I recently wrote a post “Delving into a complex world- helping to keep pace”.……to help us to keep pace, learn apply and adapt.

Finding time to read and extend our thinking is a real struggle and going that extra mile to read thought-leadership views can be a step to far, I know but I can’t help myself, it is part of my job and certainly for me, many are really worth it.

In that post I was recommending Deloitte and their thought leadership as a good place to visit.

Now I’m not sure how many of you actually did, so I thought in this post  to pick out specifically two great articles and make a post summary of these, as I feel both of these might be useful, as they challenge and break new ground in thinking.

So I can’t compete with getAbstract or Soundview or many others, offering the service of learning a book’s key ideas in less than 10 minutes but hopefully the two I’ve chosen will beat the time it takes in this one read to cover what I feel cover two topical and important innovation thoughts of the present for many involved in innovation.

The two thought leadership pieces I have chosen.Each of these are in the field of innovation so hopefully they will be of interest and raise your curiosity to dig a little deeper, if not then you have the key insights (from my perspective) here and that should be maybe enough to become more aware.

The two I have decided to summarize are 1) Beyond Design Thinking and 2) Minimum Viable Transformation.

Beyond Design Thinking

Written by Larry Keeley, president and co-founder of Doblin, Inc., an innovation strategy firm known for pioneering comprehensive innovation systems and the famous “Ten Types of Innovation”. A ‘given’ place to begin framing your innovation.

Beyond Design Thinking – reflecting on its place

Here Larry is discussing another really important system, about Beyond Design Thinking and let me pick out the key thinking within this article:

It opens with “Corporations have grown enamored with design thinking” and although design is in the ascendance, as it is powerful, effective and transformational if practiced or approached right, its trend needs examining. The key to design thinking is it begins by imagining a solution that does not exist yet, and then set about outlining a pathway to realizing it. Normally we make an assessment of a problem and seek correcting it.

What is at the heart of design thinking?

Design thinking has at its heart the generation of (lots of) ideas, build prototypes, try many things, build narratives about them, test everything, do more of what works and all the time show a clear bias for action, looking to shoot for the moon, or even Mars. All exciting, motivating stuff.

The creep is we are beginning to make design thinking a panacea – we start believing it can fix the ‘dry stuff’, the overly rational planning approaches to optimize around predetermined and deeply analyzed market segments, we are actually abusing design thinking. Larry argues that certainly conventional approaches to planning are overdue for reinvention; design thinking is sometimes treated as superficial to truly deliver on grand expectations. It falls down attempting the wrong things or trying to fit design thinking into the events of the day.

Certainly I’ve seen or witnessed many brainstorming or management meetings that have asked along a design thinking expert, who pulled out of the hat, like the magical rabbit, a wondrous show to excite, determine and mostly fill an otherwise boring day. We all got terribly excited until the magic wore off and it didn’t make a scrap of difference. This is not what design thinking should be for.

It is crafting analysis with synthesis, it is expecting divergence and convergence

As business rushes to embrace design thinking, it does move tradecraft beyond simply plain, vanilla analysis, it does embrace synthesis that helps build bolder and more newsworthy things. It can help firms build breakthroughs and contribute to the ‘genesis’ of profound insights and that alone can become the basis for an innovation team to put in the hard work of building (and validating) a breakthrough conceived through design thinking.

It is suggested in the article “put simply, analysis without synthesis is predictable and commonplace, design thinking without deep analysis is reckless.” It is seeking how to do both in integrated, even dazzling new ways.

To quote again: “when we have such highly contested markets….. it becomes a real skill to imagine a better world, make it tangible, build narratives about it and then work through the dozens of obstacles that anything new faces throughout its development”

Even more so “in a world where connectivity, collaboration, interdependence and user engagement all converge to build modern integrated ecosystems, where we formerly thought of industries”.

The quest for elegant integration of our innovation solutions

So Larry Keeley is suggesting within this article beyond design thinking we need to find “elegant integration” as effective innovations today are more about this elegant innovation of the known than the primary invention of the new. This is what is driving industry transformation everywhere.

The road ahead for the design field is three fold: use information deftly to manage complexity, great design is a critical catalyst and acceleration to the overall advance you seek and you should avoid labeling this design thinking as it is informed analysis, seamlessly synthesized into a coherent, beautiful solution.

