There is this compelling and urgent need to accelerate low-carbon technology innovation if the world can achieve decarbonization of the energy sector between now and 2050, to significantly contribute to meet international climate goals set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The twin combination of energy efficiency and renewable energy seems to be the only plausible way to achieve 90% of the emissions reductions needed by 2050 with renewables accounting for two-thirds of the primary energy supply by this date (IRENA analysis).  The essential requirement for energy efficiencies and renewable energy needs is to come from significant technology innovation and systemic innovation, so as o achieve these ambitious numbers. Will it?

To undertake such a radical redesign of the energy system, to pilot and rapidly scale critical renewable energy technologies requires a dramatic set of shifts in such an energy transformation. Can we?

Can you imagine the different sectors of the energy system that takes you from power generation through to the end-user segments of energy demand and all the changes each needs to make? Each part will need to undergo a massive improvement with deployment rates that enable the shift from fossil fuel to renewables. Mapping it is one thing, ensuring it happens is another. Translating theory into an actual (hard-nosed) sustaining return that has financial and societal benefit is one huge leap of faith, or is it? What will deliver the compelling case to make such a change? Are we making as strong a case as we could do?

IRENA, in their research, argues that to deliver on the goals for renewables the share of the total energy consumption needs from these has to rise seven-fold per year. Is this possible? Is there such an investment appetite? Are the technology solutions capable to be scaled at this rate?

Is the complexity of the energy transition to big?

How are we going to navigate such a complex shift away from fossil fuels to renewables to achieve this decarbonization energy sector? A full-scale energy transition takes decades to change as the ability to ‘enact’ the different technical steps, the lifespan of existing capital assets and the embedded role of fossil fuels competing on a price make for such a difficult transition.

The primary arguments of economic benefit are not enough. Although we can achieve a different lifestyle change from combustion-engine cars to electric ones, does this change so much of our lifestyle?

At present, we are focusing on convincing those within the energy system to contemplate change, and that is not a real imperative unless the climate concerns become compelling and force change. No amount of new technology breakthroughs in smart grids, different storage methods that can accommodate variable renewable energy power are enough to displace fossil fuel consumption at the rates required.

We can push harder to replace internal combustion cars, but we are not yet able to point at real scale in implementing such a shift to electric vehicles as we lack infrastructure, the relevant scale of production or the incentives to shift the consumer at such a level to make changes in the short-term.

Realistically we are in trouble.

The momentum behind such an energy transition is getting diffused and occurring in fragmented ways. We lack any clear roadmaps or commitments from industry sectors, governments, or institutional framework. In any significant change from one system to another, in this case, the global energy system needs not just a compelling reason but a massive injection of fiscal and policy frameworks and incentives to “push,” “nurture,” “facilitate” and catalyze the “pull” we need; of one where the party undergoing the need for change “wants” the solutions as a “must-have”.

We need a significant concerted effort for a robust international collaboration from all solution providers, and that is not easy to obtain when individual participants have “vested” interests in both maintaining the existing (fossil fuel solutions) and the new, emerging renewables (wind, solar). Is it a conflict, or can it be balanced?

My concern and for many others is the sheer complexity of this challenge is way beyond one specialized agency, one government or one corporation, it cuts across industries and infrastructure established and proven solutions. How can we create a robust, viable, and determined sustainable transition pathway, where all involved undertake their part?

Achieving a 2015 Paris Agreement on climate targets was an achievement that is still in some level of being undermined at Government level. To change “agreement” into a sustainable set of policies needs to be determined. Enabling policy to drive the energy transition, in the shift away from existing subsidized policies supporting fossil fuels, of allowing fossil fuel designs still to come on stream, to continue to actively support the extraction of our resources and many, many more existing supporting policies need to be switched into supporting and funding renewables. We need to have policies and financial incentives to scale up renewable deployment. For this, we need to accelerate innovative technology solutions.

Although we look towards Governments to be in the crucial enabling role in the past, we operate in a very different globally connected world. One government cannot influence the level of change in such a globally connected world. We need to form a new global order that has as its mission to resolve the world’s most pressing problems, something beyond the existing United Nations that galvanizes the world into a change.  Will that happen? Who can offer the leadership to catalyze this?

