The best way is to encourage everyone to have the ongoing experience, to get really involved and caught up in projects and initiatives that have the potential for impact. Learning from failures needs to be part of this.

Yet the very best thing is to encourage connected minds for value-creating opportunities and knowledge sharing for innovation to flow across an organization. For this, we need to think about some modern engagement platforms that have ’engagement and knowledge’ at their heart.

Let me offer some thoughts on this engagement need. It is (really) valuable to relate too.

Firstly and most importantly- Absorptive Capacity really does need greater understanding.

A fair time back two researchers, Cohen and Levinthal (1990) pioneered the concept of absorptive capacity, further defined as the ability of an organization to identify, value, assimilate, and apply new knowledge. Since its 1990 publication, the concept has been further developed and given rise to many thousands of published papers around this subject.

The value of absorptive capacity is that when organizations have some prior knowledge they are more receptive to adding new understandings and new ideas.

Organizations that encourage and set about learning consciously set about the search for new ideas and by having this already established ‘learning’, are far better at recognizing new ideas that might lead to innovation.

These organizations develop a deeper understanding of integrating and experimenting with this new knowledge and set about placing it in a new setting, concept or hypothesis, to push this knowledge forward into new innovation. They are consciously advancing learning.

This gaining of continuous knowledge encourages constant learning and this has a positive feedback cycle as it builds the capacities and capabilities for future innovation activity. Absorptive capacity once recognized and established as a system promotes the search for new knowledge that greatly increases the capacity to make the necessary new connections for new innovation to happen.

The ability of our knowledge gathering needs a continuous focus and methodology of approach.

For this to happen, it does need continuous focus. If organizations take the alternative route of wanting to squeeze every last drop out of the existing innovation activity or research department, organizations over time develop as bad learners, they begin to ignore, to assume they have the knowledge and get fixed in their mindsets. They fail to absorb, they tend to reject and increasingly adopt the “not invented here” syndrome. That can only last for a limited time before ‘innovation decay’ sets in, people leave and the knowledge often goes with them also.

We need a system to capture and allow knowledge to flow, and a strong absorptive capacity has three main outputs which result from the flow of external or distributed knowledge: (1) the creation of new innovation; (2) the creation of new knowledge; and (3) that it does lead to new economic and social value. This is why this becomes important to establish and apply.

Managing innovation is the ideal home. If we agree that most innovations happen outside often self-imposed boundaries then we have to extend to all our boundaries and beyond. We have to open up.

We certainly understand that today innovation is not confined to the walls of one particular company. The world ‘absorbs’ more innovation than we can turn into greater value but we need to attempt to capture this and see if and where its value might lie. 

This is going to be achieved more likely within a distributed approach, asking everyone to contribute to innovative ideas, and regularly providing them with the content and context that they need to look for.

Absorptive capacities provide us with the system on which we can encourage the gathering, understanding, and translation of knowledge. It underpins engagement.

Then we have to align technology with this ‘needing to be engaged’

We work in different modes, we have ad-hoc communications, the more process-work-driven collaboration needs and we need to seek out more content-centric collaborations to help us in our work and sense of engagement and worth.

There are plenty of tools out there that need to bring ‘in-house’ as standard service delivery platforms. These include Business Intelligence gathering tools, open access to portals, websites, and intranets to acquire, assimilate, and transform what we are discovering.  Then we need to establish organization-specific collaboration tools, enterprise social networks, encourage the constant feeding and building of content management resources, streamlining workflows, to help others to explore and build on these insights.

The key, though, is a uniformed communication strategy for all to appreciate, accept to work on and gain increased value from it.

Then we need to build this modern engagement platform.

What needs to be part of this engagement platform? It needs to have the capacity to ‘listen’ and capture understanding, it needs to deploy some filtering and analytics, it needs to have some inbuilt principles of workflow and BPM.

Then you need to capture the interactions, offer search and discovery services, organize event management, and be able to retrace the interaction history.

Then it has to have application connectors, domain-specific apps, and value the activity streams to provide rich user experience of different points within the engagement.

Finally, all of this needs to be integrated into the larger organizations’ processes and be able to be ‘syncing’ capabilities with the more traditional systems of your organization.

Achieving engagement

So this engagement platform interacts with the world to bring it into your four walls, it engages with other systems that help it in their capturing and dispersing abilities and it simply connects people. Lastly, it has to contain interesting work, knowledge, or activity.

There is a real need to think through the modern engagement platforms we require, both externally with our customers and other stakeholders, and also for our internal needs and this comes increasingly from technology solutions.

.There is increasing acknowledgment on the value of collective wisdom, growing flexibility in discovery and selection, relying on others that can add new knowledge and insights as well as recognizing the match and balance between intrinsic and extrinsic values for motivating and achieving real engagement for all those wanting to grow and prosper.

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Constructing an innovation conversation framework is never easy, we all come at it in different ways and when it comes to those strategic conversations, we feel a sense of panic and growing tension as our messages begin to fray at the edges and slip more into tactical, the more we talk.

If you just diving into innovations, this sort of strategic conversation can change the goalposts, alter the perspective, and can give the innovation a more focused framing to build propositions around. It enables you to stand out as you are able to articulate the “bigger picture”

The framing of an innovation conversation framework

What I am suggesting here is an innovation conversation framework, on how we can approach different strategic value propositions, and where we might need to debate these across the organization, as the points of impact, so we can make a move towards a higher degree of innovation alignment for all involved.

If we take the three ‘classic’ strategic thrusts of product leadership, operational excellence, or customer intimacy, then we need to make clear the potentially different emphasis points within any suggested innovation approach that we should take. We must, within any innovation approach, be clear on what and where we should be placing our primary focus.

Aligning innovation within a strategic conversation framework

This framing can be most useful to remind people who are involved, that there are significant points of difference, or always need to be in anything new and innovative, otherwise, why are “we” doing it? There is a need to agree and align on what we are driving towards – and support any selected strategic direction. This framework can really open up the discussion. It can begin to show the possible implications and challenges ahead. It forms the required strategic dialogue.

Equally, some might argue that you actually need to combine all three, well I’d certainly want to question whether this is possible all at the same time. I would really doubt it if you just consider some of the aspects I’ve laid out within this framework above.

If it is still demanded, and some leaders can be just that, demanding – wanting to cover all the bases without knowing why they should be really focusing down on one of these. The direction you go requires the organizational focus to build the type of capabilities, resources, and processes to match this.

The need for a real alignment of strategy and innovation

Innovation stands in service to strategic goals such as growing market share, differentiation, and disrupting adjacent markets, serving the consistent changing and demanding customer needs, or by honing the delivery process by spotting these and then exploiting them rapidly and effectively. The first thing is you need to have a solid, thoughtful conversation around the type of strategic emphasis you wish to achieve.

Creating clear goals and linking/aligning innovation to those more agile strategies is a vital step before you get into the actual innovation concept stage. Senior executives must establish the manner in which innovation fits within the strategic context established on their goals, vision, and strategies.

Really do try and establish some key principles

I would suggest you really do need, even more, a framework to remind you of the critical differences and what aspects need clear focus to deliver to the distinct value proposition parts. Each strategic value proposition has significant implications to plan and work through.

This framework can help you to contribute to achieving greater alignment between the strategic direction (product leadership, operational excellence, or customer intimacy) and the key innovation aspects that help to align with this which the organization will need to think about and work through. Of course, those that go and build their own, based on their different needs of innovation create something unique and more valuable to “gather around”

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As we start to think about the next year, (is it here already?) it is a time of reflection and some forward thinking. We do need to make some real changes.

From my standpoint, I am simply amazed at how the world seems to be spinning faster and faster. I am convinced my working days are shorter or the clock is moving faster or worse still, I am being “deflected” even more by everything “digital”.

I never seem to finish what I had intended to complete by the end of a day or week. I then get caught up in the spillover effect. Something always gets in the way, something has to give. So we make a resolution to change something to improve on this constant catch up state we find ourselves in. We all seem to be spinning faster but equally slowing down. Often our innovation activities face the same dilemma.

Innovation needs time, it needs evolution and resolution but also speeding up

Here are some thoughts for our future. The need for innovation results has sped up considerably. The belief that lean management principles will get the innovation out of the door quicker, has been one of those management adoptions that often trick us into believing we are achieving more than we actually are. Reality is, we have only been tackling part of the innovation process and the end results often remain the same – a slow process of innovation follows as lean hits organization reality, it gets caught up in internal roadblocks, countless discussions, and debates.

