relentless innovation and change needed - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Seeking fresh winds and new directions

@paul4innovating — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 15:05:17 +0000

Anyone who has felt the ‘full force of the wind’ will know the feeling of how hard it is to keep on your feet, to stay determined to stay upright and true, to hold the course, whatever happens.

When you feel the force of change running through the organization, you tend to have that same sensation, to resist the force with all your energy.

It is often really hard to let go, the environment was something you had become used to, you accepted and become resigned to its weaknesses and constantly exploited its possibilities or even possibly the other way round.

Ignoring the power of choice within change is dangerous

Constructing a climate for any transformation is hard. Our cultures are deep-rooted; we resist those winds blowing into us “full-on,” well beyond being reasonable or smart enough to avoid them before they confront us. The Chinese proverb below gives us a clear choice: “to build walls or build windmills”

When an organization decides to change its culture, set about constructing a different climate or environment so innovation can thrive. But there are so many steps to work through, so many obstacles to overcome, bridges to burn, habits to undo as well as construct the path of understanding, of recognition and providing the building blocks to this.

So often the top organizations keep delivering their message from the top, they so often fail to listen to the message from the bottom. Change is often resisted simply because the organization never takes the time to really listen to the views of the very people they expect to simply change..

Context is the vital ingredient often never told for innovation.

Often we hear “location, location, location” as the mantra for the real-state property. What should the mantra be for innovation? For me, it is “people, people, people” followed by “context, context and context”. We have often heard (and it is totally right) that innovation only happens through people. Everything else – systems, processes, structures, incentives and investments, sets the context that defines how people approach their jobs.

Context not only sets the stage, it gives us the reason to go and find the tools to get the job done but it is ‘our’ people who need to be motivated to go find them and apply them.

The power of context also refers to the conditions and circumstances of time and place for combining new ways to make a shift, a new understanding, perhaps to make the organization more sensitive to the need for innovation, to help fully support the people to innovate.

Context is powerful but only in the hands of knowledgeable people.

So to make the change we need context – the understanding of why we need to change and what we need to do with it. Then we can begin to think of the climate and eventual culture we want to have so as to achieve the change.

These actions shape behaviours that alter perceptions, establish themselves within the larger social group that change is directed towards, it alters the ‘norm’, opens up new possibilities and pushes the established boundaries.

Innovation is very fluid; we build systems that often impede it.

I kept a reference but I can’t recall who wrote it:

“An idea tends to be very fluid, and without context may be hard to evaluate or even consider. Certainly, any culture that discourages ideas will produce few, that rewards people for complying will not promote challenges and make the necessary breakthroughs business require today in new and different thinking. Having systems that minimize risk will also minimize innovation and risk-taking. Structures built to control only impede the very interactions that innovation thrives off of and restricting the movement of ideas will completely undercut the capacity for innovation”.

So companies need to put a great amount of attention on the context that will allow people to work clearly and effectively and provide the vital enablers that contribute to making this happen.

This power of context is something we are extremely alert or sensitive to, and when these change and we don’t understand why, we often just stop innovating, or being productive and often become disinclined to be creative. So making change for reasons that are seen as not clear to those involved stops people from doing their job of making innovation happen.

Context may be the arbitrator of success but people are first and foremost, hence why my two mantras are both critical “people followed by context” that are inexplicably linked for successful innovation but these should always be placed in the right order and recognition; people come first, context follows, innovation flows from the combination and you have the best chance to bring about positive change.

Actually making change for innovation is a lot harder.

Let me explain: Innovation, however, doesn’t work in many of our normal processes and procedures. Yes, we constantly attempt to squeeze all our innovation activity into a well-designed process but so many of those more radical innovations just cannot fit and we are then forced to ‘kill them off’ as the system rejects them.

We block any chance of making a radical change if we remain slaves to the pursuit of structured innovation alone. We should find ways to become flexible, more agile, and more ready to work with ambiguity and find the ways and means to challenge the consistent process for innovation.

Transactional processes have their context embedded in them, they are often just repeatable. Innovation, on the other hand, needs to attach context to every idea or concept, it needs to be moulded, shaped and aligned to the greater purpose, it is constantly unique and challenges the mindsets looking for simply efficiency and effectiveness.

A lot of innovation is actually not repeatable as it relies on creativity, discovery and intuition to overcome specific obstacles, all we can try to do is make them as efficient and effective as we can.

Encouraging change has one very powerful empowering step

If you encourage a certain readiness, willingness and ability to want to transform – then you must devolve power down to the individual to experiment, create, develop, to test, and then they will want to innovate.

They need to engage and identify, innovation derives from a concept in someone’s mind, who puts this into a context that others can relate to and out of this beginning comes the wish to develop and deliver this idea or concept into a final innovative product or service.

It is not the mechanical systems or processes that innovation often requires, it is the intellectual effort from the people wanting to engage in what it changes for them and those that benefit from something better and different.

Encouraging the forces, let them run free

Let those winds blow but do be ready to seek out all those within your team to harness the full forces of this change, to fill the sails that give you that momentum to move forward and pick up speed. If you lack the coordination of effort, when it is needed, and show poor commitment and enthusiasm, you create a real drag on performance.

You can often anchor and constrain the initiatives, you subject ‘forces of real negative tension’ that pulls in the opposite direction, holding everything and everybody back and eventually those full forces break free and run wild, ending up being totally out of control and all the creative energies are dissipated and going in all directions.

Remember we all need the provision of tools, encouragement, the time and space to adjust to change, to experiment and adjust, to become more comfortable, to validate a better course of action or way. We should always give liberally out the tools to do the job, but explain their purpose. We need to create the time to experiment and get used to what this means, keep adjusting and learning from the experience.

Focus constantly on the training and support always needed, you will surely lift any performance.

Finally innovation needs ‘team performance’ it struggles in isolation, it needs framing, context and dialogues to spark and evolve, and yes, always give praise and encouragement on any journey of change, lots of it. It soothes the pain of uncertainty, it strengthens the resolve to make the efforts.

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The sharks that prey are arriving a lot earlier now

@paul4innovating — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 11:26:16 +0000

Change is all around us, it is accelerating not abating. Do you feel you are trapped, encircled and just a little concerned.

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.

Adoption is far earlier, the pace of change is quickening and from this, the competition is responding in new ways, often surrounding the new innovation with their version, built on often a really ‘fast follower’ principle to keep in step, and throttle off any different adoption, knowing what it costs to have to win this back over time if it can at all when it switches.

The life cycle is becoming even more important to manage in all of its stages, as its traditional shape I feel, is radically altering. It is coming faster and fading away quicker unless you manage its parts very specifically.

The VUCA world is a brutal place to operate in

Some are arguing we live in a VUCA world, full of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. I remember one phrase in a great book to read “Moments of Impact” written by Chris Ertel and a wonderful associate of mine, Lisa Kay Soloman.

They regard this period of living as the VUCA world, as “one that is a little like those thrilling rides you find in amusement parks but just not all of them are fun!”

These “change forces” are making many organizations and the leadership a little weary and wary, they seem to ‘double down’. They become risk-averse, defensive and determined to ‘weather it through’. They might be hanging on tight, simply believing but the force of change requires a very different set of beliefs and will whisk them away if they don’t adapt and change.

Shifting from accepted to adaptive – embracing new ways to innovate.

The changes that are occurring all around us are those sudden switches from the predictable markets that are creating interruptions to that constant reassuring rhythm of the one, three and five-year business plans. Suddenly this ‘process’ is getting challenged by novel, agile, adaptive concepts stealing the growth out of ‘our’ markets.

Lost increasingly is that feeling of being predictable, offering incremental improvements as the sure-fire way of running a business, year in, year out.

