Yet we actually subvert the future to prolong the life of the existing. We need to frame our innovation needs differently for exploring and exploiting innovation across different time horizons to move beyond the usual.

Commonality within innovation is becoming increasingly important. We need to build clear common languages of innovation, frameworks, methods and approaches.

There is a pressing need to frame innovation in different ways, to meet change that lies in the future. We are in need to clarify our options and this requires multiple thinking horizons to work through to deliver a richer tapestry of innovation discovery.

Innovation is constantly facing disruption; it is constantly going through life cycles and new waves of different activities and we begin decay faster today than ever. We run an increasing risk that we begin to lose any dominance or competitive position increasingly. We need to innovate to sustain ourselves and maintain our market positions in a rapidly evolving world.

The key requires us to manage this transition, not let others manage it for us. We need a far more robust, well thought-through way to apply our innovation resources to meet and anticipate these changing events. It is how we manage this transition becomes so critical.

The three horizon framework needs to become the innovation space for dialogues, planning, portfolio debates, differentiating the distinctions between the three time line perspectives and generally arguing for inclusion, the value and importance of the thinking and then applying the appropriate resources needed in the management of innovation across these three different timelines.The 3H framework is a powerful enabler.

The value of the weak signals needs amplifying

We need to exploit developing trends that are emerging in the different but future horizons and begin to tune in and discover the emerging possible options in the future.

The discussions in any forecasting or futuristic planning often have conflicting views of the future, compared to the existing realities based on those products and services that are providing the returns for today’s business. Yet the future is also equally rooted in the present, often called ‘weak signals’

I am a great follower of Dave Snowden’s thinking and work over at www.cognitive-edge.com on “making sense of complexity in order to act” which includes SenseMaker® and the Cynefin Framework, which I have written upon in its value, in this post “use of the Cynefin model for innovation” ,and within his work equally are clear views of managing change.

Dave Snowden’s has a view that works for me in applying the thinking around the three horizons, this fits so well. He argues instead of trying to tackle the unknowable, as it is inherently unknowable, he rightly suggests 1) we fully explore the evolutionary potential of the present, 2) bring in as wide an engagement of views to find a more sustainable or resilient set of solutions to emerge and 3) in his view, and most probably the most important point, it is how you build the narrative and descriptors, as the danger becomes the more you attempt to predict and evaluate, the more you can close down options, some far too early.

He suggests the more you can hold onto this descriptive level, the longer you have in widening the range of intervention points as more knowledge becomes available. You spend less time on (predicting) outcomes and more time on measuring vectors (velocity, acceleration, magnitude, force of direction) which for me, allows the progressive build of the right future capabilities, in more evolving and evolutionary ways of learning from exploring and experimenting, the key transition point of Horizon 2 (h2).

Resisting the early decision.

It is often the cases we can detect change but we consciously ignore it or dismiss it out of hand. This is often the place where the disruptor is presently at work, both existing or new competitors, exploring or exploiting different options, working at displacing your products and market positions. The combinations of new technologies, concepts and business models are constantly emerging and we need to be pioneers these as well as detect them as they emerge, anticipating the change these might bring and focus on building the capacity and capabilities to advance on your own curve of understanding.

We need to separate and structure different mindsets to developing innovation capabilities to explore and prepare for the future, as well as deepen the exploration, to leverage the present. Structuring the approach, by looking across multiple horizons, allow you to evolve the entire innovation portfolio and begin to recognise the many gaps that exist within your thinking, within your capabilities and capacities to innovate.

Separating the horizon lenses

By looking at this through separate horizon lenses does equally assist you in allocating the appropriate but usually different resources that are needed to be applied, to each of the time horizons and challenges that are identified and lie within them.

The three horizon framework has the clear intent to grow awareness and offer a better understanding of how innovation works and fits, with also its great value for clarifying the structuring and allocation of innovation’s management. It can be used for portfolio alignment, resource structuring and the mechanism for broad dialogue of explaining decisions and describing the growing consensus of the future direction.

The three horizon framework  can offer a vital part within all the organisations thinking around working through its innovation ambitions, not just for the present but for the future and how these can transition, connecting the reality of the present with the concepts of the future.

The need is we all should make the case that different types of innovation operate and evolve over different time horizons and need thinking through differently.

