The herculean task of integrating the impossible; in rules, regulations, attempting to reduce centuries of proud independence, individual cultures to be boiled down into the Super-European one. For me, it just can’t work.

I had an incredible 15 years living in Asia and came back to Europe some years ago and noticed a real difference, in many ways it has simply gotten worse, not better. Europe has been intent on institution building, forging an EU out of all the different countries that make up the European Union. In this “obsession” it has become very inward focused, the different leaders of the individual countries are battling to save their turf, yet the world continues to turn on different axes, that Europe seems not to have grasped.

This institutional building has forgotten the people-related building where aspiration, identification, inclusion makes the transformation happen or not. The EU has forgotten to translate all its work into true meaning for the people, believing in a worthwhile future. In Asia, you feel vibrancy, energy, opportunism, dynamism, that chance to get “part of the action”, here in Europe you sense a drifting, a separation, and growing fragmentation.

I certainly feel Europe is backward-facing, it is busy protecting individuals and (self-serving) countries focusing on grabbing their piece of the pie. They have such tension within the very institutions themselves, hanging on to noble causes with 20th values of out-of-date concepts. They at the European level are blocking mergers to build European champions, fining those that challenge the European status because they have different models of operating.

I continue to feel Europe is isolating itself in much of what it does, failing to really grasp the imperatives of real change needed in a connected world, to effectively compete. Yet we see growing polarization as people can’t see the future as the European leadership itself, bickers and argues. It is not a pretty picture of the future when you look at Europe.

I have read recent reports from the WEF, McKinsey, and Deliottes all coming to the defense of Europe.

They are defending, perhaps in the hope, something will finally change. Of course, the Brits are to blame! They want to leave the EU party and go their own ways. Regretfully that has been Shambolic to witness, a further symptom of our present-day Europe. For a nation that has a lot to offer, the UK process of exit has been agony to watch what is happening.

Yet in that separation, as hard as it comes, it might offer them the independence and some re-emergence of reconnecting to the world in their own ways of seeing things. You can re-ignite that sense of freedom, independence, and spirit of adventure if it can be seized. The United Kingdom is most probably better equipped than all other European countries to accelerate a digital future. What are Europeans loss, is the UK’s gain, in being unshackled from others, not just lagging behind in digital technology and innovation but many seemingly blocking progress, dragging others down to their level, all for the “collective union”.

Europe offers incredible history, the same as Asia.

The history is there, waiting for you to learn lessons, to draw insights. The difference is it is easy to look back, with the benefit of hindsight but when you are caught up on something as transforming as we are presently experiencing, a digital transforming world, you are just that, caught up. How do the Europeans understand they need to change, to understand digitally embracing might give them a better chance than holding onto old ways?

We are in a globalization revolution, one where the world continues to connect, to increasingly rely on the internet, to seize opportunities to transform business, form different society values and where the balance of power will eventually reside in those that dominate in technology dominance. At the moment Europe is so out of the race it begins to get frightening for those situated here.

The failure to embrace change happens universally. Yet in Europe we fail to grab change in ways that can transform, we settle for status quo unless it is forced by crisis.

Let me take my area of focus – Innovation and Digital Technology.

Europe is no different to many, they are enthralled by technology, they are clearly fixated on implementing all technology. Rightly so as there is a massive amount of implementing to do. Yet technology enablement needs the right people to understand it and the right organizational structures to capitalize on it. Europe seems to lag, some still call it an innovation powerhouse but they lose me just on that point alone, they have stopped taking risk.

Eight of the top innovation countries of the world are within Europe surprisingly (source the Global Innovation Index) with Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom being in the top five globally. Now how that is measured might be stacked again on historic measurements (Universities, patents) but does not address the phenomena of Digital Technology weighting or digital communications that will transform innovation and the countries that make deep investments in this. Innovation and Digital Technology are in the future so intertwined.

To emerge out as winners in a connected world, centred on digital, seeking new business models, experimenting, exploring and taking risk is essential. It is a world full of speed and opportunitiy. The EU seems the oppositie, holding (desperately) on to stop others from the disrupting of (their) industries, not wanting to redefine business or society.

This approach means you might be hanging on to a notion of being very innovative, in those selected measures, yet set in a previous time but in reality, you will face a very different future as you hold onto mistaken, outdated approaches.

We are caught in the wrong measures in a connected world, connecting ideas, value points, supply chains that are global, that crosses borders and challenges the very notion of national states, to measure progress. Silo’s do not just exist in ortganizations they exist in measuring one nation against the other on “selected” criteria that can be measured. Today it is the intangibles that give the value not the tangibles.

Europe is trapped in legacy.

They suffer high costs, aging workforces, very high social costs in most of their current ecosystems, designed for the 20th century. The rapid shifts towards the new triggers of innovation based on the underlying technology of AI, Blockchain, cloud, and cognitive computing, data analytics and the prevalence of IoT, are all changing innovation dramatically.

Deloitte had a report or survey that came out on 29th January 2019 called “Innovation in Europe“. It offers some excellent insights on the state of innovation but I loved their Executive Summary opening:

In many ways this sums Europe up. The issue what can be done about it?

Deloitte asked the question “what triggers innovation in your company?”

This list is universal in its challenges and recognition. Europe today is trapped in not fully recognizing and embracing technology, they do lack the “innovation dynamism effect” but they do recognize the triggers they need to respond too.

My view is they have not really tackled these from an innovation solution perspective, they just know them. The World Economic Forum in a report called Innovate Europe: Competing for Global Innovation Leadership rightly point the point “that in Europe they still have not identified Europe’s innovation model to compete with other pioneering regions“.

The problem in Europe is we are not facing up to Six of the Nine shown above. This is why I’m in the bleak camp. We know them but we are not resolving them

The three “taken care of” are our focus on cost efficiency, the fixation in the change in regulations and government incentives. As those three are imposed at levels so disconnected from the competitive forces at work globally, they are focused on, drawing away the forces needed to really tackle the more important value creating ones on this list.

The other six are where our troubles begin in Europe.

We focus on internal markets in Europe and mostly fail to make a more global connection. We know where we need to go but here in Europe can’t seem to translate these into the winning business models that are needed.

There is plenty of counter-arguments with this Deloitte report, they claim many assessments of Europe’s present position are excessively bleak. I sadly am still in the “bleak” camp but will come out and fight for the possibilities, as I believe there is a real future, if only we really can leapfrog and see many of the connecting points needed for this future.

My view is Europe will not progress and really compete without something radically happening.

The World Economic Forum in a report called “Innovate Europe: Competing for Global Innovation Leadership“ rightly point the point “that in Europe they still have not identified Europe’s innovation model to compete with other pioneering regions”. They are not in Europe overcoming the challenges,  as we continue to see Europe remains highly fragmented, firstly to complete the single market but with so much uneven investment in Innovation and digital solutions, it will remain a real laggard unless something changes.

I, for one, do not think any completing of a single market as being pursued in Brussels will make Europe competitive. The task is far too complex and counter-intuitive to Europe’s history.

What Deloitte’s Executive summary points out that there is still hope for Europe:

They (Deloitte) did present some positive thinking from their survey of 760 European companies in 16 European countries,. across 20 major business fields. These were top line and mostly give some hope but these need a very different “collective” whole and a greater dedicated push. Unfortuneatlythe issues have been identified but are they being worked upon, with the energy and force they should be?

