Often this reluctance to dispose of these old systems, processes and inadequate frameworks is holding innovation back.

I would argue that perhaps many of our current innovation practices are ‘frozen’ in past times and they significantly slow us down, in a world that is becoming one built increasing on speed, flexibility and adaptability.

We lose precious time as we should be forward looking. constantly learning and experimenting with new concepts and approaches to innovation and what and where these can bring in new growth, sustainability and value to our organisations.

Where does design thinking, lean management, the early thinking to focus more on changing the business model come in? These need to be deliberately designed into your innovation process, not used in a random, ad-hoc approach or as sideshows. They need designing into a new innovation system so they become commonplace and required.

Do innovation labs feature as part of the ongoing innovation development process and how are you building the customer experience? Are you approaching these in well-established structured ways as the defined innovation system or are you constantly refreshing and challenging the system by being adaptive, experimental and fluid in how you manage?

Often we don’t allow ourselves the time, presently seen as a luxury, to call for a comprehensive review of our innovation infrastructure, yet we ought to. Innovation thinking and its approach in design are constantly evolving and we should be keeping pace with these constant developments to realign the latest thinking and the internal processes.

We also should  expand out our thinking on innovation beyond the present, lessen the constant looking back and push it a little more towards having a greater emphasis on our future foresight, one that can deliver fresher vision, built on bolder and more rewarding challenges for the pursuit of different growth options .

We need to truly capitalise on the emerging practices of innovation, not just based only on yesterday’s experiments and successes or achieved through outdated past behaviours and thinking.

Where do we start?

Firstly you have to start out with why you feel a freshening up should be required, should this be radical, distinctive or incremental. Are you getting so caught up in analysing all the pieces, you are forgetting the bigger picture?

What do you actually want to achieve that takes you closer to your aspirations, not just immediate goals? Can the way you conduct innovation today meet that strategic challenge? Does it ‘advance’ on your current position? Are all business units working on the same system, are they all advancing at a steady speed to a greater maturity? If not, what is holding them back? Do we know, have we asked?

There is a host of reasons ‘renewal’ might be needed. Today, when markets are especially tough, looking long and hard at what you have and jettisoning what you don’t need becomes essential to re-position yourself as leaner and more flexible. There are many pressing needs why you have to ‘shape up’. Don’t ignore the need for renewal, it needs to be a constant in today’s rapidly changing and challenging times. So often when we have finally decided to establish a system of innovation it is already out of date. The use of technology is equally a curse as well as an enabler.

A need for a critical and fresh evaluation of your innovation process

There comes a time where any structure, process, culture or organisation needs a radical rethink and innovation is no different. Please don’t just simply bolt on the next bit, I would argue we need to reflect on this and think differently, re-equip ourselves to meet the present and future challenges and that needs stepping back often and with a fresh clarity of purpose as our markets, customers and innovation approaches are in such constant flux and change.

To achieve this more radical departure from your existing viewpoint, you do need to look at a more structured, methodical approach to your renewal of innovation. Constantly designing, adapting and redesigning into this processes and the required structures so you can keep a more sustaining evolution to your innovation practices. Renewal and legacy reduction become second nature, a constant in your life. Constant upgrades and jettisoning the old approaches as you learn and evolve.

Making the critical steps needs structuring.

Suggesting a structured approach to renewal is not an easy journey; it takes dedicated time and incredible strength of determination but it becoming critical to pursue. The rewards come through an organisation that emerges from today’s ‘uncertainly’ equipped to be more resistant, flexible and agile, so as to seize emerging opportunities quicker, at tomorrow’s new innovation speed, built on latest thinking, design and ‘bleeding edge’ tools and frameworks  .

An innovation guide in this is what I call the ‘sense of renewal’ framing, partly based on these suggestions mentioned in that post. It can often help you think through the options, evaluate the existing and compared with the preferred as it gets you closer to the need of your innovation design. So developing a basic problem recognition diagnostic tool that frames this thinking through can help.

A more structured and systematic approach must be taken

I would recommend for building a renewal programme that you can work through a step-by-step approach, enabling clarity and understanding as you go; so everyone involved can see the problems, challenges and then actively contribute to the solutions. This should be our goals always in renewal programmes, inclusion, be these to address societal or business challenges.

