Following my last post, “I aim to put more innovation into the front end of Energy“, I want to outline why I am focusing increasingly on this front end of the energy transition (FEE) within my innovation work.

For me, it is the ability to apply the “multiplier effect” to any discovery and validation that accelerates the understanding of where the potential growth and impact points of a new business opportunity can occur.

Today, we are all trying to piece together the Energy Transition.

The claim is that there are solutions abound to move us towards the Energy Transition we all need of clean, reliable, energy built upon renewables, but I honestly don’t share that current optimism; we actuaölly have an awfully long way to go in discovery, application and adoption.

In my view, we are struggling to get the level of momentum we urgently need into this energy shift, away from fossil fuels into a renewable, clean energy system.

I content it is not just the need to have the engineer’s insight into solutions, even if they might be the final arbitrators “go-to choice.” Still, it is to forge a strategic one, evaluating innovative options to broaden understanding and provide that essential and different perspective.

We all have a certain bias, often beliefs are well-grounded in past experience and approaches that WERE successful. Any transition is exactly that, it needs a clear recognition that what was often successful in the past is not the pathway to the future.

The energy transition needs a broad array of thinking; specialists, generalists, enthusiasts and passionate people that can move beyond their own view offering a “non-ideological confrontation” where solutions are both sustainable and accelerate a path to decarbonization and net-zero without any legacy or vested interest effect.

This innovator capacity that is needed to be ‘enforced’ requires greater insights and understanding of the alternatives, options, issues, and challenges. This is why I feel my multiplier approach offers a framework to help work this complexity through the energy transition in a supportive, systematic way.

As stated, my positioning is at the front end of the Energy Transition, building insights through the “eyes” of the strategic innovator.

• I provide evaluations and assessments of the front end of a transformation in discovery and validation that provide dedicated advisory and supporting services in knowledge and insights provision on energy-related matters.
• I break my business out into dedicated focal topics in “big transforming” points of impact, applying understanding and insights that are in my mind complementary, synergistic or clarifying new emerging intersections for growth potential that have impact and growth potential.
• The combination of innovation within ecosystem thinking and the design approach has ‘arrived’ capitalizing on the value points of digitalisation combining with technology, both in the Industrial IoT world and finding a growing place and pace in the Energy Transition that is having, in my view, a very different combination effect.

Offering a given value in the proposition

• The aim is to support the individual, teams, and organisations in their innovation and transition activity around the energy transition they intend to undertake.
• The aim is to advance further what they have in place or develop more significant innovation and transformation understanding and competencies, resulting in clients achieving positive and sustaining results from these transformation activities.
• The value for the client, so often time-starved, is that they can rapidly understand the latest thinking relevant to their focus areas, in thoughts, and insights around innovation, ecosystem building, or how the energy transition impacts them to identify new growth options or radically different stances in business positioning in the future.

The return on the investments made.

• The insights delivered offer a radically different view leading to a more balanced perspective, drawing in the external perspective, saving a significant amount of time in early resource investment. These insights and recommendations provide the triggering points for seeing fresh opportunities in growth.
• This fresh focus enables a more substantial client resource focusing on highly relevant aspects of building out and validating their future interest and value in new business options and energy design solutions.
• The value of applying this approach is by having access to a  greater depth of research and alternative understanding.
• Extracting knowledge, applying application and practice, gives clients the beginning of the “discovery and validation phase”, accelerating the client’s growth options in more structured ways.

Seeking problem resolution through discoveries.

• Through my depth of research across the needs of the energy, transitions it underpins and supports the changing understanding that is necessary.
• I provide insights and knowledge to clarify and quantify answers to many issues that lead to growing awareness and clarification on multiple energy-related issues. If I can’t provide the answers then I seek out the expert opinions that can.
• This focused research is associated with innovation, ecosystems, and our energy systems and the changing landscapes that transform and energise the existing everyday business into future ones that scope, speed a and scale the transition required.

My role is at this front end of discovery and early validation

• These insights significantly underpin my supportive advisory & mentoring services to a client. This dynamic environment nurtures my understanding of what is evolving and what impact and growth opportunities on a business by taking the innovators perspective into the assessment of the need of a clients energy transition
• My primary role is advising and coaching within these areas. The principal focuses then is to help support and build internal capacity, competencies, and capabilities to undertake any transformation journey.

Recognizing the value within the knowledge service provider

So my role, through this work, is to build the context and provide the content in useful knowledge and actionable insights. These provide the building blocks of the transition narrative to galvanise and achieve a common understanding of the Energy Transition being undertaken.