• Innovation is a strategic priority – 88 percent want to increase budgets over the next two years.
• Technology is the main trigger for innovation in Europe. Ninety-two percent of businesses across Europe see advances in new technologies as the primary trigger behind innovation with new consumer expectations (86 percent) as the second most important.
•  Advanced technologies are not expected to destroy jobs.  Most companies (41 percent) expect full-time headcount to increase, while 29 percent expect it to remain the same
• Investment in data analytics and cloud computing is already advanced. Investments in data analytics (69 percent) and cloud computing (62 percent) are already well advanced, with another 26 percent of firms expecting to invest in data analytics in the next two years, and 29 percent in cloud computing. Artificial intelligence (AI) (43 percent), augmented and virtual reality (38 percent) and robotic process automation (RPA) (36 percent) will also be areas of focus over the next two years.
• Ecosystem innovation is not fully embraced by European companies. European companies do not seem to embrace the role of clusters and networks in dynamic innovation. The potential for collaboration with external partners to share knowledge, stay abreast of developments, expand market reach and provide complementary expertise appears underutilized
•  The biggest hurdles to innovation are cultural – and resistance to change is high. Cultural resistance is identified as the main obstacle to fostering innovation by 32 percent of companies. In addition, data security is seen as inhibiting data-driven innovation (30 percent).

So Deloitte’s summaries their report with the following – Innovation is far from dead in Europe.

There is no denying that Europe is feeling competitive pressure. European companies face the need to undertake substantial investment in digital infrastructure. They conclude the continent is neither poorly positioned nor lacks confidence in its ability to compete.

Do I see it differently?

There are a lot of clues within the Deloitte report that makes me feel Europe is missing the future as they are stuck in the traditional ways to innovate. Take a look at this visual from the Deloitte report. What is wrong and missing?

So at first glance, you think well these types of innovation being pursued is not wrong……..but they are.

They are primarily islands of pursuit. The value in the model is not in their individual pursuit it is finding new business models of growth by investing in as many combinations as possible, to explore and build innovation around. Innovation today is about multiples of combinations, not one rigid innovation approaches. It is not one business model it is about “multiple pursuits”.

We need flexibility, agility, rapid reaction and (real-time) understanding to deliver back what is needed in quicker ways, at a pace and intensity and capable of scaling when the market reacts in positive ways I still feel we focus on discreet pockets of innovation and never seek out ways to combine them in radical ways.

Let’s take the “classic” Doblin ten types of innovation. It is not the pursuit of one, the combination of two or three, it is seeking out innovation across all ten simultaneously and in constant making multiple combinations to extend your business model and options.

We MUST leverage all our assets, not just within one company but across an ecosystem of partners. Europe is very reluctant to embrace more collaborative partnerships, use platforms to exchange upon and build ecosystems to capture and leverage all the knowledge out there.

We need to really push open innovation through the use of this digital technology we have at our disposal. We need to learn how platforms will work for each of us, we need to understand ecosystems principles and its management, we need to work through open and collaborate in imaginative ways.

Then there is the notion of cross-sector innovation, one that can be realized through digital collaborations. Where is the engagement with start-ups, with Universities, these are still grossly undervalued and utilized in Europe Venturing is a powerful catalyst, not just for the start-up but for the large organizations yet Europe struggles to be offering new capital, it is constantly supporting old capital, why? We continue to lag other parts of the world in funding innovation as we are locked into a model of compromise to satisfy the uneven state of innovation development. Europe is channeling its capital to support those who are lagging, as against accelerating those that can seize the opportunity.

In Europe, we are around 50% of the US on digital ICT. We are struggling to embrace Big Data, we are piloting Robotics mostly, we are exploring far more tentatively than other regions of the world advanced neuronal machine learning, the effective use of AI tools, exploring algorithms and pushing outsmart workflows, cognitive agents, language processing (In Europe please).

Lastly here, Europe is still caught up in responding, as it is in a lagging position. We mimic competition or crave for it but cannot find that necessary appetite to understand how to compete in new digital and business models. Europe holds much back due to its regulations, its propensity to interfere or impose for the good of the greater community. Something really has to change. Where are those innovation sandboxes for experimentation, for supporting their evolution? So much gets caught up in internal fights and squabbles, in regulation or oversight.

We lack a vision in Europe that gives belief yet “we” have it in us.

The Brits have said “enough” and even as they leave the party in the same way as they entered it, reluctant and full of questioning, they might actually seize this European void on Innovation and Digital as they are chasing and investing. Maybe not in the same levels as China or the United States. Why? Well, the share of digitization potential realized by all countries is all to play for. The digitalization share in the US is 18%, the UK 17%, and Europe as a block 12%. So as the Brits seem set to leave, the Europeans have lost one of the leading powerhouses of innovation and digitalization.

Out of the top four in Europe, two seem to be at logger’s heads with the powers in Brussels, Switzerland and the UK. Others will follow unless Europe can find there own distinctive innovation model, based on digital technology enablers and solve so many of the internal problems bedeviling Europe.

The biggest challenge is getting identification and belief back into the people of Europe. Innovation for one, stands no chance within belief. All I hope is it does but on many days I am not optimistic. let’s say just perhaps hopeful.

Europe has its strengths, we need to learn to accelerate not pull back. We need to grasp the very essence of innovation, to explore and exploit experiments and breaking opportunities and bring back that sense of vibrancy, embracing the global forces at work to shape them, not constantly be defensive, adapting to outside influences.

The post Defending Europe, including the Brits, on innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

You can surround legacy but it diverts so much “spent energy”, it becomes the critical impediment to making that real change you so urgently require to compete in today’s’ world. We still struggle with resolving legacy in our systems, processes, factories so we lose the ability to really advance and gain true connectivity.

Why do I worry so much about legacy?  The more we hang on to legacies within our companies, the more we hold up the vital changes we need to manage in the 21st century.

Can you imagine how hard legacy systems are hard to replace? They make up vital business processes that were designed years ago but not for the technology onslaught  we are witnessing today or see in the future. They were designed on outdated technologies, designed in a world where data was recorded perhaps but not stored nor mined 24 x 7.

So much we have in place today, in our factories, in our processes, systems and ways of working have strong roots built up from individual moments of time, from decisions made that considered what was good for your one organization. They become standardized over time, they grew and they were seen as safe and secure because they were all internal. They did not need to become connected up beyond a specific need to achieve. These systems evolved slowly over time but were not designed for the world of the “Internet of Things”

The old era needs to give way to the new one of being completely connected

Systems such as ERP, CRM, and PLM were ours to evolve to meet our needs and pockets. Today we live in a completely different world. We combine the virtual world of data with the physical world of “things” and want to distribute, share, exchange, monitor in more “real time” and open ways with many others. Connections have moved out of being part of an assembly line but part of the need to connect up digital factories globally so the supply and demand get more closely aligned to react, exploit and capitalize on business opportunities.

The world of visualization, data analysis, and more holistic insights rules so we can optimize processes, utilize them in far more flexible, responsive ways and gain increased performance. That applies to our assets and our design and innovating capabilities. Speed and awareness are critical for us to react and respond, to take full advantage of “breaking” market opportunities. Data brings the potential for understanding and to achieve this we need to connect everything and every person up, to leverage this. The legacies that surround us are simply stopping that “optimizing” we so need today.

We have legacy systems that still hold far more critical day to day activities than we care to admit. We operate with legacy software that is highly vulnerable, written in another era where Cybersecurity was not appreciated or “attacks” on the system were not daily in seeking out weakness. Yet they still exist, still forming a culture of dependencies not wanted to be faced up too, as they are too hard, expensive and complicated to migrate.

Lastly here, they have such limited ability to adapt to change and drag down performance when you are at the point of time when you need to improve performance as your competitive landscape seems more threatened than ever.

I add this in here as it nicely summarizes the legacy issue in applications, those “ancient technologies” hindering us

We add more maintenance and support, just to keep them going. We often can’t push them, the business becomes dependant on them and is forced to adapt. Legacy systems have greater difficulty to integrate over time with new technologies. We spend more time on compliance. Old systems have greater vulnerability and are increasingly becomes the highest point of security breaches. Old code is becoming more compromised the longer we take the path of supporting the old and not replacing it with more resilient systems, more adaptable codes that can evolve.

Then just think of the increasing poor response times, the loss of not connecting up the customer touch points across your business, the growing loss of business opportunity as you do not have insight, based on bringing the complete picture into the one point of view, you keep silo’s of knowledge that risks fragmentation and incomplete understanding.

