In a recent report called “Radical Innovation and Growth: Global Board Survey 2016 ” (link opens the pdf) we have results from a survey jointly conducted by Deloitte Denmark and Board Network – The Danish Professional Directors Association, that opens up much that can concern us about the current boardroom and its great difficulty with managing more radical innovation.

It seems within our boardrooms they are ill-equipped to managing in today’s world, grappling with the past, holding on, perhaps too tightly, to the present and certainly being unsure of the future. It is struggling to adjust to all that is entering their world.

In this report, they surveyed 614 global board professionals from a total of 50 countries during the period covered from November 2015 through to February 2016 and then published in February 2016.

I quote extensively from the Executive Summary and Introduction and urge you, the reader, to delve into the report which I found an easy read to understand and grasp the magnitude of this present boardroom discomfort.

It comes as no surprise to me, or many out there working to disrupt the incumbent but it makes for difficult reading that this is not addressed far more head on. This is a more than timely report in my view.

Corporations are under increasing attack and are really struggling to become more radical in how they can defend, secure and achieve growth. A lack of understanding innovation in all its forms is coming back to haunt them. They can’t seemingly handle radical innovation and there is even more of an imperative to learn.

The Survey wanted to understand the current mood within the boardroom

The survey set about understanding the current boardroom thinking about how to address  the exponential technology is affecting growth (and indirectly competitiveness) in international companies and organizations, they have gathered insight on how global corporate boards address and work with radical innovation and to what extent they see growth stemming from their efforts. Radical innovation is defined here as:

The report dug into the boards’ appetite for growth; how high is the bar? It looked at their risk profile and tolerance of failure. It examined the role of innovation in company strategy and its strategic importance on the board’s agenda. Is radical innovation a bulleted point at board meetings?

It questioned whether there is a clear alignment of innovation and growth goals. Do boards spend enough in terms of man hours, consultants or other expenditures on new initiatives? It asked if companies actually own a Division-X and if yes, to what extent they are successful.

It wanted to address the skill-set at board level to handle digital disruption and the urgency to act proactively. It set about the identifying of board barriers to handle radical innovation and finished with a set of recommendations based on their quantitative findings topped with first-hand experience and opinions from a number of selected global board chairs.

The respondents describe that competition and technology are among the four most important external challenges their companies are facing now. The issue was on how are the boards taking on the challenging responsibility of overseeing their companies’ radical innovation efforts?

It concludes: “At board level, what we are seeing is the beginning of a shift among board professionals’ responsibility. As if oversight of company strategy, risk management, succession planning, budgeting and forecasting, sales and marketing, operations, auditing, IT, remuneration and tax was not already a fight.

Now corporate governance includes overseeing new business development with its itchy elements of experimentation, demand for scalability, risk of failure and navigation in a fully digitized and unpredictable new business world. On top of this new business today is developed at a pace that leaves little time for thorough analysis and precise risk mitigation”

 The Common trends they found were:

• The two dominant barriers for boards working with radical innovation are lack of insight (47%) and lack of organizational design to handle radical innovation (46%).

• 40% of respondents have no director with sufficient knowledge about digital disruption and 43% feel their management invests too little to achieve their long-term growth goals.

• The boards’ failure tolerance is low as seen 18% try to avoid failure in all their dealings.

• The financial risk scenario is also conservative, 34% of respondents characterize their board’s risk appetite as one where they try to avoid big financial risk.

• There is a clear tendency towards expecting radical change coming later (in five years) rather than sooner (this quarter).

• A staggering 75% of companies with the highest growth expectations for the coming 24 months (above 10%) also own an actual Division-X (or equivalent). We see this result as a clear indication of Division-X actually driving growth. (Note: only 22% have a so called Division- X, with 58% of these starting this in the last two years)

• Radical innovation is still a new idiom at board level with 65% not having it as a formalized item for discussion or action at the board meetings. (Note: Understandable but not forgivable in this disrupting world)

Welcome to the era of disruption, it is a tsunami of issues being grappled with.

The report suggests that while global boards are taking action now, there is room for improvement. Especially when it comes to the need for greater insight into the area of innovative initiatives, grappling with organizational design, dealing with risk and failure, and sheer experience in working in the huge discomfort zone driven by accelerating technology.

