Connecting technology and innovation is altering how we should re-access organizations ability to build out. We are in the middle of a technological-led industrial revolution It is becoming highly dynamic.

****I decided to revise this post as I originally got caught up in “conflation”. Two ideas merging as one and it simply lost the insights of each, simply attempting to fuse different thoughts into one entity. It honestly did not work and I struggled with what to do.  By splitting them up they become separate reads and more digestible and hopefully of better value. I have to admit this is not the first time I get caught in this  (or I expect the last!) and I apologize to you, as the reader *****

So here I outline a 5S framework to trigger some opening thoughts on breaking down technology design complexity. The other post, now over on my other site, deals with the growth of “apps” in IIoT “Great apps will deliver the future business value in IIoT” and is predicting a changing future based on some recent takeover announcements.

So getting that embarrassment behind me lets go back to the 5S idea.

Arriving at a designed outcome is getting complicated. Developers get caught up in the details, rightly so, to deliver on a connected world but you must always ask the “what for?”

The more I was thinking I was trying to cut through all this “unnecessary fog” as a non-techie so I started to build my 5S idea. Let me share it

Any digital inspiring organization has to deal with significant change, it becomes overwhelming for many making decisions that will determine their future. They are placing really big bets on getting the technology part right. Personal agenda’s get pushed, IT viewpoints are far to narrow, management gets caught in indecision. A technology strategy has to be designed around and into the business strategy and the future.

My simple thought here is asking different questions around a few simple triggers, perhaps this very simply 5S. They actually become very central to determining a way forward for a business in how it designs its technology infrastructure.

Firstly, how “smart” do you wish to be, through technology application, so then what then becomes your “software” needs, and where do your “store” all the inevitable data that will be generated and needing analysis (cloud, local). Then what does it take to “scale” ambition and the resulting business and finally what sort of IoT “stack” needs to be built and designed to support the ambition? So these “5S” is not a bad assessing framework initially. Let me go through these briefly:

Firstly Smart

We are moving everywhere in “Smart” be that buildings, agriculture, homes, mobility, grids, utilities, traffic, logistics, waste management, as well as in our personal lives with smartphones and how we use the smart speakers we are rapidly becoming reliant on in the home to tell us what we need to know. We are becoming highly reliant on everything connecting and enabling us to be “smart.” Every organization with a growth ambition has to look at what smart means for them

Smart dominates in the solutions we are working towards. IoT offers us that “pervasive technology” so we can optimize, exert greater control, improve, protect, have greater connectivity. Smart is offering us ways to optimize, integrate our lives in different, potentially more intelligent ways.

Smart APPS are innovative systems that gather tremendous amounts of data from sensors and other embedded equipment and through machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics, we are making information highly actionable for the user, with the aim to improve the experience, productivity, and understanding.

“Smart” needs to be central in your thinking through the end results you are looking for

Secondly Stacks.

I am constantly reading about “stacks” when it comes to technology design. The IoT stack is becoming the “Thing Stack”. Technology has layers that constantly are adding (stacks) of complexity. IoT stacks manage solutions for device hardware, devise software, communications, cloud platforms, and cloud applications. I keep being told “we are building a full stack” but I find that often hard to believe as new technology breakthroughs keep moving ahead of “physical” design. We are blending existing technologies with new ones.

There is an awful lot of engineering going on dealing with many unique challenges, built up over the years. The understanding of all the layers, how they work not just in the past but how they need to work in the future is demanding. Building the right technology stack is essential for delivering strategy and the underlying digital roadmap. Understanding all the stacks and their layering guides the creation of IoT solutions.

We are equally requiring “jobs-to-be-done” not just in one Enterprise but in the growing need to connect up in the IIoT Enterprise world, where connectivity and exchange become common to leverage new business values. Stacks need to tackle the hard-end in protecting and keeping the infrastructure secure and open enough for attracting in the user-end as well. That needs a real business grasp.

The IoT stack becoming the “Things Stack” is shifting our thinking. We need to build the physical with the digital. We need to understand the physical world of what we are trying to do or achieve, with the technology solutions that work with, or for the business. User interactions are increasing in their expectancies, wanting “greater connected experience” and demanding Enterprises are equally required to be very savvy about the markets they are in and wish to serve.

It does seem we are needing to think in different layers or stacks, in a more holistic way, dealing and understanding, solving and connecting the physical world, with the business abilities, the technology layers and the market changes taking place and the user experiences expected.

This rethinking “stacks” needs to build more of the interrelationships between these to get context, device and gain the best level of “interaction” to gain from the ability to connect up. It is not purely IoT to think this through and try to understand it, it is the understanding of the full business stack needed by all the relevant decision makers.

The world of Scale

A certain scale is a necessity it seems today. When you invest so much in revolutionalizing your business, pushing technology and digital transformation you need to achieve a greater return. The greater the investment, the greater need is to scale and cover the “sunk” costs. At present most enterprises are grappling with containing costs in operating expenses as they attempt to transition to a heavier reliance on technology. To build your own platform, you need to think scale. To grow your business, often it has to be able to quickly scale. Products, to successfully scale, need to move from trial to full execution and these need to have clearer “scaling” pathways and design.

We all are struggling to define our scalability parameters, so we can then recognize the solutions we need to manage our scaling ambitions. To scale is one of the toughest issues to handle. If you do not have the financial resources to “find solutions and resources to scale” you struggle. We are increasingly seeking scale through partnerships, in joining established platforms so we can leverage a network and take growing advantage of technology and communication scale. As we scale we need to find those greater “intelligent solutions” by converting our factories into “digital factories” so we can extract efficiencies and channel product solutions into scaling for those “economies of scale” these investments need.

Storage- where do you start

Data is growing at exponential rates. The more we connect up, the more we seek out and gather data, often to justify investments, we are requiring increased storage. Today, we believe the cloud solves our problems, I am not sure. When you enable one device so it becomes a connected device through built-in sensors the sell becomes what value you get out of all the connected data from that one device, some but not much. The power of data is when you connect up many. Processors, local storage, gateways, improved processors all have increasing cost implications. The more data you want to collect, the more it costs to store it.

No wonder “data is the new liquid gold” and those that manage the cloud for storage are the new valuable bankers in the world, look at Amazon or Microsoft in how they manage our storage needs.  Not only do you as a client need to “house” data but you then need to analyze it. The additional slicing, dicing and simulating, the belief this needs to be in real-time, all adds even more storage need and demand assessment. Managing your data storage inventory is a growing problem

Today through the internet we are streaming information constantly up to the cloud or to our own storage facilities. The type and amount of data you are storing are becoming mind-blowing. Storage is the “beast” that needs taming.

Then we finish up with Software in my 5S frame

We are working on the concept of “software-defined hardware” so hardware devices can serve multiple applications, depending on the software it is running. These device hardware and software work together to create the “smart device”.  This is the present pressure point – we can’t write code quickly enough to meet demand. Hence why low-code is currently such a hot item. The software does the talking. It glues it all together., the hardware, the device, the cloud etc. Functionality in software becomes the “golden ticket” and how we build our future applications will determine where you find yourself positioned in the eyes of your customer, or in extracting new value, to improve on what you have got.

It is recognized the building of hardware takes longer, especially in large Industrial solutions like grids, platforms, factories, utility solutions or transport. The growing question is how you accelerate software solutions so you can assist the physical side. We have seen the birth of the “digital twin” to help in this. Hence why Siemens, with all of their hardware solutions, needs the software solutions offering of platforms, connectivity, visualization, and application delivery to be in place, if it is to sell the digital solutions alongside their hardware solutions. It has multiple partners, but it is acquiring much to have internal competencies.

This in-house building has many advantages but can reduce flexibility and rate of response if some of the digital solutions (rapidly) change. In some ways when you chose to build your own platform solutions for others to come and join, the digital complexities simply “runaway” with themselves.

The platform provider needs to recognize the ultimate value is in the orchestration for others to “play,” so the supply side and demand side need equal balancing in any platform offering equation. I argue today we need to provide more value to create the demand side. Building smart apps and providing software building capabilities that accelerate solutions significantly moves towards this.

Forming a better understanding comes from breaking a problem down

It is going to be that combination of smart, stacks, scale, storage and software all combining to make the experience level that delivers the new business model and breaks down the complexity we are facing in understanding the essential needs My simple thought here is to start asking different questions around a few simple triggers, perhaps this very simply 5S. They actually become very central to determining a way forward for a business in how it designs its technology infrastructure. I know it is not that simple but it starts your journey to picking apart complexity.

***I decided to revise this post as I originally got caught up in “conflation”. Two ideas merging as one and it simply lost the insights of each, simply attempting to fuse different thoughts into one entity. It honestly did not work and I struggled with what to do.  By splitting them up they become separate reads and more digestible and hopefully of better value. I have to admit this is not the first time I get caught in this conflation (or I expect the last!) and I apologize to you, as the reader*****

The post My 5 S for future Innovation: Smart, Stacks, Scale, Storage, and Software first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

That part of the day spent on innovation, researching and reading, tends to partly stimulate my week ahead in different ways, as I try to reinforce what I’ve learned by applying this to the work gathered around me at that point in time. I am looking to see how it does help shape and influence it, it ‘fuels’ the coming-in week in some part. Of course, this greatly depends on what I am working on, for others and, for myself. Some weeks I just don’t find the opportunity to apply it, so that “Sunday thinking” sits there for another day or week, or even months before I revisit it or connect it back up.