The three horizon framework  goes well beyond simply a planning tool, it does provide a valuable evolutionary perspective that dialogues can be formed around, so decisions on where to focus and what resources need to be applied can be made for delivering a constantly evolving ‘state’ of innovation development. Dialogues that deliver that then get translated into more plausible and coherent set of activities, projected into the future, searching for emerging winners that can change and challenge your existing business.

The three horizon framework is about having strategic conversations about the future, that feeds the discussions about your innovation direction, shaping the longer-term portfolio and capability understandings. It is increasingly vital to understand all of its ways to contribute to your innovation developments and needs.

Its value – if well-managed – can offer a helpful way for a significant series of dialogues and tensions to surface, but through this engagement and respect for different positions, you can find mutual ways of connecting your innovation activities and resolve these different opinions, emerging over the different horizons and diverse thinking. You are managing uncertainty in better ways, as a team or organisation through this framing dialogue.

If you would like to explore all the different ways that give the three horizons framework a much richer return in its value and use, then let me know.

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The post Exploring the Rich Tapestry within the Three Horizon Framework first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Ralph and I exchange constantly and occasionally meet up together. Actually, we need another meeting Ralph to catch up and explore these mutual innovation value points.

Ralph in a reply to Jairo suggested this: “That’s why a portfolio approach is so important” – with his take here: bit.ly/1Rn5Svq  under his excellent Model for Integrative Innovation article.He ‘talks’ of cornerstones and offers different premises to anchor these a little more.

The different premise:  premise 1: Innovation management follows a balanced portfolio approach. The entire innovation portfolio is divided into exploitation-oriented and exploration-oriented innovation initiatives and premise 2: Senior management is committed to attributing equal importance to exploitation and exploration initiatives as both are vital for a company to thrive sustainably. Then premise 3: Exploitation- and exploration-oriented initiatives are separated in terms of organisational anchoring, governance and funding and finally premise 4: Fostering an innovation portfolio is enabled by a proper idea management system which allows to either assign an internal or external idea to the corresponding units or to reject it. Then he suggests the use of the three horizons as distinct playgrounds for innovation initiatives.

This brief summary does not do justice to Ralph’s thoughtful build up to this portfolio approach and use the three horizons as a framing for this.I do recommend reading this. The link again is here: bit.ly/1Rn5Svq 

Well Ralph’s article leads nicely into this visual I have used and I wanted to contribute further to this collective thinking around different approaches to planning out innovation and in particular in this brief exchange, we were recently having on twitter by giving it a little more context this through this visualisation.

This visual might help make a further contribution to the value and use of the three horizon methodology

I like this visual as it places the portfolio discussion into its degree of difficulty parts to build a portfolio up without assigning it to time at this stage. That comes next through the use of the three horizons where you are exploiting and exploring these opportunities over time.

Changing the annual plan thinking is critical to building a robust innovation portfolio.

The usual arguments of how do you fit these into an annual plan tend to reduce, you are focusing on the attractiveness of different opportunities and time becomes not the issue at this point, that can come back into the thinking later. As you evaluate the degree of difficulty you start assigning different resources and recognising a ‘span’ of different times to bring these idea concepts to realisation.

You will notice in the middle of this visual there is a key transforming point.

I believe if you are genuinely looking across different options and broader opportunities you can begin to see a transforming opportunity that has the potential to radically alter or drive your business in the future.

This sits in the middle as it becomes an emerging idea, that goes into the horizon two part. This needs really carefully handling and I have previously written about this horizon two specifically in an article here called Traversing across into horizon 2 for new breaking innovation.

Also, I would want you to go back and read two articles, firstly on why innovation needs a different time and thinking horizons and then drawing out the different voices within the three horizons methodology for innovation. That way I don’t need to repeat parts of them here.

Recognising our present day thinking are at odds with future thinking

So you get these clear sense that many are sceptical or pay lip service to the products or service offerings of the future as the thinking, judgement and value orientation are at such odds with the existing measures and metrics they apply to run today’s business and how they get judged.

We must move our thinking beyond the ‘here and now’ and push it into the future if we want to transform our innovation and that takes a very different mindset and where the three horizon framework can help significantly in balancing any innovation portfolio.