To navigate the energy transition

As we up the pace of economic change being undertaken in renewables, in electrification, in new forms of energy systems, we still have not crossed that magic “tipping point.”  We are today caught up in innovators, early adopters in changing their operations. We are seeing an early majority of adopters in different industries, as the solution providers beginning to have an influence or take opinion leadership positions, yet we need the most demanding push yet, to achieve the vast majority within the energy system considering adoption, to make the energy transition.

This push to achieve majority adoption needs to come within the next few years. The current skepticism, doubt, sense of being a laggard does need changing dramatically, certainly in these next few years. Otherwise, we lose momentum. Who takes the lead role in this influencing? Governments, Solution Providers or (the power of) Society demanding change?

Innovation is at the core of the energy transition

The power of innovation can serve a growing and significant part of this transition. Innovation becomes the tool, instruments, and the solutions that can galvanize change. Innovation is far broader than just technology; it needs to be emphasized that the solutions offered are part of the complete system design, in radically different operating systems and in what it can provide in new business models.

Innovation drives competition; it delivers the changed environment where those investing “steal a march” and take winning positions that alter the dynamics of industries, of energy solutions themselves.

I hear the constant beat of the drum of “we need more and faster innovation-.” Yes, this is true, but it is the higher call we all need to hear, the one that innovation provides the compelling system design to make the change. Innovation offers the potential for new competitive positioning, and give economic advantages when it is the core in any integrated business cases, one that will make a more significant difference that offers both commercial and societal benefits.

Innovation within energy is focused on solutions for electrification to decarbonize the planet. Innovation is providing solutions to digitalize all parts of the energy supply chain.  Innovation can offer reduced costs through its new solutions.  It can be designed to deliver flexibility to address many of today’s capability restrictions. Innovation can galvanize change in all the end-use sectors of transport, buildings, home use, and industry, it can provide solutions to turn “dirty fossil fuel” into “clean fuel” in the heart of energy generation and within solutions can capture greenhouse omissions,  to deliver more efficient systems than we have today

We need to talk up innovation, not for the sake of it but for its ability to bring about change, to be recognized as the catalyst of change that will bring about the significant shift we need. Innovation can unite all the parties involved in energy transition as they see the social, business, and policy values of innovation uptake. Innovation can decarbonize, digitalize, decentralize and above all democratize all that is locked up in the existing energy system

We do need to emphasis the value translation of innovation in its contribution to this energy translation.

**Disclosure: Part of my work in research and advising in the energy transition is due to being involved in the Siemens #SiemensInfluencer community or #SIEx. I want to emphasis the opinions and views expressed here are my own.

The post Confusion or Diffusion in Energy Transition? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In the past few months, I have been placing an increasing focus on the energy transition we all need to undertake in our energy systems, to build a more comprehensive understanding of the parts that make up the whole of this transition.

It is one of the most critical places where innovation application is required and able to be conducted to deliver a sustaining impact in our world. Innovation solutions will provide the energy transition needed, and that is what makes it such a compelling area to focus upon.

For me, the energy transition that the world is undertaking requires all forms of innovation, to offer technically advanced, as well as breakthrough solutions, to an incredibly complex system of energy delivery. To redesign a complete energy system in twenty to thirty years, which is the current time frame being wanted to be achieved, is as demanding as you can get. I certainly want to play a role in this transformation, it is exciting, challenging, and demanding on all involved.

We need to appreciate the magnitude of the innovation challenges

Nearly all of our energy supply is, or has been, reliant on fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas) which are non-renewable and are the primary source of the carbonization problems we have today. Omitted Carbon gets trapped in our atmosphere and has been the growing concern as the principal source of our warming planet.

After the famous and groundbreaking 2015 Paris Agreement, where we witnessed for the first time, all nations agreeing to a common cause, one to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects. From this agreement as such, it has been the catalyst to charting a new course in the global climate effort.

Central to this is that the world needs a decarbonization energy sector by the second half of the century. The encouraging view from work undertaken by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) suggests that the combination of energy efficiencies and renewable energies already known and worked upon has the potential to achieve 90% of the emissions reduction needed by 2050.

This massive shift from our present reliance on fossil fuels projects to renewables (regarded as clean energy) can account for two-thirds of our primary energy supply by this 2050 mark. Today, renewables (wind, solar, hydropower, biofuels) is presently only supplying around 16-18%. For such a significant change to happen, we need to focus on a massive global scale. To undertake such a considerable difference, we need economically and scalable solutions.