As we transform from examples like Candy Crush, Alibaba, and countless others have as their shared property: they fuse together insights that come from sophisticated analytics, with experiences that are brilliantly designed to be easy, smart, convenient and entirely understandable.

That is where the power of design thinking turns products into platforms, offering deep solutions and your industry evolves into an ecosystem. It is down to getting all the parts right, needing analysis and syntheses to work together.

My second summary: Minimum Viable Transformation

This is written by one of my favorite thought-leaders, John Hagel III, who has written here with Jacob Bruun-Jensen about minimum viable transformation and he has a follow up article of the same name over on LinkedIn focusing more on the edge to create new business value. Let me summarize the two, hopefully enough for it to make sense.

To succeed in today’s networked economy, businesses must participate in dynamic, evolving networks of diverse organizations. And while such networks can be difficult to navigate, they offer companies the opportunity to evolve their business models, deepen skills and knowledge, expand into new markets, and scale operations.

To stay viable amid accelerating change, businesses themselves must change more frequently—and in ways that use their business ecosystems as fertile ground for collaboration and transformation.

As an aside, I am spending increasing amounts of time on understanding ecosystems for innovation and its management, but that’s for another day.

Scaling edges that might become our new core

One method used to scale edges is minimum viable transformation. Scaling an edge is a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.

Here, when we are at an edge, a company pulls together the essential elements of a new business model into a barely working construct, one specifically designed to test key risks.

Acknowledging and embracing minimum viable product principles

Minimum viable products, for example, are like prototypes—except that instead of being tinkered with internally, they’re immediately thrown at the market and subjected to trial by fire.

So why would a company do such a thing? The minimum viable product is all about identifying flaws and working to improve them as rapidly as possible. It’s designed not as proof of concept, but to test hypotheses and unearth unknowns that could sink a new offering.

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

The need today is to innovate at the level of the Business Model

Rethinking the fundamentals of how a business creates and captures value has become a priority, we are in a different era, the past one was of slow change and stable industries yet we still saw rapid convergence. The sheer acceleration and changes in technology, customer desires and the need to build ecosystems is making the Business Model far more important to focus on than product and service innovations.

The problem is we are still not clear how shifting business models is supposed to get done. Taking the trend “minimum viable product” populated by Eric Reis and his Lean Start-up methodology – it suggests by pulling together the essential elements of, in this case, new business models, into barely working prototype models, specifically designed to test key risks, you learn from ‘lightweight’ and readily adaptable versions of potentially new business models to take them forward or rethink your original hypothesis.

Both MVP and MVT are like prototypes but they are simply not passed around and tinkered with internally, they are immediately thrown at the market and subjected to trial by fire. In Eric Reis’s view it is all about identifying flaws and working to improve them as rapidly as possible.

This minimal approach must be specifically designed, not as a proof of concept but I repeat, to test hypotheses and gain knowledge about the biggest unknowns that could sink any new offering.

Each change from minute operational change to global restructuring is better understood by iterative discovery but with full disclosure to customers, who surprisingly are very willing to join the journey of learning. This becomes a validated learning journey.

The whole approach to this minimum viable transformation is looking for understanding to reduce the risks of large-scale change. The core principles of MVP – validate learning, rapid prototyping, frugal creativity along with thinking MVT for reducing risks, increasing understanding of scale and speed makes for a potentially appealing approach to working on new Business Models.

Why explore new Business Models at the edge?

Focusing on “scaling edges,” allows for identifying promising “edges” for the organization, then grow that edge until it becomes a viable new core or complementary line of business. Such an approach can make it possible for businesses to reinvent themselves while minimizing potential risks—and maximizing impact.

An edge is a growth opportunity that has the potential to scale—so much so that it can catalyze change, eventually becoming effective enough to replace the core of the business. A true edge should align with larger trends disrupting the industry. Edges involve fundamentally different business models and practices from those of the core.

Edges give the transformation team far more degrees of freedom to test and experiment with new approaches to evolving a fundamentally different business model.

