I have a friend when he is presented with something that stops him and makes him really have to think he would say “intriguing”. This joining forces is one of those ‘intriguing” moments for me.

Capgemini have been leading much within the transformation process around technology with all things digital, they have been pioneering and offering some significant advice around transitions. It seems they are ‘pulling’ in the innovation promise with this acquisition to add to their solution offerings.

I wrote about their Applied Innovation Exchange announcement recently and how I felt it was thin, a more “a tenuous toe in the water” and I finished the post with “I hear you Capgemini on the intent…but “there is a real need to put some ‘red meat’ on the bone here,” and that is what they seem to be doing in a “blink of an eye,” with this Fahrenheit 212 acquisition, or at least allow the tissues to be grafted on and take hold, so it can challenge where and how innovation transforms the business process.

David meets and marries a Goliath.

On first look at this acquisition you see a 180,000 people consulting firm, operating in 40 countries with nearly EUR12 billion in revenue, adding a 60 to 70 people innovation and design consultancy, operating in the US and less so in the UK and you wonder, what simply happens with such a move? Will one simply dwarf and overwhelm the other, will the small influence the big, in the positive ways both have as the initial intent of this deal? I hope so.

I was reading the press release of Capgemini, the usual corporate speak, released for shareholders and stakeholders, nicely reassuring, sufficient to appease and appraise the stakeholders. Then compared this with the wonderful open letter written by the Fahrenheit team. They tell much of the divide that somehow has to be bridged. Let me explain or illustrate in the words from these releases.

According to Capgemini’s press release “Fahrenheit 212 will contribute its specialized capabilities for innovation strategy and consumer-centric design to the broader offerings of Capgemini Consulting. The move opens growth opportunities for both companies through their combined capabilities”

Now lets see why Fahrenheit 212 was and hopefully still is a cut apart from the rest in innovation, through the open letter they wrote on their” boldest move yet”.

“Innovation moves forward….but in the same blink it’s something bigger”

The open letter just tells a real story of passion, intent, a mixture of hope and excitement. Of course, many ventures have been dashed on the rocks of despair but at this moment of time this is the sort of message I want to hear coming from the acquired and also explaining the potential course of the new journey ahead..

Let me pick out a few

“Innovation isn’t merely driving change. It is undergoing big changes of its own”

Fahrenheit paints the picture that I believe is absolutely right in its timing and assessment:

“ Not long ago, innovation was an under-the-radar business activity. Everyone applauded when serendipity served up an occasional breakthrough. But few businesses were relying on innovation to keep them relevant and growing.

That’s all changing. With breakneck speed, forces of disruption, shifts in consumer expectations, erosion of barriers to entry and a vibrant startup movement have propelled innovation from the background to a position as one of the most important activities for any growth-minded business to get right”

“The consequences are big. Innovation is simply too important to be random anymore”

Moving from the past to the future

In this they provide the background to the change being undertaken in innovation at the moment and then they go on to clarify the reason for the decision to be acquired and why they think it makes sense for both to make a move.

“But for the innovation discipline to be truly effective today, we must empower our creative impetus with new capabilities. Capabilities like robust software development, supply chain expertise, unique access to emerging technology and data analytics – things a few steps beyond what innovation firms are asked to do today – will soon become core requirements in the way innovation is conceived and driven to market”

“This all points to a bolder future and a new set of requirements for the business of innovation consulting. Where success isn’t measured in mere possibility, but in big strategies and breakthrough ideas made real”

Marriage of shared intent

“For Fahrenheit 212’s part, it represents a way to leapfrog our competitive set and bring an entirely unique combined force to market. Individually and in aggregate, our new capabilities will drive the realization of innovations as powerfully as we’ve ignited them at the front end.

Overnight we’ll gain access to new ability to turn big ideas into not just prototypes, but enterprise level solutions. We’ll also plug into Capgemini’s global network of Applied Innovation Exchanges – 30 workspaces around the world for exploring emerging-technology led transformation in areas like retail innovation, internet of things, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

For our partners at Capgemini, linking up with Fahrenheit 212 represents a step toward their vision of redefining the way the consulting industry thinks and works. Bringing their world-class consulting and implementation practices to future-state problem solving and design.

Together we share a belief that solving for the challenges our clients will face in the future is only possible through the kind of visionary forward thinking that opens opportunities that aren’t yet in sight”

The combination has real potential if it is given the freedom to evolve but will it?

The words of Todd Rovak, the Managing Partner and CEO of Fahrenheit 212 offered these insights that give us the ‘glimpse’ into the future:

• Fahrenheit 212 fused design and development skills with a traditional management consultancy so they could assist clients well beyond identifying strong markets. By bringing creative and analytical capabilities together, Rovak said Fahrenheit can help clients unlock new spaces by identifying what existing assets to leverage and helping them design a brand strategy for the new market.
• The deal will additionally allow Fahrenheit to plug into Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchanges, 30 workspaces around the world where companies can immerse themselves in emerging technologies in areas like retail innovation, the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality and artificial intelligence. The Exchanges are also intended to help firms address the business disruptions confronting their industries.
• Fahrenheit 212 said the deal will enable the company to marry its creative impulse with an entirely new set of capabilities around robust software development, supply chain expertise, unique access to emerging technology and data analytics. “The ability to shape the future is only half the question,” Todd Rovak, Fahrenheit 212’s managing partner and CEO suggests “Being able to deliver the future in also vital.”
• The ability to combine innovation strategy and transformational thinking with enterprise-level implementation on a global scale is now a client mandate. Capgemini’s deep technology capabilities, resources and client relationships will steepen its trajectory and acceleration that would have been at a slower pace for both separately.

“Together within this sharing of a belief that solving for the challenges our clients will face in the future is only possible through the kind of visionary forward thinking that opens opportunities that aren’t yet in sight”.

Future-state problem solving and design is needed around innovation through technology

Capgemini seems to have a vision of redefining the way consulting industry thinks and works. It is bringing in global scale, leading consulting practices and the continuous implementation practices that I feel Capgemini have been developing. The Applied Innovation Exchange, recently announced by Capgemini has a great contributor to deliver on its intent with this acquisition.

Together Capgemini with Fahrenheit 212, will bring additional value and innovation to the client base, current and future, so as to expand their innovation solutions into new industries that are undergoing digital disruption.

The intent is to start with some “visionary forward thinking that opens opportunities that aren’t yet in sight” and the combination clearly stated by Fahrenheit 212 again as:

“But for the innovation discipline to be truly effective today, we must empower our creative impetus with new capabilities. Capabilities like robust software development, supply chain expertise, unique access to emerging technology and data analytics – things a few steps beyond what innovation firms are asked to do today – will soon become core requirements in the way innovation is conceived and driven to market”

The future is often limited by the constraints imposed

Fahrenheit 212 will operate within the Capgemini North American operation, perhaps far too limiting in my opinion but as a freestanding brand and group, as it certainly does have such a unique culture, team and way of working but will it be allowed to continue? Or will it simply fuse and emerge differently from its past into something more scalable, full of the need for speed, broader innovation solutions fused with a heavier technology and digital backbone? Or simply fade away drained of its creative and responsive thinking?

This acquisition certainly needs handling with real care, sensitivity and attention otherwise it can go the way of others, in their need to offer innovation, it gets simply smothered, lost and the acquirers never learn its true design force and creative value as it does not fit the existing business model.

Time will tell, I wish all involved well, it is far more an internal challenge than an external one perhaps? I do hope the traditional models around innovation are broken and a new one emerges. Capgemini have real intent at least and that is good. Who else is waking up to this change going on in innovation I wonder?

The post In the blink of an eye, it gets something bigger first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Putting that aside the website, the current point of reference, leaves me puzzled, a little unclear on its ‘compelling’ proposition. I think I get it but it simply strikes me as a launch as ‘thin,’ on really spelling it out for me, or surely the very clients, in its value and potential. It actually seems a very minimum viable product.  I just had to go in search of a better understanding.

The concept of having any “applied innovation exchange” coming from Capgemini should be promising, as somewhere to go, as they are a leading technology consulting practice. It ‘seems’ to be offering a connecting platform, well-established ecosystem advantages but it seems so understated here.

Why? It seems so tenuous, a toe in the water. I would have expected a much bigger bang here. The website told me just enough but I think it should have delivered more.

My understanding came more from the press release

So to get a better understanding I actually had to reverted to the press release and that provided more than the website in providing some improved clarity, as there seems precious little else at present. It seems they are offering a place and a digital space where others can come and play, to accelerate their innovation activities.

According to this press release AIE is “an integrated system, offering a process to rapidly and securely gain competitive advantage in today’s fast-pace innovation market landscape, by compressing cycle time from discovery to deployment of innovation“. Now that would be good news for nearly any innovation team, as they all seem to be under growing pressure to add even more speed from idea to final concept, so they can get their innovation ideas out of the door. Yet my puzzlement shifted a little here on the optimism of this.

