We don’t make all the connections we should; we are too caught up in our little world, beating our existing drum, drowned out by its own noise, to step back and appreciate something new is really happening.

Recently I was investigating one strand of thought and then bingo! Something else leads to something else and the rest, so to speak, becomes history.

I’ve been reflecting on the new era of innovation and opening myself up to exploring alternatives, different thoughts, discussions and viewpoints.

Underlying this is a growing sense of my convictions, still partly forming, malleable but trying to drive certain ‘stakes’ into the ground to keep testing and improving on a hypothesis or two; that innovation and its management definitely have to change, and fast!

Of course the cloud figures in this as a whole new different way to orchestrate innovation. More on that at another time as I need to get into some more robust discussions with one or two others on this and expand on my own position a lot more.

My recent ‘bingo’ moment was as I was listening to a round-table discussion within GE and its lighting division with a panel of outside thinkers. Beth Comstock, Senior Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer was chairing the discussion, so it will always stay lively and stimulating and it did not disappoint on that. Her throwaway line at the end of the panel session was “Perhaps the headline here is the Big Data Mash-Up”.

Mash-up?  So am I missing a certain beat here? Or does it fit into my thinking

This started me off – Mash Ups, Ecosystems, Platforms, Big Data so how about the Big Mash-Up to help the necessary Smash up?

So off I go on one of my walkabouts, needing to plug into mash-ups a little more.

Business jargon is drawing more and more from our software and computer worlds. We have seen lean, agility, scrum and a host of others entering into our business practices in broader ways than the original application; the principles are being extended out.

So what is a mashup?

In web development, it uses content from more than one source to create a single new service, displayed in a single graphical interface. It works if it is fast, easy to integrate and has clear application interfaces that allow this to happen.

The original term of mashup, according to dear old Wikipedia, comes from British – West Indies slang, meaning to be intoxicated or a description for something or someone not functioning as intended.

I like this as it is the way many of our companies are reeling from all the disruptive changes swirling around them. Also within music, it is used when we remix and combine different aspects of music or song from one vocal track to another.

Thereby ‘mashing them’ together to create something new.

So why do I feel the innovation mashup is coming?

The main characteristics of a mashup are combination, visualization and aggregation so as to make ‘it’ (whatever it is) into something more useful, for personal or professional (or organizational) use.

We have a fair number of mash-ups going on already; in business, mash-ups to reveal actionable information, consumer mash-ups that can come through our browser interfaces (maps and info) and data mash-ups that provide new, more distinctive web services.

I’m not going to get into all the technical stuff on this, let alone the challenges but as you read about the taxonomy structures I start thinking innovation taxonomy. Don’t ask me why but I do.

Let’s smoke a little more here (I’m kidding) and think the Internet of Innovation

We have been digesting the internet of things, the internet of everybody so we need to push this a little more and ask “can a comprehensive vision of how this set of events around digital, data etc., alongside our physical needs, be translated into returns for a business wanting to engaged in greater, more valuable innovation”. These will come from platforms and connect everyone.

I hold one additional thought here “virtualizing the core business” and extending this beyond the core, to deliver innovation faster and better by orchestrating its parts to architect the future, based on responding to real needs and extending those existing deliverables that continue to provide value.

We need to manage innovation in more real-time, we need to dramatically improve the process, we need to pull together often the disparate knowledge, we need to inform better, we need to place what we are doing into a greater context and we need greater predictive decision-making.

What we have working the innovation activity is ripe for disruption. Innovation and its management is mostly operating with the 20th-century model.

The move towards digital-physical mashups

Darrell Rigby of Bains & Co., wrote a recent article in the September 2014 Harvard Business Review entitled the “digital-physical mashup”. You could imagine that got my attention in my walkabout.

His view is we are in a period of upheaval, do we see technologies as a threat or a new pathway. The growing reality is digital has the real potential to destroy our existing positions in existing markets.

We see this with digital platforms, those who lean on physical assets to attack the incumbents, take Airbnb for example in its mattress and B&B challenge to hotels or Kickstarter for alternative funding. Value creation is being rethought in totally different ways and business models and being staged on platforms.

