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.

Yet there have been consistent criticisms of it, as the world of innovation has moved on. Today it is faster-paced, far more competitive and global and become less predictable.

The cries of the Stage-Gate process as being too linear, too rigid and far too planned, bordering on prescriptive have often been heard. The gates are too structured and the constant ‘creep’ of the controlling bureaucracy surrounding it in paperwork, checklists and justification has simply led to so much non-value-added work added to the moans and groans.

Surprisingly, the Stage-Gate concept was created in the 1980’s and led to Robert G Cooper’s different evolutions of this evolving and absorbing many new practices and experiences gained by different organizations across this time.

I’ve written previously on this blog site about the concerns within this Stage Gate system if organizations allow the ‘controllers’ to dominate over the ‘creators’ of innovation what can happen. We end up with “self-inflicted wounds caused by jumping hurdles and closing gates on innovation”.

The idea-to-launch gating system is under more threat today than ever before.

Is there a potential new generation or are we just going through the motions, like shifting deckchairs on the titanic as it steams towards a submerged iceberg? Bob Cooper has been open enough to challenge his thinking constantly and at this point of time he is reinventing the Stage-Gate again.

The details of the new process and its different multifunctions are still a work-in-progress. What he is looking for is something far more agile, vibrant, dynamic, flexible gating process that has as its outcomes a leaner, faster and more adaptive and risk-based approach. This alone in its principles is a great starting point.

Bob has been writing on this with different papers that have included “What’s Next? After Stage-Gate”, a far more academic one I have been (slowly) working through. It was well worth the read.

So what can we see that is ticking away in the new Stage-Gate thinking?

Will this be enough to reduce the criticisms, will it be adaptive enough to meet today’s needs? I will attempt to shorten down this thinking and try to summarize the main points.

It has three parts to it- it focuses on being 1) Adaptive and flexible, 2) Agile in its deliverables and 3) Accelerated to push the development process.

1. The adaptive and flexible part

Any idea-to-launch system will take its power from being adaptive and flexible and will need to shape itself to the context of each particular project. That is radical enough in any system.

The qualities are going to come from four attributes: spiral development cycles, context-based stage and gate definitions and activities, risk-based contingency models and flexible criteria for any ‘Go/Kill decision making.

For instance the spiral development will be based on ‘build-test-feedback-revised’ iterations. The context-based stage and gate definitions and activities to accommodate multiple versions to deal with full five stage higher-risk projects, lighter versions for moderate risk projects and an express version for small developments. There are different adaptations taking place with users already working through these.

For instance HP has approached this by geographical needs with an emergent model for start-ups, an agile model for growth sectors and a traditional phase-growth review structure for mature markets.

P&G have not employed different processes but focused more on the value-driven process that focuses even harder on the front-end.

The risk-contingency is about constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty. Here teams are working far more with blank canvas approaches to identify key unknowns and uncertainties, then determining what information is needed to validate and move in highly flexible and efficient ways. The value of having an experienced team helps here.

Finally in this part the flexible criteria for ‘Go/Kill’ decisions become the change in order of magnitude for me. Financial criteria begin to take a back seat; it is more on strategic criteria as it has always been so difficult to predict the longer-term impact. The move to non-financial criteria will radically alter the dynamics within innovation in my opinion – if this really does take hold.

2. The Agile approach

The stage-gate needs to become far more nimble, speed is the essence.

The growing adoption of the Agile development process applied to software is the point of change.

The use of “sprints” that are “time boxed” and “scrums” for meetings, are designed to deliver working (physical) products as functioning prototypes.

These become “physical milestone objectives” and if these are not achieved then you move into the risk of termination. The emphasis is demonstrating to stakeholders working physical progress. Clearly this becomes more resource intensive but true innovation does require that.

Some organizations are approving projects and resources to have unfettered six-month periods with no rules and no reviews but at the end of this agreed period ‘something’ has to be seen and tested by a customer.

Equally the drive to cut out the “work that adds no value” has involved using Lean Six Sigma methods or similar to take past business case documents from 30 to 90 pages to now 4 pages by Johnson & Johnson. P&G for instance are working on mere six page deliverable packages according to Bob Cooper.

3. Accelerated Process

The focus is on reducing the time wasting activities through a more value-stream analysis, accelerating by overlapping stages, encouraging concurrent activities, ensuring dedicated teams are assigned to properly resource projects, those real concerted efforts to sharpen up the fuzzy front end and automate these through clear support project systems are all being worked upon.