Certainly, in the majority of cases we have found nothing wrong at all with applying lean management, as it tends to lead to improvements in a final outcome, but does it actually speed up the process? I’m not sure it does. Leans slows down and becomes increasingly burdened by fat being layered on, further down the innovation execution process.

For me, I think the real need is in speeding up of the whole innovation process, approaching the whole innovation in a systematic way, as the only path to tread in the years ahead. We need to broaden out the whole process of rapid innovation application beyond the two current favorites of lean and design thinking. That requires it to be fully connected up and that means making the innovation process one that is fully digital, on a platform and accessible by all, those that can bring value and meaning to the process to deliver greater innovation outcomes. We need a greater innovation rapid prototype approach to the whole innovation process- test, learn, adapt, adjust, iterate, refine at speed and rapid scaling.

Designing the complete rapid innovation application process.

Digital technologies are beginning to have a real impact on the methods, approaches, and rates of our innovation outputs. Social technologies are giving us real-time understanding. We can connect with customers real-time. We can have meaningful dialogues and exchanges that build relationships and constant sharing of knowledge and insights.

We continually learn real time, and recognize at our cost if we do not adapt, that intuition and ‘gut feel’ or research set up and gathered weeks or months ago, is becoming so out of date before we can learn from it, and sometimes highly dangerous to follow or believe in. We live in a rapidly evolving world and we have to be highly adaptive and responsive in what we offer in products and services. To get to this “responsive” state we need to fully connect up, freely exchange and build adaptive systems that accelerate our pathway of discovery into tangible meaning, through better products and services. We need to change our thinking and design in the digital insight part more specifically within and along the innovation process.

Digital technology and transformation are changing the innovation ‘game’.

We have, in the past, tended to take a safer route to market, by trying to achieve well-defined problems, place these into process maps and worked along the timelines, often impervious to the market conditions changing before our eyes. We continue to couch our bets and gravitate to solutions that are as close to what we currently offer, and that just keeps reinforcing the incremental route regretfully.

Yet digital threatens this entire incremental pathway. Markets continue to have even greater uncertainty and we need to respond in very different ways. Competition is changing, markets are blurring and customers are becoming far more vocal. To respond we need to reconceive innovation into a constant and rapid learning approach.

The need to be highly iterative, full of experimentation, testing and adjusting lends itself to the minimal viable product approach, where we continually test assumptions, checking what we are thinking against the concept of value gained from the customer or market feedback.

Digital is also pushing us to shake off complacency since customers are increasingly further connected and interacting in new ways, we need to find paths to ‘plug into’ and join the conversation, to help shape that conversation and through these exchanges recognize how the brand and reputations become increasingly important in all things innovating.

Digital tools are changing how customers discover, evaluate, explore, make their purchases and use products and then how they react, share, interact and make their connections with our brands. The whole process is highly dynamic and reliant on the ‘network effect’, and the job of the innovator is to translate this and respond in fast, nimble, agile ways, to fulfill the needs and capitalize in responsive ways. This demands a radical redesign of the innovation process.

The need always is to “test to learn” and constantly adapt

• Without a doubt, it is finding and using more techniques and tools that help you make far greater rapid prototyping, testing, piloting and learning from these understandings and how they can be quickly translated back into the innovation process to improve on what you have known, into one of what you have become aware of. “Testing to learn” will become the new innovation mantra and the accepted innovation process; a dynamic, fluid and rapid experimenting that makes it a constant learning one.
• We are today, partly down this route of early learning, with the help of software that can capture ideas, offering a sound vehicle for communicating these and a place to gather and define solutions that can be taken forward. Yet we have to push the path of constant evolution and that will continue to come at increasing speed from technology to keep providing new knowledge so as you can constantly improve on your eventual value proposition but that is going to require an ever-increasing agile organization and adaptive system.
• We will need to find different ways to redesign the manufacturing process (more outsourcing) to have more adaptive points where we can intervene and change product design. We will need to find different ways to ramp up or dampen down finished goods, that require a more rapid change, and that is going to push ‘agile’ even further. The ability to balance “scale, speed, and scope” will become paramount in this.
• We will need to learn to focus on the seizing of emerging opportunities in quicker ways but also take a much tougher approach to divestment, so as to release resources from declining positions of advantage. The whole lifecycle thinking needs challenging and thinking through differently.
• We will need to push for “agile systems” where we can design new applications, find better communication and collaborative social technologies, so as to reduce delays of getting better access to the right information, connecting to the right people, so as to advance the process. We need to actively reduce the duplication of work or the search for the information needed, to complete the job. We need to focus much more on reducing innovation process cycle time for faster deployment
• We will also need to invest in more data-driven front ends to build a more sophisticated process of discovery. The whole concept of divergent experiments and convergent testing and validations will become the way to think along the innovation process as a re-looping process. This will require a critical mindset change from a linear one on how you set about it, in the design of the process, Then also on the use and application of the digital tools you deploy, to move this through this constant, ongoing iterative process. Nothing can remain ‘static,’ we need to make it ‘highly’ dynamic.

Rapid innovation matters and it will become even more central as digital innovation takes hold.

Rapid-iteration needs to replace the fixed product release date mentality. We are in a world, driven by digital that requires us to constantly adapt to new learning that is coming from real-time market feedback. The way we learn from this and our rapid innovation application process will be all about this continually testing new assumptions to improve our (final) product and service propositions.

I have said this often, I believe we need to rethink the innovation process, as we will need to transform the existing methods and make them increasingly digital and social, in real-time. We need to focus on the rates of innovation output from our learning and improvement in the eventual offering, as our constant bearing or benchmark. It is how we design this in a more comprehensive manner will be a real challenge going forward

I predict that innovation has some very pivotal years ahead of it, as we absorb and use more rapid innovation application processes. We should start thinking about how we can fully design and adopt a more digital innovation discovery to the execution process,  at increasing speed for final innovating outcomes.

A design that pursues a constant path of innovation understanding and evolution, that fits far more with these digital transformational times we are going through. We are entering the digital innovation era.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site and modified here.

The post Adopting a Rapid Digital Innovation Process first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Connecting technology and innovation is altering how we should re-access organizations ability to build out. We are in the middle of a technological-led industrial revolution It is becoming highly dynamic.

****I decided to revise this post as I originally got caught up in “conflation”. Two ideas merging as one and it simply lost the insights of each, simply attempting to fuse different thoughts into one entity. It honestly did not work and I struggled with what to do.  By splitting them up they become separate reads and more digestible and hopefully of better value. I have to admit this is not the first time I get caught in this  (or I expect the last!) and I apologize to you, as the reader *****

So here I outline a 5S framework to trigger some opening thoughts on breaking down technology design complexity. The other post, now over on my other site, deals with the growth of “apps” in IIoT “Great apps will deliver the future business value in IIoT” and is predicting a changing future based on some recent takeover announcements.

So getting that embarrassment behind me lets go back to the 5S idea.

Arriving at a designed outcome is getting complicated. Developers get caught up in the details, rightly so, to deliver on a connected world but you must always ask the “what for?”

The more I was thinking I was trying to cut through all this “unnecessary fog” as a non-techie so I started to build my 5S idea. Let me share it

Any digital inspiring organization has to deal with significant change, it becomes overwhelming for many making decisions that will determine their future. They are placing really big bets on getting the technology part right. Personal agenda’s get pushed, IT viewpoints are far to narrow, management gets caught in indecision. A technology strategy has to be designed around and into the business strategy and the future.

My simple thought here is asking different questions around a few simple triggers, perhaps this very simply 5S. They actually become very central to determining a way forward for a business in how it designs its technology infrastructure.

Firstly, how “smart” do you wish to be, through technology application, so then what then becomes your “software” needs, and where do your “store” all the inevitable data that will be generated and needing analysis (cloud, local). Then what does it take to “scale” ambition and the resulting business and finally what sort of IoT “stack” needs to be built and designed to support the ambition? So these “5S” is not a bad assessing framework initially. Let me go through these briefly:

Firstly Smart

We are moving everywhere in “Smart” be that buildings, agriculture, homes, mobility, grids, utilities, traffic, logistics, waste management, as well as in our personal lives with smartphones and how we use the smart speakers we are rapidly becoming reliant on in the home to tell us what we need to know. We are becoming highly reliant on everything connecting and enabling us to be “smart.” Every organization with a growth ambition has to look at what smart means for them

Smart dominates in the solutions we are working towards. IoT offers us that “pervasive technology” so we can optimize, exert greater control, improve, protect, have greater connectivity. Smart is offering us ways to optimize, integrate our lives in different, potentially more intelligent ways.