The growing concern today is we are not raising the deployment rate; it is currently far too slow to meet the potential by 2050. Deployment here is not just in the market, but it is in commercializing concepts; from the invention, concept validation, prototype stages, demonstration, integration into our parts of the system, through to full scale to commercialization and final proof of stability, and offering financial and justifiable returns.

The critical enabler will come from technology and systemic innovation.

Innovation needs to be broader than just being conducted through technological research and development; it requires a more significant integrated innovation model that has business models, policies, processes, and market design as part of the solutions.

As this energy transition is such a seismic shift, it requires clear Government support and enabling policies on a coordinated basis. There are at present plenty of pledges to boost public spending but to achieve this evident energy transformation, it needs to be conceptualized, validated, and then delivered. Any change of this magnitude requires sustained consistent investment over the thirty-odd years to 2050 and even increased where the present-day energy infrastructure is so out of data, it will require radical redesign and an even more significant capital commitment.

Any undertaking like a complete transformation of the worlds energy system will require significantly increased collaborations between public and private investments, institutions and researchers, but a growing recognition from the public that this ‘sense of united commitment’ is essential to provide us a more sustainable planet. Sadly that “compelling story” is yet to be articulated, it is far too fragmented today to galvanize the level of change understanding.

Articulating the real need for energy (consumption) change is critical

The concern becomes, will it be continued “crisis” that brings us to a united understanding of the need to radically change? Today we are still caught up in the extremes of denial or over-hype. The longer we “fiddle,” the harder this transformation will become to manage our growing needs of more energy, from an increasing world population and maintaining aging infrastructure, still reliant on very outdated central energy grid models and only fossil fuel solutions.

All of this ambition to change the energy system needs a radical approach, lots of fresh thinking, and that underlying coordinated action for all involved to undertake such a journey. The question is, will we?

Innovation has to be applied not just to resolving the physical integration and operation of the energy system to change from established sources of energy supply (oil, gas, coal) but to find imaginative solutions to a more variable renewable energy (VRE) solutions. Critically it has to be applied to solutions for much of our industrial process and within the transport systems.

In the industry sector, particularly cement, iron and steel, and chemicals account for 17% of our worlds current carbon dioxide emissions. In freight and aviation, they account for 11% of global CO2 emissions,. Our future energy solutions need to convince stakeholders that switching energy sources, over to electricity reliance, can be managed in economical ways with many of the innovative solutions on offer today, or in the innovation development pipeline, can offer a sound business case.

The societal inhibitor is a real impediment.

Technology-centric innovation can make a difference, but in this case of the Energy Transition, in the end, it is Society that has to demand it. At present there is indifference. They still have not been presented with the compelling case for change. Is it when we have more floods, power outages, hurricanes, power and water shortages that we will  finally get it?

To galvanize governments, investors, private organization, and institutions, we need to create these needs of change to become part of the dialogue we need in our fabric of society today, we need to raise global consciousness. To achieve a transformation where we are aiming for a zero-carbon outcome in thirty years is unparallel in ambition.

To undertake this energy transition is as tricky as any global initiative we have taken on before. Our institutions need to be galvanized, not by the voices of science or technology, or by individual governments or private organizations they need the “United voice of all nations through its people.”

A united voice where people demand change and demand Governments construct the new world order, to integrate, coordinate the full gambit of interventions in economic, political, technological and social systems to make this energy value chain realizable as a significant part of reducing the climate crisis of depleting resources, warming temperatures and natural disasters, caused mainly by carbonizing our world. Can we find this voice?

Managing the Energy Transition is of Real Complexity

To say this energy transition is complex is an understatement, as any pace of transformation requires real sustaining commitment, significant resources, and abundant capital, along with the urgency of deployment to rapidly switch to renewables for our energy sources.

The emerging new technologies in grid management, local and grid-scale energy storage, distributed systems, the application of mini-grids, the digitalization of energy services, energy generation, etc., are all deployed today but at variable speed and in very ad hoc fashion. We do need to formulate more detailed roadmaps for the energy transition in a highly coordinated way as part of this change. Equally, to get to more and faster deployment, we need both technological and systemic innovation to be vigorously applied.