Not fully addressing the need to change actually does lead to poor decision making or the growing inability to tailor solutions to real needs not only knowing some or none of the real needs, from lack of a complete data picture. If we cannot connect up we lose the business opportunity and fresh insights. Then the last in a long list of legacy problems we never achieve the potential of organizational agility and efficiency. We constantly sub-optimize

Then we have the other types of legacy.

Enterprises that look well-run suddenly stubble or push their existing position a step too far. They allow bureaucracy to take over, they lose that entrepreneurial spark. They become arrogant rejecting younger thinking or simply alternative thinking believing their business model is the only one. The executives at the top or near enough to wait and “fill” others shoes stop pushing, they prefer safety first. Then we get the poor planning and thinking hard about “greater” consequences, we make the constant call of shareholder return on shorter and shorter time horizons keeping within the promise of delivering what we said, allowing performance to match this, we just don’t push anymore.

Those of us looking harder from the outside can spot the company is becoming less attractive to work for, the talent within starts to drift away and as those inside don’t push like they use too, skills and resource development sort of ossifies.

Usefulness is traded off constantly

We begin to see some of the traps Clayton Christensen wrote about in his “Innovators Dilemma” and follow-up books. The theory of disruptions raises itself. We get locked in the sustaining environment and not seeking out the positions that disrupt ourselves and push through all the challenges of legacy, those new forces at work, embracing new technologies and really attacking what we have, so as to equip ourselves in future looking ways.

The hard decisions to make radical changes gets caught. So often within legacy decisions, we have two choices. When we have the real need to replace the underlying infrastructure or technology the decisions become hard. You so often get caught inputting this off, you ‘dampen’ the compelling need to change and keep adding new additions to the existing system, adding even more complexity into the legacy problem. On the other hand the need for such a compelling business transformation then we see two pathways.

There are core legacy systems and non-core and we can manage them differently.

The core ones require migration at scale, performance, and managing often wicked and complex thinking through. They call for very well-thought-through planning and execution. I don’t want to go specifically there for this post but these are the real constraints on the business as discussed earlier

Then you have the non-core legacy. There is some good news here. Non-core systems today can be undertaken at the departmental level, and can “gather” business enablement, more local governance, and rules to be managed and designed and undertaken to make incremental to distinctive improvements.

Customer Engagement Apps are a good point in case. The movement to applying low-code solutions can bridge much. They tend to be built not on feeding the old system but sitting more in the cloud that can draw up required data, recombined and shared in ways that relate far more to “specific” applications and given functional needs. They become mission critical to tackling (near) real-time needs as they are built in radically different ways and offer a far greater engagement.

That need for customer engagement is actually in designing solutions that have the users involved by applying their user-centric understanding and work with design thinking environments alongside the application code writers. They work alongside each other, not one waiting for the other, then sending it back as poorly understood. The enablement of the business in the designs to ensure app usability serves the purpose is making legacy problems reduce down.

Applying the three horizons to legacy systems

We can begin to apply the three horizons thinking to legacy complexity.

If “we” all accept rapid disruption and speed of new solution deployment go hand in hand, then legacy becomes even more compelling to tackle. Perhaps we can apply the three horizons to legacy as well?

• Horizon one we can map out a plan to upgrade where it is possible. My example of low-code and discreet business functions works here.
• Horizon two is connecting the present with the future. The need to migrate the past, into the present to prepare for the future needs specifically tackling in this three horizon dialogue mapping. How, with what, the needs (resources, time, protecting and exploring)
• Then in horizon three, we build new systems, taking leading-edge technology or solutions and give the necessary assessment and exploiting confidence into practice. We experiment with overcoming legacy in contained situations to learn and inform, to then bring these back into horizon one

We are applying the basic principles of stretching in horizon one, building out bridges of understanding and solutions from the old to the new in horizon two and in horizon three, gaining insights and confidence to take legacy away in leading-edge thinking and development.

We need to always achieve top management attention to “enact” change and gain critical support. Knowing we have this support pushes us in our goals, performance and being judged. Using the three horizons to engage, to discuss the impact, and risk, on the changes within our legacy issues, helps the critical discussions we need to have around legacy. A framework like the three horizons provides a common point of understanding.

The failure to address our legacy issues

If we fail to address our legacy and not find solutions that can overcome the design flaw of equipment or systems that were not designed to communicate or be integrated; designed for a different era. A new era that connects all the necessary devices and systems, operating in more open environments so they can exchange and exploit opportunities in multiple ways.

Today we need to have connectivity, flexibility, scalability, in cost-effective ways to provide overall benefits to the enterprise not to a discreet department or a fixed time need as that was our calendar of (predictable) events. We live in a world full of unpredictability, the world of VUCA, used to describe situations or environments that engender high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Being isolated means we are more vulnerable, being connected we can become more responsive. Legacy blocks this need for reaction, it denies us complete “line-of-sight”.

Why do we hold onto our legacy? Multiple reasons, sunk-costs, over-reliance, dependencies, fear of change. The list goes on but the significant roadblock of the legacy that surrounds us blocks us to fully participate in the connected world. Future-forward needs can never be realized, apart from being at higher costs, impacting profitability and diminishing competitiveness.

Everything slows down the longer we wait.

As other accelerate, respond and speed up, we try to follow. Our best knowledge and insights elude us. Innovation suffers, designs are caught up in workarounds and we trade off what the market wants or customers desire, and then offer solutions hobbled by the legacy that stays stubbornly resisting change and not allowing us seeking out a more complete picture. We can’t afford this, we must address it

In a current climate where the world economy seems to be slowing down, we will look yet again to extend the life of our plant, processes, and systems. We begin to put off new investment, perhaps it is the best time to address legacy not continue to push it into the future as we do need to vigorously address this legacy issue, wherever it resides.

If we can’t connect up to yield today’s critical need of “connected understanding” from having data flowing into a fully connected enterprise, we will fall further behind. We need to keep pace, position ourselves so as to leverage our competitive position alongside others, to scale to new, more complex challenges with its greater insights and growth potential. We must tackle legacy across our whole enterprise as a matter of urgency.

The post Legacy is all around us. Innovation and insights suffer greatly first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

An innovation value proposition (IVP) is not the easiest place to go. It must build meaning and purpose and provide that unique identity that enables innovation to flow. Building your innovation value proposition is critical to your innovation success.Value propositions are essential always in my opinion, innovation is no different.

Thinking about my own identification with the IVP took me back to when I started out on my innovation journey 18 years ago. That now seems like ages ago, and a lot has changed in how we manage innovation since then. But, strangely enough, a lot has also stayed the same – especially the fact that delivering good innovation is hard work.

Yet, the one thing I firmly believe reduces the “pain” comes back to how you design and relate to your value proposition – your meaning of what innovation needs to do.

Understanding the innovation value proposition

Back in 2003, I came across a two-page document written by a U.S.-based consulting firm, called Macroinnovation Associates. Though the company seems no longer around today, back when I was beginning to switch my focus to advising, consulting, and learning about innovation, their innovation value proposition struck me as excellent. I kept it, shaped it to my own emerging thinking, and it still has as much value today as it did 15 years ago. Some of its parts may have fallen away or need rephrasing, but its basic frame holds good. I will expand on those later.

The other important part of my learning about value propositions comes back to its critical focal point in the Business Model Canvas, conceived by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (and the basis of HYPE’s Collaborative Innovation Canvas). I found the idea of a one-page business canvas brilliant.

This sought out of our thinking “to describe the bundle of products and services that create value for a specific customer segment.” Osterwalder and Pigneur argue that the value proposition is the reason why customers turn to one company over another. They suggest that the value proposition “is an aggregation or bundle of benefits that a company offers customers.” It creates value “through a distinct mix of elements catering to that segment’s needs.” That value can be quantitative (e.g., price, speed of service) or qualitative (e.g., design, customer experience).

