Thinking Partner Ecosystems in design and delivery. There is a need to resolve immediate, mid-term, and long-term issues to show progressive thinking on how to grow collaboratively. How to collaborate to deliver impact, and create value when building your thinking in products, services, or new business models on any Partner Ecosystem design and thinking. One methodology stands out for me: the three-horizon framework

Partner ecosystems are highly valuable for delivering on these ambitions. Partner Ecosystems enable you to go beyond addressing immediate and surface-level issues to tackle deeper, systemic challenges and position clients at the forefront of collaborative and co-creative approaches.

In my view, this requires a progressive mindset that considers growth, impact, and value across various time horizons. This mindset lends itself really well to applying the three-horizon methodology.

The concept of three-horizon modelling, which considers short-term resolutions, mid-term growth, and long-term impact and value creation, is particularly relevant in this context.

Immediate Needs / Short-Term Resolutions (Horizon 1):

• Partner ecosystems should address immediate challenges and resolve pressing issues, such as supply chain disruptions, resource shortages, or regulatory changes and compliance.

• However, these short-term solutions should be designed with a broader vision in mind, laying the foundation for more sustainable and scalable approaches in the future.

• The searching for underlying root causes or systemic issues that need to be recognized and addressed later as partner ecosystems can develop short-term solutions that address the immediate problem and lay the foundation for more sustainable and long-term solutions.

• Collaborations within the ecosystem should prioritize knowledge sharing and data transparency, enabling a deeper understanding of the power of openly collaborating and sharing insights,

Mid-term Strategies / Growth (Horizon 2):

• Partner ecosystems should focus on mid-term strategies that enable growth, innovation, and competitive advantage. This involves co-creating new products, services, or business models that leverage the collective expertise and resources of the ecosystem partners.
• Building on the insights from short-term collaborations, partner ecosystems should drive growth and innovation by co-creating new products, services, or business models that significantly increase competitive advantage.
• By extracting and exploiting ecosystem partners’ collective expertise, resources, and diverse perspectives to anticipate and respond to evolving market trends, customer needs, and technological advancements more effectively.
• Mid-term strategies should also consider the potential impact on various stakeholders, including employees, communities, and the environment, ensuring responsible and sustainable growth.

Long-term Vision, Impact and New Value Creation (Horizon 3):

• Partner ecosystems should develop a long-term vision that transcends immediate commercial interests and addresses broader societal and environmental challenges, often contributing to underlying causes.

• Initiatives on this horizon should focus on broader areas of concern and contribution to solving, such as climate change mitigation, social equality, public health, and sustainable development, ultimately contributing to preserving human life and well-being. This involves collaborating with diverse stakeholders, such as academia, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and local communities, to co-create solutions that have a lasting positive impact.

• By co-creating solutions with a positive and lasting impact, partner ecosystems can position themselves as leaders in their respective industries and contribute to creating a better future for all.

Recognize we need to “cut through” different issues over different time horizons

• To truly “cut through the issues” and position clients ahead in their thinking, partner ecosystems must embrace a holistic and progressive approach that addresses immediate needs while simultaneously working towards mid-term strategies and a long-term vision. This requires open communication, trust, and a shared commitment to collaboration and co-creation among all partners.

• By fostering an ecosystem that values growth, impact, and value across different time horizons, organizations can address current challenges, shape the future of their industries, and contribute to a more sustainable and equitable world.

The value of the three-horizon approach

By adopting a three-horizon approach, partner ecosystems can simultaneously address immediate needs, drive growth and innovation, and create lasting impact and value. This progressive mindset requires a holistic understanding of the interconnectedness of challenges, a commitment to continuous learning and adaptation, and a shared sense of purpose among all ecosystem partners.

This approach recognizes that tackling systemic challenges requires a long-term perspective and a willingness to embrace complexity. It acknowledges that short-term solutions alone are insufficient and that true transformation necessitates a multi-faceted approach considering various time horizons and stakeholder needs.

The power of this Partner Ecosystem approach is that you recognize that in each time horizon, it considers growth, impact, and value across partner thinking and contributions. It breaks down complexity from the diversity of opinions and ideas. The recognition of cause, effect, and systemic issues catalyze the thinking. They provide this collaborative effect, bringing collective intelligence.

Your time to act is now- why not?

If you are curious to find out more, then let’s make the initial contact.

I have entered into a collaborative partnership with SIA Partners on Partner Ecosystems. Combining expertise, connections, methodologies, capabilities, and client work in advising, mentoring, and consulting is exciting; in offering some genuinely unique IP methodology in concept designs, research, and industry and institution connections, a compelling service offering is emerging. We believe the diversity within the proven application and combined strengths offer much.

The time to engage to discuss what this might mean to different businesses, institutions, and societies requires radically new thinking. Partner Ecosystems can solve complex issues, make a real difference in enhancing lives, and, in many cases, save lives through collaborative efforts.

Why not contact SIA Partners or myself to have an opening discussion? Where we, as your forward-thinking partner, are capable of helping you navigate the intricacies of today’s landscape and being your catalyst for the future in driving transformative change through greater collaboration and co-creation.  

Together, we can explore the challenges and possible scenarios that would help you move rapidly forward on your partner ecosystem journey, resolve your challenges and advance your future role in society and the values and impact of what you can offer.