Are we going to bring together multiple parties on multiple fronts at the speed and scale and investments we require? It is hard to imagine but essential to achieve

Where innovation fits within the energy transition story, it becomes the accelerant of change:

As you get into the complexity of this energy transition, you realize the difficulties. Innovation will be the key driver; it needs the following:

1). Deliver technology breakthroughs that provide renewable solutions to offer cost-effective alternatives to conventional energy technology,

2) technology innovation that improves the existing renewable technologies to reduce current cost and achieve more significant deployment,

3) new business models that allow new investors to be attracted to the energy system,

4) exploring new concepts that promote scale-up of renewable technologies,

5) supports new financing models and justification and validation for fresh capital investments,

6) enabling policies and regulatory changes to offer change incentives for different market access,

7) contribute substantially to fresh market designs and concepts,

8) encourage and provide opportunities for new energy system operators to undertake part of the transformations needed.

If ever I see a need for a shift it towards a clear innovation paradigm, it is in this energy transition we need to accelerate, support, and deliver.

Our world is becoming highly vulnerable to not being able to reverse the climate conditions of a warming planet; it does need to urgently reduce its dependency on fossil fuels, invest in a massive change in renewables and an energy system that can change and be sustainable.

The world needs to build further on its initial global commitment; this time it is driven by societies recognition that we need to change our models of power supply, transportation, industry and building reliance from fossil dependency to renewables. It is galvanizing the innovation system to provide the transformation enablers as crucial to this. It is offering new opportunities for prosperity, growth, society, and economic gain.

To conclude, I read a comment within my researches from the EIT Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community (EIT Climate-KIC) that stated any transition needs to be 1) Mission-led, 2) Portfolio-based and 3) Community-delivered. We need all three fully connected up and well-identified and being well supported.

I will be taking the energy transition story further in future posts

The emphasis within future posts will be more focused on discussing where innovation will play a vital role in this transition undertaken.

In this opening post, I wanted to provide a short opener to a complex subject. I hope it does offer enough of an overview of the global energy transition we are presently undertaking. In future posts, I plan to get down and into the weeds of energy transformation a little more, showing where innovation is contributing.

The energy transition is so essential, but within the world of innovators, it offers such a compelling story of how innovation can make such a contribution and be the catalyst of change needed.

Energy transition and innovations contribution, on this global scale, is as powerful a demonstration of the actual value and contribution that innovation does bring; it needs highlighting and drawing out.

**Disclosure: Part of my work in research and advising in the energy transition is due to being involved in the #SiemensInfluencer community or #SIEx. I want to emphasis the opinions and views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of Siemens.

The post Managing Energy Transition through Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to radically improve our abilities to engage, relate and discover new innovation opportunities at a completely different level of faster performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are dealing with a completely different set of mindsets, skills, procedures, governance, processes and responsibilities. To gain from the digital evolution taking place we need a robust, comprehensive and radical overhaul of much of what is going on within our organizations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about the need to build new capabilities?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post So Welcome to the Age of Digital Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part six of a seven-part series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Opportunity spots where we can speed up this manual process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Managing digital knowledge that adds value and growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part five of a seven-part series

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

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

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

Equally, our senior managers will be digitally challenged

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

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

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

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

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

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

How will digital automation improve and balance our innovation management?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The growing science and value of analytics for innovation

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

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

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

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

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

Adjusting our thinking on risk

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

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

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

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

The urgency of Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part four of a seven-part series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real need is to deliver a new integrated engagement platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A painful and frustrating journey is ahead of us all

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

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

The enterprise design will be radical in redesign and upheaval.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part three of a seven-part series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part two within the series of seven

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

Rational and Random thinking can be accommodated with digital technologies.

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

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

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

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

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

What needs changing is the innovation process to accommodate these changes

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

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

Managing this transformation is a real strategic and operational challenge.

We will need to transform much within our systems but more importantly to orientate our skills to receive, translate and diffuse new knowledge, in significantly different ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Innovation is caught up in this transformational change.
To be an innovator, you are always restless but the present structures and frameworks that innovation operates within have been often highly constraining and heavily reliant on manual operations. Innovation as a system has often conflicted with the approaches taken by our organizations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two schools of innovation as the common approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quest is in finding different approaches to allow the human side to shape, interpret and extract the value not just in what they want to see but through different lenses.

That might be harder than you think.

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

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

A whole mash-up of disparate technologies and systems, that seem to be heading for such an explosion of change, a post-digital transformation.