Innovation in the hands of a few has changed, it is so much more than incremental, it is radical and destructive and it’s coming at you earlier than ever, grabbing that early majority as it adapts, pivots and often blows away your ‘crafted’ design through combining a more radical solution, spotted and understood from real, early customer engagements.

Today we are far more on this quest for novel insights and much of what we will increasingly do will be transient. We are seeing much that was seemingly enduring is being challenged, even ripped out and replaced.

It is often an environment that has become a ‘feeding frenzy’ of the experiment, change, adapt and go back in and ‘attacking’ the assumptions of the business value proposition to find the ‘sweet spot’ of customer needs and why they see the value.

The “reassuring” generic statements are even more hollow than before

We might still hear the reassuring sound of those generic statements from the established incumbent of “focusing on our core assets”, “providing solid shareholder value”, “having clear target markets”, focusing on “reducing low yielding businesses to release value and drive up our stock” and the favourite by many “vested” C-level individuals announcing the latest “driving up our share price by a well-designed buyback program.”

All these ‘generic statements’ are often masking a deeper story in many organizations not at ease with themselves, at all. These reassuring statements make those on the outside feel some level of short-term comfort and stay invested but if you scratch the surface just a little, there is an underlying sense of panic. If you push too hard, and ask difficult questions suddenly it all becomes a little uncomfortable. Yet our large, established organizations are highly vulnerable to attack from their inability to adjust quickly to changed conditions.

These statements are just covering up the serious cracks appearing in the design process for new products. It is the failure not to embrace the changing management practices of working within far more lean principles, deepening design thinking, seeking out crowd-sourcing and collaborative networks, that push hard to fully understand customer engagement and challenging the business models to eventually end up with new value propositions that alter the existing market state.

Often the traditional practice organization is simply adrift in the water and others are circulating around them working through this new way of business thinking, avoiding old practices, thinking and approaches that really benefit the incumbent, often not the customer and their real needs.

The new leader within all of us needs to arise

Leadership when it wants to change for innovation needs to encourage a new set of principles so as to draw in everyone to the change process, so they can collectively unleash the potency to create the climate for creativity, innovation and eventual transformation, in a rapidly changing environment and culture that wants this change – it is liberating for individuals.

There is a lot of new thinking showing positive results and the ‘traditional’ management team or business needs to open up too much of this new thinking and find ways to adapt it and bring it in-house.

We must break out of our traditional thinking and ‘swim’ far more rigorously out of our dangerous holding patterns, to break away from the pack we get caught up in, simply accepting current practices and approaches is our only answer.

We must be bolder in where we go, in risks, in thinking, in our innovations, and in the actions we take.

When the wind of change does blow we must adjust

When the wind of change does blow and it is in every corner of every organization, it really does deliver a ‘punch’ of complex variables to manage, we do need to be ready to make the ‘required’ changes.

These ‘change winds’ influence the processes running through the organization as they are challenging and probing what is in place, they are looking to raise the creativity, by adjusting and changing the norms, making new activities work experimenting and learning.

Then you have to set about how to construct and design a more deliberate process kit for managing innovation, one that is more fluid, adaptive and agile to changing conditions and knowledge, and finally, the setting about addressing the environment and cultures needed to create more lasting conditions, so as to embed the change and establish the new (innovating) order.

Being alert, being adaptive, ready to break out and forge ahead

We are surrounded by all these sharks, hungry, constantly circling, looking for easy or ‘fat, complacent’ prey. If we are not alert to the dangers all around us we will certainly suffer. Are we the hunter or the hunted? We need to decide.

We must constantly adapt, wanting to make the change, even if it is uncomfortable, otherwise, we can so easily be swept away, at the mercy of others more adaptive.

There is no question we all need to keep moving but it is striking out with a far bolder plan to leave the ‘sharks’ behind. Let them look for the late majority or laggards that are not spotting real change occurring, occurring all around them, to become the new ‘feeding ground’.

You, simply go really hard after the early adopters and majority that determine the ones that thrive, knowing what it takes to survive and that is based largely on innovating like crazy

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Exploring the Drivers of Innovation Change

@paul4innovating — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 09:00:36 +0000

I always show a particular interest in statements claiming to have identified a relevant driver of innovation change, then think through these.

Can these be valuable and be associated to the portfolio situation within an organization’s need, in seeking different viewpoints of product or service change?

Opening up our thinking to change can drive our business offerings very differently.

Often within these drivers, we do need to explore what is the underlying force behind them, it allows us to pause and think. As you think through what these different change drivers on what it might mean to extend your new product or service developments, these can prompt radically different and imaginative solutions to consider..

Using the different drivers can give you new insights into your innovation activities plus also can prompt significant changes to freshen up your innovation portfolio.

They are certainly a good place to start to get the creative juices flowing even more.

It is worth constantly working around different drivers of innovation change.

Periodically I would suggest you work through each of these and see if this changes your thinking or approach and you can then see a different angle or opportunity that might emerge that changes the thinking.

So let me share my opening nine identified drivers for innovation change:• Emotional Drivers – as we learn, dream, create and get into a ‘free’ spirit, it often opens up our thinking. I sometimes associate heroes and champions or relate to recognized mentors and facilitators and look for what makes the emotional connection, then I ask: “can I use this or be inspired by them” to drive something within my innovation activities or not? What triggers different sentiments, warmth, excitement or feeling?

• Social Drivers – The more we seek interactions, they become (or should become) meaningful and enduring. These connections allow us to think and relate, deepen the association.

As we also seek out others’ accomplishments, can this trigger ideas, principles or actions that we can apply in what we are doing. What can we offer that meets different desires, and aspirations, prompts dialogues and might reflect for instance, a more caring and sharing viewpoint. Drivers that make us more socially relevant and connected.

• Technology Drivers – These tend to be better leveraged and understood, in collaborative methods and techniques, ones where we can demonstrate, and connect the physical and virtual world, that moves us to better, clearer, even faster transactions. Technology is a really powerful enabler of innovation if you tune into the four fast-moving disruptive forces of social, mobile, cloud and analytics that are all driven by an explosion of data and fuelling a new era of innovation for many.

Imagine if you can harness technologies application and ‘raw’ power, there becomes a higher chance of finding the needle of useful innovation insights that lie within in the binary haystack. As you learn to analyse and sort these technology drivers, can give you new insights into different trends, patterns and needs, that might even radically alter the meaning within your business and how and what you offer, with even new business models emerging from the evaluations.

• Environment Drivers – these become critical. The more we encourage the right environment the more we create a culture that others can relate to. A climate that encourages, and underlines the determination of bringing in diversity, collaborative and distinctly different behavioural patterns that encourage even more to join in, relate and participate in generating ideas and solutions. By providing a welcoming environment you can drive growing awareness, trust and shared understanding that builds a very powerful set of innovation drivers if the Environment thinking is right and tuned in to the world of what needs to be reflected within your products and services..

• Measurement Drivers – We are all familiar with the classic input, process, outputs and outcomes we strive to find measures for, good or bad. I tend to look for measurement in the knowledge that is being driven through an organization in its absorptive capacities of accessing, anchoring and eventual diffusion. If we measure actual utilization or assimilation then can we explore these in deeper ways to draw out the aspects that make up both tacit and explicit outcomes.

We also need to keep focused on time-related activities, speed of innovation to market as well as project deliverables and make different connections on what this might possibly mean. Measures can drive change if they are well thought through and connected, both to the business need and more importantly, to the individual’s own understanding of its relevancy. Make your measurements more dynamic, less static by ‘seeing them differently’

• Marketplace Drivers – Today it is all about speed and pace, accessing the changing conditions and pressures coming from the marketplace. The a constant need in understanding the rate of change dynamics to work out your fit in new innovation offerings.

We need to become far more tuned into pattern recognition, contexts of the forces at work. We need to appreciate the rivalry and competitive hunger. Above all it is figuring out the customer’s unmet needs and non-stated ones, so all these market force complexities can be worked through in your mind and ongoing evaluations.

