They are being forced to deal in increasingly complexity and environmental turbulence and ‘adapting the appropriate response’  remains increasingly a difficult one to master, within the existing regime and structures.

On the one hand the value in stability is still essential, working within specific routines and practices gives a clear ‘path dependence.’

This allows for efficiency and effectiveness to be constantly at practice, constantly building the problem-solving processes, so as to master tasks in complex environments to resolve ‘known’ problems in ‘given’ ways.

We need to become increasingly fluid but how and why?

Yet there is 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.

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.

The need for a different innovation interplay

In a recent series, of introducing the innovation interplay, co-authored with Jeffrey Phillips of Ovo Innovation, we discuss how change needs a higher appreciation and focus within any innovation design.

We go on and suggest the importance of thinking new innovation design is increasingly coming through the business model and this requires increasing undertaking of change.

This change thinking is not just for the innovator, but for the customers and markets that any innovation is channeled towards but also, in how it has a real impact on the dynamics of current competition and the potential effect on competitors.

Designing deliberate change into innovations eventual outcome, increasingly through new business models, is a powerful point of real advantage that needs greater leveraging.

So we have this dilemma of needing stability but trying to build increasing fluidity

Yet today our organizations are far too rigid, they are not adaptive or agile enough to really exploit innovation to the full. They struggle with this organizational constraint imposed by the singular, or dominating pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness at the cost of ‘fluidity.’

Organizations and individuals see change far to often in negative terms and not in the way innovation can bring positive change that seeks constant, ongoing adjustments to deliver the best, optimal solution.

How can both work alongside each other? Many theorists have suggested, of having in place the ‘ambidextrous organization.’ This would require organizations to be design organizations in their structures, people and processes to either be focused on ‘being efficient’ or being ‘change orientated’.

I have been drawn to this dual system of ambidextrous as it helps resolve one of the consistent stumbling blocks for innovation to ‘take hold’ and evolve.

Innovation is constantly fluid, needing to be adaptive as we learn and adjust to new learning and this is constantly requiring a very change orientated approach. Often innovation comes up against a rigid system and for many “it just seems not to fit” and gets rejected as not appropriate to us.

Innovation struggles as it often remain outside the prevailing system. Innovation constantly challenges the dominant mindset within organizations, who like the idea of innovation but are mostly measured to drive efficiency and effectiveness, keeping highly focused on the short-term performance as their role, reward, advancement and key to ongoing career success.

So innovation ‘sits outside’ their domain of focus. Something needs to change if innovation is really important.

Yet the very essence of our stability in organizations is under threat.

There is so much change being undertaken, the growing call for quick improvisation and ad hoc responses all needs to take us away from those rigid processes into open and far more fluid ones.

The solutions of fluid, agile and adaptive are aiming to develop highly flexible and responsive organizations as an attractive answer to manage in more uncertain times as the way to move forward. The ability to make this very defining and shaping move in any organization does seem very fraught with risk.

We do need to extend our thinking about fluidity far more, so let’s initially step back to see if we can then move forward into a more fluid organization..

There is no doubt a classic change model that needs an update

The classic “unfreeze > change > refreeze” approach to change just does not work anymore. This still remains one of the most classic change models as a three-phase model, introduced by Lewin in 1947, and became the basis for many subsequent change models.

Lewin’s change model seeks to “unfreeze” the existing conditions, in order to allow “change or transition” to occur, so as to then arrive at a new state of hopefully higher capability or competence, at which point the operating model is again “frozen” or “refreezes” into its new state.

Certainly this model is becoming very outdated and somewhat dangerous from an innovation perspective, for two reasons. First, the model anticipates resistance to change rather than engagement with change.

Second, the model assumes an eventual “refreezing” state, where the company remains in stability, without change. Today we are in need of being in a state of constantly improving our operating model and exploring growth through far more business model evolution to influence markets.

Shifting to a different change model needs a high level of transition

We need to ‘unfreeze’ through recognition of our present rigidity > We should make a ‘transition’ through experiment and exploration >

Finally, we should not ‘refreeze’ as the recommendation of past views has suggested, we should build the adaptive, agile and fluid abilities required for today from learning, collaborating and embracing a constant change mentality.

To achieve a more organic fluidity, moving from hierarchies to networks, from formal rules and high levels of coordination into far more spontaneous interactions, improvised processes that resolved specific issues and the constantly forming and dissolving project teams where far more lateral organization-wide communications take place is a set of real challenges.

Everything seems to be flowing faster and we have to respond

We are seeing far more fluidity in relationships where the knowledge is flowing within, across and between organizations. The boundaries are blurring, that increasing fuzziness needs shifting our style of decision-making and solution finding.

There is also this growing sense that innovation is endless, it never stops but simply shifts from one stage to another, often looping back to be re-evaluated and thought through. The old linear process is not working, learning and adjusting is a constant all along the pipeline development process and requires a higher level of fluidness to deal with it.

There is this nagging feeling of relentless destruction or disturbance, the very opposite of the stable equilibrium we seemed to enjoy in the past. Those that become capable of managing the constant change and disequilibrium will thrive.

Yet we need to face this paradox of fluidity and stability.

Those growing conditions of uncertainty and complexity also need boundary building, identity formation and problem-solving architectures that are stable and can provide replication of essential actions or activities.

We need to seek out and maintain yet constantly challenge to “undo” and redesign.