So to add to the short exchange on twitter I thought I’d share this visual that might help in plotting your balanced portfolio in a way that combines portfolio management and three horizon thinking for recognising time and allocating resource

The potential of using the three horizons to any blue sky thinking, or determine what makes up the portfolio, is a more classic positioning but why not, once you have determined your opportunities in the portfolio you place them back into the three horizons to manage them ‘going forward’.

Just an additional thought or two as you finish up here.

By the way in my insights and thinking tag on this site you have an extensive collection of thoughts around the three horizon methodology, including white papers and different ‘series’ collections to give you a fairly comprehensive view of this most valuable 3H methodology.

End note: Doug Collins has pointed out since this publication, that he was original source of this visual. I had lost this reference and I am happy to add it in. His original article adds well to this.

The post Applying innovation thinking in different horizons first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I had been looking forward to a nice break up in the mountains of Switzerland, in a place near St.Moritz for five days of some walking, catching up with good friends over some great meals.

The evenings playing different card games or board games, as the temperatures dropped outside to minus six centigrade, the competitive nature raised the inside temperatures significantly. All good plans sometime get disrupted.

Regretfully a few days before, I ‘pulled’ some ligaments around the knee and this rendered the walking to some pretty tame stuff but the company, food and drink seemed to compensated a little I must admit, it eased the pain.

So I had some time on my hands so I decided to go back over the whole area of disruption to get a broader understanding and how this is driving so much within our innovation activity at present.

Disruption is all around us, coming at ever-faster speeds

Disruption has been going on around us over different generations. Something simply disrupts something else, such as the change from the horse and pony to the car, onto trains, then aircraft; or the telegraph replaced by the fixed telephone, then onto the mobile phone; or the mainframe computer to the personal computer onto today’s smartphone. Everything invented seems to have been disrupted or seems about too.

“A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leaders and alliances”             – (a wikepedia definition)

The term was defined and the phenomenon really came to a our more collective attention, through some pioneering work of Clayton M. Christensen that began back in 1995. This work highlighted today’s force of change as technology-led to bring out the changing conditions usually found in disruptive innovation occurring all around us today.

As we think ‘disruptive’ we also do need to recognize that no all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary. Equally Disruptive innovations tends to be produced or driven by outsiders as the incumbent’s fight to keep hold of their established position and regarding changing as simply as too hard with such a legacy of assets established.

It often seems the incumbent only let’s go, often in dramatic fashion, when a disruption has actually taken hold and suddenly takes off or seemingly from nowhere, catching those in established market by stripping away critical points of value within the existing market. They, the incumbent, then struggle to regain any form of leadership mostly, due to this poor recognition and preparation they should have been undertaking on an ongoing basis of exploring and experimenting.

Adopting new business practices is not so simple for the majority

Even though many of the existing incumbent firms of today have some pretty smart people they simply can’t get their heads around often their collective poor-decision making, cumbersome processes, often providing a calcifying culture and lack of bold leadership, that is opening the doors to the many inspiring disruptors.

The established firm have so tightly linked their processes, planning and planning cycles but not evolved increasingly around a higher level of fluidity, agility and extracting from a broader network. They stay resolutely internally focused with this often dominating vested interest in preserving the status-quo wherever they can.

There are so many ‘blind spots’ and lack of understanding about the power and force that technology is enabling. So many are being encouraged to actively work on new ways to enter the game and find a new model that simply disrupts and ‘slices off’ a nice part of the pie, or completely changes the way the equation of price, performance and value can be dramatically altered.

This change in the value proposition results in the consumers growing acceptance to change from the previous accepted and known. It simply shifts the market forces dramatically away and becomes unstoppable, utterly disrupting and altering perceptions and past positions. The application of technology is the catalyst that creates this disruptive process.     .

You feel the only blame is on the incumbent themselves, no wonder the talent entering the employment market are reluctant to join many large established organizations and would prefer to be part of the disruptors, in new ventures and defining and delivering new value propositions, building not defending positions, so as to deliver to customers wanting more ease, convenience and connected value than they are receiving today.

The digital technology led age, with the availability of venture money and extremely savvy techies, seeks to feed off the incumbent’s reluctance to cannibalize the present profitable revenue streams, render existing assets and investments as obsolete and see the fundamental assumptions about the business and the market as different to their own understandings.