The solutions are coming from offer spaces and “exchanges” where organizations are able to immerse themselves in the understanding, experimentation and application of all aspects of emerging technologies, as well as addressing the business disruptions confronting them and their industries”. Again my pulse moves up a notch or two on this. Although these did seem to be bricks and mortar, more than cloud and remote based.

Also they will be offering a global curated ecosystem of innovation partners and a framework of tried and tested tools to help enterprises to exploit these market disruptions in a structured way. I assume ‘the curated by’ will be by Cap Gemini as it is their Exchange.

The physical spaces they are providing are presently in Munich, Paris, Lille, Toulouse, Utrecht, Mumbai, Melbourne and now San Fransisco, followed soon by London, that will house key sectoral and process domain expertise, to allow the applications of these “innovations” to their specific business connect need. Presently these are working on different solutions for the automotive sector, virtual reality glasses, agile products and services for energy, developing applications for the French Railway (SNCF for connected watches) and a number of other examples outlined in the press release.

The promise presented in this release is also that they will provide the connecting up to other significant global technology players, most already in the Capgemini network, with the intent to build a global network of start-ups, academic institutions, research organizations, access to venture capital and private equity firms.

The promise is that this AIE ecosystem will be an operating framework constantly evolving taking a greater collaborative approach and allowing the balance between external and internal thinking to apply innovative solutions.

Returning to the web site of AIE

Here is the puzzle, I was really expecting something that underscored platforms, ecosystems, gave a greater clarification of partners, a greater story on all this physical space being offered; what was in it to play with, learn from and engagement with, but it remains “thin” and this from a leading technology consultant. The client stories help validate an (emerging) concept but does it really differ itself, in ways that make me stop and feel that this Applied Innovation Exchange is really different?

I’m not sure on what I see going back to the website, it looks like a story unfolding possibly, that might have been put together quickly or in this MVP way. It seems to have a very limited architecture or depth behind it as far as you can initially explore- for me it seems somewhat beyond a placeholder but it just does not seem to reflect a real “connected thinking” behind it, that you would expect from one of the global digital leading consulting firms.

It is speaking the language of need but I’m yet unsure of if it’s a game changer or “breaking traditional models” even though it is suggesting it is taking a multi-party collaborative approach.

Being far too cautious perhaps?

For me it is a wait and see, what about for others? I believe in platforms and written fairly extensively on these (here,and here), ecosystems (here) and (here), collaborative innovation (here) and (here), transcending different industry boundaries (here),  where consultants can contribute (here) and (here) . Equally presenting the arguments that there is this need is to shift to a new radical model (here) and are we getting real value out of the existing innovation consultants (here), which I certainly believe we are not. I felt Capgemini could have presented a more compelling and connecting story for this launch

Have Capgemini fallen into the trap that I’ve written about before (here) of “Consultants are far too cautious for their own good“ It is often harder to make internal change than providing the advice for others to make. As I assume this was all internally driven you enter the world of the typical client, lots of conflicting opinions, worries of risk, what to reveal and provide, as others are watching and can be fairly nimble if they spot something different. Maybe this is an assumption too far but it is not delivering a wow factor, yet for me.

Bridging the intent with the present deliver

So I hear you Capgemini on the intent, I would suggest the execution and launch might not be living up to this as yet. Still it is early days, or I am missing something a whole lot deeper that is failing to be conveyed in this website? .As I say, the press release gave a whole lot more than this site. Is that a good thing as it stands?

There is a real need to put some ‘red meat’ on the bone here or perhaps a seen ‘gap in the market’ might be lost to others as they can explain it better, Capgemini needs to recognize urgently this real need for a deeper understanding presently missing.

Equally internally, in consultants you have strong and diverse opinions and I would fear these potential internal antibodies kick-in and go back to the traditional practice unless they see their own compelling value, treating this as just another part of the technology service offering, an add-on, or perhaps it simply was just that, an extension to existing services?

The post Is this really breaking the traditional model on Innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

With the dizzy array of choices, combined with technical prowess and ‘plugging’ these into ‘seen’ customer needs.

These  are setting about disrupting existing businesses and establishing new ones, on an ever-increasing global scale.

So what and how is the incumbent meant to react if it is an existing market?

What should they do when they realize the traditional markets where they have safely operated for years has suddenly been overtaken by a new market creation, one that has gone outside old borders in industry and product.

Markets that are in the hands of the technically savvy entrepreneur are to be sliced, diced and recombined, are providing totally disruptive approaches to existing business models.

If they get the factors right, hit the needs of customers in their design, understanding, agility in responding to learning and adapting, ability to be fast to market and capable of scaling up really fast, then they transform spaces, leaving the established players desperately struggling to find answers and catch up.

The whole world of business is changing radically.
The existing organizations are failing due to their lack of agility, flexibility and ability to adapt; they always want to manage through existing systems, structures and designs. They constantly want to just simply optimize the existing and not radically redesign these.

Mastering the technology, thinking in radically different ways and harnessing to this customer need is just not built into the DNA of most existing businesses. They can’t let go, they hang on to what they have got and not capable of radically redesigning, in time, to offset this digitally savvy usurper.

Within all the failures to change there still remains inside our existing organizations there is the inability to let go, to open up and share. Control still dominates. There is still this relative reluctance to form broader collaborations that will provide new ways of managing through this technology led revolution.

The Ownership mindset still prevails, that of managing the assets, real estate, resources, value chain ‘as ours’ still dominates most board members thinking. Eventually this reluctance to not let go of large swaths of their possessions will be the death of the organization.

Changes that need to be faced in many situations need to be radical and most existing board members are ill- equipped to understand this, as they have not gained through their own experiences the skills to manage in highly fluid, entrepreneurial ways.

Their careers has been built in their era of rising through the organization ranks. Growth was found through expansion, through being efficient and effective, in leveraging ‘owned’ assets, not in seeking radical reinvention.

The business world as it seems to be radically changing is exposing this weakness within established organizations. Growth has slowed significantly, it is coming from exploring risk far more, with the world the entrepreneur enters and accepts is part and parcel of the ‘play to win’ entrenched within their mentality.

The established corporate executive is poorly equipped to compete in this technology age, where lean, agile and flexible are required to explore risk and new visions, increasingly critical to build and operate under.

This not only is the age of the digital savvy entrepreneur but it needs to the age where connectivity and collaboration will determine new business models that provide growth and scaling in ways not seen before and this is where the large, existing companies should be in the ascendancy here. It is where the analytic and physical meet and combine.

Managing in different ways in large organizations
Existing companies need a different game plan. A more open one built on collaborating, on leveraging, on tapping into low-cost capital presently available and pushing really hard for radically different business model design.

The closest I have as an example is GE , do really see this video, at least the 1st 15 minutes where Jeff Immelt sets about explaining the changes and how GE is currently undergoing a radical redesign. GE is radically designing its approaches around all these different links to explain their positioning on 1. digital, 2. the industrial internet of things, 3. the connected cities, 4. software and 5. an ecosystem of different partners and connected into 6. the industries they work with, all participating in this radical redesign of business and finding different solutions.

In GE words for instance “GE is transforming itself to become the world’s premier digital industrial company, executing critical outcomes for our customers”

External collaborations built on emerging platforms of shared need are becoming vital to change the dynamics of existing industry or service to extract growth.

Addressing the needs of a global customer, demanding not just a certain uniqueness in their solutions but a recognition that their partners really work on improving the business in more connected ways where innovation and technology combine with traditional effectiveness and efficiency needs.

This is requiring this partnership of global organizations to come together and provide solutions where all involved have ‘skin in the game’ and outcomes that can be measured in real growth and savings.

Large organizations all collaborating and leveraging their assets can respond effectively to savvy entrepreneurs.

This collaborative imperative need acquiring the ability to manage platforms, operate in different ecosystems simultaneously to form a significant part of forming the competitive response position to counter the young usurper, the technology savvy entrepreneur, who lacks scale, resources, existing established partnerships all vested in finding solutions and access to vital capital.

The customer is making this the “digital business era based on their needs”, where constant redesigning and orchestrating the parts will keep ‘things’ fresh and relevant.

It will be consistently offering new sets of combinations and leveraging a network of diverse capabilities that businesses will grow and these come through the exploitation and exploration of technologies and diverse partnerships.

New combinations can led to real competitive advantage

It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where ‘people, things and their business offering’ can come together for mutual value based on the unique combinations that serve identified customer needs with all the different technologies available and the innovative way these are combined as the value offering.

There will be a constant evolving evaluation of the assets both internal and externally that make up this digital world (people, the business and things) that will take this out beyond the control of one company. This will evolve into a system of connected ecosystems working at a constantly evolving speed to gain identification and partnership adoption.

Innovation will certainly be one significant part of this, so it will not get any easier; it will be faster, more demanding and a heck of a lot more risky.

Managing within collaborative platforms the innovations that are needed to ‘work and deliver’ will be complex and demanding.

Innovation is hugely caught up in this transformational change.
To be an innovator, you are always restless but the present structures and frameworks that innovation operates within have been often highly constraining and heavily reliant on existing operations. Innovation as a system has often conflicted within the approaches taken by our present organizations.

