Four years ago, I downloaded an article that I keep coming back to. It was called “Managing Disruptive Change Be Ready for What Is Coming”, written by Estevao Seccatto Rocha. At the time, Estevao worked for KPMG in São Paulo as a transformation and turnaround advisor. Today according to Estaveo’s LinkedIn, he works for Stone Partners, still in São Paulo.

I think he wrote this article while studying at RWTH Aachen University, and he references Professor Malte Brettel, the head of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Group.

I kept coming back to this and decided to try and pick out some of the points here in this post. The work is either Estavao’s or Professor Brettel. I am trying to translate it in a way that works for me, and hopefully, you as a reader of this posting site to bring disruption far more central in your thinking.

Digital is one of the most disruptive forces we have to face. This is why I decided to summarize some points, remind myself and appreciate what we really mean when we advocate and encourage going disruptive.

Understanding the basics of disruption

Disruption is constant; it simply disturbs all we do. If we ignore it, we lose what we have; if we determine how to meet disruption, we have a chance to survive and even come out better, certainly differently.

Estevao offers this “Disruption change people’s routines, the way people think, behave, do business and learn, it “displaces an existing market, industry, or technology and produces something new and more efficient and worthwhile. It is at once destructive and creative.”

Much of the article attempts to apply a systematic approach to disruptions, which is why I partly like it. Disruptions come at you in different ways, and the ability to manage all the possible variables makes the management of disruption really tough.

The first need is to try and understand the disruption

1. Understand the disruptions. Why companies are disrupted, and what are the sources of disruptions?
2. Build patterns and try to understand in which pattern is causing disruption;
3. Start reacting to the disruptions in a general way;
4. Look more closely, understand the strength of the disruption;
5. React in a specific way;
6. Understand the changes in the environment and respond to them.

Disruptions happen as they are mostly triggered by 1) Regulative Environment changes, 2) Technology, 3) Customer Behavior changes, 4) Competition and New Players entering.

Professor Brettel established six specific disruption patterns, depending on how the disruption affects an organization.

Professor Brettel outlines each disruption pattern with clearly different intensities but lays out the reaction patterns, dependant on the degree of disruption, in this useful visual.

The article looks at different disruption patterns by Speed, Stage and by Impact. It then concludes with the actions to be taken dependent on the degree of disruption. by describing the actions, action pattern, action manifestation and rationale.

I have not brought these into this post. For me, it is the structured approach, not so much the specific questions that were applied (at the time), so if and when disruption hits, I have the basic thinking framework shown above and the suggested reactions to these. I think each disruption might have different reactions to consider.

The conclusions from the article are:

Success will come from being faster and flexible, anticipating and responding to drastic transformations, with an innovative approach, embracing change and capitalize on disruption. The organization must have dynamic capabilities to transform it into sustainable advantages.

One in three CEOs says their organizations have failed to achieve the value they anticipated from previous transformation initiatives due to:

• Failure to understand the complexity of the operating model: The most commonly identified barrier to success is underestimating the significance of operating model changes necessary to effect transformation across the organization;
• Inability to innovate: organizations are incapable of implementing formal innovation processes, management, and budgets;
• Missing the cultural connection: existing organizational culture is a barrier to execution;
• Failure to take a “business value first” approach to technology: organizations’ legacy technology/systems are a barrier to success. Transformations that begin with a specific technology (rather than with strategic objectives) are twice as likely to fail;
• Inability to execute: organizations are incapable of executing an implementation plan to build and operationalize a new target operating model.

It is sobering that embarking on transformation change, mostly forced upon you, ends up as a failure. The five summary points are as relevant as the outline to manage disruption shown above.  These five aspects doom the changes if they are not really focused upon. All the structure in approach is only as good as the ability of the CEO and team undergoing change can avoid these five failures.

So I wanted to capture this article or paper of Estevao’s as it has been on my mind for several years. I needed to place it in a post to be reminded, and as digital disruption is becoming the higher constant, it is good to be logged here to refer to.

The post Preparing for Digital within your Innovating Disruption first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Digitalizing has a positive impact on our innovation activities, it opens up new exciting possibilities. The first question of what, how and why are we doing this, we can start by looking at the data to begin to see there are potential ways to change something existing or improve on our idea or concept. As we gain insights then we can apply that innovative thinking with a greater technology application understanding.

We then begin to make the changes within the process, be those incremental, radical or even revolutionary to change the processes operating today.

We have distinctive ways to treat data and digitalization that leads to distinct new value points for innovation.

A useful view was provided by the IBM Institute for Business Value identified five distinct opportunities where digital innovation provides additional value:

• We gain new insights that augment products and change our thinking by the generation of real-time or constant flows of market and customer-driven data

• We improve our assets by digitalizing them. We can connect up machines, whole plants and complete organizations can be designed around the flows of data. This has an enormous impact on the potential to collaborate, to liaise, learn and build from this data, a new fresh knowledge insight. This can trigger ideas and new concepts to be evaluated as well as gain from having full oversight over the assets generating data or that coming into the company.

• The ability today is to combine data within and across different industries. Within our move towards platforms and ecosystems the exchange of data allows for a “greater whole” to view it, add insights and knowledge and from this combined effect those within the ecosystem can gain a commercial and competitive advantage to build appropriate products, services, and business models in response

• Each party is building up its own data. We are in times where trading data has become a highly valuable new source of revenue. Knowing weather patterns helps farmers, utility and those dependent on delivery to know and plan far better. We can trade audience data, interest in articles or newsworthy stories so others can associate with these to build more of a profile of who is engaged so they can offer products and services more tailored to their possible needs. The business of trading data is the new oil in the economy

• Lastly, we can begin to organize data into more distinctive patterns, service capability options and build more sustainable systems where you build increasingly an accepted language that becomes codified in some way that gives new value. We can systemize thinking through data that allows for uniformity and allows multiple systems to exchange and see patterns. This is where algorithms have increased value. They can predict change.

Each of these new ways to use the evolution of digitalization to add completely different levels of innovation potential. Seeing this value is one thing, achieving the connecting aspects it requires is another. As we continue to make deeper and deeper connections into manufacturing sites we do need to consider not just the value of digitalization and what it connects up, we need to study and review the data to look for the innovation opportunities to make this an ever greater impact on productivity, efficiencies but more import allowing us to think and design differently, to begin to think changes in technology and innovation.

Innovation and digitalization are as powerful as innovation and knowledge in their combination. They both combine to give new insights, new options to generate significant new and greater value. The sooner we can bring in digital solutions and processes into the innovation process of the industrial process, the better to realize some of the real potentials that this combination can give us, as fresh opportunities to add new value

The post Digitalizing has a positive impact on our innovation activities in IIoT first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How do we find answers to knowing what measures give us for success in any digital transformation? Are today’s measures relevant to tomorrow, are they still based on our legacy system of measurement, when a business was operating in a stable, predictable environment?

Yes, we can measure success in our progress but these are in both multiple and equally personal ways.

Each organization is unique. Never has this become crystal clear that when you face your own transformation journey. You can learn from others, you can adapt but you need to clearly understand where you are in your own evolution and capacity to undertake change as it is simply your journey.

