In the past twelve months or even more, I think there have been some exceptional reports and thinking coming out of Deliotte’s group   on business issues

These have been from their dedicated practice centers, their University Press and the Deliotte Consulting LLP, mainly from the US practice.

I would regard their thought leadership as close to the top or even at the very top of any of the big consulting firms.

I’ve certainly gained some richer understanding as I am sure many others have and for me Deloitte deserve significant praise for investing in their thought leadership thinking.
I have been reading their interesting views on different aspects of business redesign through their varied and detailed reports that have included: “Work environment redesign”, “Employee engagement”, “Board practices”, “Developing effective governance”, “Integrated reporting for M&A’s”, “Field guides to practical IT, “Tech fusion for CIO’s” and recently a broad report around “Business Ecosystems”.

I’ve always followed closely the Deliotte’s Center for the Edge on their pioneering work coming from the likes of John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Tamara Samoylova and Duleesha Kulasooriya and all their research team.

They really do push the boundaries and thinking to prompt us all.

Here I just wanted to firstly publically acknowledge all this great work but to pick up on one part of a report, of 150 pages, that suggests the “CIO as chief integration officer”. It pushes the CIO role into a far more prominent role, which makes total sense.

The CIO needs to become the Chief Integration Officer.

As they rightly point out in the Deloitte Tech Trends 2015 report, as technology continues to transform existing businesses and their business models, the CIO is evolving rapidly into a key for integrating these significant changes occurring into the core of the business mission.

As the report suggests the CIO can not only be the connective tissue but the driving force of intersecting” all that is needed to work in this connected world.

Business strategy and technology cannot be separated, they need to be constantly harnessed and balanced as never before, in feasibility, resolving complexity and managing all the risks associated with the changes unfolding, leveraging all the potential of the existing with designing and exploiting the disruptive aspects coming daily at a business.

The level of collaboration and cooperation between all C-Level executives to the CIO is absolutely essential to respond in dramatically different ways than the past, it needs to radically be seen as a collaborative partnership not in adversarial ways, as often in the past.. IT has such a transformation role to play but it has to firstly ‘transform’ itself.

Overcoming political resistance and organizational inertia is critical for the CIO, starting with his own team

The following was a shortened checklist of suggestions offered for the changes that are needed to be brought into the CIO’s thinking, to dramatically alter the dynamics and perceptions of his role and contribution and that of the central technology group, from initally getting their house in order and then being recognized as critical to shaping the business future:

* Work more like a venture capitalist by adopting a portfolio management approach.

* Provide visibility into the IT “balance sheet” for an understanding the assets and how they align to strategic priorities in projects, hardware and software, data, contracts, vendors and partners.

* Organize assets to address business priorities by striving for operational excellence by mastering that capability by delivering on what is needed and then that moves the needle to earn the right to help shape the business transformation.

* Focus on flexibility and speed to advance agility, responsiveness, being adaptive in experimentation and innovation.

Then link the potential of tomorrow to the realities of today in the following suggested ways:

• Create a deliberate mechanism for scanning and experimentation
• Rapidly vetting and prototyping new ideas and optimizing for return on assets.
• Build a culture within the team and those associates that encourages failure by learning
• Think big, start small, learn and leverage fast and then scale quickly
• Collaborate to solve tough business problems
• Tapping into diverse thinking, assets and entities
• Actively engage with business peers to influence their view of the CIO role
• Focus on delivering on the promise of service predictability, reliability and efficiency’ as and when’
• Serve as the connective tissue to all things technology, linking the various initiatives
• Advocating platforms instead of point solutions, keeping adaptive and flexible
• Design continuously the architecture and its integration in optimal ways.
• Deliver ‘prime time’ to the business units the security, scalability and reliability.

Grabbing the present and future opportunities that technology is delivering

The role of the CIO and the IT organization under him or the designated person needs to rapidly change from those past perceptions of being remote and restricting the level of change that was required by the business unit to just do their job as expected.