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The Three Horizon Methodology is discussed extensively here

The post The value of applying the Three Horizons to Partner Ecosystem thinking. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Mapping any innovation journey can be complicated. There is a fairly detailed journey needed to be undertaken for mapping out your future direction of innovation.

Let’s get straight into it and the process and sequence needed within any innovation journey.

Firstly you have to work through the Strategic Needs– this needs to cover the type of approaches, the scope and intent, the assessments of the required impact for the end customer and organizational value, the understanding and outlines of this becoming organizational-wide in its integrated needs.

This approach does need a systematic approach, continuous up-dated toolboxes and visible metrics and tracking. Lastly, to build and quickly test, adopt and scale as knowledge and understanding are gained.

Second, there is the need to build reference points for future innovation activities, so duplication and learning can be built into understanding. Here it is vital to have gained the continued support and engagement of high-level participation, where we recommend the Leadership Alignment work Mat approach,

We need to ensure transparency for all stakeholders; the design evolves into a highly usable and integrated set of modular interlocking designs that allow for learning and flexibility to adapt to different needs, budget, and resource considerations. That collaborative mindset enables innovation to progress and eventually emerge from all the dialogues, exchanges, and contributions.

Then thirdly, we go into the process design stage shown.

This is the validating, evaluating and forecasting the future innovation state. This needs to be well planned out in a roadmap of initiatives, identifying and resolving the key components and establishing a framework of how this will be moved forward. You have the choices of any work going to be internally developed and alternatively having a consortium or network of collaborators. I would argue here is one of the most valuable contributions an experienced innovation facilitator can participate in.

The final stage is the implementation and momentum building stage. This includes a dedicated programme management need, approaching any roll-out through initiative testing, piloting and exploring steps to move towards the organizational design options that work from this validation. A growing need is to build supporting technology and structure requirements, provide consistent internal communication of progress and applying for the associated screening and approval.

Ending in a ‘living and dynamic’ innovation touch and value map that evolves in time

Finally, throughout this journey, a consistent focus on building the appropriate capabilities and competencies. Over time and experiences, you clarify and deepen your innovation proactive principles and make this a constant “living and dynamic” touch, reference and value map.

The level of mapping out your innovation pathway gives significant dividends where there is any collaborative environment. This provides identification and reference.

Happy to talk about innovating mapping some more if it interests you for applying to your organization’s needs.

The post Mapping Out Your Innovating Way Forward first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Innovation is not so easy. There are so many dependencies that you need to work through. The importance of recognizing innovation needs a systematic approach becomes clear when you begin to work through all the needs and issues to understand and translate. Here are some thoughts:

By exploring and modelling the mutual dependencies, you get to see how the existing and alternative future innovation system will behave as you begin to map out and recognize the different emphasis points that make up your innovation system.

You can begin to identify the more important dynamic ones that require a more dedicated focus and place more of your resources behind. In contrast, others can evolve at their own pace or simply improve as they are far more dependent on the dynamic ones than you realized initially. These can get simply get ‘pulled along’ and rise equally in their performance.

The real need is to pass through different stages of understanding what makes up a dynamic fitness innovation landscape.

There is a complementary set of forces; improving one often triggers improvement in another. What you have to guard against is possibly ignoring one might equally impact negatively on others. Recognizing dependencies is critical, and their triggering effect makes innovation evolution even more dynamic.

The combination effect of gaining a greater innovation fitness effect comes from managing this over four stages of innovation fitness towards the dynamic capabilities stage and fitness landscape outcomes.

The four stages within each part of this journey are briefly:

1. The goal within these stages is to identify the key dependencies relevant for improved innovation within your organization to discover
2. What are the mutual dependencies that will have a more dynamic impact on your innovation system, so you understand
3. What consequences come from this and how the changing environment will behave to consider the effect that then leads to
4. What recognition and implications this has to put in place an ongoing, evolving set of innovation dynamics that keep you fit to perform innovation sustains higher performance.

Again, I want to emphasise here that this is an evolving journey. Still, the critical recognition here is that for innovation to continue to be the driver of future growth and wealth, it clearly needs to have a greater understanding and recognition of its management potential within organizations.

This site I’ve made as a dedicated one to the innovation journey. Go to www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com if you are determined to push beyond today’s accepted, often ‘lagging’ performance from innovation activity and raise the innovation performance engine up within your organization’s efforts.

I believe we do have this critical need to have in place a growing clarity of the factors needed to consistently deliver a more ‘leading’ position of knowing what does actually have a real dynamic impact, both on an organizations innovation performance and the individual contributions that contribute towards the required strategic goals and objectives.

This, I feel, states any journey and how we plan this out to traverse across the terrain towards better innovation solutions that make up the dynamics of innovation and provide a ‘fitness’ solution that is unique to your needs.

Care to share and join the journey? We can discuss how I can join you on your own innovation journey and enable greater innovation fitness we all need to achieve. Innovation is a hard road to travel without the appropriate recognition of all it entails.

The post Fitness Landscape Dynamics for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Finding opportunities for Innovation and Growth is hard work. It is the value of having good, interactive, highly participative workshops that breaks much of those initial barriers to allow the hard work to begin more cohesively and collaboratively.

I believe any workshops design must meet your needs, push the thinking, and generate new returns in innovation understanding.