This digitally transforming has not been as well recognized as it is today when we attempt to make any transition, from the old ways of doing business to the new one; that is highly connected, collaborative and based on our growing reliance on technology and ‘everything’ digital. It can become life-changing, changes the scope and opportunities within the business and it is highly individual.

Each business makes a judgment, on speed, scale, and scope of their digital transformation.

How they evolve, in new growth, in their changing business model, in their innovation, in their capabilities to manage the “spread” of activities required to transform. How do they upgrade or re-orientate their people, their customer-facing activity for example?

The world is moving at different speeds, technology is being implemented in unique ways. We are all making and leaving our digital footprint, each very differently depending on our own situations. Judgment becomes personal, relative to your own situation.

We need to measure in those “measured steps” what you need to determine as a transformation journey. Of course, once we have our ideas, we can begin to find ways to measure.

We should always calibrate but we need to seek our own pathway

It is not a bad thing that we must calibrate this against others, in seeing the outcomes feeding back from our customers and markets but it is a journey that you can undertake as you and only you, have the best grasp of what is needed or required. It is your journey.

Can we look out and give it a ‘hard’ quantification in five or say ten years? Does digital transformation have any easy answers? We can take some broader measures as a business is still driven by growth, growth in revenue, in product mix, in-country development, in market share. Or equally how the perception of the company is beginning to change and how the market ‘sees you’ as different and adapting to volatile conditions. You hear the word “exponential” often and that seems a high validation point today.

Seeing the digital transformation story in different ways

I am involved in a community that supports Siemens and attempts to contribute as well as relate to a better understanding of their transformation journey.

This involvement is being part of their external influencer community called SIEx. We influence in different ways but more increasingly shape perceptions and undertake exchanges. This is not a community for social media influencing alone. It is where there are engagements in deeper meaning and relationship growing, that can only emerge from sharing other’s perspectives.

We have two perspectives for this community to thrive in, the insiders working within a business such as Siemens, and those that are outside, looking in, mutually engaging, offering their experiences and views on how they see change occurring and impacting their area of specialised focus.

These views within the community can have creative tension, they are sometimes a little uncomfortable, often challenging ‘relationships’ when someone outside challenges the management of an organization to give it a different perspective.

You can face “push back” or simply a rejection, or moments where you can openly exchange and gain from conversations.  Or, you simply add a new dimension to a particular challenge or problem, that is if the other party is prepared to listen or learn. The value is in having time to listen, learn and adjust if the argument makes sense.

Diversity is allowing different perspectives to have a voice

Many companies talk of diversity, in who they attract within their company but this diversity of opinion, of different perceptions, is as increasingly important. I think Siemens is recognizing this and exploring what this means in value and contribution. It is a privilege to be part of this. I learn constantly and I hope they gain from my contributions equally.

The initiative for this building of a Siemens Influencer Community is driven within Siemens Communications Group, initiated by Clarissa Haller (@clarissahaller), the head of Corporate Communication within Siemens, and driven by Ellen Schramke ( @ellen_schramke). Ellen aims to connect the internal with us as this external resources to aid the Siemens digital transformation. We explore, discover and experience change as it is occurring all the time and I believe makes discussions relevant and valuable to all involved, it adds to the journey of Siemens.

The journey of discovery is the digital transformation one we all are undertaking

Digital transformation and digital maturity must be understood through the lens of business focus, which in turn prioritizes investments and defines success. It is knowing what outcomes you wish to achieve will help enable that transformation process but this is not a “static” process, it is dynamic, highly interactive and being able to listen intently and learn so we all evolve in the journey of digital discovery.

As I suggested earlier “Each business makes a judgment, on speed, scale, and scope of their digital transformation. These are highly individual.

The post Success in any digital transformation is a journey of discovery first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We really do have this compelling need to have a new cycle of innovation design.

A more integrated solution that takes our understanding of innovation and how to manage it, into the realms of ecosystems and platforms in its design and thinking.

To achieve this we need to recognize a significant change we must undertake in our present innovation management. We need to open up our thinking to embrace a new era of digital innovation

Does it make sense? You judge as you read.

Extract what makes sense for you, explore where there are thoughts that can be applied to your current innovation set up. Just remember a new innovative design needs to be radical, totally connected, and resource-rich.

Firstly, we do need to recognize technology is going to be inseparable in what we are doing in the innovation world, going forward. The blurring of our lives, of the breaking down of the different old industry demarcations, the blending of government, corporate and social engagements are all giving increasing voice to each of us as individuals, all happening due to this exponential set of connections. I sense from many this is‘epic’, exploding and life-changing, with all of us, simply learning to adapt and adjust, moving at speed to align ourselves.

The choice of apps, platforms, the number of connected devices is teaching us new ways of communicating, learning, interacting, and extracting different values and needs out of the technology available which is all constantly evolving.

How does a large business keep pace with this exponential connection?

Where is the starting point or the necessary change inventions one needs to bring in to understand the gaps and fill the voids, can we back-fill as we equally move forward?

The past business decision was based on evidence, validated and then this was justified and sort of evolved at a steady pace. There is something different presently going on, the sheer scale and impact of how technology is evolving at increasing speed will need a massive mind shift and radical redesign of our innovation management systems.
Although each organization is having so many competing priorities, the gap between how it is organized today and building these required digital capabilities is getting wider, unless you work through this transformation plan in a clear, purposeful way. It has to begin with a ground-up approach, small experiments that can quickly be scaled up or revised. It needs very hands-on engagement throughout the whole process.

A key need of this digital transformation is going to be asking the question of how we can build in ‘greater agility’ and what is presently stopping us from achieving this. Then it is the agility to achieve better response times to customers ‘needs, to respond to market changes quicker, to translate insights into knowledge and then into the product and service innovations that meet ever-changing needs.

It is recognizing and then facing up to your present ‘pain points’ and the key competitive places that agility, digital understanding and translating this into outwardly facing outcomes will significantly improve your abilities to compete, in often volatile markets. It is shortening the time between understanding and reacting, and this is where digital transformation offers both the ‘return’ promise or becomes the threat.

We are in real need of connecting innovation and digitalization. Digital innovation is the future, it accelerates our world of possibilities

Forming a strategy, roadmap and business case needs really many new considerations

There are many considerations, each organization will be different. Yet all have a common need; the recognition each organization needs to develop its digital capabilities, organization-wide, not stuck in some IT department. It is a total company-wide set of activities that are affected. It is developing the digital capabilities across the organization by transforming the culture, the people’s digital skillset and the structures to get into sync, not just with newly defined organizational goals but also consistently adjusting to the rapid pace of change occurring in the marketplace, aligned to customers evolving needs.

The critical first points to address are the lack of something, be this the resource to undertake such a task, a lack of digital talent residing in the organization or digital savvy, the ability to make this a corporate priority and not leave this to limited pockets of divisions, functions or channels. It needs this powerful syncing and top-level focus and support.

Then we need to encourage and expand the risk appetite, in rapid experimentation and learning, to accelerate the infusion of digital talent, enhance the understanding of soft skills and the art of collaboration, in new teaming, in-goal, and process identification and solution solving. Also, in developing greater fluidity in structures, exploring, and identification with the needs of new solutions to keep ‘feeding’ this back into the evolving roadmap. All of this needs to establish a new digital rhythm to encourage the flow of knowledge and understanding, to feedback into evolving solutions that will take time to develop and embed.