Toyota uses a synchronized process for simultaneous execution and search for ways to improve on this continuously.

The emphasis is to maximize speed, working really hard on scoping the front end in greater detail, and asking key questions on where the right track is and what this needs in resource, time and development.

So there is significant evidence that Stage-Gate is evolving

Some of this is evolutionary, such as fast-track versions, and some more revolutionary, based on more risk-orientated contingency models.

The continued need is to get the next-generation process to be adaptive, flexible, agile and accelerated. The use of the evolving value proposition through prototypes and early beta market testing versions is part of this.

The starting point is with a blank canvases, exploring constantly the uncertainties and risks – determining the critical but evolving assumptions, and working to deliver the right deliverable at the right stage to validate the key assumptions – calls for a completely different mindset.

Is this radical or simply catching up with the changes that we have been seeing taking place in innovation to deal with the pace of change? One that can fit better in our evolving global world that is more impatient than ever, not bothering to wait for those focused on managing the stages and gates in old-world ways.

A time to move on I think for us all?

******

Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Opening up the Stage-Gates to let the new innovating world in? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Squeezing all types of innovation through this, for whatever people claim is a linear process, is simply wrong.

You can simply say: “we destroyed much to get sometimes so little out as the final outcome, when initially it was seen to be so promising.”

The difficulty is that we are still struggling to find a real alternative, although there have been some recent noteworthy attempts, firstly by Jose A Briones and his Spiro-Level 3D approach and then by Paul R Williams, of the American Institute for Innovation Excellence, to move the discussions beyond the Stage-Gate process from this linear into more spiral concepts and beyond.

There has been an awful lot written on Stage-Gate, some people attacking it and suggesting it “guarantees mediocrity for your business”.

Clayton Christensen has suggested “the Stage-gate system is not suited to the task of assessing innovation whose purpose is to build new growth businesses, but most companies continue to follow it simply because they see no alternative”

Stage-Gate has certainly earned its place for product management.
Stage-Gate is an ideas-to-launch process that encompasses a solid body of knowledge built up over the years and has for many become the blueprint for managing the NPD process, reinforcing effectiveness and efficiency as its core discipline. I would argue that’s it! It reinforces but at what cost?

Innovation can actually miss out! Often it can also extract out much of the very process that we need from great innovation to leap forward and grow our businesses today. More on this later.

Employing this Stage-Gate methodology you can feel safe that there is behind it a body of knowledge on the best practice gleaned from studies of thousands of new product developments. The process takes you through stages or hurdles, passing through gates where ‘go/ kill’ decisions should be made.

Organizations that thrive on having a ‘regime’ hold ‘fast’ to the Stage-Gate as their way to manage innovation. This rigidity of a given mindset is one of the real concerns about being totally reliant on the Stage-Gate. It works for product development that is more incremental in nature –the bread and butter of most businesses.

A really short history of the Stage-Gate first.              

Stage-Gate was developed, is registered as a trademark and certainly popularized by Robert Cooper. His first edition was published in 1986 in the early days of understanding the management of the innovation process.

He has since updated with a second edition in 1993 and from this it gained its real traction as the recognized process, and established the term “Stage-Gate” clearly to manage within any product development process. His third edition in 2001 shifted the focus and became more taking the concept further on accelerating idea-to-launch.

In 2011 he gave us a completely revised and updated fourth edition.  Robert Cooper reminds us that his Stage-Gate process has become the most widely used method for managing new products in industry today.

It has been suggested that this Stage-Gate process is a conceptual and operational map. Well, yes for NPD only maybe it is but today with all the other types of innovation needed to be considered by organizations it is NOT really capable of living up to this claim.

I grant you can think through the process conceptually on how to manage this but I feel this grants Stage-Gate more than it really can offer. It is a stage-gate decision process for product development.

Do linear processes manage all the different types of innovation?

Organizations have become so use to thinking only product innovation they are attempting to drive ‘any’ innovation through the same system.

This approach is placing so many self-inflicted wounds on the organization, often in the most painful way possible; through lost opportunities on achieving more significant growth, lost chances to fundamentally change the competitive game and ill-fitting attempts to fit innovation through this one process system.