Smart APPS are innovative systems that gather tremendous amounts of data from sensors and other embedded equipment and through machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics, we are making information highly actionable for the user, with the aim to improve the experience, productivity, and understanding.

“Smart” needs to be central in your thinking through the end results you are looking for

Secondly Stacks.

I am constantly reading about “stacks” when it comes to technology design. The IoT stack is becoming the “Thing Stack”. Technology has layers that constantly are adding (stacks) of complexity. IoT stacks manage solutions for device hardware, devise software, communications, cloud platforms, and cloud applications. I keep being told “we are building a full stack” but I find that often hard to believe as new technology breakthroughs keep moving ahead of “physical” design. We are blending existing technologies with new ones.

There is an awful lot of engineering going on dealing with many unique challenges, built up over the years. The understanding of all the layers, how they work not just in the past but how they need to work in the future is demanding. Building the right technology stack is essential for delivering strategy and the underlying digital roadmap. Understanding all the stacks and their layering guides the creation of IoT solutions.

We are equally requiring “jobs-to-be-done” not just in one Enterprise but in the growing need to connect up in the IIoT Enterprise world, where connectivity and exchange become common to leverage new business values. Stacks need to tackle the hard-end in protecting and keeping the infrastructure secure and open enough for attracting in the user-end as well. That needs a real business grasp.

The IoT stack becoming the “Things Stack” is shifting our thinking. We need to build the physical with the digital. We need to understand the physical world of what we are trying to do or achieve, with the technology solutions that work with, or for the business. User interactions are increasing in their expectancies, wanting “greater connected experience” and demanding Enterprises are equally required to be very savvy about the markets they are in and wish to serve.

It does seem we are needing to think in different layers or stacks, in a more holistic way, dealing and understanding, solving and connecting the physical world, with the business abilities, the technology layers and the market changes taking place and the user experiences expected.

This rethinking “stacks” needs to build more of the interrelationships between these to get context, device and gain the best level of “interaction” to gain from the ability to connect up. It is not purely IoT to think this through and try to understand it, it is the understanding of the full business stack needed by all the relevant decision makers.

The world of Scale

A certain scale is a necessity it seems today. When you invest so much in revolutionalizing your business, pushing technology and digital transformation you need to achieve a greater return. The greater the investment, the greater need is to scale and cover the “sunk” costs. At present most enterprises are grappling with containing costs in operating expenses as they attempt to transition to a heavier reliance on technology. To build your own platform, you need to think scale. To grow your business, often it has to be able to quickly scale. Products, to successfully scale, need to move from trial to full execution and these need to have clearer “scaling” pathways and design.

We all are struggling to define our scalability parameters, so we can then recognize the solutions we need to manage our scaling ambitions. To scale is one of the toughest issues to handle. If you do not have the financial resources to “find solutions and resources to scale” you struggle. We are increasingly seeking scale through partnerships, in joining established platforms so we can leverage a network and take growing advantage of technology and communication scale. As we scale we need to find those greater “intelligent solutions” by converting our factories into “digital factories” so we can extract efficiencies and channel product solutions into scaling for those “economies of scale” these investments need.

Storage- where do you start

Data is growing at exponential rates. The more we connect up, the more we seek out and gather data, often to justify investments, we are requiring increased storage. Today, we believe the cloud solves our problems, I am not sure. When you enable one device so it becomes a connected device through built-in sensors the sell becomes what value you get out of all the connected data from that one device, some but not much. The power of data is when you connect up many. Processors, local storage, gateways, improved processors all have increasing cost implications. The more data you want to collect, the more it costs to store it.

No wonder “data is the new liquid gold” and those that manage the cloud for storage are the new valuable bankers in the world, look at Amazon or Microsoft in how they manage our storage needs.  Not only do you as a client need to “house” data but you then need to analyze it. The additional slicing, dicing and simulating, the belief this needs to be in real-time, all adds even more storage need and demand assessment. Managing your data storage inventory is a growing problem

Today through the internet we are streaming information constantly up to the cloud or to our own storage facilities. The type and amount of data you are storing are becoming mind-blowing. Storage is the “beast” that needs taming.

Then we finish up with Software in my 5S frame

We are working on the concept of “software-defined hardware” so hardware devices can serve multiple applications, depending on the software it is running. These device hardware and software work together to create the “smart device”.  This is the present pressure point – we can’t write code quickly enough to meet demand. Hence why low-code is currently such a hot item. The software does the talking. It glues it all together., the hardware, the device, the cloud etc. Functionality in software becomes the “golden ticket” and how we build our future applications will determine where you find yourself positioned in the eyes of your customer, or in extracting new value, to improve on what you have got.

It is recognized the building of hardware takes longer, especially in large Industrial solutions like grids, platforms, factories, utility solutions or transport. The growing question is how you accelerate software solutions so you can assist the physical side. We have seen the birth of the “digital twin” to help in this. Hence why Siemens, with all of their hardware solutions, needs the software solutions offering of platforms, connectivity, visualization, and application delivery to be in place, if it is to sell the digital solutions alongside their hardware solutions. It has multiple partners, but it is acquiring much to have internal competencies.

This in-house building has many advantages but can reduce flexibility and rate of response if some of the digital solutions (rapidly) change. In some ways when you chose to build your own platform solutions for others to come and join, the digital complexities simply “runaway” with themselves.

The platform provider needs to recognize the ultimate value is in the orchestration for others to “play,” so the supply side and demand side need equal balancing in any platform offering equation. I argue today we need to provide more value to create the demand side. Building smart apps and providing software building capabilities that accelerate solutions significantly moves towards this.

Forming a better understanding comes from breaking a problem down

It is going to be that combination of smart, stacks, scale, storage and software all combining to make the experience level that delivers the new business model and breaks down the complexity we are facing in understanding the essential needs My simple thought here is to start asking different questions around a few simple triggers, perhaps this very simply 5S. They actually become very central to determining a way forward for a business in how it designs its technology infrastructure. I know it is not that simple but it starts your journey to picking apart complexity.

***I decided to revise this post as I originally got caught up in “conflation”. Two ideas merging as one and it simply lost the insights of each, simply attempting to fuse different thoughts into one entity. It honestly did not work and I struggled with what to do.  By splitting them up they become separate reads and more digestible and hopefully of better value. I have to admit this is not the first time I get caught in this conflation (or I expect the last!) and I apologize to you, as the reader*****

The post My 5 S for future Innovation: Smart, Stacks, Scale, Storage, and Software first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Innovation is often too intangible, full of unknowns as the very nature of anything new and different. Innovation risk leaves many executives very uncomfortable.

Organizations get uncomfortable when the words “radical” “intangible”, “unknowns” and other words like these when they form part of the conversation. It often starts to induce that “risk twitch” where that careful management for short-term performance might become threatened, or the manager feels any decision is ‘going out on a limb’ and possibly career threatening.

That growing uncomfortable feeling that innovation places their bonus at “risk” so they like to ring-fence innovation as much as possible. Now some of that ring-fencing is fine, you contain a risk to keep it manageable but most innovation does not constitute organization risk, yet it gets caught up in that risky fear that innovation seems to induce. Actually, if we were managing innovation at the core, our risk management for it would be very heightened and managed differently, but how many of our companies’ have innovation as their core?

So I always welcome discussion on risk and innovation. The more we talk about it the better for what is coming towards us.

As we talk about managing risk and innovation we can become more comfortable, yet when you often hear those leading the discussions on this innovation risk, where they keep overemphasizing “Risk-appetite, risk-attitude, risk-adversity, broader risk, even risk-contagion,” now if this does begin to get you nervous. Reality simply is, when most of the innovation is exploring the unknown to change the known for something better, then organizations seem to go into a certain “lock-down” when it manages the innovation-risk equation. Innovation remains uncomfortable for many senior executives.