We are caught up in a technology revolution and the sooner we think “digital innovation” the greater our chances are for some significantly different outcomes that push the boundaries and connect-up to more radical designed solutions. Solutions that our customers will relate to, not because they are more complex, which they will be but because they are connected, adaptive, and anticipatory.

The new age of innovation is dawning. Let’s “seize the day”.

The post A new cycle of innovation design first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How can we bring increasing agility into our innovation work, that requires both stable and dynamic moments to deliver better outcomes?

Where do we focus, what do we recognize as organization practices, that can begin to transform the organization and re-equip it for a different future?

Agility for me is vital, it allows us to increasingly be adaptive in an uncertain world.

As innovation continues to be central to growth far more in the future it is our ability to adapt and adjust to all the uncertainties and this requires the ability to be agile.

A report provided by McKinsey “How to create an agile organization” has been part of a broader ‘agile’ series from them but this one specifically gave me my necessary anchor point, to move forward with my own design thinking for agility and innovation.

McKinsey does point out in this report you do need all eighteen practices to be fully alert to agile, but it is these dynamic ones that hold the real promise in my mind. These are the ones we all should move towards as our projected aim to achieve.

So let me summarize these nine dynamic practices

I have taken the nine dynamic practices outline meaning from this McKinsey report and added my own thoughts and reflections within these summaries.

1. Information Transparency

Today we need to take away all the filtering going on in organizations. Those who fill positions to control and attempt to influence the data. If we can’t unlock the knowledge within the organization, we fail to connect the people working within the organization to its products and related customer needs. Transparency makes the sharing of the knowledge increasingly relevant to connecting up the ‘whole’. There needs to be a very powerful concept of un-filtering, to allow the flow of understanding. It is highly dynamic and powerful in all it can release if encouraged and supported.

2. Rapid iteration and experimentation

The whole emphasis today is on rapid and fast cycles of learning. That testing, learning and adjusting from mistakes and building on these become really valuable progress points. Prototyping is getting so much better, it is creeping into the everyday culture when we innovate, or should. The MVP concept is so right to get features that are potentially better, out there, to test and learn from.

3. Continuous Learning

The moment we stop personally learning, we are the real losers. We need to find ways to ”cut out time” to explore and look for new ways to learn to improve ourselves and what we do within organizations. We need to push for new ways of working and to learn ‘more freely’ from other’s knowledge, in open exchanges and ways to collaborate. We progress by learning from failures and relating to them.

4. Flexible resource allocation.

We need to be adaptive, fluid in any organization and team design. The ability to feel in a position to ‘ramp up or shut down’ initiatives empowers us. We need to want to constantly change teams, seek out joining new ventures. To be always wanting to be redeployed, not because we are hanging on but because any new deployment means new horizons and opportunities. Seek change out, embrace this flexible world and show you are a key resource to help mold and shape it.

5. Open physical and virtual environment.

I often struggle with open planned offices, they provide an environment that distracts and not promote. If you can achieve a way that people communicate and collaborate with each other then great but when you are in a globally dispersed organization it is how you openly ‘react’ in your daily work. For me the virtual environment holds the real future and with so many organizations denying social tools the key to make it ‘purposefully designed’ is to make the activities clearly visible to all that need to know, to constantly show where your intervention and impact has made a difference in building context, content, structure or sharing knowledge. We need to find much better ways to make this a really dynamic, exciting, and rewarding part of agility within organizations

6. Sensing and seizing opportunities.

The value of being proactive, to watch out for signals, to then act upon them, to make your insights valuable to change perceptions, to alter customer bias, to engage with the external environment to shape, influence and contribute into new initiatives makes ‘sensing and seizing’ so important to drive innovation as the catalyst of change.

7. Technology, systems, and tools.

The constant demands being placed on us, to learn and adapt to new technology, systems, and tools as it keeps changing is mega-hard to keep pace with. New organization design in architecture, infrastructure, practices, and ways is tough to integrate the old and the new. How we respond to these is highly dependent on the articulated needs of the business. We can only be ‘responsive’ if we relate to the changing needs. The ability to have a more modular architecture, updates coming in a shorter interval of times can help in a continued updating. It is when the process determines rigid design you can’t change. To ‘react and respond’ you need to keep looking at moving towards technology frontiers. Exploring and exploiting contributes to a better holistic desired business outcome.

8. Role mobility

The movement needs to be constant. When we design we need to always account for achieving a certain fluidity. We need to constantly match our present skills with organizational needs. As we develop a more open talent marketplace we need to have this increasing mobility. Communicating roles, tasks and project outlines need to be demanded, then we have the understanding to change and then deliver to these ‘askes’ of us. These need to constantly match with our own goals, the alignment is the enabler to make this happen.

9. Active partnerships and ecosystems.

Relationships are our trading value. As we build out networks we need to trade. We trade in knowledge, in contribution, in working alongside others to co-develop. We seek out partnering, to invest our intellectual capital with theirs. We look to build the organization’s ecosystem through these engagements, to contribute to new products, services and solutions to look to bring them always to fruition. Our ‘need’ for activity and engagement builds a thriving, more dynamic environment.

In summary.

If we can embrace change by seeking out ways to re-equip ourselves, we encourage our organization to become more dynamic by these actions. We do get stuck in a certain mindset and set of behaviors. We become beholden to them, they eventually ‘freeze’ our progress, we stop learning and experimenting. We need to push for formal mechanisms of change, we need to seek out our own. We need to take hold of our actions, be clear on our organization’s vision and how we believe we can contribute.

As individuals, as members of fluid teams and as an organization we need to be mutually reinforcing. For me, fluidity is equally the growing need of organization’s today.  It is in recognizing that the dynamic practices found for building agility into ourselves and the organization do lie in these nine practices, they give us this level of fluidity. Take them on board, practice them constantly and over time your agility becomes your transformation. It becomes the ‘norm’ and allows for constant adaption.

The post Achieving agility within your innovation work first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We have seen an incredible rise in digital platforms that have become part of our everyday lives.

Whether it’s Apple, Google, eBay, Amazon, Android, Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba, Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal or one of the many others, they all have become some of the hottest companies that consumers value.

These companies have built out their businesses on powerful platforms that drill down on what we value and allow us to connect. They (B2C) have connected the consumer like never before. Now we see the surge of the industrial platforms (B2B), the IIoT world arriving in force.

The big questions for many companies that simply sell products are: can they benefit from making changes in these platform models and how do they go about it? Is the stand-alone product model breaking down? Do the more traditional approaches to customers, those that are more supply sided, still serve their needs today?

Consumers have come to expect more

When any form of digitization is introduced, the expectations of the customer rise exponentially in the expectancy of service, engagement, response, and support – this is increasingly becoming 24×7. A brand is continuously determined by the service and how it fits within the individual’s life. This is having a more connected set of components coming from technology, built into the value proposition.

This rising expectation has its roots in our appreciation for the connecting value of Facebook, Google, Apple or Microsoft. Our “need” for technology has grown in recognition that it can solve our personal problems and situations and is quickly becoming the norm of everyday life. Today the industrial company, selling traditional tangible goods, is expected to engage, listen, adapt, and offer ever-increasing tailored services to our personal needs. Do-it-yourself has become do-it-with-us; let’s collaborate and let’s support each other on a more substantial journey of co-creation. This is where the platform comes in, the enabler in which you can build the exchanges.

