framework and methodology.  STICK uses a multi-level data organization framework and advanced data mining techniques to model more subtle structures of ideas and influence in the innovation network through citations, publications, events and the like.”

STICK has the potential to integrate a measure of the intangible nature of innovation – the “buzz” so to speak – into the overall model.

http://stick.ischool.umd.edu/

The value of understanding your Ontology and its relationships

“Ontology has been long used to model the nature of being and their relations. The rise of ontology building with standardized language and semantic web platform made it possible to build scalable ontologies, and conduct further analysis and inference.

This study proposed and designed ontologies to model IT innovations and represent their relations with industry and academia. To understand the formulation of innovation and how it gets popular, this study also proposed to study the evolution of IT ontologies.

We made two main contributions here: first, we designed the ontology to model IT innovation and main factors that influence its popularity. Second, we view ontologies as a model that evolve dynamically when new factors joining in and proposed the study of ontology evolution”

Finally we have growing networks and nodes for social innovation

http://www.socialinnovationexchange.org/network-nodes

“As a global network SIX offers value by bringing together the collective wisdom of the social innovation field, and by creating an eco system where everyone can play their part in bringing the field of social innovation forward.

Through SIX social innovators come together and share their experience, know- how and expertise in order to spread best practice and help each other overcome challenges. The SIX global community has become an invaluable resource for its members.

What is a SIX node?

As SIX has proved, networks for learning, sharing and collaborating can play an important role in developing a mature ecosystem for social innovation to be effective. All over the world, regional clusters of social innovation activity are developing.

A SIX node takes the global work of SIX, scales it down, and applies it to a smaller geographical area. The value of the nodes is that they enable people to network and collaborate with people closer to home on challenges that are relevant in their region, but by being part of something global simultaneously, it helps them keep a wider perspective.

A node can provide a collective identity and impetus to connect with people in the region that they would not otherwise make time to connect to”

So a new era perhaps, a new world order around understanding what offers value?

New approaches to learning that emphasize the connecting of the right knowledge nodes and navigating the network to build content with context will change the nature of innovation.

The shift to building the new innovation ecosystems for learning and forming new relationships between investors, people and companies will perhaps channel the flow of talent, information and financial resources in different ways than we measure performance today.

As one organization put it I came across in this quick review: “Leading corporate innovation executives, business network orchestrators, policy analysts, technology transfer experts and academics are invited to participate in co-creating new understanding and visions!” Let’s agree on that, as it is sorely needed!

You do need a fine needle to thread all that is going on connecting so many buttons

I’m only beginning to pick back up my needle to ‘thread the buttons’ in better ways, so as to understand all the rapidly changing ways innovation might be generated.

To finish with a powerful statement from the interview between Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt:

“There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

Let’s explore this dramatic shift taking place in generating innovation further at another time.

The post A time for new innovating buttons and threads first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.