Osterwalder and Pigneur further teamed up with other writers to generate the book “Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want,” which explores the value proposition in a highly structured way and explains how to write a business model. The book opens with three messages that will resonate with anyone who has given thought to a value proposition. These are:

1. Understand the patterns of value creation
2. Leverage the experience and skills of your team
3. Avoid wasting time with ideas that won’t work

These three points ring equally true for innovation.

Four parts to consider when building your value proposition

There is a lot of advice out there that deals with value propositions, but there’s not as much that focus on innovation value propositions.

The starting point in designing an IVP is “what will bring it to life?” Does it reflect the mission? Does it “paint” the innovation initiative? Does it indicate where value creation lies? Well, all three and then some.

The IVP needs to state the most important point of “how it serves others.” That comes back to solving a problem, its relevance, its benefits, and its differentiation. If you can capture those four main aspects, you are shaping your IVP in a unique way.

An IVP also is a “statement of intent.” It is beginning to provide why your innovation needs to be compelling, to make it valuable to those that have a clear and vested interest.

This “vested interest” part is why the initial value proposition I came across in 2003 hit home. It sought to break down the IVP into four constituents that needed consideration, which include:

1. The Value Proposition to the Management and Staff
2. The Value Proposition to Shareholders
3. The Value Proposition to Customers
4. The Value Proposition to Other Stakeholders

So, tell me how often do we consider all four in their distinctive ways? Or do we tend to merge and blur these into one?

Let’s look at these four critical entities separately as your triggering points to build out in your specific meaning and validation.

There are four distinct groups to consider when you build an IVP, and each wants to see and hear differently. Take your time to separate out your IVP for each of these stakeholders. In separating these out, you are confirming each of these stakeholder groups is mutually reinforcing and being rewarded.

1. The Value Proposition to Management and Staff

• Improves the rate and quality of innovation: to detect problems and opportunities and to address them effectively
• Enables earlier and more thorough detection of problems and opportunities: so early responses reflect the continually changing environment to capture ground-breaking valuable additions
• Expands the range of business solutions available to management: through diversity, seeking out worldview perspectives and how to translate these
• Enhances the quality of inventive thinking: share entitlements to innovations with employees
• Raises employee satisfaction and morale: all employees need to be actively engaged in organizational learning
• Leads to richer “communities of communities”: communities are essential to learning and innovation in a firm
• Amplifies knowledge sharing and integration: by focusing on the policies and programs for knowledge sharing
• Results in “sustainable innovation”: supports, strengthens, and reinforces the self-organizing tendencies of organizations to innovate in their own endemic ways

2. The Value Proposition to Shareholders

• Enhances the quality of information about a company’s operations: the “open enterprise” approach
• Lowers risk in investments: decisions are more open to scrutiny from stakeholders
• Improves financial performance: enhanced capacity to detect and solve problems and opportunities
• Increases the value of intellectual capital: the social capacity to learn and innovate is the most valuable form, building a company’s intangible “assets”

3. The Value Proposition to Customers

• Advances the quality of fit between a supplier and its customer: responding to individual expressions of customer demand, thereby increasing the value and fit of their offerings – and themselves – to their customers
• Lowers risk to the customer: the risk of disruption can be mitigated by choosing to do business with suppliers whose operating environments are “open” and innovative

4. The Value Proposition to Other Stakeholders

• Enhances the quality of relationships with trading partners: for all of the same reasons as customers
• Reduces risk of irresponsible social behaviors by companies: in broader social responsibility efforts and in the conduct of business affairs

Now, imagine this was written in 2002 or thereabouts. Taking my thinking into these does it not hold true for today? Or maybe even more so? It establishes dialogue and openness.

If we can build out our IVP on these value-adding parts, we are making a compelling statement of innovation’s contribution. Can you see why I liked this and often refer to its ideals? I think the customer value-adding can be built out in stronger, value-adding ways for example, same as we can build our intent into each of these.

Also, as you reflect, you can perhaps make it more personal and more compelling to project out your innovation ambition.

Over time, I took the concept of innovation value propositions into my consulting work. I was looking to turn the need to convert IVPs into new business results by promoting the meaning (to the client) on the following positioning:

Innovation services consulting – additional value proposition statements that drive a value proposition to arrive at a bundle of benefits.

I used the below as my triggering points for opening discussions.

Building a more effective innovation transformation system, which:

• Leads to higher conversion rates
• Increases business volume throughput
• Improves business quality and evaluation techniques
• Uncovers the unmet needs of customers (clients become marketing resources)
• Enhances perception of professionalism in the marketplace and by other stakeholders

Achieving a higher integrated development program for innovation, which:

• Allows individuals to develop at their own pace but in structured ways
• Increases workforce effectiveness and engagement
• Links competency with rewards/recognition
• Provides empowered career paths due to higher motivation and identification
• Integrates strategy, vision, and governance within embedded practices
• Offers greater value from your business process, systems, and their design

Searching for and building a robust management evaluation toolset, which:

• Generates on focused customer needs (data mining/management)
• Explores priority analysis (individual/grouped/clustering)
• Promotes developmental analysis (benchmarking and best practices)
• Improves strategic forecasting/planning and alignment capability
• Advances resource management capabilities
• Enhances internal mechanisms (resources/business transactions)

Establishing the levers for a motivated workforce focused on innovation, which:

• Seeks out and resolves concerns with clear adoption techniques
• Emphasizes organizational and team focus
• Stimulates individuals’ desire to participate and share
• Evaluates candidate capabilities (attitude, reasoning, and learning capacity)
• Reduces organizational “risk” with improving profiles and learning experiences

Then, I wanted to force the IVP thinking even more to explore the “differentiation” points of seeking competitive advantage.

Amplifying the value proposition (and rethinking it every 12 months)

Delivering a set of innovative solutions in these changing market environments needs to focus on your resources to provide you with clear freshness on a constantly-updated basis. Markets don’t stand still, nor do competitors. We are constantly “disrupted,” so any future innovation results need to lead to significant competitive advantage within your offerings. You and your firm should also evaluate your IVP every 12 months by asking the questions below.

How can we…

Increase operational effectiveness (channeling your resource management)?

• Build more effective and systematic management frameworks to grow a more adaptable, flexible business
• Improve the rate and quality of our innovation
• Gain an early warning system of detection to stop or accelerate opportunities
• Create a robust innovation process that moves concepts to market faster

Achieve greater people retention and productivity returns (focused more on outcomes and needs)?

• Grow the use of networks and knowledge necessary for value creation
• Encourage a more engaged and motivated workforce wanting to innovate
• Foster confidence across self-forming, motivated teams
• Improve the quality of inventive thinking and knowledge exchanges

Drive innovation across the organization (through different tools and techniques)?

• Use the innovation integrated framework
• Define and align on the innovation choice cascading model
• Create a clear innovation process across all its stages
• Know the right evaluations to measure value and success

Provide a return on innovation (ROI)?

• Reduce costs through a better idea or project development structure
• Increase revenue by spotting new business opportunities, realizing new products/service in faster delivery, extending existing lifecycles
• Align goals and business objectives to intangible benefits that generate our make up of much of our innovation capital
• Build your intangible assets as the core capabilities to generate market advantage

I provided these points above to strengthen the innovation value proposition

Conclusion

Every day our innovation is being eroded. We must continually seek out new positioning, differences, and points of value – those new value pools that build and sustain our business.

By crafting a well-thought-through IVP for all its constituent parts, we are giving innovation a robust and dynamic framework to build out and point back as validation.

Building your innovation value proposition is critical. It forms a bedrock of your actions and your big picture of your innovation intent. We often must restate the value of innovation. If you work through some of the above suggestions, then those that “might doubt” will see the compelling value that makes innovation central to your company’s future. Innovation creates value, but it is by stating these value propositions in clear and highly visible ways that you are held to the “innovation flame.”