“If work has become steadily more demanding for the global board member recently, at least there was a predictability associated with that work but it is all about to change.

Now, in light of massive technological disruption, the new workload for a board professional revolves around a risky, failure prone and unknown innovation territory as they can start seeing themselves as largely inexperienced new business development leaders”

I do recommend reading this report.

I certainly do recommend this report, it confirms much, it conveys much, it certainly helps to frame many of the issues the boards are less than certain about; of the uncertainties they are facing, of where their business will come from in the future.

Indeed how they are presently ill-equipped to fight on these new battlefields of future business creation in this disrupting world, as these are “largely inexperienced new business development leaders,” in a radically changing world of radical innovation.  With lots of uncharted waters entering the boardroom they need to become far more radical within themselves or will be drowned from not navigating this at all well, the worry is who and what else sinks with them?

It does seem the board members need a lot of help and it needs to come from well beyond the usual advisors but are they prepared to take different advice? It does not auger well as there does seem a real stubbornness to make real change and perhaps a belief that these disruptive forces are not knocking on their boardroom door. How wrong they so are!

The post Uncharted Waters Disrupting the Corporate Boardrooms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I had been looking forward to a nice break up in the mountains of Switzerland, in a place near St.Moritz for five days of some walking, catching up with good friends over some great meals.

The evenings playing different card games or board games, as the temperatures dropped outside to minus six centigrade, the competitive nature raised the inside temperatures significantly. All good plans sometime get disrupted.

Regretfully a few days before, I ‘pulled’ some ligaments around the knee and this rendered the walking to some pretty tame stuff but the company, food and drink seemed to compensated a little I must admit, it eased the pain.

So I had some time on my hands so I decided to go back over the whole area of disruption to get a broader understanding and how this is driving so much within our innovation activity at present.

Disruption is all around us, coming at ever-faster speeds

Disruption has been going on around us over different generations. Something simply disrupts something else, such as the change from the horse and pony to the car, onto trains, then aircraft; or the telegraph replaced by the fixed telephone, then onto the mobile phone; or the mainframe computer to the personal computer onto today’s smartphone. Everything invented seems to have been disrupted or seems about too.

“A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leaders and alliances”             – (a wikepedia definition)

The term was defined and the phenomenon really came to a our more collective attention, through some pioneering work of Clayton M. Christensen that began back in 1995. This work highlighted today’s force of change as technology-led to bring out the changing conditions usually found in disruptive innovation occurring all around us today.

As we think ‘disruptive’ we also do need to recognize that no all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary. Equally Disruptive innovations tends to be produced or driven by outsiders as the incumbent’s fight to keep hold of their established position and regarding changing as simply as too hard with such a legacy of assets established.

It often seems the incumbent only let’s go, often in dramatic fashion, when a disruption has actually taken hold and suddenly takes off or seemingly from nowhere, catching those in established market by stripping away critical points of value within the existing market. They, the incumbent, then struggle to regain any form of leadership mostly, due to this poor recognition and preparation they should have been undertaking on an ongoing basis of exploring and experimenting.

Adopting new business practices is not so simple for the majority

Even though many of the existing incumbent firms of today have some pretty smart people they simply can’t get their heads around often their collective poor-decision making, cumbersome processes, often providing a calcifying culture and lack of bold leadership, that is opening the doors to the many inspiring disruptors.

The established firm have so tightly linked their processes, planning and planning cycles but not evolved increasingly around a higher level of fluidity, agility and extracting from a broader network. They stay resolutely internally focused with this often dominating vested interest in preserving the status-quo wherever they can.

There are so many ‘blind spots’ and lack of understanding about the power and force that technology is enabling. So many are being encouraged to actively work on new ways to enter the game and find a new model that simply disrupts and ‘slices off’ a nice part of the pie, or completely changes the way the equation of price, performance and value can be dramatically altered.

This change in the value proposition results in the consumers growing acceptance to change from the previous accepted and known. It simply shifts the market forces dramatically away and becomes unstoppable, utterly disrupting and altering perceptions and past positions. The application of technology is the catalyst that creates this disruptive process.     .