There is an urgent quest in finding different approaches to allow the human side to shape, interpret and extract the value not just in what they want to see but through different lenses. It will be through the effective leveraging of all the different technologies that will fuel the innovation activity but in these new platforms of collaboration and ecosystems required to deliver game changing or game reversing innovation offerings to counter the usurper.

What needs changing is the innovation process to accommodate these changes that are occurring all around us. We will need to transform much within our systems but more importantly to orientate our skills to receive, translate and diffuse new knowledge, in significantly different ways.

The balance in innovation activity is changing
Whole new business propositions are emerging, where technology drives the change and many established organizations we know today are powerless to stop as they are unable to adapt fast enough to transform their business model, it is far to ‘vested’

They will need to adjust radically to a new collaborative model that leverages the assets they have and combine these with partners that can deliver global solutions that can scale, require large investments and resources, something the entrepreneur struggles with and is less capable to build, unless they have such a radical set of solutions heavily protected by IP and technology prowess. Time and resources to scale can be a wicked inhibitor unless you really have a unique offering, unable to be replicated.

The need is to transform into radically different form of entity that have intelligence, innovation, customer understanding of their real needs, deep connections, global reach in technology and capability to meet market needs, delivering to each customer’s specific needs.

Managing digital knowledge that adds value and growth

Digital technology is about to become the precursor for all the changes we have put off for years within our organizations. We need to radically improve our abilities to engage, relate and discover new innovation opportunities at a completely different level of faster performance.

Technology is presently moving way-ahead of the systems our organizations have presently in place, it is failing to extract the value and insights that others are beginning to clearly see and capitalize on through the connection of technologies and market insights.

Unless larger organizations fail to see the significant changes occurring then we will see the disruption of existing organizations will simply accelerate.

Today’s established organization needs to be fundamentally redesigned.
We are in a new age, the technology age and much needs to be challenged. This is no different from the arrival of the industrial age, it changes society dramatically.

We are dealing with a completely different set of mindsets, skills, procedures, governance, processes and responsibilities. To gain from the digital evolution taking place we need a robust, comprehensive and radical overhaul of much of what is going on within our organizations or they will not survive the current revolution occurring all around us.

It requires radical thinking in new design, leveraging technology and collaborations. I watch GE and how it is radically redesigning itself, it is significant “full-on, full load” . Presently it is the top of GE that is engaged in the huge change required, driving this down the organization, yet it is the organization underneath that is presently struggling to come to terms with this and the ongoing approach to business.

The level of change might be underestimated within GE but these next two to three years will determine this. Many other organizations must be watching with fascination and real interest but should be citing this as an example t learn from

In summary

I believe that many existing larger organizations will need to follow in their own ways this example of GE, by placing really big bets on connecting technology so it ‘runs through everything’  to not only stay in existence but to discover new growth paths built on technology, innovating prowess and established business that can be reassigned (realigned) to meet changing market and customer needs.

The revolution of business as we know it today is undergoing radical redesign in front of our eyes, are you watching from a safe distance, in the back seat in for the ride or in the front, driving this radically re-designed model in the real-time conditions that all pioneers face to prove it is the model of the future.

The post We are transcending traditional industry and product boundaries first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Thinking about ecosystems certainly allows us to go out of our normal scope of internally generating new products.

It opens up a host of possibilities, that can add significantly to a new service design, new capabilities and solving more complex problems.

In opening up to managing within ecosystems, you begin to see your ability to contribute and tackle societal problems within a collaborative system.

You can see new opportunities that can allow you to enter new markets that would have been impossible as an individual organization.

You begin to see the power, scale and strength of having the collective collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional thinking design. You go beyond the utilization of leveraging existing infrastructure, building on others’ specializations and leveraging through technology powerful new concepts to tackle increasingly complex innovation design.
We are all making greater connections within ourselves as we find and connect to our own “tribes” that all the different social platforms are providing. Crowdsourcing is another example that is offering huge potential to exploit as it can encourage much to forge, serve and grow whole new communities from a ‘simple’ beginning, building on real-time knowledge.

The future of collaborations can increasingly share previously idle or under-utilized assets. We are seeing the most valuable companies that are emerging today are largely based on sophisticated platform business models where ecosystems are vital to their health and global ambitions (Apple, Amazon, Car Manufacturers are all examples).

But be aware – the challenges are difficult to work through
Often this involves designing the architecture, platforms, construct new standards and be equipped to integrate and adapt different members of a community, who have something relevant to contribute. Managing this growing form of complexity is challenging old theories, boundaries, organizations and how they exist going forward.

Ecosystem innovation today is more about managing beyond the immediate known found within one organization’s limited focus of the world. The race is to gain advantage and often try to dominate and influence the future direction a market will take. This requires a broader perspective, a greater diversity of thinking by tapping into varying levels of specialized expertise.

Regretfully we are not yet fully equipped to manage these new innovation ecosystems. We need to think through a better emerging theory of leading or good practice. We need to advance the measurement and impact that ecosystems will have within advancing our innovation activity.

Measuring innovation in ecosystems has real differences

To start we need to measure innovation more on the following aspects:
Linkages – content and productivity of relationships, alliances, collaborations, interactions, networks, clusters and all the complementary aspects and assets deployed to do this
Knowledge engagement – the ability to attract knowledge into the organization, through greater content and value, through the people involved and the way we anchor and diffuse this new knowledge.
Intangible assets – increasingly people and the combination of their intellectual capital in knowledge, relationships and how they structure work will be the central focal point of innovation success.
Conditions for innovation – we need to develop the ability to ‘sense and respond’ to shifts in markets, from the competition and evaluate these changes in ‘real time’ and we will become far more reliant on data and analytics for this.

Connecting these four critical aspects becomes vital. As we learn to collect all this incoming knowledge (data-driven) this will then impact our own innovation programmes and require them to be more adaptive, dynamic and fluid. We need to recognize changing patterns, and then build in these reaction points to keep our own innovation activity staying ahead of the game.

Organising within Networks of Firms within multiple Ecosystems
The organization that envisages a changing world needs to organize around ecosystems to deliver on that vision to gain the leading influencer’s position.

Ecosystems require increased interactions within the community and need more tightly controlled activities to gain the synergies and effects from working within an ecosystem. Relationship management needs to keep focusing on enhancing, driving innovation and knowing how to adapt this within the whole concept. No easy task.

Ecosystems that ultimately produce new business models rest on a large capacity for agility within the participating organizations. Internal capabilities and competencies get highly stretched by the new dynamics taking place, you need a strong orchestrator of the ecosystem to manage these challenges and many cultural biases that can blind a ‘line of sight’.

Aligning partners on a platform needs-basis is very different from aligning them to just one organization’s needs. In the past we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process.

Today you can argue differently, why what you see as needed is not the best and maybe different from first envisaged, and it is better and evolutionary but demands more change and disruption internally. It allows for more breakthrough innovation, greater challenging of the existing status quo and often taking organizations out of their existing comfort zones.

As we think ecosystems, we need to think differently

Think carefully through any move to join innovation ecosystems, they do have a high, immensely attractive return, if managed well; they are nearly always disruptive to the existing markets and highly valuable to the participants. There also is a big ‘but’ here, since the pathway to get to that ‘success point’ is full of potential risk and immense ‘spent’ energy.

Watch out for those “burning platforms”
Burning platforms will be all around us, as we continue into the age of disruption. To counter this we must welcome the new era of global collaborative innovation where we will be learning the abilities to move between different ecosystems, collaborating at different levels of participation, to extract completely different forms of innovation value that advance our growth prospective.

A suggested way we need to think about building ecosystems

One recent report I was reading from Deloitte, based on some of its recent analysis, suggests that we need to consider and recognize where ecosystems and the platforms will help us. They suggest we begin by answering these initial questions that I have adapted and extended:

1. What makes up the critical capabilities for minimum viable transformation to participate and learn about this shift taking place to understand and participate?
2. What needs to evolve in the enterprise strategy and especially where platform thinking comes into play, to radically alter the innovative offerings that are not available as a stand-alone organization?
3. How can we liberate the internal potential of resources, stored knowledge and latent assets so as to tackle harder challenges that can transform an industry and who can help in this?
4. Finally living in a changing world of blurring boundaries, and uncharted frontiers, how can we participate in different ecosystems of learning and value that can transform our competitive position and provide us with a substantial leap?

In Summary
The ecosystem, through the use of technology, the cloud and a diverse set of collaborations will increasingly become the mainstream for innovation inputs, accelerants and delivery value.

We need to prepare for it, experiment and become involved in different offerings. Platforms, strategic partnerships, and new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and learning to deliver through this requires a radically different innovation system of management built around adapting and changing ecosystems.

Innovation will move from being based on incremental innovation, all designed in-house, into bold, collaborative offerings, cutting across today’s established industry boundaries, pushing out across different innovation frontiers, participating on a variety of platforms and extracting in different ways across multiple ecosystems.