Now, what happens when you combine digital and physical? As Darrell comments, there is a growing ‘weaving’ of digital and physical worlds to come tightly together. He cites Nike+ that is giving more than 30 million customers tracking, sharing of runs, workouts and setting fitness goals as the shoe has a built-in sensor and can work with your iPod to see data on time, distance, calories burned and can all be synced back, compared for charting your progress.

Here we see digital sport emerging, the ones not embracing technology will suddenly have their market position erode (and fast)

Then we come back to GE and Beth Comstock’s throwaway line “the big data mashup”

GE when they decide to move into something, tend to do it big time. They make “big bets on big things” according to their CEO and Chair Jeff Immelt. Big Data Analytics is one of these exploding for them. They have housed this under “Industrial Internet” and GE Predictivity TM for asset and operations optimization.

This will come from these analytic insights, through the use of sensors and other technologies in aviation, rail, oil & gas, power generation, wind, power distribution, healthcare, mining, water and process technologies, lighting and manufacturing from machines that are self-aware interacting with other machines and their human operators.

The collecting of data is impossible to manually analyse but if this can be translated into insights through analytics and big data management techniques, visualization and dashboards techniques, that can manage complex machines, save labour, downtime, direct resources and reduce costs it certainly opens up the thinking.

GE’s estimates could be as much as $20 billion in wasted deficiencies per year. Further opportunities will simply occur as this gets understood more as it gets rolled out.

Wikibon analysts believe the analytics market will be worth more than $47 billion by 2017 and Gartner reckons the rise of the Internet of Things will propel the global IT industry past the $3.8 trillion mark by the end of this year.

I can certainly see this as a valuable and seemingly ‘big bet’ sandbox to go and play in and GE is doing this on a strong execution platform. They already have scale, they are just scaling this more into a different business model and value propositions.

Big Data is coming of age, can we handle it?

Big Data is going to certainly drive IT spending in the next few years, yet it is its translation that promises to be within the value extracted, on how we interpret this through analytics, insights and what it then yields in improved productivity, new product designs and service offerings. It all signals a very healthy set of new innovation activities in new products, services and through new business model designs. The fusing of digital and physical for new opportunities is upon us.

So are we seeing the groundwork for a new industrial age where innovation will increasingly play even more of a part, one that needs us to focus on the data, our people and the whole architecture, where the ability to collaborate, exchange, network and decipher what is coming towards you in meaningful ways to turn insight into commercial opportunity seems beckoning?

So is our current innovation systems fit for purpose?

So real-time comes up against old-time innovation processes – something will have to give.

So there is a whole new world of possibilities, a mash-up of the cloud, data, analytics, digital/physical combinations, and real-time activities all crowding into the existing innovation pipeline, manually being cranked along. No, something needs to change. We need to really begin to dump these legacy systems for manual innovation and really step back here.

The BHAG for innovation is needed here
We need to take a very different perspective on the innovation process. We need a greater visual control across our organizations; we need to build a completely new end-to-end innovation management system on a platform approach.

We need to collect and aggregate more knowledge, information and data than ever, the complexity will simply grow as we connect more the digital and physical worlds and innovation is being expected from this fusion.

Fusing the parts, forming the bigger picture

We need to give up on ‘hard end of line’ measures and metrics (so anti-empathy) and go into analytics far more, for driving innovation along its new process constantly at its point of need (note that), embrace data, seek and design new deployment models like cloud and mobility, merge the architecture design of the innovation process onto a visualization platform, seek out those that can contribute both inside and outside the organization.

We need to orchestrate, and provide stunningly different user interfaces (beyond the Excel spreadsheet please) that can come into you wherever you are, tailored to the individual’s role within the innovation development process.

We need to make it highly adaptive, so at a particular time to make it flexible as an on-demand need, drag and drop knowledge into your space to make it hugely dynamic full of interactions, modular and capable of being extended within our more elastic (flexible) enterprises.

A future full of collaboration built on real-time and valuable insight

The future will be collaborative, full of mash-ups to make innovation happen. Innovation management needs to be in the driving seat of changing in response to the next revolution of digital and physical that is ushering in the next era of innovation.

Who is going to take up this grand challenge or is innovation just going to be lagging behind again as efficiency and effectiveness remain as the big brothers dominating the organization’s thinking ‘block’?