You feel the only blame is on the incumbent themselves, no wonder the talent entering the employment market are reluctant to join many large established organizations and would prefer to be part of the disruptors, in new ventures and defining and delivering new value propositions, building not defending positions, so as to deliver to customers wanting more ease, convenience and connected value than they are receiving today.

The digital technology led age, with the availability of venture money and extremely savvy techies, seeks to feed off the incumbent’s reluctance to cannibalize the present profitable revenue streams, render existing assets and investments as obsolete and see the fundamental assumptions about the business and the market as different to their own understandings.

The world of managing within a business has changed. This lack of seemingly rigorous internal constant challenging and exploiting alternative positions in real time, and exploring these through experimentation and discovery is rendering many firms unable to adapt and not be as agile and responsive as they could be. They stay often in this constant state of inertia, denial and myopia, even though they, within themselves still feel ‘dynamic and responsive’. A real dilemma that is extremely hard to get right. I feel “restless without consistent experimentation” needs to be embedded within the soul of many organizations.

They, the incumbents, see things in rational ways, based on past experience, whereas the usurper has no inhibitions and can only see inefficiencies, inept understanding of changing customer needs and fat, slow-moving incumbents. We must learn to walk in other peoples shoes to understand and ‘see’ differently.

The new cooking recipe for business disruption.

A light bulb went on for me as I sat there, near St. Moritz reviewing disruptive innovation. I remembered the terrific value we all seemed to have obtained from the pioneering work of Doblin and its ten types of innovation when it came out some years back. This allowed the collective ‘us’ to suddenly see innovations simply beyond products. We were able to combine them in new ways. The ten types of innovation framework took us beyond a stereo-type view of innovation, it opened up our thinking.

 A new framing of connecting disruptive innovation

I see the work currently being undertaken by Deloitte University Press as emerging as another important step, it allows us to frame and think disruption along recognized points of value, old and new. They have defined the nine patterns of disruption as shown in the graphic below. Incidentally the Doblin group is now part of Deliottes.

I think this has a great place to frame your disruptions, no different from the ten types of innovation.

The nine patterns of disruption (according to Deliotte)

Deliotte University Press has been exploring the disruptive forces at work in a “Patterns of Disruption” extended article and then providing a recent case series on these nine patterns of disruption shown above. I urge all worried or simply interested in understanding disruptive innovation to read these as an excellent point of reference. It can become a really powerful starting point to look, explore and determine ‘your’ possible points of disruption

Getting closer to understanding today’s business disruption phenomena

Here we see the basic ingredients for making change in these nine patterns and a new recipe for challenging and making change as ‘relevant markets’ can be redefined, providing a different source of value creation and recognizing that unmet need of the consumer. It might be something as powerful as the ten types of innovation in exploring the disruptive innovation points of value.

It is the new conditions of lower cost of entry and asset light, that technology is putting the potential into the hands of anyone to allow us to re imagine and recombine, to look to eliminate waste, improve choices, offer greater connected convenience, more personalization but on a different scale and scope. It is allowing us to challenge and exploit direct and indirect costs, to reduce lead times, focus upon new response times, to gain new identification and improved relationships, by connecting all the parts differently, that can create a change in finding new creation value points.

Exploring quickly, learning from these, developing the ability to pivot from this new set of insights, to firstly establish a new base line approach that taps into the right conditions and having the ability, resources and confidence to quickly scale this and mature it out into a broader offering of its interconnected parts that keep adding more value. Large established forms can achieve this, no differently than the small and nimble but in different ways, it lies in the art of orchestration, mobilization and clear, resolute commitment.

Becoming hyperaware, taking decisions and executing on these well is a great step forward for many.

We are certainly breaking faster with the past than ever. In the past we saw the future based often on the past, today we must see the future by exploring and experimenting constantly, based on our agility to recombine based on the technological potential we have increasingly available. Although all these have such a short history and are always changing we need to be more at the forefront of this exploring. It is our embracing all forms of this technology revolution that allows us to frame our thinking differently, it alters our thinking constantly and our organizations need to be set up to evolve in the same responsive ways.

We need to build a greater hyperawareness, the ability to detect and monitor changes and that is coming at increasing speed through more data flowing towards us. It is our ability to absorb this and translate its meaning in different, value-added ways to give it new value from a customer and market perspective. We also need to make better informed decision-making and acting upon these through faster execution and these ‘skills’ need to be far better put in place within most organizations. We need to cut through the existing ways of doing business as normal and challenge everything, everywhere, constantly.