Tuning in to the market forces gives an abundance of new thinking to work into your products and services.

• Design Drivers – approaching issues and challenges with more of a design thinking hat can help identify a number of hidden drivers. The more we experience and experiment, the more we tune into the power of stories, narratives and experiences. This heightens our awareness the more we practice looking ahead.

Equally looking back it can reveal much more in our designs and what made up our thinking (at that time). Fashions and traditions, how we work today, how we worked in the past – and how different in the future – will influence much in our innovative thinking. We need to open up to experiences far more.

We need to look for improving flows and reducing barriers, making different combinations of potential richness and innovation promise, we need to focus on function and form far more, that more human-centred need and always look for improving the degrees of freedom and ease of purchase. For example, working towards the ‘one-click away’ concept for our customers in making their transactions easier.

• Rational Drivers – Organizations survive by their rational drivers, be this strategic architecture, management systems and innovation processes. Those processes and procedures are where you are always looking to achieve and drive execution and results through improving productivity and creativity as well as working constantly at clarifying the interventions, controls and monitoring.

The rational drivers, if well set up, can make such a difference to being ‘in control of all the innovation activities or not and should constantly be challenged for redundancy or improving upon. Innovation Governance is a classic place for constantly working through the rational drivers and keeping faith in the decisions made and guidance given.

Having a rational opinion within your team has great value in keeping random thoughts more ‘grounded’ to the task at hand.

• Intelligence Drivers – The whole focus is on knowledge generation and recognition, in awareness, competencies needed and seeking diversity of interpretation.

The underlying collection of intellectual capital, our intangible source, needs to keep feeding in the knowledge stock to allow ideas, concepts and outcomes to flow. Ones that drive to transform intelligence into tangible outcomes are so important to yield fresh value and lead to improved commercial outcomes.

Sadly it is often under-appreciated and not allowed ‘it’s’ right amount of digesting time to allow all the connections to be made to piece together something completely different and potentially valuable in new innovations. Listening to different people’s views values intelligence.

Looking around these drivers of change can yield very different thinking, prompt different actions and produce different innovation results. Get your team to discuss each of these change drivers to unearth new innovation possibilities.

Why not go and give these a ‘team test drive’ in exploring, focusing on each of these individually. Ask what can they do to alter your current thinking on your approach to your products and services.

By getting into this regular habit of working around these different drivers of change will keep your innovation engine in much better shape, more in-tune to accelerate away with better innovation outcomes. These can be designed to stimulate and really trigger the imaginations, often with the result of you making some unexpected connections.

Finding new spaces that differentiate your product or service offerings as radically differently perhaps, that improve on the ones that are presently within your existing portfolio and development process. The end result is a significant improvement in both the quality as most important and also the number of your options, so new concepts can emerge from this exploration of the different drivers of change.

Perhaps you just even simply ‘drive away’ leaving everyone else just watching you pull away in new competitive ways, with you knowing where and why you are making real change within your innovation activities and what prompted this. Recognizing the need for different innovation evolution is a big part of the ongoing battle we are all needing to discover..

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Publishing note: This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and has been significantly revised. With their permission, I have republished this original concept by deepening the thinking on this within this post here.

I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Exploring the Drivers of Innovation Change first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

So Welcome to the Age of Digital Innovation

@paul4innovating — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 10:10:25 +0000

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.

There are many issues both strategic and tactical to work through, to extract the rich potential from any digital transformation for new innovation growth outcomes

The final part of a seven-part series – new dawn or your worst nightmare?’

The array of new digital technologies that we are trying to connect organizations into, for the world of digital insights, is going to be highly disruptive or empowering, for all organizations. It has the potential to radically alter our organization’s performance.

These are powerful technical forces that are going to connect the digital age inside organizations, these will require a deep thinking through for all the ‘points of impact’ this will have.

Digital is presently moving way ahead for the systems our organizations have presently in place. What does need changing to ultimately yield the innovation returns we will be looking for?

Expectations and reality needs resetting, the hard work is not ‘just’ in connecting the technology, it is its impact that it will have across the organization to be able to ‘react, respond and reorganize’ in very different ways from today’s practices.

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.

Many of our existing systems will need a radical redesign
The innovation system is not broken (yet) but it is totally inadequate in its present form to capitalise on this influx of new opportunities digital connecting can bring.

It will potentially just choke up and come to a grinding halt unless we seriously step back and re-evaluate the innovation process, its needs, tools, frameworks and its ‘new way of working’. We need to redraw the innovation system and its management structure, procedures and governance.

There is this need to blend technology post digital with people in significantly different ways. Innovation calls for better automation and its management understanding to design all these into its system. Information systems and their data outputs might generate but humans have to frame the challenges and problems they are in search of answers.

So how can digital technology be leveraged more effectively as an engine for innovation and future growth when we are seeing current innovation constraints and impediments?

Is the innovation process fit for the new purpose? Clearly not. It needs a radical overhaul to support the digital technologies and the ‘insights’ coming towards it.

To embrace digital innovation there is a lot to work through, here is my initial attempt.

As we move towards this age of digital innovation, what do we face?

“We are faced with a truly pervasive global network making more things possible, the biggest value proposition of technology has shifted to the new, deeply super-connected, scalable-to-billions, always-on ways of working that digital business now represents. The upshot: Nearly everyone today is connected to everyone else in the world 24/7, with the devices in their pockets and purses” (View of Dion Hinchcliffe in his article “The internet inside the Enterprise“). Innovation needs to race to catch up and respond, so as to capitalize on it.

Equally in Dion Hinchcliffe’s view, which I can recognize: “the Internet has proven itself countless times as that uber laboratory of innovation, trying — quite literally — millions of new ideas in scale, continuously finding the way forward on how best to create value over networks, sustain it, and to relentlessly find new models that have the least friction, cost, the highest velocity, most agility, and best ability to tap into shared innovation.” These observations point towards a very different design and structure within organizations to achieve these ideas to scale.

What will be the new management skills and leadership competencies required to achieve continuous innovation and transformation within organizations? What will need to change, what needs to be brought in and equally, thrown away from today’s practices?

What are the new forms of organizational design that will be required as ‘adequate’ for an environment of unremitting change? The present innovation system is not ‘fit for digital innovation purpose’ today.

To learn to apply the application of technology in support of the business, to cope with the new mantra of making it ‘cheaper, faster, and better‘, combined with the increasingly need to ‘communicate, collaborate, and engage‘ across businesses, customers and stakeholders 24/7, we will need very different, more agile and adaptive systems.

Everything about technology is poised to upend the current model in organizations, from architecture, software development, processes, the way to manage and offer a very different level of service delivery in new business models, rates of change, and cooperation and co-creation needs.

Boards will need to balance the need for stable, resilient, dependable systems and infrastructure as they go through a ‘state of flux’ in this push for investing in new digital initiatives They must clarify what is essential ‘to make us more agile, innovative and responsive.’

The worry of dealing with increasing risk; cyber risk, organization risk and the organization’s ability to capitalize on any discovered insights before others do, all raise the risks and threats. Boards just have a real aversion to risk and how this will play out as we digitally connect will partly determine the winners and losers due to their risk appetite.

To help ‘modify’ the risk concerns at board level, the CTO, CIO or CDO or all three, need to stop talking about the potential of these technologies and more the language of business. Frame this not in terms of cost or disruption but in revenue and new organizational opportunity.

The need is to establish a digital strategy, which represents all the opinions and the fusion of business and IT, as they are becoming one of the same, as digital is becoming a unifying concept and pervasive and all business has an increasing digital element.

There is this need for cognitive alignment as it will be increasingly about sense-making, learning, understanding pattern recognitions, gaining debate, and consensus for alignment within the leadership teams.

We certainly need a very different organisational design to digitally innovate?