We are still struggling with the dominant linear logic of much of what we do in organizations, and often this constrains innovation, restricts us to provide radically different business models and limits our abilities to change fast enough. We are learning to be far more adaptive in our learning but this is constantly meeting up with the resistance of this linear logic.

What would help us build a higher fluidity into the design of our organizations?

Firstly what makes up the competencies of fluid?

Here we provide a list that has many aspects or enabling attributes to them you might recognize. Embracing all of them is not the answer but taking a more detailed and thoughtful approach to those capabilities, competencies and capacities to build fluid into your organization becomes important.

Today we are all on the search for new adaptive infrastructures. We should be participating in platforms and building our ecosystems to extract outside knowledge to learn how to recombine it in new ways. Nothing today stands still; we are in that need to constantly redefine, to build in flexibility and this adaptive skill.

We should encourage thinking and challenging present orthodoxies and explore ways to rewire and rethink much of the prevailing system and processes as it has far too much built-in rigidity.

Today we are losing predictability on much that was a constant within the past, we have a speed of development that needs to constantly be reduced down, for gaining competitive advantage and getting our innovation to market earlier.

So can we identify competencies that would help embed a more fluid way of working?

We need to look for or deliberately design into our thinking the following:
We are all becoming far more digital, fluid and fast, we are absorbing and responding at faster rates and we are adapting to a constant, multifaceted world of connections, systems and knowledge piecing to combine up into different ‘wholes’.

• To get there we need to be far more nimble, we need to learn navigation skills far more, we are increasingly assignment driven, less exploratory in many things, and technology is taking on this role.

• We need to become increasing agile, iterative, be experimenting, and constantly determined to execute to drive our results and value-add.

• We need to seek empowerment, focus on delivery and collaboration outcomes far more resolutely.

• We need to grasp the make-up of value creation and why innovation is becoming new business models in its potential.

• We need to establish within ourselves and the working environment we operate within a sound conflict resolution pathway and strive for authenticity and trust within the places we operate.

• Lastly a real willingness to seek out diversity, to be visible, and be wanting to have this constant entry and exit to our projects and challenges, to drive our personal satisfaction and worth up.

In summary

We need to relentlessly challenge and push out our own boundaries and knowledge and adapt these to be designed to those we seek to exploit constantly. The mantra of “adapting, exploring and quickly responding” to the needs seen in rapidly changing markets and across our customer base of past, present and future needs this fluidity.

The need for being fluid across our organizations is to respond to those different demands being faced today, it requires a far more adaptive and responsive business to work in increasing parallel of balancing stability alongside pushing for dynamism .

This dual need of maintaining stability in the force of resisting shocks and keeping leveraging the existing optimization has to yet work alongside responding to changing markets, resolving increasing challenges.

The end result is in delivering more innovation that meets the changes occurring, these require both fluid and stable thinking and approaches.

Additional material to explore

For a more extended discussion on change, its impact, its force within the interplay of innovation, change and business models, there are two White Papers you can read written jointly by Jeffrey Phillips of Ovo Innovation and myself.

In a White Paper “Critical Interplay Innovation Business Models Change 6-2” we provide a foundation document that highlights the important interplay between innovation, business models and change.

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

Here the paper is laying out more of the discussion for building the case of fluidity as discussed here..

The post Fluidity – the growing need of organizations today. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

These new innovations frequently change or modify operating models and business models, often not by deliberate design.

We’d stipulate that most innovation should be focused on updating and changing business models constantly and with increasing focus. With this focus new products and services become by-products or outcomes that support or sustain new business models for driving greater lasting sustaining competitive advantage.

In short, most innovation should be focused on creating new business models, with new products or services serving as enablers to intentional business model innovation, rather than the other way round. This is what we mean by flipping perspectives.

Critically we have to become far more comfortable with constant, ongoing change and align this into new innovations and business models. This move to positive change is discussed here, recommending a movement that allows the changes we need within our organizations to become more fluid in their adaption, for leveraging and exploiting innovation in new, far more compelling ways.
This is the fourth in a series discussing the interplay around innovation, so to recap

In a recent series, introduced initially on www.innovationexcellence.com with this one being the fourth post, originally published on June 25, 2015, we discussed the importance of the emerging interplays and how all innovation has the potential to be a new business model and creates change.

This series is re-produced here as it is a important concept to consider all the aspects within any innovation interplay.

Both myself, Paul Hobcraft of Agility Innovation and Jeffrey Phillips of OVO Innovation, co-authors of this series, would argue that we are failing to manage the different and multiple interplays that are constantly taking place when innovation occurs. We are often ignoring them and failing to extract the best or optimal value out of the innovation we are introducing.

In a White Paper we have just written called “The Critical Interplay among Innovation, Business Models and Change (6-2)” we provide a foundation document that highlights the important interplay between innovation, business models and change.

A new white paper “Why innovators need a new change paradigm” takes this even further by looking more specifically at emerging models and the competencies required to react to this change in more ‘fluid’ ways. You can find the download links at the bottom of this post.

The Interplay is Demanding Change and New Models

If innovation continues at a high pace, and forces change across customers, the market and the innovator, as well as creating new business models, then we can easily accept that innovators must be good at planning for and executing change. Innovation and change are somewhat symbiotic: sustained innovation cannot occur without good change capability, and innovation creates demand for change.