Then to support and help bridge the gaps in capacity, competency and capability recognition of the needs of having the innovators mindset, to get the Energy Transition journey onto a stronger momentum pathway of common understanding and realization of the tasks and issues to tackle.

Aspects of my knowledge and thinking through focus

I am a fairly enthusiastic researcher and writer that supports my work as a transition advocate for innovation, ecosystems and sustainability, specifically focusing on the industrial internet of things (IIoT) and energy systems that are radically changing our world.

A different combination effect- my multiplier framework

I see a combined effect of innovation, ecosystem design thinking, IIOT and energy as my work-to-be-done through different channels and services to stimulate and catalyse the energy transition we are all undertaking.

The vital “infusion” of innovation in thinking, approach and building this into the front end of energy provides a greater discovery structure and process that can greatly facilitate the changes, with more informed knowledge, insights and validation of a path to travel.

If you would like to delve into this further then go to innovating4energy.website for more details.

*** FYI-  I discuss and investigate about #energy, #ecosystems, #industry4.0, #innovation, and #sustainability. My dedicted posting and website references, if you are interested, are shown in the about section

The post My multipliers for innovation at the Front End of Energy first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I see the front end of energy as the critical feeding-in point for the energy transition. So what does this mean exactly?

The front end of energy for me is the point of discovery and validation. It is the place I feel I can make the best contribution within the energy transition. The discovery is where the stimulus and catalyst point to take an idea to commercialization. 

This capturing, evolving, exploiting and exploring needs a clear management process and the understanding of how to undertake this. This needs a focused innovation specialist or a systematic approach to building those innovating capabilities and capacities.

I believe there is a real gap for many organizations involved in the Energy industry, often in the recognition, they are lacking a real lasting robust innovation capability, capacity and competency, as the sustaining way to help accelerate the Energy Transition journey.

There is often a mistaken belief that they are undertaking innovation as they simply react and copy others, not recognizing their own distinctive needs and never building their innovation capacity in systematic ways.

Innovation is vital to the energy system’s evolution, its need to be fully integrated and operational in design, and we need to further recognize its crucial role.

I certainly argue the systematic approach for the Energy transition

Innovation begins with discovery, then it moves through the innovation pipeline through its experimenting, validating, testing, often multiple trials, commissioning and eventual commercialization roll-outs.

The early you can do this validation, investigation, and conversation, my front end of energy, the better. We need to always relate, even “ground” the thinking and determine the real value and potential as a progressive journey and sometimes the external person can become a valuable partner in this process to keep the thinking on track.

Innovation is made up of many enabling technologies that support energy.

This complexity requires innovative approaches to be built in highly systematic ways. Its ultimate result is to offer innovation that can continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.

To undertake the Energy Transition requires a radical transformation in the way we supply, transform, and use energy. This requires a profound transformation in technologies, systems, and infrastructure. The complexity in the discovery, validation and lengthy process time to fruition is highly challenging.

Having a “system of innovation” enables the potential concepts to be captured in common, identified ways for all involved, the inventor, the developer and production groups to identify with the evaluation process.

When you establish a recognized system that others can follow as it is transparent to all, you can evaluate innovation activities through common “hurdle points” and evaluation criteria. It focuses on efforts that bring common identity and purpose.

What do I mean by a systematic process here?

Well, we know that Innovation often begins with discovery, a new realization something can make a fundamental change to what is existing. That concept then moves through the innovation pipeline, through its experimenting, validating, testing, often multiple trials, commissioning and eventual commercialization roll-outs.

That can be fairly complex and demanding. It needs a combination of solution understanding (researchers, engineers, designers) but it also needs a constant “mapping back” to the commercialization and to relating to the other stakeholders that can help facilitate or block progress.

There is nearly always a need to bridge the awareness gap or others to provide the validation. Knowledge is gained when it is shared and exchanged. I put a lot of my time into researching the energy transition.

Often external views can make a decisive difference in any discussions, they offer independence to balance the vested interests often defending what they have, and can show a different way to see new possibilities.

I have focused increasingly on the Energy transition, it fascinates me

Besides writing about innovation and energy on two dedicated blogs of innovating4energy.com and digital4energy, I recently launched a  website of innovating4energy.website, for my business offering.

I set out to offer the external perspective to those busy inside organizations by focusing on mapping out the future of energy and where they fit and what gaps they have in need to fill.