I don’t think the suggested change list outlined above is bad for the incumbent CIO to think through and decide how they are going to change and be seen as embracing their own change.

The ownership of a digital strategy is somewhere where the CIO can be and often is accountable for and needs to show a decisive position on that embraces all the present and future business needs.

It’s design touches increasingly on every corner of the organization, increasingly in mission-critical ways and its capability to deliver on time, in the right way is absolutely essential.

Technology needs to be elevated from personal, sometimes entrenched positions, into a comprehensive plan, recognized for its grasp, perception, understanding and knowledge of what the business requires.

The managing of this really vital strategic asset, one of establishing efficient operations that can effectively do their job but equally lay in the foundations for the organization to respond to breaking and planned opportunities to grow the business effectively, as and when required is no easy task, it needs deep understanding and be conducted in a highly collaborative environment.

It is the CIO who needs to step up and take on this challenge as the chief integration officer but he needs his colleagues to see he has at his disposal the tools, structures, solutions and architecture to deliver on the promise.

The friction of the past has to be put well-behind all, as the organizations future is even more at stake than ever. Deloitte suggests in this report that: It is for the CIO to firstly, put his internal technology house in order, then really leverage the advances in science and emerging technologies, to drive innovation as the growth enabler and finally, re-imagine their own roles to focus less on technology management and more on the total business strategy for what is needed.

Solving the moment, delivering the future

There has never been a more defining time for the CIO to step up and fundamentally deliver on the promise of technology, by connecting an organization and aligning its parts into a cohesive whole.

One that leverages ‘all things’ available to take the business forward in strategically valuable ways as well as operationally effective ones, to grow its sustaining value in how it functions, responds and adapts in our rapidly changing and challenging world.

The post The challenge for the CIO is the fusion of business and IT. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Is Innovation finally moving beyond the previous constraints and boundaries we have been recently applying? As organizations really start to ‘ramp up’ their efforts for growth what will this mean?

Today and in the future we certainly know that innovation is about open, inclusive, full of exploration and harmonization to extract the best results across all that are engaged within their organizations. Getting engagement up in organizations is going to be top of the agenda and innovation can be a significant contributor.

We seem to have really grasped and recognized the combination-effect that comes from the myriad of different linkages that is propelling innovation activity and bringing increasing confidence within the boardroom. Innovation is within all our grasps, if we really want to grab hold of it.

Let’s look at some of the possible top-level trends I think we might see in 2014

The good news is, we are finally seeing innovation maturing.

We are certainly seeing innovation has moved well beyond just products. It is exploring the value of combining or even separating services, changing value propositions on a more consistent basis and exploring new business models far more openly.

Organizations are far more open to the search for their future growth than before. Each avenue for innovation to be traveled will be explored far more in our innovation activities in 2014.

As growth comes increasingly back on the agenda for most organizations, it will come far more from exploiting through a greater organic growth approach. Yet to achieve the ambitious growth targets that many organizations are seemingly talking about, there needs to be a radical overhaul of internal innovation understanding and structures.

Mindsets are ripe to make significant change, we can’t stay fixed in our ways in a far more agile and adaptive world, we are all facing. Cost cutting can only take us so far, being cautious and risk averse has longer term consequences. Organizations will finally make those efforts to established innovation as a competence all must learn and understand.

One innovation struggle is around ‘rigidity’ within the organizations.

Innovation requires a more fluid, adaptive and agile environment. This will require some significant changes within the approaches within managing within these structures and this takes a significant and dedicated approach to achieve.

The end result is changing the way people are managed and valued. There is a need to draw in, to engage, more open to diversity in opinion and thinking and increased emphasis on fluid teams tackling issues and challenges in unique ways, not through standard processes and approaches.