What this step-by-step programme does call for, is a very structured, comprehensive investigative approach across the organisation. firstly to build the momentum for recognising what a sense of renewal can bring as important for the future, and then secondly, seeing an emerging clarity for this future built upon a sustaining innovative culture that all contribute and become involved in.

The need for making the case for renewal and charting the path towards the solutions is no different from any other corporate initiative. Making the commitment and getting others to sign on is sometimes hard, but essential. Seeking out places of ‘duplication’ and latent redundancy is also necessary to build into any renewal programmes.

The post Dealing with the innovation legacy lying within your business. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New combinations can led to real competitive advantage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Managing digital knowledge that adds value and growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In summary

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

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

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

We are opening up our thinking about where and with whom, to collaborate.

We are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into one that is having a far more open stance. We are searching for more collaborative innovation (external orientation) combining external partners into more ‘collective thinking’.

The shifts taking place are offering us the promise of “extra acceleration” that is needed to improve our innovation performances from concept to market delivery. Or, we hope it is!

Collaborative innovation is also leading us to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success, as nearly all novel ideas lay are mostly outside the organization’s domain of understanding. We need to always bring the knowledge inside and build from it.

As we increasingly include the customer and their more exacting needs within our understanding, these multiple collaborations and dialogues are building this better internal understanding to align our innovation with specific opportunities, relevancy and needs.

There also seems that many organizations are presently searching for new business models of innovation delivery or architecture.

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

I’d say we are presently in a state of flux on adjusting to all of what this might mean, in customer and market offerings, as well as internally adapting our structures to the new forms required in these business model changes.

Adjusting to many different forms of external relationships

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

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

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

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

As we tap into all the expertise up and down the value chain we will become far more aware and will need to explore all the depth in thinking, contributing and making available through extending our connections in deeper and broader ways. Knowing how to adjust, accommodate and shift our thinking requires us to become more agile, finding new ways of connecting and working.

Do you notice how the single industry focus is seemingly in decline?

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

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

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

We are seeking out relationships, not just within given industry sectors but into partnerships that allow us to deliver different offerings, that would not be possible without broader collaborations.  The relationship between NGOs and the private sector used to be combative rather than collaborative.

However, that is rapidly changing

Take for instance the Oxfam and Unilever partnership have been working together since 2010 to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Also the External Alliances department of the Nestlé Research Center(NRC) manages external collaborations and partnerships to complement the internal Nestlé R&D pipeline and innovation process. Currently, NRC participates in more than 200 external scientific collaborations worldwide.

Then Unilever created  The Unilever Foundry, a new platform that unites and expands the company’s existing efforts to work with startups.

The Foundry will serve as Unilever’s flagship, global tech collaboration and investment program, providing an accessible mechanism for startups to interact with them in their “pitch to pilot” approach.

Offering more one-stop, connecting places to go about your business
Interesting examples are how Autodesk and Adobe are building the environment for others to join, build and participate within. The focus is on rapid prototyping in collaborative environments. They are offering one-stop shops where technology, 3D printing, software design, their engineering services can be combined to work on your ideas, all ‘housed’ in one location.

For start-ups, small and medium-sized organizations are given even more chances to bring their concepts to life and find the opportunity to compete with larger organizations through this approach. They are helping you to bring your prototypes to life and create real functional end-use parts with additive manufacturing, production processes and software applications.

For instance, Autodesk facilities at Pier 9, in San Francisco is a place for design and fabrication, it includes a cutting edge digital fabrication lab, a woodworking shop, a metalworking shop, a 3D printing lab, laser cutting and printing capabilities, an electronics workshop, a commercial test kitchen, and an industrial sewing centre as well as smaller speciality project areas.

Stepping out is stepping up

Today there is a growing realization that thinking ecosystems can allow us to have a new framing of possibilities and offer us different mindsets that tap into different and diverse relationships, partnerships, alliances and collaborations.

This was unthinkable until recently, without the enablers to make these connections through technology and more open platforms where you can come together and collaborate.

The increasing value of participating in ecosystems or collaborative environments allows for large and small organizations to come together, share, exchange, create, scale and serve markets in ways that were not thought of before as we did not have the ‘ways and means’ of how technology connects us in so many different ways to new possibilities.