This role is to support, complement, and provide different value points to this thinking and eventual work. I see this as more advisory to complement their insights, more feeding into and augmenting their expertise with different points of value.

My role is to be a “translator” and take the innovator’s perspective looking for fresh opportunities, supporting and accelerating your existing ideas and concepts.

We need to relate, even “ground” thinking and determine the real value and potential. to leverage all that innovation offers the energy transition.

The post I aim to put more innovation into the front end of Energy first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Sustainability is one of the hottest topics in the business world at present. There is a hunt to find a new growth engine for a business and fundamentally show the pathway to a sustainable future.

A sustainable future that mobilizes action in searching for new economic thinking. One which incorporates a more circular model of management that builds a more purposeful recycling approach that has the objective to reduce the pressures on our use of precious minerals and resources and current consumption patterns.

• A sustainable design that turns today’s promise of decarbonization into a real, meaningful one, that delivers tangible and quantifiable solutions in product and the extended supply chain
• A sustainable design that shifts our thinking into a more equality-sharing model where respect for our planet, people, and environment is central to our actions. They become the core of a well-understood value system that recognizes diversity, inclusion and community development.
• A sustainable design that recognizes the “twin” pressures of moving as rapidly to a net-zero achievement as we can. Also recognizing that our planet is under great threat in nature, our plants, animals, land and water and any sustainability focus needs clear biodiversity goals, EQUAL or greater, than our emissions goals.

Each organization is evaluating and embarking on its sustainability journey.

I would caution the many that this “sustainability journey” is not a five-year response, determined by today’s existing management but a lasting one that transforms what we do and undertakes a transformation into new economic thinking and business models that “accounts” in radically different ways, where financial numbers follow planetary concerns.

We will need to re-learn much and map it out.

Our innovation needs to become well designed as “responsible innovation” with sustainability in all that we design, build and provide.

To get to this new design, we need different thinking.

We need a greater horizon projection. For me, this can come from engaging and mapping ideas that have sustainability within them into a Three Horizon Sustainability Framework. We learn, experiment and embed sustainability into our everyday thinking.

Fundamentally, we need to reduce risks and become far more transparent in our actions and achievements; we need to strengthen society and all stakeholders to trust that the sustainability pathway chosen is well thought through and highly connected.

We need to connect today’s business with that new sustainable one in the future. To plan and expand out the transition, so new opportunities have “grounded into them” solutions that are more accessible and affordable, ones that have this circular business model as central.

A future to have ambitions that are constant improving and challenging in designs, when technology advances can bridge the digital divide, improve purpose and leverage technology to give fresh meaning to the delivery of real sustaining purpose.

Any journey needs a clear sense of purpose or governance; it needs resources and discipline to bring the ideas and concepts to fruition.

The UN Agenda for Sustainable Development has Seventeen Goals. Still, it is the ability to translate the need for sustainability into a driving force that has at its heart the following aspects.

We need to rapidly adapt and layout our sustainability journey that has real intent and purpose.

1. Sustainability becomes the new core of the business
2. We turn the wake-up call into a well-designed journey
3. The investments made will have different ROI horizons
4. Strong credentials on sustainability will be highly valued
5. A new financial set of calculations will drive recognition of change
6. The urgency of the journey will become unrelenting.
7. Investors and stakeholders will become highly demanding on this issue of sustainability increasingly into the future.
8. The goals, milestones and actions must be seen to be highly calibrated.

To achieve this set of objectives, we need to communicate in written and highly interactive, visual forms. In my opinion, the three horizon approach provides the connectivity between where we are today and where we need to get to in the future and why the middle, horizon two, is so essential.

The essential understanding of Horizon 2 becomes crucial.

Within this three horizon framework, horizon 2 becomes the critical one to understand and manage.

FYI, this was the framing of my intent on focusing on the energy transition in this post to outline where I was explaining the importance of this horizon 2 within the energy shifts that need to occur.

“The second horizon (H2) is the one you need to move through. It is the place to let go of much of the past. Yet, it also allows you to build, experiment, and validate these solutions that seem viable for the future. In this horizon 2, you identify how to draw out the nature of the tensions and dilemmas between vision and reality. You can separate the distinction between innovations that serve to prolong the status quo needed and necessary (keep the lights on, allow for a bridge from one fuel system (oil, gas, coal) to another that is more sustaining and based on technology breakthroughs and the renewables available (wind, solar, water).”

