We need to ask a broader question here: what does it actually take for an organisation to shape the system it operates in, rather than simply adapt to it?

Philips is not just the subject of the analysis. It is the case that makes the wider architectural question visible.

The Philips case matters because it shows the difference between speaking in ecosystem terms and building for ecosystem behavior. The lesson goes beyond one company: many organizations want ecosystem leadership, but few redesign their operating logic to support it.

The diagnosis is clear: Philips is speaking at system level while still operating largely at company level. That matters not only for Philips, but for any organization that aspires to ecosystem leadership without yet redesigning its architecture to match.

This second part of a series that builds on the Philips analysis following on from the first article: Royal Philips: Metaphor or operating logic?

This article raises some of those tougher questions when you are building collaborative Ecosystems.

That question of shaper or shaping became sharper in July 2026, when the Dutch government and Philips announced a ten-year MedTech investment of €102.5 million in public funding, matched by €50 million from Philips, focused on image-guided therapy powered by AI and robotics. This was not just support for Philips as a company. It was a nomination for a system-shaping role in a broader MedTech ecosystem.

The ambition is explicitly ecosystem-level: to strengthen the Dutch and European MedTech system by connecting start-ups, SMEs, hospitals, universities, researchers, and larger companies. That ambition is significant. The harder question is whether an organization can build the architecture that attracts world-class contributors and enables them to work at that level.

In the first article, the point was not that Philips lacks platforms, partnerships, or AI capability. It was that those assets still sit inside a company-centred logic: intelligence flows inward, governance sits with Philips, and the actor network around it participates on Philips-defined terms rather than through a structure it genuinely co-owns.

This second article asks the harder Ecosystem design questions.

Not whether Philips should change — that case has already been made — but what change is actually required at the level of architecture, governance, and operating logic.

Within our analysis we have different Lenses applied in a Ecosystem diagnostic that are grouped around a Structured, Strategic, Adaptive and External Signal Lens set of questions.

First, What the Strategic Lens of the IIBE Reveals

The IIBE strategic lens asks multiple different questions but one of these is a simple one: does the organization’s strategy operate at the level of the ecosystem it inhabits, or at the level of the enterprise it manages?

For Philips, the answer is both. And that is the source of the tension.

Public language from Philips’ leadership — at Davos, in quarterly calls, and around the MedTech commitment — speaks at system level: open ecosystems, integrated AI platforms, innovation through shared ambition. But the internal operating priorities still speak at enterprise level: extracting value from existing assets, restricting pilots and experimentation, and focusing on near-term margin improvement.

These two strategic registers are not in creative tension. They are pulling in different directions.

A system-shaping strategy requires investment in the conditions that make others want to participate: governance design, interface architecture, trust frameworks, and standards that attract actors who would not otherwise contribute. An extraction strategy does the opposite. It pulls resources away from those enabling conditions. You cannot ask others to innovate on your architecture while limiting the experimentation that would prove that architecture can work.

What the strategic lens reveals is not a communications problem. It is a design problem. Philips has not yet made a clear architectural choice about which destination it is designing for.

The strategic question is no longer whether Philips can speak ecosystem language. It is whether it can own the interfaces, standards, and governance architecture of a MedTech system rather than only the products and platforms within it.

So exploring within the Structural Lens you can evaluate differently.

The structural lens, for instance, asks a different series of questions, for example: Is the organization built to deliver what its strategy implies?

For Philips, the gap is not about scale. It is about design logic.

Two concepts matter here: dynamic orchestration and adaptive governance.

Dynamic orchestration means the architecture connecting actors in the ecosystem can sense what is changing and respond in real time, rather than waiting for the next update cycle.

Adaptive governance means the rules, trust frameworks, and decision mechanisms change as the ecosystem learns, rather than being fixed until the next review.

Those are not incremental improvements to a product-company operating model. They require a different organizational function altogether: a deliberate architecture above the existing platform and product structures that manages the conditions under which the ecosystem evolves.

In our view this is the role of the Living Bridge.