This will open up the whole need to re-evaluate the governance, the risk management and the resources needed to operate in this new innovating world. It is going to demand a very different set of disciplines, processes and design.

Are you exploring this new innovation dynamic of platforms and ecosystems yet? You do need to get into a position to experiment, test, exploit and explore in limited ways to learn and adapt.

It is even more dramatic in change than moving from closed to open innovation, it will challenge much that was only recently established to be radically redesigned and altered again.

The post Innovators – are you thinking about Ecosystems? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The new combination is the new connections through people and things (IoT) that we can achieve a new innovation potential.

We will obtain increasing more powerful insights that have the real potential of being turned into new innovation outcomes, through the connected businesses we are presently needing to build. This can generate new value and business propositions.

Today the virtual world of digital is moving much faster than the physical ‘enacted world,’ of turning insights into actual innovation activities, through the innovation pipeline. Our innovation systems are lagging significantly behind. We need to radically redesign them and bring them up to date, fit for managing innovation in the 21st century.

The whole discovery to final execution, is for most organizations still a very fragmented, often disconnected system. It is highly reliant on manual systems with people often disconnected from the real innovation engagement making decisions on inadequate data or insights.

We are failing to leverage all we have gained from our innovation understanding over the years. We have this ongoing inability to adapt, to connect the innovation system through the use of technology and growing value networks, so as to provide the integration, the dedicated resource and accountability to deliver successful innovation outcomes that our customers require.

Successful outcomes are certainly possible, from a well-designed innovation management system brought up to date, adaptive, flexible and responsive, if we apply the time and effort to conceive and construct it.

It is still managed mainly through a linear process of stage-gates and investigation / validation to decide to move on or not. I can’t see this continuing to work in any efficient or effective way in such a digital hyper connected world, where insights flood into the innovation engine room, expecting the same ‘hyper’ response and delivery outcome result.

We need to address this incompatibility, we need to integrate and harness the innovation management system and bring it completely up to date and integrated in design and function.

In a series of posts I have been arguing that innovation management needs to radically be redesigned, based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services to highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently through technology, driving the design and response capabilities where platforms dominate and transformation becomes an ongoing process, to constantly evolve the business model, so as to seek out constantly changing market opportunities, in agile, adaptive and fluid ways, for successful innovation outcomes that meet those real customer needs.

Mashing up for explosive change
I recall reading that up to now, each digital technology change was a separate era of change, to absorb and adapt towards, yet today we are facing something seemingly different, a collision, a whole mash-up of disparate technologies and systems, that seem to be heading for such an explosion of change, a post-digital transformation.

This merging of cloud, big data, social, and the internet of things is becoming the new system of discovery according to some. Others call it the crossroads where the post-digital reality of bringing together the cloud, mobile, interconnected devices, data analytics and embedded intelligence are pointing us to a hyper-connected world, less tomorrow, more speeding towards us in the here and now.

Digital matters, in its raw innovating power and its potential business impact

I think digital is clearly a transformational phenomena across much of today’s existing business. The unique combining of the cloud, big data, social streaming, the internet of things, mobility, the industrial internet, are all making this the time for new growth opportunities through this digital economy and the radical overhaul of the activities to realize the benefits.

The enterprise integration will need to be constantly evolving, adapting and become highly agile, it will totally redistributed, decision authority will move more rapidly towards evolving business models and distributive decision-making, to seize breaking opportunities far more quickly than in the past.

Business models will not stand alone, they will interlock in intelligent ways, to benefit from scale that becomes the essential need and greater appreciation of sharing services, jointly working towards common outcomes.

These strategic connections will open up different partnerships, opportunities for shared cost of new channel developments, separate value propositions driven through common back office services and increasing requiring a platform management to manage these.

We are transcending traditional industry and product boundaries
The dizzy array of strategic choices will totally disrupt existing business models if they are right in their design.

The whole world of communicating, transacting and designing all the different negotiations and products that meet the immediate needs of the customer makes this the “digital business era”, where constant redesigning and orchestrating the parts will keep it at the forefront by a constantly evolving set of combinations and leveraging a network of diverse capabilities.

It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where ‘people, things and their business offering’ can come together for mutual value based on the unique combinations of the different technologies available.

There will be a constant evolving evaluation of the assets both internal and externally that make up this digital world (people, the business and things) that will take this out beyond the control of one company, into a system within a larger system to make it work at a constantly evolving speed and gain adoption. Innovation will certainly not get any easier; it will be faster, more demanding and a heck of a lot more risky.

Innovation is caught up in this transformational change.

To be an innovator, you are always restless but the present structures and frameworks that innovation operates within have been often highly constraining and heavily reliant on manual operations. Innovation as a system has often conflicted within the approaches taken by our organizations.

The quest is in finding different approaches to allow the human side to shape, interpret and extract the value not just in what they want to see but through different lenses

The balance in innovation activity is changing
What needs changing is the innovation process to accommodate these changes that are occurring all around us. We will need to transform much within our systems but more importantly to orientate our skills to receive, translate and diffuse new knowledge, in significantly different ways.

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

Huge amounts of data can be interpreted through specific algorithms but these will have to have set very clear parameters set within them, for them to be of any worth on what we believe is needed by our customers, for delivering successful innovation outcomes.

The real need is delivering a new integrated innovation engagement platform

Without doubt digital and physical operate at really different speeds. We need not just a new innovation management system, we need a modern engagement platform. We need to integrate and sync so many transaction and stand-alone systems that have been allowed to proliferate over the years to meet specific business needs.

The growing pressure will be demanded to find solutions that provide a cohesive and business-focused approach to the new social enterprise where we seek engagement at scale into a multiple array of communities and advocates that has data and innovation as its core.

The Need to Automate the Innovation Process

We still are very reliant on stage gate intervention points, often more due to dogma and imposed oversight by committees occasionally meeting.

Decisions are determined by the human, based less on hard knowledge or dynamic intelligence, often these have tended to be thinner on the ground to validate concepts and judgement becomes highly personal and reliant on (past) experience.

What can we change within this? There are leading practices to compare and contrast with but we do need to push this automating the innovation process further, in different ways.

How can we connect, enable and deliver better innovative outcomes?

There is so much to be realized, connected and enabled for the higher scale, richer, more innovative business outcomes but it is a massive undertaking that is only just being ‘kicked off’ by the current internet of things. It will eventually become the integration of everything but the disruption and realization of what needs changing is only just dawning on many.
We need to review organizational engagement.

Much has to change, be uprooted and completely revisited to begin to design a new digital and physical integrated innovation system.

The need to respond quickly to new business objectives

We will need to adjust our thinking on risk. Technology insights can provide a better mitigate risk, it can equally fine tune innovation but it can equally make it far more complicated. Massive amounts of data can complicate decision-making, determining the right decisions and next steps.

Technology will require opening up the present risk mitigation process to capitalize on emerging opportunities at greater speed and higher levels of compromise, to meet that emerging opportunity ‘seen’ requiring it to be turned into commercial offering quickly, so competitive advantage can be gained.

Managing digital knowledge that adds value and growth

Digital technology is about to become the precursor for all the changes we have put off for years within our organizations. We need to radically improve our abilities to engage, relate and discover new innovation opportunities at a completely different level of faster performance.

There are many issues both strategic and tactical to work through, to extract the rich potential from any digital transformation for new innovation growth outcomes

Digital is presently moving way ahead for the systems our organizations have presently in place. What does need changing to ultimately yield the innovation returns we will be looking for?

Expectations and reality needs resetting, the hard work is not ‘just’ in connecting the technology, it is its impact that it will have across the organization to be able to ‘react, respond and reorganize’ in very different ways from today’s practices.

We are dealing with a completely different set of mindsets, skills, procedures, governance, processes and responsibilities. To gain from the digital evolution taking place we need a robust, comprehensive and radical overhaul of much of what is going on within our organizations.

We need to begin to really think though this as a complete redesign – achieving a clear engagement platform for all to gain from

So in our need to achieve a greater engagement from everyone within our organizations we need to recognize the importance of having a ‘modern’ engagement platform available, a central place for scalable learning to take place, so we can structure the new knowledge and insights that is coming into the organization and manage this through a well-designed innovation system into a final execution of successful innovations.

Moving from ad-hoc approaches to an integrated, synergistic and designed for each organizations unique state for the innovation management process to perform in today’s and tomorrow’s world on a sustaining basis. One where technology is central to its structure, highly connected, highly adaptive and totally fluid in its response to meet the constant array of innovation opportunities, looking to have solutions applied to them.

Is there not a mounting case for designing a new innovation management system?

I clearly am convinced there is and it certainly can be designed today in my opinion.

What is involved in plotting out a new innovation roadmap, who is the lead orchestrator or the navigator in this and can we structure this design accordingly, to bring it into our organization sustaining innovation?

One that offers a system that is fully integrated, connected and compatible with the needs of the business to grow and recognizes the need to build a sustainable innovation capability.