Never underestimate this traversing across Horizon 2

I wrote this post “traversing across into horizon 2 for new breaking innovation” that gives a real dose of realities to attempt this radical journey from the existing business model and its value extraction into the new one.

Horizon two poses a real challenge within any management of our organizations.

Certainly, if many of today’s solutions provide current small bases of volume to warrant a change then we need a more incremental approach in making change. If they are highly complex and expensive to change or reconfigure and will need a substantial change then a more radical re-design is required.

There is a risk perhaps that no real additional meaningful profit from the investments made but this is where the more central sustainability core is determined as the necessity, Existing and future products and services all become real points of discussion. This often can be a hard sell across the organization.

Projects that focus on future work mostly are based on ‘best’ assumptions but do need future thinking application. Sadly, executives often expect to see the same ‘hard’ metrics being applied as the existing business. We ignore significant differences or avoid making shifts in product design and then this is a huge mistake. Design in the future needs a sustaining core.

We must move our thinking beyond the here and now, and push it into the future if we want to transform our thinking and build a sustainable business “formed”on new economic values and approaches.  This shift takes a very different mindset and where the three horizons framework can help significantly in balancing any sustainability aims, planning and portfolio management to undertake such a radical shift in mindsets.

I urge you to consider the three horizons as a framework that can significantly help your sustainability journey. I believe I can help guide and work with you on this if required.

*I offer a good amount of thinking about the three horizons approach, mostly for innovation.

The post The value of three horizon mapping for a Sustainability Journey. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Sustainability is rising to be top or close to the top of a boards agenda. The growing concerns of several intertwined issues need addressing as they will initiate a significant change to the Business and how it operates and presents itself to the world.
Boards are asking where our business fits within and alongside society, both in who we serve and society in general, coupled with realising that the planet is heading towards a critical crisis and what we can do to reduce these pressures?
Not just sustainability forces a sharper need for strategic choices but the ability to undertake the product reinvention. A reinvention that concerns itself with reducing waste, minimizing carbon emissions, valuing the full life cycle and the ability to show the increasingly important end-of-life part of the lifecycle model. To extract precious, rare earth minerals and recycle parts reduces the demand for future mining or heat intensive materials.
Any products need to have a clear understanding of all their stages for the clarity of sustainability.
A clarification that the materials were sourced from green energy or sustainable sources to build, deliver and dispose of the product in this new truly sustainable economy approach is needed. Green credentials are going to become super important to the consumer’s decision to buy or not.
To embrace sustainability, you embrace a new set of principles of governance that bring the planet, people and prosperity far more into the thinking. What would that mean in the magnitude of change? How do you assess if your current business portfolio is sustainability proof of not just what is required or needed for today but also in the future? Different scenario thinking needs a constant mindset and evaluation.
Sustainability is becoming hugely critical for a business to build out its pathway.
I have been writing about sustainability in several posts recently over on my ecosystems4innovators posting site. If you want to think about how sustainability will affect you, the three posts tackle different aspects of sustainability. I firstly looked at the Environmental, social and corporate governance in “Looking beyond ESG“, then followed up with the need for finding a “Sustainable Value Creation“, and finally, in this mini-series “, Sustainability is the new growth core.”
The argument is to envision today going forward and the future working back for framing the different scenarios.

Each of these different approaches to framing future challenges requires different thinking. The two perspectives, predicting forward, working back, give insights into alternative positions and build out required milestones for the next 5,10, and 20 years. The annual business plan has become increasingly adaptive to meet today’s operating conditions.
These different scenario plans are essential for the business to manage a sustainability pathway, navigating in increased uncertainty, challenge and complexity and become the dynamic strategic document for moving towards a sustainable future.
I wrote an article on the Art of Back Casting that needs care earlier this year. In this, I was suggesting, backcasting is not concerned with predicting the future: The major distinguishing characteristic of backcasting analyses is the concern, not with likely energy futures, for example, but with how the desirable futures can be attained in this future working back approach.
So In this clean and green future, the consistent moving towards a desirable position for the planet, people and prosperity from only using clean energy, having fully decarbonised plants and supply chains, managing more efficiently and reducing waste. Are the products or services we sell environmentally friendly, easy to dispose of and made from sustainable sources of material or raw materials? So for knowing the future we need to achieve, we move back to achieving it over a given period.
“The concept of “backcasting” is central to a strategic approach for sustainable development. It is a way of planning in which a successful outcome is imagined in the future, followed by the question: “what do we need to do today to reach that successful outcome?”
The 3H methodology enables us to look out into the future across different horizons.
It allows us to gauge the challenges, adding aspects we are beginning to gain a sense of, transitioning from one position to another. It requires us to reflect and possibly make the change, then we can move forward to meet the new challenges within this emerging vision of the possible futures.
I have focused for many years, teaching, advising and building the-critical-value-propositions-of-the-three-horizon-methodology (3H- pdf download). Envisaging what we know and have today, we can begin to “plot” a pathway, here a Sustainability pathway, into the future in clear steps moving and supporting the existing and traversing to the seen future. For me, the value of the 3H has been one of my primary areas of focus for my innovation and change work for many years. It has a contributing value to any sustainability thinking. An example of explaining this might be worth the click: “Navigating of the three horizons framework- an emerging guide.”
The Three Horizon Framework for Managing.
The 3H can help tackle complex problems and draw out the future intent on sustainability; in its planning, resource allocations and skill gap identification to build capabilities and capacities to be ‘future-ready. We need to map the sustainability pathway across the three horizons. There will be constant disruption along the way.