We are seeing platforms transform the business landscape to ‘search for new growth’

There is an imperative to understand the whole meaning and implications of platforms. The business implications of platform management are significant because they have a transforming effect on all we do within companies. As technology continues to change the way we do business, we move from being internally directed to externally driven. There is the recognition that innovation does not occur inside, it occurs through collaboration, engagement and admitting that other people may have better ideas and possible answers. There are many people looking to combine their expertise into a new more radical design that increasingly meets the customer’s needs, which they could never be capable of on their own.

To understand where ecosystems and platforms fit within our corporate strategies, there are some well-respected voices discussing and predicting the rapid rise of the platform and what it all means in its implications and changes.

More and more people are asking constantly for platform understanding

Notably, for me, I have been referring back to a number of these experienced voices, as well as recognizing several books and thoughtful papers discussing the platform phenomenon and how it is radically changing our business landscape.

For me, one of the most exciting voices on platform’s comes from Simone Cicero and his team at platformdesigntoolkit.com. This excitement from my side is the result of how they are planning to tackle this. They are creating design tools for platforms and by extension, ecosystems. These come in highly visual formats, built on the canvas approach where they fully provide the toolkit, which you can download for free and a detailed user guide – providing their learning, growing depth in experience in workshops, masterclasses and consulting. They are increasingly focused on building stores around their thinking and are increasingly a great source of reference. Also, a great place to start is to download their Whitepaper “From Business Modelling to Platform Design”. Currently, Simone is working on how they are going to evolve their platform design toolkit. They made an incredibly long way in a short time, but this partly reflects the dynamic, evolving nature of platforms that each business has to get its head around. You can listen to Simone on this podcast to gain some excellent background on his thinking and developments around platforms.

As a real alternative on designing platforms, you have the Platform Innovation Kit developed and led by Matthias Walter. They help entrepreneurs and corporate innovators to design and implement successful network-based businesses. The 5 canvases of kit will guide startups and corporates identify, ideate, build and scale successful platform business models. They see Platforms businesses are hyperscaling and beating traditional business. Increasingly they are seeing more businesses are based on platform business models. Here, they have set about creating an innovation process to help companies build better platform business models leveraging the power of ecosystems. The Platform Innovation Kit is a series of five canvases to ideate, design and implement platform business models. It’s straightforward, easy to use and a must-have toolset for startups and corporates around the world.

The book “Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy – And How To Make Them Work for You” is co-authored by three of the leading voices of platform management, these being Geoffrey Parker, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, one of the world’s foremost scholars of information business models and visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Sangeet Paul Choudhary, an entrepreneur in Residence at INSEAD, who provides a great posting site from pipes to platforms. Each of them is bringing the considerable weight of understanding and insights into Platform Management to gain a really sound grasp of the shift we are all moving towards.

Then, there is John Hagel, co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, who provided valuable insights and thinking on ecosystems and platforms with his colleagues through Deloitte University Press. One of my favorite references is the paper “the power of ecosystems”, which is part of a whole series discussing, “Business ecosystems comes of age”, a must-read for anyone wanting to work systematically through ecosystems and platform thinking. They suggest that “businesses are moving well beyond traditional industry silos and coalescing into richly networked ecosystems, creating new opportunities for innovation alongside new challenges for many incumbent enterprises”.

Furthermore, I recommend the works of Haydn Shaughnessy and Nick Vitalari. I would suggest different books, such as,  “the Elastic Enterprise” on how enterprises scale and operate in a completely novel way, as well as one written just by Haydn “Shift: A Leader’s Guild to the Platform Economy”, and a range of posts to highlight different parts of the platform equation. Haydn continues to explore at the edges of platform thinking which I absolutely value, although it sometimes requires me to re-read his thoughts more than once, but hey, that’s often happening on my own as well, according to some.

My last voice on all things about ecosystems and platforms is Bala Iyer, a professor and chair of the Technology, Operations, and Information Management Division at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, who recently wrote a paper “To Predict the Trajectory of the Internet of Things looking to the Software Industry” where he identified 34 platform providers, although he identified 2,000 in total. In this paper, Professor Iyer provides a terrific graphic laying out the IoT ecosystem, one that is a broadly distributed among the network of these providers who, most of them, are providing application programming interfaces, many of them are offering infrastructure, devices, and platforms as their core, looking for others to connect and build their solutions on these platforms without the high levels of infrastructure investment cost. I’m presently looking to read more on Professor Iyer’s work, and we have been exchanging around the rapid number of platforms that are being created at present.

Each of these expert voices is offering great sources of knowledge, although they tend to revert to the software and technology-centric companies far more since this has been the source of platform understanding.

The industry is lagging but catching up in platform offering

There are growing voices on different aspects of innovation, which are being built through ecosystems and on collaborative platforms, more of which are coming from the traditional manufacturing and service industries. I can refer to these in my own joint site on ecosystems and platforms under https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com/about/.

I chose to shift part of my business over to developing a certain knowledge expertise on ecosystems and platforms last year. There are so many changes occurring around collaboration it needed a dedicated focus. This is a part of the posted site above as it sets about explaining this evolving phenomenon. It’s becoming a really big shift in innovation as this graph shows. When you start thinking about the ten types of innovation, those can be channeled onto platforms, in highly collaborative ways to cover off multiple types of innovation through platforms and ecosystem collaborations to meet customer needs.

Source: https://www.slideshare.net/lugtu/types-of-innovation-59505692

There are many platform providers. Two I would recommend investigating

I follow with growing interest Bosch, the main supplier into the smart era of mobility, cities, and homes and through their subsidiary, Bosch Software Innovation, is building a technology stack of IoT that is becoming, for now, a go-to place for the industry. In my review “Bosch Software Innovations will drive your connected device business” you get a real sense of this. In an earlier post “Bosch: A Leading Platform Exemplar of Digitally Connecting“, I outline some of the necessary details and put much into context, in order to understand why Bosch is becoming well positioned to connect “everything with everything”. They are mainly developing this to align with the new manufacturing era which has been dubbed Industry 4.0 and the need to build multiple ecosystems. Bosch is offering different analytic applications, device management tools, and platform enablement for rapid deployment and device development that becomes designed to your specifications and needs on their platform, validated mostly by their own implementation and application.

Equally, I stay very engaged on where Siemens are taking their business through a radical re-design around digital. MindSphere is their digital platform and is no doubt is the core of all Siemens future digital work and 2018 has been a very expansive year for Mindsphere.

As customers are constantly being confronted with greater platform choice, those making offerings that are showing substance and quality have to find some critical edges that separate themselves and draw in and build digital services up for clients. It is a competitive field and Siemens seems well placed to compete but I wanted to find out why and have been discussing areas of opportunity over on my Ecosystems4Innovating site

I wanted to find those real competitive edges with MindSphere. I think I have found already some distinct value positioning from my research and a recent series of visits.  These can make for a distinctly different value proposition but this is an ongoing work-in-progress that needs building further. I wrote this a year ago

Just look at the pace of Mindsphere’s expansion this year. I wrote this on “Don’t hold your breath due to the increasing pace”

Lastly, in this part, I want to touch on Asia as powerful catalysts leading the change as well as the charge.