Recently I re-read a recent PwC report “Managing risks and enabling growth in the age of innovation” as they continued to periodically give risk an innovation focus. We need more reports on innovation and risk. I can recall two or three reports they produced around this ‘risk and innovation’ theme over the years, happily sitting in my taxonomy of innovation, always useful to refer too. This latest one had an opening theme about innovation being described in more revolutionary terms such as part of the fourth industrial revolution, the second machine age, the cognitive age and this is adding more pressure to innovate or search for “greater innovation within companies.

Of course, the more you invest in innovation, the likely the risks will increase. So the report polled 1,500 executives, focusing on managing innovation risk and how effective they are in managing this risk-reward balance needed for innovation. As I have just finished writing about innovation and the 4^th Industrial Revolution in my last post, it was good to try to find some new ways to look at the changes going on in innovation.

I cannot agree more with PwC and the fact that the innovation and changing risk landscape is making us all think differently. I have called this the “new innovation era” where technology is underpinning so much of innovation’s activity and outcomes.

I have written about risk at different times, such as a post “Treating innovation risk differently, dealing with uncertainty” and a few times since. Enter “risk” into the search box to check these out if you are interested. A very extensive review of risk I wrote in suggesting “Developing a new framework for risk and innovation”

Yet this post is not about the risks but the emerging possibilities

As we enter this different era of innovation, as we begin to connect “everything up” through implementing the 4^th Industrial Revolution we do have so much new possibility for innovation than ever. Two of the visuals (figures) within the PwC report excite me in the optimism of taking innovation out.

If you look at the “within 3 years” add-on (see below), it does paint a really good picture of innovation opportunity, and by implication, the increased risk, in my opinion. This will simply not be the “as is” to simply extend our existing innovation activity,” it will be radical in innovative change. It simply has to be, coming from technology connecting up our networks supporting and forming new collaborative relationships providing us a growing set of new technology options, we have to integrate within our business thinking. These are all emerging frontiers for innovation to explore

Combining technology and innovation gives me real optimism for innovation, does it for you?

Yet just question if you are focusing on these types of innovation? I bet you many of you are not giving this much focus, your company is still debating and figuring out how to integrate the systems and processes required for such a magnitude of change. Well, innovators need to start pondering all the possibilities. Ask yourself what new innovation growth they could bring to your innovation activities?

There are new sources of revenue, of building out our growth options will certainly come from technology- it will enable projects, form new alliances through the greater ecosystem and network forming platforms. We have the potential for this connecting ability to achieve scale and global presence through the ability to connect across global networks and form new partnerships. New business models can emerge, enabling a moving beyond traditional borders, adding in new supply chain resources. All grow in innovative opportunities when you build out a digitally connected enterprise.

Then I wanted to put another spin on a second  PwC visual shown below.

This one outlines'” a programs ability to effectively manage AI, IoT, and robotic risks”. Confidence is growing as we learn to embrace and value new technology enablers. Now my spin is simply  around “where is the new innovation possibilities in the exploitation of these emerging new technologies?” They really excite me, a little frightening for me as well, yet this adoption of new technology innovation must have so much new innovating potential, waiting to be extracted from implementing and leveraging these new technologies.

When you consider the incredible list of technology enhancements we are thinking through and adopting across a business, as we  learn their value to our business, we can clearly see a number of real innovative growth opportunities as we embed and extract value out of these:

• We can streamline operations and maintenance
• We can optimize assets and increase their ‘connecting’ value
• We can get closer to greater workflow automation
• We will focus on data as it forms a greater part of our strategic input as well as build out the security of this
• The ability to engage with customers directly and in highly personal ways from the connected 3economy
• We can achieve a higher dynamic of scale, speed, size and customer intimacy thanks to technology.
• We can achieve rapid adaption and continuous improvements through greater data monitoring and management.
• We can own assets, share and build out our service provider activities from leveraging technology
• New Business models become increasingly possible by mixing and matching resources and opportunity spotting.
• We gain new learning and awareness, sharing and exchanges on experiences

All of these bodes well for a new innovation era they give me optimism. Just reflect on this excellent visual supplied by PwC on each of the enablers to achieve this new range of innovative options.

Yet the innovation impact is troubling me though. Can we achieve all the promise emerging from these different technologies?

The huge elephant in the room is this: do we have a new innovation system in place to adapt to all this significant change occurring in the next few years?. Our present innovation processes and structures live in a different age, the old industrial age, not in the new one, the one where we connect up everything, as the 4th Industrial Revolution indicates can be realized. I wrote about this from the innovation perspective in my last post “Innovation cannot expand without the 4th Industrial Revolution“.

Have you explored these yet? I think we are still grappling with their meaning, their new positioning inside and outside our organization on their effect. Yet if we ask “what are those new possibilities” by exploring them from the innovation perspective, it perhaps offers some really new, exciting innovation potential we can only begin to consider.

Innovation is moving from taking an idea, validating it and then run it through a pipeline to build out and commercialize. Innovation is going to get increasingly complex as it brings in all the different technology enablers into play. What they provide is data, in new insights on how to manage, respond and connect all part of the business, to extend this into customers to engage. Without a doubt we need to design a far better process to innovation, we need to rethink how we manage innovation.

I am scratching my head on this, yes I am getting splinters in doing this, but we are changing the very way we are needing to manage innovation. It involves different people, different thinking, different processes and this adds up to a very sizable new level of risk that we have to manage and orchestrate. As PwC suggests there is a new risk appetite in how we are investing in technology and yes, we are learning to share risks far more through managing innovation, this being far more through platforms and ecosystem design. We need to manage our assets differently, we need to invest and equally divest and outsource and give a real fresh emphasis to our innovation capital differently, and that also means discussing innovation risk differently.

I don’t have the answers, only some emerging thoughts on where this seems to be heading- the new innovation era –  but we do need to lift innovation out of its place today and give it a much higher sense of urgency in how we manage it. Risk’s are taking on greater risks in Security, in Transaction, in Customer dialogue that innovation needs re-setting.

It is all about building new capabilities and the capacity for innovation

As we move towards a new age where technoölogy connects us up we are forced to address the need for a radical review of our existing capabilities. Do we have the capacity and skill-sets for extracting out new innovation opportiûnities? We will need a much higher level of “rapid and effective” sense-making, portfolio management, and execution, of those new innovation opportunities.

We will certainly need a very different approach to risk management. The greater the innovation opportunity, the higher the risk management becomes. We need reset points all round We are going to be dealing in a world of “all things” being visible and a greater relationship with all potential things being invisible. We are dealing in a world of the immediate, to read and react too and the dual world of scoping and exploring, based on a greater informed gut-feel, growing in relying on data validation and a healthy theoretical belief and vision of how this all connects up all those ‘famous’ dots.

Today we are facing increased frequency to react, a greater pace and speed to move from decision to execution. We need to redefine new tolerances of performance, to firstly seize and then grow these “breaking” opportunities. These new opportunities are coming from multiple points of value, not just one product or a service perspective, they are all different and we need to bring a different thinking to innovation to manage them accordingly.

We need to accommodate data analysis through ‘richer’ visualization tools, we need better dashboards of discovery and awareness, we need a new approach to different capturing tools on the needed innovation inputs, drawing our attention of where innovation is emerging and signaling opportunity. It is the ability to utilize and extract from all this technology connecting-up, through our learning of the innovation outputs and outcomes from applying the 4^th Industrial Revolution, through working in platforms and ecosystem designs for innovation, we really need this transformation of innovation thinking

Interestingly I feel one old evaluation model of innovation risk actually seems to have a new twist or lease of life if we add one new evaluation dimension. We have mapped innovation ând its associated risk according to three dimensions in the past: the degree of uncertainty, the degree of controllability and the relative importance in benefit. Well perhaps we add another, the degree of technology connection (our network relationships) we have embedded and put to use in our innovation activity.

In Summary

We are recognizing there is a growing pressure to change, the technical advantage is offering new revenue and innovative sources of growth. We can see a dramatically changing landscape of the business boundaries becoming more permeable, and a increased pressure on resource management in a changing world. Innovation needs to shape up to deal with this.

I want to thank PwC for their continued focus on innovation and risk. This recent report gives me optimism. It raises the level of risk but it is offering different strands of thought (for me) to begin to frame my “new era of innovation” in further ways.