We are having the increased ability to interact and co-create in increasingly sophisticated and novel ways opens up new opportunities. These ecosystems form a bond of shared interest, of recognition and purpose which quickly becomes established as the new ‘commons’ in sharing and contributing.

Opening up to being supported should accelerate your innovation

Any opening up should be clearly designed to accelerate new innovation but as you build these external relationships or participate in these innovation centres, it can often equally ‘complicate’ the original intention by this different layering in of complexity.

Keeping it initially simple, exploring and exploiting, building and adding increasing value as you grow, enables an evolving value proposition that keeps you keen to extend beyond your borders from the increasing returns and more distinctive offerings you can provide.

We do need to open up, learn from others, look for and engage in far more collaborative ways across more diverse groups than ever before, each vested in a better outcome and then build this ‘acquired’ knowledge into your thinking and offerings for delivering better outcomes.

The post Opening up our innovation to stay relevant first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There is a need in any framework design for building a new integrated innovation network that it needs to have openness, agility and flexibility purposefully built into it. It is more than likely that in the past design, the legacy within existing systems needs radically dismantling and redesigning to reflect the multitude of changes happening.

The reality today is we have to tear down much of what we have built up and in place to reflect the changes occurring all around us. We need to account both internally, in making a new structure for crucial decisions, based on those far more dispersion principles but also on the external, in how you will be reacting to competition and the challenges being presented in changing market conditions.

Increasing knowledge dispersion, shorter cycle times demanded to meet and respond to ‘breaking’ opportunities requires you to effectively manage these across your network in speedy response cycles, having in place a highly focused management and clarity of what is important and needing to worked upon. Even harder strategic choices, evaluating what gaps are needed to be filled in capability constraints, the ability to project and build a new collaborative culture play significant roles in any design and managing across this network.

Any new design has to carefully reflect on overcoming existing obstacles as well as anticipating and  accounting (as best it can) new barriers. You consistently are working towards the maximization and leverage of this new dispersed knowledge and what it can collectively bring  in its contribute into that ‘greater’ competitive advantage than the old system was able to achieve.

Building new designs for innovation needs to be more central in our thinking.

To make innovation more central, it has to designed in. This is not just building an internal innovation core but today it has to go one step further. We need to build into our thinking structures and flexible designs for constructing a dispersed integrated innovation network. This firstly needs recognition of its growing critical importance, then it requires a understanding of what and where this impacts on today’s existing organization design and then followed by a huge organizational commitment to make the evolutionary changes, in its sustaining and management. Our worlds are full of growing complexity that is being faced, externally within our market places and we need to be far more externally facing to understand these.

It is becoming absolutely essential to make these commitments in rapidly changing circumstances and global challenges to seek out innovations potential that lies across the globe, in every corner and the organization needs to have all the essential connections and avenues to this, to capitalize and turn the knowledge gained into commercial innovation opportunity. The more you are networked and get closer to emerging opportunity, the greater chance to translate this (quickly) into new innovation value to meet different  and common market needs.

We all  have come to recognize today, that “all knowledge does not reside within one place” and how we set about dismantling and redesigning our organization for tapping into global innovation knowledge will determine our future place in any competitive race. Innovation needs to be fully designed into the core of what we do.

The post Today organizations essential design is for openness, agility and flexibility first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today, we are confronted with a very different global marketplace than in the last century. National borders and regulations built to protect those that are ‘within’ in the past have rapidly become a major part of the ‘containing- restraining’ factors that are rendering many previously well-respected organizations as heading towards being obsolete and not in tune with today’s different world where global sourcing determines much.

They are increasingly trapped in declining markets, and starved of the new capabilities and capacities to grow a business beyond ‘traditional’ borders, so this means they are unable to take up the new challenges that are confronting them.

They see themselves as reliant on hanging on to the existing situation as long as they can, often powerless to make the necessary shifts, failing to open up, finding it increasingly more than difficult to find the ways of letting go, of changing. They are trapped in legacy.
Legacy can choke an organization in so many ways to limit expansion.

How can we break out of this and rethink? When we begin to investigate legacy to cut lose and design differently, it begins to infringe, it challenges, it simply attacks what has taken often years to build and those most involved become defensive and fit to hang onto what has been established, as it feels familiar.