The three voices that are to be hopefully found in the same board room when you undertake this

The different voices involved can be highly engaged; you have the voice of today, more concerned with managing the existing, maximizing returns and keeping the organization going efficiently and effectively. Then you have the second voice, the voice of the entrepreneur, the one eager to experiment, try out new things, explore and extend, accepting some aspects will not work. The third voice,  of the aspirant, who is looking to build a different vision, believing in different, more pioneering ways and visualizes things in their ‘mind’s eye’, far more aspirational, that can seem on first ‘take’ look to be totally incompatible to the reality of today.
A critical assessment of the present business and how it will “project” into the future is needed.
To embrace sustainability requires a no-holds-barred assessment of the present business and what is required in resources, shifts in strategic design and stakeholder dialogue. The journey does need a robust level of quantifying the disruption, for not just better-informed decisions based on fact-based or at least best assumptions.
The value of applying BOTH framing techniques to determining a sustainability pathway is to begin to make the connection’s, shifting individual thinking into team actions and decisions. Building multiple scenarios helps bring strategy, vision and innovation into greater alignment of thinking through diverging and then converging and then selecting the determined pathway from these alternatives.
Sustainability will drive the future of business. The evolution of innovation will come from increasing alignment. Any journey like this needs to commit to moving forward, learning, pivoting where needed, recognizing what and why that has been seen and understood and now needs changing, and re-affirming the moving forward again in approaches that continue to build future scenario’s built on evolving understandings.

The post Thinking sustainability needs a mix of future scenarios. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

A truly integrated innovation solution that sits in our organization to allow innovation to be fully leveraged and exploited.

We need to recognize innovation has many touchpoints and a myriad of dimensions that need to be aligned and integrated. I genuinely believe we need a solution provider, who takes a more holistic view of innovation management that can make a significant advancement on where we are today, in our processes and systems.

These need a total integrated solution as the approach. this has its complexities in the challenges but we do have the potential through technology deliveries, platform constructs, and using the flexibility and adaptability found in the cloud.

If we combine these technology enablers with our innovation management understanding, then we can begin to construct this systematically and thoughtfully. It is very achievable and necessary for our organization’s abilities to absorb and translate knowledge into innovative growth, something missing for many.

Innovation is certainly one of those in need of a real concerted effort to bring our approach to the management of innovation up to date within our enterprises, to make it more inclusive and that can I believe come far quicker through delivering it across the organization and all their partners by operating within the cloud.

An Enterprise Innovation Process (EIP) that is highly visible, agile and core to the organization’s future, seen by all, used by all and truly valued by all, as integrated and highly valuable to engage with.

The formal management of innovation is not resolved today, it is a collection of pieces.

To quote these statistics from an Innovation Leadership Study in March 2012 for example:
• *Only 30% of respondents agree they have an effective organisational structure for innovation.
• *45% do not have a well‐defined governance structure for innovation.
• *40% lack clear roles and responsibilities for innovation.
• *39% state they do not have an effective decision‐making process for innovation.
• * 54% of those surveyed indicate they do not have a formal KPI system for promoting innovation.
• *49% are not having a well‐defined process to prioritize and allocate time and funding to innovation projects.

If innovation management can be integrated into the organizations systems, I would suggest many of the current problems and frustrations we face today, in our innovating efforts, in barriers and issues surrounding innovation, might begin to melt away or change the existing unsatisfactory result game of today.