This merging of cloud, big data, social, and the internet of things is becoming the new system of discovery according to some. Others call it the crossroads where the post-digital reality of bringing together the cloud, mobile, interconnected devices, data analytics and embedded intelligence are pointing us to a hyper-connected world, less tomorrow, more speeding towards us in the here and now.

It is through people and things (IoT) we will get new innovation potential

It is through people and ‘things’ (machines and devices) that we will obtain increasing and more powerful insights, that have the real potential of being turned into new innovations potential through the connected businesses.

This can generate new value and business propositions.
It is this “turning into new innovation” is where I have my current difficulties. The virtual world of digital is moving much faster than the physical ‘enacted world,’ of turning insights into actual innovation activities, through the innovation pipeline.

The whole discovery to final execution is for most organizations still, a very fragmented, often disconnected system, highly reliant on people to make decisions and organize the more tangible finished result. It is still through mainly a linear process of stage-gates and investigation /validation/move on or not. I can’t see that working in a digital hyper world where insights flood into the innovation engine room, expecting the same ‘hyper’ response and delivery result.

The ‘play’ at present is how all this represents such significant business opportunities for both the large and start-ups alike and how they set about it. There is a real hype and force behind this but until we fix the total innovation value chain, the (new) front end for all these digital insights flowing in, otherwise it will just simply increase the log jam and the significant frustrations will grow even more that innovation is not matching its potential.

Something will have to give or change and needs fixing to be better equipped for this digital transformation of real-time insights and opportunities.

There is significant increased capital and funding going into these technology changes, not the innovation process

Recently IBM was reporting how the VC is funding much of the ‘edge of embedded systems, different gateways of connectivity, messaging and the much-needed security all this means. Equally how the VC is investing heavily in the back-end of cloud services where data services, analytic services and (again) security need different solutions to meet these changing times.

Then we have the leaders in the shape of Amazon, Google, Salesforce and a number of others all-seeing significant ramp-ups in engagement. Also, this is equally coming from the likes of industrial giants like GE, in their connected world and many, many others, all determined to shape their industry and change its boundaries, through offering broader system products that pull together these technologies and shift the customer value proposition in radical ways.

There are sizeable bets and large sums of new capital going into this front end of discovery.

We are transcending traditional industry and product boundaries
The transformation that is underway is exciting, actually scary and highly challenging in significant ways. Like in any “wild west” environment advice comes from every quarter, stories feed off each other and magnify but heroes are born or in this case, are created, for this convergence of post-digital evolution.

This is the time we are blurring or having so many things flashing before our eyes with the digital and physical worlds combining for this convergence of people, business and things.

The dizzy array of strategic choices will totally disrupt existing business models if they are right in their design. The whole world of communicating, transacting and designing all the different negotiations and products that meet the immediate needs of the customer makes this the “digital business era”, where constant redesigning and orchestrating the parts will keep it at the forefront by a constantly evolving set of combinations and leveraging a network of diverse capabilities.

It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where ‘people, things and their business offering’ can come together for mutual value based on the unique combinations of the different technologies available.

There will be a constant evaluation of the assets both internally and externally that make up this digital world (people, the business and things) that will take this out beyond the control of one company, into a system within a larger system to make it work at a constantly evolving speed and gain adoption.

Who will master all the necessary interactions?

The decisions being made will define markets and push way beyond established industrial boundaries to seek out and attract, acquire both data and sales and keep retaining customers, who will increasingly become more fickle unless they ‘see’ the changes and the values being offered.

This is going to have a real velocity to it. In our homes, in our personal lives, in connected transport, in our cities, in a multitude of our industries and health care systems, in our shopping, in the way we can buy and engage with the source of our needs. None of this will come overnight but it is going on all around us in improved response times, connections and choices.

As the organizations investing in this changing world learn about people, different business approaches and structures and what these ‘things’ are capable of it is the knowledge gained and translated represents a new world of possibility.

Much will become even more highly transitory
I was going back through Rita McGrath’s book “the end of competitive advantage” and although this only came out in late 2013, I realize it does seem to be lacking in much of the change taking place through this new emerging digital era. Yet it does paint a changing world, it does offer many pointers to understand and filter new thinking through.

Rita discusses “arenas” that are transcending current industry boundaries where organizations spot’ opportunities and look at what needs to fill the space, by pooling and orchestrating different assets to go after that opportunity. A different game is opening up.