Boilerplate designs might look initially attractive, but knowing your needs, limitations, concerns, and ambitions can transform a workshop into one that lasts in the participant’s minds. They felt it was “clearly” designed for them.

Which end of the innovation spectrum do we need to go to?

• Workshops can mean different things to different people. Find ones that are 100% focused on engaging with and accelerating innovation. They need a couple of simple rules.
• Conducting ‘open’ dialogues or focused conversations should always have a sound context, so the contributions slowly build-out and hold real promise.
• Discoveries can start with different ‘fields of enquiry’ to achieve different connections and deepen our perspectives.

A great book, written by Bill Sharpe, explaining the Three Horizons often comes to mind. I wrote about it here “Three Horizons- fields of future, full of foresight.”

Then I find the Divergent / Convergent approach in thinking as highly valuable.

We need to always challenge ourselves, and taking you through a set of lenses of discovery that go from ‘divergent to convergent‘ is important.

You need both to explore and exploit the multiple possible solutions. Divergent thinking is the ability and opportunity to offer different, unique or variant ideas adherent to one theme. In contrast, convergent thinking is the (eventual) ability to find the ‘correct solution to the given problem.

You encourage and ideate many possible and impossible solutions and then use convergent thinking to move towards a realizable resolution or solution.

I use this ‘divergent and convergent’ structure for many of my workshops; it allows for broader engagement and involvement and that eventual drawing together from this process. Once or twice you have to be nimble on your feet to move from one to the other. Still, the discipline comes from timing these as shared spaces but giving each a clear discipline of dedicated time as you do need a very different mindset to think openly than begin to narrow the options down.

Creativity uses divergent thinking, which is solving problems with many possible solutions, as opposed to convergent thinking, which is solving problems.

The process of figuring out a concrete solution to any problem is called Convergent Thinking. Divergent thinking is the process of thinking that explores multiple possible solutions to generate creative ideas. It’s a straight forward process that focuses on figuring out the most effective answer to a problem.

“Divergent thinking” is the process of coming up with new ideas and possibilities. We are more in a creative and intuitive mindset. We explore lots of possibilities and stay more at this point on the conceptual abstractions.

We work this through, then we go more into  “Convergent thinking”, which is associated with analysis, judgment, and decision-making. We become more analytical, rational, sequential and objective. We begin to explore constraint-driven issues. It is the process of taking a lot of ideas and sorting them, evaluating them, analyzing the pros and cons, and making decisions, and exploring options that reveal, over time and discussion, emerging value.

These journeys are personal ones and team forming opportunities and form the backbone of good workshops.

 Understanding innovation requires a deep awareness- through a variety of tailored or purpose-designed workshops, dialogues or discovery trips, you can rapidly enhance your awareness and grasp of what ‘makes up’ innovation. 

Innovation is 100% of our focus, and we can, without question, advance your knowledge and insights across all of its complexities to be simplified through our workshops, dialogues, and discovery approaches.

Building the workshop is deliberately designed to help you think through many productive innovation opportunities. For example:

1. Understand the trends and drivers in your industry and explore alternative perspectives allows you to look at not just ‘best practice’ but leading and emerging practice.

2. Look constantly outside your organization to ‘see’ and collaborate from the values of applying open innovation principles and techniques

3. Fostering the culture and climate for Innovation to work inside your organization can create the environment you are looking for, but it takes a real understanding.

4. We all need to be aware of the way we earn our profit and where and why, and it becomes absolutely vital that our innovation activity fully aligns with the strategic needs

5. Complete differently in the value chain- what it gives from new Business Models and discovering new opportunities to energize your business in different ways

6. When we stop and look at customers in different ways to listen to their needs, we can discover new innovation opportunities and then how do you discover those unarticulated ones?

7. Expand into new markets and customers thoughtfully using the core within your business, exploring the adjacency spaces and probing those ‘white spaces’ needs careful consideration.

8. Develop new product, services, structures and processes needs debate and understanding

9. Pursue a range of degrees of novelty to generate a greater sense of innovation possibility

10. Being able to sustain your momentum and make innovation repeatable does need a broad identification and set of discussions to raise awareness and build those capabilities and capacities well.

These journeys are personal ones as well as a team forming opportunities.

 Understanding innovation requires a deep awareness- through a variety of tailored or purpose-designed workshops, dialogues or discovery trips, you can rapidly enhance your awareness and grasp of what ‘makes up’ innovation. 

Innovation is our 100% focus, and we can, without question, advance your knowledge and insights across all of its complexities to be simplified through our workshops, dialogues, and discovery approaches.

The post Designing Unique Workshops is hard work first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Finding opportunities for Innovation and Growth is hard work.

It is the value of having good, interactive, highly participative workshops that breaks much of those initial barriers to allow the hard work to begin more cohesively and collaboratively.

I believe any workshops design must meet your needs, push the thinking, and generate new returns in innovation understanding.

Boilerplate designs might look initially attractive, but knowing your needs, limitations, concerns, and ambitions can transform a workshop into one that lasts in the participant’s minds. They felt it was “clearly” designed for them.

Which end of the innovation spectrum do we need to go to?

• Workshops can mean different things to different people. Find ones that are 100% focused on engaging with and accelerating innovation. They need a couple of simple rules.
• Conducting ‘open’ dialogues or focused conversations should always have a sound context, so the contributions slowly build-out and hold real promise.
• Discoveries can start with different ‘fields of enquiry’ to achieve different connections and deepen our perspectives.