We need to think of these ‘forces of disruption’ as the ‘era of displacement’ as we are all caught up in this technology revolution. The headlights are full on and blinding all of us, it is how we quickly respond will give us a better chance of emerging out of this period of (digital) technological revolution. Technology should not disable us, it should be enabling.

The post Caught in the Headlights of Disruptive Innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

 

Now the report in its fifth edition, it is now spanning 23 countries where the opinions of senior innovation executives or the equivalent are sought out, covering 2,748 executives, with 1,915 being in the C-Suite.

This year the barometer decided to explore the perceptions of the (informed) public for their thoughts on innovation’s growing impact and in particular, the future of work and they interviewed 1,346 to gain some useful insights and pointers that separate business and the citizen in their understandings.

The report covers a significant amount of areas across innovation. Here I wanted to pull out just a couple that initially caught my eye. I might add to this in further posts.

The top line according to GE has six supporting key findings, many supporting their strategy, which sometimes leaves me uncomfortable but partly expected. Are they just looking for their own validation but are they drawing out the downsides and implications that might bring and challenge their model. Hopefully yes, they do have a head-start over many in the way they have been undertaking transformation in my opinion.

The top supported findings were:

• Creativity and problem-solving will be key for future work forces
• Minds and machines are working together (expected perhaps from GE)
• The ROI on Collaboration is constantly improving
• The Emerging markets are more fearless in embracing innovation
• The (constant) call for greater Government support to break down barriers
• The energy sector is ripe for disruption (again GE specific)

The four main themes that did emerge from the key findings from this report see’s pressure is rising but optimism as still prevailing. These needs considering as they do cover some of the critical forces that will push or limit the 4th Industrial Revolution many are talking about and discussed further below. These are:

• A welcome revolution. Both business executives and informed citizens are optimistic about the digital transformation of the world. In emerging markets they actually feel “empowered” by this as a radical transformation point. More on that later
• The Embracing of New Models and Technologies. The continued adapting of investments, partnerships and collaboration opportunities will inform decision-making far more.
• Disruptive Innovation: the solution and the challenge. The recognition that business needs to innovate radically most are mindful of the risk, yet fear being left behind and obsolete.
• Everybody’s starting up. The balance between safer, pursuing incremental innovation and protecting the core business is growing. Inertia and risk-aversion are growing. Yet meanwhile the “start-up” ethos is growing creating different innovation cultures within companies of all sizes.

Getting past the GE shaping in the opening part of the report when you dig a little deeper there are plenty of ‘nuggets of pure gold. I want to pick out a few only here. There seems a lot of denial, delusion and inertia under the surface.

Firstly setting this into context: The 4th Industrial Revolution is challenging us all

This report is timed for the Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum 2016, starting this week. Within the themes this year is the 4th Industrial Revolution is one of the main focal points, I felt we ought to bring this into this review of mine.

Dr. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the WEF wrote about this 4th revolution recently. He points out we stand on the brink of a technological revolution altering the fundamental ways we live, work and relate to one another. This is rapidly underway for each of us. It has scale, scope and complexity that is unlike what has come before. It is characterized, in his opinion, by a fusion of technologies that are blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres.

Its power will lie in velocity, scope and impact it will bring, more breakthroughs, exponential rather than linear in pace and will disrupt almost every industry in every country, it will eventually, sooner than later transform entire systems of production, management and governance.

The real fear is on the impact on business

The impact on business will be huge. In Dr.Schwab’s constant conversations with global CEO’s  is that the acceleration of innovation and the velocity of disruption are for most hard to comprehend, or even anticipate. The drivers of this revolution will deliver constant surprise, even for the best connected and most well informed.

Entirely new ways of serving needs, massively changing value chains disrupted constantly will require highly agile responses as the growing access to global digital platforms will oust well-established incumbents with improving on quality, speed, price and availability to serve emerging needs that are highly valued by the end user.

The main effects of this 4th revolution will be on seeing different customer expectations, changing rapidly product and service enhancements, the need for constantly adapting and collaborating in different ecosystems of partners and constantly changing organizational forms.