We do need a whooping big innovation mashup. By all indications, what is coming towards us we certainly will need some big innovation mashups.

The post Opening Ourselves Up to the Innovation Mashup first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Well some of us do, but sadly most tend to become risk-avoiding because of the environment they are in or have been associated with for long periods, where avoidance rubs off, it seeps into the soul.

Many enjoy being simply ‘passive’, avoiding anything that smacks of being ‘proactive’; it is safer to be ‘reactive’. Innovation and heaven can equally wait.

Putting it simply most people and organizations are just afraid to take risks and this fear takes over and drives their choices. Innovation is certainly something that suffers from this fear of risk.

Organizations miss critical opportunities, individuals fail to speak out and argue for a given change or innovative idea. We can simply stop growing, to want to become something more, we take the easy option, we avoid risk.

Reducing innovation to the lowest common denominator.

How often have you felt all the risk mitigation has been taken out of the innovation concept you have been working upon, for it to emerge as a pale reflection of the original idea? Often I can hear.

We need to be reminded that innovation is the act (risk-taking) of introducing something new (creativity) that adds potential value. By reducing the risk we often do not produce something better, just simply an alternative to what is already out there.

Minimise the risk, strive for certainty, avoid the awkward questions, and just keep the head down and toe the line.

Our organizations talk about the need for risk but don’t walk the risk path.
The understanding of risk will always have associated with some fear, discomfort and resistance and that can be an uncomfortable place to go.

The whole ‘act’ of letting go is never easy. It is the ability to manage the risk that reduces its fear. It is through experimentation we gain our best learning, we actually are forward learning as we are accelerating our knowledge.

Surely the more we attempt something different, proving or disproving it makes for exciting work, we become motivated, curious and want more, providing there is an encouraging environment to experiment and explore.

As I have suggested before “shaping ideas, taking risks, allowing experimentation, providing tolerance (of failure or debate), exploring the unknowns, all should be an integral part of innovation”.

Innovation is risk-taking so let’s embrace it, not just for the sake of taking risks where you can become addicted to the thrill but in constantly seeing the positive payoff within the risk, it needs to be appropriate and set against the ‘given’ situation and the learning in potential loss but recognizing the potential in gain.

The search is for meaningful contributions

There is so much negativity swirling around our organizations, a real detachment that is raising alarm bells.

Today’s workers are “neither empowered nor inspired to navigate the challenges faced by twenty-first-century organizations” according to a recent Deloitte report and commented upon here by Steve Denning .

As Steve observes in this article, as a result, creative, passionate workers simply don’t want to work in organizations with “clearly defined roles, organizational silos, and predictability”.

We are also in real need of better “inner working lives” and we need to look for ways to allow our people to become engaged, feeling part of something that allows for being more creative and passionate.

An environment offering somewhere that is seen as more productive, looking to build for future contribution and finding ways to be more collegial, working in teams on these experiments and explorations to learn and advance the innovation thinking. It allows us to grow from within.

We need to find ways for higher levels of risk tolerance. We push the ordinary back into the extraordinary and all of us what to be associated with those sorts of moments, those events that give meaning, purpose and pride to what we do. We need to allow risk in, so the risk can come and live with you.

Our leaders need to lead and guide.

When one hears that the leadership is in disagreement it tends to stop organizations from being adventurous until that issue or sticking point is resolved.

When it comes to innovation we do need to look to our management to manage option proliferation, resolve criteria disagreements, overcome stalled decisions, clarify rejections or discount new ideas before they are ‘fully’ formed

Those leaders assigned to lead innovation need to become more engaged, stop the limited participation and take the time innovation does require. Head nodding or ‘just’ talking innovation just does not cut it!

Commitment does matter, enormously, up and down the organization.
We need to recognize allowing risk is becoming the basis for a commitment to change

Wanting innovation requires the need to encourage the management of risk. Today we are in markets with slower growth, higher volatility and potential for disruption. Risk needs to be proactive, not reactive.

Equally the sentiment that we cannot disrupt our core needs some shifting in thinking as others are busy working on ways to do that to you at this very minute. Risk comes from not knowing.

We need to manage the ‘certainty of return’ by making the knowledge that comes from incremental steps of an experiment to validate an idea into a new innovation needs this consistently improving the business case.