A great book, written by Bill Sharpe, explaining the Three Horizons often comes to mind. I wrote about it here “Three Horizons- fields of future, full of foresight.”

Then I find the Divergent / Convergent approach in thinking as highly valuable.

We need to always challenge ourselves, and taking you through a set of lenses of discovery that go from ‘divergent to convergent‘ is important.

You need both to explore and exploit the multiple possible solutions. Divergent thinking is the ability and opportunity to offer different, unique or variant ideas adherent to one theme. In contrast, convergent thinking is the (eventual) ability to find the ‘correct solution to the given problem.

You encourage and ideate many possible and impossible solutions and then use convergent thinking to move towards a realizable resolution or solution.

I use this ‘divergent and convergent’ structure for many of my workshops; it allows for broader engagement and involvement and that eventual drawing together from this process. Once or twice you have to be nimble on your feet to move from one to the other. Still, the discipline comes from timing these as shared spaces but giving each a clear discipline of dedicated time as you do need a very different mindset to think openly than begin to narrow the options down.

Creativity uses divergent thinking, which is solving problems with many possible solutions, as opposed to convergent thinking, which is solving problems.

The process of figuring out a concrete solution to any problem is called Convergent Thinking. Divergent thinking is the process of thinking that explores multiple possible solutions to generate creative ideas. It’s a straight forward process that focuses on figuring out the most effective answer to a problem.

“Divergent thinking” is the process of coming up with new ideas and possibilities. We are more in a creative and intuitive mindset. We explore lots of possibilities and stay more at this point on the conceptual abstractions.

We work this through, then we go more into  “Convergent thinking”, which is associated with analysis, judgment, and decision-making. We become more analytical, rational, sequential and objective. We begin to explore constraint-driven issues. It is the process of taking a lot of ideas and sorting them, evaluating them, analyzing the pros and cons, and making decisions, and exploring options that reveal, over time and discussion, emerging value.

These journeys are personal ones and team forming opportunities and form the backbone of good workshops.

 Understanding innovation requires a deep awareness- through a variety of tailored or purpose-designed workshops, dialogues or discovery trips, you can rapidly enhance your awareness and grasp of what ‘makes up’ innovation. 

Innovation is 100% of our focus, and we can, without question, advance your knowledge and insights across all of its complexities to be simplified through our workshops, dialogues, and discovery approaches.

Building the workshop is deliberately designed to help you think through many productive innovation opportunities. For example:

1. Understand the trends and drivers in your industry and explore alternative perspectives allows you to look at not just ‘best practice’ but leading and emerging practice.

2. Look constantly outside your organization to ‘see’ and collaborate from the values of applying open innovation principles and techniques

3. Fostering the culture and climate for Innovation to work inside your organization can create the environment you are looking for, but it takes a real understanding.

4. We all need to be aware of the way we earn our profit and where and why, and it becomes absolutely vital that our innovation activity fully aligns with the strategic needs

5. Complete differently in the value chain- what it gives from new Business Models and discovering new opportunities to energize your business in different ways

6. When we stop and look at customers in different ways to listen to their needs, we can discover new innovation opportunities and then how do you discover those unarticulated ones?

7. Expand into new markets and customers thoughtfully using the core within your business, exploring the adjacency spaces and probing those ‘white spaces’ needs careful consideration.

8. Develop new product, services, structures and processes needs debate and understanding

9. Pursue a range of degrees of novelty to generate a greater sense of innovation possibility

10. Being able to sustain your momentum and make innovation repeatable does need a broad identification and set of discussions to raise awareness and build those capabilities and capacities well.

These journeys are personal ones as well as a team forming opportunities.

 Understanding innovation requires a deep awareness- through a variety of tailored or purpose-designed workshops, dialogues or discovery trips, you can rapidly enhance your awareness and grasp of what ‘makes up’ innovation. 

Innovation is our 100% focus, and we can, without question, advance your knowledge and insights across all of its complexities to be simplified through our workshops, dialogues, and discovery approaches.

The post Designing unique innovation workshops is hard work first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

For innovation to be successful, the bottom line is the commitment and focus made for building the capabilities and competencies in innovation as people make us the real value and ARE the innovation success equation in my opinion,

So we must simply invest in them by focusing on the 3 C’s of developing peoples Capability, Competency and Capability.

As we set about to build and expand capabilities, we need to consider:

• How we can accelerate the uptake of innovation activity around the conditions provided through investing in them
• The need to trigger engagement and achieve growing attainment of knowledge acquisition and dispersion skills- essential for collaborative innovation
• Setting about building practices for greater synergies, relationships and networking conditions, for ongoing learning and absorptive capacity
• Extracting the right cultural, design, climate and environmental conditions,
• Placing increasing value on evolving the structures, processes and technology application
• Investing in lessons learnt through validation and resolutions to challenges to build an ongoing adaptive capacity.
• Recognizing people solve the critical bottlenecks and find solutions to overcome the constraints, they become increasingly motivated to find solutions and resolve gaps through their ability to be creative and inquisitive.
• The ongoing building of capabilities and competencies clearly leads to a more sustaining and determined innovation future.