Nearly all we know in business will require some significant level of rethinking. It is against this scene the GE Global Innovation Barometer helps to unpick much of the complexity. The GE Innovation Barometer report is extensive it what it is providing. It has many avenues to explore

Early ‘stand-outs’ for me from this Barometer report at first glance

The aspects I pick out initially here are around Digital Darwinism, and The Start-Up Ethos, Internal Inertia and Ineffective Business Models

Digital Darwinism or is it simply full-swing Darwinism?

The consensus of both the business executive and the informed public is that more and more businesses face extinction, rapidly becoming obsolete, as technology is evolving far faster than many can adapt too. The feeling is that only a few are performing as quick adapters and implementing emerging technologies, many are simply lagging. One that I tend to believe does explore and exploit is GE, although its leaderships foresight and speed with the need to adapt is struggling to equally bring its organization up to speed, possibly it is not working “all the pumps” on this one. It needs too.

The gold standard is “being disruptive” but it is such a challenging goal. According to the report, even though 90% of innovating companies are claiming they not just launching new products and services but are creating a new market that did not exist previously.

Now I must admit I just find this totally at odds with what I see or read on a constant basis. I really would want to dispute this or those making this claim have very low threshold of what they define as ‘new’ and being created. Is this more delusional, believing incremental innovation is determining “new” in the broadest sense, to simply justify this claim? So where is all the real growth in the worlds business organizations then if this claim is valid? A question going beyond “not only launch” but ones that are proving real impact on the top and the bottom line (defined criteria needed) would define innovation a little better.

Time and time again I read reports on the lack of innovation, of dedicated resources, even the leadership has such limited time to put behind innovation. I really question this result.

Also 47% are claiming the development of entirely new products or services has contributed to the performance, yet 60% state it is difficult to come up with radical and disruptive ideas is still a key challenge. Definitions of ‘new’ certainly need clarifying. This slide shown can be highly misleading on real innovation progress.

Turning to the Digital Darwinism, it is not just digital in my mind, it is in understanding what is really in need of radically changing and adapting that companies need to do, in  innovating to meet this revolution that is clearly underway.

On the other side of this positive view of innovating reported, we then get the result that the majority of business executives continue to favor a “safer” approach to innovation. They want to maximize existing revenue (58% of those interviewed), protect the core (64%) with only 34% recognizing the development of new business models has contributed to the performance within their company. That is more in line with what I ‘see’ in the market.

The report also points out most businesses innovate incrementally as a way to mitigate risks, even while speed to market is increasingly a differentiator.  63% use incremental to improve existing products and solutions, while 46% try to get to market as quickly as possible to keep an edge over (existing) competitors (for me viewing in the back mirror) and not scanning for the upstarts or disruptive forces coming from different places .

When you look at the country breakdown, this protecting the core is dominant for most countries and a real lack of looking for long term payoff for innovation dominates company thinking. Most executives within most countries have difficulty coming up with radical and disruptive ideas with a growing challenge the highest concern in the USA, South Korea, France, Canada, Japan, Sweden, with the one sizable exception being China.

A growing perception difference on Innovating

The informed public think internal inertia and lack of leadership prevents business from innovating efficiently, while the exec blames ineffective business models (the poor worker blames his tools perhaps). The report specifically asked each, the business exec and the informed public to clarify the challenges preventing businesses ability to innovate efficiently. To level inertia and lack of leadership is a damning reflection of what the public think holds innovation back. I would not disagree.

Darwinism is certainly tapping on every organization’s door in the need for evolution. There are new ideas, concepts, combinations and much more all emerging. If organizations hold onto the totally mistaken belief that incremental will allow them to survive then we are seeing many heading for extinction.

In the past business has found ways where they thrived through stable markets and interlocking in ways we have known to keep thriving. In recent years we are losing many of our known beacons of business , whole rafts of previously well-established business sectors or industries, or ones are being forced to merge as they failed to evolve.

We will continue to lose many of our present organization as they are approaching the edge of a sheer cliff from keeping in denial.

Is this any different from our endangered wildlife species we are in the early stages of a mass extinction event if our businesses fail to become more radical, prepared to disrupt and challenge in a fashion unknown before. Of course the future is unknown but there are things we do know and we need to adapt and work with what we are being provided in this revolutionary period.