That comes from steady ‘readiness-based decisions that prototypes or pilots put into the hands of the consumer or customer to explore around, will advance our knowledge, each time of the potential value and ‘seen’ worth of this concept over the existing ones in the market place.

Shifting our thinking can be gradual in learning

The effectiveness of risk assessments, capturing more and more external market data and attempting group prioritization certainly helps but in volatile markets this is not enough.

We need to develop those risk-mitigation steps to constantly increase confidence; we need to look more internally or with our partners at our capabilities to measure the controllable factors and events to keep innovation on track and we need to seek out individual stakeholders discussions to manage their unique concerns.

This is far more a shift to execution than relying on market attractiveness conditions alone.

Thinking about risk in those different and manageable ways to move forward and grow

We need to mitigate uncertainty by constantly reiterating known and unknown risks through these constant engagements in experimentation, prototyping, and piloting concepts. This needs to be in a more dynamic ‘management of the portfolio’ concept, from concept to commercialization process.

A place where risk-mitigation needs to be in-built all the way, to build knowledge as it ‘reveals’ itself. In innovation, mostly completely new to the world it is never apparent, you have to ‘tease ‘ it out on its value and contribution.

Everything simply cannot be available when you often just don’t know, you take small steps often to feel your way and build that knowledge up.

We need to understand our reach and ability to grasp

The ability to push on and find out, to stretch, to understand our reach and our grasp, does need some risk-taking but in thoughtful, measured steps.

Good innovation needs measured risk-taking and let’s learn the ways to allow our innovation to happen and get our passion and engagement back, flowing through the veins of our organizations.

We need a mantra of ‘build-test-feedback-revise’ iterations performing constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty. One that is far more agile, vibrant, dynamic, and flexible that applies a leaner, faster and more adaptive and risk-based approach.

The risk-contingency is about constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty.

We need to move forward with a degree of certainty but also perhaps a little fear.
How about this as an idea to explore?
How about approving some pilot projects and providing resources to have unfettered six-month periods with no rules and no reviews but at the end of this agreed period, ‘something’ has to be seen and tested by a customer.

Then you embed the learning and further scale
It encourages risk but in clear time frames and with a definitive result that advances knowledge and takes you closer to its future value.

You look for and encourage new perspectives. Is this that risky or is it perhaps allowing risk to be managed in new ways of learning?

We do need to rethink the management of risk for innovation.

New business growth is very different from business as usual but in all honesty, is there that much business as usual still around?

We do need to loosen up our thinking on risk when it comes to innovation, otherwise, our growth will remain limited, stuck in the fear of the unknowns?

The post Risk Is Understanding Your Scope of Reach Should Exceed Your Grasp. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Then you read in one of the latest McKinsey Quarterly’s articles about “the global company’s challenge” (http://tinyurl.com/8yvwsrv) suggesting many issues are needed to be faced within large global organizations, you get even more of a confirmation that all is not well for innovation.

Innovation’s future seems to need some wholesale changes to take place and those innovation leaders are facing multiple dilemmas and choices that can’t be ignored for much longer.

The issue is “are the leaders of these organizations up to the challenges?”
According to McKinsey, through a fairly extensive survey overall, global organizations are struggling to adapt in many areas. A year ago, McKinsey uncovered a “globalization penalty”: high-performing global companies consistently scored lower than more locally focused ones on several dimensions of organizational health.

For example, the former were less effective at establishing a shared vision, encouraging innovation, executing “on the ground,” and building relationships with governments and business partners.

Also another section of the CEB report states clearly that “the past decade of economic uncertainty made executive teams risk averse—focusing on incremental innovation to improve existing products and ensure more predictable, near-term revenue. In effect, these firms have been trading larger, higher-impact (and riskier) ideas for a greater number of smaller, more manageable (and less risky) ideas, causing incremental and next generation initiatives to dominate most innovation portfolios.  Incremental innovation still accounts for more than 80% of funded innovation initiatives”

The CEB report further goes on “With weakened ideation networks, stretched management, and ineffective global working relationships, many companies are hard-pressed to restock their innovation pipeline with breakthrough ideas. Without re-establishing the necessary organizational capabilities, companies are unlikely to shift their innovation portfolio fast enough to compete and win in new markets”.