What started me on a given innovation “tack” was that for a long time I have seen an awful lot of opinions, solutions, concepts, that have been breaking down innovation into its many parts. The practice of lean thinking, design thinking, visual thinking has increasingly started to dominate our “innovation thinking.” We keep breaking down innovation into its parts, we continue to fail to build this back up into a whole system approach, simply because we don’t understand the whole innovation system and how it all interconnects. We, in general, all seem to remain constantly disappointed at the end results of our innovation efforts. In some ways, all this new learning or applying novel solutions that we are adapting to the different parts are often just triggering knock-on consequences that still consign innovation outcomes as a failure. It must continue to frustrate each of us, if the final outcomes, if out of our hands, end up as disappointing even though we all feel we are making progress in improving innovation. We must think differently and that might mean whole innovation system thinking.

We, in general, all seem to remain constantly disappointed at the end results of our innovation efforts. In some ways, all this new learning, or applying novel solutions that we are adapting to the different parts, are often just triggering knock-on consequences that still consign innovation outcomes as a failure. It must continue to frustrate each of us, if the final outcomes, often out of our hands, end up as disappointing, even though we all feel we are making progress in improving innovation. We must think differently and that might mean whole innovation system thinking.

Going back and reminding myself

So this Sunday I went back to a range of concepts that all have a critical impact on the innovation process, ones that many of the present popular thinking parts only trigger, a specific part of the innovation system for incremental improvement, even if it is dramatic for one person or a team exposed to it. It so often does not yield the impact we require from innovation; successful outcomes that accelerate growth or make for substantial change.

So where was I going this Sunday morning? These have included (eye-roll please) the dynamics capabilities within the innovation system, where the work of David Teece, for example, is exploring the theory. I know wretched theory on a Sunday or any day come to think of it, but it does inform.

Teece’s concept of dynamic capabilities is a theory about the source of corporate agility: the capacity (1) to sense and shape opportunities and threats, (2) to seize opportunities by mobilizing your resources to capture new value from those opportunities, and (3) to maintain competitiveness through enhancing, combining, protecting, and, when necessary, re-configuring the business enterprise’s intangible and tangible assets, by transforming them for continuous renewal. This makes organizations dynamic. It is the dynamics of the innovation system that can make it transformational.

 Then I went into System Thinking.

Our quest should be finding answers to why innovation is often failing to deliver on our expectations and needs. So for me “System thinking for Innovation, as a whole” should be grabbing more of our attention. Yet we seem not to get our heads around this “whole” part so we set about redesigning the parts. Nothing wrong with that, it has lots of moving, sometimes unique parts, improvements are certainly happening, replacing past approaches but they still remain discreet parts but overall innovation performance, does it improve?

System thinking looks at ALL the interacting parts, their interdependence and how one part fits and reacts with another. We get caught up in the linear progression of one part and not considering enough the reinforcing loops or balancing the loops to foster stability or understand impact across the wider system. Actually, we are potentially increasing its complexity and volatility, pushing this down the line, to somewhere that is not capable of absorbing this “great piece of thinking” and translating it into the outcome expected, even when we did the initial work or visualizing. We always need to translate what we do, for others to pick up with and turn this into something better.

If we don’t have a well-understood view of the whole system of the innovation design, it does not matter how many separate parts we design or apply, the end result is this either ends up the same (disappointing), poorer, as it replaces something we failed to improve what was existing from the end-users perspective, or managed some increased ‘spike’ that needs constantly improving upon to get finally right. Constant improvement often makes up much of a business, as it continually improves on its offering, especially as technology is continually changing, allowing us to apply what we are learning and as we plug into the feedback we are getting from the market but these reinforce the incremental improvements not change the market or product dynamics as much as we often want

Then we have system imbalance to contend with in innovation.

So we have plenty of dynamics and system thinking improvements, so why do we need to spoil a perfectly good Sunday looking deeper and questioning? Well, it’s all about system imbalance. System imbalance? Yes, a system imbalance in what we are doing in our innovation work.We come back to the point until we connect up the whole innovation system we are just pushing our piece of efficiency into someone else’s in-efficiency, as we have not integrated or interconnected the whole, we just have compounded more independent parts.Pushed more work (or rework) off to somewhere else. It continually keeps innovation as inefficient and less effective. Everything should be connected, all the subsystems should connect.

Today we have systems for design, ideas, portfolio management, for research, for evaluation, for pipeline management, all operating in their ‘silo’ of activity. If we fail to understand the relationships and the connections between them all we are having a real difficulty to optimise the whole innovation system. Our focus should become far more focused on achieving better interconnection and interdependence.

Then as the Gym beckons, I start picking up on System Dynamics

So system thinking needs a greater area of our focus within the innovation system. We need to understand reoccurring patterns that constrain us. This begins to take we into System Dynamics. Do you remember the brilliant book of Peter Senge: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization”. This book needs dusting down, searching out, purchasing as essential reading, as it gives us some more clues on System thinking as many of our problems are reoccurring ones. It might become a way to understand the reasons we lack an interconnected innovation system.

Just take a look, step back, before you have opened that special bottle of wine for Sunday or you go off and do what all sane people should be doing on a sunny Sunday, getting out and enjoying the day. I’m heading out the door mighty soon after this ‘outpouring’ but I’m asking you to think about all those reoccurring bad patterns we have fallen into, around innovation

Take a look at the eight system archetypes, outlined here by Jorge Taborga in a piece on system archetypes and their application.

Eight systems archetypes and their storylines

The eight, most common systems archetypes are: 

1. Fixes that Fail—A solution is rapidly implemented to address the symptoms of an urgent problem. This quick fix sets into motion unintended consequences that are not evident at first but end-up adding to the symptoms.
2. Shifting the Burden—A problem symptom is addressed by a short-term and a fundamental solution.  The short-term solution produces side effects affecting the fundamental solution.  As this occurs, the system’s attention shifts to the short-term solution or to the side effects.
3. Limits to Success—A given effort initially generates positive performance.  However, over time the effort reaches a constraint that slows down the overall performance no matter how much energy is applied.
4. Drifting Goals—As a gap between goal and actual performance is realized, the conscious decision is to lower the goal.  The effect of this decision is a gradual decline in the system performance.
5. Growth and Underinvestment—Growth approaches a limit potentially avoidable with investments in capacity.  However, a decision is made to not invest resulting in performance degradation which results in the decline in demand validating the decision not to invest.
6. Success to the Successful—Two or more efforts compete for the same finite resources.  The more successful effort gets a disproportionately larger allocation of the resources to the detriment of the others.
7. Escalation—Parties take mutually threatening actions which escalate their retaliation attempting to “one-up” each other.
8. The tragedy of the Commons—Multiple parties enjoying the benefits of a common resource do not pay attention to the effects they are having on the common resource.  Eventually, this resource is exhausted resulting in the shutdown of the activities of all parties in the system.

Now apply these to why innovation often fails, they constrain what we do. We get unwanted results due to a specific set of behaviors. If we start looking through these archetypes as lenses we might begin to ‘flesh out’ the needs to think through when we look at a whole system design for innovation. We are testing what we do, to see if it passes through this lens. If we can change individual behavior and keep coming back to improving the ‘whole’ design needed for innovation we do get to connect it all up.

So my Sunday morning: has it been well spent or not?

In this limited time I had on this Sunday, I have triggered my thinking into Dynamics of Innovation, System Thinking, System Dynamics and System Archetypes and recognizing we have to look for more interaction and interdependence within any innovation work we do. We need to take our innovation activities out, recognizing consequences and attempting to manage the whole design.

So where does that take me or innovation? Firstly, I’m off to the Gym, I think I need to work off a few more pounds of newly gained brain ‘fat’ in my (limited) understanding. I need to deepen my thinking around all these areas as I know, no actually I am convinced until we map the whole innovation system, we are just moving the pieces around and I just can’t see this as optimizing it, it is simply making innovation more complex and disappointing. It does not need to be.

Complex adaptive systems relate to innovation, are yet another story that I attempted some time back to quantify, actually back in 2012 and, yes, it still sits here in my pile of things to connect up as part of this integrated system we require for innovation

Now back to a more normal Sunday…….

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The post Innovation System Thinking on a Sunday! What, no roast or glass of wine? Later. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

A collaboration is being mooted between us but until there is a point of common understanding much stays under partial wraps until we both get to a more comfortable point, where we feel it can go for us but it certainly triggered this post as a starter.

The thinking hinges around the state of innovation today, how it is fragmenting in  a myraid of parts, all seemingly contributing; yet it seems learning has been replaced by personalized experience and the chase for individual knowledge. Mostly this does not get embedded back in the company, the ones who are paying for this exposure.

