Just trying to stay your own course is tough enough but with all the diversity of views, it must be even more overwhelming for others, those who are asked to take on a role within innovation. Where and who do you turn too must be a real dilemma?

In recent years I have found I need to diversify away from one given ‘voice’ on innovation and channel this out into specialized and more focused areas of innovation activity. At present, I have SIX channels open on innovation advice or advisory service that has made my life partly more complicated but more importantly, able to separate my thinking into these parts, as they deserve a ‘deeper’ dive and/or broader exposure.

I thought I’d outline the six here in this post as the sum of the parts that  contributes to the whole

I have two established businesses, one started in 2000 and one in 2008. They are distinct in what they provide as services. Let me illustrate this by a screen lift of their two separate “main menus”:

HOCA International Consultants

It covers many of the adjacencies on innovation. You do need to find out more of the emerging Work to be done as it is a far more the dynamic place for innovation to happen.The Work-to-be-done is focused on connecting to the emerging dynamic future areas that your Organizational is facing today and then how to work through these so as to respond to the rapidly changing markets and diminishing resources. It’s areas of focus:

With the types of offering in HOCA we are looking at the roots of organizations values, build the interactions and strengthen the connecting parts that build a strong ‘network effect’ in relationships; explore the more emerging practices and seek to build the Enterprise Capabilities that place innovation and knowledge as the ‘beating’ heart of your organization.

Agility Innovation Specialists

Everything we want to do is 100% focused on innovating!  Bringing agility, flexibility, adaptability and learning into the innovation equation. We provide the pathways to your future innovation growth through critical focal points of any necessary value creation.

Agility’s primary role is to support and extend innovation, in thinking and developing the capabilities and capacities, to match the client’s ambition and goals, by providing a real depth of innovation insight and advice.

“Our objectives are to identify promising business opportunities, develop innovation expertise and competencies, create value and grow competitive and profitable businesses 100% focused on our innovative support to you”

Agility Innovation Specialists aim is to offer a real “intensity in innovation” at its core.

Then I have broken down my posting on innovation thinking onto four sites.

I took this decision, not to make my life extra complicated, which it partly does, but to focus specifically on critical areas of innovation focus. Innovation thinking is diverse and I felt there was a place, space and need to separate my thinking to allow it to go deeper or wider.

Paul4innovating

The ‘flagship’ of my innovation posting world is this site you are on:

This I launched into blogs and posts in August 2010 and is nearing 500 posts which have built up an amazing library of innovation views, advice, solutions and exploratory work. Some of these I’m really proud of, others were attempts to shift conversations or simply the outlet for my innovation ‘rants’ or passions.  I ‘house’ my blogging intent here, describe my own innovation journey and provide my collection of insights and thinking.

So this is my ‘core’ blog for “building the DNA of innovation” one that is allowing me to wander far and wide, as I see innovation as a living, evolving area of management, discipline, and knowledge. You have to stay open to change, ready to shape as well as rework what know that is in within our existing work, experiences, and activities. I continue to shape and evolve myself, as innovation management is certainly a “living thing.”

Innovation fitness dynamics

This has been the hardest dedicated site to work with. I have been working away on building a methodology for building innovation capability, capacity, and competencies for a number of years. It seems in permanent beta. This blog is about offering you a pathway towards achieving your own innovation fitness dynamics. The end goal of your journey is simply “the greater fitness you can achieve in innovation capability the more it can equate to a new value creation“.

There is, again a journey story, the nine stages to pass through for building innovation fitness and critically how innovation capital becomes the important area of exploration and exploiting. It currently has about 70 posts in the site related to this building of capability and capacity to innovation, through a designed approach to how you can achieve innovation fitness.

Innovation Ecosystems

This is a collaborative site I share with Jeffrey Phillips from Ovo Innovation. This is actually our fourth substantive collaboration together but this time we decided to turn our thinking into a regular viewpoint as the subject is presently evolving before us. We are entering the world of innovation ecosystems where broader, more complex innovation challenges, through greater collaborations can be achieved.

This site includes our thoughts on what makes up innovation ecosystems and the changes these can offer us in innovation opportunity. What is explored is ecosystems, the delivery mechanisms of platforms along with other collaborative methods and push towards the new need of today, to deliver a seamless total solution that provides customers what they are constantly asking for, to solve their needs and give them greater engagement and experiences.

This thinking is driven by a need for new products and services and experiences, otherwise, we believe customers will continue to turn away from discrete, disconnected products and services, increasingly over time. Shaping and introducing new innovation ecosystems is not easy but it has enormous potential to transform competition and in my view, it is ushering in the new innovation era and providing the principles of this shift taking place.