The post Optimism in Innovation, Thinking About Risk Differently first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In a recent report, jointly from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey called the “The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the factories of the future” they made a number of observations

“After a decade of flat productivity, the arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is expected to create up to $3.7 trillion in value to global manufacturing. A few years back, experts noted that the changes associated with the 4IR would come at an unprecedented rate yielding incredible results for those who truly embraced them.

Still, the hockey stick of benefits has not kicked in yet – while all companies are making efforts to adopt technology, most of the production industry (~70%) remains in pilot purgatory (where technology pilots last for extended periods of time, and companies do not take the final step of scaling up viable technologies). Less than 30% of manufacturing companies are actively rolling out Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies at scale”

No wonder we presently have trouble attracting many businesses onto platforms when they are still very much behind in deciding or deploying a strategically thought-through IIoT digital design, that is connecting everything up.

It is equally holding a new form of innovation back, one that is highly collaborative where partners come together to work on more complex problems. Collaborators can achieve solutions only by being “fully” connected up, comfortable with their data, understanding and contribution, both within their knowledge and insights.

The power of multiple-connected ecosystems gives innovation a completely different momentum but it needs this 4th industrial revolution to be fully operative, for a digitally connected world in manufacturing and beyond.

According to a recent Deloitte report: Most manufacturing lines still look a lot the same way they did 10, 20 or even 30 years ago. Operators clock in, have a brief conversation with their crew and shift supervisor and then operate a machine or tool for 8-12 hours before heading home. Depending on the day, the machine may break and need maintenance or an adjustment, the line settings may need to be modified for a specific product or run, or the operator may need to step away to resupply the line or be trained on a new procedure. In 4IR transformed manufacturing sites this is no longer the case. So why are we adopting digital in our manufacturing plants slowly and very cautiously?

The biggest reason is dealing with the fear of the unknown – a lesson in 4IR change management.

This fear of the unknown, that constant blocker of “not been tested in our environment” has greatly inhibited adoption. Equally the nature of much of production has been designed “on the fly” and the equally tough job of connecting the whole process up in a new integrated, fully connected system meets huge resistance. Legacy systems plague the ability to break out of our present traps of silo’s and we are still struggling to solve these issues, machine by machine, a process by process, incompatible software and hardware, piece by piece.

Arguably Industry is trapped by complexity. The system complexity, understanding and investment delays are often huge and difficult to unwind. Many organizations are constantly meeting resistance to change, building some very mixed views of transformation and its lasting benefits. Thirdly the redesign to save space, and to determine more up-stream flexibility needs embracing digital solutions and reliance on partners and levels of collaboration not truly established to date. Any revolution is difficult, costly and requires time to work through a change in “order” to adapt to the new.

The Underpinning drive to connect-up is getting closer to that “crossing over” point

Increasingly, there is this recognition that the competitors seem to be moving faster towards becoming more digital, so it then becomes a race to catch up, as this “digital advantage” is increasingly eroding competitive advantage for the digital laggard, even if he is today the market leader. There also continues today that industry disruption is increasing, by those spotting both opportunity and weakness in present market players. Those that are digital laggards can’t achieve the same flexibility, the speed of manufacturing change, productivity and response as the new investor, building more on “greenfield” principles. The established player has processes that are fixed far more on past trading conditions, where longer production runs produced (past) economies of scale that became over time, more rigid and not adaptive.

Supply chains have often remained reliant still on manual instructions with limited visibility to the whole supply change to manage, adjust and respond. Today, production is changing its philosophy where flexibility is “baked in”, for adapting further upstream and downstream so as to cater to a greater individual client and customer need. High levels of automation are generating the “digital factory” that comes as an offspring of this 4th industrial revolution.

The internal change is slow. There is a strategic resistance, there is a lack of organizational agility and still not the level of commitment this is required, driven from the top. Hence why we are stuck in so many “pilot purgatories”

Yet the threat of not changing is building pressures. this reluctance to embrace a new digitally connected world is feeding the “seeds of destruction”. Customers expect rapid response, reduced delays, tailored designs and greater engagement.  What is going to shift the needle on this dramatically to recognize we are in a real revolutionary period and caution is not your friend but your enemy?

There are increasing use cases being built and shown. The WEF wants to create a neutral, learning platform, which provides the best technical and organizational insights with respect to 4IR technologies in manufacturing to accelerate the delivery of the benefits, to give a sort of safe harbor. Such a learning platform will also facilitate collaborative action and the new partnership between companies and governments. Confidence grows through these learning exchanges This will partly help yet this will not be the real catalyst, that lies in addressing the old legacy problems, in bold, imaginative ways.

Innovation is one powerful catalyst ripe for leveraging in this 4th Industrial Revolution.

I wrote a post over on the Hype site “The Innovation World is Changing Due to the 4th Industrial Revolution“: We first need to recognize that there are twin forces at work, feeding off each other. We are facing greater disruption and an increasing innovation pace. These are constantly combining, relentlessly adding the new shape to our future. We are actually caught up in a very revolutionary period. The prospect of new innovation potential will eventually work through into the world of Industry 4.0 as a major game changer“. It is all ready for those accelerating and being fully committed to their 4IR journey.

We have to recognize the days of simple product innovation are dwindling. where technology, digital solutions, greater customer insights, where a new breed of designers, engineerings, scientists and software talent are combining built through a platform and new innovation ecosystems thinking, are all emerging. This new innovative approach is building greater complexity into our final innovation offerings, yet it is providing increased customer value or societal needs, on problems that require this combined thinking.

We need to recognize that we are increasingly becoming reliant on collaborative platforms, to realize the result: one of more radical innovations, that are capable of winning the hearts and minds of many consumers as they are more adaptable, adjustable to personalization, rapid shifts in trends or solving their complex problems with imaginative solutions, unseen at the time, in ways not possible without embracing and connecting up in the digital world.

Reality dawns, when the penny finally drops as I said in the Hype post “The customer is increasingly at the epicenter of the economy. The products and services are enhanced through the digital capabilities that boost their value and worth. New materials are making our assets more durable and resilient, and data and analytics provide the valuable feedback needed to build even better services and performance in the future. All this connecting and reacting is requiring new forms of collaboration, and we are seeing new types of organizations emerging. They are far more dependent on platforms and ecosystems. Innovation is the unlocking mechanism”

There is a real value in recognizing and delivering on the fourth industrial revolution, we can start to think outside our classic product innovation boxes. We can shift our often-linear thinking as the Industry 4.0 is the revolution that connects all the parts. We can loop, explore, connect, build scenarios, test assumptions, build digital twins to just the product and manufacturing impact.  Recognizing the transforming potential of having fully connected up digital factories will revolutionize how we manage innovation going forward. It shifts our thinking and the management of innovation dramatically.

The ability to have a more “rapid response, flexible manufacturing” can align more to market shifts earlier. We can begin to design products that are more “digitally connected” that can be updated in the consumer’s premise or hand. We can enhance “their” innovation by shortening the time-to-execution and extending the product life cycle, we can build new potential through greater innovation design, based on increasing insight and collaboration.

Growing the business in new ways, we are building revenue based on Industry 4.0.

Deloitte put out one report “Industry 4.0 and manufacturing ecosystems. Exploring the world of connected enterprises“ where it focuses on a few themes that point towards the benefits of IR4. One is growing the business through I4.0 and also integrating the digital and the physical to achieve business objectives

Growing the business comes through the transforming of engineering, research, design and achieving increased levels of customer engagement and interaction and achieving a greater co-design of the products themselves. The key is again through innovation to make already existing products smarter, offer more data relevancy from smart technology, the change to add completely new products and services in format or build alternatives in business model thinking.

We have the ability to apply a greater “intelligence” to marketing products, using analytics and predictive customer tools to draw closer to actual need. The opportunity to improve the aftermarket experiences, extend the life of the product and work towards maximizing uptime all have value. The use of sensors dramatically helps connect the product throughout its lifecycle to be constantly monitored, updated and managed in collaborative ways between the buyer and seller.

Application-based technology, based on connecting in new digital ways, can reduce the idea to market, be able to digitally link design to product intelligence and improve the overall effectiveness of having connected engineering. We can test, provide feedback on early design concepts, adjust them and redevelop their designs within our network of suppliers, customers, and the manufacturing.

Integrating the digital and the physical to achieve business objectives, the arrival of the digital twin.