The living bridge is the function that keeps the system connected, keeps intelligence moving, and helps the rules evolve with the network. It seeks out pattern recognition, cross-domain synthesis and interpretive judgement under ambiguity.

The Living Bridge is the institutional capability that connects actors, routes intelligence across boundaries, updates governance in response to what the network learns, and balances stability with evolution. Without that function, the platform remains a platform. The ecosystem ambition remains a statement of intent. The architecture never becomes a system-shaping capability.

You can explore these needs for applying Dynamic Orchestration, Adaptive Governance and the Living Bridge in more detail in the post: “The Architecture That Changes Everything in Ecosystems is Dynamic and Adaptive“

What the External Lens Shows

The external lens asks what the actor network outside Philips needs to see before it contributes its best rather than its most cautious contributions.

That question matters because a world-class MedTech system requires world-class contributors. Hospitals bring clinical workflows and outcomes data. AI developers build on shared infrastructure. Academic medical centres contribute research. SMEs bring specialist innovation. Researchers treat the system as a neutral commons rather than a company-controlled environment.

None of those actors will contribute fully unless they can clearly see at least three things.

• Firstly, governance that is neutral enough to protect their interests. That means rules, standards, and trust mechanisms that no single actor can dominate, including Philips.

• Secondly, interfaces that are open enough to enable genuine co-creation. Publishing an API is not the same as designing an open architecture. Open architecture means others can build in directions Philips did not specify.

• Thirdly, standards that are ambitious enough to attract serious partners. A world-class system is defined by the quality of its standards: data sharing, clinical workflows, AI validation, and outcomes measurement. Philips has the credibility to help set those standards. The question is whether it has the governance design to do so in a way that attracts rather than controls.

The external lens makes the design requirement plain: Philips must build for attraction, not control. The broader lesson is that ecosystem ambition only becomes credible when the architecture makes co-ownership possible.

Where the Gains and Risks Sit

The gains from becoming a genuine system shaper are structural, not incremental.

A system-shaping position creates a moat that product investment alone cannot replicate. Every additional actor, every new data flow, and every innovation at the intersections of the network compounds the value of the architecture. That is a different kind of strategic position from owning strong products or having good partnerships.

Philips already has useful foundations for that move: an installed base, clinical relationships, imaging and monitoring assets, and an AI portfolio. None of that is wasted by a shift to system shaping. On the contrary, it becomes more valuable if it sits inside a governed ecosystem architecture.

The risks of not making the shift are now more acute.

The first is competitive lock-in. Siemens Healthineers and GE HealthCare are both investing heavily in owned data and intelligence architectures. Each quarter spent managing bilateral relationships while competitors build owned system architectures widens the gap.

The second is partner confidence erosion. The actors needed for a world-class ecosystem are watching the architecture Philips actually builds, not just the language it uses. If the governance feels tightly Philips-controlled, participation will stay cautious.

The third is the cost of delay. The system-shaping position is open now, but it will not stay open indefinitely. The organization that designs the governance architecture, sets the standards, and builds the Living Bridge function first will capture compounding advantage. The organization that waits may find the position already taken.

What This Means More Broadly in Ecosystem Design

The Philips case is important because it shows a broader strategic pattern. Many organizations want ecosystem leadership, but few redesign their operating logic to support it.

That is the core lesson here: ecosystem ambition only becomes real when architecture, governance, and external design change together. Platforms, partnerships, and innovation programs are not enough on their own. Without a design that supports trust, co-creation, and adaptive governance, the organization will still behave like a company — even while it speaks like a system shaper.

That is why this case matters beyond Philips. It shows how difficult it is to move from participation in a system to shaping the system itself.

It brings us to the fourth lens: the Adaptive Lens

Adaptive capacity requires the important permission and resource to experiment, pilot, test, fail. Has the Philips organisation explicitly received that permission. Consequences often compound negatively as landscape evolves faster than restriction-mode organisation can track within Ecosystem design. This needs a certain clarity.