It feels like ‘their’ legacy is being destroyed and what they have fought hard to gain know needs protecting. Most organizations never feel fully capable to address legacy, they even will deliberately design duplication into their operating model, they will recognize they are far from optimal and more often than not, live with the consequences. In today’s world this is a real mistake.

The world is changing; you can’t afford to keep heads buried in the sand like an ostrich, although that’s actually a myth of when ostriches are faced with attack by predators they bury their heads.

New global adversaries are altering our landscape and forcing us to become increasing competitive, forcing us to often reluctantly alter our established ways. We can’t afford not to refresh and renew on a constant basis. We need to not just adapt, become more agile but we must think through what, where and how we manage.

We need to build a more dispersed network of connections within our organizations to gather and synthesize knowledge that have potential value and future worth.

Today, innovations new knowledge lies elsewhere

Increasingly we need to open up our organizations to different learning, experiences and knowledge. The growth of open innovation has been part of that.

Equally we are recognizing increasingly, that basing everything in one central place is becoming severely limiting. We need to adopt a more genuine openness that increasingly relies on a collection of dispersing and gathering points, where knowledge obtained has been closer to its markets and customers to provide greater potential of discovering future value.

Places where you have been able to gather these understandings and begin to quickly ‘translate’ them across a dispersed, highly connected networks of expertise, that can work on transforming this knowledge into new revenue opportunities that meets that identified need before others do, often set in 24 x 7 time to achieve the result.

Any journey starts with ‘letting go’

Control gives comfort; we constantly design this into the system. The larger we are, the greater the controls built into the system it seems but somehow, controlling for control sake, does need replacing; we need to let go of more than we realize to reduce the constraints placed on our business. We need to replace ‘command and control’ built up over numerous years with something different.

We need to begin to ask a range of strategic questions that question our legacy, so we can be released to move forward.

So what do these strategic questions cover?

I can’t do justice to all the avenues of this strategic inquiry but I can offer some of the most critical that will inevitably fuel others in your own specific situation.

Taking as an example an existing organization, caught increasingly in declining or stagnating markets, who are forced to address many important issues in designing into the organization, new, more diverse capabilities, that have significant ‘legacy’ issues running through them, let’s take a look at some of the most important ones to address.

• Legacy issues must be a significant ‘part and parcel’ of what needs to go, separated out from what needs to be kept and modified, or simply kept in place as it is strategically essential to the well-being and functioning of the organization. Managing legacy out of the innovation system, can be highly liberating.
• Where do you hold your core knowledge? – Is this centrally, perhaps in a home market or do you reflect on how you are going to disperse this across more decentralized organizations. What has on-going value, what does not and can be dispensed with?
• What does it take to diversify your knowledge? Pushing knowledge to new centres needs carefully re-designing. You do not want to end up having even more islands or silos of knowledge; you need to think through carefully a more integrated (global) model. It needs to build in my 6F framework of formality, flexibility, facilitation, form, function and focus. You need to take out what is irrelevant.
• Taking any decision to ‘attract’ and ‘disperse’ knowledge you must set about building the competencies, confidences, trust and network to bring this together. This ‘gelling’ needs lots of communicating, collaborating, and consistent feedback mechanisms that are well-built into any new system. Don’t try and adapt old structures methodology to a radical change, it needs redesigning from the bottom up. Get rid of as much of the legacy as you can.
• Redesigning a new culture becomes essential. It needs to be an adapting one, one that places demands on all within the networked system, it needs an overarching set of innovation culture and environmental principles. It needs clear governance structures and well-thought-through innovation processes and systems that allow innovation knowledge to flow where it simply needs to go. Again absorptive capacity principles are important to design and build in here. Don’t overlay practices that were based on being closed for ‘command and control’, design new ones that allow knowledge to simply flow and open up, in structures that can ‘encourage and compliment’
• Any ‘system’ has constraints. As you rid yourself of some, others quickly fill the space. It is how you manage constraints will determine your ability to make transformational change. The devil they say always lies in the details, and as you configure and design a new integrated model you have to constantly examine these trade-offs. There is lots of divergences and then convergence needs to be within the thinking this system through. Taking a whole lot of old practices out of the system is essential as they have no value or place in any new dispersed network. It simply works differently.
• When you are integrating in new ways requires certain like-mindedness of the people within the dispersed network. Building new teams that are spread out is hard, dedicated work. Recruiting, retaining and reallocating can make or break any new initiative in how they work together. Working within dispersed teams is demanding due to the make-up of cultural, education and time differences. You need increasing reliance on collaborative technology, creating as many face-to-face opportunities as possible but more importantly having projects where it becomes the unifier and common identifier. This unifies far more the cultural differences and tensions by focusing on the project outcomes itself, personalities are supplanted by the higher goal and motivation of working on ‘meaningful’ work . Tough as it may seem, root out the blockers, and dispense with those not prepared to work in teams.
• Costs accrue for a fair time in any starting up and transferring of knowledge, before the benefits really ‘kick-in’ and accrue in greater innovation capability. The working through the design of a new integrated but dispersed structure, in its logic and its make-up of the parts that will contribute into building increased innovation capacity and capability all need to ‘add up’ to larger than within the existing design. Don’t delay this potential by weighing it down with inadequate commitments and lukewarm understanding. Commit to a radical redesign and be realistic on when the (higher) returns are likely.