Increasing capacity through coaching

There are many benefits from having an intense course of one-on-one coaching, irrespective of the level of responsibility you have for innovation within your organization.

It is very similar to management behavioural coaching to change perceptions, reorientate your thinking and approach, and open up to different thinking to build out your innovation understanding. Coaching yields a clear return, but the hard work lies with coaching, wanting to see the alternatives, and adding these into their daily actions and lives.

Increasingly your innovation knowledge through coaching, you can accelerate different insights that can form a vital part of any innovation comprehension that can reduce uncertainties, encourage experimentation, draw others towards a changing relationship of trust, and increase productivity and engagement.

Working with us you work through some fairly intensive and context-specific sessions, you quickly deepen personal knowledge and accelerate your critical business awareness and contribution.

Our innovation coaching approach provides ideal safe environments to enable innovation to quickly take hold and be translated.

Leaders, champions, sponsors and teams can gain from this coaching as well as the individual.

The Real Tipping Point in your understanding comes through ‘tailored’ Innovation Coaching where you see real benefits by discussing why and this, in my opinion, always is framed around content and context:

•Context matters a great deal

•Content needs to offer a total solution

•Success takes time & effort

•Finding a release of working time to focus on adding new value to the Business (hard-wiring) becomes essential to achieve this shift

I wrote this sometime back ““Learning the Mantra of Innovation Context. “It has value to read.

I take the approach in coaching innovation in multiple ways:

•Our approach is a mix of questioning, listening and re-skilling techniques and why this makes sense

•We recommend coaching is normally on a 1to1 basis is ideal, but this can be in team situations as well, although this has a different approach

•This coaching is always innovation-centric in everything we do in these 1on1 sessions

•Ownership lies with the person being coached, and we seek to transfer the necessary insight and knowledge quickly and effectively

•We facilitate the unscrambling of many random thoughts and provide the clarity of piecing the innovation puzzle all together

It is yours alone to finally assimilate and use this new knowledge gained; we will help you achieve your personal goals, provide a fresh dimension, and place innovation understanding into the context necessary.

Why not contact me to find out more about the many unique ways we approach innovation through coaching. Many of these become ‘deep dives’ to provide the necessary breakthroughs.

Then we have Peer-to-Peer Mentoring.

There are certainly growing benefits in using external advisors and innovation mentors.

Finding someone empathetic and experienced in business innovation is growing harder to avoid many typical, sometimes unseen ‘pitfalls’ on innovation.

Someone who has a depth gained from their own business experiences; working in large organizations, managing complexity, projects and starting up fresh initiatives or taking them over to turn them around.

Someone who can empathize with the managing of innovation; in learning and leading significant activities.

A mentor or advisor can certainly provide:

* The opportunity and environment for you to step back from the day-to-day detail to take fresh stock, to re-engage in the bigger picture of what innovation can provide. They can help you to refocus and re-energize innovation activities. They can be timely.

* They can be a great sounding board; they can prompt and stimulate your thinking as they listen. They can challenge it and help in arriving at new ideas towards solutions to your challenges. They can offer a series of directions and courses of actions to be considered.

* Growth or the needs for Renewal needed are often tough areas to manage and deliver through innovation activities. Timely advice can instil growing confidence, the chance to debate and explore alternatives, and explore emerging options. A mentoring approach can help in avoiding ‘classic’ mistakes made by others.

* Today, we need to leverage the connections within our networks more and more. Knowing who, where and why becomes increasingly valuable to avoid loss of time, energy and basic mistakes.

A mentor who has a wide network to tap into can seek the best advice to support assumptions or offer even more clarification.

Each mentoring or advisory engagement will be different

Discussing constantly changing business challenges often values external evaluation. Often you can forget one issue as another one ‘pops up into the crowded agenda.

A mentor can remind, prompt and connect issues and bring a fresh perspective to these. Having the opportunity to revisit the different complexities within innovation to have available a knowledge resource to share and reflect on constant changes since the last conversation or meeting can provide a catalyst to taking the appropriate action.

Having the opportunity to engage around different discussions about innovation can become a powerful motivational force for you to recalibrate, stay motivated, and have added incentives to think through these again.

In our view, an innovation advisor or mentor needs to offer:

A good innovation mentor or trusted advisor should offer a different perspective based on a combination of their own practical business experiences and a real depth of innovation understanding to provide a real return to your needs from innovation.

So to build the 3 C’s of Capabilities, Capacities and Competencies, we can follow a peoples equation and invest in coaching and mentoring to really accelerate these.

The post Building Capability and Capacity to Expand Capabilities for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

For innovation to be successful, the bottom line is the commitment and focus made for building the capabilities and competencies in innovation.

It is recognition that people make us the real value and ARE the innovation success equation in my opinion

So we must simply invest in them by focusing on the 3 C’s of developing people, these are Capabilities, Competency and Capability.

As we set about building and expanding capabilities, we need to consider:

• How we can accelerate the uptake of innovation activity around the conditions provided through investing in them
• The need to trigger engagement and achieve growing attainment of knowledge acquisition and dispersion skills- essential for collaborative innovation
• Setting about building practices for greater synergies, relationships and networking conditions, for ongoing learning and absorptive capacity
• Extracting the right cultural, design, climate and environmental conditions,
• Placing increasing value on evolving the structures, processes and technology application
• Investing in lessons learnt through validation and resolutions to challenges to build an ongoing adaptive capacity.
• Recognizing people solve the critical bottlenecks and find solutions to overcome the constraints, they become increasingly motivated to find solutions and resolve gaps through their ability to be creative and inquisitive.
• The ongoing building of capabilities and competencies clearly leads to a more sustaining and determined innovation future.