Deloitte nicely put this as “It is the leap from digital back to physical—from connected, digital technologies to the creation of a physical object—that constitutes the essence of the Industry 4.0 concept”

We are at a point of combining information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT) to enable the creation and use of a digital twin for example and fuse our operating environment into one.

Deloitte points out “The value of a digital twin can allow companies to have a complete digital footprint of their products from design and development through the end of the product lifecycle. This, in turn, may enable them to understand not only the product as designed but also the system that built the product and how the product is used in the field. With the creation of the digital twin, companies may realize significant value in the areas of speed to market with a new product, improved operations, reduced defects, and emerging new business models to drive revenue.

The digital twin may enable companies to solve physical issues faster by detecting them sooner, predict outcomes to a much higher degree of accuracy, design and build better products, and, ultimately, better serve their customers. With this type of smart architecture design, companies may realize value and benefits iteratively and faster than ever before.

A digital twin can be defined, fundamentally, as an evolving digital profile of the historical and current behavior of a physical object or process that helps optimize business performance. The digital twin is based on massive, cumulative, real-time, real-world data measurements across an array of dimensions. These measurements can create an evolving profile of the object or process in the digital world that may provide important insights on system performance, leading to actions in the physical world such as a change in product design or manufacturing process”

“Indeed, the real power of a digital twin—and why it could matter so much—is that it can provide a near-real-time comprehensive linkage between the physical and digital worlds. It is likely because of this interactivity between the real and digital worlds of product or process that digital twins may promise richer models that yield more realistic and holistic measurements of unpredictability. And thanks to cheaper and more powerful computing capabilities, these interactive measurements can be analyzed with modern-day massive processing architectures and advanced algorithms for real-time predictive feedback and offline analysis. These can enable fundamental design and process changes that would almost certainly be unattainable through current methods”

The Deloitte report Industry 4.0 and the digital twin is a highly useful reference to read.

The present organizational inertia is stopping innovation to realize radically different benefits from Industry 4.0

There are so opportunities for innovation well beyond products and services. We require new approaches, new skills, different talent and design capability to realize and leverage the power of connecting coming from industry 4.0. It can offer us, for the first continuous learning, we can tap new a network of talent through ecosystems and platforms designed for greater collaboration and exchange. We can reach far more into underserved markets through greater customer connections and engagement, we can co-design with them.

We can, by embracing 4IR, have available far more predictive and evaluation tools to help improve processes, to reduce or test risk, to prototype and experiment, partly engaged with customers in learning and adjusting design and value. We can build and connect different supply chains that read and react, we can create new ecosystems where we share a common goal and value, we can enable more agile systems that can adapt and respond to changes in real time to reconfigure the ‘connected factory’.

Innovation emerges out of the Industrial 4.0 initiative in radically different ways to explore and exploit.

We are waiting for the fully connected up factory and process so we can apply a very different digital set of innovation tools. Until then we have innovation being managed the current linear, disconnected way.

We fail to have a seamless set of connections into our industrial process world, into our designers, engineers, research scientists and more importantly our customers. Until we all get the same “line of sight” innovation stumbles along its familiar “guessing game” derived of insight and underlying knowledge.

The quickly we connect up and build the fourth industrial revolution we can explore, build and redesign our whole innovation process. We can .look towards managing more radical innovation design in ecosystems and networks, that push existing boundaries, explore new technologies and materials, that all can combine into the Innovation Revolution that follows the Industrial Revolution.

The post Innovation cannot expand without the 4th Industrial Revolution first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

If you are not aware, it is worth reading about the Gordian Knot.

“For people the world over, the Gordian Knot represents the difficult, the intractable and often the insolvable problem.

Today’s systemic business problems are the modern-day equivalent of this seemingly impossible challenge, our Gordian Knots to untie or cut through.

According to Greek mythology, the huge, ball-like Turkish knot with no ends exposed was impossible to untie. An oracle had predicted that the first person to do so would become the ruler of all Asia. Thousands of people had tried, without success, to unlock its complex riddles. Alexander of Macedonia, son of King Philip II of Macedon, solved this puzzle simply and very creatively – by cutting it in half with his sword, exposing its ends and making it possible to untie. Alexander the Great went on to conquer all of Asia, just as the oracle predicted”.

So are Organizations Cutting their Gordian Knots?
So how can we cut the intractable knot inside organizations and thrive from it?
We all face increasing uncertainties and are having our trust battered. We live increasingly in a world of complexity. We are seemingly not rising to the challenges that seem to be growing in this complexity in the global, organizational and personal context.

For me it is attempting something new and different, can often undo these knots we find ourselves. We grab digital transformation as one of those solutions. Often that simply makes it even more complex unless we cut through the current impossible knots we have today.

Innovation has a vital role to play but it must be ‘treated’ differently.
Where do we start? Firstly we need to revisit any work we are thinking about changing more on an “adaptive enterprises and systems” way of thinking.
We need to find ways to deal with unpredictable, discontinuous change and make this more predictable for us to manage.

We need to be agile, fluid and adaptive in allowing design, systems, and processes to continually adjust, to reflect the constant challenge of change going on continuously.

We lack often a real coherence of purpose; we lurch from one opportunity to another, from one-quarter of financial results into another, reacting to that moment, often defensively, with often no longer-term consistency in our activities. Performance has been taken over by opportunistic behaviors. Innovation often takes the real brunt of this. It gets cut like it is the very knot that needs cutting!

Our intended strategy, moves suddenly, into more of a deliberate strategy, and then somehow this gets abandoned or unrealized. We keep responding and slowly we replace this with an emergent strategy that is rapidly become our realized strategy that we present to the world, as a response to ‘factors outside our control’ for our often indifferent performance. We are passing through different strategy responses without any coherence of purpose.

Who really talks about the EXACT results achieved from a specific innovation for instance? We might get financial numbers, we will get lots ot “hype” but we never get the recognition, that transforming validation of this success, maybe in rare cases. Why is that?All we hear is just a general reference to it, to cloak innovation often in the ineffectiveness that lies within. We bundle up our innovation activity, we cloak it in mystery, we fail to draw it out and give it the credit it is often due to our growth strategy. We rarely encourage it and give it the real recognition it deserves but we constantly “simply” talk about our innovation success.

I think innovation should be central to any events involving results and predicted future. Knowing the innovation capability is knowing the changes to a better future and shareholders are denied that. Do we have any clarity on innovation processes, are they sustaining or one-off, do we know the investment being made in building individuals innovation value. Do we break out innovation investments in capability, capacity or competence management. We should, as innovation grows a company, it is a major indicator of future success. It needs more “cutting open” and revealing, as “our” innovation management process.

For innovation and many things going on within organizations they often lack a real coherence, they ‘signal’ inconsistent behaviors, especially within the organization. These bad signals simply build up all the tensions and dysfunctional aspects that middle order management and the organization, in general, has to mop up and cope with.

How can innovation thrive in this sort of chaotic mess? No wonder it never takes hold, it just has nothing ‘permanent’ to attach too and grow. Management needs a radical overhaul so innovation can be the vehicle for what is articulated but often poorly delivered on a consistent basis.

Context & Coordination needs designing in purposefully.
Again, where do we start? We start with ‘disconnect’ that organizations often have. As we “cut through” the problems we need to take the different strands and piece them together. To make fresh knots to make a different strength. The understanding of the underlying purpose of the organization going beyond just making money and keeping the shareholders happy is that it does need a deeper primary function, it needs re-articulating, it needs constructing a new entity. Some organizations do a reasonable job of this but many simply don’t.

We need to restate our primary function and purpose far more in its societal contribution. We need to express the bounds as a governing set of principles that are known, reinforced and measured against. We then need to set about building in a consistent way, the capabilities that are able to produce the outcomes. Those new outcomes need innovative thinking to be central to them.

We need to build in the accountability into the roles that reflect that need to combine innovation, effectiveness, and efficiency, that is needed so they can be managed equally side by side. We need to teach the ability to be adaptable and recognize the differences so as to actively manage the ‘creative’ conflicts and tensions.

Innovation can help in cutting through existing “knotty” problems by searching for new strands that give fresh opportunity to be tied together and build strength beyond the existing. We need to cut through old knots but, yes, make new ones that form around some of the old and plenty of the new, “weaved” into them, to give them a greater strength of purpose and ability to take on new “knotty” problems, in different innovative ways.