They are extending platform management and thinking in some very evolutionary ways. My main focus was on one special company so far, Alibaba, which is going more and more head to head with Amazon. In the post I wrote, “Where the physical and virtual worlds are blurring, thanks to Alibaba”, you gain a sense of how transformative they are becoming. They are so focused on building the fundamental infrastructure for modern commerce, presently comprising of marketplaces, payment, logistics, cloud computing, and big data, collectively empowering businesses of all sizes to leverage the internet for their own digital transformation.

I read a report recently where there are about 450 providers offering a very fragmented market. But of course, there are some substantial “biggies” that are covering the consumer market. If you break down the platform market into manufacturing, smart cities, energy, mobility, health, supply chain, retail, public services, and many others, the use of IoT platforms are catching up with the consumer side. One real growth area is the platform startup where funding seems to be strong. Cisco investments are backing a number.

A useful report summarizing the recent situation is from IoT analytics.com.

So, yes we are in the middle of this Platform Revolution

I recently read this and it’s worthy to share it here as it does work really well for me on explaining platforms in a fairly concise way. It’s by ING, Office for Experience Design 2016 being under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The full set of their insights does a good job of discussing not just platforms an the network effect but also ties these back into ecosystem thinking – again a good read and reference.

“The role of the platform is the creation of these connections. To this end, the platform facilitates an accessible, scalable and efficient network of users, services, devices, and intermediaries to make the value exchanges happen. It is over this network that value is created, distributed, discovered and consumed. The complementary aspects of platform and network are key to any platform ecosystem business model.

Users of the platform may be consumers, producers or a combination of both at times. Whatever their role, they connect and interact with each other over the network using the facilities provided by the platform. Depending on the nature of the business model, participants may or may not be required to connect explicitly. Social networks often require explicit connections, whereas marketplaces do not but match buyers and sellers on a case by a case basis. Users of a personal finances platform may not connect at all but still benefit by being benchmarked against comparable users.

The platform consists of core technologies, shared tools and services, and rules and standards that enable producers to create and share at scale with sufficiently low costs of distribution and transaction. It provides a set of interfaces for the participants of the network to communicate, interact and interoperate within the ecosystem.

This definition sits well with the generally accepted notion of “platform” as a product or technology that allows complementary, modular components be built on top of it. Well-known cases are product platforms (like VW’s MQB), industry platforms (like Intel’s x86 architecture) and cloud computing platforms (like Amazon Web Services).

Platform ecosystems often use the latter kind of platform. The platform’s job is to support the network comparably efficiently. This is not an unimportant task, but it just does not differentiate ecosystems in their evolutionary battles to the same degree as the networks do”

The 9 types of software platforms that you need to know

In a great article by Platform Hunt, they identify and track the 9 types of software platforms.

Let me just quote a small part of this article:

“All platforms are not created equal. Google Search, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Marketplace, Android, Uber, Airbnb, Waze, WeWork, Twilio and even Bitcoin are all platforms. At the same time, these platforms are very different in how they create network effects, interactions they enable, approaches to solving “chicken and egg” problems (do you build the demand side first or the supply side?), openness levels, growth dynamics, subsidies, competitive strategies, and monetization methods.

Building a successful platform is more about making the right trade-offs than it is about the best technology. To understand these tradeoffs you must have a good grasp on what kind of platform you are building. We decided to help platform entrepreneurs understand these tradeoffs, find their role models and learn from numerous examples of other platforms.

We took a data-driven approach and analyzed 170+ platform businesses created by Internet giants, traditional companies and startups. Several iterations on the data produced nine distinct platform types that we introduce in this post:

1. Technology Platforms
2. Computing Platforms
3. Utility Platforms
4. Interaction Networks
5. Marketplaces
6. On-demand Service Platforms
7. Content Crowdsourcing Platforms
8. Data Harvesting Platforms
9. Content Distribution Platforms

Platform Hunt is an open initiative aimed to help entrepreneurs build successful platform businesses. The list of 170+ (and growing) platform examples is open and is stored in a public Trello board at data.platform-hunt.com.”

Summing up where platforms sit in our present and future thinking or at least where they should

The goal of this post was to introduce platforms as I see them and provide a growing source of references and to encourage those of you who are interested to explore this topic even further.

Each platform has unique characteristics with a central effect being the presence and need for building the network effect. The more users engaged, the more increasingly dynamic it gets, offering a self-reinforcing cycle of growth. Platforms as they are today, digital in nature, capture, transmit and monetize data and connect this into the physical world.

Many platforms are transactional ones (Uber, Google, eBay) but the ones that really hold my growing interest are innovation platforms, such that provide the technological building blocks for collaborators to come together and use this as the foundation to exchange and build increasing value as they form the innovation ecosystem, that expands our innovation potential in new ways.

It is building these complementary technologies, services, and products that need to appeal to the customer. They connect and then provide the potential for greater seamless customer experiences. The push is combining transactional platforms with innovation platforms to give a more integrated platform.

The magnitude and impact of platforms is way too important to ignore

To understand the implications of the magnitude of what the changing technology will bring and any decision to move towards a platform strategy needs a deep understanding of all the consequences, risks, and investment costs, let alone in the different resources this will require.

This requires organizations to know what is cutting edge, what works for them and then working through the aligning of often complex IT systems, seeking higher levels of machine learning and investing increasingly in the future around advanced artificial intelligence. It is about exploiting technology that is appropriate to their and your strategic needs.

Platform management has formidable tasks in orchestrating, designing and developing clear and sound governance systems, along with clearly significant organizational capital to have the best chance to succeed.

The key takeaway is the huge implication for managers, when making the strategic and operating decisions, fully recognize that technology is central, it changes everything on how you plan and organize yourself. It forms many of the decisions on a platform strategy, its design and eventual business success. It changes the organizational design, workflow, and how it has this increasing need to be orientated out into a connected world.

**Adapted from an original post for Hype

The post The Rise of Platform Business Models first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

As we start to think about the next year, (is it here already?) it is a time of reflection and some forward thinking. We do need to make some real changes.

From my standpoint, I am simply amazed at how the world seems to be spinning faster and faster. I am convinced my working days are shorter or the clock is moving faster or worse still, I am being “deflected” even more by everything “digital”.

I never seem to finish what I had intended to complete by the end of a day or week. I then get caught up in the spillover effect. Something always gets in the way, something has to give. So we make a resolution to change something to improve on this constant catch up state we find ourselves in. We all seem to be spinning faster but equally slowing down. Often our innovation activities face the same dilemma.

Innovation needs time, it needs evolution and resolution but also speeding up

Here are some thoughts for our future. The need for innovation results has sped up considerably. The belief that lean management principles will get the innovation out of the door quicker, has been one of those management adoptions that often trick us into believing we are achieving more than we actually are. Reality is, we have only been tackling part of the innovation process and the end results often remain the same – a slow process of innovation follows as lean hits organization reality, it gets caught up in internal roadblocks, countless discussions, and debates.

Certainly, in the majority of cases we have found nothing wrong at all with applying lean management, as it tends to lead to improvements in a final outcome, but does it actually speed up the process? I’m not sure it does. Leans slows down and becomes increasingly burdened by fat being layered on, further down the innovation execution process.