Increasing capacity through coaching

There are many benefits from having an intense course of one-on-one coaching, irrespective of the level of responsibility you have for innovation within your organization.

It is very similar to management behavioural coaching to change perceptions, reorientate your thinking and approach, and open up to different thinking to build out your innovation understanding. Coaching yields a clear return, but the hard work lies with coaching, wanting to see the alternatives, and adding these into their daily actions and lives.

Increasingly your innovation knowledge through coaching, you can accelerate different insights that can form a vital part of any innovation comprehension that can reduce uncertainties, encourage experimentation, draw others towards a changing relationship of trust, and increase productivity and engagement.

Working with us you work through some fairly intensive and context-specific sessions, you quickly deepen your personal knowledge and accelerate your critical business awareness and contribution.

Our innovation coaching approach provides ideal safe environments to enable innovation to quickly take hold and be translated.

Leaders, champions, sponsors and teams can gain from this coaching as well as the individual.

The Real Tipping Point in your understanding comes through ‘tailored’ Innovation Coaching where you see real benefits by discussing why and this, in my opinion, always is framed around content and context:

•Context matters a great deal

•Content needs to offer a total solution

•Success takes time & effort

•Finding a release of working time to focus on adding new value to the Business (hard-wiring) becomes essential to achieve this shift

I wrote this sometime back “Learning the Mantra of Innovation Context. It has value to read.

I take the approach to coaching innovation in multiple ways:

•Our approach is a mix of questioning, listening and re-skilling techniques asking always why does this make sense?

•We recommend coaching is normally on a 1to1 basis is ideal, but this can be in team situations as well, although this has a different approach

•This coaching is always innovation-centric in everything we do in these 1on1 sessions

•Ownership lies with the person being coached, and we seek to transfer the necessary insight and knowledge quickly and effectively

•We facilitate the unscrambling of many random thoughts and provide the clarity of piecing the innovation puzzle all together

It is yours alone to finally assimilate and use this new knowledge gained; we will help you achieve your personal goals, provide a fresh dimension, and place innovation understanding into the context necessary.

Why not contact me to find out more about the many unique ways we approach innovation through coaching. Many of these become ‘deep dives’ to provide the necessary breakthroughs.

Then we have Peer-to-Peer Mentoring.

There are certainly growing benefits in using external advisors and innovation mentors.

Finding someone empathetic and experienced in business innovation is growing harder to avoid many typical, sometimes unseen ‘pitfalls’ on innovation.

Someone who has a depth gained from their own business experiences; working in large organizations, managing complexity, projects and starting up fresh initiatives or taking them over to turn them around.

Someone who can empathize with the managing of innovation; in learning and leading significant activities.

A mentor or advisor can certainly provide:

* The opportunity and environment for you to step back from the day-to-day detail to take fresh stock, to re-engage in the bigger picture of what innovation can provide. They can help you to refocus and re-energize innovation activities. They can be timely.

* They can be a great sounding board; they can prompt and stimulate your thinking as they listen. They can challenge it and help in arriving at new ideas for solutions to your challenges. They can offer a series of directions and courses of action to be considered.

* Growth or the needs for Renewal needed are often tough areas to manage and deliver through innovation activities. Timely advice can instil growing confidence, the chance to debate and explore alternatives, and explore emerging options. A mentoring approach can help in avoiding ‘classic’ mistakes made by others.

* Today, we need to leverage the connections within our networks more and more. Knowing who, where and why becomes increasingly valuable to avoid loss of time, energy and basic mistakes.

A mentor who has a wide network to tap into can seek the best advice to support assumptions or offer even more clarification.

Each mentoring or advisory engagement will be different

Discussing constantly changing business challenges often values external evaluation. Often you can forget one issue as another one ‘pops up on the crowded agenda.

A mentor can remind, prompt and connect issues and bring a fresh perspective to these. Having the opportunity to revisit the different complexities within innovation to have available a knowledge resource to share and reflect on constant changes since the last conversation or meeting can provide a catalyst to taking the appropriate action.

Having the opportunity to engage in different discussions about innovation can become a powerful motivational force for you to recalibrate, stay motivated, and have added incentives to think through these again.

In our view, an innovation advisor or mentor needs to offer:

A good innovation mentor or trusted advisor should offer a different perspective based on a combination of their own practical business experiences and a real depth of innovation understanding to provide a real return to your needs from innovation.

So to build the 3 C’s of Capabilities, Capacities and Competencies, we can follow a people’s equation and invest in coaching and mentoring to really accelerate these.

The post Building competence and capacity to expand capabilities for innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

One of the toughest aspects within Innovation is making the Business Case. Much of the information is imperfect, the returns are often fuzzy and the doubters ready to block and deter new ideas from entering the commercialization process.

Knowing the issues, reducing often the ‘noise and distractions’ and making the professional case is what we need to do to attract commitment to the projects we are working upon.