The fear of being obsolete is worrying that it is becoming faster than many can adapt to, it seems. This is something each business leader has to face up to and radically change within themselves and their organizations. It is the challenge of today.

I would say, others may not agree but I feel GE are attempting to head of these warnings in their way and taking to heart much within the Barometers past and present.

The “Start-Up” ethos and the chase for the talent has growing implications

• How are different parts of the world trying to catch up, leapfrog over others and become more radical to make this valuable to them?
• How is the larger company equally attempting to stay incremental for their core to protect it but also in using this “start-up” ethos increasingly?

The challenge is how to create an innovation culture within companies of all sizes that allow this- often referred to as the “dual” approach of simultaneously exploiting and exploring.

The report observes with digital transformation there is the rise of the nomad employee. These individuals do not seek full-time employment but favor freelancing or contracting modes. 71% of Business Executives confirm this trend and 84% of the informed public (the very people searching for this). This has implications on building a loyal cadre of employees or holding them within the one environment without significant adjustments to changing the working environment.

It is from the questions to the informed public they see the top elements to create a more productive work environment as 89% flexible working hours with a level of freedom to choose these working hours, 80% want participative management principles with a growing say and 79% want remote working on a regular basis. Other productive environments consist of flexible holidays (75%), more open (flexible) offices (71%), Minimal hierarchy (69%), Satellite offices (62%), participative salaries (60%) and hot desking facilities (50%)

The interesting ‘tension’ within companies is they are looking for creative problem solvers but this entrepreneur spirit is not fully embraced. The “start-up ethos” is not being fully exploited as it potentially might challenge the core and unleash ‘uncontrolled’ disruption within the organization that prides itself at being, foremost efficient and effective. These often run counter to entrepreneurship, and innovation.

The main attributes are still aligned to the business as usual not the need to think new Business Models, become more radical, look to be disruptive, although the Business Executive thinks perhaps they are embracing this “ethos”, the effort supporting these initiatives are “just but a toe in the water” testing the concept today.

Again I feel some level of denial, of not wanting to really embrace or face up to the real race for talent. Often we mistakenly ask the question to the company “what do you look for in candidates” but it is the candidate today that is asking “do I fancy working for them” and how does it fit in my personal journey, in my terms and wishes to achieve.

We come back to the embracing of the 4th Industrial Revolution

It was surprising within the Barometer report that most Business Execs and informed public are optimistic in embracing the 4th Industrial Revolution. That was surprising.

Embracing any future is full of uncertainty. According to this report there is surprising optimism, even some feeling of empowerment and the developing countries are leading this charge. Indonesia, Nigeria, Israel, Turkey, Algeria, China, Mexico, India, Poland, Malaysia, Brazil, Russia and South Africa feel certain positivity.

Those stuck in uncertainty are the ones who lose the most, these being Australia, Canada, USA, Sweden, France, South Korea, Germany and Japan.

It is within this group of ‘reluctant’ countries we find the most tension. The fear and needs in protecting the core, the difficulty of implementing (or wanting too) new business models, the worries of becoming obsolete, of being disrupted alongside the pressures of failing to attract and hold the talent as they are fighting in some respects and not fully embracing the “start up ethos.”

There is a lot to lose but equally to win. By not accepting that within any revolution, you can’t simply defend, you have to know where and how to attack, adapt and experiment, learning to evolve and embrace the changes at a really agile speed. Playing safe is not a winning option.

Safety first is a long-term losing strategy in my opinion

This ‘safer’ approach really needs changing. The absolute need is to embrace a more radical, disruptive stance of advancement. The urgency is where the leadership should be really  taking the important time of working all the revolutionary forces, exploring them, making them work to understand their changing environment, then disruption will be a force that catches them completely out. The CEO should devolve the day-to-day to the COO and get back to much deeper strategic thinking.

The challenging that needs to go on today is that most of the existing, prevailing assumptions are needing revising, even uprooting, forcing of the operating teams to relentless adapt, and become continuously good at innovating through new business models, products and services. Leaders need to be a whole lot bolder in setting a disruptive, technology driven agenda that radically alters the present offering. GE is certainly attempting this in my opinion.