When we add in the interplay across innovation, business models and change it’s evident that change is a constant, and will only increase. Yet there is a significant problem: existing change models that describe how we think about and implement change no longer seem valid, given the nature and the pace of change.

Innovators need a new change model

We, innovators, need a new model of change, for at least seven important reasons:

1. As innovators we aren’t simply responding to external change, we are creating change, both for customers and for our companies and markets. (inside, proactive change vs external, reactive).
2. External change is far more unpredictable, in global markets new threats emerge from anywhere, at any time and are often delivered in totally unpredicted business models.
3. The pace and nature of change aren’t slowing but is accelerating and will continue to accelerate. (increasing pace, frequency and amplitude of change).
4. As we’ve demonstrated, most innovation has the potential to be business model innovation, which will require change. (As more innovation becomes focused on business model innovation, this will create even more change).
5. We recognize that change is no longer an occasional threat but a constant companion (shift from the idea of change as a threat to change capacity as a competitive advantage).
6. The idea that companies can achieve a protected steady state where change won’t affect them doesn’t seem to apply anymore (long periods of stasis, or standing still are no longer possible. Must be able to change/evolve constantly).
7. We need to think of change as a capability that we constantly deploy, rather than a threat we typically avoid. (Need to develop change as a capability, to build skills, reduce barriers).

For these reasons the concept of unfreezing and refreezing does not seem appropriate anymore. As change becomes more constant, and as we ourselves create change through innovation and business model development we must be much more open to, and welcoming of, change.

Rather than viewing change as an occasional nuisance or hurdle, we must build capabilities that allow us to implement change constantly, building barriers for other companies that don’t embrace change or can’t change quickly and capably.

Factors that must change

Perhaps the biggest change to status-quo thinking about change is the concept of a protected steady state where the organization can “freeze” and resist or deflect change for a long period of time. The nature of competition is so fierce that we cannot wall off a market, a segment or a company and avoid change.

Rather we need to create capabilities, systems and knowledge that allows us to embrace change and use it to our advantage, whether we create the change through new innovation or the change is thrust upon us from external factors or competitors.

Another concept that must be rejected is the idea that change is difficult, distracting and problematic. In the older unfreeze-refreeze model the goal is to experience a significant amount of change in the shortest amount of time, moving as quickly to the new steady state as possible.

This signals a lack of engagement, resistance to change and avoidance. Why would we reinforce avoidance of change when the winners in the future markets will be the firms that can embrace and manage change, who are constantly creating change through new innovation?

We need to create the belief that change is a positive experience and change capacity creates a positive differentiator for those who invest in the skills and methods.

The old change model indicates signals that a company must endure a brief change activity to win a long period of quiet in the new operating state. This promise of eventual stability is misleading and based on historical data, not future trends and indicators.

The older model makes promises that competitive forces contradict. New realities suggest that we need to be constantly adapting to emerging opportunities and threats, and building change capabilities. Perhaps a new model for change is:

Unfreeze the Rigid – Build change capabilities/reduce cultural barriers – Create change/Promote Fluidity

In this suggested change model we recognize that rather than adapting to a new reality, we need to build and sustain change capabilities to be prepared for any eventuality. In the new “state” we don’t expect to sustain a new status quo but to create change and remain capable and be constantly fluid, embracing change and innovation consistently.

To succeed in future markets that will possess far more change, at a much higher rate than before, with far more innovation, we need a new model for change that shifts the concept of change from an occasional, painful interruption to a consistent, evolving capability.

First, we need to understand the existing barriers and challenges associated with change. Then we’ll need to build change capabilities, and finally create a new operational and cultural structure to sustain change.

Fluidity is becoming our growing need of understanding today

There is considerable discussion about changing structures and models to become more adaptive, agile and fluid. With such an increasing level of complexity and environmental turbulence that organizations are having to master, most of their existing systems, processes and approaches are facing increasing challenges.

The solutions of fluid, agile and adaptive are aiming to develop highly flexible and fluid organizations as an attractive answer to move towards.

There is so much change being undertaken, the growing call for quick improvisation and ad hoc responses all needs to take us away from those rigid processes into open and fluids ones.

To obtain BOTH White Papers you can DOWNLOAD by going to
https://ovoinnovation.wordpress.com/thought-leadership/ or
http://paul4innovating.com/insights-thinking/

The original post was published on www.innovationexcellence.com on June 25, 2015

The post A new innovation perspective – change to fluidity first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

As we consider the interplay between innovation, business models and change, it becomes clear that many companies have a definition of innovation that’s far too narrow.

Increasingly we need to rethink the scope, depth and breadth of innovation possibilities, as well as the secondary implications of innovation.

Ignoring this broader definition of innovation means we can never achieve all of the possible benefits innovation has in store.

We believe ignoring the breadth and depth of innovation can also allow competitors and new entrants to disrupt your position or industry.

Fortunately, some of these definitions have been created for us.

Our responsibility is to understand the definitions and their implications, not stay constrained but seek and explore the broader options this can provide.

The post Most Innovation is Becoming Business Model Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The post The Interplay in 3 Essential Change Points for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Yet why is it we often ignore the power of change when we design innovation?

We often fail to fully appreciate the changes that are occurring from the innovation we produce, it often seems an afterthought, there is this lead and lag effect and needs, firstly recognition and then addressing in how we manage innovation going forward.

In a recent series introduced initially and given a feature of the week prime spot on www.innovationexcellence.com on June 7, 2015, we discussed the importance of the emerging interplays.