The shifts in innovation activity, seeking simplification

We are also seeing increasingly the disruptive era of simplification, which captures far more of the imagination and where the increased movement of future wealth generating opportunities lie by meeting targeted customer need.

These are not ‘layering’ on features that have been the approach of the past, this is stripping away and rapidly breaking these back down into targeted applications that do the job, we the consumer or client wants, often willing to pay a premium upon.

Complexity is also changing, taking out the pain for customers

Complexity should not be about customers having to work out how to understand something; it is using the smart complexity that sits behind the solution to allow us to focus on what we need to achieve, to then help us significantly deliver on our required needs.

Smarter searches, algorithms, designing your own options all are giving us the complexity we need. Simpler, interactive interfaces to do the job we wish to do, not forced to spend time learning and doing.

The continued exploring of the effects of reverse innovation and lean approaches.

Reverse innovation, jugaad or frugal innovation is where there is  a huge potential – still largely untapped in developed countries offering new avenues to real targeted growth.

What about the strong underlying movement in start-ups that is far more ‘needs related’ or serving ‘unmet needs’ through lean approaches and customer development techniques.

These are so much better understood than the approaches in the past, of simply cruising along for opportunity with a vague business concept.

Sharpening the minds, changing the mindsets.

Everything has become so much sharper in why we have to focus our minds down, it is far more on what and where innovation can give us the next growth opportunity and that comes from all the diversity we can muster.

Managing in the global innovation space is no different; we can get far more quickly at answers on a global basis than at any time in the past. We are learning to tap into this global knowledge in different ways, it needs a dedicated focus and understanding, to find the unique mix that suits your needs and knowledge accessing and translating and then we are closer to the solutions that have the global unlocking key.

The increasing value of data – its collection and understanding

We are using the ability to engage, to explore and exchange through a variety of social mediums, we can collect and interpret larger amounts of data than ever before. Collecting this data is the easier part, interpreting what it all means is a lot harder.

We will continue to improve our abilities to find the patterns, the trends, the underlying meaning of what this data is telling us. Then we get into decisions from this new understanding.

We will need to have far more adaptive, agile, responsive organizations that can quickly pivot to seize on these opportunities. The skill sets for managing data will become more established, discussed and quickly adopted as emerging practice.

Revisiting past practices

All of what has gone on previously needs to be revisited and in many cases reworked through new practices, new systems and new measures. Organizations are coming rapidly to the point of needing to be innovation re-engineered to make the sizable changes they must achieve to ‘allow’ organic growth to deliver.

We are forced to look harder for attracting growth into our business and innovation can provide this force if there is the commitment backing the rhetoric; the one of needing organic growth to be the primary driver of over the next five years.

Re-engineering the existing innovation is not a bad place to start, maybe in 2014 the innovation renovation movement might come more into force.

Innovation needs positive translation in its management practice

I am sensing a really positive shift in innovation practice. It does seem to have gone up a notch or two in its maturity and adoption within our organizations in recent months.

Can you feel the changes or are we still at the intent stage? Are organizations fully commitment to what shifting to an innovation emphasis will mean? Or are we only at a recognition stage?

Of course, there are significant sets of issues needed to be addressed to really allow innovation to drive growth. Organizations need to consider very radical shifts in approaching innovation and its management to gain any momentum, so intent can meet these organic growth ambitions as suggested?

Innovation needs to become fully integrated into organizations

 Innovation challenges much that is presently established within organizations, there is potential higher risks, significant changes required to be enacted within the organizations, with a whole raft of different competencies and capabilities are to be learned to extract the ‘promise and value’ from the innovation needed.

I predict the next twelve months will advance innovation understanding significantly

For me, in the next twelve months will be seeing an increased level of activity around innovation. The difference will be it will be at a much higher, strategic level to begin to re-equip organizations differently.

What will decide if this is a reality or just C-level rhetoric? C-level management is deeply worried over the alternatives of facing further low or no growth prospects, staying risk-averse or recognizing finally that the operating conditions need to change to search for real growth and that comes through more radical innovation.