I was wondering if there was a decent ‘return on investment’ being made by the company or was it just being front-loaded on the individual, so they gain and then can take that understanding elsewhere, or simply set up their own shop of ‘innovation expertise’. The ROI and the Return on Learning seemed to be mostly heading out of the door, leaving the organization that made the investment, devoid of a return.

My feeling is this should change and we firstly establish a “System of Record” for innovation that brings the individual learning into a collective one, a “system of collective engagement” that enables all within the system to gain from and design innovation solutions, from a more ‘whole’ system thinking perspective, that gives innovation sustaining power connecting the individual to the organizations needs.

To get to any change point and simply not go with the flows or is it stocks (?) of lots more practicing and advising on specific innovation concepts, we needed some greater system thinking to be applied here. If we don’t look at the ‘whole,’ all we might be doing by adding more and more innovation experiences is simply layering on limited perspectives and simply sending it even more into a fragmented market of innovation consulting, one of “atoms and bits” that never combine into delivering innovation differently.

I recall a piece by Rick Karlgaard of Forbes entitled “Atoms versus Bits: where to find Innovation as we increasingly need to find answers on not whether you mean innovation in the world of atoms (physical things) or innovation in the world of bits (software). We need to combine them.

In the article he was suggesting ‘Atoms’ are slowing as the pace of improvement has become more incremental but the ‘Bits’ are accelerating like crazy. We have been locked in a world of not transitioning, we are working out how the “bits” are changing the way we are using our “atoms” or things (transport, reading, listening to music) but trying to apply old practices and systems to work this through.

It is from my perspective we have not redesigned innovation away from these ‘physical atoms’ into the ‘speed of bits’ or found better, more sustaining ways, in our the ability to combine them into the world of the really new and really different. Some have achieved the combination effect but many are not, simply stuck in a ‘given’ world. I just think we need to think differently about the whole innovation system to release a new dynamism for innovating.

Innovation really does require system thinking

My potential collaborator is steeped in systems thinking and change learning and this is where any rethinking can take place, to pull back from (my view) this rapidly fragmenting market in innovation advice still caught in product outcomes and repurpose it back us back into a whole picture understanding and the corporate need to bring out both the atoms and bits that make up innovation and combine all the parts of learning.

So to begin with,  I have begun my searching back into my collection of files on system thinking, complex adaptive thinking, the changing way we are all learning, the incredible value of technology in collecting data and then translating it, etc., etc.

I remembered one post I wrote some while back, to remind me on recognizing there are many parts to any journey that requires a fresh change of perspective.

There is a growing need for having some dynamic tension within the innovation system; this helps generate the better conditions for innovation to thrive. We are learning more on the better tools, techniques, and approaches available but here are some general thoughts to put some opening stakes in the ground for my (our) future thinking around.

1). A common language is essential

Any dynamics in the system needs that ability to talk the same language, something that becomes common and embedded to support the routines and move quickly to the concepts and solutions, as others can ‘understand’ them as well. It is through working on the inner stories and appreciating the history, it is having an appreciation of events, good and bad, it is through local slogans, your jargon, and dialogues that bring people together. The power of storytelling helps gain adoption and identification to those needs for working on a common cause.

2). Creating constant opportunities for conversations

So many organizations don’t work on the ongoing conversations, design workshops, road shows and dialogue sessions that give everyone linkage and growing identification. You begin to identify your sense of purpose and value contribution if there is a consistent diffusion of messages; these should be always lead from the top or moved up and down the organization to allow for these ongoing conversations.

3). Using the knowledge that resides

Organizations like to believe they are building domains of expertise but often they are actually building the silo’s to restrict the flow of knowledge. Knowing where the right functional expertise lies, the relevant skills, experiences or relevant insights ‘reside’ is increasingly important to throw open to all, to tap into, extract and contribute. This expertise can help with our daily routines by offering different thoughts, ideas, and practices that may have a real impact on how you can change.

4). Wrapping up intelligence to give it real value and knowledge understanding

The bundling of intelligence is becoming critical. It needs to be increasingly shared across the organization at real-time speed. As we look increasingly outside our organizations, our focal markets sensing and seizing the information and being able to connect it, to bundle it into knowledge that has potential application or relevance allows for absorptive capacities to really come to life. Those are able to learn to bring into the organization by accessing, anchoring and diffusing that external capacity for creating and exploiting new value.

5). Capturing and extracting tacit knowledge

Our ability to capture and access the tacit knowledge that resides in all our employees is a critical issue to achieve new dynamic tension. How do we harness tacit knowledge, capture it, even recognize its value we need to encourage a continuous learning environment, we need to have clear organization learning strategies. Tacit knowledge helps us tackle the unknowns associated with discovery. The more we share, put effort into collaborative ventures the more we learn. The more we engage with external experts the more we should gain from these exchanges. Context becomes vital, as does striving for that common language and association.

6). Allowing time to explore and improve our human capital

Tacit knowledge as it becomes embedded in shared values, assumptions and beliefs you can qualify and map tacit knowledge.  Our tacit knowledge increases the human capital. It can, through creative acts give strong feeling and give a real sense of commitment. The more we explore, the more we ‘ignite our passions’ but you need to consciously find the time to explore by clearing the path to allow the absorbing to take place and then extract the knowledge through putting any challenge into context, allowing time to access, anchor and diffuse.

7). The ability to harness our dynamics is vital

The ability to make our environments more dynamic, more engaging, more challenging, more a place to learn and contribute allows greater movement and potential for innovation and growth. A growth that is for the organization and its people, to provide all the different intellectual capitals to combine, be those human (knowledge, skills and experiences), relationship (social and through our networks) or through the structural ones you put into place (where you pool knowledge, use routines, and systems).

Good use of our intellectual capitals and knowing what these are does allow for a greater unlocking of innovation value. The more we ‘work and encourage’ our learning capitals,  combining the power that lies in the dynamic linkages we can forge, in acquisition, in assimilation and then into eventual transformation then this allows known knowledge to become new wealth-generating innovation

8). Knowing your innovation ‘stock’ and  ‘capital’ potential

We need to know our ‘innovation stock’, a large part of our wealth generating capital and where it can be best put to use. We are valuing the knowledge perspective far more and with this, we are increasingly recognizing the importance of the intellectual capital that makes up the organization.

We need to ‘master’ our understanding of the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure, and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate innovation as this is increasingly needed for participating in more complex open collaboration efforts. To achieve this, we first need to know ourselves and our capacity to innovate, both the strengths and weaknesses.

9). The ability to map the landscape for making increased inquiry

This landscaping for me is one of the exciting outputs we can get from gathering data, from understanding all the sources of activity, of harnessing our learning experiences and then translating those into a form of inquiry to then build from.

Outcome delivery: Coherence in purpose & consistency is what we all desire that organizations are presently lacking in innovation

It is accepted wisdom in today’s environment, enterprises cannot design and impose from the top down, it stifles far too much and limits creativity. Strategies do not only emerge from the whole but from the sum of all the parts and it is the diversity of the parts gives the ‘richness’ to innovation. It is the ‘combination effect’.

It is the embedding of these that build the eventual innovation design of a ‘whole’ innovation system

It is drawing together all the ‘bits and pieces’ into the whole. It is ensuring all the ‘collective experiences’ are captured and put to work, not just for the individual exposed and learning from all the great innovative thinking going on ‘out there in organization that the individuals are working for, so we need to ensure their personalised learning is put to ‘collective productive use’ for giving real returns on investment and learning and it is this constant input puts the dynamic back into innovation for the organization they work for.

Within an organization we seek to have coherence in purpose and through this a consistency in behaviour. Innovation needs that collective behaviour as well, it needs to be dynamic, constantly evolving, explring and experiementing and we must design it into our innovation experiences, so we can achieve a more collective tension that continues to improve the total design of the system, not just its parts.

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The post Putting some dynamic tension back into the innovation system first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I felt that warm and fuzzy feeling, as I read all too often those comforting words or platitudes of how “innovation is vital to us” and one of the “highest areas of focus.” Yet as you then listen to the voices of the very leaders within these industries in interviews, or read on blogs, or in discussing what are the challenges they face, it does seem somewhat hollow.

You know they are nowhere at the point of really understanding the potential of the changes that could take place within adopting a broader view on all aspects of innovation.

Nearly all in these current companies making up the Chemical and Pharmaceuticals sectors are well past their prolific era, the discovery part is bogged down in slow growth, expensive development costs and regulatory conditions. Blockbusters seem a thing of the past but perhaps they don’t need to be with a very different innovative approach.

You do get tired of hearing “we are looking to become a value-creating solution provider”, yet the willingness to really create collaborative networks is still stuck in the “us and them” mentality. The thinking through on the contribution around innovation needs to be changed.

The two industries are struggling in finding new operating models to adapt to a different, changing world. They are not yet tuned into those more integrated systems of collaboration, where platforms and ecosystems are critical to making improved progress, advanced by multiple contributions to the discovery and exploration stages, where there is a new potential force of collaborative breakthroughs. So from what I can see so far, change is highly constrained:

Evolution is slow, revolution is seemingly non-existent due to narrow vested interests.