This series will be re-produced here as it is an important concept to consider all the aspects within any innovation interplay.

The emerging concept of “interplays”

Jeffrey Phillips of OVO Innovation and I, Paul Hobcraft, through my consultancy work at Agility Innovation Specialists, the co-authors of this series, would argue that we are failing to manage the different and multiple interplays that are constantly taking place when innovation occurs. We are often ignoring them and failing to extract the best or optimal value out of the innovation we are introducing.

In a White Paper we have just written called “the critical interplay among innovation, business models and change” we provide a foundation document that highlights the important interplay between innovation, business models and change.

In this whitepaper we discuss the dynamics and focuses of its impact on all three constituents involved when innovation occurs; that of the customer, the market or industry itself and on the innovator itself.

We used the “lens” of the three horizon model to demonstrate the interplay between innovation, business models and change.

The concept of the interplay – a brief introduction

In this post we introduce the concept of the interplay of innovation to provide a short understanding of this emerging thinking between us and hopefully this encourages you to read the different White Papers that are available on both our web sites (Agility and OVO) to download and read, with my link opening these up directly as pdf’s of one and two here.

We both feel outlining this has only started our thinking to begin our journey to find new ways to frame this ‘interplay’ so it becomes a management discipline, to think far more broadly about the innovation you are designing today.

A series of subsequent posts will delve deeper into specific interplays going on following this introduction which link further with the whitepaper (links for downloading are shown below).

There are interplays constantly at work around innovation that we are failing to fully recognize, manage and leverage.

The vital interplay between innovation, business models and systemic change isn’t fully appreciated; we are failing to appreciate the amount of change that is occurring by innovation and as such failing to leverage it to its most optimal.

We specifically chose the word ‘interplay’ as it means “reciprocal actions, reactions or interactions” and that is exactly what innovation imposes in potential change, to something new, and in altering the existing state, with new business model potential.

It is ‘exerting an influence’ and it is this potential for ‘reaction’ comes from thinking more about the recognition of the value within change and looking to design new business models. One affects the other or has the real potential too, if it becomes an integrated part of the innovation execution process

Any innovation creates change but we have constantly failed to recognize each of the constituent parts this can and does have an impact upon.

Understanding the interplay and why it matters

We tend to understand more and more about a capability as we work with it and learn its capabilities and power. Over time humans have mastered many technologies, from fire to the splitting of the atom.

We believe we are still in the first stages of fully understanding the scope of innovation. Until we recognize the interplay between innovation, business models and change, we cannot fully grasp the potential impact innovation has across horizons, to customers and markets, and most importantly, to the innovator themselves.

Corporate innovation has, to date, been relegated for the most part to incremental improvements, which have little impact on the market or the innovator.

We know this because of how much emphasis we place on the few stories of true disruption – the iPod for example, or how NetFlix destroyed Blockbuster. Increasingly, however, many people are realizing how much power and capability innovation has to offer, and how innovation can create exceptional change, for each of the three constituents noted above.

Further, as we expand the scope and breadth of innovation outcomes, we’ll quickly see that many innovations aren’t simply products, but also new channels, new services, new processes and new business models. As these new innovations emerge more consistently, they will create great change. This becomes part of our need for the interplay

We see different interplays

The first interplay is between innovation, business models and change

As innovation increases, we will see far more variation in the impact and outcomes, which will force business model changes. As industries and competitors adapt to the increasing pace of innovation, the pace and scope of change will increase as well, leading to more business model shifts and more potential innovation activity.

These three factors create a virtuous (to some) or vicious (to others) cycle, depending on the organization’s ability to sustain innovation, change and evolve business models.

The second interplay is between the three primary constituents involved

Innovation has an impact on at least three constituents: customers, the markets and the industries themselves but also internally on the innovator themselves.

1) The customer as the first constituent
These are at the customer, where the ‘job’ your product or new service is seeking to resolve often requires very different actions, behaviours or beliefs, firstly to adopt the innovation but then to ‘extract’ the advantage gained in making the change.

We believe we fail to provide enough of the positives of this change, often they are discovered through trial and error or through a newly forming community that shares their knowledge. Customers experience change from any innovation they adopt.

2) The Market and your competitors as another constituent
Each industry has established ‘norms’ that are increasingly under attack from new business models, and new competitive threats that are not bound by these norms.

We are seeing many conventions previously established being challenged not just by innovation itself but by the clear use of the business model to explore all the options available. New innovations often create change for competitors or the industry at large.

3) Then we have the innovator themselves
What is so staggering to us is how many innovators are refusing to recognize that innovations always create change that has a significant effect on the innovator themselves. We must ask – why is that the case? Often by not understanding the scope of change, they are attempting to create they totally miss the business opportunities that could come with it.

Change is still seen internally as something to be avoided, often at all costs, but we would argue most strongly to embrace change before a lack of change destroys you. Innovators are not immune from the change they create.

The third interplay is the three horizons to manage innovation and change

To explain the impacts of innovation and the change it creates, we’ll use an accepted framework (the Three Horizons) to consider the impact innovation has on change capabilities and business models.

What’s important to understand is that every innovation creates change, and the amount and impact of change scales out across each of these three horizons into different business model opportunities

Change today is, without doubt, a constant

We need to create a new interplay design. Before we can embrace constant change we need to see the effect of change certainly in more positive ways.