Guide4innovating

Advocating the practice and understanding of innovation

This is my recently launched site, in March 2017, dedicated to providing and advocating innovation advice to individuals, and innovation teams. The starting point is “Building a strong advocacy practice” and providing a learning platform, dedicated to personal innovation learning journeys.

My worry continues, even with all the insights and advice out there on innovation, that it continues to flounder. Innovation still gets treated often as an add-on, often overridden, to the more established practices within organizations.  Innovation does need a different mindset, metrics, and operational practice to be able to yield its true potential.

I have thought for some time about the advocacy of innovation, turning my intent into purpose and positioning, by becoming a more dedicated source of essential knowledge for innovators as a guide, mentor, and catalyst for accelerating performance. Although it is early days for a dedicated site, it has been a significant part of my innovation practice for years. all I am doing is giving it a more dedicated focus for clients to visit, decide and then engage with me.

Innovation Advocacy needs strong guidance.  As I would like to be positioned as a “go to” trusted authority that can influence, argue, advocate new directions, and provide clear options for change, I can push the ‘edges’ of today’s status quo, perhaps be your required catalyst to trigger ideas or offer different insights.

Many executives engaged in innovation are time-starved. They are constantly reacting to daily events, focusing and fixing short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior. My intent is to help reduce this pressure to constantly advance and stay alerted to changing innovation practices. So in my own limited way, with those that want to engage and explore the ‘richness’ within innovation my intent is to help them in their innovation acceleration purpose.

In summary

So these are my innovation playpens or sandboxes. I also often write and contribute to many other innovation businesses in different media channels, specifically for innovation thought leadership. The combined effect of my work has been where this activity has been consistently voted in the top innovation knowledge providers since 2011, something I am incredibly proud to have achieved

I enjoy the returns this provides, in awareness, in engagements or leading through to different offerings, speaking, advising, in exchanges and deepening the contacts that I have gained in the years since I started in the innovation space, that was 2001/02, when innovation come clearly into focus as my path to pursue when I lived in Singapore. It has taken on a life of its own ever since.

I certainly believe I can contribute to the wider innovation community that we are all part of, to support the innovation activities we all need to undertake. Through my advising, coaching, writing and mentoring on innovation, as well as through my ongoing consulting and advisory work I attempt to offer a broad innovation service. My aim is to stimulate others to gain fresh insights and knowledge from these collaborative exchanges and explorations through innovation. Each engagement continues to equally grow my own understanding constantly.

I hope by having this multiple channels available, does give you a real value to explore and engage more with me, as each channel attempts to provide answers to your innovation needs to seek out advancement and different insights in the practice of innovation management.

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The post Covering Innovation My Way first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I have written about the new innovation era in 2017 made up of higher levels of needed collaboration, where platforms, ecosystems and customer experience understanding become increasingly central.

I felt I needed to provide a more dedicated perspective on these in a collaboration with my established sparing partner Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation in our website of Ecosystems4innovators.

We do stand at the cusp of a new innovation era but where do you stand?

We need to push well beyond our existing core of (existing) innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design that recognizes the “core” lies at the edges of discovery.

The tenet of each organization in the past has been in protecting its core.

This is changing as the very core is changing to adapt to more volatile conditions, changing landscapes and more disruption. The core is not so much in what we know or own but in what we can learn from all that surrounds our core and this is increasingly found at the edges and externally.

The edge is our new emerging adaptive core

The new core can only be found at the edge, the customer edge. The customer is critical, they are absolutely essential to any innovation. If their needs are not fully understood, to turn the present fuzziness from not fully understanding their needs and unmet needs into opportunity to grow our business, you are at a real disadvantage today.

We need to really engage and have a real depth of understanding of the customer, their needs, their individual journey, by discovering and engaging with them constantly at all their current touch points and experiences of what they are wanting to do, that is different from today and this comes from new combinations.

We are rapidly appreciating the combination effect of technology, the data exchanges, and the analytics we gain from this, the insights and discoveries. The combination effect is changing the starting point of innovation, it is not beginning in idea generation found inside the building, and it is discovery found outside brought in, to then turn into potentially commercial ideas.

The world of discovery is rapidly opening up through software and technology solutions

There is a host of digital solutions that can bring discovery and insight into our innovation thinking.We have a growing selection of innovation software all looking far more at the “edge” to then bring this into the new core.

For example we can automatically identify trends and technologies that might shape our world, we can scan different corporate environments by applying a more disciplined radar scanning approach, we can capture more inspirations and ideas “on the go” through all our mobile options, scanning, sending and collecting in dedicated ‘idea’ repositories.

We have multiple choices of collaborative platforms, we can quickly mount crowdsourcing campaigns, validate different concepts and prototypes, have corporate idealization platforms, construct road maps that can steer discovery, technology, resources and ideas so as to ‘quickly’ translate these into a portfolio of options to judge and decide.