Organizational innovation will have to change fairly dramatically to regain the momentum most organizations need and have lost for far too long. I think the focus on strategic innovation thinking will emerge stronger as we enter 2014 to give innovation that dramatic push, the ‘magic’ tipping point.

A collection of thoughts from recent observations and research.

The post Heading for 2014, will innovation change? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today, when markets are especially tough, looking long and hard at what you have and jettisoning what you don’t need becomes essential to reposition yourself as leaner and more flexible, far more agile.

Looking to be capable in incremental innovation is simply not enough, we need to be at the same time achieving more distinctive and breakthrough innovation.

This is the higher demand point that is expected from the innovation system within organizations,  and regretfully this is not happening as much as it should.

There are many pressing needs why organizations have to ‘shape up’ and make some adjustments to their innovation activities.

One of these is simply don’t ignore the need for looking to explore a re-engineering of the innovation process. It can really make a lasting difference to the fortunes of the organization.

Herein this second part of the case for re-engineering are some thoughts to offer and support this call for a more in-depth look at redesigning your innovation process.
What is valuable, what is not?

What does give you real value within the existing process? What are really non-added value activities that have been implemented over time to defend, to protect, to layer on the existing?

Perhaps having a fresh perspective, driven by changing market conditions, you can challenge many present activities as work that might be unnecessary, as you make a greater focus on optimization and speeding up, consolidating activities, as part of your needs to adjust and meet this market change that is happening at present.

The need for focusing on new responsive outcomes not just task or unit inputs and process outputs does need radical rethinking.

To be more responsive you might need to place into the innovation system a higher sense of urgency, of reducing time to market, of delaying certain decision points closer to the end.

You need to be more adaptive to these changing market conditions and this might need some radical rethinking by challenging existing practices and norms.

Firstly what is achievable within the existing system?

What is possible with leveraging different technologies, collaborative platforms, more flexible structures and exploring synergies across the whole innovation system?

If you were able to cut across existing boundaries, changing existing controls and constraints presently imposed and challenge the existing structures, what would that achieve?

Of course you begin to challenges sensitivities, threaten personal silo’s and comfortable routines built up and nicely established, you challenge existing attitudes.  All of this has increasing ramifications on existing structures so you have to move cautiously and in thoughtful ways.

Focus on those that might be effected most, that can block and challenge, then set about to offer them a clear alternative. One that they can see a different potential and ‘richer’ promise than often just the protect and defend of the daily grind.

You need to paint an inspiring vision and some details of the journey and outcomes expected. Get them involved, excited and wanting to change, those that don’t, well it just simply will get harder for them to block real progress if you can gain real momentum and early success is quickly seen and felt.

A more radical rethink needs a reason

When we are evaluating the existing business processes, there will always have a certain structure and measured set of activities within it. These are designed to produce existing acceptable results from a set of particular outcomes that might have worked, but I expect, really expect, you were not really happy with the results, it seemed to give a certain disappointment.

If you are truly dissatisfied with your innovation outcomes then you need to see these existing systems and structures as an obstacle and barrier to a different innovation path.

It is when the dynamics change, then you need to be alert and ready.

What if you needed from your innovation process, the shift to a real need for building in agility and higher market responsiveness for example?

Changing the existing process is unlikely to work it needs re-engineering.

You certainly don’t just change just for the sake of it, this does not make sense but changing it for a new strategic purpose does. If you markets are changing, if we are moving towards more volatile trading conditions this provides the strategic intent and motivation to change.

Are you ready when the CEO enters your office and expects different innovation?

In the coming months and over the next few years CEO’s will be finding their way to your executive office, more and more. Or equally to the marketing teams office or R&D centres, demanding far more from innovation.

As responsible for managing within the innovation system do you have you a complete ‘handle’, an in-depth understanding, of what is truly possible to respond to this increasing demand from the CEO?