What This Means for Philips to determine

The board-level question is no longer whether Philips should talk ecosystem. It already does. The question is whether it is willing to redesign the organization so that the language is matched by the architecture.

That means three things in our view to be explored:

• 1. Philips needs a clear architectural choice about what it is designing for.

• 2. it needs dynamic orchestration and adaptive governance as core capabilities, not as side projects.

• 3, it needs a Living Bridge function that can connect actors, evolve governance, and turn platform assets into system-level advantage.

That is the real decision now in front of Philips. Not metaphor or messaging, but architecture.

Shaping the system is not about executing the current model a bit better. It requires a different one altogether; one that attracts serious contributors, enables co-ownership, and creates value across the ecosystem rather than only inside the company.

**

In the next piece in this series, we apply the Optionality and Volatility lens to Philips, exploring which strategic options remain open, which are closing, and where the most acute risks are now unhedged.

Paul Hobcraft is the creator of the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem framework (IIBE), advising enterprises and institutional bodies on ecosystem architecture, governance, and orchestration design.

The post Royal Philips: Will It Shape the MedTech System — or Be Shaped by It? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Roy Jakobs has been saying the right words for a while now. At Davos in January 2026, freshly reappointed as Philips CEO, he called for an “open ecosystem” in which Philips adopts other companies’ AI into its workflows rather than trying to build everything itself. By March, he was describing Philips’ shift from standalone devices toward integrated AI platforms, while also warning that slower growth leaves less room to keep investing in innovation. Then in July, alongside the Dutch government’s €102.5 million MedTech commitment, he returned to the same theme: “innovation thrives when we come together around a shared ambition”.

That is not random messaging. It is a CEO describing something close to an orchestrator strategy. The question is whether Philips’ actual architecture matches what its CEO is now saying in public.

A simple test helps. If Philips disappeared from HealthSuite tomorrow, would the hospitals, AI vendors, and researchers connected to it keep building together on their own? Or would the whole thing simply stop? If the honest answer is “it would stop,” then Philips does not yet have an ecosystem in the full sense. It has a company-centred network using ecosystem language. That distinction – metaphor versus operating logic – is the most useful lens for reading Philips’ current strategic fork.

Metaphor versus operating logic

Using the Intelligent Intergrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) lens, the difference is straightforward. The IIBE is designed to expose how a company’s architecture really works – where power, governance, and value sit in practice, not in slides. Ecosystem as metaphor means a company describes its partnerships, marketplaces, and platforms in ecosystem language while the real decisions still sit inside its own governance, incentives, and control logic. Ecosystem as operating logic means governance, data flows, experimentation, and value capture are deliberately designed so that outside actors can build, scale, and benefit on infrastructure the anchor company does not fully dictate.

Philips’ HealthSuite and ECG AI Marketplace are real enough, but structurally they still look like Philips-owned rails with Philips-defined terms. That is company-level logic borrowing system-level language. It is not unusual; many important ecosystems begin this way. The real issue is whether Philips evolves beyond that stage or gets stuck there.

The pendulum Philips keeps repeating

Philips has spent decades swinging between two different failure modes. For much of its history, it over-indexed on invention without reliably capturing the value. NatLab helped produce the compact cassette, the CD with Sony, early LED advances, and the semiconductor capabilities that later fed into ASML. Innovation was not the missing ingredient. The persistent weakness was converting breakthrough invention into durable, compounding, owned advantage.

Then came the swing the other way. After the Respironics crisis, Philips did what a company in shock should do: preserve cash, tighten operations, and rebuild credibility. Jakobs’ turnaround is real; Philips has reported improving sales, margins, and order intake despite tariff and geopolitical pressure. But a crisis response can easily harden into a strategic habit. When pilots narrow, experimentation slows, and near-term extraction dominates, the company may protect the core while quietly losing the next layer of strategic freedom. Philips has already seen what this looks like in practice: from the full value of the CD, to semiconductor depth, to the upside of ASML, important positions have slipped when architecture and governance lagged behind invention.