For me, I think the real need is in speeding up of the whole innovation process, approaching the whole innovation in a systematic way, as the only path to tread in the years ahead. We need to broaden out the whole process of rapid innovation application beyond the two current favorites of lean and design thinking. That requires it to be fully connected up and that means making the innovation process one that is fully digital, on a platform and accessible by all, those that can bring value and meaning to the process to deliver greater innovation outcomes. We need a greater innovation rapid prototype approach to the whole innovation process- test, learn, adapt, adjust, iterate, refine at speed and rapid scaling.

Designing the complete rapid innovation application process.

Digital technologies are beginning to have a real impact on the methods, approaches, and rates of our innovation outputs. Social technologies are giving us real-time understanding. We can connect with customers real-time. We can have meaningful dialogues and exchanges that build relationships and constant sharing of knowledge and insights.

We continually learn real time, and recognize at our cost if we do not adapt, that intuition and ‘gut feel’ or research set up and gathered weeks or months ago, is becoming so out of date before we can learn from it, and sometimes highly dangerous to follow or believe in. We live in a rapidly evolving world and we have to be highly adaptive and responsive in what we offer in products and services. To get to this “responsive” state we need to fully connect up, freely exchange and build adaptive systems that accelerate our pathway of discovery into tangible meaning, through better products and services. We need to change our thinking and design in the digital insight part more specifically within and along the innovation process.

Digital technology and transformation are changing the innovation ‘game’.

We have, in the past, tended to take a safer route to market, by trying to achieve well-defined problems, place these into process maps and worked along the timelines, often impervious to the market conditions changing before our eyes. We continue to couch our bets and gravitate to solutions that are as close to what we currently offer, and that just keeps reinforcing the incremental route regretfully.

Yet digital threatens this entire incremental pathway. Markets continue to have even greater uncertainty and we need to respond in very different ways. Competition is changing, markets are blurring and customers are becoming far more vocal. To respond we need to reconceive innovation into a constant and rapid learning approach.

The need to be highly iterative, full of experimentation, testing and adjusting lends itself to the minimal viable product approach, where we continually test assumptions, checking what we are thinking against the concept of value gained from the customer or market feedback.

Digital is also pushing us to shake off complacency since customers are increasingly further connected and interacting in new ways, we need to find paths to ‘plug into’ and join the conversation, to help shape that conversation and through these exchanges recognize how the brand and reputations become increasingly important in all things innovating.

Digital tools are changing how customers discover, evaluate, explore, make their purchases and use products and then how they react, share, interact and make their connections with our brands. The whole process is highly dynamic and reliant on the ‘network effect’, and the job of the innovator is to translate this and respond in fast, nimble, agile ways, to fulfill the needs and capitalize in responsive ways. This demands a radical redesign of the innovation process.

The need always is to “test to learn” and constantly adapt

• Without a doubt, it is finding and using more techniques and tools that help you make far greater rapid prototyping, testing, piloting and learning from these understandings and how they can be quickly translated back into the innovation process to improve on what you have known, into one of what you have become aware of. “Testing to learn” will become the new innovation mantra and the accepted innovation process; a dynamic, fluid and rapid experimenting that makes it a constant learning one.
• We are today, partly down this route of early learning, with the help of software that can capture ideas, offering a sound vehicle for communicating these and a place to gather and define solutions that can be taken forward. Yet we have to push the path of constant evolution and that will continue to come at increasing speed from technology to keep providing new knowledge so as you can constantly improve on your eventual value proposition but that is going to require an ever-increasing agile organization and adaptive system.
• We will need to find different ways to redesign the manufacturing process (more outsourcing) to have more adaptive points where we can intervene and change product design. We will need to find different ways to ramp up or dampen down finished goods, that require a more rapid change, and that is going to push ‘agile’ even further. The ability to balance “scale, speed, and scope” will become paramount in this.
• We will need to learn to focus on the seizing of emerging opportunities in quicker ways but also take a much tougher approach to divestment, so as to release resources from declining positions of advantage. The whole lifecycle thinking needs challenging and thinking through differently.
• We will need to push for “agile systems” where we can design new applications, find better communication and collaborative social technologies, so as to reduce delays of getting better access to the right information, connecting to the right people, so as to advance the process. We need to actively reduce the duplication of work or the search for the information needed, to complete the job. We need to focus much more on reducing innovation process cycle time for faster deployment
• We will also need to invest in more data-driven front ends to build a more sophisticated process of discovery. The whole concept of divergent experiments and convergent testing and validations will become the way to think along the innovation process as a re-looping process. This will require a critical mindset change from a linear one on how you set about it, in the design of the process, Then also on the use and application of the digital tools you deploy, to move this through this constant, ongoing iterative process. Nothing can remain ‘static,’ we need to make it ‘highly’ dynamic.

Rapid innovation matters and it will become even more central as digital innovation takes hold.

Rapid-iteration needs to replace the fixed product release date mentality. We are in a world, driven by digital that requires us to constantly adapt to new learning that is coming from real-time market feedback. The way we learn from this and our rapid innovation application process will be all about this continually testing new assumptions to improve our (final) product and service propositions.

I have said this often, I believe we need to rethink the innovation process, as we will need to transform the existing methods and make them increasingly digital and social, in real-time. We need to focus on the rates of innovation output from our learning and improvement in the eventual offering, as our constant bearing or benchmark. It is how we design this in a more comprehensive manner will be a real challenge going forward

I predict that innovation has some very pivotal years ahead of it, as we absorb and use more rapid innovation application processes. We should start thinking about how we can fully design and adopt a more digital innovation discovery to the execution process,  at increasing speed for final innovating outcomes.

A design that pursues a constant path of innovation understanding and evolution, that fits far more with these digital transformational times we are going through. We are entering the digital innovation era.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site and modified here.

The post Adopting a Rapid Digital Innovation Process first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

As we start to think about the next year, it is a time of reflection and some forward-thinking

From my standpoint, I am simply amazed at how the world seems to be spinning faster and faster. I am convinced my working days are shorter or the clock is moving faster. I never seem to finish what I had intended to complete by the end of a day or week. I get caught up in the spillover effect.

Something always gets in the way, something has to give. So we make a resolution to change something to improve on this constant catch up state we find ourselves in.

Innovation is just the same, it needs evolution and resolution.

Here are some thoughts for our future. The need for innovation results has sped up considerably. The belief that lean management principles will get the innovation out of the door quicker, has been one of those management adoptions that often trick us into believing we are achieving more than we actually are, but it is only been tackling part of the innovation process and the end results often remain the same – a slow process of innovation.

Certainly, in the majority of cases we have found nothing wrong at all with applying lean management, as it tends to lead to improvements in a final outcome, but does it actually speed up the process? I’m not sure it does.

For me, I think this speeding up of the whole innovation process is the only path to tread in the years ahead; we need to broaden out the whole process of rapid innovation application beyond the two current favorites of lean and design thinking.

Designing the complete rapid innovation application process.

Digital technologies are beginning to have a real impact on the methods, approaches, and rates of our innovation outputs. Social technologies are giving us real-time understanding. We continually learn, at our cost, that intuition and ‘gut feel’ or research set up and gathered weeks or months ago is becoming out of date before we can learn from it and sometimes highly dangerous to follow or believe in. They cannot be the basis for any justifications for high stake bets. We need to change our thinking and design in the digital insight part more specifically within and along the innovation process.