We can collaborate in ecosystems of mutual understanding, working to a desired end or range of new solutions, we have multiple platforms to leverage and work through. We have data inflows, analytic solutions, and insights, all crowding in on us to deliver sometimes overwhelming choices. The ability to reorganize differently becomes paramount to seizing the new potential that lies at the edges of external discovery.

No, our discovery side is so rich in possibility yet we often stay stuck in our existing core.Why?

I can liken it to an old heart, ticking away but not as capable of a great amount of real exertion as it used to be. It has had multiple bypasses, an odd heart attack and plenty of emergency interventions. We need a transformation, a new beating heart of innovation possibilities, recognizing these as continued infusions, becoming the essential (blood) flow that feeds the innovation heart. It has never been as healthy as today, of being able in providing a constant flow of possibilities that circulate and provide the new innovation oxygen.

Forget the past reliance

The old concept of a complete reliance on internally thinking, of “we have the best ideas and understanding” are totally out of date. Believing our growth is simply being reliant on internal product and service extension is failing to move this growth needle apart from limited short-term gains. We can’t rely on simply ‘tweaking’ the existing core anymore. We need to think differently. We need to be utterly outwardly orientated to all of the customer and market dynamics and it is through technology capture we can begin to translate these into new innovation opportunities.

So the edge will radically begin to transform the core

To become more aggressive and combat the disruptive forces at work all around us we must go to the edge. The edge can be still made up of products, services, and market opportunities but we need to consider the underlying forces that are at work within this and these lie outside our own domain of physical building, experience or our existing techniques to exploit the known.

We need to find the unknown, we need to pick up on the weak signals we can only find at the edges and begin to build a very different institutional innovation set of capabilities.

Thinking at the edge can be very transforming.

Edges require different practices from the core; they, over-time impact the core, hence why we need to begin to think through institutional innovation change to accommodate this leading from the edge.

The value of considering platforms and ecosystems within this redesign allows you to accelerate outside learning, leverage the knowledge available across a broader community and can deliver internally new understanding and knowledge in areas where the core lacks, or is inadequately set up in expertise.

What was the internal competence of knowledge inside the organization is becoming increasingly an inhibitor. It only contains the core of the existing business; it does not allow you to tap into opportunities of tomorrow in new, openly shared ways.

Collaborations across organizations can defray the cost; it limits risk but encourages experiment. You achieve ways to gains quickly differently learning opportunities and connect with different areas of specialization not found within the one organization.

A different understanding of stocks and flows that come from our edges.

Today it is not “stocks of your knowledge” as these rapidly lose value, it is the “flows of all knowledge” and these come increasingly within the relationships you form at the edges and platforms and ecosystems can accelerate these flows and leverage knowledge and discovery.

We do need to re-conceive innovation – our new core is found at the edges if growth is important to you. It is how you apply all that is potentially available to you today, to leverage and learn what is valued and needed becomes the critical investment time, you need to put into the discovery of the edge and all it can mean to your existing core.

We simply need to transform our framing and much of this is outside not within. Have you made this recognition that your core is at increasing risk unless you discover the edges that will transform everything you do and you will want to protect as your new connected intelligent core highly connected to the outside world?

We can explore this more if you are interested?

The post We are pushing away from the old innovating core first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I continue to read and explore as much of the thought leadership on innovation, it continually points to a change in how we approach innovation.We need to embrace this need for change.

I have written about the new innovation era in 2017 made up of higher levels of needed collaboration, where platforms, ecosystems and customer experience understanding become increasingly central. We need to push well beyond our existing core of innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design.

We are pushing further away from the old core.

The tenet of each organization in the past has been in protecting its core. This is changing as the very core is changing to adapt to more volatile conditions, changing landscapes and more disruption. The core is not so much in what we know or own but in what we can learn from that surrounds our core and this is increasingly found at the edges and externally.

Let me explain

The customer is critical, they are becoming central to any innovation, and they are our need to fully understand, to turn the fuzziness into opportunity. We need to start constantly at understanding the customer, their needs, their individual journey by discovering and engaging with them. We are rapidly appreciating the combination effect of technology, the data exchanges, and the analytics we gain from this. The combination effect is changing the starting point of innovation, it is not beginning in idea generation found inside the building, and it is discovery found outside brought in, to then turn into potentially commercial ideas. These can only be found at the edge, the customer edge.