You get the impression that all seem to be struggling with the ongoing pockets of internal silo’s, knowledge trapped or buried, determined that everything still must be invented inside and stay locked up inside.  The existing model of the continued pursuit of the one-to-one partnerships, where they, expecting to be the dominant player, can dictate the terms and conditions severly constrain breakthroughs to happen. You breed risk adversion. The established players, all global in reach and size, seem to lack the understanding of how innovation has changed in recent years. Innovation has really opened-up through highly collaborative approaches explored through relationships, using a more holistic ecosystem approach and exploiting concepts and ideas on common platforms.

There is certainly a clear buzz and appeal for more novel solutions, based on more rigorous evaluations through increasing the field of data analysis, leveraging a greater discovery of Molecular sciences and finding these different combinations that stretch existing products and patents. Yet this seems emerging, one that can be a prelude to opening-up a far more cross-disciplinary field that studies molecular materials, structures and systems and their application to real-word problems than any one company possesses the complete insight to own it. Hence my return to platforms and ecosystems for more open-collaborations to explore this area as it holds the potential of exciting new discoveries and breakthroughs.

Struggling with legacy and old models

The idea of opening-up into a broader integrated solution, collaborating and co-creating is a tough call to make, when patents and scientific investment has been borne by the one company. I was reading that drug development costs can be up to $2 to 3 billion and can be taking a process of up to 14 years. How can these companies slash these costs but improve the safety of the drug they are developing? It can’t come from extracting from operating within a limited selected partnership, that has been the area of focus for years, it needs a different model to push discovery across new boundaries and collaborations.

There is the need to think even more on how to engage differently.

For instance, earlier engagement with governments, with research institutes, publishing new findings in more open ways, less restrictive on a sharing data all might allow the communities to search for a different model of discovery to commercialization. A radically different productivity model, more collaborative and open, more interacting across the communities that make up the broader ecosystem.

Yet it does seem in both industries, there is a considerable lag in transforming through digital, when you compare this to other industries, where collaboration across the broader ecosystem requires this to deliver a more efficient and effective value chain. Industry 4.0 as a concept seems to be lagging perhaps in these industries, it is failing to really connect-up and leverage all that is within the “collective” ecosystem of scientific knowledge, it is safeguarded and protected behind closed doors and patents. Can this change?

Trapped with the four walls is holding any new growth potential back.

Yet, lying within the walls of these large Pharmaceutical and Chemical companies is such a rich dataset that stays behind their ‘closed’ walls. They are not yet at the point of being digitally effective to turn what they have into real competitive advantage as they lack the capabilities in big data analysis and those algorithms that reveal ground-breaking innovations, Are they hanging on in the belief they will become digitally transformed eventually or just deluding themselves?  There needs some radical transformation to occur but this means significant investments in connecting ‘everything’ up, firstly, internally and then externally to exploit the potential of greater synergies.

The ability to open-up the industries to accelerating real change in personalised medicines or more tailored treatments requires a greater collaboration, from the doctor or health system providers into the combined organizations that can deliver a better holistic solution. Until there is this recognition that greater collaboration is required between traditional past rivals, tailored treatment remains constrained due to the existing business model emphasis on “ownership” and not “co-ownership”. Having more open platform that focus on combined treatment to tackle cancer, Alzheimer or numerous other challenges where the flow of data from the patent, from the solution provider can be evaluated, explored, mixed, matched and worked up on in a much broader way, limits future growth and breakthrough solutions where collectively, sharing data might be found.

The Sustainability Pressure Is Occupying Industry Attention.

A further big buzz in both industries is tackling the sustainable pressures and be seen as having the right customer credentials, of being good for society and the environment has been finally increasing the pressures to change. Monopolies are being broken down. Industries that are known too over-supply, over-specify and have had limited regard for the final consequences needed to shift. Today the work has been in reducing individual footprints and controlling pollutants and gradually coming to grips with assessing the complete life-cycle. Presently efforts are highly individual, driven by the belief this might give a competitive edge in the eyes of the consumer but there is this growing need to have a more ecosystem awareness that would be more significant in understanding true cost of impact, and from this understanding, deliver real sustainability credentials. Individual actions, however noble, does have other consequences pushed down the value chain. Are they any better in the whole chain’s cost?

Presently efforts are highly individual, driven by the belief this might give a competitive edge in the eyes of the consumer but there is this growing need to have a more ecosystem awareness that would be more significant in understanding true cost of impact, and from this understanding, deliver real sustainability credentials. Individual actions, however noble, does have other consequences pushed down the value chain. Are they any better in the whole chain’s cost?

Consumers are certainly demanding more products that they believe has benign environment impact, safe to use and having a clear understanding of all the side-effects or consequences. Plastics, Polymers for example, as well as Medications all need growing customer credentials by giving a greater clarity on explaining their effects on society and the individual.

A time for seeking more radical change, ditching the outdated Innovation Models

How can these two massive industries across Chemicals and Pharmaceutical move beyond their outdated models of innovation, based on one-on-one or limited relationships that fits their self-interested needs and not the ‘greater’ needs that have greater societal good? We have a real powerful ability to truly transform established business models by our abilities to connect digitally and by working across multiple platforms to deliver these real breakthroughs that we, as society, are clearly in need of. Those that actively work to solve environmental issues, improve the ability to degrade or be even more recycled, as well as offer medical solutions that rapidly change some of our biggest disease issues of the day.  Solutions are far to complex to still be worked upon at individual level, they need collaborative effort and while we lack this recognition at industrial level any efforts remain marginal in impact.

There is a future that can be different but will these industries embrace it?

Let me offer some of the parts that need to be explored and changed, to radically update the innovation effect within the Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries and allow for a different scope of discovery, engagement and exploitation.

1. Digital connections and technology platforms.

So many organizations are not internally connected-up as they should be. The project and portfolio management, the life-cycle management, integrating the supply chain, quality assurance and corporate sustainability all are work-in-progress. Product innovation from discovery to market is still the biggest drag on industry performance. The parts are not digitally connected-up.

Before companies think about new business models they do need to connect everything up internally. The productivity release and efficiency gains radically alter the cost structures. The whole dynamics of collective scale brings together today’s scattered knowledge islands.

2. Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Analytics and Algorithms beckon hugely

We know that the tantalizing effects of artificial intelligence, data analytics and these algorithms need to be built into internal systems to make it a systematic digitization process of innovation discovery to realization built on data science and innovation understanding. Yet are we seeing the type of change within the industries occurring? Are trained date scientists the established norm or the notional few?

3. The opening-up of huge databases of scientific understanding and customer awareness

The investment of prior clinical trials, the application of patents, the exploring of material components, combining and exploring characteristics in more open, collaborative ways can radically alter the existing dynamics of these industries. Currently with narrower vested interests we lock away knowledge that might allow for radical discovery. How can this be unlocked?

4. Both the Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industry are knowledge-based

Much of the knowledge is internal to the people who work within their islands of specific responsibility. Digitalizing and knowledge mapping offer ways to open this up and share this across the wider community that can contribute new insights and thinking. By mutually collaborating on society issues, knowledge can be extended and shared with the greater potential of new insights from these knowledge sharing opportunities.

5. Unleashing the talent, changing the cultures

The talent and the culture are still caught in old paradigms of these two industries understanding. Technology is still not being fully embraced, putting to use the enormous power of data, medicines or science that sits inside these organizations. Internally many of these companies still do not have the interconnected workspace to find better ways to collaborate internally. Team profiling can bring together the best available resources to work on problems or challenges. In diverse global organizations unlocking the knowledge within such a pool of highly qualified talent remains elusive, yet it clearly should not in providing a more open-minded culture of enquiry, sharing and learning.

6. Digital Productivity Revolutionary Outcomes Beckon.

When you think about how technology can bring the customer inside the walls, it offers up an exciting and potential collaborative space. Build that on the collaborative platform where institutions, government, regulatory and other industry players can participate what can this unlock?  The acceleration of trials, of experimenting, of learning, of understanding impact, exploring pricing, spotting segmentation opportunities, using data and science in radically different ways, speeding up trials or simulation and scenario planning all can release existing ‘spent’ energy by finding different productive outcomes through digital mapping. We see the industrial digital ‘twin’ but are there digital twins within the Chemical and Pharmaceutical industry to design products to be more effective and connected?

7. Building differently the pillars of innovation as essential

Can those within these industries step back and rethink innovation. Most operate with out-of-date innovation processes and models. If new collaborative models take hold then innovation needs to be designed totally differently. We need to ask: What future capabilities and competencies will be needed in a different operating model? What would be different if we explored and extended our business out onto platforms and greater partner ecosystems, what would need to be different? How do we specifically look to build our digital talent and our need for a more open culture? How do we learn from all this connecting up and exchanging to spot new and exciting new business models? What is required to become more agile, adaptive and exploratory beyond our scientific communities? How do we build the engagement with customers on a lasting platform of ongoing exchange, response and provision?