Digital technology and transformation are changing the innovation ‘game’.

We have, in the past, tended to take a safer route to market, by trying to achieve well-defined problems, place these into process maps and worked along the timelines, often impervious to the market conditions changing before our eyes. We continue to couch our bets and gravitate to solutions that are as close to what we currently offer, and that just keeps reinforcing the incremental route regretfully.

Yet digital threatens this entire incremental pathway. Markets continue to have even greater uncertainty and we need to respond in very different ways. Competition is changing, markets are blurring and customers are becoming far more vocal. To respond we need to reconceive innovation into a constant and rapid learning approach.

The need to be highly iterative, full of experimentation, testing, and adjusting lends itself to the minimal viable product approach, where we continually test assumptions, checking what we are thinking against the concept of value gained from the customer or market feedback.

Digital is also pushing us to shake off complacency since customers are increasingly further connected and interacting in new ways, we need to find paths to ‘plug into’ and join the conversation, to help shape that conversation and through these exchanges recognize how the brand and reputations become increasingly important in all things innovating.

Digital tools are changing how customers discover, evaluate, explore, make their purchases, and use products and then how they react, share, interact, and make their connections with our brands. The whole process is highly dynamic and reliant on the ‘network effect’, and the job of the innovator is to translate this and respond in fast, nimble, agile ways, to fulfill the needs and capitalize in responsive ways. This demands a radical redesign of the innovation process.

The need always is to “test to learn” and adapt

• Without a doubt, it is finding and using more techniques and tools that help you make far greater rapid prototyping, testing, piloting and learning from these understandings and how they can be quickly translated back into the innovation process to improve on what you have known, into one of what you have become aware of. “Testing to learn” will become the new innovation mantra and the accepted innovation process; a dynamic, fluid, and rapid experimenting that makes it a constant learning one.
• We are today, partly down this route of early learning, with the help of software that can capture ideas, offering a sound vehicle for communicating these and a place to gather and define solutions that can be taken forward. Yet we have to push the path of constant evolution and that will continue to come at increasing speed from technology to keep providing new knowledge so as you can constantly improve on your eventual value proposition but that is going to require an ever-increasing agile organization and adaptive system.
• We will need to find different ways to redesign the manufacturing process (more outsourcing) to have more adaptive points where we can intervene and change product design. We will need to find different ways to ramp up or dampen down finished goods and that is going to push ‘agile’ even further. The ability to balance “scale, speed, and scope” will become paramount in this.
• We will need to learn to focus on the seizing of emerging opportunities in quicker ways but also take a much tougher approach to divestment, so as to release resources from declining positions of advantage. The whole lifecycle thinking needs challenging and thinking through.
• We will need to push for “agile systems” where we can design new applications, find better communication and collaborative social technologies to reduce delays of getting the right information to the right people to advance the process and reduce the duplication of work or the search for the information needed to complete the job. We need to focus much more on reducing innovation process cycle time for faster deployment.
• We will also need to invest in more data-driven front ends to build a more sophisticated process of discovery. The whole concept of divergent experiments and convergent testing and validations will become the way to think along the innovation process as a re-looping process. This will require a critical mindset change from a linear one on how you set about it, in the design of the process and the use and application of the digital tools you deploy to move this through this constant, ongoing iterative process. Nothing can remain ‘static,’ we need to make it ‘highly’ dynamic.

Rapid innovation matters and it will become even more central as digital takes hold.

Rapid-iteration needs to replace the fixed product release date mentality. We are in a world, driven by digital that requires us to constantly adapt to new learning that is coming from real-time market feedback. The way we learn from this and our rapid innovation application process will be all about this continually testing new assumptions to improve our (final) product and service propositions.

This, I believe, requires a rethinking of the innovation process, as we will need to transform the existing methods and make them increasingly digital and social, in real-time. We need to focus on the rates of innovation output from our learning and improvement in the eventual offering, as our constant bearing. It is how we design this in a more comprehensive manner will be a real challenge in 2017.

I predict that innovation has some very pivotal year ahead of it, as we absorb and use more rapid innovation application processes, as the one to fully design and adopt as our new innovation discovery to the execution process. One that is a constant path of innovation understanding and evolution that fits far more with these digital transformational times we are going through.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Coping with Digital Transformation: Adopting a Rapid Innovation Process first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Often you hear the request made:

“can you give us a best practice snapshot; we would like to get a sense of where we are”.

The trouble with best practice is you are looking at someone else’s practices and these are highly individual, made up of different groups of methodologies, processes, rules, theories, values, and concepts. These together have provided that specific company a level of success that others – mostly competitors – begin to notice.

As the famous line in the film When Harry met Sally as Meg Ryan was faking it, went “I’ll have what she’s having”. No, there is no such thing as best practices, you can’t simply pick up and plug and play, as one organization’s initiative is never the same set of conditions or positioning that others can simply copy.

We desire the “one-size fits all” as a comfort blanket. Many consultants love this request, as they do not need to apply the real skills of discernment, subject matter expertise, and the difficult challenge of peeling away a client’s practice to understand how they can rebuild them to become unique, into a leading practice that cannot be copied.

Here does lie a true competitive component and so many organizations seek to apply someone else’s practice so they can end up as “same” practice.

Moving from “Best Practice” to “Next Practice”

The digital transformation that is underway becoming a very uncomfortable place. We are all presently learning a practice. The past best practices are now a very poor playbook for the future digital connected world. We need to ditch much of the endeavors that make up a legacy of past practice, and think forward, to which the term next practice becomes the learning spot.

No one can maintain the past, much of our systems are rooted in the 20^th century, in markets that were predictable and where supply and demand were simply managed to seek out the status quo.

We are facing such an unprecedented change and technology is re-writing the rule book in everything we are going to do. Many have argued it is a foundational shift and today we are struggling to articulate or codify the shifts. We seem to be moving from the world of complicated into the complex. It is hitting us in multiple ways, in scale, in speed, and across the whole organization. Technology and digital are changing the business dimensions significantly.

We are moving from “pre-connectivity” to “post-connectivity

I wrote a report for HYPE on the topic of Digital Transformation, attempting to find these emerging and next practices. It has been a very, very deep dive into this subject and it is full of different views, approaches, suggestions, and recommendations. In the report, I have attempted to ‘pick out’ those practices that take you towards a new thinking for digital transformation.

What I have not included in the report are these two wonderful paradigm shifts we need to take to grasp digital transformation.

The first contribution is from a short article I came across in my research written for information-age by Carl Bate, managing partner, digital strategy, and transformation, Atos

http://www.information-age.com/digital-transformation-are-you-living-and-breathing-next-practice-or-best-practice-123458572/

This emerging shift in leadership techniques, from best to next practice, from pre-connectivity to post-connectivity, is shown here.

The practices of ‘best’ on the left-hand side are the very practices that have fostered industrialization and led to global connectivity.

The irony is that these practices do not naturally foster external and connected views, which are essential to working in the connected world that the best practices have helped create.

The second contribution into thinking next practice comes from a really promising book by David L Rogers called “the Digital Transformation Playbook”, recently published in April 2016, and he is offering a superb list of changes to consider as we move from the Analog to the Digital Era.

The Author offers a view on how digital forces are reshaping five key domains of strategy—customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. These five domains describe the landscape of digital transformation for business today.