One that can to capitalize on the innovation opportunities being discovered in new and different ways that need connecting and accelerating, into commercial propositions that meet customers’ needs?

I want to look deeper into these in the coming weeks to add some thoughts to this new innovation system design and where and with whom it fits.
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They become fixed, rigid and locked into their established ways, not adapting to the changes occurring around them. We often give up and leave, moving on to better places and challenges.

We seemingly are reluctant to undergo any transformation, experimentation or adjustment in our organizations until it becomes a matter of survival, then its often far too late.

Then it becomes a mad scramble to transform ourselves, often with damaging consequences of deteriorating performance, battling more competition that are sensing our weakness, never capable of returning to those previous highs.

We simply  hate adapting or adjusting, certainly on a constant basis, we resist any form of ‘greater’ transformation – why?

If we can’t adapt to changing times, we simply struggle to survive, that is the growing reality operating in today’s environment. Simply put companies ‘die’ due to their inability to adapt to change and transformation projects fail because the message somehow fails to register and never gets completed to the original objectives.

According to a survey by McKinsey in 2011, 72% of our transformation programs fail to deliver on their original targets. Also one out of every two of our top organizations in the Fortune 500 will be gone, history, dust, taken over in ten years, according to the OECD.

Unless we create a strategy to transform, how can we re-imagine our innovation processes?

We talk so much about “innovation is critical” today and in our future, but is rarely achieved.The confidence levels plummet as the pressure to innovate mounts, simply because the necessary components of delivering innovation are critically missing.

Innovation requires us to do something different or something new, to explore, where as transformation wants to make dramatic changes in the form, appearance or performance, more to exploit and capitalize on changing conditions. We are at a crossroads of determining if the management of innovation should change and if so, how.

I argue that innovation management needs to radically adjust and will be based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently through technology where platforms dominate and transformation becomes an ongoing process to evolve the business model, so as to seek out constantly changing market opportunities, in agile, adaptive and fluid ways, for successful innovation outcomes that meet those real customer needs.

In this fourth post of an extended series I explore the potential for changing the management of innovation, this looks at transformation, our willingness and capabilities, on being capable of “moving towards a new way of managing innovation”

This does require a transformation of how we design, structure and bring together all the relevant part of the innovation process. This requires technology to be central to this different thinking, alongside a radical shift in how we see innovation. I refer back to my evolving hypothesis above of where, why and how this innovation management needs to shift.

Can innovation and transformation combine and work together?

We hear far too much about the need to transform and change. We do need to get a whole lot fitter in our innovation understanding to transform it into a more robust, sustainable process.

Firstly isn’t Change and Transformation the same thing? Well, not really.
Change = to make or become different (often includes more or better). This is where incremental improvement resides. Most of our innovation activities reside in this change space, fooling us, tricking us to believe we are “making real change”, whereas we are just pushing ‘things’ along.

Transformation though is = a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance. This is where breakthroughs live. This is where innovation needs to go to counter the fundamental shifts going on in our markets, to really drive and thrive in an increasingly hostile environment.

Yet both transformation and change bring new possibilities into reality.

Both require thinking that is broad and expansive, with a strong sense of curiosity and discovery.

Unless we refocus our current management approaches to both be transformation and innovation, we will continue to face losing our competitive edge. Needlessly defending and spending our capital on the position of yesterday, not looking to seek out and transform to seize the new positions or opportunities that are occurring in our rapidly changing world.

Adapting the business model to the needs and desires of the market

There is a real shift for adding greater value within innovation occurring. There is this growing recognition that product alone has good value but it is the power of combining this with a range of services, by designing this into specific business models and solutions, that deliver on the needs of the customer.

I was reading an interesting article from LEADing Practice® posted on the iGrafx site who offers a set of process design, analysis, optimization and management capabilities . LEADing Practice® performed a study (not sure when) to uncover the obstacles to achieving innovation and transformation. 1,765 CEO’s and 2,936 business leaders representing all major countries and industries were surveyed.

In this article they were suggesting that most successful companies’ focal aspects of innovation are on new value, revenue and service models, while transformation is centered on cost, operation and performance.

To quote from the article “It’s no coincidence that when talking about successful companies and their ability to adapt to change, that they are achieving both innovation and transformation by applying both best and leading practices in appropriate domains of the business”.
“Best practices are transformative and should only be applied to non- core competencies that don’t effect differentiation – they are purely about meeting the market standard. These lend themselves especially to cost and operating models, which are not made up of core competencies. Leading practices are about doing things efficiently, but different – innovating. They are how they create value, deliver service and generate revenue and growth.”
“While best practices are tried and true methods that can and should always be applied, leading practices are methods of adapting best practices to situations that require a difference – this is a key differentiator”.

I needed to pause for thought on this as they are suggesting transformation and innovation are separated on their focal aspects. I’d never broken them up as specifically as this as I always saw this as the two sides of the same equation – the front end (value, revenue, new value propositions) and the back-end ( managing costs, operational aspects and the broader performance of key stakeholders) but both working towards a common goal- transformation through innovation.

I am a great admirer of Alex Osterwalder and the work his team over at Strategyzer are doing around and applying the Business model canvas into designing new models that have innovation and transformation as part of them. Does this article raise a new way to think about the design of the BM.

I actually do need to think about the linkage of transformation and innovation through the lens of the BMC some more, based on this article.

I do have a certain ‘crankiness’ around best practice – it is often a killer of your innovation

I do get a little cranky on this ‘reliance’ on best practices, most of our organizations like to gravitate towards. I totally agree for innovation it is actually the art of “learning practices” that emerge as ‘leading practices’ but these evolve often in highly unique and different ways. Often that is why innovation is hard for many, as they often fail to recognize the uniqueness within its makeup for them and take the existing practices, to simply copy.

Best practice is where everyone seems to want to go, the lazy and mistaken route to transformation and ending up at a point of no differentiation as everyone is also attempting to get to this point of best (existing or past) practice. It is leading practice, exploring, keeping it still efficient but different that you move towards a real competitive difference. I call this far more the ‘emerging practices’ that are working on the parts that add value, service and new revenue. These are often highly unique to individual circumstances, individual organizations and their market conditions and position.

The article stirred up my thinking at least, reaffirming my own beliefs on practices, on the increasing importance of the business model design in all we do and think. When we want to innovate, we should look at the transformation impact and this suggested allocation has sharpened my thinking, although parts of the article I’d debate or want a deeper explanation. Still take a read.

The experimental model is replacing the rational choice model

Rational choice is the familiar one where we set ROI’s, KPI’s, establish clear milestones and expectations from new projects or innovation. We are driving towards predictable outcomes. Is innovation by its unpredictable nature on time, always defensible and predictable? If it is then we are back in the land of incremental innovation where risk gets delegated down and we keep informed only to ‘what we think we know’ not what is changing. We lose so much by approaching innovation in a ‘prescripted’ manner.

The experimental model is far more the place to be in today’s uncertain and rapidly changing world. To succeed in today’s networked economy, businesses must participate in dynamic, evolving networks of diverse organizations based around platforms and ecosystems offer the fertile ground for collaboration and transformation.

And while such networks can be difficult to navigate, they offer companies the opportunity to evolve their business models, deepen skills and knowledge, expand into new markets, and scale operations. To experiment we limit risk, we learn through engaging in market understanding, validating needs, we adjust our model, then we rapidly scale, keeping competition lagging.

For companies seeking to reinvent not only their products but their business models, minimum viable transformation allows for rapid iteration on the unknowns of a new business model. This MVT thinking comes from Deliotte University Press and partly from one of my favourite thought leaders, John Hagel III. It builds on the initial work of Eric Ries and his minimum viable product thinking within the lean startup thinking methodology.

For companies seeking to reinvent not only their products but their business models, minimum viable transformation allows for rapid iteration on the unknowns of a new business model—anything from minute changes to operational processes to full restructuring of the go-to-market strategy. At its core, it’s a strategy for gathering validated learning about individual business model elements, then assessing how those elements interact and combine to form one cohesive strategy.

Based on the minimum viable product and lean start-up philosophy you are replacing internal intuition with the learning to iterate around your learning about market factors and what is valued and needed as innovations and adaptive business models.

The experimental model with the MVT thinking contains the risks down to more manageable levels; it allows you to explore market needs far more and exploits new learning by delivering and adapting ‘as you go’ and then scale.

You are combining the power of transformation and innovation.
Transformation and innovation are combining as your new agenda. To achieve a growing understanding of the kind of decisions companies want to make then we must transform ourselves on how we undertake innovation, to lead us out of average performance into a more radical, robust growth performance.

We must envisage, invest and lead and this will come through adapting far quicker to different business models, use new technologies and its powerful connection and analytical capability, so we can critically evaluate the operational process and engage with customers in all possible ways.

Innovation is far from static, it should be highly dynamic, it should be adapting and adjusting, it should be highly fluid. I’ve written on this need for fluidity as we are facing this considerable discussion around changing structures and models to become more adaptive, agile and fluid, to react and deal with this increasing turbulence occurring all around us.