8. Embracing Digital Innovation with a more extended ecosystem.

How can the fostering of new capabilities be balanced with the existing core competencies built up over many years? Striking the right balance is critical. Established innovation capabilities of the focus on the individual product needs to be replaced with a greater process orchestration. Internal innovation needs to become far more externally driven. Control of the established project and portfolio management process has to give way to increased flexibility and external contribution that can absorb and translate new knowledge quickly back into the system, to feed new insights into a more open system integration that connects scientific innovation processes, new incoming data and external knowledge contributions to evaluate changing outcomes. A very different stage gate process, changing the common one found in these industries, needs to be re-designed and thought through. One to be replaced by a more adaptive, looping back design, permitting digital insights to fuel the innovation activity and scientific understanding, requiring flexibility and constant new predictive modeling showing impact understanding.

9. It has to be a step-by-step process, internal first, external second all connecting up.

Step-by-step means the need is to fix the internal operations within your one organization first. This needs to be fully digitally connected up.  The aim is in building the operations agility in data, insights, seen improvements and cross-collaborations that get you to the point of repeatable outcomes and scalable options, seeking out higher level of productivity, driving down costs. Then you are in the better shape to collaborate externally. It is only then you can experiment with new business models as you have achieved a higher level of clarity of your position.

We do need a new radical innovation redesign to take hold?

By rethinking the Innovation design through digitally connecting-up the parts there is a real potential to unleash discovery and breakthroughs in these two industries. To achieve this transformative state, we do need a dramatically different open innovation era to pervade beyond the walls of our chemical and pharmaceutical companies. One based on exploring and exploiting the wider ecosystem and built on highly collaborative platforms, digitally designed.

A dream or within the realms of reality?  I believe it is within the realistic if those within the industries concerned decide it has become necessary as change continues to bear down on them from managing within a very out of date business model.

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The post Choosing your direction of innovation travel first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I argued we need to think differently about how we manage innovation. It needs to be more radical in design, actually, it needs to be far more up to date and in tune with the technology progress we recommend so much to others! Innovation systems are lagging, they should be leading in their design and connectivity.

What I mean by this is it needs to begin to ‘account’ for cognitive solutions that can augment and help automate our present highly manual innovation systems. I know we have some good software for different parts of the innovation process but none of these are integrated, fully connected up in their design. We still work in piecing them together. We lose significant collaborative opportunities and speed due to this mostly disjointed innovation approach. Surely this has to change?

We need to bring innovation and its process up to date. With cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, cloud-based solutions, purposefully designed apps and specific tools and frameworks, we do need to begin to stretch our imaginations further and flex our technology and app solutions more towards providing a better, more connected innovation process. I want to see a new innovation era happen.

I’ve pushed the idea of highly adaptive applications that are selected to do the job on hand. We all recognize “one size does not fit all” and that is absolutely clear when we have incremental, distinctive, radical and ground-breaking innovation all trying to be squeezed through the same innovation process design. This squeezing does exactly that, it squeezes the life out of the creative process, measuring all that goes through an innovation pipeline with the same measuring stick, it takes away trust, judgment, and inventiveness and replaces this with ‘watered down’ solutions that emerge out into the real-life world. They have been risk-reduced and judged on their return on investment, even if they are unknown to the world. The hard dominates the soft, the rational need over the emotive need.

We need to change this but it needs a concerted effort to think differently. I have scouted around in ways to advance my own thinking and I came across an article by Accenture Turning Cognitive Computing into Business Value Today and it had one visual that held my attention. So I’ve reworked it for where I think it can go for innovation. It gave me a break-through moment in how I could see innovation processes can advance in combining the human and automating design as it frames innovation to allow differences to be designed in, determined by the ‘type of innovation’ we want to achieve.

An augmented, automated innovation process design model that might advance on today’s not fit for purpose innovation process

Here is what I came up with. It is a prototype version one. It break down innovation into different types of innovation impact, into four distinct parts, and then attempts to decide what needs to go into these. It certainly as an emerging model is needed to be pushed, questioned and validated but let me ‘release it’ to the world as a work-in-progress, publish and be dammed.

So I’m not going to explain the parts here, I will do this in a further post as I did not wish to extend the post here unnecessarily. It needs more technology ‘layering-in’ to the specific parts.

What I ask and lifted out one nice visual from that Accenture report that asks this of you:

Innovation and how we manage the process and its “static” design needs radically changing. It needs to be far more connected (up) and automated, dynamic in its design and parts, adaptive to the specific need or challenge. We are in the age where technology can make this possible, can we make it realizable? Can we advance how we manage innovation in its process, in its discipline and design, that gives ‘us’ the potential for greater growth and advancement?

What do you think of this suggested model shown above, part of the innovation puzzle we need to design? Can you see its design and its parts that will require different alignment between the human managing the innovation idea and the power of different technologies to automate and augment it in better ways than we are having as solutions today?

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The post Advancing My Applied Innovation Thinking first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We can simply go on and on in the many ways we have evolved our problem-solving techniques or methodologies, as those help the innovation and discovery process; incremental, piecemeal and experimentally.

Yet we still get caught out by not resolving or addressing the essential building blocks of innovation (culture, environment, climate, governance, alignment). We have never ‘cracked’ the full innovation management system. Perhaps we can today. We should try at least.

Many of those innovation tools that have been emerging in recent years have now built up a powerful body of validation, and they become necessary to know and practice yet often miss the basic building block needs of innovation. We need to do better, we need to design a completely new innovation process that takes into account all that has evolved in our understanding and experiment in recent years. Some thoughts:

A new cycle of innovation

In some ways, we are, in my opinion, at a point of completing a full circle for much within innovation and its management and this is becoming far more based on Applied Innovation, with that need to take a greater hold of all these promising and emerging tools and methodologies to achieve selected jobs. Also alongside these grow the theoretical underpinning of innovation management in more ‘collective’ and uniquely ‘combined’ ways, so as to establish innovation more formally, in formalized and structured ways, as a distinctive process, designed to the business needs and mission, not ‘lifted’ from copying best practices of others or adopting generic processes. We need to adapt our system thinking to the challenge identified, not the other way round.

But for me, the really radical way forward is to have all these solution parts constantly available and adaptable to the situation. We relate to the problem on hand and set out in designing the process needed in frames, tools, process designs. We go and simply ‘grab them’ to fit the innovation we are working upon. We design the innovation system we need after we know what we are trying to achieve in the challenge or idea. We “pull down” what is needed. Can we design a totally ‘adaptive’ innovation process to fit the specific need? Why not?

Innovation is seemingly more complex today, we need to be highly adaptive

We need to increasingly rely on problem-solving techniques. So as we seek out greater applied science knowledge we will use it to support and develop practical applications based on technology and innovation. Utilitarian in its principles, seeking real-world use and implementation through a more creative, collaborative environment, leading to more discoveries that distinctly ‘blend’ the lab application with the customer discovery of unmet need.

We are encouraging a more abstract thinking as we are increasingly focused on “engineering our business in new and different ways and this becomes the uniqueness and requirement of applied innovation to meet specific needs.

We have seen a consistent change over the years to move towards a more inventive engineering and discovery mindset within our innovation approaches. We started in manufacturing, continued in logistics and supply chain and have seen an evolution of our labs and thinking to keep advancing our processes, thinking, and growth inside our organizations.

Now we are looking far more outside, connecting more specifically with the customer’s needs, the jobs they want to complete in better, more effective ways. These evolutionary steps need to rethink how we look and management innovation. We actually need to re-engineer our processes as they have become “not fit for purpose”

We have been steadily learning to adapt what we knew inside an organization with what we should increasingly listen to outside it. There has been an increasing emphasis on linking concepts in new and novel products and services, increasingly closer to these customer needs and desires.

We have moved from the inside looking out of organizations to focusing on the outside coming in, working more in ecosystems and far more closely with the customer in growing collaborations. To support this ongoing journey we have been evolving our problem-solving methods.

We need to consider how big data and analytics, technology and a far more creative thinking needs to be applied collectively. Each of these mentioned will begin to have a change in everything we have in place today, their ‘productive’ lifecycle and their growing legacy problems in the coming years as we re-evaluate them, integrate the design to adapt to a very different future, constantly adapting and evolving them into a more structured innovation process.

Innovation management itself must become “fluid” in design, in adaptation so the right approach is to be constantly ‘adaptive’ and put together what is needed to tackle the challenge that needs resolution. A constant redesign to meet the circumstances

Creating a fluid, adaptive, agile innovation system unique each time

Can we find ways to be highly adaptable, agile and fluid in grabbing and taking the parts of the innovation system and constructing them into that design and process that works for that specific challenge? Becoming adaptive in organizations that are often highly rigid and standardized is so conflicting, so different, you must separate the two that many are arguing even stronger today than ever, a dual innovation process or organization design.

We do have more tools, processes and theoretical understanding of innovation and its management to make each design that more of a specific applied innovation service, we have the capability to construct this. Can we go that route in our organization design? We need to apply what we need to get the “job” done and this becomes specific to the challenge and its complexity and engagement needs.