Get this right and innovation burns bright.

*** This post was first published through Hype. and is republished here.

The post I would recommend applying the Innovation Value Proposition first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Throughout the past couple of years, I have been constantly arguing about the need to put innovation management on a digital platform.

These have come in different thoughts on digital platforms, ready for cross-industry and having in place, a rapid digital innovation process that scales and evolves on new technology and insights.

We need a radical design, universal in design and approach.

What if you could manage your innovation in the ways shown in this diagram?

This is the way PLM innovation platforms are progressing and currently being assessed by CIMdata in a PLM Innovation Assessment Scorecard shown further below. Link to the position paper

The argument about what any innovation management system provides goes on and on and still, we seem not to be at the universal acceptance point that an innovation management process is critical and needs a better system of management.

What we should finally accept, a platform connects all users, both internally and externally in their ability to share their knowledge and information in exchanges, in one environment to cultivate collaborations and continuous collaborative creativity. The more we design and need to deliver smart, connected and innovative products the more we have this innovation platform need.

The majority of the present software providers fail to grasp this.

Those that do, grasping the incredible value of offering a digital innovation platform, will be, it seems, coming more from the Product Lifecycle Management perspective (PLM) where product design has always been complex. Those that don’t come from the old traditional thinking about innovation idea management or managing a single product portfolio. Both of these older solutions to managing innovation are approaches urgently requiring a radical change. Solutions should not come out of a box, loaded on your machine but readily accessible in a cloud environment built on a digital innovation platform design.

It is in recent years that the whole need to emphasize collaboration and constant ongoing exchanges become essential to speed up the response to customer needs and competitive advantage. This constant demand for improvement and digitally connected products is a constant “dynamic”, demanding ever-changing needs, additional tools, software updates, adoption of new technologies, and expects the constant change in how you manage your innovation environment differently. Innovation management, at present, stays in the last century.

The requirement has been growing around the understanding to make innovation work, we need to make sure our tools, people, information and departments of expertise all work in sync, increasing throughout the whole lifecycle, not just in ideation, or execution of a launch. Innovation today requires, no it actually demands, more connectivity to stand a chance of building (really) innovative solutions

The whole need is for functional domains (silo’s of knowledge) can work outside of their specific domain so others can link the information and knowledge up and apply the orchestration to bring this together in “better” products. We move from specific owners like marketing into organization engagement and enterprise ownership contribution.

Platforms perform really good jobs of making this enterprise engagement happens.

The platform becomes the conduit for connectivity, you begin to build a certain gravity in finding, securing and exploring data. You achieve a greater flow, you see traceability and configuration, you begin to evaluate iterations of design, you encourage openness. You make these platforms available, accessible and above all, provide a stable environment for all to appreciate end-to-end innovation lifecycle evolution.

So why don’t many software providers within innovation provide us this connectivity, so as to make sharing and accomplishing tasks easy? Most provide the tools to do this but they are often labored, manual, controlled for those that need them, not for all to see and participate.

We simply liberate connections on a platform.

Software providers want to sell licenses, that is the source of their gravity, of their measure of success. But gravity, in my view, comes from building compelling interfaces, designed to build positive experiences and collaborative efforts. Of course, designing software out of a box (many of today’s models) attempts this but “gravity” comes from making connections and offering great platforms in tools, connections, apps etc gives innovation management a whole new dimension, that software limited out of a box can’t. It keeps evolving and being dynamic.

Then we have this magic word of “flow”– the activity where innovation is fostered, encouraged and building momentum. It is understood today as the need to have interoperability, seamlessness, and traceability as the core of our solution needs. We know that the flow is essential to innovation. To make this gravity and flow to happen we need openness, in collaborations, in support, in continuingly improving our design systems to galvanize and connect innovation work.

Two platform authors Mark Bonchek and Sangeet Paul Choudary often talk of the building blocks of platforms and any platform success is built on this connection, gravity and flow thinking.

The other keys of a platform are its ability to scale. It can offer sustainability in being adaptive in interfaces and workflows, far more dynamic and evolving that solutions out of a box. They can be extended via constantly updated configuration than awaiting modification or updates on the next release or software upgrade you are forced to pay for. Then you have maintainability as it seeks to stay current, relevant and response as technology and application are evaluated and changed.

For me, I have become increasingly impressed with where the PLM providers are going.

One stands out for me in giving that significant focus on innovation management, not just product is Aras.

Now Aras I have written about before (herein “Can We have one of These- A product Innovation platform?“) as they are laying out their PLM product innovation platform so it is open, flexible, scalable and upgradeable powered by digital solutions.

Specifically, and interestingly, Aras has no upfront software licensing fee’s, enabling the ability to seek out as low as the possible total cost of ownership, company-wide, not restricted to a few. This challenges most of the conventional business models of upfront license models currently offered by Innovation software providers.

Aras provides a range of services that sit on the platform allows for dynamic workflows, plenty of visual collaborations, reporting all in different variants to fit your (entire) business, not one specific part, choosing separate solutions.

This is the present assessment of Aras and its platform score for its product innovation platform assessment

I keep hoping Aras recognize innovation is not just emerging from those older CAD days, or limited to certain industries that needed heavier industrial engineering solutions, but able to grasp the greater potential; to offer an innovation platform to everyone that needs one.  Innovation comes from everywhere and through the adoption of the Aras design, I believe can offer a total innovation management solution across the entire enterprise, irrespective of industry or service focus.

This visual shows the existing Aras PLM platform. It can be adapted to all of the innovation we undertake today, quickly and fairly well, if the value is seen and the parts needed to be added are made, especially relating to innovation deriving from marketing initiatives.

The significant advantage of having tools integration, integrated workflows for all to participate (R&D, Engineering, Marketing, Designers etc), to be able to track and trace the evolution of the product concept throughout its entire lifecycle. Also in having selective parts being able to be reused for a product family or variant design has significant time, and cost savings. You can minimize rework or build out from past work.

Can the present application overview of Aras be extended to incorporate all types of innovation that require collaboration, exchange and constant on-going evaluation?

In Summary

Can you imagine a fully integrated product design development for innovation management, one that enables global, cross-industry, an open collaborative approach built into the platform design? One that is still built on your rules and structure suitable to your task and vision, of what a product needs to achieve? One that is giving you the potential for not just the digital thread but higher levels of digital twin design to prototype, share and engage customers with, throughout a product and its service design. One that manages the entire end-to-end design to eventual market, how it evolved, was validated and update. Then why are we not screaming for this solution?

Tell me why we continue with a pen, paper, excel spreadsheets, silo’s of knowledge, dependency on opinion and not fact. Why do we keep restricting our innovation to move across our organizations due to limitations on software-out-of-a box or licenses as the go-to-market business model? Why are we not talking to the PLM providers, especially it seems to me, Atas, and getting some level of movement out of their traditional PLM box, into the innovation world? A world for all, to finally have the potential to connect up innovation across the whole enterprise and beyond?

The post Building the Single Innovation Digital Platform Environment first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I can honestly say, it never fully works out as the year progresses, there are distractions, subjects that attract my eye, hold my attention or simply ones become bigger in my wish to pursue as important to understand or become more focused upon.

Innovation is constantly shifting in customer needs and issues to absorb, relate too, build into our thinking, in a world where many within the business community are “time-starved, often knowledge poor” I look to help them on different innovation insights.

What about you? Here are my thoughts coming from 2018 that are leading me into 2019

Firstly in the year just closing I have been taking a look back at what I wrote about in 2018.Digital and innovation dominate.

On this site paul4innovating, I wrote 34 posts, a drop on past years, but increasingly with the shift into the constant integrating of digital into all things innovation, continuing as the emerging trend and theme, I seemed to spend the most time upon. On my other main site focusing specifically on ecosystems and platform related work, I wrote 25 posts.