This is where the innovation-portfolio problem matters. Philips does not just appear to swing between experimentation and extraction; it appears to do so without a stable, explicit portfolio of bets across horizons. In a true innovation portfolio, some capital protects the core, some extends adjacencies, and some creates future options. Without that balance, the pattern becomes predictable: one era produces too many disconnected experiments; the next kills or starves them in the name of discipline; and the company never builds a repeatable pathway from invention to new architecture. In IIBE terms, the portfolio gap shows up as an architecture that can’t reliably turn pilots and incremental projects into system‑level capabilities and commercial scale. Research on innovation portfolios repeatedly shows that firms overloaded with incremental projects rarely generate the growth they seek, while weak portfolio design often kills breakthrough options before they scale.

The ASML lesson, properly read

This is where the Philips story becomes more interesting than the standard cautionary tale. The usual version says Philips co‑founded ASML and then failed to hold onto the value. That is true at one level, but incomplete at the level that matters.

ASML emerged in 1984 as a joint venture between ASM International and Philips, at a time when Philips did not want to carry the full cost and risk of lithography R&D on its own. In other words, ASML was not only a story of strategic foresight. It was also a story of constrained capital, risk sharing, and partial release. Philips did not create ASML by perfectly orchestrating an ecosystem from the centre; it helped create the conditions for ASML by allowing something strategically important to become more independent than its normal control instincts might have preferred.

Philips has been here more than once. ASML is the clearest case, but the later spin‑off of its lighting business into what is now Signify – separating health tech from connected LED lighting under capital and focus pressure – followed a similar pattern: when the scope and investment needs of an activity became too large to run as just another Philips division, independence and new governance followed.

That changes the lesson. Philips’ greatest ecosystem successes may not have come from holding tighter, but from loosening its grip early enough for independent governance, partner trust, and external complementors to emerge. The point is not that Philips should simply “let go” in some vague romantic sense. The point is more exact: when innovation becomes too complex, too distributed, and too capital‑intensive for one company to control end‑to‑end, value shifts toward whoever designs and governs the shared architecture.

The real strategic move: orchestrate others’ innovation

That is the sharper thesis Philips now needs. If a company is under real capital discipline and no longer wants to fund broad internal experimentation at scale, the only credible way to continue benefiting from innovation is to become a great orchestrator of other people’s innovation. In IIBE language, that is the work of dynamic orchestration and adaptive governance: creating movement and shared value in the ecosystem, and making sure the trust infrastructure and rules can adapt as more actors join. That means owning the interfaces, standards, governance rules, and system architecture that let external actors experiment and scale on your rails – without turning the whole thing back into a one‑company system.

This is not the same as “spend more on R&D,” and it is not the same as “extract more from what we already own.” It is a third move. Philips does not need to outspend Siemens Healthineers or GE HealthCare in every AI domain. It needs to become the indispensable coordination layer in the domains that matter most to MedTech. That is the difference between participating in innovation and architecting its direction.

The IIBE’s core question here is simple: will Philips be a neutral orchestrator, or simply coordinate activities within boundaries it already controls?

Tier 2 or Tier 1

Seen through that part of the IIBE lens, Philips’ current positioning looks uncomfortable. In many of its AI and data plays, Philips still resembles a Tier 2 actor: a supplier contributing data and algorithms into environments others govern, rather than a Tier 1 orchestrator that sets the shared architecture and the interfaces others must plug into. Tier 2 actors can make money. They do not usually shape the system.

A Tier 1 orchestrator sits higher in the architecture. It shapes the rules, governs the platform, and captures the optionality that comes from being central rather than adjacent. That distinction matters because optionality – future strategic room to move – is now the scarce asset. Once a company settles into a subordinate layer of someone else’s architecture, climbing back up becomes expensive and politically difficult. And every year Philips waits, the easier it becomes for rivals to lock in that upper tier.