We need to strive towards making a more radical attempt at integrating innovation into our systems and structures. It is needed, as we need to all engage through innovation far more, to tackle growing issues and problems that are complex challenges that really need integrative thinking and connected processes.

Making the business case

Innovation management today is often standing outside any integration structure.  Some people, I am sure, would argue that it should do, yet I do often see and certainly feel innovation is often missing the critical top management line of sight and suffers accordingly.

Often this is in numerous resource constraints that ate becoming a real performance drag against expectations. To resolve this and many other issues innovation needs to be more central in core process thinking and managing throughout the entire organization.

• Often Innovation runs counter to repeatable processes; it needs to leverage this ambidexterity of having access to all that makes it adaptable‐ nimble, agile, constant change, and experimentation, prototyping tailored to explore incremental innovation in faster, more flexible ways.

• Alongside this to allow for more radical innovation that taps into greater needs for mobility, usability, elasticity and yet still be aligned to leverage, exploit and maximise opportunities needs to run in parallel.

We need not just a new innovation management system; we need to build this on a modern engagement platform. As constant change happens we will need to accommodate new technologies and its realization of enterprise value will need an even greater evolution than ERP, the present backbone of organizations.

We need a new outward-focused orientated system that can be delivered through this suggested Enterprise Innovation Planning (EIP) system.

As outlined earlier here, to achieve this I think we must go cloud‐based, agile, and moving towards having a more ambidextrous organization design for innovation.

This will help innovation to break out of the existing constraints and linear approach we have given it as its present straight jacket.

Integrating the innovation process and system is needed more today than ever.

We are in a really evolutionary period, with the explosion of change taking place in the post‐digital world of cloud, big data, social and interconnected devices. 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 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.

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 growing digital knowledge and activity.

Insights and ideas will form 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.

The innovation pipeline today is very manual; it will always need human intervention, in decisions, in inputs, in what is communicated, and what is approved or dropped. Yet innovation often gets far too weighed down by the wrong type of human intervention.

What changes are needed, who will be willing to invest in this radical redesign of the innovation system?

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 that previously fragmented and dispersed information, through analytics so it can be turned this into emerging valuable knowledge.

Innovation needs a radical redesign and update to accommodate the changes occurring in the present digital evolution of mobility, social and big data.

• 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 into our businesses that we will be able to extract new observations, to give us insights that can lead to completely different innovation opportunities.

• 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.

Today we are still too reliant on manual systems for much of our innovation work.

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

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 to 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 would certainly help instead of bolting further onto our present ways as our innovation challenges become even more complex.

Offering an Enterprise integrated solution would really offer innovation and its management a real opportunity to become fully embedded within our organizations.

Innovation gains a real line of sight and across organizational engagement to move closer to its promise of delivering sustained growth, new business and impact.

So it would be a real achievement if we saw real hard physical evidence that innovation was moving towards this integrated system in 2015, so our Enterprises can leverage all the knowledge and insights that can be harnessed into new innovation growth.

The post My innovation wish for 2015 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There is still a continued reluctance for exploring new radical innovation opportunities and although organizations ‘talk’ growth, they continue to struggle in achieving it through new innovation.

The incremental commitments to innovation still rule the day to move growth along. Until new sustaining confidence returns to our economies, risk mitigation dominates as markets continue to be more volatile and unreliable in predictive data and executive sentiment remains cautious.

Our organizations are looking for a higher certainty of return and seek sometimes endless validation and justification before they commit, even to small incremental changes. It is no wonder incremental innovation dominates in our innovation decisions; it is where reality sits for many. Are we heading off in a bad innovation direction?
Solidification in organizations seems to be moving towards simplification
As this incremental set of attitudes solidifies within organizations, have you noticed a growing trend of recognizing the processes and systems built up are actually more complex and creating ‘drag’ on performance demands? There is a move to greater simplification that strengthens the incremental mindset. We are perhaps ossifying innovation in our organizations if we elect to take this simplification route.

Risk readiness might be taking a bigger ‘back seat’ than we expect. This has significant implications as organizations continue to lose the ability to be ‘growth ready’ to execute on any sudden change of executive direction if market conditions suddenly change. Many are losing the ability to innovate beyond incremental approaches. It might catch them out badly if markets suddenly change and they are faced with a very different set of challenges demanding a more radical set of innovative solutions.