Summary

We need to react and become more responsive, becoming more adaptive to changing environments and business challenges, that are often unknown, unexpected, or not yet explored or exploited.

Shifting to a different change model to meet the changing market conditions and customer needs will require a high level of transition; it needs us to transform our innovation management practice

A further white paper “Why innovators need a new change paradigm” takes this need for transformation even further, by looking more specifically at emerging models and the competencies required to react to this change in these more ‘fluid’ ways.

To achieve this different state, technology is central. My next post in this innovation management journey discusses why “Technology leads, we are lagging”

The post Our inabilities to adapt needs changing. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are moving towards a new management of innovation where ‘greater’ collaboration is fueling new business models built on platforms, formed around ecosystems of communities with vested interest, contributing and extracting value.

Today and in the future, the value is created outside the individual company and not within. It is far more working as a constellation, drawing from an evolving network effect seeking out combined solutions from this design.

This third post of an extended series on my thoughts on “moving towards a new way of managing innovation” that explores the potential for changing the management of innovation, this looks at the significant value of platforms and ecosystems.

We need to find a new way of doing things differently around innovation and its management.

This is based on a relationship-based, networked designed concept built for collective activities. Relationships where shared value leads to a value creation that no one single organization can provide.

This requires open collaboration and an environment seeking mutual promise from individual input, contribution and extraction, delivering an integrated set of services and solutions being constructed on the platform from a sharing of knowledge, for delivering into evolving value propositions, all benefiting from, both collectively and individually

I am proposing in this series a view that innovation management needs to radically adjust and will be based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently through technology where platforms dominate.
Moving towards an even greater openness

We are evaluating and changing our existing focus from being closed up and having an exclusive internal orientation to innovation solutions, into ones that are having a far more open stance, more collaborative, open to external ideas and thinking. We are searching for more collaborative innovation combining external partners into more ‘collective thinking’.

These dialogues within the ecosystem, influence and shape each other, they alter the terrain, they compete and collaborate, they share and create resources, they co-evolve and adapt to new understanding, becoming increasing dynamic and interconnected, due to the recognition of mutually building value is greater than individual solutions.

The greater the collaboration improves chances of creating even greater value, finding solutions that are unique, radical in design that customers rate and seek out to resolve their needs.

The value of being involved in a dynamic platform offers the provision of constantly building and increasing the value of the services and content found on that platform, it continues to evolve and improve.

It proliferates, is dynamic and constantly evolving where everyone contributes, everyone benefits in a shared ‘commons’ but within a unique entity offering sustaining competitive advantage, solving complex problems but providing individual needs and returns.

Shifting towards many to many (m2m)

This shift to collaborating on a many to many platform is offering us extra acceleration that is needed to improve our innovation performances in radical designs that can significantly change existing market spaces from concept to market delivery. The phase of “open innovation” connecting one party with another (one to one) is well-established. We are presently entering the phase of ‘many to many’ and the use of platforms to manage this is still in ’emerging practice’.

Collaborative innovation is also leading us to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success, as nearly all novel ideas lay outside the organization’s domain of understanding. As we increasingly include the customer and their needs within our understanding, these multiple collaborations and dialogues are building this better internal understanding.

There also seems that many organizations are presently searching for their new business models’ of innovation delivery or architecture. I’d say we are presently in a state of flux on adjusting to all of what this might mean, in customer and market offerings, as well as internally adapting our structures to the new forms required in these business model changes.

Loops are replacing the linear

Equally, we are constantly moving from managing in linear innovation processes and making these more adaptive, constantly looping back when new information or data is being discovered, increasing this knowledge and insight in highly dynamic, constantly evolving and informing ways.

We need to adjust and learn the value of platforms, about the power of ecosystems and be significantly open about partnerships and shared intellectual property to tackle far more complex innovation challenges.

If we set about to properly designed business platforms these create and capture new economic value and scale the potential for learning across entire ecosystems of resources and participants that can give new meaning to innovation solutions that tap into our needs and can be scaled and adapted constantly.

Adjusting to many different forms of external relationships

We are forming external relationships in many different ways as this increased diversity does matter to each organization for building different competitive positions in their innovation offerings.

We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services through new business models that would not have been enabled by only having the one organization attempting it. Collaborations are significantly adding value into the innovation equation.

Also we are seeing complexity rising considerably. The search for finding greater value is shifting even further, increasingly forming around innovation ecosystems, loose federations of vested interest, forming and dispersing when the job is complete.

So is ecosystem thinking part of your innovation make up? Let me offer some thoughts.

So why are business ecosystems emerging as a real competitive force?
As we begin to open up our thinking the concept of ecosystems will increasingly having a powerful effect on our future growth perspectives, as different partners will all contribute to this often ‘emergent’ thinking to increase the total sum of the value.

Our innovation exploration will become far more evolutionary and requires a completely different way to think and manage these ‘relationship contracts that are forming around a given concept of platform engagements.

As we tap into all the expertise up and down the value chain we will become far more aware and will need to explore all the depth in thinking, contributing and making available through extending our connections in deeper and broader ways.

Knowing how to adjust, accommodate and shift our thinking requires us to become more agile, finding new ways of connecting and working.

A single industry focus is in decline

Opportunities exist everywhere. We need to look well beyond our own industry to evaluate different perspectives, seek out the potential of different concepts that can be adapted to our own industry.

Many companies are exploring the value of becoming involved in a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries to build new communities that have the capacity to transform existing environments.

A new battle ground of organizing ecosystems and providing platforms

As an example, let’s take the “battle of mobile devices” has now become a war of building the better ecosystem. It is not one single product it is chasing an increasing share of minds, preferences, changing habits and tastes and to achieve this ‘paradigm’ shift the search is on for forming the ecosystem that can deliver this ‘transformation’. This is coming through apps, technology, different value propositions built into a platform of offerings that combine through your mobile device.

Another example is the Autodesk facilities at Pier 9, in San Francisco which includes a cutting edge digital fabrication lab, a woodworking shop, a metalworking shop, a 3D printing lab, laser cutting and printing capabilities, an electronics workshop, a commercial test kitchen, and an industrial sewing center as well as smaller specialty project areas, all highly linked into technology and services.

This is allowing for start-ups, small and medium-sized organizations are given even more chances to bring their concepts to life and finding the opportunity to compete with larger organizations through this approach.

The combination is helping you to create real functional end-use parts with additive manufacturing, production processes and software applications all in a one shop environment.

In the car industry, consolidation is forcing a collaborative rethink. Sharing core platforms is driving commonality and global flexibility. There is this industry push for more universal regimes to drive down costs, guarantee quality and standardize the production and supply chains.

This approach is cutting across suppliers, extending collaboration between traditional rivals on this need to contain costs and variance and extend global reach. It has enabled a significant shift on redefining competitive positions closer to customer needs by focusing on distinctive propositions, less on car assembly (since industry reliability has universally risen by applying industry ‘best’ practice for much within the manufacturing and production of cars).

Also one outstanding example is Saleforce.com as a platform manager, today positioned as the customer success platform, where they offer a trusted enterprise cloud app platform for building and managing all your customer relationships. Today Salesforce is powering innovation in sales, service, marketing, community, analytics, apps, and more.

Stepping out is stepping up

Today there is growing realization that thinking ecosystems can allow us to have a new framing of possibilities and offer us different mind-sets that tap into different and diverse relationships, partnerships, alliances and collaborations. This was unthinkable until recently, without the enablers to make these connections through technology and more open platforms where you can come together and collaborate.

Also the positioning of platform thinking is another. To quote, I believe from Marshall Van Alstyne, a professor at Boston University “products have features; platforms have communities“.

Today we are realizing that the growth and value lies within communities, we see Uber owning no cars, Airbnb bring ‘idle’ real estate into places to stay, and Facebook creates no significant content itself, it just provides the space (platform) for others to build and extend their communities as part of their social strategy or simply a place to go and keep in touch and aware. In all three of those examples, platform users represent the origin point of the product or service.

What the companies we are valuing the most? Take a look all are based largely on technology with platforms where the ecosystem thrives through the exchange, interactions and collaborations they provide. Google, Apple, Amazon, Alibaba along with GE, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, Oracle.
We are equally searching for ways to democratize our business model’s today, one way is through crowdsourcing that can represent the future true value of the platform investment by others joining, creating and providing additional new value.

As we embrace “all things digital” and connect between ever-increasing communities, we will tap into and rely far more on a wide partnership of contributions. We are significantly recognizing the limitations of our past products and services, this way of innovating is on the way out, and platforms are the ‘in’.

In summary

The increasing value of participating in ecosystems allows for large and small organizations to create, scale and serve markets in ways unthought of previously. The ability to interact and co-create in increasingly sophisticated and novel ways on platforms opens up new opportunities.

These ecosystems form a bond of shared interest, of recognition and purpose which quickly becomes established as the new ‘commons’ in sharing and contributing and the platform management organizes and shapes the value for all involved to ‘extract’ their share of the innovation solution.