Not just knowing your existing innovation system and structure but what are the possible options and ways to rise up and respond to a new set of challenges?

I would suggest that you should be already working on it because the way we are all doing business today, is certainly about to change, if it is not already under-way.

It happened to me some years back

I recall one event many years ago when it was expected to improve productivity within the system by 15 to 20% in the organization I was working for.  Admittedly not the innovation system but the whole organizational system.

I had to go out and deliver this as my area of responsibility across a global operation. Equally, there was a further demand to reduce operating costs by 15% and standardise the process so it could be understood and totally visible to the CEO.

The outcome delivered was 25% improvement in productivity and 25% saving in operating costs to channel differently. Both outcomes allowed for increasing throughput desperately needed and holding operating costs so as this allowed us to channel much of this to different new value-adding activities to raise performance even further and drive through more volume.

It took a significant amount of time, commitment and resolve to alter structures, systems, processes and the mindset across a global organization that had been very defensive in its local organizations.

What it did do is radically altered the market competitive position of the total organization and gave the customer more of what they wanted, guaranteed delivery to his desired needs when it was expected.

Why can’t these types of results be applied to the innovation system you have?
Don’t be dismissive simply because my example is a business process re-engineering one, what do you think innovation has become?

It is a business process, with its entire supporting infrastructure, systems, management structures, processes, controls, culture and practices.

Recognize the beast that lurks across your organization called innovation in all its forms, it can make or break you, it is that important to your future.
Innovation needs to find slack, it needs to utilize technology, it needs to find new ways to combine and explore.

To achieve this you need to engineer time, to save on your existing costs, to improve on your existing process and to allow for experimentation, fresh generation of ideas and concepts and allow for the three ’S’ needs.

You need to stretch, to scope and too scale differently on your innovation activity if you want more real distinctive innovation breakthroughs that truly accelerate growth.

What are my three big imperatives (BHAG’s) that push you towards re-engineering innovation?

1. We need to improve the operations around innovation. We need to improve the formal and informal aspects of managing within the innovation system. We have to adapt our organizational structures to improve the balance between local and global responsiveness. We need to capitalise on all the information systems, communication technologies and infrastructures we have introduced progressively over the years and not harmonized or integrated fully. We need to account more for open innovation. Finally we need to look harder at what adds real value and what doesn’t and rebalance the two
2. The scope of the operations is increasingly complex and we need to reduce this. We need to build more scale where it matters to outperform competitors and outperform in (deteriorating) market conditions. We need to add flexibility, we need to maintain standardization in approach, we need to add a higher risk profile into our innovations.  We need to share in a more inclusive innovation strategy and we need to maximise our global processes to help deliver in reducing time frames. We need to make innovation life simpler.
3. The chance to build fresh capabilities into your innovation systems. When you need to reconsider innovation beyond the existing incremental you have delivered you need to find compelling value propositions. To achieve this everyone involved needs to lift their heads up and find some solid, decent time to be allowed to think through this challenge. Knowing the (changing) innovation strategy and the need, being more included in this dialogue, adding their personal insights built on solid market understanding and not just through reliance on other people’s focus reports. Having a growing sense of trust that the outcomes of any re-engineering will release them.

We need to build  new competencies and capabilities into our innovation system, so as our people engaged in innovation can be able to contribute to improving more helpful processes for them to do their job and, feel engaged in a more compelling work experience.

A place where their contribution is truly valued and seen, feeling included and able to ‘freely’ reach out across internal and external networks. Placing real trust and investing in the skills will open up individuals to want to take on new experiences and challenges. They can see they are making a real difference.

So any first step is to see and then respond.
So what do we really need to do to seize emerging opportunities quicker, at tomorrow’s new innovation speed?