Yet digital thinking is transformative and does take us into a different business dimension, one that can offer greater transparency, connectivity and the need to respond in dramatically different ways than our past business models were capable too. We look out in broader ways.

Those that seize this opportunity will look towards shrinking market cycles, delivering totally different value propositions, and seizing vacant space where a better job- can be done. These will be further exploited through combining technology, social and marketing solutions that explore different innovation offerings, ones that customers will decide (or not) do meet either their needs or unexpected needs.

Some innovations or value propositions will take them by a real surprise, as they were totally unaware of these, yet they seem to fit into their ‘perceived’ lifestyles and activities, captured more and more through these SMART devices, many of these will offer new premium value price points for business or customers.

The reality is fast becoming our ‘advantage’ will be highly transitory as competition will be seeking all possible ways to match your offer. Shorter cycle times, constant change and updates will be the point to chase the value and keep the interest, otherwise, others will nip in and steal the ‘advantage’.

The reduced lag time of everything perhaps?

The lag time of everything will be dramatically reduced. Be these traditional industry cycles, product development, and customer feedback as the battlefield will be staying constantly ahead of the competitor’s response through this constant investment and re-engineering of the different combinations of new transient competitive advantage.

A world of rapid testing, experimenting, test and learn cycles, the increasing use of 3D printing, exploring different configurations that resonate or not with customers, so they can be quickly scaled up and delivered as the advantage point.

Digital technologies in their different forms will establish new terms of customer and competitive advantage, where the whole cycle spins faster, latency constantly gets destroyed and organizations seem to increase their velocity to simply stay ahead.

If we do begin to believe all of this, the new channels will be digital where products, services and experiences will alter in ways it is hard to imagine today, although I’m sure they are being worked upon by the next wave of digital / business smart organizations searching to be the next Amazon, Google or GE.

Converting theory into a reality that drives increased growth and revenue

The game is presently to convert the theory, the numerous ideas coming from all these digital insights and interactions, into concrete reality and we will have a real difficulty for most on this to convert these quickly enough. Many opportunities might be simply transitory but highly valuable to exploit.

It is not what is coming through our door, it is what we are able to get out of the door at the other end. Most of the innovation systems are designed from a very physical engagement, validation and execution perspective, operating not at any speed like or what we are wanting to get out of all the front end investments from the new digital era.

There will be systems and practices at real odds in speed, agility and decision-making. This will hold any evolution up, until the back end of the product, service or business model is equally addressed. This does need the same commitment of funding and strategic thinking and organisational engagement or this post-digital era will fail to deliver, due to these upstream constraints and antiquated approaches to the innovation system.

Digital disruption is with us, it seems to be enormous in its potential transforming effects. It has an enormous potential to alter how a business conducts itself; in seeking out its different (and multiple) value propositions, the design of its new business models in the way it engages with people, things and its business. Yet I have to ask about the physical innovation value-creating capacity – can it cope?

I’ve just got one enormous headache thinking about it.
Innovation will certainly not get any easier; it will be faster, more demanding and a heck of a lot riskier. The innovation systems we presently have will simply not cope, the log jam will not be the data flowing in,it will be the amount of innovation flowing out or more than likely just trickling out.

It does not matter what we rush to invest in digital capabilities something down the value chain will have to be radically altered to seize this digital era and turn ‘seen’ opportunity into reality and that is today based on people’s innovation capabilities.

Innovation still totally relies on people, not this digital tsunami or digital monsoon as I called it, that is altering the front end. I understand most working within our organizations are lacking engagement, will they welcome the digital age or it will become even more the whipping boy, being forced upon them of reluctant change? The digital front end is going to hit a real roadblock within organizations that needs addressing.

Innovation remains stuck in 20th-century thinking
How will ‘we’ seize the opportunities and turn them into the innovations that is needed to be delivered to capitalize on the insights gained? I would think we need to invest in the innovation system and structures to enable this to happen and are we?

Today most innovation systems are broken or one-paced, mostly fit for incremental innovation only and as latent as you can get, in reaction, inefficiencies and in delivering any concept to the final product or service delivery in anything remotely close to the real-time or incoming digital response.

The innovation life cycle is not fit for this digital purpose for most organizations. Is anyone thinking of this? This needs equal attention and fixing. As we assemble highly transformational road maps we might pause and think about the inadequate one we have for the innovation life cycle.
Or am I missing something here?

The post The proliferation of transitory moments are ahead first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.