The radical shift for the innovator is the need to define the right challenges, in constructing the digital brief, in building the parameters and inputs to be able to ‘extract’ the data that leads to information and knowledge that eventually connects to final valuable insight. Today we are not so good at that.

The human part within the new innovation process will still be the framers of the task, interpreters of the information and synthesizers of the result. They will be guided by the digital knowledge and techniques they deploy to help them in this. Framing and synthesizing becomes essential skill.

Developing those abilities and skills in interpreting and synthesizing the data and insights will become essential attributes so to attain the understanding to deliver those “higher scale of richer, more innovative insights” expected.

The ‘crunching’ of large data sets, will this be simply be left to the analytic person? Someone deploying different techniques, algorithms and predictive solutions. Will they have the necessary understanding or business experience? Who will have oversight or determine interpretation?

Much will rest on the way these new insights can be communicated back into the organization, to be translated and to be turned into new profitable innovation offerings.

This ability to align analytics, extract important insights and spot the potential commercial value will become critical. These have the potential to determine the organization’s future.

There is this need to spot more of those ‘weak signals’ to learn from, using predictive and pattern recognition tools and methods, generating ideas or insights that fit within briefs or parameters that align to the organization’s strategic needs.

What value judgements will be constructed to rank and grade ideas or insights, so as to begin to formulate the commercial response in new innovation activities.

Trending, producing insights, scenarios and patterns of discovery, will need both computer and human power of understanding. Forecasting potential, spotting the breaking needs, segmenting the markets and validating assumptions and trigger points for solutions will become a pivotal role.

Listening, filtering, and constructing user experiences that allow interactions and knowledge sharing will be essential. It will be again the analytics, the discovery process and the event management techniques will partly determine the value and richness of these engagements.

What about the need to build new capabilities?

There is this increasing need to develop sense-and-response capabilities, increasing ambiguity and uncertainty over time will change our ICT thinking.

A constant change or extraction continuously from the cloud or data lake will require flexible processes, constant adapting, needing highly agile responses

There will be increased demand for visualization and managing decisions in responsive, agile and adroit ways. Constantly communicating the ‘breaking’ story will be essential.

The increasing value of purpose-designed intelligent dashboards to allow decision-making and the appropriate information to flow to the decision-maker, as well as the governance trail of where, when and who made what decision becomes important.

Whole areas of research, testing, experimentation, and modelling will become increasingly automated but the framing parameters will again require growing specialisation and understanding.

The ability to test combinations, to work through countless data points will generate new possibilities but these again need clearly framing well, so as to avoid drowning in data, ‘for the sake of it’.

The ability to engage in and across different communities will allow for richer understanding. These communities will be internal, business partner ones, customer and other stakeholder communities all contributing and engaging.

The emotions, feeling and often unexplained human behaviour will always intervene somehow. It will depend on the robustness and strength and belief in automation on personal as well as organizational levels. This needs careful management the engagement.

Lastly, and I think most important, you do have to keep asking that question of “what are you trying to do, resolve and understand” because data for data’s sake will just simply just let you drown in it, equally change for change sake.

We need to begin to really think through this as a complete redesign.

There are a host more areas to draw out in any digital innovation system we do need to surface and resolve. To achieve that new position of understanding is a really hard piece of work required to determine and redesign the new digital innovation process.

It cannot be a simple ‘bolt-on’ job, it needs a radical redesign. We should grab this ‘moment of time’ to think what a new innovation system, fit for the post-digital age really should look and operate like.

Organizations will be in their search for understanding what needs to change within their innovation systems as soon as they realize that today’s design can’t cope.

What is needed depends on how each wants to ’embrace’ digital. It will need a real depth of understanding and working through.

I’m on it, are you? Its BIG and breathing down your neck. Welcome to the age of digital innovation.
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*** This is the final part of a seven part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These have been published daily over the last week.

The intent was not to provide definitive answers so much at this stage, it is more about raising our thinking about our lack of providing an adequate innovation system for the changes caused by embracing the digital technologies coming towards us.***

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The Need to Automate the Innovation Process

@paul4innovating — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 09:13:47 +0000

There has always been a consistent call to automate the innovation process.

Now it might turn into a stampede, based on real ‘digital’ need.

We have made solid progress in the use of out-of-the box software for capturing ideas at the ‘fuzzy front end.’

We have developed pipelines and use product life cycle software systems to manage this through to commercialisation.

Yet today we still have a fragmented, often broken innovation process, very reliant on the manual processes, where the human intervention dominates.

Can this be changed? Technology must form a greater core of the innovation process.

We still are very reliant on stage gate intervention points, often more due to dogma and imposed oversight by committees occasionally meeting.

Decisions are determined by the human, based less on hard knowledge or dynamic intelligence, often these have tended to be thinner on the ground to validate concepts and judgement becomes highly personal and reliant on (past) experience. What can we change within this? There are leading practices to compare and contrast with but we do need to push this automating the innovation process further, in different ways.

Part six of a seven-part series

Perhaps all this can know change, with adopting a broader more connected engagement process and take this out, we can constantly engage in community collaborations to test and experiment than before.

We can quickly go into the market through digital technology to engage with our communities of interest to confirm or influence a design or concept and shape it.

We can gain ‘scale of insights’ quickly all the way through the new product life-cycle, validating, adjusting, adapting through to commercialization.

In the past innovation took a linear route, very reliant on a manual process.
I recently had some different exchanges with Jeffrey Philips, over at Ovo Innovation, a long time sparring partner on innovation thinking.

From his organization’s work he suggested top of mind there are five key activities, which are typically completed manually today:

1) Defining a specific challenge or opportunity, 2) Gathering trends and developing alternative future scenarios 3) Understanding/Validating customer needs through research 4) Generating ideas/solutions through brainstorming and from these 5) Developing and Prototyping ideas.

Given some more time I am sure this list would grow. Jeffrey certainly suggests many of these tasks can be accomplished through some form of automating the process, I’d agree.

I’d suggest for many the innovation process in organizations are even more manually conducted in collecting data, validating actions or decisions, communicating the status, working through project tasks, etc.

We are very reliant on manual systems for much within our innovation work.

I don’t think we can afford to let this continue, it often slows decisions and activities significantly down. I know of consumer goods companies that work on 18 to 24 months for incremental products from conception to commercialization. Is this good enough or just comfortable enough for those involved?

Market trends are changing faster and becoming shorter, so opportunity windows are narrowing. Risks of missing out are constantly increasing for those who are not focusing intently on that critical ‘time to market’ and not constantly streaming their innovation system, looking to automate it where ever they can.

Bob Cooper, creator of the Stage-Gate system recently warned, in their ongoing research data “did you know that”…..1) 76% of businesses have already too many development project for the limited resources available. 2) 81% of businesses have unbalanced portfolios full of small bets, 3) 90% of businesses have “few or no” high value projects in their development pipeline and 4) 75% of businesses profess to poor project prioritization.

What happens when all this digital knowledge and insights starts hitting our desks, having to work through a manual or semi-manual system seeking to capitalize on a ‘breaking’ opportunity? It will be a real choke point.

Opportunity spots where we can speed up this manual process.

Jeffrey suggested some immediate places where there was some clear automating opportunities but we agreed these were ‘just the tip of the innovation iceberg’

• Many innovation teams have gathered and analysed trends by hand, attempting to forecast their impact in the future, to understand emerging needs and alternative future scenarios.

• Also market research has required intensive customer interaction, which has tended to be reliant on face-to-face or observation. Equally the heavy use of surveys and large data sets has tended to have significant human involvement. This is significantly changing through the use of technology and numerous analytical tools and predictive methods.

• Idea Generation has often completely relied on a number of people ‘brainstorming’ or generating ideas and we have learnt this needs to be less random in the event and more specific to problems we believe need to be solved.