We need to guide the evolution and find ways that are mostly yet to come so we have to be highly adaptive.  We need to break out of linear thinking, stop being absorbed by multiple crises and think strategically and longer-tern about all that is disrupting us and how innovation must shape the future.

The GE Innovation Barometer can only signpost, it is for us to extract the value it provides to help in any change journey. Find a copy and understand its implications on you personally, and more importantly its implications on your business.

Here is a link into the GE Innovation Barometer Report 2016.

The post GE and its Global Innovation Barometer 2016 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The post Seeking fresh winds and new directions first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

You often hear of volatile trading conditions, a more complex market and situations changing constantly and moving faster than ever. ‘Much’ seems to be closing in on us.

We do know we need to re-equip ourselves for constant disruption; we are really beginning to see a shift from the classic bell curve into more of a shark fin for adopting change.

One that is characterized by sudden, even violent success or an event, some moments of brilliant dominance, followed by a dramatic change in conditions as others have spotted the same opportunity and you hit a rapid decline, the race to the bottom of competition constantly negating one another.

Market are segmenting, the life cycle is shortening or having an even longer tail of dealing with slow decline and constant erosion of any competitive position. The sharks are arriving even earlier and in a greater need to show their dominance.

It does seem “creative destruction” is a central force in many of our activities. Activities where innovation is continually replacing not just in products and new services but in designing radically different business models, searching to replace less adaptive competitors in the marketplace at faster rates.

The post The sharks that prey are arriving a lot earlier now first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

It seems in all I keep reading that we are being extorted to disrupt our enterprises before someone else does.

The constant threat of both those known to us and those unknown competitors who can simply raise money based on a disruptive concept, provide a different business model and then attack tomorrow. It is not a comfortable feeling is it?

We are told It is in our ‘complacency’ that we are losing our competitive advantages, even face extinction from those that attack and tear down, replacing it with something different and supposedly better. Did we really need it?

Can we learn to adapt as fast as all that is seemingly coming toward us?

There is so much disruptive power being harnessed that we are all facing an exponentially more complex and challenging environment. Why is there seemingly this determination to tear down many parts of the fabric of our society by challenging institutions, businesses and government structures?
Are many of these organizations so bad – inefficient granted, complacent most likely, and complicit in holding onto what they have achieved, most definitely. So arguably many can be rightfully challenged but what will be the eventual price for this disruption that is occurring all around us?

Unhealthy shifts in the chase for economic growth
The shift has placed the emphasis on the role of destruction rather than creation in driving different economic activity in present times. Will that change? This is getting uncomfortable, is this good for you or me, perhaps not?

This is becoming the game for a few to make money, I mean big serious money and are these not so worried over the wealth creation aspects of creating jobs, building communities, cherishing certain values or just recognizing those communities built up over many years can just shut down and life moves on?

Whole communities are being disrupted, left derelict, with hope changing to hopelessness; we are seeing a lot of social destruction, wrought by much of this current chase for change that is blowing through our global businesses.

The balance seems out of whack but from whose perspective? The incumbent or the usurper? what about the employee or the society that built up whole communities, reliant on that firm for its very existence. What are we destroying in the name of progress?

Looking for the trillion-dollar disruption or seeing whole industries being wiped out

So we will be seeing not just the young start-up rapidly scaling and replacing larger incumbents but new trillion-dollar businesses emerging, wiping out other trillion-dollar businesses, this is a foretaste of the disruption to come even more than we are already witnessing.

Presently we are having to deal as much with fear and anxiety as we are scratching our heads and absorbing this pace of change, all driven by technology and the flow of money into it

Big Data and harnessing technology seems to be threatening everyone in its path
The ramping up of rhetoric around Big Data certainly is fueling this angst of fear and anxiety but is pointing us towards the changing landscape we are travelling towards.

Clearly, the emergence of Big Data is a phenomenon we can’t ignore. But will it disrupt as much as being talked about, or just simply allow the incumbents in the marketplace to respond and adjust their businesses to accommodate this? Time has an impact that is immediate, but also it has an influence on our futures.

A McKinsey study finds French companies that have undergone thorough digital transformations may unlock revenue gains of up to 40 per cent, while companies that do not quickly become digitally integrated could lose up to 20 per cent of revenue to competitors, now that is significant by any account.