Six simple opening steps to begin to think through

1. Redefine our need from innovation
2. Sketch out an opening road map of how to tackle any re-engineering of innovation
3. Identify some opening improvement opportunities that can really galvanize change and significant for the organization can get behind.
4. Take a hard look on what you need to achieve for any change like this and what it means in efforts and resources. Often not as much as you initially think.
5. Begin to organize and draw in a team that can undertake the redesign and can share in this. This calls for expertise but seek out a real diversity of opinion but can all come together as a united team once the debating has run its course and results come in.
6. Seek a growing commitment from those around you, determine the appropriate approach and be ready to clear the decks and take the initiative out of your office into the heart of the organization.

So, concluding my opening case for re-engineering innovation.

As I suggested in my opening remarks in part one of this, innovation, as we know it today, is grinding to a halt for many. The existing treatment and values we offer in innovation’s name are tired, overworked, often over-engineered and under-delivered into the marketplace to make real difference.

We need to radically re-engineer the innovation systems and structures to offer a better value from all the innovation activity that is going on within organizations.

In  not recognizing the crisis within, is not providing the opportunities to explore & extract the best opportunities we can deliver to meet our customers needs and what markets are looking for in growth and stimulus today.

We have available more means at our disposal to move from the existing to the preferred than ever before. Innovation needs to go back to being the real option for significant growth by offering something that ‘wow’s’ the consumer and creates fresh new markets, found by tapping into the unknown needs and jobs-to-be-done that our consumers are trying to achieve with the existing products and services but failing.

We are in volatile times or heading towards them. The markets and consumers requirements are changing, much is by being forced into making change and they, our consumers, don’t like that.

So we have to find different ways to meet these changing conditions with radically altered approaches within our innovation management to respond and be more agile, to draw the consumer back in.

Without question we do need to put back the ‘wow’ factor back into innovation if we want to first survive and then begin to thrive in more compelling ways and in tougher times.

There is a time for this need to re-engineer what we do in the name of innovation and this might actually be that time

The post The Case for Re-engineering Your Innovation Process (part two) first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When are we going to recognize that innovation, as we have it organized within many organizations today, is failing to deliver on its promise of providing the growth expected and so often talked about by the CEO?

Larger organizations, let’s face it,  are so caught up in the incremental trap. Risk mitigation rules at every level of the management of innovation, as it ‘churns’ slowly through the complex innovation process, built up over the years.

If an organization is totally happy with spending all its knowledge and internal resource on providing incremental products to its customers and gets away with it, then fair enough but does it have to be so?
Alternatively, if shareholders, customers and competitors sense there should be far more, then the organization is travelling a road that indicates the pathway to decline.

The worry becomes simply, can it reverse this mind-set of incrementalism and risk mitigation in driving its innovation? There is a different pathway on offer but to travel down it, you have to think about some serious form of radically altering your existing innovation structure and processes.

Much has happened in innovation in the past ten years.

Often you wonder if any new understanding really has permeated through the outer skin of some organizations, perhaps with the notable exception of open innovation.

We have greater technology, software, and understanding of systems, people, and structures than ten years ago. We are better at measuring innovation in inputs, throughputs, outputs and outcomes or have the potential to do this. Of course, that is, if we chose too.

The real issue for me is that much of this potential, these potential advancements are often seemingly being ignored, or certainly not fully leveraged. We just keep adding more and more on top of the existing systems, instead of stepping back and looking for a more radical redesign, one that can change the innovation dynamics.

The one that transforms and goes well beyond our existing slow growth reality, seen today based on present performance of so many. The extra margins of profit today are more likely to come from reducing not enhancing.

So why do I argue we need some radical re-thinking of how we manage innovation?

Well most of the economies are flat on their back; the money in the pocket of the consumer is dwindling and less certain than in recent years. Many of our larger organizations continue on in their juggernaut fashion, believing they are that irresistible force that is indestructible and that they can keep on going offering increasing extensions to existing products, passing on higher prices expecting those higher sales. Will this last? I doubt it.