• Then we have been reliant on traditional prototyping methods that again rely on people to form a crude representation of a concept or idea. These were reliant on ‘hand-crafting’ prototypes, reliant on people with some skills and scheduling the time to complete these but the extensive use of 3D printing is radically altering this.

We can recognize each of these has changed over the recent years. They are being automated wherever possible through pattern recognition methodologies, predictive analysis, trending evaluation methods where there is less human interaction but more interactions with a prototype, simulation.

Now with the recent introduction of 3D printing the designing a prototype or even a finished product, has become highly valuable, it is shifting and beginning to disrupt many of the traditional ways of ‘machining’, undertaken in the past. For example, in the dentistry business where the dentist they can make the part using ‘on premise’ 3D fabrication.

We have been seeing better-structured approaches, mixed in with unstructured methods and framing techniques to pull out ideas, challenge existing, often entrenched thinking and breakthrough roadblocks to keep moving our innovation work forward. All continue to improve but still miss opportunities to automate in some way or another.

As we have used software to collect information and ideas at the front end (idea management systems) this has made the innovation process far more automated, interesting and participative.

What is needed is to push the thinking on how to automate the innovation process even more.

We see start-ups adopting agile methods, lean processes and new practices, new visualization tools and frameworks, and designing techniques as they are unencumbered by a legacy, yet for the most part, large organizations have been slow to adopt these on a wider corporate practice. They still experiment but do not adopt these as organizational practice although this is changing constantly as they value these techniques.

These need pushing deeper into large business organizations. We need a functional group that explores, experiments and seeks broad adoption of many different tools and pioneering methods in our organizations, so they become increasingly part of the daily toolkits we use. Design thinking, business model design, and lean for example, all should be adopted as everyday tools. Each helps innovation.

Can this be pushed further; can we perhaps become more radical?
Digital technology might be giving us the tools to shape our environments in very powerful and different ways. We can amplify what is going on, we can capture all the interactions, we can discover, explore and extrapolate better and at growing scale.

Less randomness, more of a quest for rational answers but we still need to frame the questions we want answered and that still seems to remain difficult for us humans to do. Even here technology can give us increasing intelligence to spot patterns.

There is so much to be realized, connected and enabled for the higher scale, richer, more innovative business outcomes but it is a massive undertaking that is only just being kicked off by the current ‘internet of things. It will eventually become the ‘integration of everything’ but the disruption and realization of what needs changing is only just dawning on many.

Managing digital knowledge that adds value and growth

External insights coming from market and customer intelligence will not fully take hold as Enterprise knowledge throughout the organization, without real, deep integration of systems designed to ‘receive, translate and diffuse’ valuable knowledge from all this digital information flowing in. A new system of knowledge adoption needs designing in.

Receiving the knowledge alone will not turn these into higher scales, richer, more innovation business outcomes that have real growth value unless we realize the massive ‘mismatch’ between digital flowing in and the physical attempting to cope with this.

We need to think about our innovation system designs a whole lot deeper to allow these new digital technologies and the insights to be worked through the innovation process. Speed is becoming ever more important, for new solutions to be turned out the other end as new innovations.

We need to design a complete innovation system otherwise we will be investing in a front-loaded area alone, limiting digital impact and that will not deliver the power of actual growth expected or needed from our innovation activities so as to deliver new valuable outcomes. Approaching the innovation process holistically helps.

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*** This is the sixth in a seven-part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These will be published daily over the next week. The intent is not to offer definitive answers so much at this stage, it is more about raising our thinking.***

The post The Need to Automate the Innovation Process first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The need to respond quickly to new business objectives

@paul4innovating — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 08:59:45 +0000

The business objectives will change as we invest heavily in digital technologies, as we increasingly recognize and embrace this changing world where digital knowledge and insights begin to challenge and change our existing frameworks of innovation thinking.

Part five of a seven-part series

The outcomes of the investment are expected to provide clear returns and these might include but are not limited to:

1) different customization of services 2) quicker response to market trends in new offerings 3) identifying real-time cost optimizations, 4) concentrating on faster, more accurate decision-making to give new competitive edges 5) better and more holistic R&D 6) automating even further the supply chain management, 7) alter your approach channels to market, 8) move your business into new adjacencies or even white spaces and finally 9) design new business models and value propositions.

There will be lots of new moving parts to grapple with to be future innovation agile.

Equally, our senior managers will be digitally challenged

As machine learning or digital inflows occur, the pace will become even more rapid and the leaders will be called upon to create the new innovation forms. The mental capacity and physical adroitness will continue to multiply through digital technologies and the need to be agile in responding. There is going to be significant advances in cognitive work but will this be human or digital brains doing the work?

If we foresee a deeply driven digital world, the new place for human intervention is “where do I actually add value and where do I need to get out-of-the-way and let data take me?”

So we are going to be potentially more data-driven, less intuition driven. Your whole domain expertise will eventually be stripped away.

The challenges within the leadership of our organizations are to somehow envision how the physical world and digital world can be ‘pulled’ together.

That critical need of applying the different forms of intelligence and experiences and provide the ways to network and build from these ideas and insights into tangible values that fit with the organization’s objectives.

The key to leading in a data-driven world recently was suggested in a McKinsey article on the Manager and the Machine will be 1) learning to ask good questions, 2) attacking exceptions, 3) tolerating more ambiguity and 4) focusing as much as possible on employing ‘soft’ skills where insight gets turned into messages that resonate with the organization to see as innovation potential will require that human touch.

How will digital automation improve and balance our innovation management?

As data flows in we will need to rationalise the decision-making, we will be seeking out for the gathering of data more fact-based observations. The intervention of personal opinions and “experience” will become highly challenged and hopefully on the endangered list.

We can look to insights as possibly better predictions of success by lessening the risk factors of no knowledge or very limited understanding and underpin the assumptions with ‘trends’ and rich insights to validate directions and emerging solutions

We will be able to explore the ‘worlds’ trending on those topics relevant to our needs, knowledge and innovative thinking. Exploring consumer behaviours, technology trends, competitor monitoring and significantly granular insights to shifts taking place in real-time and near-time.

We might discover the unexpected and the surprising and not rely on instinct, sixth senses or ‘our past experiences.’ This may increasingly clash in the validating, we need to ensure this increase in insights will yield better ideation. As time goes by and we become more reliant on digital technology our idea management thinking will become distinctly different, less based on a hunch, feel or (sadly) experience.

We will be even more under pressure as if the data is ‘open and common’ for all to ‘trawl and gather’ then you are in a race to capitalize on this before your competitors is able to learn or react to it.

Through validation we can constantly confirm or question the business case, and we can test hypotheses and experiments. We can check assumptions for validity far more and across broader communities than in the past.

Having data, and creating a history you can equally be more backward looking to judge success and failure and use these different understanding and analyses to design more predictive forward-looking models and framing techniques that capture differently or improve your pattern recognition.

The growing science and value of analytics for innovation

Innovation analytics will become an integral part of the entire innovation life-cycle to make smarter decisions and to optimise the innovation performance along its value building chain.

Having clear data-analytic strategies that break down the information into something commercially useful will require more searching for ‘weak signals’ that contain those real nuggets of insight.

The early mover has to have a speed and pace of decision much higher. The emergence of customized dashboards will dramatically advance but working on the parameters that feed into these will be a real challenge.

The need to analyse, synthesize, transform into actionable events and value-enhancing insights will be based more on fact-based decisions but the human interventions become more responding to exceptions not stage-gate managing everything.

Analytics will evolve into providing answers or guiding you to create descriptive answers, situational to why this is happening, predictive in what this might mean or trending towards, prescriptive in validating choice options and finally simply evaluating the risks, the choices of doing something or not due to this data and insights.

Adjusting our thinking on risk

Technology insights can provide a better mitigation risk, it can equally fine-tune innovation but it can equally make it far more complicated. Massive amounts of data can complicate decision-making, determining the right decisions and next steps.