The old concept of internally thinking of growth being reliant on internal product and service extension is failing to move this growth needle apart from limited short-term gains. We can’t rely on simply ‘tweaking’ the existing core anymore. We need to think differently

Scale, scope, and speed are becoming dominate in all we need to think through

To become more aggressive and combat the disruptive forces at work all around us we must go to the edge. The edge can be still made up of products, services, and market opportunities but we need to consider the underlying forces that are at work within this and these lie outside our own domain of physical building, experience or our existing techniques to exploit the known.

We need to find the unknown, we need to pick up on the weak signals we can only find at the edges and begin to build a very different institutional innovation set of capabilities.

The value of the three horizons comes into play here even more as an innovating force of change

Horizon 2 and especially horizon 3 are exploring the edges; they should be set up for discovery, for experimenting and learning.

Horizon thinking goes well beyond “just” internal thinking and building a portfolio, it needs to be extended into understanding its growing role in platform and ecosystem design.

As we think beyond the one entity we are moving from the existing products and service in horizon 1, to building a new platform constellation of connected products and services in horizon 2, and looking to form a network of ecosystems to explore these emerging edges in horizon 3. I will be exploring this connecting the three horizons into platform and ecosystem thinking further, at a later time.

Edges, if chosen well become eventually the new core – they give fresh perspective

We need to think about scalable learning, we need to quickly translate potential scope and deliver understanding at new speeds that our present core can’t cope with. The present core is designed for exploitation, for efficiencies and effectiveness and it relies on predictability.

The edge is the opposite; it needs constantly exploring, adjusting, learning and experimenting. Yet this cannot be left to ad hoc design, it needs this institutional design. It functions differently than the core, it requires the dual management practice often discussed around the solutions within the design of ambidextrous organizations. It ‘pulls in’ the understanding

Deloitte Centre for the Edge

I constantly find Deloitte’s thinking as leading edge. Often to absorb this thinking can take time and the appropriate conditions can come later. That is thinking at the edge so you draw in the understanding and this becomes more central to your own core. Deloitte’s often have this impact on me.

They have written about innovating at the edge for some time. They argue an edge opportunity has four distinct characteristics that differentiate.

In the short-term– an edge requires minimal investment to initiate and the edge has to have the potential to grow the pie.

In the longer-term – an edge aligns with the long-term disruptive shifts in the market and has the potential to transform the core.

The design principles of the Edge offered by Deloitte as a framework.

GE, for example, is taking Predix from the cloud to the edge.

Predix is the GE operating system for the Industrial Internet, has been opened up as a platform for outside companies to write apps, have access to collect and harvest data, as well as have access and use of all the tools available for the data collected in the cloud to be analyzed on this Predix platform. GE recently recognized and decided to place machine apps anywhere, literally at the edge of any networks or systems on devices, on controllers, in positioning this analysis capability as a network gateway or router, ultimately connecting back to the cloud.

This change in thinking actually takes innovation to the edge, it delivers knowledge to the customer who has invested in the machine. It changes the relationships, alters the dynamics of managing. Can this thinking of data, platforms, ecosystems and relationships with the actual (human) customer be equally managed at the edge, I think so.

This can give ‘edge understanding’ by each device, by each interaction, by what needs to be completed. The application of thinking at the edge is where you can gain insights faster. Where you can run programs faster, adapt them to local environments and exchanges, develop dialogues by running a quick analysis on or close to the machine or the person using the machine themselves.

As GE claim in their case “the edge is the place where the cloud meets the customer environment”. You can then get a better prediction on the spot, you can make needed personal corrections and over time the machine has the capability to learn over time what is optimal, what is needed to be completed, what will help optimize the process.

So the edge can begin to transform the core

Thinking at the edge can be very transforming, can you imagine the Smart Phone, or other smart devices being the edge, where the exchange takes place, the knowledge collected and shared and the relationship forms to design the innovation future, as close as you can get, in the consumer’s hands. It is a reality already, we just have to reconceive this differently.

Edges require different practices from the core; they, over-time impact the core, hence why we need to begin to think through institutional innovation change to accommodate this leading from the edge.

The value of considering platforms and ecosystems within this redesign allows you to accelerate outside learning, leverage the knowledge available across a broader community and can deliver internally new understanding and knowledge in areas where the core lacks or is inadequately set up in expertise. It contains the core of the existing business; it allows you to tap into opportunities of tomorrow in new shared ways. It defrays the cost, it limits risk, it gains ways to quickly learn and connect with different areas of specialization not found within the one organization.

Today it is not “stocks of knowledge” as these rapidly lose value, it is the “flows of knowledge” and these come increasingly within the relationships you form at the edges and platforms and ecosystems can accelerate these flows and leverage knowledge and discovery.

We do need to reconceive innovation- our new core is found at the edges if growth is important to you. It is how you apply all that is potentially available to you today, to leverage and learn what is valued and needed.

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The post The future innovation core lies at the edge. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.