The emerging principles of Applied Innovation Service

To get the best out of any idea or innovation concept we need to design the process around the idea or the challenge, not try and force these through the wrong standardized process we try to “work” innovation through today. Often innovation outcomes end up totally different from the original intent or vision and become highly compromised in their value and impact.

We do need to think very differently in designing the process to the job /challenge on hand to give it the best chance of going from a ‘great’ idea to a great commercial success

I believe we need a radical redesign of how we manage innovation

For this to happen we need to radically redesign how we manage innovation and that is through highly adaptive applications that are selected to do the job on hand. We seek out and pull down, connecting them up for that specific job. We reject those that are simply superfluous to this specific need or make sure those operating in the background are not dragging down our performance. What needs to be clearly recognized, to take each innovation concept through its design will require not the current approach of ‘one-size fits all’ process we have today, we need a consistently adaptive innovation design process. We must step away from the present process that destroys much creative thought and innovative thinking and slows down the eventual outcome.

We need to be highly adaptive in what innovation applications, processes, tools, and frameworks can be grabbed, perhaps from the innovation cloud and formed into the individually designed innovation process that looks capable of delivering the challenge or idea or can be adjusted as we learn and go.  That’s where we should be going in our thinking of our innovation (process) thinking in my Friday afternoon thinking time, even before the “happy hour”

That’s where we should be going in our thinking of our innovation (process). Just my Friday afternoon contribution, even before the “happy hour”. As Steve Blank often says “It’s a big idea”

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The post Needing To Think Applied Innovation Services first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Core capabilities have upsides and downsides. As many of our business organizations seek to optimize their processes across the company, they are constantly reaching more outside to gain growing partnerships and greater innovation interactions. They are looking to complement and reinforce existing capabilities through more open innovation thinking and approaches but is that enough?

One focus area is on value chain optimization, another on customer engagement, yet the one that has the potential to really transform the innovation process lies in the partnerships emerging from reaching back into established suppliers, but also by tapping into the broader network of knowledge that can be found in reaching out to the innovation community of start-ups, venture capitalists, research institutions and other key players, capable of fostering and delivering innovation in unique and diverse collaborations. The collaborating edges are becoming our new core.

The core is far more found at the edge, in the collaborating capability and networks we form and this needs very different organizational design.

Building new innovative collaborations.

The richer ecosystem of collaborators are those that can bring complementary capabilities, that can drive increasing opportunity and values, push out the thinking, which was not possible in the past, based on pursuing innovation as purely an internal process.

Underway is a series of transformations to redefine activities, realign core activities, centralize around clearer corporate shared services and the general intent to release the operating divisions to be more market and customer facing, to invest in innovation and accelerate the innovation pipeline to keep competitive positioning as the critical need in far more ‘disruptive’ markets. That is mostly focusing on the ‘internal’ part.

Technology is transforming so much, it is the catalyst for change. It is the enabler for the external, collaborators part. Combined the intent is to take out complexity and duplication by simplifying and harmonizing services, by sharing expertise and specialized knowledge in innovation ecosystems. By focusing on key common denominators of success the new innovation digital partnership  does offer the promise of accelerating time to market, improved understanding of market needs and coordinating solutions through technology that can be delivered to meet these, in the strengthening of the partnerships, tapping into leveraging the networks of capabilities all around the organization, outside-in and inside-out.

There is a significant transformation of the value lying within this extended system of collaborators and organization design. It is the ability to leverage, through technology the broader ecosystem of partners and internal collaborators by a more holistic view of sharing building ‘greater’ value together

The evolving innovation lab

The innovation lab has been part of this new innovation era, we are seeing them being formed and then increasingly transformed into dedicated product innovation centers where the environment becomes highly “entrepreneurial” as it draws in start-ups, alongside established partners to connect the physical with the digital to manage bolder innovation initiatives.

This exploring the wider innovation ecosystem is offering new ways to innovate products and find more imaginative solutions to customer needs. The connecting of a diverse ‘pool’ of collaborators is taking product and service concepts from cradle to grave. The lifecycle becomes part of the design needs by all the partners within this ecosystem. They stay involved from start to finish.

Growth challenges and organizations priorities are being immersed in this innovation ecosystem thinking. Overall project value grows as the complexity becomes more shared but grows in value creation.

In this new emerging innovation, the model is requiring radically redesigned skill sets, consisting of stronger relationship building capability, a higher emphasis on the facilitating, brokering, moderating and influencing concepts. Different entrepreneurial business driven models are being explored and the seeking out and tapping into a broad set of technical and specialized skills are requiring far more orchestrating and project coordinating requirements. Specialist knowledge is being fed into the ecosystem, through the platform set up deliberately to handle the specific growth challenge or priority.

The new innovation era.

We are entering a new innovation era as the conditions for this are coming together. Digital, technology, ecosystems, platforms, collaborative software and a host of others. I have written about these in an earlier post, detailing out these market conditions all forming into this new era that has been building progressively in my mind, to come to this new innovation point occurring.

There are profound shifts taking place to accelerate innovation in the more established organizations, partly to counter the start-up but more importantly to regain the necessary growth momentum that has been sadly missing from treating innovation as, yet again, another island or silo within the larger organization. It has the potential to change through connecting all the parts if you work through the significant strides innovation management has been taking, to form the new collaborating core.

The skill is connecting all the required parts to meet your innovation needs and that needs some specialized focus and exploring within itself.

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The post The innovation value lies within the new system first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I certainly believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery. Platforms, strategic partnerships, new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and ecosystems through platforms are the organizing environment to enact these.

Jeffrey Phillips and I have collaborated around different innovation thinking for some years and in a late August  2016 discussion, over Skype, we realized that what was emerging from our usual exchanges and insights was that the area of Innovation within Ecosystems was gathering pace and what did that mean for innovation in future business and practice implications?

In Jeffrey and my latest collaboration what became different, is instead of a series of stand-alone posts or thought papers, we would place this collaboration into a dedicated “ecosystem” posting site https://ecosystems4innovating.com/ was created to reflect the world of ecosystems we need to explore.

Why not take a look, it is building in its diversity of understanding, exploring this fascinating area of platforms and ecosystems and what this means for innovation. I believe this is heralding in a “new innovation era”

Why the difference in having a dedicated website?

It is our growing understanding that all of ‘the dynamics of the innovation system’ we all operate within, is evolving all the time and in this particular intersection that we have chosen, is highly dynamic and fluid. Understanding ecosystems and platforms is evolving in front of our eyes. So to put our thinking and collaborative time into this we felt a dedicated website allowed us to post insights, knowledge, experiences and discoveries on a constant, evolving basis.

The reality beckons: Today larger organizations need to face the stark truth.

Either organizations will adapt or die.  We are undergoing a fundamental transformation in business. Technology offers us the transforming means but can we, as leaders, as innovators, as customers take all of what this means on board? It needs bold leadership. The structure of our business today cannot afford to try to stand alone, it needs to extend beyond its traditional supporting partners. It needs to learn to collaborate with a whole new range of partners, even some of your existing or previous competitors, to radically adapt to the different world we live in. We need to adapt.

Learning to collaborate in new, more open ways

Yet moving from the present position of offering specific stand-alone, unconnected products and services into ones built on technically connected ones, where they collaborate and be part of an ecosystem of partners, that are pushing to provide greater customer experience, that they learn to connect into becomes of a higher value, as against discrete products is a massive strategic and organizational change in learning how to open up and collaborate.

The delivering of totally different value propositions for the ultimate consumer is a highly daunting challenge. It ‘upends’ much, if not all, of how our business organizations have been organized around, mostly within themselves, it is going to need radical change, the organizations is needing inverting. It calls for bold management to instigate such a transformation and open up to external collaboration and exchanges.

Heading for Innovation Ecosystems through participating in Platforms

Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems will have a powerful effect

Our whole understanding of innovation is certainly changing; we are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into open and far more collaborative innovation (external orientation) with our collective thinking offering the acceleration into improving our innovation performances, leading to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success.

The search is seemingly on for finding greater value and that will increasingly coalesce around innovation ecosystems. We are in need to ‘form’ in many different ways, significantly build more relationships that increasingly matter to each organization, ones that add value, insight and bring external expertise inside, to work on ‘greater’ innovation solutions. We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services that extend beyond the stand-alone discreet offering, that would be delivered by only having the one organization attempting it into broader collaborative offerings that provide a greater customer experience. Complexity is on the rise, offering discrete products is on the wane. Value is in the connecting of experience.

We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services that extend beyond the stand-alone discreet offering, that would be delivered by only having the one organization attempting it into broader collaborative offerings that provide a greater customer experience. Complexity is on the rise, offering discrete products is on the wane.

Have you asked why are business ecosystems emerging as a real competitive force?

As we begin to open up our thinking and begin to focus on the concept of ecosystems, it will increasingly have a powerful effect on our future growth perspectives in considering alternatives and possibilities. The network of different partners will all contribute to this often ‘emergent’ thinking and will very quickly increase the total sum of the value, the ‘combination effect’ will bring to the ‘party’. Diversity in innovation is a powerful catalyst.