The post The legend of the Gordian Knot and today’s organizations knotty problems first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Let me provide a short narrative to give this a meaning and why it is becoming so important

Today we deliver content- It has become far too easy. We are drowning in it on a daily basis. We all suffer a massive deluge of digital input. Content can’t stand alone.

• What we need is context to anchor content and give it the clear meaning to understand………..that’s our necessary starting point.
  

Context shifts everything, it gives it shape, a structure to draw (deeper) meaning from. We learn to know, to integrate, to remember, to understand and to act.

Of course, context is going to be fluid as it builds out its related content.

Having content and context is complementary, interconnected, and interdependent, they interrelate to one another.

As we gain more insights we can potentially build a greater understanding. We simply improve our knowledge.

It is going to be needed to be adaptive as we learn but it will be placed in ‘certain bounds’. If we start from a much clearer starting base then the learning and discovery allow people to want to find solutions as they gain increased knowledge and provide fresh inputs, they begin to strongly relate. We pass through memory understanding as we learn.

“ Context provides the innovation marching orders” in my world

• We achieve a higher sensitivity to needs and understanding, we begin to relate
• We engage more, we can dialogue more, we ‘unite’ more in relating
• It adds more value to our thinking, it triggers additional ideas and contribution
• Functionality and Capability then follow from this- we build it differently

Context gives us certain guard rails or borders to help gain a more united focus. Where we go after that, by pushing those borders will depend on those involved, by us collectively seeing a greater value in an evolving context of mutual understanding.

• The ‘setting it in context’ allows for dialogue, adding more value to the thinking.

Context needs to also become, increasingly the arbitrator of success. Around this, you form your community that seeks out the possible solutions to this. Context gives knowledge into the hands of others to go and work on finding possible solutions.

• Knowing the context gives us something highly relevant to judge eventual outcomes on.

Q: How can we absorb and learn differently?

• We are overwhelmed by “content stock”
• We need to understand (increasingly) what is relevant to us
• How should we engage? What can make it easier?
• We need to build content creation for a context-specific world
• This needs to be increasingly tailored to our needs with help increasingly from (AI + Machine Learning)

Introducing the notion of Knowledge Graphs (KG) – its value and purpose

Here I wanted to give a deeper explanation of knowledge graphs- a ‘potted’ history and future view.

I wrote about Knowledge Graphs “The Arrival and Potential of Knowledge Graphs Into Our World” to give them a little depth of understanding.

So, my attempt here in this post is to give Knowledge Graphs a more ”layman” context so we can begin to see how this “Knowledge Graph” concept can become really important to recognize, support and apply in our lives. They help us relate faster.

KG will equally become a significant contributor to the industrial application as well, as increasingly it will build knowledge visually and be part of our everyday working life in related searches

I recently heard Knowledge Graphs will become as topical as “Artifical Intelligence” as a prediction for use in an industrial application.

We are told Artificial Intelligence is meant to be a panacea to solve all this current ‘disconnects’.  No, not without solutions like Knowledge Graphs alongside them, well actually underpinning much within AI

It is once we try to make all the ‘connects’ in the knowledge that is out there, waiting to form new relationships, we unleash our connected understanding in completely new ways……….we become more creative, informed and innovative….so let’s look at these a little more:

Knowledge Graphs captures the relationship between people, processes, applications, data- the things and their relationships

KG makes the connections for “contextual information”

• We need to stop stringing together to build a picture of things, piece by piece
• We need a way to bring together contextual knowledge in greater collective forms

Connecting knowledge is one of our biggest challenges today

The more you “see” within the relationships the better the insight, to influence decisions, to set actions and directions.

This leads to “cognitive solutions”

Let take an Example from  Google Search

Google pioneered or advanced Knowledge Graphs- “the information box on the right-hand side”

Examples “Google”:  “Bertrand Russell” or “the “Mona Lisa” or as shown here “Leonardo da Vinci”

• We are linking data and semantics (well-defined, related), easy to query and explore
• We are linking relevant information- (threads) which we can build and add too, in time (AI) smart. We are building dependencies of understanding (content and context)
• It integrates (over time) with machine learning
• Knowledge = Structured = Connected Relationships = Entities

Outcomes are represented in knowledge graphs (visuals)

This gives us data visualization, logical reasoning, it represents and presents knowledge

So why KG? It is becoming essential for Enterprises to link Knowledge and Intelligence

Today it is estimated 90% of enterprise data is unstructured, it is hidden in textual form (documents and files). What if?

• It Organizes and Distributes Structured Knowledge
• It has Openness, Transparency, and Accessibility
• It is Collaborative, a Sharing and Exchanging ‘mechanism’
• It is Enriching and Contextualized
• It ‘bridges’ Enterprise Knowledge needs with Open Knowledge Learning

The technical know-how lies within Siemens today and this has been my initial catalyst to understanding its value.

The outcomes are full of helping us get organized:

Ontologies, Common Language builder, Builds Schema, Common Descriptors, Vocabularies

Turning A Data Aware to a Knowledge Ecosystem, linking data, information, into knowledge and building on this

It is full of Entities and Relationships, it is dynamic and grows by you making the connections to constantly improve.

If organized differently:  it can create a better customer experience, greater efficiencies, increased insights for more connected products and services and understanding across the whole enterprise value chain, internally informed, externally communicated.

It can build upon those “keepers of specialized knowledge” driven by domain experts and business users that use their (growing) insights to increase connections and subsequent value generation.

Machine learning works at understanding dependencies so emerging from any learning you get a growing sense of intent, objective and those important aspects that you are wanting to find out more upon, to build out even further. The move from just “stringing data together” to build a picture of ‘things’ you get greater contextual knowledge.

It is this lack of connecting all of this knowledge up that is really placing demands on organizations that manage knowledge flow today, As we know it is often very inefficient to know where the knowledge actually lies.

As we digitally transform and improve the IoT through cognitive/ AI solutions we will automate and personalize communications. It is recognizing the semantic technologies part that will deliver cognitive solutions that have the real value.

This value can be built in very different ways than today with the use of Knowledge Graphs. It can have the incredible value of being driven by the domain experts and actual business users, as they make and use their knowledge to make the increased value of all the connections they have, increasingly in a growing network of relationships, constantly building a deeper domain knowledge.

It is a Learning Memory Builder

It gives us: What we know or need to know how we integrate, remember, to act and understand

• What is our challenge? (the need)
• The Suggested Solutions (the insights)
• Value Generation (empowered, equipped and enabled, to decide, to improve upon)

The promise of Knowledge Graphs allows for the collected data and the connections to provide insight, influence decisions and set direction. The more you “see” all the connections and relationships the greater these become, and then the better you become, in being “informed” to act in more knowledgeable ways.

The post So the value we can derive from using Knowledge Graphs first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I decided to invest a decent amount of time into the Siemens 3^rd Quarter Announcements and it has been worth it.

I really don’t understand the reporters and analysts attending this event as they seem to continue to stay stuck in their recurring opinions and stances, constant looking in the rear-view mirror. It has its reference points perhaps but it is understanding “the road ahead and its conditions” that provide shareholder value.

We need to become more forward-looking based on strategic outlook, innovation potential and market opportunities.

The analysts seek to always look constantly to the immediate, often not looking beyond their own noses. They seem not to want to go under the bonnet through investigation, just rely on ‘given’ handouts or myopic views, rooted in the short-term. The sound of future innovation potential was in most of the event as very evident but lost in the focus on immediate numbers and results. Why?

Widening the scope of inquiry

Do these questions, many highly narrow in their own scope serve us well? Surely we should be looking far more for that “real, sustaining value” under the hood of a company that shows a growing clarity to the future? One or two questions certainly were attempting to get under the hood but you get that feeling they (reporters) were simply  wanting to “pain the CEO in a corner” in forcing out positions wthn the management’s reply that then”paints them in a corner” so the reporter can go back and refer to them (constantly) at a later date. I find that highly negative.

Although there was a new word that emerged to counter this and couch future options under “optionality” simply as much in the future stays “highly fluid”. It is advisable to have constant evaluations, up to the necessary point of a required decision, to then make the best decision in (their) judgement.

Of course, some of the replies from Management remain vague, sometimes annoyingly so, couched in future options such as “optionality” that can leave you, as a listener, in negative territory wanting more understanding.