Managing complex knowledge and dealing with codified knowledge
As you learn to manage increasingly outside one central resource, you quickly come up against one of the biggest challenges within ‘dispersed innovation’.

What is needed to be put in place for you to capture and translate knowledge that can give increased value and (eventual) commercial benefit. Clearly that is the goal of any significant change in design but acquiring, assimilating, transforming and exploiting knowledge comes in many different ways.

Partly this depends on your industry and how you have allowed knowledge capture to evolve.  Certain industries need to manage their knowledge differently.

For instance the chemical, automotive or electronics industry have built up over many years significant ‘codified knowledge’ that is simply necessary to have in place. Other industries like consumer goods, pharmaceutical or the healthcare find it much harder to codify as they have a much more complex knowledge that requires greater understanding of differences to exploit each market.

This is not universal in its practice but knowledge should be valued, recognized and treated, partly in traditional ways but I would argue, it can be broken down in radical new ways where old constraints (legacy again) can be challenged in light of advances in technology, regulation, protection, intellectual property reinforcement, than in the past.

There are huge implications in the managing of innovation knowledge. The incentive to learn, absorb and translate knowledge is its unique value to you for ‘new to the world’ outcomes.

The essential need is to design for agility, flexibility and leveraging.

There is a need in any framework design in building a new integrated innovation network that it needs to have agility and flexibility. It is more than likely that in the past design, the legacy within existing systems needs radically dismantling and redesigning to reflect the multitude of changes happening.

These need to account both internally, in making a new structure for crucial decisions, based on dispersion principles but also on the external, in how you will be reacting to competition and the challenges being presented in changing market conditions.

Increasing knowledge dispersion, shorter cycle times demanded to meet and respond to ‘breaking’ opportunities requires you to effectively manage these across your network in speedy response cycles, having in place a highly focused management and clarity of what is important and needing to worked upon.

Even harder strategic choices, evaluating what gaps are needed to be filled in capability constraints, the ability to project and build a new collaborative culture play significant roles in any design and managing across this network.

Any new design has to carefully reflect on overcoming existing obstacles as well as anticipating and  accounting (as best it can) new barriers. You consistently are working towards the maximisation and leverage of this new dispersed knowledge and what it can collectively bring  in its contribute into that ‘greater’ competitive advantage than the old system was able to achieve.
Balancing legacy and new designs

The whole legacy issue needs those certain degrees of reciprocity, a moving or paring back initially to then move (significantly) forward. If you can’t understand the clear reasons why it is crucial to change the organizations ability to innovate across a more diverse network then simply don’t do it.

To make such a commitment, to make this sort of move, to a dispersed integrated innovation network requires huge commitment, in its sustaining and management of a growing complexity. But it is often absolutely essential to make these commitments in rapidly changing circumstances and global challenges to seek out innovations potential that lies across the globe.

The more you are networked and closer to an emerging opportunities, the greater chance to translate this (quickly) into new innovation value to meet different  and common market needs.

We all have come to recognize today, that “all knowledge does not reside within one place” and how we set about dismantling and redesigning our organization for tapping into global innovation knowledge will determine our future place in any competitive race, the one we all are seemingly caught up in.

Don’t let legacy be the reason to hold you back.

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