There is really no “steady state” anymore, change through innovation will become the predominant state. Change and innovation become constants, as business models continually evolve. It is reducing the fear and uncertainty of change by taking a totally different view of the value of innovation that we can alter today’s change perspective.

Organizations need to become more excited about pursuing new business opportunities, looking for new business models to change the existing dynamics.

It is totally energizing to try out new things, design a more holistic innovation experience that accounts for the customer and the market and constantly experiment with all that does ‘interplay’ around innovation.

Managing the interplay of innovation, business models and change

You do need to pass through different phases of understanding, of awareness and recognize the increasing interplay undertaken by combining innovation, business models and change across all three constituents of the customer, the market and yourself as the innovator, through a lens that sees emerging opportunity across different horizons.

In our white paper “the critical interplay among innovation, business models and change” we provide a foundation document that highlights the important parts of a new interplay that needs recognition, framing even more and a fresh approach to building the competencies, capabilities and capacities to manage the interplay of future innovation opportunity.

A place where you are seeking the power and impact of innovation lies in the interplay between change and new business designs.

To obtain the White Paper you can DOWNLOAD by going to

https://ovoinnovation.wordpress.com/thought-leadership/ or

Insights & Thinking

The original post was published on www.innovationexcellence.com on June 7, 2015

The post The Interplay Surrounding Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The opening post is entitled “the interplay surrounding innovation”. Please take a read

Our opening argument revolves around the recognition of change as part of an interplay

We argue that we are failing to manage the different and multiple interplays that are constantly taking place when innovation occurs. We are often ignoring them and failing to extract the best or optimal value out of the innovation we are introducing. The change effect is often being ignored.

You can download this whitepaper on this site within my newly created “Insights and Thinking” tab on this site.

In this paper we discuss the dynamics and focuses of its impact on all three constituents involved when innovation occurs; of the customer, the market or industry itself and the innovator itself. We used the “lens” of the three horizon model to demonstrate and frame the interplay between innovation, business models and change.

We are providing a series of posts on this through Innovation Excellence in the coming weeks which build from and on this White Paper. We both feel this has far more to explore in practices, frameworks and thinking and we hope you share this view, as it builds.

We initially chose change over transformation.

Clearly the emphasis is to encourage transformation to meet the unrelenting disruptions going on all around us makes sense. I certainly believe we have to become far more comfortable with change, before we attempt anything transformational and that in itself is not easy at all.

We seem hard-wired to resist change until we are forced to accept it and that is a real pity and loss within ourselves. We need to see a change in different ways, through the lens of discovery and learning, and then we transform.

Change always feels painful.

Change is notoriously hard to achieve both within ourselves and especially in organizations. The reality is we want to resist change, it makes us feel uncomfortable, often raising the fear of the unknown. We form habits that we find hard to shake free of.

Often we invested a fair amount of time in learning, it then becomes even tougher to start unlearning but that is what we must do, unlearn, to then open up our minds to relearn. We worry about are we losing something of value, is the change going to feel better or just increases our insecurity even further.

The level of failed change or transformations undertaken has been put at somewhere between 70 to 80% in falling short on the initial targets or aspirations that drove change. The value generated from change often falls below the expectancies visualized when the organization embarked on the change program. So why do we put ourselves through this level of pain, disruption, uncertainty and potential risk of failure?

We do get caught up in interchanging change and transformation and believe it is the same.

It is not! In my research on change, I altered my own understanding with a range of thinking I explored.

Change tends to focus on making the existing system better.
You use this as your framing point and the level of efficiencies and improving effectiveness is judged as the success or not of the end result.

You actually are ending up with a reconditioned model of your past as you have mainly dealt within the boundaries and constraints to make this (often) well-defined shift in the way things have worked.

Transformation is a different matter. You are attempting something far more radical and disruptive.

It is aiming to reinvent the organization, and significantly challenge and change the practices that are in place. It places far more at a higher risk as it is more unpredictable, iterative and often a series of experiments to learn and adapt. It often feels you are entering the unknown as it can become a real process of discovery, experimentation and adjusting execution.

Transformation is far more dynamic and far-reaching. It is often looking to design for the future as you release the shackles of the past, bound up in existing processes, behaviours and thinking. You are looking to invest far more as you learn, clearly more radical new business models would have this ‘transformational’ effect.

Both change and transformation need to deeply understand the “as is” and those committing to make a change or transformation need to share the goals and understand the reasons for undergoing such a conversion from the existing state to a different one. There are considerable risks associated with both.

What might help flip the odds?

I would argue that most change or transformation initiatives attempted are far to piecemeal, they address only certain known parts and fail to address the ‘whole’ that is actually affected by the change.

Any change program needs a far more holistic approach than often we give this, we get caught up in the project management, we focus too much on one side of the change equation and either get caught up in the people side or favour the structural side of processes and functional design.

Undergoing any change required dramatically rethinking the reasons for this, the effects this will seem to have on the operating and business model. Will the effort yield a more positive result?

We are facing unprecedented disruption

Externally we are seeing increased volatility, complexity in regulations, the impact of geopolitics, constant pressures in public spending and shifts in demand, the digital disruptions and social media influences forcing a greater need to dialogue with stakeholders, customers and new entities and finally, our employee base is questioning and demanding in unprecedented ways.

All of these are having a significant impact on our organizations and they have not responded and are often stuck in those past times where these forces of real change were simply not built into the system.