Many of the fundamental assumptions are outdated and he is suggesting we move from the Analog to Digital era, with his chapters in the book to work through these. This I think is such “next practice” thinking to get us in the digital era mindset.

David Rogers sums up the change we are all facing from digital transformation

“We live in what is commonly referred to as a digital age. An overlapping ecosystem of digital technologies —each one building on those before, and catalyzing those to come—is transforming not only our personal and communal lives but the dynamics of business for organizations of every size and in every industry.

Digital technologies are transforming not just one aspect of business management, but virtually every aspect. They are rewriting the rules of customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. Responding to this change requires not just a piecemeal approach, but a total integrated effort—a process of holistic digital transformation within the firm.”

The key is to look forward and recognize past best practices are just not relevant today. We need to look forward and seek out those “next practices” that are emerging.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

The post Forget Best Practice, It Is All About Next Practice first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

To attempt to keep up to date we all need to invest increasing time in acquiring a better understanding, a deeper knowledge of all the interconnected parts. Even if we are “time-starved” we simply must try and keep moving along in this understanding.

As part of my job, advising others on all things swirling around innovation, I invest significant time in researching, learning, and applying what I feel is important to others to understand or at least to raise their awareness.

The rich source of knowledge that comes from the consulting firms.

The emphasis has been on establishing a clear “thought leadership” approach to underpin the consulting expertise. As this is being published in more open ways, it is not just the client that is benefiting from this research or learning but the wider community.

Many of the bigger consulting companies highly value “thought leadership”. Many are presently actively trying to quantify the impact of this thought leadership. At the clients end in a recent survey of 400 CXO’s from www.sourceforconsulting.com found that half of these rarely read thought leadership so that automatically halves the size of the ‘market’.  But yet….

Yet, critically, of the remaining ‘active’ consumers, between 50% and 65% are surprisingly passing material on, reading more from the same firm, and so on. They are inclined to browse deeper into the website of the firm and extend their reading. But crucially, about a quarter contacted the firm concerned and, in many cases, bought services from them. It does seem thought leadership really can have a direct commercial impact. But not all thought leadership is equal.

The really important sniff test is “so what?”

One of the best sources of consulting news that focuses a fair amount on the “thought leadership” part comes from the company I mentioned above (sourceforconsulting.com). They suggest “thought leadership has come to dominate the marketing activities of consulting firms, and with good cause: our research with clients finds consistent evidence that good thought leadership matters to them, too. It helps them to do their job, to identify where world-class capability exists in consulting firms, and even to shortlist the firms for their projects. So “thought leadership” is becoming a highly valued part of the consulting equation.

As they state: given this is, or is becoming, the primary marketing mechanism for consulting firms, there is little point in producing thought leadership that leaves the reader thinking, “hmmm, interesting”, before tucking the report away in a drawer, never to see the light of day again”.

In their research in 2014, the impact of thought leadership clearly demonstrated that one personal recommendation is much more likely to drive engagement with thought leadership than one email from a faceless firm – and much more likely to be the start of a conversation.

Then we have the consistency test: Sourceforconsulting found firms dividing into three groups: the consistently good (a very small number), the consistently bad (a slightly larger number) and the consistently inconsistent (the biggest group by far). So it does seem thought leadership has some real mileage to go to get better, more consistent and in tune with client needs and the consulting practices expertise.

One consulting firm that I feel is doing a very good job – Deloitte’s US division.

According to the Chairman and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, Jim Moffatt:

“Deloitte is helping clients with their most complex challenges – how to grow globally; how to innovate; how to integrate technology and strategy; how to attract, develop and retain talent – so they can make bold decisions with confidence.” I’d buy that so far on their quality of thought leadership.

Deloitte has set up different thinking tanks. An exceptional one is Deloitte University Press who publish some really good original articles, reports, and periodicals that provide insights for businesses, the public sector, and NGOs. They break down their topics into these:

I thought I’d spend a little time raising your interest, curiosity and learning on this.

Within the topics that Deloitte’s focus on, there is clearly a reasonable level of crossover but let me outline some very useful thinking by briefly summarizing the ‘hot spots’ from my perspective, which may differ from your own. I only touch on some points of possible interest:

• Business Analytics covers Data Science and Analytics. It tackles artificial intelligence and cognitive analysis. It looks at connected learning and the network approach. One good link to explore is Digital Education 2.0: from content to connections.
• Emerging Technologies discusses Why strategy, not technology, drives digital transformation and also explores the value of smart devices, IoT, and amplified intelligence. It covers the topic of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and cloud solutions to scale quickly due to diminishing barriers occurring in our business world. Also trend sensing, ecosystems, experimentation and edge scaling are covered here, along with exponential organizations looking for disruption.
• Innovation offers articles on “Beyond design thinking”, written by Larry Keeley, co-founder of Doblin, designer of the ten types of innovation framework. Doblin is now part of Deloitte. They also discuss minimum viable transformation, and separately, a really interesting Editorial piece on scale and innovation.
• Risk and Security is a section that covers cybersecurity, global risks, choices of regulation and different governance models.
• Sustainability spends significant mileage on smart mobility for many options within businesses, industries or regions of the world. It offers different thinking on options and alternatives on this sustainability question.
• CFO focus is mostly about the transitions being undertaken in Executive transitions and offers thoughts around time, talent and relationships, making hard choices and letting go.
• Growth covers a fair amount (at present) on consumer trends, the growth, and options to be considered in their different focus industries.
• Performance is hunting for that “superior business performance”, exploring this in the supply chain, value webs, and platform management and in business relationships.
• Social Impact looks at health, aging, alternative options, scarcity as a podcast, ‘smart’ options, commuting, ride sharing, transport options.
• Finally Talent, here you have interesting topics like going rogue or connect passion with a profession, learning, leadership, engagement, simplification, and performance reinventing are nicely covered to stimulate our thinking.

In summary on Deloitte’s investment in thought leadership.

Deloitte offers a diverse range of topics, depth in introducing and discussing these on a website that is modern, attractive to engage and look around, and offers numerous different filter options and signs up options. Of course, we each have our own focal points but there is increasing value in appreciating different aspects of thought leadership in quality and depth of understanding.

Add the Deloitte consulting arms own web site that covers human capital, strategy, operations, and technology, it really delivers in my opinion, a highly professional impression and selection of good research in depth, ease of navigation to draw you in to find what you are looking for and that all important feeling they can add value to you as a client or researcher.

I rate Deloitte as one of the best in this thought leadership space, many of the other bigger consultancies are real laggards in this, which I feel is a mistake in their client/ reputation/marketing mix.

Thought leadership is really a very, very big, growing business.

Measuring its impact is not easy for the classic ROI yet if you can measure the material read and then passed on; you have achieved something highly significant. The screening for value has been pre-edited so that it’s relevance to the receiver is personally valued, sent by someone who really knows what concerns them – something even the most targeted mailings can’t achieve. If those people are in the position to buy, influence any consulting decision then that is worth millions but more importantly, allows the conversations to be on a mutual platform for deepening the discussions. Do you agree?

For me, it is not just the passing on but the number of yellow markers I add to remind myself in applying these. That is partly my litmus test of quality, interest and learning.

Thought leadership is important to demonstrate today so clients can help “size and fit” the thinking with their challenges.

** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site

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