The single industry and business-specific approach are seeing change, many companies are exploring the value of becoming involved in a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries to build new communities that have the capacity to transform existing environments.

A whole new battlefield of connecting.

One has to recall the “battle of devices has now become a war of building the better ecosystem.” It is not one single product that is chasing in crowded, highly competitive fields. We are looking to increase the share of minds, engagement, offer increasing preferences that are reflecting these changing habits, tastes, and lifestyles. To plugin to achieve this ‘paradigm shift’ the search is on for forming the ecosystem or set of ecosystems that can deliver on this ‘transformation’ going on in front of our eyes.

To plug into achieving this ‘paradigm shift’ the search is on for forming the ecosystem or set of ecosystems that can deliver on this ‘transformation’ going on in front of our eyes that works for us. We can’t afford to wait, we must experiment, explore and extract different learnings from our own involvement. Standing back never wins the race, it only relegates you to being a bystander and to achieve any successful innovation outcome demands engagement and involvement.

Can you imagine working with Innovation Ecosystems and Platforms?

Just imagine each silo has to plug into the same platform to engage, build into and extract. Visibility quickly rises; collaboration becomes increasingly the order of the day. Through the cloud, platforms and across business application, all are operating on the same operating system, not multiple versions, waiting for IT and budget justification to update.

The engagement becomes where and when the network and collaboration parts grow in importance, as it feeds into and lives off of others making a living, engaging ecosystem, where mutual dependency generates a greater ‘return’.

Turning from being inwardly driven

You turn from being inward to engaging outward, in all your measurements, metrics, and rewards. ‘Reacting and responding’ becomes more central to employee incentive to pay against as “the effectiveness measure” needed today falls away replaced by ways to accelerate the essential collaborating need.

You then begin to turn from being inward to engaging outward in all your measurements, metrics, and rewards. ‘Reacting and responding’ becomes more central to employee incentive as you consistently engage and collaborate, building more knowledge and value into the system, This becomes critical criteria to pay and reward in building new value. This becomes “the effectiveness measure” needed today to the essential collaborating need to build upon the ecosystem’s collaborating knowledge.

Consistently being engagement becomes common place

Equally, the ability to have different and more diverse ways of connecting with the customer managed in real-time, in the cloud and on connecting platforms becomes increasingly essential. In collaborations and engagements we built on evolving knowledge, insight, and understanding, where the data flowing in, from the multiple touchpoints and deliver back innovation that is more closer to their needs.

Imagine all being captured, understood, personalized and built into a ‘web of understanding’ that drives the insights that generate the next level of innovation.

Then as you build your awareness of the ecosystems of your own business and its capabilities, mix in the customer’s engagement and needs you begin to recognize the value of others, within the design chain, those other stakeholders who are the experts in different parts of the connected need of customers.

We move even faster from ‘dumb devices’ to smart products

‘Dumb’ or discrete products turn into ‘smart’ ones and ‘stand-alone’ products become ‘connected platform solutions’ that those within the ecosystem jointly work upon, as they  extend the potential through technological and innovative change. Through this collaborative work they extend out in surprising new ways, feeding of the diversity within the ecosystem, so the customer experience goes way beyond what is established today, it captures their imaginations and quickly becomes their choice, as it connected parts that make the job or need easier than before.

Increasingly the value is residing in this complex web of collaborations, working towards delivery of seamless experiences, made up of multiple brands building constantly on what they are learning in the ongoing engagements.

A pipe dream or our beckoning reality – your choice?

We are witnessing the connecting of technology, people and things in dramatically different ways. The recognition that moving towards the goal of providing ‘customer seamless experience’ lies in leveraging across platforms, ecosystems, different vested parties and working to align all of what this means in open, collaborate ways.

In making the customer the center of the focus, so by connecting, relating and deepening their experience, the value in return is greater than what one individual organization can offer today, as it stays part of a disconnected process, locked in a narrow ecosystem that ‘forces’ the customer to connect their parts they need, instead of offering solutions they can connect and value, as it makes their lives easier and more seamless.

It is hard, demanding and risky work, working on solutions that customers unmet needs. The rewards are not crystal clear, they evolve through experimentation and dialogue.

No one is suggesting this is an easy journey, far from it.

I do believe we all need to embrace and explore platforms, join different ecosystems and push harder to relate more to real customer needs. I believe it will make a difference to our ability to deliver innovation that can have a real impact in totally different ways than we are capable of delivering today. Of course you can be the ‘lucky one’ or exceptional. that ‘hit’ the mother lode of innovation growth but these are very few, for most of us, we need to travel the harder route towards discovery, step by organized step.

The end result we all are needing to deliver in innovative solutions, is to find distinctly different ones. Increasingly these will come from being in highly connected ways, that are built from contributions from a broader ecosystem of vested parties, offering solutions that are really different, ones that really can add value and meets customer needs.

Welcome to the transforming world of Innovation Ecosystems and platform delivery systems, it offers our new innovation era. I do suggest you explore this dedicated site, (see the link below) it offers a growing source of insights and knowledge that will give you a real value in relating to the changes going on all around us, and attempting to solve the questions we need to answer on how you are shaping-up to participate in this different era of innovation.

Again come and visit ecosystems4innovating.com

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The post Business Needs Innovation Ecosystems first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have a friend when he is presented with something that stops him and makes him really have to think he would say “intriguing”. This joining forces is one of those ‘intriguing” moments for me.

Capgemini have been leading much within the transformation process around technology with all things digital, they have been pioneering and offering some significant advice around transitions. It seems they are ‘pulling’ in the innovation promise with this acquisition to add to their solution offerings.

I wrote about their Applied Innovation Exchange announcement recently and how I felt it was thin, a more “a tenuous toe in the water” and I finished the post with “I hear you Capgemini on the intent…but “there is a real need to put some ‘red meat’ on the bone here,” and that is what they seem to be doing in a “blink of an eye,” with this Fahrenheit 212 acquisition, or at least allow the tissues to be grafted on and take hold, so it can challenge where and how innovation transforms the business process.

David meets and marries a Goliath.

On first look at this acquisition you see a 180,000 people consulting firm, operating in 40 countries with nearly EUR12 billion in revenue, adding a 60 to 70 people innovation and design consultancy, operating in the US and less so in the UK and you wonder, what simply happens with such a move? Will one simply dwarf and overwhelm the other, will the small influence the big, in the positive ways both have as the initial intent of this deal? I hope so.

I was reading the press release of Capgemini, the usual corporate speak, released for shareholders and stakeholders, nicely reassuring, sufficient to appease and appraise the stakeholders. Then compared this with the wonderful open letter written by the Fahrenheit team. They tell much of the divide that somehow has to be bridged. Let me explain or illustrate in the words from these releases.

According to Capgemini’s press release “Fahrenheit 212 will contribute its specialized capabilities for innovation strategy and consumer-centric design to the broader offerings of Capgemini Consulting. The move opens growth opportunities for both companies through their combined capabilities”

Now lets see why Fahrenheit 212 was and hopefully still is a cut apart from the rest in innovation, through the open letter they wrote on their” boldest move yet”.

“Innovation moves forward….but in the same blink it’s something bigger”

The open letter just tells a real story of passion, intent, a mixture of hope and excitement. Of course, many ventures have been dashed on the rocks of despair but at this moment of time this is the sort of message I want to hear coming from the acquired and also explaining the potential course of the new journey ahead..

Let me pick out a few

“Innovation isn’t merely driving change. It is undergoing big changes of its own”

Fahrenheit paints the picture that I believe is absolutely right in its timing and assessment:

“ Not long ago, innovation was an under-the-radar business activity. Everyone applauded when serendipity served up an occasional breakthrough. But few businesses were relying on innovation to keep them relevant and growing.

That’s all changing. With breakneck speed, forces of disruption, shifts in consumer expectations, erosion of barriers to entry and a vibrant startup movement have propelled innovation from the background to a position as one of the most important activities for any growth-minded business to get right”

“The consequences are big. Innovation is simply too important to be random anymore”

Moving from the past to the future

In this they provide the background to the change being undertaken in innovation at the moment and then they go on to clarify the reason for the decision to be acquired and why they think it makes sense for both to make a move.

“But for the innovation discipline to be truly effective today, we must empower our creative impetus with new capabilities. Capabilities like robust software development, supply chain expertise, unique access to emerging technology and data analytics – things a few steps beyond what innovation firms are asked to do today – will soon become core requirements in the way innovation is conceived and driven to market”

“This all points to a bolder future and a new set of requirements for the business of innovation consulting. Where success isn’t measured in mere possibility, but in big strategies and breakthrough ideas made real”

Marriage of shared intent

“For Fahrenheit 212’s part, it represents a way to leapfrog our competitive set and bring an entirely unique combined force to market. Individually and in aggregate, our new capabilities will drive the realization of innovations as powerfully as we’ve ignited them at the front end.