The Dutch bet and what it really asks

That is why the July 2026 announcement matters more than the headline amount suggests. The Dutch government and Philips jointly announced a ten-year MedTech investment: €102.5 million in public funding, matched by €50 million from Philips, aimed at image-guided therapy powered by AI and robotics. The ambition is explicitly ecosystem-level: to strengthen the Dutch and European MedTech system by connecting start-ups, SMEs, hospitals, universities, and larger companies.

This is not a rescue package. It is a nomination. The Dutch state is, in effect, asking Philips to play a system-shaping role in a sector where innovation will increasingly depend on shared data, clinical workflows, software layers, and institutional trust. That is a much bigger ask than running a better internal platform.

It also brings a hard behavioral constraint into view. Hospitals, researchers, and AI partners will only contribute seriously to a shared innovation system if they believe the governance is neutral enough to protect their interests. If Philips uses public money to build a bigger version of a Philips-controlled network, the ecosystem language will stop persuading people long before the architecture starts compounding.

The control trap

This is the trap some industrial platforms fall into: trying to become the orchestrator by increasing ownership rather than increasing trusted coordination. The result is a platform that is technically central but politically unattractive. Partners join cautiously, share selectively, and hold back their best assets because they do not want to strengthen a proprietary gatekeeper.

For Philips, that is the key design challenge. The company does not need less control in the abstract; it needs the right kind of control. It should control the interfaces, quality standards, and system coherence that make a MedTech ecosystem reliable. But it cannot control the whole field so tightly that hospitals, AI developers, and academic centres feel they are simply feeding Philips’ next proprietary advantage. In behavioral terms, the ecosystem only works if other actors see enough gain, enough fairness, and enough autonomy to keep contributing.

Why the IIBE lens matters

This is exactly why the IIBE framework is useful here. It forces the question away from rhetoric and toward structure, and its full evaluation takes an organisation through extensive diagnostic and discovery so boards can see where their ecosystem design is strong, and where it quietly closes their options. Is Philips operating at company level while speaking at system level? Is it preserving strategic optionality or quietly closing it? Is it orchestrating a partner system or merely extending its own enterprise boundary?

Those are not abstract questions. They are board-level questions about capital allocation, governance design, trust, and future value capture. Philips’ fork is not simply whether to innovate more or cut harder. It is whether to remain a company-centred actor with ecosystem vocabulary, or become a genuine orchestrator of MedTech innovation in a world where no single player can own the whole stack.

The choice, stated plainly

So the choice now looks sharper than it first appears.

One path is familiar: keep running a Philips-led network, optimise extraction, limit experimentation, and accept a role as a strong but ultimately subordinate player inside larger architectures shaped by others.

The other path is harder but more consequential: build the governance, interfaces, and shared architecture that allow other actors to innovate around Philips without requiring Philips to fund all the experimentation itself. That is the only path by which a more disciplined Philips can still capture the upside of innovation at system scale.

What makes this more than an abstract choice is timing. The orchestrator role is still available in MedTech AI today; it will not be if two or three better-capitalized rivals succeed in entrenching their architectures first. In that scenario, Philips’ current Tier 2 position becomes the ceiling, not the starting point.

That is what makes Philips such a revealing case for business ecosystem thinking. It shows the difference between talking about ecosystems and building one. And it shows why, in turbulent times, the companies that still benefit from innovation are not always the ones that invent the most. Often, they are the ones that learn to orchestrate best.The Dutch government has bet that Philips can do the second. Roy Jakobs’ public language suggests he understands this direction.

The unresolved question is whether Philips is prepared to redesign not just its strategy deck, but its operating logic. In the next piece in this series, Paul Hobcraft uses the full IIBE to show what dynamic orchestration and adaptive governance look like in practice and needing to be applied to Philips through this IIBE lens, and how this can give boards a clearer basis for deciding which path to take and what to avoid.

The post Royal Philips: Metaphor or operating logic? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Following on from my last post suggesting the way to move innovation forward, it was to ‘take the different innovation hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement” I used a military metaphor of “taking the hills”.

So what are the hills we need to take?

 There are plenty of innovation hills to attack but here are ten suggestions that would advance the cause of innovation and establish its territorial importance in the organization somewhat.