They are busy chasing higher revenue, not so much in existing markets but more by expansion into new markets. Much of the existing market activity is quickly negated by competitors, which stalk every move and cover off any short-term advantage to try to regain the status quo. Layoffs, reductions across the board just continue to eat into the very fabric of the organization to extract profit, often at the price of real innovative growth.

Organizations are increasing their complexity by the very nature of the business model they are pursuing.  They are reducing decision-making away from the markets and the field and centralizing this, therefore requiring the building up of the necessary controls to make sure there is compliance and fulfilment of these decisions.

They are increasingly remote and losing the very trust of many of their employees by this ‘drip by drip’ set of actions.

Complexity comes with a growing cost.
It is slowing everything down. More people are spending all of their working days coordinating and justifying more than ever. The productive person, seen before to be the one producing something new or different is today plainly different.

They are more likely seen as dynamic by the way they respond to requests, the way they communicate and coordinate, the way they chase and monitor.

They shut down more in creativity by their need to satisfy growing demands placed on them.  Organizations are employing hundreds, if not thousands caught up in feeding the machine not driving the value-adding process.

We spend increasingly more time in seeking out efficiency and being more effective but effective at what? Certainly not on working with great innovation in the majority of cases!

The need to shift from efficiency to agility for innovation
Our focus is on efficiency and control, delivering more and more incremental better products, trying to stay one step ahead of competitors.

By being in increasing control by planning and knowing your outcomes well ahead of the real need you are running your process to minimise risk and variation.

The need is to have constant visibility and anticipate obstacles by employing the means to make this happen, being in total control, taking out uncertainty, taking out experimentation and replacing it with certainty. Six sigma enthusiasts must be delighted.

What if we changed this?

We want to bring in agility, the ability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions, to lead market change that increasingly shows signs of volatility and uncertainty. Would our existing ruthless grinding execution machines be up to the different challenge?

Challenges like building in accelerating effective exception handling, separating the prevailing present business and application logic to be driven by different innovation logic of rapid, more radical, responsive product and service offerings that provide solutions that get closer to meeting some often radically changing customer needs.

We need to be looking to take greater variation and turn it into a market winning advantage.

To achieve greater agility we need to cut rework, we need to seek faster problem resolution and reduce cycle times way down, reduce downtime involved in waiting for escalating decision-making of the past, minimise any backlogs and combine current innovation into bigger big bang solutions that can cut through market uncertainties to maintain your share of wallet, mouth or bandwidth.

We need the principles of Six Sigma but with distinct differences. A corporate culture dominated by Six Sigma management theory will be primarily inclined toward inwardly focused, continuous improvement types of innovation activity — process, customer service, systems, operations, and so on. The aim is small, incremental innovations that really can add up but only can go so far!

Seeking a more entrepreneurial environment
A culture that fosters disruptive or encourages distinctive innovation is going to be more entrepreneurial, more outwardly focused on new markets, technologies, and business models. The goal is to find big new growth platforms that add significant chunks of revenue and profit.

Innovation is uncertain, unsure territory and requires sometimes a significant level of unstructured thinking to spot the emerging patterns and opportunities; the innovation system needs to build this in as slack.

We need to ask the underlying question is whether the discipline of process management will fertilize or strangle those new ideas that come from light-bulb moments of brilliance”

The need is for a different orientation

We cannot make money without innovating for growth, and we cannot save money by not having efficient processes. W

hat we need is to strike a new balance from what we know that works and what we know is questionable if the activity does not have a real value add component to it.

The task would be to re-invent how we work to carry out this. We need to focus on the fundamentals within our existing processes and even be ready to tear down many of the current ways of managing innovation within the business.

We need to seek solutions from a fresh perspective. When you begin to question you begin to re-engineer.

Part two, published tomorrow, will delve further into this case for re-engineering innovation.

The post The Case for Re-engineering Your Innovation Process (part one) first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.