Also in this year I began to put some fresh  life on two new posting sites, one focusing specifically on coaching and mentoring “guide4innovating” and the other “connecting digital and innovation” looking more at the critical part of digital and innovation that is forming most of my posting and researching work in recent months to break it out. My one other continues a very tortuous journey of building the dynamics when linked, become the connecting points in building innovation in the needed capacity, capability, and competence, that I term the pursuit of “innovation fitness dynamics“

Why do I run so many posting sites?

Some people just look at me, rolling their eyes until I explain that each has a specific innovation purpose or focal point that needs this separating out, as more specialized reference sites for the work I do, it is easier to “point” to these. Well, that’s my excuse! I post to deliver specific content and context that I want to inform.

They are simply clear “points of reference” specifically focusing on building blocks, based on my work focus.

So let me provide my leading posts in 2018 on  this site: www.paul4innovating.com

The stand-out posts were”Shifting our thinking within the 4th Industrial Revolution“, followed closely by  “The arrival and potential of Knowledge Graphs into our World”  then followed by Applying the Three Horizon Thinking to a Fresh Perspective of Innovation Design and close behind “A New Integrated Innovation Engagement System“

The one that consistently performed at or near the top, has been every single year since I published it in late 2010, eight full years of posting has been “The Three Horizon Approach to Innovation”

The one that disappointed me?

I had expected this to do as well as the others mentioned above.  “There are Known’s and Unknowns in Innovation”  For some reason it did not but this could be that it was published first over on another site, at Hype Innovation.

Then on my other main posting site www.ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com

The three most popular published this year were “The Emerging World of Connected Industrial Ecosystems” followed by “Platform Providers need to think more about Ecosystems Principles and Design” then“When is a partner not a partner?”

The one I was disappointed with as it did not get as many reads as I would have expected was “Defining Ecosystems in Industry” I really thought that offered a lot of insight into the developments of IIOT ecosystems and their platforms

So an interesting mix, I get the impression that innovation posts as stand-alone tend not to be as popular, they do need to be attached to something else (digital, platforms) or help sove a problem, offer a solution or otherwise they simply get caught up in the “mass” of these “helpful suggestions of useful lists” that are constantly coming out daily. Nothing wrong with those, they remain popular and I do a fair share if I feel I can add some new level of insight or help.

So as for 2019?

I have been contemplating a shift of tack. Again innovation runs through them all but it continues to be linked into the bigger picture and the power of technology and all things digital.

Here is my mind map as my starting point. Will I succeed in covering off all of these, actually should I? Let’s see.

Innovation is in a constant shift in emphasis, in placing it in context and the context-specific work that I am looking to post about to give better learning value. The value creation emphasis is critical anytime but I feel in my coming year of advisory, mentoring and coaching it will have an even more central place alongside the constant “Interplay” between digital and innovation as the dominant factors..

I can’t get away from the belief we are in a “new innovation era”. It runs through all of the different focal points outlined in the above mind map.

I certainly wish you, my reader, a really great 2019. It is going to be a very tough year, unrelenting in change and innovation pursuit.

So onto 2019. I wish everyone that does invest their time in reading my posts a really big thank you.

I would like to do, even more, invest more in my thinking about innovation but these themes, outlined above, come more from the work I undertake or look to advise upon, on behalf of others, or in pursuit of my own researching interest. I hope they offer you some level of interest.

I laid out my original blogging intent here and so are attempting to be laying out my agenda for 2019. With this, I have hoisted my innovation flag, laid out my themes and put that proverbial ‘stake’ in the ground on my posting intent for the coming year.

My best wishes for a successful, productive and great innovating year ahead of you in 2019.

The post Entering 2019 – What Do Each of Us Need to Focus Upon? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

If you are frustrated with your current innovation process then read on. If you are not, then simply “click away” and certainly my best wishes by ignoring a very changing innovation world that we are all undergoing.

The reality is we are all moving towards becoming “Digital Enterprises”. Digital transformation is deepening into an enterprise-wide movement. and is modernizing how companies work.

As these Digital Enterprises effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy, then it is clear that innovation certainly needs to be part of this but is it digitally ready? I think not. Much of the current innovation process you are currently working with is a Dinosaur, it should have disappeared long ago. Can we manage innovation the way many still are?

Innovation, in my view and many others, is rapidly becoming even more complex. Risks are actually rising not falling. Products continue not to meet customer needs in multiple ways. Without the “connected digital difference,” products are remaining limited in their appeal. Innovation is struggling to really perform and unleash breakthrough products due to many ‘inbuilt’ inhibitors. We need a radical redesign of the innovation process and that is becoming full connected up and have a distinct digital thread running through it. We need to think about complete digital innovation solutions in the future.

We are seeing many digitally aware organizations like Apple, Amazon, Salesforce all recognizing their future innovation is reliant on innovation and digital to be tied at the hip, wedded together in a design that builds towards satisfying customer needs. Applying technology application to innovation opportunities needs a platform thinking approach.

Embedded software is becoming more important in value than the physical product

Embedded software is becoming essential within products; from shoes, household appliances, cars, travel etc. The relevance of this innovation plus digital is not just for providing improved customer satisfaction in today’s market and its needs but allows for evolving these digital products for the future.

Future products are increasingly engaging the consumer as they evolve and respond to “data” and knowledge supplied back. It is evolving product solutions that can be more sustaining, delivering increased functionality, usability, and utility and offering greater value to all involved.

According to a past report  “Mastering Product Complexity” some time back from Roland Berger, the complexity of products more than doubled during 15 years and it continues to accelerate. In the quote from Roland Berger “complexity, manifests itself in the demand for a wider variety of specialized products across multiple manufacturing industries”

To deliver on this “digital innovation” without a doubt, the whole process of our innovation management has to be digitally connected up, to manage this from concept through to product end of life. It is evaluating across the full innovation value chain we can extract greater innovation. What is essential is a digital cohesion, not one that maintains our fractured, broken into parts and current innovation process.

As we connect up more, we are accessing the best sources of new business opportunities through gaining knowledge, discovering fresh insights and building increasing relevancy into our product solution understanding. We are in an ever-increasing engaged world of collaborators and customer feedbacks to build concept designs, test prototype reactions, investigate product use and explore customer satisfaction, all helping to improve product application and deliver closer to customer needs or provide evolution in innovation application.

Today we are poorly equipped to handle cross-discipline collaborations,

We do remain siloed on much within the innovation process, our knowledge often stays trapped, we can’t tap into expertise because it ‘remains’ invisible, we struggle to show progress as it is locked into manual processes, all requiring significant effort to be extracted.

If we see the need to change this, then through a digital transformation of the innovation process that works across the complete enterprise needs to be found and put into place. Innovation cannot afford to be excluded from being part of the “digital enterprise” we are moving towards, yet it needs specific solutions for this to happen. We do not offer solutions that achieve a complete solution, we still have a broken innovation system where discreet parts fail to talk to other parts.

We need to think this new digital innovation structure to have both internal disciplines in solutions but also designed for extended enterprise collaborations so “ecosystems of innovations” can finally take hold.

Do the PLM providers hold the innovation key?

At present, the best solution available to deliver a complete, inter-connected innovation process or system seems to be lying in the hands of the product lifecycle players under PLM. Siemens, Dassault, PTC, and a very fast growing Aras. They are talking innovation platforms, even digital platforms but are locked into the legacy mindset of PLM systems that are highly focused on mechanical design. They are struggling themselves to shrug this engineer only mindset off, for one that is thinking broadly, in new ways of complete product systems of hardware. software and mechanical, electrical, and all component parts of a finished product design.

These PLM providers rightly on traditional ‘heavy’ industries like Cars, Plant Design, Complex Products such as Turbines, Electrical Plant, Assembly Lines or Aeroplane designs or manufacturing specific. They are grappling with their legacy of CAD and CAE software and the software tools built up for years. Can we get them to think differently? Can we get them to re-think innovation in a broader domain for all innovation development work?