Technology will require opening up the present risk mitigation process to capitalize on emerging opportunities at greater speed and higher levels of compromise, to meet that emerging opportunity ‘seen’ requiring it to be turned into commercial offering quickly, so competitive advantage can be gained.

Getting the parameters right, this digital innovation criteria will potentially determine the direction of the organization and where it places its resources.

McKinsey talks of democratizing and managing will be determined more by pattern insights, and clear insights, less upon waiting for a top manager’s decision as the defined strategy and business development directions become sharper, enabling this ‘decision-making’ to be made much closer to the market or the information source.

The urgency of Leadership

Leadership will have to become far more effective in decision-making and digitally savvy, so as to provide the guidance and strategic frameworks required for the governance and direction digital technology is required to go, to meet the organization’s stated objectives, and those will change constantly as better insights flow in. Defining those needs and the expected returns does sharpen everyone’s minds.

Tom Davenport of Babson College and MIT made some helpful suggestions about the general use of the phenomenon of big data, and add its project attributes so leadership understands its increasing value.

He suggests these are 1) describing the data you are using, 2) where the data comes from, 3) the problem you are wanting to solve and 4) wherein the company you will use the insights to solve what. This as he suggests “provides clarity” and we all need that with the present easy use of “big data,” which impresses no one.

The changes wrought by applying all the different digital technologies promise far more than the adoption of a more fluid core that Haydn Shaughnessy has written about, as “understanding a new hierarchy of enterprise needs. Adopting a new, adaptable infrastructure where technology, humans and competitive conditions intersect and can interact in real-time.

Leadership needs to respond quickly to the demands and additional strains this will place on their organization to provide guidance, strategic direction and above all the right resources to capitalize on all the changes this will bring. To expect to achieve a ‘real’ return from the investments being made or asked for in new growth and innovating value.

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*** This is the fifth of a seven-part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These will be published daily over the next week. The intent is not to provide definitive answers so much at this stage, it is more about raising our thinking.***

* Sopheon through its software applications have been outlining some of their arguments for improving innovation due to big data and analytics and these helped me kick start part of my own thinking here.

The post The need to respond quickly to new business objectives first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

IT is Struggling to be the Digital Technology Master

@paul4innovating — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 08:28:59 +0000

There is so much occurring in new applications and alternative solutions, it is a very tough position for most dealing in technology to truly master all of these breaking options they might have to consider.

It must be a little overwhelming when many responsible for IT have for years not had any strategic involvement and not been given clear line-of-business oversight.

Business management equally has over the years built up an ‘arm’s distance’ to IT and found ways to overcome barriers they felt were seemingly put in their way when it came to ‘bringing in’ the technology they deemed as essential.

Something needs to change going forward. Both the business manager and the IT need to find ways to exchange, collaborate and share. It is in their ‘vested’ interest but more importantly for the future health of the business itself.

Part four of a seven-part series

Over a number of years IT and the business seem to have grown apart. IT worked on keeping all that surrounds the ‘systems of record’ and tended to push away or outsource many of the ‘systems of engagement’ to others, either third parties or line-of-business.

Email, for example, stayed within their domain but collaborative tools, the building of online communities, and supply chain systems tended to be handed over to the expert group and they provided the ‘back-end’ support.

Much within IT has been handed over to lines of business to design and manage. Will this need to change back?

Today, the lines of business are rapidly handling increased system designs to meet their own needs and are seemingly encouraged to do so. IT often seems to have been assigned the back-end task of ensuring they can work, are safe and don’t corrupt those all-important organizational ‘systems of records’.

The changes in customer experiences and the engagement within these communities, the open innovation activities prompted by research and development, the stand alone systems for manufacturing design and improvements, have all seen a massive proliferation of either independent systems with minimum integration, or systems to site upon systems, adding complexity and poor line of corporate oversight.

An awful lot of business intelligence is sitting in silo’s where there is limited ability or even no incentive to explore these in different ways. The Enterprise core is limited and not really connected to much of the value-generating parts as we would wish. Knowledge is not flowing across and up and down organizations unless with some considerable manual effort.

There is a time for real change – technology and business need to be redesigned

We are in need of recognizing this new wave of external connected technology needs to be well-connected within our organizations. There are so many forces of constraint, forces of proliferation that need to come together but this is a massive, significant task for an organization to signal its (final) determination to achieve.

The implementation of ERP for many was a painful experience, not because it was not needed, it seemed such a wrenching change. Any significant technological overhaul will make that set of experiences a ‘walk in the park’ compared to this set of challenges that is being thrown at us today. The changes we will be facing to accommodate new technologies and their realization of value will need an even greater evolution, ERP will fade into the background as a new Enterprise Innovation Planning (EIP) system evolves

The real need is to deliver a new integrated engagement platform

We need not just a new innovation management system, we need a modern engagement platform. We need to integrate and sync so many transaction and stand-alone systems that have been allowed to proliferate over the years to meet specific business needs. The growing pressure will be demanded to find solutions that provide a cohesive and business-focused approach to the new social enterprise where we seek engagement at scale into a multiple array of communities and advocates that has data and innovation as its core.

There is such a business / IT / customer divide where the social push is shifting and still very emergent, where the new competitive advantage will be based on ease of acquisition, ease of use, clarity and diversity of choice and variety so innovations will be more tailored to the individual.

The demand for increased autonomy, personal choice will come up against the organization that is totally unprepared in adapting to this rapidly changing world. Organizations are lacking the right type of resources and a comprehensive view of what needs to be connected and integrated, what is presently underway is going to change many of our current industries today as they all become partly a software businesses.

How can we connect, enable and deliver better innovative outcomes?

There is so much to be realized, connected and enabled for the higher scale, richer, more innovative business outcomes but it is a massive undertaking that is only just being ‘kicked off’ by the current internet of things. It will eventually become the integration of everything but the disruption and realization of what needs changing is only just dawning on many.

External insights and Intelligence will not become Enterprise knowledge that flows without real, deep integration. Receiving the knowledge alone will not turn these into higher scales, richer, more innovative business outcomes that have real growth value unless we realize the massive ‘mismatch’ between digital flowing in and the physical attempting to cope with this.

I would think unless the innovation systems within organizations are not dramatically altered and that is calling for a massive investment and some really tough strategic decisions of what and where to place those strategic bets and much of the technology needed is only being designed today that focuses mainly on the incoming part.

A painful and frustrating journey is ahead of us all

Turning big data and its insights into commercial successful innovation outcomes may be a very painful journey for many organizations. Business and IT have got to find radically different ways to collaborate and align.

We need new models of work, more community-centric, non-hierarchical, dynamic and fluid, in a sharing economy where the evolution of apps and new devices will all have an increasing impact, based on collaborative technology. I’ve previously written on this as “the proliferation of transitory moments”

The enterprise design will be radical in redesign and upheaval.

Much of the hype today about all this big data and the analytics behind it is great but the handoff back into existing infrastructures will mean most of it will never be realizable. It certainly can’t be handled by today’s innovation management system where knowledge is lacking and physical intervention is built on the wrong premise of managing innovation activity.

We need to review organizational engagement. Much has to change, be uprooted and completely revisited to begin to design a new digital and physical integrated innovation system.

To master digital technologies and what that can bring in new innovation and value requires a coordination and collaboration of business and IT, each needs to become involved in what the other is doing, thinking and planning and make these plans integrated through a new organizational set of process and procedural designs.

We need to reconsider enterprise architecture for this 21st digital century where increased autonomy, choice and resources can adapt, disrupt, refine, grow and renew constantly in a digital enterprise collaboration that allows data and voice to be heard….and acted upon.

I liked a comment recently from Beth Comstock, the Senior Vice President of GE in a recent interview on the imperative of speed commented: “If we left it up to each business to figure out their data and software, we would not be taking advantage of the scale of the company”.