Equally most organizations are losing any significant competitive advantage as the competition has intensified, the design and adaptability of others to challenge the existing incumbent is being made easier through the internet, reducing global barriers and high level of mobility, operating often at much lower operating costs, free from legacy.

The final imperative for change comes from our present poor levels of growth and innovation.

Innovation requires managing differently, to function and yield those higher results we would like and this becomes part of the dilemma within organizations. Yet innovation is also badly constrained because change is not considered as having this symbiotic relationship with innovation.

Innovation being designed and produced are mostly new to the world (or should be) and these confront customers, markets and the innovator themselves in making change.

The higher the scope of impact of innovation the more we do need to address change yet we can’t often grasp the nature and amount of change that the innovation unleashes. We should think about innovation and change together.

This is where Jeffrey and I are focusing our thinking at present

Change is all around us as a constant-  we need to simply get used to it
We can’t escape change; we can’t transform ourselves without a clear holistic model of its impact across the whole organization.

Change and transformation require us to be dynamic, constantly exploring, adapting and learning, it cannot be refrozen as was the thinking of the past. Nothing is stable; we need to build it as fluid, agile and constantly adapting through our learning.

We need to generate a far more highly dynamic environment, one where we are constantly being challenged and seeking out answers through discovery, experimentation and constant execution.

We need to become excited about change, each of us becoming innovation change leaders.

Change today is about building a change capacity that is constantly evolving.

We need to see change as pursuing new opportunities, exploring different horizons and thinking. We need to become far more energized in trying out new things, in experimenting or prototyping, to learn and advance.

We must retool ourselves as change not only leads to transformation but it will allow us to explore all the interplays we can find within and around innovation and those can lead to great things.

To obtain the White Paper you can go to my insights-thinking page, where you can download or view the paper “the critical interplay among innovation, business models and change”

The post The ongoing challenge is making change our constant first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

For me innovation capabilities and competencies needs to be far more adaptive and aligned to the different emerging skills we should be bringing to bear, so we are able to find better innovating solutions for our collective futures.

The issue is this: if we do want to reshape much of what we are struggling with today – poor growth, diminishing futures, disconnected communities, stagnating economies or ones struggling to emerge from devastated and austerity measures inflicted upon them.

We do need to change our skill sets to reflect a more realistic and up to date need to navigate and transform knowledge to tackle these. Often our present skills are not equipped to manage in these more “disruptive” environments.

I wrote in a past post about “Learning to absorb new Knowledge for Innovation and the ability to understand Absorptive Capacity and how it works. Recently I followed that up with two recent posts about our pressing need that Jobs can be created but our skills do need very much adapting and refining, from where we are at present. One post was “Innovation Job Chasing- A Race Needed to Win” and the other was its precursor “The Present Innovation Jobless Era We Face.”

Our real need is to put in place those stronger adaptive skills  as our foundations so we can be better equipped to compete in the growing innovation race we all facing at personal, community and national levels. We need to equipped differently to meet the tougher global conditions that will be with us for our lifetimes, irrespective of our present age.

Competition won’t go away; it will only increase in its intensity.  To meet this we need to be far better equipped to be ‘innovation-ready’ in our skills. What forms a better ‘innovation ready’ skill set?

So what are those future skills we should be working towards to group around?

There was a report published in 2011 by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and sponsored by the University Of Phoenix Research Institute to understand the skills workers will need over the next decade in our changing world, based far more on technology and its continued advance.

The report “Future Work Skills 2020” looks initially at what it feels are the six drivers that are shaping our landscape and then the ten skills they see as emerging that need to be where we place our future focus upon. These are:

• Sense-making: the ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
• Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
• Novel & adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
• Cross -cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings
• Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
• New-media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
• Transdisciplinarity : literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
• Design mindset:  the ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes.
• Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
• Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team.

A call to action

As the report authors of Anna Davies, Devin Fidler, and Marina Gorbis suggest, the results have clear implications for individuals needing to learn these skills. They will be asking from where will these come? From the educational institutions that need to grapple with changes that are occurring fast. Also it is the actions both  in business and at government level on how they will encourage and develop the strategies and policies fast enough, so as to offer the incentives to drive the changes needed. It is how quickly we move towards any organized ‘grouped’ learning of new skills can we begin to build within these new groupings.

All institutions certainly do need to provide the leadership to embrace the shifts needed in a constantly changing set of lifelong learning. It is recognized increasingly that skill renewal is constant to meet tomorrow’s ever changing global challenges.  A place where skills are far more heavily reliant on technology and we are able to manage these constant changes effectively. So as the knowledge that is emerging gets translated into new values offering new opportunity, learning and growth. We discover, absorb and translate.

Teaching both hard and soft skills that reflect tomorrows needs

The underlying need is to teach skills that promote quickly in response to changing conditions that will include a higher emphasis on critical thinking, depth of insight and the analysis capabilities to ‘translate’ the information or data emerging from multiple sources.

Equally the soft skills, so often ignored as crucial become increasingly relevant. The ability to collaborate and network, to read social cues, not ignore them as not important to me and respond with this much higher level of adaptability. I wrote about “Recognition of better soft skill taxonomy for Innovation some time back that has a useful way of grouping soft skills.

My summary

Predictions can always be difficult but the impression I gained from looking at the suggested ten future skills suggested by IFTF is that they do seem to make for a solid basis for us to gather around.