How can you reduce down uncertainty? By ensuring the innovation business case takes a clear methodical approach to this and builds the arguments up in a sound structured way, that shows the areas of clear discussion and conclusion and reduces down the more ’emotive parts, so as to allow the ‘idea or concept’ to firm up and be seen for its real merits.

I would initially consider a fairly rigorous examination of all those that might be involved in the approval

Examination Mapping

So getting to know the health of anything usually requires some rigorous examination and the potential within the new innovation concept needs some evaluating.

It is no different for understanding your innovation fitness. We explore fitness in many ways and some of these approaches are unique, exciting and ‘dynamic’.

Any examination needs to follow a ‘routine’ methodical check up. In our view any initial innovation examination requires to explore four key ‘health’ indicators

1. The ‘fit for purpose‘ in strategic and innovation intent, definitions of success, the core values, sense of mission .
2. What are the expectations and the environment you chose to compete in3. What condition of ‘readiness’ in design, capabilities and capacity4. Have the critical processes for creating success been laid in or still have critical gaps

The outcome are your initial examination results? These form the ‘way forward’ in discussions, resolution and design.

So what is the approach taken?

A systematic model that you go through, that takes the business case through a structured step-by-step approach, enabling arguments based on facts to build and grow, to layout challenges and uncertainties, so everyone involved can see the same steps of approach in making the case.

The business evaluation obtained provides a consistency of approach to all cases irrespective across the organization. one to build a compelling comprehensive case-building technique that provides all stakeholders with their essential information through a clear transparent process.

This should include consideration for the following within the preparation and assessment:

• Offering different creativity tools to start the process, structuring project information on a comparable basis, clarifying often different definitions of success, providing suggested guidelines to individuals making the case, exploring different aspects of ‘getting ready’ to make the case and what that means and points to where to go to resolve these.
• Then we move into building the business case preparation, cost and benefit analysis, clarifying opportunity need, factor analysis, assessing stakeholder interests, clarifying uncertainties.
• The next group of factors to consider is making the clear assessments of competition, outlining the tactical moves to be considered market attractiveness, the ability to execute and what business model does the business case take to provide the fit and attract the commitment.
• Lastly to go back through the Business Case elements check-list to present a format that builds up and breaks down the case logically with the best available inputs, the unique selling proposition and the future resources needed to translate this case into a winning commercial prospect, with clear time lines and milestones and the projected financial and commercial value it would provide.

Moving an idea into a mainstream activity is one of the hardest aspects to achieve. Making the innovation business case a winning one is not down to luck, it is down to a systematic approach to building up the compelling case for this. Making the innovation case in a well-structured process gives greater opportunity for identification and realization.

This approach we take offers a comprehensive solution to the innovation business case and its methodology . To find out more contact me.

The post Building the Innovation Business Case first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

“Why do we always seem to have internal difficulties to self-disrupt?”

Now that is an interesting question. My quick and simple answer is to look at all the internal constraints you can see, or ask those around you what they can see as constraints for them. You will be surprised at all the constraints that stop the individual or the organization to make changes.

It is also being constrained when you look outside your organization and not recognizing the (perpetual) changes going on, often until it is too late or a fast, nimble entrepreneur has nipped in and set about building a new alternative to your existing offering that has, perhaps for some time shown signs of business model decay.

In most cases, organizations cannot self-disrupt, which is largely covered by this veritable list of constraints that I see. So I set about thinking what these could be, the bigger inhibitors and here is my rather ‘stark’ list, can you think of any more?

• Organizations often are far too close to existing markets to recognize that they are actually shifting; they ignore or miss the signs in many ways. The famous “death (of a good idea) by a thousand cuts or reviews as it winds itself slowly up to the top and across the flattened hierarchy that believes it is the guardian of the existing.
• They get so fixed on their own perceptions they don’t see change coming – often until it is too late and has lost that intuitive, entrepreneurial touch within the mix.
• They have invested too much, they hang on, often reducing prices, pushing more volume into the markets, and crank out even more “extras” to offset change. Legacy rules, extract the maximum and even extend it!
• Organizations are full of rigidities, rules, procedures, processes and personalities, and often no one is prepared to put their hand up to challenge the present paradigm.
• The reinforcing values are just plain tough to change, you need dynamite to shift these, and under that rubble, you have buried the very nuggets of alternatives that can radically alter thinking.
• The people within organizations love the comfort of the nest they have built around themselves, who wants to bail out and expose themselves? The status quo is very reassuring and comforting.
• The processes become overburdening, hard to change, far too complex to change without significant commitment and top management support. The approval processes are determined by purchasing officers and not the line managers and cost often prevails. Processes grind enthusiasm and experimentation down.
• Cultures are wonderful things to have and determine, that over time get to become the very reasons you become immobilized as you did not evolve constantly. You impact culture by a changing environment or altering the climate. Culture, Climate and the Environment go hand in hand. Mess with one, and the others go out of balance.
• The dark side of fixing your culture and focusing the organization on its purpose and value is they can stifle and constrain far more than promote and let free. As soon as you recognize your culture, it has moved on and evolved.
• Leadership is locked into the strategy, tied into compensation on delivery on the existing, not on the preferred, far more radical, risky alternatives and waits, instead of encouraging small experiments or pilots to learn from.
• Organizations, huge ones are less than nimble, they fail to adapt and respond quickly enough – they prefer to double-down’ with more of the same but faster, leaner and more determined than ever, missing the real dangers occurring under their noses or spend ages coordinating and discussing alternatives, mostly too late.
• Today, we are putting more and more of our organizations into boxes, they are becoming highly structured and specialized in maximising effectiveness and efficiency. Do we ever really ensure all the voices of expertise are in the same room, or do we simply make assumptions that we also really know what the expert knows.
• Markets are more global, faster, fiercer to compete in, often organizations are reluctant to explore and experiment with new business models, or push into adjacencies for fear. They can’t easily spin out or build alternatives as they fear they cannibalise their own business, allowing others to easily pick off valuable areas of new growth.
• Lastly, it does not matter how hard many organizations try, they lack real intelligence in market and customer needs, hence why the jobs-to-be-done is one essential component. They constantly under-invest in knowing the market and listening to their customers.