Some hills maybe on first glance, seem not so important but they all move towards setting up the winning conditions for innovation to become a core within organizations. Some are sending clear signals of intent; others show the fighting commitment necessary to take that hill because it is strategically important.

Hill one is by abandoning quarterly reporting

Thank heavens there are organizational leaders beginning to push back on the obsessive need of reporting results every three months. A number of multinational businesses, such as Google, Unilever, Coca-Cola and National Grid have signalled the end for Quarterly Reporting in order to halt short-term relationships with investors. This is such a psychological hill to regain to signal a better focus on the longer-term,

Steve Holliday, CEO of energy company National Grid PLC, recently stated quarterly reporting encouraged short-term thinking and behaviour, stating, “Chief Executives and investors must move beyond financial value as the only recognised metric of business success.”

Unilever CEO, Paul Polman, when announcing Unilever’s approach to reporting, “If you buy into this long-term value creation model, which is sustainable, then come and invest with us. If you don’t buy into this, I respect you as a human being, but don’t put your money in our company.”

The second hill is trying to regain stability in organizations leadership

Let’s get some stability at the top of our organizations. Through this focus on longer-term value creation it might allow the C-level a better chance at considering the strategic effects of ‘rushed, responding to the short-term’ can bring. They need motivated people and the limited talent will go elsewhere if they feel the conditions laid out are too risky and uncertain.

Stability in leadership and strategic direction are important to innovation, The tenure of CEO’s has got dangerously short and as they have become increasingly incentivised to gain their reward on their time in the job with a direct consequence that more radical innovation gets ignored or relegated.

Hill three to take- making innovation not just the addition to the day job.

Innovation to really work, to become sustaining, has to be integrated and central to the daily job. Innovation needs to lead each person’s thinking. Let’s do away with those often separate focused activities of managing (exclusively) through efficiency and effectiveness and add in innovation. Innovation should not be a ‘bolt on’ afterthought, it needs integrating into each person’s daily role.

Hill four- stopping the fad and fashion of innovation

How often do we hear that innovation is in our top three priorities yet leadership is concerned over their innovation success rates? Innovation swings through this fad, popular to trot out when needed and pushed back when times require ‘swinging’ cost cuts. These cuts take out any slack within the system, freeze the hell out of what is left and then the leadership can’t understand the lack of commitment, of trust, of engagement.

This hill is vital to capture and plant the flag of innovation to announce it has become a core driver of growth, performance and valuation and we will hold this hill at whatever cost.

Hill five- the ability to understand and stimulate innovation

Survey after survey senior executives are only “somewhat”, “a little” or “concerned” in the decisions they are making around innovation. What does explain this gap between aspirations and eventual execution? Innovation as a force is hard to build but it becomes impossible, if you do not immerse yourself in it. To sustain innovation you need to create ongoing capabilities, then scale to build the momentum of overwhelming forces that deliver lasting impact around innovation.

Hill six. There are no best-practice solutions, this is full of booby traps.

Those organizations that rush to copy others simply forget they are uniquely different. Simply copying and being selective on taking others best practices enables those others to always be ahead. What you think is a best practice has most probably moved on. If you are busy chasing your competitor to get ahead you have to change this best practice crutch and exchange this for more modern fighting equipment.

Base your own practice on ‘good’ practice, or ‘emerging’ practice and explore ‘novel’ practice with greater confidence. These allow you to  scan the practice horizon but intelligently assessing the terrain in better, more adaptive ways, to see what you can learn to deploy to give you your advantage. Avoid the best practice hill, you will find it full of booby traps that will ‘bog’ you down in your longer-term advancement if you blindly stumble onto this hill.

Hill seven- taking explicit steps to foster an innovation culture

Creating the conditions, the environment for innovation to take hold allows for growing trust and increasing commitment. If executives listen to their people’s ideas and value them, it brings growing trust; it pulls individuals together in a collective identity. This offers more as an innovation culture of trust than monetary incentives. People go that extra yard, push their bodies and go to extremes if they believe.