Original fresh ideas get morphed into completely different end products that seem to become more incremental the further they have to accommodate all the jumping over these hurdles and passing through the stages and gates. It becomes the skill in trying to avoid being ‘killed off’ for often a lack of validation (often obscure)  and that famous cry of “give me proof” often of the unknown- how can you?

Stage-Gate ‘plays’ right into the hands of the bean counter, the risk reducer, the keeper of maximizing productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. Each gate, each hurdle forces the denominator down, mistakenly thinking this is reducing cost risk (often of the only true innovative part) and effective management of time will serve the organization well.

This fuels the short-term protectionism we all cry about today, as well as it adds even more to the long-term detriment of mediocre innovation entering the market. We are still failing to ignite growth and continuing to disappoint customers with underwhelming offerings that still doesn’t meet their needs.

The Stage-Gate is not the panacea for managing innovation

I would argue we should stop regarding the Stage-Gate as the panacea for managing all of your innovation needs. Stage-Gate handles the incremental product cycle fairly well, but when you are on a more open innovation platform collaboration it struggles to be flexible, agile and fit the different challenges presented by the collaborating parties.

True innovation goes through such an iterative process; processes like Stage-Gate are simply not equipped to manage all of what this entails. Nor does it really pick up well on the growing impact any potential new business model innovation might signify.

The stage-gage approach wants to constantly refer back to excepted existing practices and the structures in place and not novel or radically altering ones that can challenge the existing business model. Can you imagine something completely breakthrough or totally disruptive being forced through a Stage-Gate NPD process?

What also does happen when you have to work through separately the potential of the service innovation dimension or the myriad of other types of innovation? Too often we retrofit service instead of running this in parallel.

We have arrived, it seems to me, at a certain point where innovation is often being projected forward to a given solution and then worked back, so it can pass through the Stage-Gate system. Sometimes this is right if you spot a unique opportunity for a job-to-be-done need but we have to be more than careful of this ‘forming’ habit, it can exclude even greater insights and discoveries even here.

Recognizing limitations AND managing in new and different ways.
So we can recognize that Stage-Gate can work well for incremental and well planned out innovation but it ‘stutters’ and can ‘die’ when you need radical, new-to-the-world breakthroughs as you enter those far too many unknowns to try to run them through a system.

Whichever way you ‘wrap’ Stage-Gate it is still a linear process that has to go through justification at each stage and pass through the ‘gate’ in resolving the criteria expected, before it can go on. Irrespective of the innovation this can often load the process with bureaucracy, internal politics and tensions. You increasingly focus on preparing for these ‘gate’ meetings, losing valuable time often not on the idea and concept itself.

Invariably the questions asked to justify and validate requires much rethinking, leading too aspects of the proposal rewritten and then resubmitted, turning even more into growing time delays.

This leads to escalating upwards through the gatekeepers to the senior manager, who is not fully engaged in the process, you lose even more time, he often does not have context, you lose precious opportunity, and you lose money in delays while this all gets sorted out, eventually and it goes on and on with growing conflict and tensions.

There is also a shift to ‘status and attainment’ on sitting on these reviewing committees rather than bringing real ‘value and benefit’ and often this gets confused to the detriment of the process . The process often dominates not the product concept itself. Stage-Gate might have become simply a safety first decision-making tool than an actual NPD process to help and assist.

You begin to justify the many unknowns somehow, you cater to the constant demands for proof at every step of the way, or otherwise you will never get your products out of the door.

We just end up with wicked compromises and the original idea deserves better, much better than that.  If we were honest with ourselves, we shave things off, we dilute, we radically alter what were initially great looking concepts and reduces them down to a pygmy of the original ‘wow’ concept.

Lean and rapid principles have some foundation value

I think where Dr Cooper has continued to explore in his Stage-Gate journey has been the move towards his lean and rapid principles. Those are closer to universal needs of all innovation. These are

1. Have a clear customer focus
2. Ensure as much front-end loaded as you can in assessment and testing
3. Spiral development- find ways to be more iterative and greater community engagement
4. Push for more holistic approaches of effective cross-functional teams
5. Seek the right metrics, accountability allocation and continuous improvement
6. Focus on building a more effective portfolio management through funnelling and appropriate resource allocation
7. Looking to keep pushing for a flexible, adaptable, scalable and efficient process

These are useful ‘generic’ contributions to finding better solutions to having an updated innovation process, irrespective of type (of innovation).

A lot about the Stage-Gate has organizing value to incorporate with this more holistic design of a process to manage all innovation ,it should certainly not be discarded but looked at with a different perspective.