It does offer the following glimmer of hope “while daunting, the challenges are not insurmountable” but let’s think more radically in resolving these barriers.

I think we should stop the innovation bus and re-evaluate where large organizations are really going.

In both reports they indicate fundamental underlying weaknesses that are not being fully addressed that seems to me is a major constraint on innovation. Unless those on the ever-moving faster wheel don’t pause and reflect they are just going to run harder and harder for diminishing returns and growing frustration, then they are facing the road to nowhere.

I think it is time to get off the existing tread mill and really begin to think through a major re-engineering of innovation.

Four tensions need addressing but differently for each organization

In many ways I like the McKinsey suggested four tensions they put forward as needing to be addressed in their article to be overcome; in managing strategy, people, costs, and risk on a global scale.

The importance of each of these four tensions will vary from company to company, depending on its particular operating model, history, and global footprint. My approach to these:

• Firstly manage within the global innovation team differently than today. We need to bring back strategic confidence and put a different stretch into the structure that builds on trust, on exchanging, on collaborating and building a deeper ,a  more globally spread experience level that is both dispersed, yet still globally orchestrated and one that is simply not imposed and driven centrally.

• Make people more the central asset to your accelerating innovation. Place more trust in them. Not by simply dumping more work upon them and asking them to fill in more forms for a central repository on their progress. Or equally demanding a constant feeding back, often in one-way conversations but in permitting the unleashing of the talent that does reside within and across organizations, so often buried, by giving it a higher level of trust and self-determination.

This would mean a much more focused coordinating platform that exchanges on mutual respect and value for each person’s contribution and value-generating contribution. Balancing local insight, adapting global brands and tailoring the final offering to tap into local opportunities needs a different approach than we are seeing today. Stop imposing, start listening and adapting and adjusting more to what is needed in local markets not ‘driven’ from some distant point of reference that needs significant compromise to meet different market demands.

• The huge advantage global organizations should have is simply being eroded more and more. Not just by the local more nimble competitor but more importantly by the way organizations seem to be structured in recent years. The advantage of shared infrastructures that large organizations are supposedly meant to have, does seems to me, all but eroded. You see the duplication in the system as often staggering.

The myths of shared services can be often illusionary, as well as more and more complexity is layered in the system to offset and counter potential risk. The growing cost of compliance, seeking global standards and coordinating these needs constant re-evaluation, cross-validation and assessment is pushing out products by turning them into just safe innovation. Often we are seeing even longer delivery-to-market time horizons with all these internal exchanges .  There is a real pressing need to release this layering-on effect and find new and different ways to speed up and become more adept and agile.

• Reducing risk often seems the first overriding priority in many large matured organizations. Take all the risk out of innovation and all you end up with the incremental approaches we are seeing today, all too often touted as innovation breakthroughs, what rubbish. Can this change, I think it must do, as real growth demands different solutions than what is being offered today, otherwise we will just simply ‘bounce along’ in slow growth across many industries.

How to manage a more diverse business portfolio in global organizations needs a different hedging policy to rebalance the risk premium with more of an adventurous exploration of innovation bets. Re-balancing infrastructures and deciding where to locate skills to support both a global business but with a greater diversity of innovation within local operations and regions is a tough challenge. Managing mind-sets and embedded thinking calls for a more radical overhaul if more breakthrough thinking is called for.

Each of these four tension points needs to be re-balanced, to be re-engineered. Innovation needs some radical re-thinking, a more ruthless review of what is working, what is holding it back.

To achieve this I feel a complete re-engineering approach to innovation is called for. Large organizations are strangling great innovation ideas at birth and slowly to death through a heavily compromised pipeline

These are being replaced with lacklustre concepts that are often boring their customers and compelling them to question the value and look more and more elsewhere, for solutions that fit their needs and pockets.

Otherwise, global scale will simply not matter if organizations can’t leverage the people on the ground, so as to link more specifically to the customer needs in different regions and markets and provide them with what they want.

The urgent need is to improve the organizations abilities to connect locally and adapt globally, not the other way around.

Yes, you can call that reverse re-engineering in the way you are managing innovation.

The post Establish a different global thinking for your innovation. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.