What of course we need to do is to develop what ‘lies underneath these ten skills ‘to allow us all to become more ‘innovation ready’ in our skills needed to survive. These might give us that better chance to thrive in the future and find fresh innovating opportunities because we are better equipped in relevant skills.

The burning issue is that our window of time to change and incorporate these into our organized learning is shrinking at ever faster rates. We need to move from recognition of these skills into the setting about of building them far more systematically.

We need to build our future innovation capacities on more relevant skills that are based more on what we need to have within our ‘natural’ skill base based on today at least, and not ones still based on 20th century practices.

The post Navigating the future landscape by developing adaptive innovation skills first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We simply miss to much in today’s globally connected world.

Let me explain that part here on ‘the why’ that I believe in this:

Innovation is simply not containable within borders
Firstly innovation is not containable within borders; not ideas, not practices, not final concepts.

If we try to simply constrain it, it will never get the traction and momentum often needed from those ‘great ideas’ born locally, to ever grow and scale and achieve their true success.

Nationalized innovations are never seen or valued by others, and even more importantly, they aren’t seen and adopted as ‘our own’ solutions.
Innovation simply goes where it is needed or felt
Innovation should simply go where it is needed and felt. The closer you are to the final consumer, the greater chance you have of solving their needs or even unmet needs. It is often policy, constrained funding and human interference that intervenes to stop that natural open flow.

Thankfully that is changing: as we recognise within our shrinking world, movement is completed now in milliseconds. We inform others, and transfer knowledge and ideas fast.

National borders are powerless to stop this knowledge flow and that is good for innovation. Where these innovations are seen as valuable, the ‘smart money’ follows to build.

Social issues are incredibly fluid and can’t be contained
Social issues are even more fluid; boundaries can be even more permeable.

The Arab Spring is testimony to that; social and economic crisis facing Europe at present is yet another one where social unrest is driving change. Social issues are forcing change that simply flows across borders.

We might still believe one country and its social problems are different from another but they often have the same core issue, concerns, pressures and conflicts behind them.

Often because we don’t work on this similarity in early identification we leave ourselves short on insight, as we dismiss “their problems are simply different from ours”- are they really?

National Innovation has significant blind spots
Also have you noticed how often National organizing activities seem to have a number of inherent blind spots. In this case of Social Innovation, will the filtration system be useful and to whom, the whole social community or narrow groups? Will it be discerning enough?

Will it truly represent the broad spectrum of social ills and challenges that are around? Will it simply be a needless obstacle, another filter in the chain? Will anything national represent your views and issues appropriately with a clear enough understanding to add value?

My final thought here.
Why do we still compare and contrast innovation on a National basis- innovation is global, most global innovation moves where it is best managed or delivered?

All national measurements do is simply capture a given part of the activities going on within a geographical area, it completely misses the across-border flows that make up the higher value points within innovation.

Also any reports you read on the national comparison,  never, I repeat NEVER, can really compare fully each country. Each has different ways it approaches innovation  that reflect their context, objectives and conditions.

The extended articles

If you are interested the extended article for Social Innovation Europe was in two parts:
Here: http://socialinnovationeurope.eu/node/2280
And here: http://socialinnovationeurope.eu/node/2281
About SIE: http://socialinnovationeurope.eu/about

The post Should any innovation be nationally structured? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The ability to ‘evolve’ is very determinant of the knowledge base, either within a given economy or within a ‘federation’ to bring together as something new, offering more value than what is on offer today.

Innovation is highly dynamic in its constant change but also in its need of constant coordination of its parts.

Nations are Very Different

No one nation can just copy another, the same as one business entity cannot simply copy another, each has distinct characteristics, a history and a certain set of ‘physical’ boundaries on where it is located.

Different cultures, and different histories set each Nation apart.

The main difference of Nations requiring to innovate is they simply just can’t migrate to another country or spread themselves around the globe to tap into the activities in these different places, they are geographically bound.

Nations have to think differently, they are firmly anchored and the job of nations is to attract innovation activity so as to ‘create the right conditions and facilitate these as best they can, and work within the economic circumstances they find themselves within.

They can’t escape but they can create the ‘right’ conditions and now what they are good at or could be good at.

Proactive Innovation Needs to be Channelled through Entrepreneurs

Innovation is considered one of the few proactive strategies available to promote wealth and growth. It does need organizing; it cannot be left to chance.

It is working on the connectivity points; to reduce often abstract agenda’s and turn them into tangible opportunities. We need to make the approaches and thinking around innovation as coherent, accessible and open as possible.

At the heart of any future within innovation is the entrepreneur and the ability of nations to succeed in today’s environment of ‘stagnation’ is to provide the environment for these new entities and smaller ideas -rich ones to grow.

Joseph Schumpeter talked about ‘creative destruction’ many years ago, back in 1942, that applies even more in today’s world.

“Creative destruction resulting from innovation and entrepreneurship is the force that creates sustainable long-term economic growth”.

He concluded that radical innovation can lead to a better society but it is the way you interpret this will determine the winners from the losers. In Europe the entrepreneur exploits existing structures whereas that shining beacon of entrepreneur activity lying in Silicon Valley and in a number of other innovation hot spots of the USA seem to have a greater appetite for radical change.

This has its consequences and its attractions. Venture capital has its concentration in the US; failure is not only tolerated but talked about as a learning point, a certain badge of honour even. In much of the rest of the world, failure is a heavy stigma that constrains and is often judged harshly by society.