What is called for, in my opinion, is to build even more on these lean and rapid principles but also to recognize and go ‘simply beyond’ the often fixating obsession of applying a product development process with decision gates that many currently have.

Although it is not a bad organizing principle for business decision checkpoints, we ‘just’ need to go way beyond this to obtain the increased need for flexibility required, by considering all the different types of innovation an organization needs to consider and cater for them in some form of reviewing approach, if we can.

We need a different more agile, adaptable process that deals with innovation outside the ‘norm’ of managing incremental NPD, if we are ever going to move beyond the present, more common incremental mindset prevalent today.

The need to build and extend our capabilities and processes

We must certainly stop trying to treat all innovation projects with the same ‘Stage-Gate’ brush, squeezing it through the same process. We need to develop different ‘templates’ but have perhaps a common recognized set of decision points or organizing principles.

We certainly need to offer more autonomy to teams through a more robust Innovation Governance structure, this is for me critically important. We need to shift the mindset from ‘Go / kill’ to greater informing choices and options to consider. We need to be less reliant on data, more ready to sense, listen and make informed decisions as we go.

We must make sure we capture the alignment with senior management on the strategic goals, the priorities and allocating appropriate resources according to the innovation type and challenge.

We need to allow for a greater freedom of thought, of investigating ‘breaking’ ideas, encourage explorations along the way. We need to push for more experimentation, conceptual work, design modelling so as we learn we can quantify, as we quantify we gain increasing identification and organization alignment.

We know much of innovation is unstable, throwing out fluid information that is often contradictory; we need to capture these differences in more flexible, intuitive ways.

This calls for a lot more agility in thinking, in accepting often erratic behaviours to see if we can suddenly leap ahead. Hurdles, keeping to prescribed steps and trying to pass through decision gates needs some very fluid approaches but can still be in disciplined, informed ways but with totally different mindsets of searching for ‘better’ innovation outcomes.

The innovation system required today needs to be more flexible, adaptive, agile and scalable.

The system should not dictate innovation, it has to be more adapted to our different innovation needs and their circumstances so we can maximise innovation’s potential to lead growth.

We need to recognize that a breakthrough concept, a disruptive game changer, a new business model proposition or a multiple type innovation (product, service and BM) need different approaches, all much faster to be developed but with increasing levels of uncertainties being built into the ‘system’ not just taken out because we are uncomfortable with this or unsure how to handle this. Simply ask others to help you, there is no shame in this.

There have been significant changes in our understanding of innovation since Stage-Gate was first introduced. In the process, the culture required, the ways to manage, to align and to develop have all evolved.

We must stop being a slave to the innovation system in place, often left over through legacies in the system and find ways to go beyond the often rigid, linear Stage-Gate process that organizations are locked into.

Innovation is complex and adaptive
Innovation should be understood as a system that will always have non-linear behaviours, it cannot be stage-managed in isolated events.

Innovation is complex and adaptive and the more we recognize the power of unpredictability, the significant variations, need for constant interactions and the careful selection of those ideas that need to be carried forward, the closer we might get to finding a more universally accepted innovation system.

Let’s stop trying to force innovation by jumping hurdles and closing gates that often do not apply, so we end up with self-inflicted wounds because we were on the wrong track.

The post Self-inflicted wounds on innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The question today being faced by many is how to transform existing business models so as to avoid that race to commoditization and decreasing shareholder value and so to provide improved value.

Equally business model innovation increasingly needs to be able to reduce the threat of new competition that is constantly finding ways to undermine your present business. The Entrepreneur is snapping at your heels like never before.

Leaders need the tools, skills and experience to envision, test and implement new business models more than ever and certainly faster than ever.

The worrying aspect today it seems is that many leaders are still not knowing what it is within their existing business model that ‘combines’ to make the existing profit engine of the business, those ‘value points’ that really provide the innovation opportunity to sustain or challenge their existing business models.

So what is Business Model Innovation?
There are numerous definitions of a BMI- let me provide three that I trust build the understanding.

In Alexander Osterwalder’s & Yves Piqneur’s book “Business Model Innovation” they simply explain this as:

“creating value, for companies, customers and society, replacing outdated models that respond to emerging user needs and pressing environmental concerns. A business model describes the rationale of how an organisation creates, delivers and captures value”.