She is totally right, decisions being made today around digital technology are broad room and highly strategic. IT going forward shapes the organization’s future.

Who is going to take the lead in your organization to design digital technologies into the very fabric of the organization? It can’t be left to one person or another, this is a total leadership challenge.

IT need to find ways to engage fully within the board room, across all line of business and drive the changes up into each conversation and strategic discussion for the foreseeable future.

How organizations design and connect digital technologies with profitable innovation outcomes will decide most organization’s futures going forward, markets, customers and investors will be judging this ability very critically over the next few years.

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***This is the fourth of a seven-part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These will be published daily over the next week. The intent is not to offer definitive answers so much at this stage, it is more about raising our thinking.***

The post IT is Struggling to be the Digital Technology Master first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Aligning digital discovery with physical innovation outcomes.

@paul4innovating — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 08:23:34 +0000

We really do seem to be in a really evolutionary period, with the explosion of change taking place in the post-digital world of cloud, big data, social and interconnected devices.

The discovery of insights from all this embedded intelligence, social activity and data analytics is leading us to realize a potentially significant wave of new innovation opportunities from this digital knowledge.

The question is “are we internally ready for this?” Are our innovation systems and structures able to adapt to a need for exploiting ‘breaking’ opportunities where speed and agility become a critical deciding factor to capitalize on breaking commercial advantage by tapping into all these fresh insights?

Part three of a seven-part series

It is through this combination of people and ‘things’ connecting into our businesses that we will be able to extract new data to give us insights that can lead to completely different innovation opportunities.

The concept of (big) data flowing in, discovery being made from all the analytical insights that leads to innovation does work for some but will it for many?

I tend to feel the hype or promise of digital technology is running ahead of reality. There is no question that each organization has to work through this connection of the digital technologies in their own understanding and needs, of what the whole gambit of IoT will bring them. That will be a set of tough calls, decided on thinking strategically, not just simply listening to all the ‘urgency and hype’ presented today.

Yet most organizations have to be careful that the idea of the digital promise does not run so far ahead of the realization of a ‘reasonable’ return for all the investment and potential disruptive that these changes will demand and bring. For some it requires a step process to feel their way, for others they will go for the big bang approach.

Each will disrupt and alter the way we conduct business. Either way, it is not just this ‘need to change’ it is looking very hard at the investment returns and risks associated with this. Managing any potential bigger innovation outcomes I would put down as a ‘risk and critical choke point’ that needs different solutions

I do really get stuck on the downstream from these data insights.
These insights will need to be turned into initial commercial ideas and potential ‘realisable’ concepts that can give new growth and value into the organization.

If we are expecting a deluge of new ideas to commercialization then is our innovation pipeline fit for this new level of purpose? I have serious doubts

Without doubt digital and physical operate at really different speeds.
Huge amounts of data can be interpreted through specific algorithms but these will have to have set very clear parameters set within them to be of any worth on what we believe is what we need.

We can go through the analysis and rely on the analyst’s understanding but will they actually have the necessary experience of what is useful and what is not?

Or will that ‘analysis’ be turned over to the marketing team or research and developers, in its raw form and they become responsible for relating the data into something that might have some ‘tangible’ value. Will data scientists sit within these teams or in some remote centre that creates a new type of ‘knowledge’ void?

By exploring this data, yielding their insights, can go through the internal innovation pipeline system that is presently in place? Are those tasked with turning insights into innovation have the different skills, authority and abilities to make ongoing data interpretation, where re-validation will become the constant ongoing norm.

How will they see different patterns and opportunities and try to fit these into their current view of the world? Can the innovation pipeline cope with even more business opportunities? The human mindset will need to re-orient to receive new digital information in ‘informing’ ways.

Are we seeing a re-run of the tortoise and the hare?

Digital happens at lightning speed, our physical world operates at a snail’s pace equivalent. So we want to push all these digital insights through a manual innovation process – yeah right! Expectations are rising, as dollars are being spent on re-equipping out IT systems to update with this range of digital technology, that the line of business is demanding, they are all arriving around at the same time.

The end game stakes are rising with every decision made or not yet is the organization ready to receive this deluge of digital technologies and be able to translate them into hard, quantifiable returns?

So where does the agile, shorter business cycles, faster innovation come into play. Really though our existing innovation systems, that are totally reliant on human interactions? How will the well set up stage gate systems of approval and validation cope? Digital technology is potentially fast, the human is still very slow in comparison. Is this a heading for a miss match or ways to build fusion differently?

I have written in the past “Innovation has layers that sheer against each other” where ““Slow constrains quick, slow controls quick” These unnatural built-in tensions build up and create this shearing effect. They grind against each other, like tectonic plates that force further disruption and upheaval.

The story of the tortoise and the hare is delightfully told here. “Once upon a time there was a hare who, boasting how he could run faster than anyone else, was forever teasing tortoise for its slowness……”

Technology is racing ahead like the hare, the reaction of our existing systems is a little like the tortoise. Technology will simply, underdeliver on its promise and wait for our tortoise in systems, organizations’ ability to respond in radically different. more nimble and agile ways or simply go further downstream to help the tortoise along by making more of the innovating process automated.

Fragmentation is everywhere and different communities of interest are demanding real change

Then we have the emerging fragmentation of the channels to and from the customer. As we listen more intently we will need to develop not just our analyse, but our filtering and listening skills and each human has different levels of this tolerance to all arrive on the ‘same page’ of insight and potential opportunity.

All sorts of new communities start to ‘cloud’ the decision-making. Those coming from the marketplace, the devices being used, the evaluation of usage and value, the definition of different communities, and the building of new business partner communities.

Then the whole thinking through on attempting to gain a new sense of engagement within your own workforce, convincing them that this time it will be all different.

The disruption to their work will eventually deliver a different environment that is better, whereas they will be busy grappling with new skills, even faster paced work and yet again, will it settled down into quiet acceptance, limited engagement and enthusiasm?

As we ‘slice and dice’ even more through digital insights, markets will fragment, even more, products and services have the potential of offerings that can be tailored than ever, yet complexity in our offerings will dramatically rise. We need to find ways to structure and adapt to this, otherwise, risks rise as mistakes are made, and customers move away and not closer due to this lack of a comprehensive engagement strategy.

The question remains “so how significantly different will all of this be?”
What will we need to address? How bold and radical will this need to be and can whole organizations re-orientate and change their established ways to exploit digital technologies?

It will call for some fairly bold management decisions and growing risk in the undertaking but more than likely have a greater risk of not being well thought through and designed. Bolting this onto existing systems, many manuals does not sound to even be a compromise, although I’m sure many will initially try to achieve, creating real operational problems.

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***This is the third part of a seven part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These will be published daily over the next week. The intent is not to offer definitive answers so much at this stage, it is more about raising our thinking.***

The post Aligning digital discovery with physical innovation outcomes. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Is the balance in innovation activity about to change?

@paul4innovating — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 08:58:27 +0000

Is the digital technology we see emerging today going to be able to provide the positive tension between rational and randomness that takes place in our innovation activities today?

Will digital begin to dominate our innovative thinking, will we lose this randomness, this spark of human creativity or will it be allowing this to connect multiple strands in new, more exciting ways? How are we going to adjust to the changing way technology will impose itself on our innovation activities and needs?

How will all this Mobile Connectivity, Cloud Computing, Social Media, Crowdsourcing, Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, Big Data, Analytics, 3D Printing and Scanning be presented and managed as a part of successful business scenarios and intertwined with changes in social behaviour?

Are our existing innovation systems ready for this potentially set of sweeping changes in knowledge inflows and translation, so they can be successfully commercialized into new innovation?