We finish this with five guidelines for transformation on the edge

Today corporate transformations must be designed and executed quickly and routinely—not as once-a-decade events. Management teams are looking for best practices that increase speed and reduce the risk of pursuing business model innovation and change. That’s where minimum viable transformation comes into play. Before diving in, management teams should consider these five principles:

1. Learn how to learn. The central goal of minimum viable transformation is to learn from a true field experiment.

2. Pick up speed. There’s a reason this approach starts with the word “minimum”: The learning has to happen fast. As soon as a company executes the idea it’s pursuing, it shows its hand to competitors— who will quickly respond with their own strategies.

3. Embrace constraints. Much has been written about the counter-intuitive effect of constraints—they don’t foil creativity, but fuel it. It’s worth noting that the very constraints we’ve been talking about here—few bells and whistles and scarce time—take real creativity to address. At the very least, they compel a focus on the goal—the need to learn and reduce risk around the key objective.

4. Have a hypothesis. To succeed, transformation initiatives must clearly articulate both the need for change and its direction. Such a statement of direction helps identify key assumptions driving the change effort (assumptions that will need to be tested and refined along the way). Leaders will also need to develop metrics that measure short-term progress.

5. Start at the edge. Find an “edge” of the current business—a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.

In short, these five key principles can help bypass traditional barriers to transformation, ultimately supporting more effective response to mounting performance pressures.

In Summary

Both of these articles come from a significant report, the full report is “Business ecosystems come of age“. The notion of business ecosystems is now a crucial focal point for innovation, analysis, and strategic planning. Businesses are moving beyond traditional industry silos and coalescing into richly networked ecosystems, creating new opportunities for innovation alongside new challenges for many incumbent enterprises.

The world is entering an era in which ideas and insights come from everywhere, and crowds, clouds, collaborators, competitions, and co-creators can fundamentally help define our shared future. The business environment is being permanently altered as a result.

We require the thinking of thought leaders to emphasize and point us to ideas that we can adopt, experiment with and learn to our own benefit. For this learning, you need the time to read, explore and experiment.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have this added to my own site

The post Deeper read or quick summary- finding the time first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In recent years our innovation understanding and its management have significantly changed, due to numerous factors that have been happening. These have been advances in technology, methodology or design- thinking and we do need to stop and think about how we could do ‘things’ differently by asking “what is possible?” This should be asked not just on each occasion of an innovative concept design but within the total innovation system, we are presently operating under.

Perhaps by asking three critical questions on “what is possible?”  we might produce better innovative answers (and solutions) than simply not bothering to, at least, scope out the real possibilities, where we can miss so much.

The aim of asking is to reduce the constraints, free up resources, leverage the techniques available, and equally, push the boundaries of your thinking to want to generate “great” innovation, not just the mediocre, incremental stuff, so often produced and labelled “innovative” that we end up doing.

We often fail to ask three critical questions before we embark on innovation. They may not eventually fit or work together but they do enable you to see what is possible, what is desirable and what is then that certain dose of business reality we all need to work through.

Asking these questions offsets that attitude of simply accepting the established approach from the very beginning..Speed, scale and agility are required and many of our existing innovation practices do not adapt to these increasing demands.

Lets take a look at each of these three questions above.

What are we capable of?

With the incredible array of frameworks, solutions, technical applications and design options, we are becoming far more capable to innovate than ever before. How we engineer and design our solutions will determine much of the ‘ability to innovate’.

We are very capable to push our design thinking and quickly turn our conceptual blueprints into a reality, through the smart use of cloud technology alongside being selective in the enterprise software we need, and ensuring we have an innovation backbone of a clear process that can be adapted constantly to the ‘needs’ we require to achieve the best result.

Today nothing has to be rigid or protected, we have to encourage and find a certain freedom to adapt, adjust, pilot and experiment within our innovation ‘system’ as the very solutions we desire are in constant in need of adaption from fresh learning.

The ability to utilize the cloud, use the increasing range of rapid software prototyping, agile principles, and full stack, cloud based platforms we are getting closer to game-changing business technology solutions you are able to develop, build, test and iterate a solution.

For example IBM’s Bluemix provides the ideal DevOps environment (great link BTW) for rapid prototyping, then building, scaling and integrating apps. Bluemix lifts you out of the past practices of working through rather rigid Enterprise solutions and protocols, it rapidly speeds up your innovation search and discover, validate and learn environment and can also scale and integrate.

So we should be asking of ourselves “what are we capable of?” To stay incumbered with a rigid system is simply denying yourself all the possibilities that can be achieved by having a highly adaptive and flexible innovation system.