The world of managing within a business has changed. This lack of seemingly rigorous internal constant challenging and exploiting alternative positions in real time, and exploring these through experimentation and discovery is rendering many firms unable to adapt and not be as agile and responsive as they could be. They stay often in this constant state of inertia, denial and myopia, even though they, within themselves still feel ‘dynamic and responsive’. A real dilemma that is extremely hard to get right. I feel “restless without consistent experimentation” needs to be embedded within the soul of many organizations.

They, the incumbents, see things in rational ways, based on past experience, whereas the usurper has no inhibitions and can only see inefficiencies, inept understanding of changing customer needs and fat, slow-moving incumbents. We must learn to walk in other peoples shoes to understand and ‘see’ differently.

The new cooking recipe for business disruption.

A light bulb went on for me as I sat there, near St. Moritz reviewing disruptive innovation. I remembered the terrific value we all seemed to have obtained from the pioneering work of Doblin and its ten types of innovation when it came out some years back. This allowed the collective ‘us’ to suddenly see innovations simply beyond products. We were able to combine them in new ways. The ten types of innovation framework took us beyond a stereo-type view of innovation, it opened up our thinking.

 A new framing of connecting disruptive innovation

I see the work currently being undertaken by Deloitte University Press as emerging as another important step, it allows us to frame and think disruption along recognized points of value, old and new. They have defined the nine patterns of disruption as shown in the graphic below. Incidentally the Doblin group is now part of Deliottes.

I think this has a great place to frame your disruptions, no different from the ten types of innovation.

The nine patterns of disruption (according to Deliotte)

Deliotte University Press has been exploring the disruptive forces at work in a “Patterns of Disruption” extended article and then providing a recent case series on these nine patterns of disruption shown above. I urge all worried or simply interested in understanding disruptive innovation to read these as an excellent point of reference. It can become a really powerful starting point to look, explore and determine ‘your’ possible points of disruption

Getting closer to understanding today’s business disruption phenomena

Here we see the basic ingredients for making change in these nine patterns and a new recipe for challenging and making change as ‘relevant markets’ can be redefined, providing a different source of value creation and recognizing that unmet need of the consumer. It might be something as powerful as the ten types of innovation in exploring the disruptive innovation points of value.

It is the new conditions of lower cost of entry and asset light, that technology is putting the potential into the hands of anyone to allow us to re imagine and recombine, to look to eliminate waste, improve choices, offer greater connected convenience, more personalization but on a different scale and scope. It is allowing us to challenge and exploit direct and indirect costs, to reduce lead times, focus upon new response times, to gain new identification and improved relationships, by connecting all the parts differently, that can create a change in finding new creation value points.

Exploring quickly, learning from these, developing the ability to pivot from this new set of insights, to firstly establish a new base line approach that taps into the right conditions and having the ability, resources and confidence to quickly scale this and mature it out into a broader offering of its interconnected parts that keep adding more value. Large established forms can achieve this, no differently than the small and nimble but in different ways, it lies in the art of orchestration, mobilization and clear, resolute commitment.

Becoming hyperaware, taking decisions and executing on these well is a great step forward for many.

We are certainly breaking faster with the past than ever. In the past we saw the future based often on the past, today we must see the future by exploring and experimenting constantly, based on our agility to recombine based on the technological potential we have increasingly available. Although all these have such a short history and are always changing we need to be more at the forefront of this exploring. It is our embracing all forms of this technology revolution that allows us to frame our thinking differently, it alters our thinking constantly and our organizations need to be set up to evolve in the same responsive ways.

We need to build a greater hyperawareness, the ability to detect and monitor changes and that is coming at increasing speed through more data flowing towards us. It is our ability to absorb this and translate its meaning in different, value-added ways to give it new value from a customer and market perspective. We also need to make better informed decision-making and acting upon these through faster execution and these ‘skills’ need to be far better put in place within most organizations. We need to cut through the existing ways of doing business as normal and challenge everything, everywhere, constantly.

We need to think of these ‘forces of disruption’ as the ‘era of displacement’ as we are all caught up in this technology revolution. The headlights are full on and blinding all of us, it is how we quickly respond will give us a better chance of emerging out of this period of (digital) technological revolution. Technology should not disable us, it should be enabling.

The post Caught in the Headlights of Disruptive Innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We place a disproportionately high amount of our resources in the ‘here and now’ to defend what we have and what we know. A potential ‘big mistake’
We actually subvert the future to prolong the life of the existing.

