the future of innovation.

So where do ideas come from? The most popular one is the ‘voice of the customer’ yet this is one of the many ‘voices’ that need to be allowed to speak.

In this fuzzy front end of innovation where ideas are generated, there are many places we can ‘discover and listen’ to the voices that will provide concrete ideas and concepts. Let’s take the time to recognize these and ask you, the reader, do you have a systematic plan to capture all these voices?

The Voice of the Customer

The most talked-about place to find the ideas that are closer and relevant is the search for new ideas around the jobs needing to be done (jtbd). We get closer to these voices when we use a variety of techniques that give this voice its chance to speak.

Thinking about ecosystems certainly allows us to go out of our normal scope. The ability to tackle societal problems within an ecosystem can allow you to enter new markets that would have been impossible as an individual organization, as you did not have the collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional channels of delivery or utilize the infrastructure, building on others specialization.

We are all making greater connections within ourselves as we find and connect to our own “tribes” that all the different social platforms are providing. Crowdsourcing is another example that is offering huge potential to exploit as it can encourage much to forge, serve, and grow whole new communities from ‘simple’ beginning, building on real-time knowledge.

Our whole understanding of innovation is changing; there are numerous shifts occurring.

We are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into ones that are having a far more open stance. We are searching for more collaborative innovation (external orientation) combining external partners into more ‘collective thinking’.

This shift is offering us extra acceleration that is needed to improve our innovation performances from concept to market delivery.

Collaborative innovation is also leading us to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success, as nearly all novel ideas lay outside the organization’s domain of understanding.

As we increasingly include the customer and their needs within our understanding, these multiple collaborations and dialogues are building this better internal understanding.

Constructing an innovation conversation framework is never easy, we all come at it in different ways and those strategic conversations begin to fray at the edges and slip more into tactical the more we talk.

At this time of year for many, this is a potential chance gained (or lost) to influence the strategic plans and secure the commitment and funding towards your innovation activities for the coming year and beyond.

If you just diving into innovations, this sort of strategic conversation can change the goalposts, alter the perspective, and can give the innovation a more focused framing to build propositions around.

The framing of an innovation conversation framework

Anyone who has felt the ‘full force of the wind’ will know the feeling of how hard it is to keep on your feet, to stay determined to stay upright and true, to hold the course, whatever happens.

When you feel the force of change running through the organization, you tend to have that same sensation, to resist the force with all your energy. It is often really hard to let go, the environment was something you had become used to, you accepted and become resigned to its weaknesses and constantly exploited its possibilities or even possibly the other way round.

Firstly the sharks are circling

Change is all around us, it is accelerating not abating. You often hear of volatile trading conditions, a more complex market, and situations changing constantly and faster than ever. We do need to re-equip ourselves for constant disruption; we see a shift from the classic bell curve into more of a shark fin.

For a big majority of us, open innovation is now well established, it is part of our innovation furniture. The quest for many, today, is the search for richer engagements, possibilities, and exchanges. We need to move beyond the existing boundaries and go deeper into the collaborative space.

I regard collaboration as the active ingredient, the yeast that allows our ‘daily innovation bread’ to rise. Getting all the parties ‘gathered around’ puts increased vitality, energy, and commitment to working together on a project or idea.

As we learn to reach out and collaborate, exchanging perspectives and our different thoughts, it is in these interactions, in the many exchanges on-line and off-line that we move towards a real sense of achievement.

Allowing outside ideas through our doors

 

Innovation pathways – a way to map out your strategy needs adapting.

I found time to finally sit down and listen to the discussion that occurred between Haydn Shaughnessy and Colin Nelson some time back, on the Hype webinar “How Companies Address the Disruption Challenge” and I thoroughly enjoyed it

There I was penning my notes as they discussed between them their different views on how they saw this world where disruption is becoming part of our daily lives. I took a lot of ‘takeaways’ from it and I’d encourage you to find the time to listen to it. Also, it prompted me to register and download Haydn’s White Paper written for Hype entitled “How companies address the disruption challenge”

If disruption is a new force then pathways give you options to respond

You can’t escape the reality that having the right environment for innovation means different things to different people. What we should be all able to agree upon is that the environment for innovation houses many of the conditions that connect innovation in people’s minds. The environment needs to be connected to the vision around innovation, it needs to be translated for each of us to relate too.

The environment provides the right growing conditions for your organization to foster its unique environment to prosper and grow. Deny those growing conditions and any innovation initiative is going to struggle and eventually die from the lack of the essential feeding of its roots.

We are constantly nudged towards understanding the needs of customers through the jobs to be done approach. So why do we still seem to not achieve this ‘higher purpose’ of providing solutions to customers’ needs?

Predictable growth has run its course as we live in unpredictable times; we need a better way to identify ALL those unmet needs that our customers have. That need comes from knowing the “job which needs to be done”. We need to sharpshoot to hit clear targets, we need to become a lot more explicit in our knowledge of a customer’s unmet needs, and they need to make the connection of that need with our product (or service).

We need to map the jobs and generate desired outcome statements that are specific and of real interest to the customer, not our list of multiple ideas generated based on where we are or what we think we know. We need to build the hierarchy of customer needs.