Hill eight- Ensuring you have a formal integrated innovation plan

Approaching innovation in an ad-hoc fashion delivers occasional success and the potential for plenty of failures. By integrating innovation fully into the strategic management agenda, in the vast majority of senior level meetings encourages a more structured approach to innovation. Innovation should be consistently managed, tracked and assessed as a core element of an organizations strategic agenda. This is a hill that provides that essential higher ground.

Hill nine- senior leaders need to explicitly lead the innovation battle.

If the leadership of organizations is not seen to be explicitly leading and fully involved and committed to innovation it sends the wrong signal to the troops. Being visible, being engaged, and being as committed to taking the innovation battle on makes a world of difference.

Hill ten- Winning the hearts and minds of all those around you

The failure within organizations is that innovation is foremost a peoples game. All the technology, processes, frameworks mean nothing unless there is utter engagement and commitment in what we do. To protect and encourage people that make bold decisions signals the fear of failure is part and parcel of innovation. Encouraging behaviour of ‘wanting innovation’ inspires trust and belief.

Winning the battle for innovation

Laying out the conditions, explaining the context, communicating the ground rules and governance gives a sense of clarity. By knowing the objectives, the taking of all these different hills becomes easier. Who is leading your charge, what hills does your organization need to take to give innovation the liberating effect it deserves?

The post Taking on those innovation hills is never easy first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How do we move innovation forward? We need to see this as a battle of hearts and minds, of overcoming dogma and fixed mindsets, using skirmishes to advance the innovation advancement. We need to break out of entrenched positions and lead innovation forward.

Many people feel innovation is an uncomfortable place, it often is at the edge, it deals in both opportunity and risk, it is uncertain to commit to joining the innovation battle. Sadly the majority working within our organizations do not understand innovation, it is too intangible, it seems shrouded in mysteries, yet it offers challenge, excitement and satisfaction. To achieve ‘something’ is highly motivating.

We firstly need to mobilize around innovation

To mobilize the organizations troops you have to give them objectives, they need to identify and be given a clear understanding of the ‘cause and its effect’. Over time they can recognize the positive effects and begin to understand the consequences if they don’t join in and engage.

Let me use a military metaphor, in war for this post.

Achieving advantage it is necessary to take the high ground away from others, “to take the hill”. This is always a costly operation, both because an attacker usually suffers from this ‘push’ and because it is more difficult to attack uphill and take someone else’s hill or advantage point.

The uphill battle for innovation is not an easy one

Innovation is in an uphill fight to gain the high ground and provide the strategic advantage that this will eventually bring, if it is sustaining and well executed. To help in this our leaders have to decide the strategic framework for advancing innovation.

The approach and the eventual strategy needs to lay out what the intent is, it needs to define the objectives. Any clear statement needs to state where the business is headed in the long term and how innovation will contribute. It should include major goals and milestones, as well as how resources and assets are going to be deployed. It needs a real comprehensive innovation battle plan.

Planning our innovation battle requires the taking of different hills

This plan or framework needs to be simple, clear, credible, motivating and it reflects the uniqueness of the organization to achieve the innovations needed. We need to see this as taking one hill at a time, tactics may change but each new hill taken signals advancement and provide better conditions to ‘think’ innovation with growing confidence.

Each hill might be just one mission in the overall innovation strategy. The role of our organization’s leader is ensuring they are putting strategy into practice by constructing and then communicating where do we want to get to and how are we going to get there.

We need to take each hill one at a time and then to secure it to gain a lasting position for innovation

Innovation does not happen overnight, it takes time and preparation. It takes dedicated commitment. We need to advance ‘one hill at a time’.

So what are the hills we need to take?

Any thoughts, I’m going over a few suggestions in my next post? Some are establishing strategic change, some are to stabilize positions and some are to push out and establish the strategic advantage. Others hills need to be established so organizations can build capabilities, then mobilize theses to deploy innovation in structured ways.

amended -broken into two posts for ease of reading

The post Taking the hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.