Why I feel PLM offers the way forward is they are fully aware of much within innovation language and understanding. They work consistently around the concept of complete systems from concept to final design, incorporating the product from all its hardware, software, design capabilities. They are well advanced in the increasing value of visualization (for design improvements, prototyping) and simulation (for testing and assumption management). They are comfortable with assessing risk, knowing the need to build in as much collaboration as possible. It is only in recent years the whole PLM process has gained this digital thread running throughout all. PLM is being transformed and offers the present digital innovation thread that all that innovation is requiring.

They can and do have connected design across R&D, Manufacturing, Developers and commercialization teams and well equipped to deliver smarter, connected products that can be further designed or enhanced for extended life by exploring material design and component fit.

Taking PLM as we know it out of the engineering domain and opening it up to all of innovation activities and needs is certainly a “Sea change” for them so this would happen. The point for me is that the approach of PLM solution providers, is they are steeped in innovation understanding for many essential and significant aspects.

PLM solution providers might offer the best bet for solving the need for providing a complete innovation system that is designed for all innovation needs, not just in specialised manufacturing industries but by offering solutions that have a capability for managing complexity as well as provide (stripped down) versions for many others that do not have the same design or concept delivery needs but require an integrated process that sits on a platform for allowing it to flow and connect all involved. That can only happen in a digital innovation platform in my opinion.

The stand-alone world of ‘Just’ product is rapidly declining

In a new world where software is often defining the product, there is a reversal taking place from our old worlds of the product alone into a software and product one. We do need to manage products far more across the full product lifecycle as we need to be more consciously “sustainable”.

We are seeing more and more possibilities with the use and application of “digital twins”. To achieve this transformation requires us to go digital within innovation. We need a clear, well designed digital thread running through all our innovation processes. It needs an enterprise-wide foundation. To achieve scale becomes more likely if we have our innovation concepts captured, modeled and designed through being fully digital in the innovation process. This gives us a better scope for scale, for exploration of alternatives, for collaboration and faster adaptation as market conditions constantly change.

Yet to achieve this we must overhaul our existing innovation systems and processes.

We do need a more system engineering approach as our products become increasingly complex. We are being pushed to have far more extended lifecycle responsibilities in our end solutions and in our design, build, service and operating stages we have greater potential to achieve this.  Through the digital capture, we can have our innovation digitally mapped, modeled and having in place a clear “system of record” for any design, so we can have a roadmap of design decisions and validation points and the established basis for building out further, due to these digital captured activities.

We have long moved beyond the “simpler era” in innovation Yet we still operate significant legacy in systems, in our thinking on the approaches we take for innovation. Much today is unconnected, inefficient, not visible, unable to provide a cross-collaborating environment inside our enterprise, let alone connected up to other enterprises. We have far from secure closed-loop systems and usually rely on a consistent manual intervention and lack often the serious impetus to push for progress. Too much innovation, god concepts, die inside an Enterprise for the wrong reasons of poor judgment, lack of knowledge or sufficient weight of evidence.

So we do need to ask ourselves and question our present innovation processes?

How can we evolve within ourselves when we are keeping our systems and processes “static” in design, still operating on spreadsheets, through emails, shared files that often do not ‘speak’ to each other, or capable for sharing across multiple enterprises systems as they are digitally captured, in common language?

In our current fragmentation process, we continue to “promote” gaps in knowledge, understanding and restrict learning. We need a “dynamic” environment, digitally connected that flows and connects, one that is visible to all, to contribute into.

We do need to move our rather tired innovation needle, it is truly stuck in the past.

Where will it function if we continue to manage innovation in our present ways across the emerging Digital Enterprise, without being radically altered and given a 21st-century digital solution? One that forces new designs, different innovation strategies, through technological solutions that can accelerate new business opportunities and perhaps radically new business models.

Smart connected products that through digitalization can shorten time to market, increase flexibility, improve flexibility and utility, increase our efficiencies, offer the possibilities of new business models and work towards proving the environment for increased security and protection of IP, product design and counter cyber-attacks as we add increasing software to our products.

No, there is a compelling reason to make innovation fully digital. Who can take on this challenge?

So how can we set about to build an extended digital innovation enterprise system? It needs someone to see the opportunity and seize the initiative. Can a Siemens, PTC, Dassault or Aris see the bigger innovation picture or financial pie in the potential returns and engagement? Each is growing as they embrace digital and innovation. Of the four of these, I would put PTC or Aris as the ones that have the entrepreneurial flair and independence of thought, to consider this. They both have the ambition to evaluate this as a valuable addition, by capitalizing on building this broader innovation process opportunity. It surely should be valuable to consider? As for Siemens or Dassault, it is harder to see as they are more specific in their business focus of supporting their own business entities and solutions. It might be hard for them to “look beyond”

I just presently cannot see the existing solution providers of idea management or product portfolio management have the “appetite” for this. Most have failed to evolve, many have actually retreated into being more specialized as crowdsourcing platform providers The financial investment, belief and understanding, a lack and depth of resource to deliver on this. They are all far too small, caught in their own legacy business model system, many still stuck often in the fixation of selling simply more licenses. They do, in my view, miss the bigger picture or opportunity

Can Oracle or SAP be able to step up on this? In theory, the answer is yes but so far they have made a real “hash” of their innovative solution offerings. I would like to see them shift their thinking, perhaps understand innovation beyond their own “nose” or past perspective, ones of just “extracting intelligence” or “fitting innovation into the supply chain” as the thrust of their solutions. I presently doubt either have the capabilities to realize this as they presently simply cannot see it or not motivated to think differently, a pity. No, if anyone has the “credentials” it lies within the PLM players, such as PTC or Aris.

Innovation Management and its process needs to come of age, not stuck in the past.

It can be transformed by lifting our thinking, connecting the technology that is available out there and delivers a digital innovation solution.   Are any of the providers of innovation solutions really listening or prepared to be more radical in their offering? Or are they “wedded” to their own mindset of legacy PLM thinking, mostly manufacturing orientation through the engineering culture this requires or marketing driven, reliant on brainstorming ideas and crowdsourcing as their belief this is innovation?

The post The Need for Digital Innovation Platforms first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have often been returning to scaling, struggling with finding the best answers. Many organizations struggle with scaling. This can be scaling their organization, their capabilities or more often, taking an idea into a fully scaled delivery.

Maybe I have been looking at it all wrong?

The complexities of scaling can’t be lightly dismissed. You need very often, size to scale. This could be in a new plant, in where production should be situated, so it can be allowed to scale at a later date, in resources able to achieve scale or more importantly you scale according to the type of goods or demand so they can be readily available, closer to the market they are needed.

When you work in a global organization, scale takes on even greater set of dimensions, one that needs coordinating and managing.

So I was thinking through some points on scaling a little differently. They are partly ‘open questions’ or some thinking out loud. You can say they are “half-baked”, perhaps in more than one way!

Can we make scaling up more systematic? I know that a good colleague and friend of mine, Ralph-Christian Ohr spends significant time on this to crack. He is a joint facilitator to “Scaling-up: From Corporate Startup to Business Impact” along with Frank Mattes. You can follow their work over on innovation-3,  where they help companies to set the Scaling-Up of a fully validated innovation concept up for success.

I am thinking scale differently here, So let me explore this, it is only emerging for me. I have found much on scaling-up as specific to a certain point of need, such as a startup to a new business outcome. Can we think of scaling-up differently?

So a series of questions first.

Are we placing the emphasis of “scaling-up” too far down the delivery chain? Should “scaling” be broken down and modernized? Can we scale-up firstly in the digital world and then take this into the physical world. I am questioning scaling-up and much of this might be simply mumble jumble or is it? So some of my opening thoughts and I will also want to come back to this at a later time.