Part two within the series of seven

It is through searching for and seeking engagement in the ‘wider’ world we will begin to make greater connections and receive potentially enormous amounts of (raw) data, about interactions, performance, possible issues and connecting, previously fragmented and dispersed information and through analytics turn this into emerging valuable knowledge.

Rational and Random thinking can be accommodated with digital technologies.

Technology has spawned operating systems that are set up to be searching for the rational, by setting up the system hierarchy, by ensuring a coherent input of facts and data, you can automate the process and generate greater outcomes that give you scale, make considerable processing saving, and gain increasing efficiencies by the constant quest for improvement and automation.

We are equally seeing more random pattern recognition, matching, and ‘crunching’ data to offer up multiple scenarios. Then we begin to see equally a big move in where you store this data, those ‘data lakes’ where you can constantly revisit and drawdown raw data, in new and different ways. For managing significant data the cloud offers a significant alternative to on-premise.

Thankfully the quest to extract intelligence out of the raw data has equally kept the randomness side moving along in equal measure. It is this side that is making the big leap through these emerging technology changes of social media, smart mobility, sensors and other machine intelligence that is generating vast new levels of data.

This big data requires analysis and the analytical aspects coming from exploiting different algorithms, will allow for greater insights into all the activities taking place.

There is even more of a promise that artificial intelligence can combine with human intelligence in significantly different ways, to generate new growth and deliver those richer, higher scale, more innovative business outcomes, that this investment being undertaken will be required to bring.

What needs changing is the innovation process to accommodate these changes

The arrival of big data is full of bytes, both terabytes but also strategic bites! We seem to be in a really evolutionary period, with the explosion of change taking place in the post-digital world of cloud, big data, and social and interconnected devices.

The discovery of insights from all this embedded intelligence, social activity and data analytics is leading us to potentially manage a significant wave of new innovation opportunities from this digital knowledge.

Managing this transformation is a real strategic and operational challenge.

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.

It is through this combination of people and ‘things’ connecting to our businesses that we will be able to extract new observations, to give us insights that can lead to completely different innovation opportunities.

That is the promise of this ‘fat juicy carrot’, providing fresh growth, new innovation opportunities, that have real value and worth.

Insights and ideas will become a real log jam attempting to enter the innovation pipeline

As it stands I can see a potentially damaging build-up, or a log jam of promising concepts all desperately trying to work themselves through the innovation funnel. Either decisions or the existing disciplines have to be radically altered, where we take on a much higher risk profile to enable these to move from idea to finished product or new service, or we accept the consequences of different failures, growing frustrations or variable revenue metrics against the cost invested.

Cranking up the innovation throughput needs different approaches than at present. The innovation pipeline today is very manual, it needs human intervention, in decisions, in inputs, in what is communicated, what is approved or dropped. Innovation gets often weighed down by human intervention.

Will this change, if so what is required is for the innovation process to become more automated where predictive decisions or probability ratings are presented more from technology design and digital information? What changes are needed, who will be willing to invest in this radical redesign of the innovation system?

Radical smart-connected and digitally discovered concepts will radically alter the value proposition as I have outlined before. These will need the internal business structures to alter and deliver new business models to respond in unique market ways.

That will call for bold leadership and radical redesigns of much within our organizations to allow greater innovation to flow out to the market to capitalise on these increasing levels of insights coming from a more digitally connected front end.

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***This is the second part of a seven-part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These will be published daily over the next week. The intent at this stage is more about raising our thinking on what might need changing or at least re-orientation within our innovation management approaches.***

The post Is the balance in innovation activity about to change? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

As new digital technology dawns for innovation

@paul4innovating — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 08:46:29 +0000

Digital Technology is significantly challenging for organizations to re-think and re-equip due to the emergence of big data, smart mobile connectivity, social media, cloud, analytics and the growing commercialization.

These are all driving external technology change, all clearly pointing towards a significant disruption of the existing ways we conduct business internally. So we need to ask “how are we going to take advantage of the potential business transformation?”

The issue is how to capitalize and create the value from all this change for innovation and performance enhancement?

***This is the first of a seven-part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These will be published daily over the next week. The intent at this stage is more about raising our thinking on what might need changing or at least re-orientation within our innovation management approaches.***

A number of well-respected thinkers see this as the opportunity for a ‘great transformation,’ challenging much of our past practices and calling for embracing new ones. Ones based far more on open engagement processes and structures that connect in a greater networked world where reaching out for personalised relationships will lead to different insights and potential value growth opportunities.

Digital technology provides the conduit and sourcing to achieve this very different engagement process.

This flow of digital generated technology will alter the very nature of how we react and respond in organizations. Insights derived from the data, to gain any real worth, will need to be turned into new innovation activities, and new business models leading to commercial or social changing solutions.

Restructuring and re-skilling will be needed to take advantage of this influx of raw materials of potentially valuable insights that need as much focus (actually more) as connecting to these different digital technologies. We will need new business practices to accommodate this new digital world and take full advantage of it.

Innovation is 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 manual operations. Innovation as a system has often conflicted with the approaches taken by our organizations.

Innovation challenges much of what organizations believe they want, repeatable systems so that our organizations perform as well-oiled, highly structured and maximizing value by striving to be efficient and effective. Innovation often requires agility, flexibility and allowing creativity to flourish, it often stays outside the mainstream system structures, sometimes to its and the organization’s detriment.

Innovation often flies in the opposite direction, it is needing to be fluid, open, responsive, sometimes reliant on the instinct, hunch or powerful insight that is never ‘predictable’ but suddenly emerges from a collision of events or random thoughts that lead to a new insight, a game-changing one. It is really hard to turn this ‘randomness’ or serendipity into a system but not impossible.

Yet over the years, we have learnt more about the ability to innovate.

We can provide some structures, some thinking through concepts, different frameworks and tools where innovation can ‘spark’ and ‘emerge’. These can also be placed in a logical process, captured and automated.

The argument has always been that innovation is first and foremost a people’s domain. Individuals tend to ‘push back’ when systems and structures are imposed or they simply accept them and become increasingly disengaged.

The more you engage and encourage people to find time to think, to step back and reflect, the more you encourage new ideas. People have this innate ability to discover, challenge and explore, to push beyond the known and strive to solve the unknown.

Many of our present systems ‘push’ to constrain this, they want to measure productivity in hard ‘throughput’ and often can’t accommodate the softer side where the intangibles quietly work away and generate the real underlying value of creativity and being innovative.

The two schools of innovation as the common approach

There has been constant ‘tension’ between the rational school, where everything can be broken down and analysed and then through this work you can predict and reason everything out. System thinking tends to dominate with Six Sigma practice being a good example here.

Whereas on the other end has been the school where randomness allows the concept of chance, without defined plans where ideas simply occur, in fortuitous, often haphazard ways.

These are often more often by accident or casual connections all being able to come together in ‘blinding flashes of insight’ or confirmation of something deeply felt suddenly triggered or recognized as valuable in fresh ways of thinking, that are potentially new to the world or certainly worth exploring.

Digital Technology will have to cope with both schools
Innovation has to cope with both rational thinkers and random thinkers, structured and unstructured; it has had to strive for a ‘reasonable’ balance between the two to allow for innovation to be discovered and worked through on both sides.

For this reason among others, people are central to making innovation work, they have this ‘habit’ of interfering with our systems and structures.

They will find ways around obstacles but sometimes can become ‘blindingly’ stubborn in the pursuit of their thinking,

Digital technology for innovation will still be totally dependent on people wanting to ‘see what they want to see’. They will engage not just with technology but with the desire to see insights and new discoveries through emerging new innovations.

The issue is how do you harness the machine, its outputs with people and their constant need for input?

Perhaps it might be hard initially until we can re-orientate our innovative thinking, systems and processes to accommodate the digital technologies that are seemingly breaking all around us today.

The quest is 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.

That might be harder than you think.

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The post As new digital technology dawns for innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.