The innovation concepts you work upon are constantly evolving, then so should the systems that support it and this needs a far more ‘hybrid’ approach than ever before.

What is desirable?

“If you shoot for the stars and hit the moon, it’s OK. But you’ve got to shoot for something. A lot of people don’t even shoot.” – Confucius

So do we ever ask ourselves what is truly desirable? So often we just accept compromise is inevitable and start with that position from the very beginning. I would argue strongly we don’t accept that. If we do we fail to ever achieve innovation that is truly a ‘breakthrough’ or ‘disruptive’.

We should have aspirations, as humans we need these. Innovation is no different. When we see a ‘real need’. either from the feed back from clients or spotted by ourselves in the market place or simply conceived in  your ‘minds eye’ we must fight to hold this in any innovation discussions that subsequently take place.

Being dogmatic is not the answer but bringing others to ‘seeing the same potential solution’ allows for advancing the initial idea into perhaps, an even greater solution

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Normal Vincent Peale

I know, I’m offering a lot of moon and stars here but it is far better to open up our thinking, lift up our heads, out of immediate solutions and see the possibilities that can become more within our realm of possibility. To really spend some time on the desirable, that aspirational place is where innovation becomes great.

I think we should always seek out this desirable point, scope it and shoot for the potential it can offer. We as humans need to work on the aspirational aspects, besides maintaining the existing, it gives us a greater sense of identity, hope and fulfillment.

For instance the human centered design kit offered by Ideo although written principally for the social sector, is  a full-color, 192-page book, the Field Guide that comes with 57 design methods, the key mindsets that underpin how and why IDEO.org believes design can change lives. The concept of human-centered design sets out a counterbalance which puts the human and social imperatives first and foremost. It can help drive a customer focus deep within a corporation and make this focus the heart of value creation.

What is viable?

This is the tough ground to travel through and over. Each business has a need, to grow, to add value, to beat or at least equal competition, or should do. The tough part is we are never starting as equals.

Some have ‘abundance’, others have a ‘scarcity’ of resources, of ideas, of seemingly building innovation capabilities that ‘deliver’. We are often required to find (and fight) for the optimal ground for much of what we do and often end up with the imperfect solution from the compromises we have to make.

Innovation is imperfect, we start with certain ideas or concepts and these over time and discussion seem to change shape, sometimes way beyond their original  simplicity or need. We do like to overly complicate. The larger the organization, the more we have to seek out, exchange, find solutions in a very imperfect environment. We hit that ‘certain reality’.

There is a real hope this tough terrain can be traversed differently than in the past.

In the Lean Methodology we are discovering the MVP (minimum viable product) as the process to travel through as we “Build- Measure- Learn” as the feedback loop. The quicker we enter the build stage, designed with the minimum amount of effort and least amount of time, this approach allows us to build prototypes, quickly test them, gauge and learn from them, we can then hopefully pivot into something better.

The closer to the needs of the market or client the greater chance of innovation success. We are then moving back towards the desirable to then push harder for our ‘engineered’ solution.

There is equally a growing push to take the principles of minimum viable product (MVP) to a higher level, taking transformational ideas through the same core principles for minimum viable transformation (MVT) of validated learning, rapid prototyping, frugal creativity enabling often the business model to be equally redesigned.

The combined thinking of Eric Ries and his “Lean Start up thinking” and Deliottes “Minimum Viable Transformation” is giving us increasing scope to hypothesize, test, learn, adjust and transform.

So our “what is possible” becomes even more aligned

By asking ourselves “what are we capable of?“, alongside “what is desirable?” with the “what is viable” through this MVP / MVT approach I believe the business need have far greater chance of alignment far more with all the potential innovation available.

The “what is viable” becomes richer, more engaging and closer to the two other parts of a solution needed for greater innovation delivery. One where we are capable of designing and engineering far more so as to deliver and have a more desirable end.

By taking the rapid changes occurring in technology (cloud, agile) and design thinking and leveraging the human design and customer need we are bringing a changing business environment of rapid iteration, experiment and prototyping into the very core of our innovation thinking.

These examples are changes where we can be exploiting far more the changing business condition, so as to respond and deliver in better flexible innovating environments.

An end so much closer to client and market needs and that leads to a greater potential for growth, surely?

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