When we decide to scale

As we scale and become more outward in chasing global trade, issues move from being simply complicated to be far more complex. Past experience can be enough to assist complicated but complex becomes more problematical as it is ambiguous, uncertain and presents a uniqueness in its challenges. Scaling-up does have the potential of opening up new places to play, or the dark holes many of us often fall down into. Getting scaling right is hard and having it available at the right time even harder. How can we reverse engineer scaling up to reduce complexity?

This growing uncertainty we face in the world that has become (overly) reliant on the continuance of open borders, will add to our scaling up dilemmas. We are seeing risk management become increasingly important in any assessment on where, how and why we need to scale-up and more importantly when. This growing complexity to manage is increasingly moving organizations towards the very traits innovation also requires. Those of dealing with greater ambiguity, of building in the needs of agility, higher levels of flexibility, curiosity and the willingness to explore and experiment, and take increasing risk.

Dealing in agility

For many, it is a very uncomfortable place to go, when they have invested millions in their supply chain. They naturally want to channel everything into their supply chain to optimize and utilize it. They have obtained high levels of visibility but in this pursuit of optimization traded off many levels of flexibility. Supply chains have become reliant on high levels of predictability. This reliability has been working well for the established organization, set up to extract maximum efficiency and effectiveness out of the investments they have made in predictable markets. Careers have been made previously on stability, exploitation, and extraction, not risk and exploration. Yet, what if this changes? Scale will be dealt with differently if unpredictable conditions come towards us.

Yet, as markets become increasingly uncertain, new competitors entering the markets with very different ways that they see the supply chain and delivering their solutions, will be better positioned to leverage on a more volatile set of market conditions. Emphasizing delivering on customer needs will be placing uncertainty back into the previously honed supply chain model or production model of many companies stuck in the old model of generating demand for their solutions, not those of the marketplace. The risk of being highly scaled is fast becoming a point of disruption for others. Scaling up needs a different lens than in the past perhaps.

The shedding of legacy can equally liberate innovation

Legacy, leadership, cultures, and processes, are inherited from the past industrial economy of standalone businesses, where the scale was achieved through mass production, tailored to the producer’s needs, of providing products that worked but not necessarily in alignment to the customer’s needs. That was fine when you had a limited choice available. There is a shift going on today.  Supply is exceeding demand and demand has simply become that, demanding. That is reversing part of the thinking towards scaling up, the consumer expects and demands a solution to their own specific problems, and organizations have to adjust accordingly.  This is where innovation comes into play. Supply has become more tailored and focused. It needs to be more agile and flexible. It is being forced back in the production process to meet rapidly changing demand. The scale has to respond accordingly.

To get supply closer to demand, you need to be closer to your ultimate consumer, in the market and through a more personalized, focused dialogue to shorten “the response to change,” to keep in pace with customer requirements. In many ways we need to scale-up understanding, the front end of innovation, drawing in the knowledge and insights quickly enough and then process these at speed to keep pace. Today scaling-up has a different point of resource emphasis, it is not so defined as the end point but more as “adaptive” scaling, at the appropriate point of need. We are shifting from applying standardization and searching for increasing flexibility. Scaling needs a more modular set of solutions.

So standardization is giving way to customization. Large-scale product runs are being adapted to meet more specific opportunities; response rates and customer engagement are being hugely advanced by technology and constant exploring the full customer journey with data and analytics helping the understanding. Hierarchy and delegation are flattening out and seeking engagement. The whole doing and thinking, is based far more on this dependency on growing real-time feedback and ongoing knowledge flows. Digital application throughout the organization to speed up understanding and provide visibility, where ever it is needed to shorten ‘response’ time.

The changes we are undergoing play towards innovation outcomes seen differently

Strategy today, is far more on grasping the essence of a constantly changing situation and equally on anticipating the future. It is forward looking not backward filled. A primary goal of growth requires innovation to be the catalyst to create the future. For this to happen we do need to recognize that innovation must become a greater instrument of strategy, far more central or core, in organization application and understanding. It is the best means of gaining a strategic advantage and often the basis of survival in how innovation creates, leading to new growth and profits.

So by us recognizing innovation as the means of gaining an advantage, we need to think more creatively on where and how we scale.

Unfortunately, innovation is primarily made up on “Knowns and Unknowns in Innovation: Let’s Manage Them Differently and much of the innovator’s job is to make these “known” as soon as possible. Any plan of future actions needs to be designed in different ways. We need more modular thinking and this is where scaling can be achieved differently. We are seeking emergence; this is the key.

Today we are struggling due to these legacies. We are attempting to scale out, often on a current path of decline, or organizational design; one that is too rigid, and static, and we chose to ignore many warning signals as the understanding is not well connected up. The route to new scaling needs to be built on a fluid design, dynamic and based on constant discovery so we can be in this ’emergent mode’ as quickly as we can, to translate this.

The value of the digital twin may offer some resolution to scaling up (of everything)?

The smaller the component to build, the quicker you can scale it and optimize it. In the age of the digital twin, we can build the virtual product by specifying and validating it, we can prototype it for increase verification and greater digital/physical engagement and interaction. Then we can go into a virtual production to simulate, to map product concepts out, to validate and begin to commission and structure the physical as you can provide better understanding, structure, and behavior your innovation concept will have increasingly “down the innovation concept/validation” process.

We are moving the front-end of design into a virtual one, more and more, to enable products and then eventual production to simulate, test and optimize concepts in a virtual world before it enters the real world. As we work in this digital twin world we continually gain new insights from concept designs, from customer feedback and then when it does enter the real physical world there is a well-established continuous loop of improvement.

We can design production, facilities and a host of other things through digital twins. I wrote “have you got your digital twin strategy sorted out yet? This thinking more holistically about how and where digital twins can be applied does make a significant contribution to thinking “scaling-up” accordingly in very digitally connected ways.

Scaling up comes from focusing on real points of value, these being optimizing, enhancing, digitalizing and streamlining, on a continuous basis and digital process design, might do this well. It is for me, the combinations we can achieve from engineering the innovation value chain through connectivity, through increasing intelligence and feedback, and by constantly validating this, by automating this innovation process of design in this digital (virtual) world, as well as in its physical one.

We need to build more into our front end to model different scenario’s so we can “scale” and ask “what if?” accordingly. We are surely building designs that by going through this digital /physical process that gives us flexible, are scalable and upgradable as the designs evolve. We then adapt our scale as we validate.

As put forward by some of the suppliers of PLM software, we do need to think far more about Product Innovation Platforms that offer enterprise-wide foundations to build and design the concept, to scaled out the solution. To achieve this we do need to creatively think where a digital twin can play their part, recognizing the digital thread that is occurring in all our future innovation activity. Going fully Digital offers us an evolutionary path if we choose to take it. It connects much more than we have connected today.

We must recognize “just” physical assets are actually less important, they are becoming increasingly dependant on digital being part of their offering, an increasingly valuable part, as more of our solution components are software related. It is in the software we have the potential to scale out in different ways, less in the physical assets that house them. The value of software giving outcomes and insights is increasing the value of the assets. The physical assets are the delivery mechanism, the host, and it is the value “extracted” from data that is rapidly giving the “return on investments”. So what should we be thinking about to “scale-up?”

Many “stand-alone” manufacturers would gain by considering platforms and joining forces in ecosystems that can design and share more complex solutions. This allows for a shared scaling up design. This fresh thinking of ecosystem design gives different scope, architecture, and capabilities. Having smart, connected products offers the ability to scale differently.

Innovations and Strategy need to be tested constantly in a different time and space.

Re-thinking design, applying digital solutions can provide the connecting mechanism to explore, relate and test assumptions, to relate your context to the higher level ones. You have brought back “scaling up” to the front end.

By designing your innovation through greater visualization and digital “twinning”  you can cascade your innovation views quicker. By building innovation concepts digitally, you can to make better assumptions, predictions, solutions, and decisions; it is drawing in all involved, specifically customers into the strategic process. It allows for conscious awareness, it becomes the method to examine, test, validate and improve on the assumptions. Then you can scale-up with increased levels of confidence.

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