The USA does have the inbuilt structure and capabilities to realize a new innovation spirit

If the US was to really extract and study its emerging innovation activity, that certain ‘collective learning curve’ often not captured enough to see the discernable patterns.

It might realize it has its new launching point, to position itself even further as the vibrant ecosystem for innovation start up and acceleration, the place where you do create new jobs and future wealth of a nation.

The US has most, if not all, of the factors needed in place or easily put into place, it just needs a collective recognition of what it has, what it can provide and that is simply, going back to what America use to do best; to provide the best possible conditions to pioneer, to explore, to extract, to venture forth and simply innovate.

It is through the recognition that the small business is the economic generator of jobs and through recognizing and then intensifying the factors that will allow entrepreneurship to flourish, that a path to growth can occur.

The American dream is still caught up always in the adventure, that pioneering need; innovation can certainly feed that ‘desire’. The Americans are curious, and enjoy experimenting and pushing the limits.

They need to reawaken the entrepreneurial spirit further and regain that roaming spirit by moving across the new innovation landscape or prairie, this time a global one, to explore and experiment.

It is certainly a place that the US can grasp, as a nation and transforms its economy back to an engine of value and real worth it is through entrepreneurism.

Encourage proactive practices not protective practices

To do this policy needs to ‘anchor’ everything that entrepreneurs require and seek to protect this by all the means possible, not in protective practices but in proactive practices and stimulus.

So if I was setting innovation policy in the US or even Europe, I would certainly clear the current innovation ‘wood for the trees’ so it can then allow the emerging best to grow tall and give the new growth needed for the ‘ecosystem’ it will attract around it to provide new jobs and fresh growth.

This is focusing clearly on entrepreneurs as the place to give the best return for moving our stagnating economies forward again.

The post Economic growth is an outcome of the innovation trajectory we set. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Participating in Asia, watching how Asia has evolved has been a real experience, that stays with you as something hugely valuable, as it partly shapes your thinking and how you look at things going on in the world.

Some events today set me thinking that resulted in this blog.

It was August 3^rd 2010, exactly one year ago today,  I wrote one of my first blog entries for this site, entitled “The Yin and Yang of Innovation” (http://bit.ly/gXeWir)  and talked about the ‘fluidness’ in innovation that makes it hard to manage. How do you get the balance right in managing the innovation activity?

I described yin yang as polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces that are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Opposites thus only exist in relation to each other.
Yin and yang are bound together as parts of a mutual whole

I’m presently working through Langdon Morris’s new book “The Innovation Master Plan”, written to complement his previous book “Permanent Innovation”. Both offer such good, solid common sense around innovation.

I recommend you lay your hands on copies if you can.

One comment made in this latest book by Langdon was talking through the strategic viewpoint and what and where innovation fits. He was describing this strategic viewpoint stating innovation is the means of gaining an advantage while from the operational viewpoint it is often the means of survival.

He suggests the most effective approaches to innovation will continually strive to address both the strategic and operational benefits, neither to the exclusion of the others.

So here I am one year later back at my feeling of yin yang of innovation. Again the two aspects discussed by Langdon are in need of mutual support. I value the mutual forces innovation needs.

The cultural opposites when East meets West are worth considering also.

This yin yang triggered me to reflect on the constant dilemma we have between Asian and Western thinking and I thought I should share these orientation opposites with you. They might help you.

These orientations have built up for me in my understanding over this extensive period, living, travelling and working in Asia, were built up over many years.

They are structured on cultural aspects well studied, certainly well written about and discussed with many people trying to figure out the many cultural differences they seemingly encounter in dealing with the East or visa-versa, the West, and trying to understand the behaviours behind these differences.

Clearly not each person can be ‘assigned’ a specific label but these suggested observations serve as useful generalizations and as a broad reference to refer to, that might help resolve cultural differences and gain a better understanding of why innovation is often seen through different cultural lenses and can produce very different insights and observations that can lead onto completely different innovative solutions to meet different cultural needs.

Dilemmas of orientation and management when East meets West.
There is real importance in fully appreciating sometimes really big differences between not only cultures but ways different groups go about their ‘collective’ business.

For instance, we, in the West, often fall into a trap of ‘forcing’ the pace, whereas in Asia ‘pace’ is determined by a number of often complex factors that need to be fully appreciated and accounted for.

We need to recognise differences and balance them.

When you assess your progress in Asia, and your ability to engage effectively,  this handy list might be a useful guide and reminder to refer to on measuring your progress and ‘seeing’ why you are often not making the necessary progress you expected or get caught out by surprise.

This clearly is a generalization but more often than not, stands the test of seeing and appreciating the differences.

Western orientation                                                                      Asian orientation

Valuing these orientations, and respecting what they mean can help yield better results through appreciation.

These orientations have given me a good understanding while working in Asia.  Over my extensive periods living and working in Asia for the past 20 plus years, I’ve been able to validate many of them.

Innovation needs equally a clear balance in orientation, and so do the cultural lenses we view the world through. I hope these outlined here provide you with a useful way to balance out and appreciate differences in a world of growing mutual dependence.

Valuing cultural differences and diversity offers many more innovative possibilities, explore them all, one is not mutually exclusive, they offer different perspectives.

The post The dual forces within our cultural thinking first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.