What signals are showing through?
Often we read of the likely demise of innovation but I think it’s ‘nature’ is changing. At the top of our organizations there continues to be this higher dissatisfaction with the value and returns within innovation and this is possibly being addressed in different ways down below in the organization, to compensate and appease.

Risky projects for the majority are not the place to blaze away in their careers; they want the known reward from keeping ‘steady’ the ship and being part of the incremental growth movement, to be seen as good operators working at constantly offsetting any risks, delivering what is wanted to be heard, not the bearer of bad news.

Do you spot this trend within your organization or industry? That growing movement where the ones intent on developing the routines that increasingly are only focused on incremental improvements are in the ascendency? Those driven by pushing hard for operation productivity to the exclusion of a number of traits associated with more radical innovation or potential breakthroughs.

Driving innovation through productivity has a real drumbeat
Are you in that place where there is this constant attention to improving practices continuously, to the exclusion of enquiry and only investing in the capacities that supports the delivery of this drive for greater productivity. A place where organizations are constantly seeking out those best practices, by wanting to eliminate variation, believing to simply copy others gives them the answer.

Do you gain that sense of impatience to evolve and develop in your own unique ways, as you attempt to short cut your own development in this blind copying? All around you feel that growing sense that the movement of six (sic) sigma is resurfacing, tapping into this quest for greater productivity and the ‘richer’ innovation potential seems to diminish?

When you have this incremental mindset then you become dedicated to standardization, you focus on real-time performance that can be measured and judged, you promote a more careful evaluation of innovation practices, striving to eliminate variances, you become relentless to reduce the unpredictable activities.

It becomes the prevailing organization mindset, the radical innovator drifts quietly away, disillusioned with where it is all going. Left to the gods of others making market change.

Organizations are more comfortable with improving productivity
There has been so many years of cost cutting, the consultant is also repacking it’s services from the present col-de-sac, largely played out, by housing organizations needs under the appeal for this quest for simplification.

Recently I was reading a report from www.sourceforconsulting.com that simplification is the next step in the evolution of productivity. The argument goes productivity is linked to growth and as our organizations are still very determined to do more with less, rather than simply less, the rise of rationalization grows and the demands to tap into this gathers pace.

Mitigating risk is the easier option
It is the attraction of combining this prevailing risk mitigation mindset with the idea of standardising and simplifying, validating through increased data verification and mining, striving for benchmarking and searching for best practices seems to go nicely with placing the innovation bets on increasing the incremental activities, all to the detriment of seeking out more radical innovation. Less risk, steady growth, fits with the short-termism of the board. Reward and remuneration become increasingly geared to this.

The vicious circle of meeting the board’s demands for immediate return simply tightens the noose and the longer-term building of capabilities for new innovation continue to slide, pushed off to yet another day, somewhere in the future. Does that really matter to the current board executive or his external board? Managing today’s volatility and uncertainties means risk mitigation is dominating. Let tomorrow be managed by someone else.

Are the majority of our organizations becoming the great sustainers?
A recent article by Gary Pisano on the HBR blogs was arguing for the defence of routine innovation. He suggests the vast majority of profit from innovation comes from the stream of routine, or sustaining, innovations that accumulate for years.

He mentions Intel as a great sustainer, with its value proposition of higher-performing, higher-margin microprocessor chips has not changed. Growth is slowing but Pisano’s argument is Intel has generated cumulative operating income before depreciation of $287.4 billion. That is a lot of cash generation to keep investing or distributing back to the shareholders.

Equally, Pisano argues Microsoft that started as a great disruptor but for much of the recent years, it has been following a sustaining path, defending its position. Of course it has perhaps missed out with this prevailing ‘mindset’ on some really key growth areas, yet it has earned $325 billion over three decades.

The article is equally suggesting Apple is a sustaining, more incremental organization today. It has generated $150 billion is cash flow since 2011. The emphasis is perhaps less on the next big disruption and more on aesthetically pleasing designs and versatility in their devices.

Are we leveraging to existing strengths and not grasping new opportunities?

Gary Pisano’s point is as an organization becomes well established, its innovation strategy needs to understand how to leverage distinctive existing strengths to generate and capture ongoing value.
It is about recognizing and organizing innovation around the repertoire of existing strengths to extend increasing the value from innovation, to play to your existing strengths. Or is it?

Are we not putting off our future by not investing in the future? How can we strike a balance on this and what should that allocation of resources be like? What needs to be brought in to add to the existing repertoire of skills?