While all these stays in place, or not recognized as inhibitors to your own disruption capabilities, it is not surprising it is, in the end, those up and coming usurpers, the nimble and unencumbered, that thrive and begin to disrupt. You simply struggle when you leave it to late- your organization needs to resolve many of the above issues before it is ever capable of responding.

Have I missed many of the constraints you are placed under?. Do you think these are the “prime” inhibitors to why your organization seems incapable of self-disrupting?

The post Why do we have difficulties to self-disrupt? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Backcasting is a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified “future to the present”.

The fundamentals of the method were outlined by John. B. Robinson from the University of Waterloo in 1990. The fundamental question of backcasting asks: “if we want to attain a certain goal, what actions must be taken to get there?”

While forecasting involves predicting the future based on current trend analysis, backcasting approaches the challenge of discussing the future from the opposite direction; it is “a method in which the future desired conditions are envisioned, and steps are then defined to attain those conditions, rather than taking steps that are merely a continuation of present methods extrapolated into the future”

I have collected different views on “Backcasting”.

Those are from assorted references like Wikipedia, from past work on water and energy systems, Natural Step, from Innosight, discussed and promoted in Mark Johnson’s book “Lead for the Future” and a really recent one from Roxi Nicolussi and her Backcasting; Creating a Strategic Roadmap for the Future” or finally here, this one “All Roads Lead From The Future Back — A Vision and Spoke Model” by Aidan McCullen. I am looking to further explore the applications applied in water, energy and climate work.

So exploring backcasting as a method

Backcasting involves establishing the description of a very definite and particular future situation.

It then involves an imaginary moving backwards in time, step-by-step, in as many stages as are considered necessary, from the future to the present to reveal the mechanism through which that particular specified future could be attained from the present.

Backcasting is not concerned with predicting the future: The major distinguishing characteristic of backcasting analyses is the concern, not with likely energy futures, but with how desirable futures can be attained. Thus, it is explicitly normative, involving “working backwards” from a particular future end-point to the present to determine what policy measures would be required to reach that future.^[

The concept of “backcasting” is central to a strategic approach to sustainable development. It is a way of planning in which a successful outcome is imagined in the future, followed by the question: “what do we need to do today to reach that successful outcome?”

This is more effective than relying too much on forecasting, which tends to have the effect of presenting a more limited range of options, hence stifling creativity. More importantly, it projects the problems of today into the future.

In the context of sustainability, we can imagine an infinite number of scenarios for a sustainable society – and ‘backcasting from scenarios’ can be thought of as a jigsaw puzzle. We have a shared picture of where we want to go. We put the pieces together to get there.

However, getting large groups of people to agree on the desired future scenario is often all but impossible. Further, scenarios that are too specific may limit innovation and distract our minds from the innovative, creative solutions necessary for sustainable development.

Over the years, I have pursued the Three Horizons methodology. I am more comfortable with this and applied this approach to countless issues or future thinking as it feels more casting forward.

Backcasting offers a different approach nicely illustrated here.

Backcasting is further explained or applied.

So strategic sustainable development relies on ‘backcasting from sustainability principles’ – which are based on science and represent something we can all agree on: if these principles are violated, our global society is unsustainable.

To achieve a sustainable society, we know we have to not violate those principles – we don’t know exactly what that society will look like. Still, we can define success on a principle level.

In that way, backcasting from principles is more like chess – we don’t know exactly what success will look like, but we know the principles of checkmate – and we go about playing the game in a strategic way, always keeping that vision of future success in mind.

Natural systems are complex and non-linear, and while we understand more and more about how they behave on the principle level, we still cannot predict the weather. Social systems are far more complex. Still, we try to force these systems into models so we can ‘understand’ them and ‘predict’ how they will behave.

To do this, we are forced to make assumptions that often make the models reductionist, simplistic, and absurd. For example, in economic systems, the assumptions are that all people are ‘rational actors’ and that there is ‘perfect information’.

In large part, this is due to a tradition of compartmentalized disciplines in academia, where the social scientists have pushed a quantitative, value-neutral approach to study these systems in the misguided pursuit of establishing concrete laws similar to the laws of nature.

Even if we could predict the future, why would we want to? We have the power to create a better future.

If you backcast, future cast or apply the three horizons we do need to look out, into the future and try and bring it back to the present so we can move towards that desired state in a planned and methodical way.

More on backcasting in the future!!

The post The art of backcasting needs care in innovation activities first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.