The future of successful innovation management is managing in the cloud, on platforms and through ecosystems. These are radically altering the way we need to manage our innovative designs.

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Publishing note:  Part of this blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished this as part of an extended view on my own site to bring this into this series.

The post The innovating power of ecosystems and platforms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The impact of digital innovation changes the innovation paradigm significantly.

Organizations can stay digitally closed in their innovation activities, moving beyond simply developing innovation solutions themselves into a connected (closed) network, where the platform becomes the enabling force and those that join share common ground or purpose but are pursuing separate value propositions that required this ‘extended’ collaboration to achieve this position.

These ‘closed systems’ can give a level of competitive advantage but these are increasingly transitory depending on the complexity and uniqueness of the eventual value proposition. Collaborative platforms are clearly the way to go to open-up innovation that allows more radical and complex solutions to be provided.

We will see a new wave of open digital innovation So why do I say that? There are four aspects where technology will trend towards open (see more on that here: http://digitalsocial.eu/) to exploit our connected world. We will be looking to extract an ever-diminishing competitive advantage as the world just keeps speeding up, pushing us as technology continues to run ahead of our capacities to assimilate it.

So we need to keep moving towards open and complex solutions that require us to become increasingly collaborative to let (many) others help us on the way as partners so as to exploit the competitive advantage that is increasingly transitory.

1. Firstly, open networks – those innovative combinations of networks, which continue to evolve new solutions and infrastructures and are very rich in bottom-up potential. These open networks are extremely dynamic and diverse, full of experimental pioneers and as they work at the edges, the rest of us need to stay connected, as these open networks will continue to suppliant what we have on a constant, evolving basis.

2. Open data – This explosion of new types of data analytics and machine learning means we all will eventually have access to analyse vast amounts of data. As we innovate ways to capture, use, analyse and interpret open data coming from multiple sources we need to find its value for what we do. Open data policies will emerge from government, local authorities and (eventually) within our business organisations. We will need the tools and skills to interpret all the open data coming into us from people, our networks and simply from the environment and world we belong to.

3. Open knowledge – We are in need of co-production of new knowledge. We need to learn more about adaptive capacity where you acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit knowledge from its potential to a realized value. There is a greater trend to mobilization based on open content, open-source and open access so we can understand, absorb and make comments (or not). Knowledge must be allowed to flow openly to allow us to grow individually. We will see an increasing mass-scale of social collaborations. We are all moving to blogs, wikis, social networking and hundreds of collaborative platforms of choice. These are beginning to manage (even take over) our lives. As we disseminate the knowledge we get growing cross-fertilization.

4. Finally, Open hardware – The more we become curious, the more we want to build ‘something.’ More and more open-source hardware is permitting us to build upon it. We are increasingly having the potential to study, modify, make, extend, distribute or design so these modifications take on our identity. The use of ready to use components and materials, tapping into established processes, open infrastructures, allowing unrestricted content and plugging into open-source design tools gives us all as individuals the ability to create something. The more we are moving towards a more open-source internet of things to design, use and value within our lives.

All of this digital technology is seemingly all about getting to know. Our privacy and security concerns are getting caught up in this, for a time it will slow the pace down but I fear the ‘genie is out of the lamp’ constantly asking you your next connected wish before you see another useful technology lamp to ‘rub’ for more wishes. Over time privacy and security will take on a different meaning and the pursuit of traceability and transparency will take their place as our concerns.

Why will this change – simply because we need everything to be open?
As we become more open, more willing or coerced into trying the latest thing, the internet of things will increasingly determine our behaviours.

There are four powerful enablers that are working away at making a significant change in our lives. As we connect more, we change our ways of working, our thinking, our habits and our abilities to earn a living.

• The more personal devices will keep us in the anytime / anywhere state, demanding the services it provides will give us increased innovating opportunities.

• IoT will offer those (expected) guarantees of access into the physical world. Digital will fuse more with the physical and we have to keep open to explore this.

• Then we have the internet of people, all busy connecting and communicating that will promote the internet as the fundamental channel of choice, into user communities of selected groups, or broader communities that we will rely increasingly upon for data, content, services and increase our ‘digital currency’ to earn a living.

• Lastly cloud computing allows an infinite array of connecting apps, and your personalised virtual infrastructure, where you can receive, deliver, create and distribute growing services over the internet, extending your ability to innovate to a much wider market.

Yes, the world of innovation is changing, digital is changing it significantly.
We felt open innovation was a big enough deal, perhaps it was in its day but as digital implants itself into our lives, into our organizations, into our societies more and more.

We must decide if we stay open to allow it in or try to close it off and channel it in ways that will provide value, but those will be transitory moments before we need to go back and open up again.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Our longer term winner is clearly open digital innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Well then, are you going all digital on me from your innovation activities?

Take care, it does change our view of the world, as we look inside-out or even, outside-in

So there we all were, getting really very comfortable in our open innovation activities, learning to collaborate and co-create outside our organizations.

Even our management has finally got “open innovation”.

We are encouraged and allowed to collaborate outside our four walls of the organization as the penny has finally dropped that “not all knowledge resides within the company”.

We had worked through some of the cultural stuff, shifted around the team who like to collaborate, pushing others less collaborative to the back; the conflict points, we had established the process, practice and tools.

We even have our legal teams on board helping sort out all the conflicting positions that open innovation can mean when it comes to dividing up the IP spoils and even had our leadership tuned in, singing our praises and even (heavens forbid) getting engaged in the process.

When the world shifts, we all need to as well, or we get left behind.
Then suddenly the world shifts on its axis once again, everything seems to be digital. The buzz is big data, analytics, smart mobility, and social media, with lots of talk of interconnected devices giving us the next big paradigm in innovation growth.

So will my innovation portals, my collaboration platforms, my idea capture tools or my crowdsourcing and patent scanning techniques all get thrown up into the air or are they going to be squeezed into this new digital pot?

Many are struggling with the sudden talk of big data; all of it flowing into the organization when many of us were simply struggling with what we thought was big enough data being generated already.

What and where is this digital actually going and what does it mean to us?

How fast will the digital revolution come into my organization? Are any of us ready for this latest onslaught? Do we have the new skills all of these digital technologies need? Does this mean I have to talk again to the IT department?

So many questions are bubbling up on digital technology; it is going to be hitting us like a tsunami, at a potentially destructive force. There is a time to find the high ground and I’d recommend to start now.

We will be faced with two choices as my ‘open’ thinking here

We will either go from open innovation to open digital innovation or we will revert back to closing up and trying to manage all this data within a closed system or network. So is this another moment for open vs closed debate, just with digital included to make it ‘open digital innovation’ or, is it closed digital innovation?

Will there be a difference? I think so.

First we will need to debate the ‘network effect’. Metcalfe’s Law “that the value of the network is in proportion to the number of members squared”.

In other words, the evaluation of how strong a network is, will be determined by the numbers connected. As we use technologies and leverage the internet the greater our intelligence will flourish. So open digital or closed digital?

Exploiting the ‘digital effects’ will be determined by the value it can generate. The more open the data infrastructure is, the more the networks and open hardware can collect, generate information, extract actionable value and increased awareness. So open digital or closed digital?

The excitement that digital is expected to generate in delivering the insights of anticipated solutions and pointing ‘us’ is being ‘dangled’ in front of us.

Are we ready, can our organizations cope?

The more ‘everyone’ connects on the internet through the Internet of Things (IoT) then we will be experiencing even more of a bigger transformation. They forecast 5 billion additional people will connect to the internet globally in the next ten years all wanting to ‘give voice’.

Today we talk of ‘high-speed’ I just wonder on when ‘the day the internet broke’ or simply taking speed and putting it is greater context such as ‘managing in open innovation ecosystems to deliver the speed’.

So which way will we go? Open digital innovation or closed digital innovation?

Either into the creation and consolidation of monopolies of knowledge (closed digital innovation) or open ecosystems to foster grassroots ideas, social innovation to resolve growing problems, entrepreneurship or giving the nimble and savvy business organizations the chance to pull even more ahead in exploiting.

Each is going to demand a massive mobilization of resources, internally and externally. The digital world is more enmeshed in our lives; we are living in more ‘real-time’ than ever before that continue to form a universal distributed intelligence. We are all going to keep learning new skills and tools for understanding all this ‘collective intelligence’ coming at us.

The battle for control lies in the power of digital understanding

Question: Are we going to have a battle of competition based on open standards so as to benefit from interoperability between this data streaming in, the multiple devices we have, and the growing services and networks that we require to manage it all?

Question: Or will we see some attempting for lock-in engagements, striving for anti-competitive dynamics to steal competitive advantage and undermine swaths of ‘not able to compete or ‘far too slow to see it coming?

Question: Will we see platforms that we can all sign up and join in that link all the value chain providers, each seeking their part of the value chain that will allow for replicable, scalable and sustainable solutions or shall we stay narrow in scope and ambition?