Is the innovation message today becoming more deliberate in its design?
I wonder what is around the corner. So is the message today the one of trading off the risks of radical, disruptive innovation for the more incremental, sustaining innovation? Is this the period of evolutionary innovation, less revolutionary?

Of course, we all know that oblivion is potential ‘just around the corner’ as there are many competitive forces at work looking to disrupt.

For me, it does seem far too many of our organizations today might be far too focused on protecting and defending their existing positions, they are failing to extend beyond a core. Are our organizations working on incremental innovation to the detriment of more radical and riskier innovation? Is that unhealthy or simply prudent?

I fear the innovation balance seems not right.
Of course the strategic view of sustaining innovation while you explore and experiment the next big potential wave is the best approach but I tend to feel the dominating mindset of risk mitigation today, is driving many to simply just become incremental innovators only and that has a growing risk attached to it.

You continue to lose the skills, the understanding that more radical innovation is very different in time, in placing your resource allocation and building all the different skills and experience you need and these need to be consistently worked at. They can’t simply be turned off and on when changing market conditions are suddenly confronting you.

If incremental innovation dominates we lose the future
If one type of innovation prevails and begins to dominate, the risks of not providing for a healthy future increase, and we are ossifying our innovation.

We begin to lose our abilities to be responsive and flexible. We lose our agility to respond to changes in our markets.

What is always needed is to strike a good balance in our innovation portfolio, between the immediate and the future.

We need to not forget that we all must manage in all three innovation horizons to have a (greater) chance of achieving a really sustaining future.

The post Are our organizations ossifying their innovation or simply have no clue? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I was surprised, going through some of my past blogs, that the time between related entries on the need for having in place a sustainable competitive advantage framework on innovation has been longer than they it should have been.

This blog is the third entry on this subject.

Always, always and always do I see organizations struggle to align themselves for their innovation activity, why is this? Either alignment of innovation into the strategy they are (assumedly) following or shaping innovation into the context of where and how innovation can fit.

I’ve written on this often enough actually, and argued the need for building a more sustaining innovation framework.  I have been working for some time within one of my formulas on this with its given framework of II + EE + MLC + OC + RNE build towards = SCA. I somehow suspect you need nudging on what this means.
Required past reading possibly needed here.

Without duplicating more than necessary you need to go back and read two previous blogs on this

The first was written in August 2010 and entitled “A formula for Sustaining Competitive Advantage through Innovation”. The link is here:  http://bit.ly/95kCI1

The second was written in June 2011 and entitled “Sustaining is Pivotal to Making Innovation Progress”. The link is here: http://bit.ly/lPLssm

Both offer a helpful introduction to the framework and formula.

The next part of the equation
This blog ‘advances’ this framework by attempting to link the context of innovation into a process to think through. I say attempting because we need to accept each building process is different, and unique to the organization and the circumstances of what they want innovation to achieve, besides the standard reply “growth and profit”.

Doesn’t this always sounds like the famous question asked at beauty pageants: “So what’s the most important issue for you?” asks the compare with the reply “world peace”. Oh, I wish it was so simple.

Those leaders that talk of “growth and profit” from innovation seem to reduce it to just a sound bite, I just wish it was so simple. I do wish the majority of our business leaders would get ‘into’ innovation understanding a lot more.

Innovation breaks down always outside the CEO’s executive door and it really does need them to step outside and get more fully involved as it is a major area to succeed at if a longer tenure is in their minds.

Still, I digress. Here I outline how I see a typical linking through of a context to innovation in a ‘flow through’ process that is shaped along the II + EE + MLC + OC + RNE build towards = SCA, framework.

Innovation Alignment, Context & Process

Innovation Alignment to the Corporate Strategy does need working through. It needs linking to business goals and strategy, to the role innovation plays within this, the type of innovation portfolio you wish to design and work upon and the delivery and adoption needed so the organization ‘aligns’ itself. You need a thinking-through process to align context into activity.

This takes time, it needs sustaining effort but it needs leadership to understand the critical connecting parts to do this. It needs a defining framework that I see as separate to what I’m offering here. On my present rate of outlining this it does seem sometime next year for that – not good news for those interested.

Watch this space

Actually let me share a little secret between us,  I’m working on a more radical, visually appealing and exciting way to approach this now but within a joint collaboration around this critical issue.

So, who knows this might be discussed earlier than my past track record of once a year to move from one aspect to another.

It needs to be and I’m sure my collaborating partner on this will be pushing me a lot harder going forward.

The post Linking innovation context to the process first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.