By the way, the meaning of “optionality value” (optionality used in a financial sense) is “enormous and choice or discretion is allowed”.  Now that sounds intriguing as it was used many times in this Siemens Event.

As the CEO of Siemens rightly put it “it is always a difficult balance to strike between the doable and the desirable. Sometimes the speed to go to the desirable has got to be slower because the doable will otherwise not be accompanying you”.

Who actually creates the volatility- the messenger sometimes needs to reflect.

Share price volatility depends to a large degree on finding the balance between short-term gain and long-term planning and structuring.  One headline prior to the actual the event was “Siemens sees lower profit, announces restructuring followed with this short “breaking news” article : “Siemens sees lower profit, announces restructuring” then you hear one of the analysts noting “that they see today that the share price is trading down” asking what Management is doing about it. Well, duh, of course, results are down for many well-explained reasons, market reasons. Yet the immediate reactions are far more due to these immediate news feeds that shareholders were given (by you analysists) that provides a very restricted story.  The headline-grabbing reaction that this type of “dramatic” heading makes the positive story very hard to get out there as the valuable one to absorb.

Would I scoop up Siemens with many others within closely related business areas? Specifically, those desperately struggling in their crisis, mired in rapid reorganization and sell off, of past strategic parts? Yet that is what you immediately think, with headlines like these above but is that really true? Clearly not in my opinion, totally different but treated in the same sensational way.  I think it is a headline bordering on a level of reporting that continues to push reporting into an ever-tighter corner, boxed in by this type of translation and a constant search for “hype”.

Listening for the deeper messages from this Siemens event

So I wanted to sit down and listen carefully to the very extensive explanations laid out by the CEO, Joe Kaeser, and the CFO Ralf Thomas. I said earlier “we need to get under the bonnet” and the level of “analysis offered” at the event just failed to do that for many. I saw this differently. Many, not all, were applying their own narrow lenses to the questions they asked not connecting all the story given at the event. As Mr. Kaeser remarked, “I do appreciate that maybe the quality of detail has been insufficient for some, but obviously have been more than able to digest for others, so we need to bring things together….”

So what has this to do with innovation?

Well, it is only when you get under the hood you begin to see the sparks of creativity, innovation, and imagination working away. In Siemens case when you are in leadership positions where the “feast of opportunities” for Siemens electrification, automation and digitalization systems of products, solutions, and services are coming together in some imaginative and thoughtful ways to evolve and solve many of the challengings within the world, you need to dig a whole lot deeper.

Perhaps Siemens is failing to tell this “future story” in a better way. They have seen the paradigm shifts and are repositioning themselves to address these in new business-orientated ways to further shareholder value. Here lies the real story, by being adaptive and responsive you are tapping into creating attractive growth opportunities. So why become fixated on the past (last quarter results) when you need to understand one company and its approach to the future, to overcome transformational challenges? It is managing these that gives us innovation, growth, and creativity.

Making the calls to a new platform for business need

I was reading, just before listening to this Siemens Event, a piece by BCG Henderson Institute, entitled “Leaping before the platform burns; the increasing necessity of pre-emptive innovation”

The article rightly points out that we know systems are failing faster than ever, businesses are operating in increasingly complex adaptive systems that are increasingly reliant on mutualistic relationships, where one benefits from another (business ecosystems in my thinking and work) to grow markets, to solve more difficult challenges and drive its development. Siemens is setting itself up to do just that.

The BCG article also points out “we are facing countervailing forces- negative feedback loops – that limit growth”. Part of those is “traditional business metrics and strategies that tend to reinforce these negative feedback effects”. One of the roles of management as nicely put in this BCG article is to “anticipate exhaustion”, “make big and small steps” and “embrace evolution”. Siemens is doing just that in what I heard.

At this Siemens event, I heard many analysts looking to provide negative feedback loops, in their questions. Management needs to give as much depth or color to ideas, concepts or future assumptions as they can. We come back to the balance between “doable and desirable” spoken about by Mr. Kaeser

Why should we look deeper and listen just a little harder?

As this event showed (well to me) that the depth of thinking, the processing and “best” judgment being outlined as a “way forward” offers a better pathway to a “feast of opportunities”. As Joe Kaiser rightly underlined the major intent of his outline was around the whole intent of Vision 2020+, to integrate the interest in an evermore “dividend world” in this balanced meaningful way. It may not be perfect, or fleshed out in the “granular detail” but it is signaling the way forward in very deliberate and broad brush strokes, the details of how this is “colored-in” will emerge in the months ahead.

Siemens is reshaping its organization for a greater long-term value creation by giving individual businesses sharper goals and targets to chase, to provide them more entrepreneurial freedom away from a consolidating center so as to sharpen their focus on their respective markets.

Siemens looks to build new growth opportunities in partly a new emphasis on IoT integration services, distributed energy management and greater infrastructure solutions for electric mobility. The decision to consolidate the business down into tighter groups, such as dealing with a broader remit in industrial digitalization gives new growth opportunities. How these are managed going forward is another matter as Siemens needs to believe it has greater strength than many others in this field of opportunity. It has but it does need to tell the different stories of that future in new ways.

I have some lingering doubts over the execution in this industrial digitalization, but I do not have doubts over a vision or where the focus needs to be. It is how responsive and adaptable they are and for me, that seems like a work-in-progress that is getting better but not yet good enough. The level of integration is going to be critical and well-managed with the senior group coming together in greater ways around the emerging vision and strategy. This needs well-managing.

I want to pick up on some of these real, tangible innovation stories in the next week or so.

The announcement of buying Mendix, a leader in a low-code application is certainly one is a very exciting purchase. My mind has been racing over this announcement.

We could be seeing a new platform dawn, one of a “Smart Platform, full of smart apps designed to seek out experience, not just data” This is going to be potential “context-aware”, “intelligent connected” and “pro-active” in intelligence outcomes.

One key to unlock this is visualization in programming, combining artificial intelligence and knowledge graphs to build better, informed work-flows. This is a must for me to focus upon as it overs the route to the 2^nd generation of platforms, smart and dynamic for abstraction and automation. The point of shifting to “experience relating” is crucial. I see a very clear three horizon plan emerging with this Mendix and Mindsphere integration that I’ll share soon that takes platforms into a new era.

This building of a business unit for IoT Integrated Services is another. The lack of platform adoption by many companies has been significantly held back by not addressing comprehensive strategies for digital transformation and a feeling of concern, to date, over the poorer comprehensive support needed in any transformation. If this can be pulled together in the way Siemens believes it can do this, then terrific but the providers of specialized services need to be pulled into the Mindsphere platform in different ways and repositioned in the Ecosystem to deliver on this ‘aspiration’ in greater service to the clients and customers’ needs and wishes.

I also want to investigate the new “Smart Infrastructure” business being ‘bundled together” in this announcement of a reorganization. Where what, how and why this will unleash a whole new era of innovation solutions. That is exciting to explore in multiple ways for innovation perspective.

So let me offer a simple summary

I heard a different story by listening carefully to the Siemens Event. It struck me as very progressive in how they are wishing to respond to the changing world. Yet more importantly where innovation can be positioned in the future vision that was outlined. There are so many stories of innovation potential to tell at Siemens- now that is a “feast of opportunities.”

My focus continues to get as deep as I can under the bonnet of Siemens, more and more as it reveals itself. It needs to think about building more “compelling” stories to link to the future, so the prevailing negative forces diminish or maybe regroup as they equally focus on the future and stop looking constantly in the rear-view mirror, attempting to predict the future,

When you stay stuck, perhaps based simply on the past and not look  deeper and rigorously towards the options Siemens have to explore in the future is a shame, it misses the possibilities and options and these seem highly promising if executed upon.

The management is attempting to do it job in sketching out the potential in a rapidly changing and challenging world and the future is not based on the past, believe me, but on how you set up for the future.

Telling the future innovation stories builds a better future for all involved. Somehow Siemens need to draw these out, it would help many ‘stuck’ in the present, based on (past) experiences.

Let’s give credit, where credit is due.  When a Management of a Company comes out with a strong vision, a set of well-thought-through validations and justifications. It equally resets the metrics and accountability closer to where success is found, closer to the market and reliant on people and technology to continue to combine and progress in new (imaginative) ways.

We should be applauding not pushing the underlying messages down into negative territory when the future does seem very bright.

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