Can we afford to, if the world is connected outside our window, we continue to struggle to lookout?

Whatever, digital feeding innovation will reign supreme in the forthcoming years or will it?

We are exploring all the current trends in digital technology promising to give us embedded intelligence in our devices, social activity, plenty of social and business platforms to join in and lots of mobility to keep us on the move, we seem to be heading off into a new world where digital will reign supreme.

All this data streaming in, either open or closed in collaborative management seems to be promising a wave of new innovation opportunities.

We have to decide which digital technologies are good for us and, are we throwing open the innovative digital doors or simply limiting it down, trying to control it for our sole competitive advantage?

Presently we are seeing the race to build platforms – but are they (really) open or (selectively) closed?

Closed innovation allows for a clear network of like-minded and determined organizations to work on their purpose-built platform to specifically deliver value propositions.

GE has been developing their proposition around the Industrial Internet where sensors within all their products (trains, aircraft engines, wind towers, MRT scanners etc), and these sensors will provide back the data that can analyse performance, so the customer can determine the scheduling of maintenance, improve planning and logistics etc.

They make the value proposition of offering a return of 1% as their stated claim, and already have a one billion dollar business since scheduling maintenance is a significant economic undertaking of downtime, resource planning and scheduling.

That is a closed innovation platform as it serves GE customers, and this is being sold as a value-added service.

Already they are looking to open up the platform for others but it seems not in competition to GE, so others can utilize the resources and expertise being built up for GE to build their ‘closed’ system of innovation for their competitive advantage but will this limit digital evolution or allow it to be evolved through our growing ‘maturity’ to handle it?

So will we see open digital innovation or a specific type of closed? I’ll give you my best bet in the next post, on what will eventually win.

******

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Are you going all digital on me? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We are coming up to nearly 10 years since Dr Henry Chesbrough wrote his first book on open innovation as the necessary business imperative.  There has certainly been considerable progress in many business organizations to embrace this open collaborative principle.

“Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as their own internal ideas, and explore both internal and external paths to market. Firms need to look to advance their technology, resources, their knowledge and understanding through innovating with partners by sharing risk and sharing reward”.

Isn’t it strange that the very consultants expounding ‘open’ for innovation are as closed as ever? Why is this?

I would argue that the consulting industry specializing in providing innovation services is its own worst enemy today, by not being more open themselves. It is actually failing to recognize that this is inhibiting their own long-term prospects.

Nearly all within the innovation consulting industry seem to be resolutely staying very internally driven, self-promoting, still trying to convey the story of their mastery, when clearly this is so painfully lacking from the results in growth by many of their clients from their existing innovation activities.

Due to this lack of openness, they are failing their clients by not offering them leading and emerging practice advice. Yet the client is increasingly requiring more complete or holistic solutions, not from a ‘piecemeal of innovation offerings’ they are presently receiving.

These separate pieces currently being offered by one group of consultants often don’t dovetail into a complete innovation system because they are supplemented by a variety of different service providers, all having their own ‘pet’ approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools.
Why is it when many clients who are actively working on increasingly open complex innovation challenges and working through a more diverse range of collaborative platform solutions, that the innovation consultants working alongside them, are still such a different story of being closed up?

Consultants seem so reluctant to open themselves up and embrace this more open collaborative culture and gain from embracing that essential more divergent thinking that innovation often calls for by the use of external collaboration.

Innovation consulting is a fragmented consulting industry unable to achieve scale to match client needs.

Today innovation management advisory firms are mostly small, loosely organized, some highly specialised, that have a flourishing complexity of activity but often spend inordinate time reinventing many aspects of innovation management that are not necessary and serve little value for the client.

While client’s requirements for structuring innovation are often claimed as unique and distinctive, they are in many cases, actually not. What they really want is to acquire is a common, repeatable, scalable innovation structure that allows them to manage their distinct innovations on a consistent basis.

The understanding of the innovation process is basically common or should be. Until this point of difference between what a client’s wants is a common, scalable process and yet the providers want to offer, their own versions, innovation in general will face many disadvantages in not advancing, as it is not formed around a basic set of common standards.

Consultants are ignoring the richer places of competitive advantage or doing a poorer job of exploring variability, diversity and within the organizations building capability as it is people who offer the real value within innovation.

Managing the intangibles is certainly far harder and messy but it is the ‘sweet spot’ of innovation, where the multiplying of the degrees of connectivity, interactivity and sharing, offers the new innovation equation point.

Consultants are far too cautious for their own good
Consulting firms on the other hand are moving far too cautiously to any form of collaborative engagement; it is far too ad hoc. Wherever possible consultants want to manage as much as possible internally to ‘keep’ the fees generated inside.

This is not a recipe for building lasting relationships that have mutual value in growing understanding. They stay’ in-breed’ and are not reflecting the commonly held view today, “that all knowledge does not reside within your own walls”; they still reluctantly hang on to the closed system of  ‘invented only inside here’.

How do we resolve this? Should we? Are Disruptive Forces Around?
Combining all these islands of innovation knowledge into some form of combined force would be a healthy step. Innovation is consistently ranked among the top three strategic imperatives by business leaders yet it is not recognized by consultants with the same strategic commitment.

Of course there are some big challenges facing innovation consultants today:

1. How do you break out and resolve this fragmenting industry of many niche consulting players certainly not matching the clients’ ideal profile of global span and support?
2. The inability to offer broad innovation experience or depth in capabilities is another negative working against many consulting firms.
3. Forward thinking innovation centres within consulting are rare so there is little fresh ‘knowledge stock’ being added to tackle increasing complex issues around innovation.
4. Sophistication & specialization is highly sought after but expensive to keep around. And having this expertise sitting on the bench within one consulting company as it is regarded more as a cost liability and not as a valuable asset to leverage.
5. Strategic understanding in fast changing, complex markets and organizations is extremely hard for outsiders (consultants) to grasp in the detail required to be able to contribute into clients with the impact often justified by the fees demanded.
6. Limited experiments are currently being undertaken in the innovation consulting practices, yet clients are actually crying out for this, it is a massive unmet need or job-to-be-done.
7. Lastly consultant partners should change their remuneration models that drive their consulting business to actively seek more ‘win-win’ solutions in collaborative partnerships.

A bolder, more open collaborative model is required.

1. Consultant companies should become the host and potential ‘orchestrator’ of platforms for the ‘best’ to gather and collaborate and offer this to clients as a real value benefit.
2. Clients are learning how to collaborate and to openly network.  So shouldn’t consultants embrace this and seek out the places of complimentary knowledge by recognizing they can only, as they stand today, make a limited contribution and cannot claim ‘total solution expertise’ without active collaborations themselves.
3. There are growing sources of advice alternative– clients are recognizing this and seeking it out so why not the consultant being the platform provider for this ‘clearing house’ in diversity, thinking and understanding.
4. The appeal of bringing together experts that can come together and work on specific complex problems and then disperse has great value for all concerned providing it has a retaining clause and gives all involved their own specific returns on their business model.
5. The need today is to have real access to great quality thinking and this does not reside within the walls of one consulting firm. However large a practice of consultants they are repeating the same solution set, mindlessly pulling down their ‘best’ practice from their internal knowledge and then, attempting to apply this to someone else’s unique circumstances, failing to evaluate this sufficiently and eventually failing the client.
6. Consulting practices need to address rework. Much of the profit comes in reworking what has previously been delivered, selling it time and again. This would need changing but is not so radical a change as first thought. It is extracting the repeatable parts intelligently, evaluating the points of difference in a more forensic way from ‘available’ expertise.

A revolution for innovation consulting comes from opening up.

The resolution or (salvation) of innovation consulting is to build transparent networks of expertise, brought together on platforms provided by the nominated host or consultant, so clients see and value the access to broader, best available expertise that is working through their own, often unique challenges, not being felt as ‘cookie cutting’ recipients.

Complexity, uniqueness and expertise need to be addressed in more customized ways and that challenges the existing global consulting model of maximizing repeatability. Applying the best in knowledge application for innovation consulting services offers the client a real value for accelerating growth and job creation based on more radical and breakthrough thinking.

So what I propose requires us to think through a new model that can combine the best available expertise on a given client platform, hosted and orchestrated by the innovation consulting firm, pulling together the best advisory and thought leadership around to solve unique client challenges.

We need to alter our ways to achieve this.

What will it take to shift the existing practices? Possibly clients demands better support or simply keep voting with their feet by investing in their own experimental learning themselves, as they don’t feel the consulting advice available gives them much they don’t or can’t find out themselves.

The alternative is someone sensing the opportunity to disrupt the existing consulting model and bold enough to make that fist mover advantage and take innovation consulting up a level or two of engagement.

Actively working on finding ways in their value offer, so as to position themselves with clients as a critical ‘must have’ for working alongside them on their current and future problems in richer collaborative ways.

They share the joint objective of achieving a higher level of innovation growth and return that the client can’t achieve in their current approaches to innovation management.

The post A call for a more open collaborative innovation consulting framework first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.