Overnight we’ll gain access to new ability to turn big ideas into not just prototypes, but enterprise level solutions. We’ll also plug into Capgemini’s global network of Applied Innovation Exchanges – 30 workspaces around the world for exploring emerging-technology led transformation in areas like retail innovation, internet of things, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

For our partners at Capgemini, linking up with Fahrenheit 212 represents a step toward their vision of redefining the way the consulting industry thinks and works. Bringing their world-class consulting and implementation practices to future-state problem solving and design.

Together we share a belief that solving for the challenges our clients will face in the future is only possible through the kind of visionary forward thinking that opens opportunities that aren’t yet in sight”

The combination has real potential if it is given the freedom to evolve but will it?

The words of Todd Rovak, the Managing Partner and CEO of Fahrenheit 212 offered these insights that give us the ‘glimpse’ into the future:

• Fahrenheit 212 fused design and development skills with a traditional management consultancy so they could assist clients well beyond identifying strong markets. By bringing creative and analytical capabilities together, Rovak said Fahrenheit can help clients unlock new spaces by identifying what existing assets to leverage and helping them design a brand strategy for the new market.
• The deal will additionally allow Fahrenheit to plug into Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchanges, 30 workspaces around the world where companies can immerse themselves in emerging technologies in areas like retail innovation, the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality and artificial intelligence. The Exchanges are also intended to help firms address the business disruptions confronting their industries.
• Fahrenheit 212 said the deal will enable the company to marry its creative impulse with an entirely new set of capabilities around robust software development, supply chain expertise, unique access to emerging technology and data analytics. “The ability to shape the future is only half the question,” Todd Rovak, Fahrenheit 212’s managing partner and CEO suggests “Being able to deliver the future in also vital.”
• The ability to combine innovation strategy and transformational thinking with enterprise-level implementation on a global scale is now a client mandate. Capgemini’s deep technology capabilities, resources and client relationships will steepen its trajectory and acceleration that would have been at a slower pace for both separately.

“Together within this sharing of a belief that solving for the challenges our clients will face in the future is only possible through the kind of visionary forward thinking that opens opportunities that aren’t yet in sight”.

Future-state problem solving and design is needed around innovation through technology

Capgemini seems to have a vision of redefining the way consulting industry thinks and works. It is bringing in global scale, leading consulting practices and the continuous implementation practices that I feel Capgemini have been developing. The Applied Innovation Exchange, recently announced by Capgemini has a great contributor to deliver on its intent with this acquisition.

Together Capgemini with Fahrenheit 212, will bring additional value and innovation to the client base, current and future, so as to expand their innovation solutions into new industries that are undergoing digital disruption.

The intent is to start with some “visionary forward thinking that opens opportunities that aren’t yet in sight” and the combination clearly stated by Fahrenheit 212 again as:

“But for the innovation discipline to be truly effective today, we must empower our creative impetus with new capabilities. Capabilities like robust software development, supply chain expertise, unique access to emerging technology and data analytics – things a few steps beyond what innovation firms are asked to do today – will soon become core requirements in the way innovation is conceived and driven to market”

The future is often limited by the constraints imposed

Fahrenheit 212 will operate within the Capgemini North American operation, perhaps far too limiting in my opinion but as a freestanding brand and group, as it certainly does have such a unique culture, team and way of working but will it be allowed to continue? Or will it simply fuse and emerge differently from its past into something more scalable, full of the need for speed, broader innovation solutions fused with a heavier technology and digital backbone? Or simply fade away drained of its creative and responsive thinking?

This acquisition certainly needs handling with real care, sensitivity and attention otherwise it can go the way of others, in their need to offer innovation, it gets simply smothered, lost and the acquirers never learn its true design force and creative value as it does not fit the existing business model.

Time will tell, I wish all involved well, it is far more an internal challenge than an external one perhaps? I do hope the traditional models around innovation are broken and a new one emerges. Capgemini have real intent at least and that is good. Who else is waking up to this change going on in innovation I wonder?

The post In the blink of an eye, it gets something bigger first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Putting that aside the website, the current point of reference, leaves me puzzled, a little unclear on its ‘compelling’ proposition. I think I get it but it simply strikes me as a launch as ‘thin,’ on really spelling it out for me, or surely the very clients, in its value and potential. It actually seems a very minimum viable product.  I just had to go in search of a better understanding.

The concept of having any “applied innovation exchange” coming from Capgemini should be promising, as somewhere to go, as they are a leading technology consulting practice. It ‘seems’ to be offering a connecting platform, well-established ecosystem advantages but it seems so understated here.

Why? It seems so tenuous, a toe in the water. I would have expected a much bigger bang here. The website told me just enough but I think it should have delivered more.

My understanding came more from the press release

So to get a better understanding I actually had to reverted to the press release and that provided more than the website in providing some improved clarity, as there seems precious little else at present. It seems they are offering a place and a digital space where others can come and play, to accelerate their innovation activities.

According to this press release AIE is “an integrated system, offering a process to rapidly and securely gain competitive advantage in today’s fast-pace innovation market landscape, by compressing cycle time from discovery to deployment of innovation“. Now that would be good news for nearly any innovation team, as they all seem to be under growing pressure to add even more speed from idea to final concept, so they can get their innovation ideas out of the door. Yet my puzzlement shifted a little here on the optimism of this.

The solutions are coming from offer spaces and “exchanges” where organizations are able to immerse themselves in the understanding, experimentation and application of all aspects of emerging technologies, as well as addressing the business disruptions confronting them and their industries”. Again my pulse moves up a notch or two on this. Although these did seem to be bricks and mortar, more than cloud and remote based.

Also they will be offering a global curated ecosystem of innovation partners and a framework of tried and tested tools to help enterprises to exploit these market disruptions in a structured way. I assume ‘the curated by’ will be by Cap Gemini as it is their Exchange.

The physical spaces they are providing are presently in Munich, Paris, Lille, Toulouse, Utrecht, Mumbai, Melbourne and now San Fransisco, followed soon by London, that will house key sectoral and process domain expertise, to allow the applications of these “innovations” to their specific business connect need. Presently these are working on different solutions for the automotive sector, virtual reality glasses, agile products and services for energy, developing applications for the French Railway (SNCF for connected watches) and a number of other examples outlined in the press release.

The promise presented in this release is also that they will provide the connecting up to other significant global technology players, most already in the Capgemini network, with the intent to build a global network of start-ups, academic institutions, research organizations, access to venture capital and private equity firms.

The promise is that this AIE ecosystem will be an operating framework constantly evolving taking a greater collaborative approach and allowing the balance between external and internal thinking to apply innovative solutions.

Returning to the web site of AIE

Here is the puzzle, I was really expecting something that underscored platforms, ecosystems, gave a greater clarification of partners, a greater story on all this physical space being offered; what was in it to play with, learn from and engagement with, but it remains “thin” and this from a leading technology consultant. The client stories help validate an (emerging) concept but does it really differ itself, in ways that make me stop and feel that this Applied Innovation Exchange is really different?

I’m not sure on what I see going back to the website, it looks like a story unfolding possibly, that might have been put together quickly or in this MVP way. It seems to have a very limited architecture or depth behind it as far as you can initially explore- for me it seems somewhat beyond a placeholder but it just does not seem to reflect a real “connected thinking” behind it, that you would expect from one of the global digital leading consulting firms.

It is speaking the language of need but I’m yet unsure of if it’s a game changer or “breaking traditional models” even though it is suggesting it is taking a multi-party collaborative approach.

Being far too cautious perhaps?

For me it is a wait and see, what about for others? I believe in platforms and written fairly extensively on these (here,and here), ecosystems (here) and (here), collaborative innovation (here) and (here), transcending different industry boundaries (here),  where consultants can contribute (here) and (here) . Equally presenting the arguments that there is this need is to shift to a new radical model (here) and are we getting real value out of the existing innovation consultants (here), which I certainly believe we are not. I felt Capgemini could have presented a more compelling and connecting story for this launch

Have Capgemini fallen into the trap that I’ve written about before (here) of “Consultants are far too cautious for their own good“ It is often harder to make internal change than providing the advice for others to make. As I assume this was all internally driven you enter the world of the typical client, lots of conflicting opinions, worries of risk, what to reveal and provide, as others are watching and can be fairly nimble if they spot something different. Maybe this is an assumption too far but it is not delivering a wow factor, yet for me.

Bridging the intent with the present deliver

So I hear you Capgemini on the intent, I would suggest the execution and launch might not be living up to this as yet. Still it is early days, or I am missing something a whole lot deeper that is failing to be conveyed in this website? .As I say, the press release gave a whole lot more than this site. Is that a good thing as it stands?

There is a real need to put some ‘red meat’ on the bone here or perhaps a seen ‘gap in the market’ might be lost to others as they can explain it better, Capgemini needs to recognize urgently this real need for a deeper understanding presently missing.

Equally internally, in consultants you have strong and diverse opinions and I would fear these potential internal antibodies kick-in and go back to the traditional practice unless they see their own compelling value, treating this as just another part of the technology service offering, an add-on, or perhaps it simply was just that, an extension to existing services?

The post Is this really breaking the traditional model on Innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.