The authors offer nine basic building blocks that build up the complete logic of how a company intends to make money through a new BMI. It basically covers the four main areas of the business: customers, offer, infrastructure and financial viability.

They suggest you construct a business model canvas through exploring key partners, key activities, key resources, customer relationships, channels (to market), customer segments and the value proposition with cost structure and revenue streams.

In Mark Johnson’s book “Seizing the White Space”, he firstly starts with White space as defined as “the range of potential activities not defined or addressed by the current business model, beyond its core and adjacencies that require a different business model to exploit”.

He sees a BMI to have four parts requiring a clear, strong customer value proposition (CVP), secondly the show me the money part- a profit formula that defines how and where the company will capture value for a given set of customers at a given price.

The third and fourth element of this framework is key resources and key processes as the means by which the company delivers the value to the customer and itself.

Thirdly, Boston Consulting Group argues a business model consists of two essential elements- the value proposition and the operating model. Within the value proposition, you need to be explicit on your target segments, product or service offering and revenue model.

In the operating part you need to address three critical parts- the value chain, cost model and organization.

So in summary:

Business model innovation is really all about game-changing moves, partly dependent on the industry and the circumstances. BMI should be seen as a proactive need for all to explore new avenues of growth and opportunity before others steal in and take the space from right under you.

Understanding your value-added points is essential

Articulating the (existing) business model as a first step leads to exploring ways to add further value. Customers want to be served in increasingly different, more exciting ways that often need lower cost delivery, greater convenience or improved functionality or are genuinely novel to the world.

Knowing these value points is vital.

The role of the business model is capturing that value from new innovative insight. Increasingly this is coming from articulating your purpose more than the product or service and discovering the value promise that will gain customers attention and then delivering on it through your redesigned business model.

You need to be really clear on the scope of your business and be ready to outsource the rest to others who specialise in that part more efficiently than you can do. This might be in the area of supply chain, technology platforms, research and development, warehousing and storage, support services etc.

The Catalysts of Change needed for a new Business Model Innovation.

The starting point of a new Business Model is to know what the customer is trying to do that they cannot do as effectively as they would wish today.

These are regarded as jobs-to-be-done or knowing the unmet needs and often not unarticulated as they have not been recognised or even appreciated  as needed when you ask.  You can recognise these more often through deeper observation to discover the opportunities that are presently not being served correctly.

So the execution of the task or job is becoming increasingly more important to focus upon and today I feel less attention should be given to (existing) known product or services that often over-serve the real need of the customer.

The critical aspect here though is that it must be delivering something the consumer wants resolving not what you might just think from your own internal perspective, it needs identifying and then validating. If you can correctly identify these then you have a potential innovation match that might need a new business model to support this.

For me, there are four powerful drivers that can galvanise BMI- increased visibility, reducing complexity, providing a different effect than the present and altering the perception with significant impact on today’s understanding.

The reason for today’s emphasis on Business Model Innovation

The challenge is to unravel the (increasing) complexities of a business.

There is a consistent need to beat back intensifying competition, not just coming from the normal competition but from emerging entrants that have spotted these breaking opportunities or seen an unmet job that need to be changed and resolve a customer’s needs.

They can quickly translate this into a viable business alternative and scale rapidly to disrupt the existing business providers. This ‘disruptive process’ is happening across all sectors of the manufacturing industry and service and has given rise in these times of increased uncertainty, accelerating global competition and increasingly more choice for the buyer.

As a consequence, it is getting harder to not evolve constantly and this is increasingly coming through a closer ongoing review that Business Model Innovation provides.

To summarize why you need a clear understanding of BMI

Business Model Innovation is becoming essential to understand and explore. Luckily there is numerous references available to refer too, to draw down examples and to gain encouragement to experiment.

It is not something that I would suggest you push away or delegate to others, BMI offers a powerful concept to change the existing ways and to help you identify the present unknowns that can offer new value and growth paths for you and your future business.

• A business model defines a broad competitive approach to business and you need to articulate this
• A successful business model needs to ‘earn’ some sort of competitive advantage to the extent it changes the existing offerings available in worthwhile ways, for the consumer to ‘do something better than what is presently available.
• Having a comprehensive understanding on the focus of competition must also mean a greater focus on innovation, as the relentless changing conditions ensure any business and its model must evolve.

Today you simply cannot afford to stand still, you need to innovate your business model consistently.

The post The systematic understanding of Business Model Innovation design first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.