Harnessing technology, adapting business models, exploiting data, scaling fast all become vital to adaptive infrastructures, even I’m told building stacked ecosystems, all modular, layered, highly granular and extendable as you go, are the requirements within this disruptive world to thrive.

Increased rhetoric is not helping me at present, it is making me uncomfortable

One of the big consulting firms writes “winning big by thinking big” and is suggesting larger companies will turn out to be among the biggest beneficiaries of initial big data implementations. Why?

In their words, “although big data projects still pose challenges, larger companies appear to bring more to the table.” I’m not sold on this. I feel the usurper has the edge over the incumbent. New models are like new species, they are faster at adapting to the changing landscape

Maybe we all have to be on edge, it makes us sit up and focus as others go jumping over the cliff screaming “disruptive whoopee” for our lemming moments. Are we all jostling for the leap, caught up in the moment, feeling great about the launch into the unknown?

Disruption and change is all about market transitions

I was listening to one of the World Economic Forum’s debates around “digital in context,” it confirmed much. The discussion led off with “watch for market transitions”, “don’t be slow to adopt” and “if you don’t reinvent, you will fail.”

The underlying message was that data has a real currency to all our organizations. They were suggesting that 40% of our current enterprises will be gone in 10 years and with the digital revolution, there will be a completely different landscape of winners and losers. There will be no hiding place with connected technology.

So we will increasingly see technology killing off jobs, causing dis-location, forcing many into life-changing choices. We are seeing increasing conflicting and fragmenting positions that are causing growing uncertainty.

The “cost to serve” is continuing to be driven down, and data is driving this. Add dislocation and deconstruction to disruption, destruction and digital.

We all need to keep moving
We are all being warned to “keep moving”. I often feel we have become like our forefathers, a nomadic tribe that is both physically being forced to move, to hunt for the jobs that allow us to live and to keep applying knowledge found through the internet to survive and thrive.

So it does seem we are in the “disruptive era” but I prefer to think this is more a ‘transformation’ period, often uncomfortable since much of its boundaries and borders are not clear.

It is fluid and we need to adapt to this flow until the disruptive events subside into something we have learnt to accommodate and manage. It is transforming much of what we know, our technology and all that comes with it.

Yet, we need to equip ourselves to be empowered in this transition, we need to keep constantly engaged and attempt to figure out what’s next or at least go with the flow. We need to keep our focus on outcomes and not get caught up in the inputs or the process.

The return of the hunter-gatherers.
Hunting and gathering have suddenly returned as an increasingly important part of our lives, it is changing us back. Nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes follow the animals they hunt; we need to follow the jobs and opportunities.

We are perhaps facing the same constant transition, so it is not a disease but a symptom of what is needed in our future lives, at least for the foreseeable future.

We need to embrace transition as the future way of living

My need, and I think yours as well, is to stay alert and be aware. In many of our jobs, there must be this chance to evolve, or we should move on. I don’t feel we can stand still long enough; we need to change it far more by taking a number of different risks. Keeping moving is part of our future.

I believe we do become far more empowered in any transition if we chose to actually make the change, instead of rejecting it on the premise that there is no need for movement. There is no hiding place it seems.

I just feel far better ‘in transition’ it is that feeling that I am still pushing forward, what I do is in my hands than the alternative, when that moment that I have stopped I am being threatened with disruption and destruction. Both are a little scary and will get exhausting.

Extinction is very threatening, oh just screw it, bring it all on… whoopee”.

The post Disruption, Destruction, Digital Our Way of Future Life? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I often wonder if “best practice” is actually a hidden drug within our organizations that everyone simply craves to be taking.

Firstly organizations need to move well beyond their lazy reliance on best practice comparison and they need to find better ways to explore emerging practices. But that takes many into the realm of increasing uncertainties, and most people and organizations are not trained for this exploration and experimentation, yet it is the place for gaining leading practice.

The Cynefin framework has five major domains

For a more distinctive innovation, you tend to move more towards the complicated domain, where experts ‘kick-in’ to help and offer plausible outcomes based on known experiences. You need to listen to conflicting advice and watch out for entrenched thinking so it can be challenged.

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The post Are you dependent on other’s best practices? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.