We constantly look to make it more efficient and more effective but this is in the majority of cases just incremental in what we do, both in innovation and our activities. These are often simply propping up the past success instead of shifting the resources into the investments of the future.

Spotting signs of innovating decay

Within the Three Horizon framework for innovation the horizon two is beginning to address some of the current decay arising from the core within the existing activities (or system). Here we have the highest tension point as it is the place for transformation to take shape and form.

We do need to challenge short-term thinking and balance this with this longer-term perspective and we do need to traverse into the future in clear thinking through steps (or horizons).

Our horizon one does begin to decay faster today than ever, it does not fully cover off the strategic fit we want and can begin to lose its dominance over time. We need to manage this transition, not let others manage it for us.

It is how we manage this transition becomes so critical.

We need to exploit developing trends that are emerging (h2) and begin to tune into possible options in the future (h3). Within these options will emerge the winners and become the more dominant systems or solutions that we should be moving towards, even from today. Some of these only have faint emerging signals but they need to be brought into the innovation portfolio activity to explore, often in novel ways.

The discussions that centre on often conflicting views of the future, compared to the existing realities and those providing the returns for today’s business. Often we can detect change but we consciously ignore it.

This is the place where the disruptor’s are at work, existing or new competitors, working at displacing your products and market positions.

They look to be more agile, they might have greater entrepreneurial ways, they are ready to explore emerging practices far more than the established leaders, they look to leverage different business models and are certainly not handicapped with legacy and mindsets stuck in the past. Increasing competition is today’s certainty.

Horizon Two needs a totally different mindset.

You need to see H2 with different metrics, with different perspectives, with more open minds. This is not easy. This needs to become the meeting point or “the space for transition” where you begin to let go of just protecting your core and open up your thinking to experimentation, prototyping, exploring different business models and begin to figure out how these will impact your existing core, to become more agile and adaptive than you are in the existing system or structures

These horizon (h2) concepts being explored really do need ‘ring fencing,’ so you can protect these from all the ‘vested’ claims that your horizon one focus will continually demand to keep, so as to bring in the results in this calendar year.

It is a real fight, these ideas or nascent concepts ‘give off’ negative results, they are still a mix of the tangible and intangibles where you can’t get the ‘hard’ fix on the ROI, on their real market value or potential.

The risk of internal executive ‘attack’
Many executives ‘defending’ the core will ‘attack’ or hold back any release of their resources to help these emerging initiatives. It is a ‘hard-nosed’ reality. It needs a very high level and conscious set of decisions coming from the top to determine these new moves.

Do not believe that when most executives ‘just’ react and shrug their shoulders regarding h2 as a natural, everyday occurrence, it is far from not.

Many have to come ‘kicking and screaming’ to supporting emerging activities. Far too much ‘invested’ interest comes into play. They see this more as a threat not an opportunity. It is not their sand box so why should they ‘play’.

This is why the three horizon approach has real sustaining value because if we don’t have this longer-term, transformational perspective we are just prolonging the existing until it gets disrupted by others.

This is where the working across different horizons for ‘thinking’ through innovation does need different tools and mindsets and these should be based on (h1) see and operate, (h2) adjust your thinking frame and solutions, (h3) more evolutionary.

Each has different techniques to explore as I’ve previously outlined in my navigation guide to this approach.

The tensions are not just visible but played out in many subversive ways.

Just take performance metrics, if these are solely structured on the calendar year, are you realistically expecting a dilution of focus as their compensation is totally caught up in this.

Horizon two poses a real challenge within any management of our organizations. If it provides current small bases of volume, no real meaningful profit from the investments made it can be a hard sell across the organization.

Projects that focus on the future work mostly are based on ‘best’ assumptions. Sadly it is often executives expect to see the same ‘hard’ metrics being applied as the existing business. We ignore significant differences and this is a huge mistake.

Recognizing our present day thinking are at odds with future thinking

So you get a clear sense that many are sceptical or pay lip service to the products of the future as the thinking, judgement and value orientation are at such odds with the existing measures and metrics they apply to run today’s business and how they get judged.

We must move our thinking beyond the ‘here and now’ and push it into the future if we want to transform our innovation and that takes a very different mindset and where the three horizon framework can help significantly in balancing any innovation portfolio.

The post Traversing across into horizon 2 for new breaking innovations first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.