This article did disturb me, it triggered a number of validations in my own mind. Once you get past the opening rant about the infamous Juicero juicer, that has now been used as an illustration of how investors funded something that automates something that you can do faster by hand.

The article opens up the doors to questioning much that is going on under the Silicon Valley umbrella. The juicer got funding of $120m from a number of blue-chip VC’s but it was not this that actually disturbs me, it was this “ant-innovation” tag the writer was attaching to (North) America.

The article goes deeper in questioning where we are in our innovation thinking. We do have a real innovation growth dilemma that we can’t lay at the door of Silicon Valley alone, it is part of the Western world’s current sickness. It has lost that ability to take a positive risk in so much, ‘kicking the can down the road’ for others to resolve, be these societal, educational, health, infrastructural or institutional reforming and so much more. All really important innovation opportunities.

Has the US become “profoundly anti-innovation” as stated?

The writer suggests

“At the root of the problem is the story we tell ourselves about innovation. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a lone genius disappears into a garage, preferably in Palo Alto, and emerges with an invention that changes the world. The engine of technological progress is the entrepreneur – the fast-moving, risk-loving, rule-breaking visionary in the mold of Steve Jobs.

This story has been so widely repeated as to become a cliche. It’s also inaccurate. Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs typically make terrible innovators. Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risks – something that, myth-making aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for”

I started to identify with the second paragraph of this. Real innovation is very expensive to produce and it is the appetite for risk that has been lost in America as it has been in Europe. That I strongly relate too as we have certainly lost that corporate ‘will’ to pursue much that can provide significant breakthroughs in products and new services, but is this because it is such a volatile, transforming time? Can we be bolder and more determined to differentiate ourselves or do we stay tucked into the pack, like a long distant runner, waiting for something (someone) to break away, hopefully, able to equally ‘kick in’ and stay in touch, still hopeful we will be in a position to win but mostly remain a fast follower only?

Are we committing suicide with a lack of innovation? Are we crushing real innovation?

Is it is suggested in the article, the USA is showing signs of a country committing economic suicide?” The writer’s observation: “Innovation drives economic growth. It boosts productivity, making it possible to create more wealth with less labor. When economies don’t innovate, the result is stagnation, inequality, and the whole horizon of hopelessness that has come to define the lives of most working people today”. 

I certainly can’t disagree with this, that Companies do need the breakthroughs to build their business but they do seem very reluctant to build this risk mentality in recent years. Innovation has been taking a back seat to shoring up our balance sheets, delivering increasing profits and shedding people and ‘unproductive’ assets that do not fit the business today. The longer-term has equally been put into the back seat, alongside innovation.

The sad loss of the real innovation risk investment?

Breakthrough innovation needs heavy investment, the writer reminds us:

“So where does the money come from? The government. As the economist, Mariana Mazzucato has shown, nearly every major innovation since the second world war has required a big push from the public sector, for an obvious reason: the public sector can afford to take risks that the private sector can’t.

Conventional wisdom says that market forces foster innovation. In fact, it’s the government’s insulation from market forces that has historically made it such a successful innovator. It doesn’t have to compete, and it’s not at the mercy of investors demanding a share of its profits. It’s also far more generous with the fruits of its scientific labor: no private company would ever be so foolish as to constantly give away innovations it has generated at enormous expense for free, but this is exactly what the government does. The dynamic should be familiar with the financial crisis: the taxpayer absorbs the risk, and the investor reaps the reward.

Again I feel uncomfortable and I would love to disagree with this but it is true in the majority of cases. Truly innovation breakthroughs have come through Government investments. When you look back or read it does seem true that most of the innovation breakthrough for transforming have their roots in publicly funded research. As the writer puts it (again):

The advances that created what we’ve come to call tech – the development of digital computing, the invention of the internet, the formation of Silicon Valley itself – were the result of sustained and substantial government investment. Even the iPhone, that celebrated emblem of capitalist creativity, wouldn’t exist without buckets of government cash. Its core technologies, from the touch-screen display to GPS to Siri, all trace their roots to publicly funded research”

Getting to the longer-term disturbing part – the decline is in ‘pure’ scientific R&D

Yet, and this is the really disturbing part for me, the truth lies in the declining investments that we see being made in research and development. Both Government’s and the Private Sector has been constantly reducing the research funding for years. Recently in a PwC Strategy & report “2016 Global Innovation 1000 Study”  it was reported that there was a 19.5% decline in allocated funds to products but it is being redistributed it seems into software and the digital transformation journey as the focal point of new investments. The truth is we actually need both for a better transforming future.

Here in Europe, we have seen steady declines in R&D investment. They are at worrying levels as we lose those that are the brightest as they go where the R&D investment seems healthy and for that, we need to look East my friend.  In both the US and Europe we are seeing falls in funding research as a percentage measure of the GDP, it is steadily declining. Science funding is in real decline and that does not auger well for the future prosperity of our societies.

Well, why are we at this point? it is a combination effect in real innovation decline.

It is this combination of Short-termism that businesses have become caught up in. Also, how VC’s are looking for bigger and bigger returns and earlier payouts, pushing to see an exit strategy more towards 3, rather than in the past of 5 years or even more. This adds to the pressure to grow quickly, spending more of those funds to scale, delaying often furthermore groundbreaking breakthroughs that build on the initial insight until the IPO or acquisition by others takes place.

None of these factors are actually helping stimulate real innovation growth, they are relying on geographical expansion or product extension. New companies are also getting insanely overvalued and basic research continues to suffer from this redirecting of funds across the broader spectrum of funding.

Then you have companies like Apple sitting on an absolute mountain of cash, presently over a quarter of a trillion dollars and many commentators constantly asking where is their next big innovation going to come? They have the means but maybe not the innovation desire anymore, it will come externally by acquisition and not internally it seems?

Over 1.2 trillion dollars of overseas cash is sitting outside the USA held by just twenty companies of the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Pfizer, GE, IBM, J&J, Cisco, Merck, Google, Exxon Mobile, P&G, and Citigroup. US companies hold more than $2.4 trillion in profits abroad for various reasons, all supposedly waiting for a tax law change to come back in. Will these be invested in innovation?

The writer of this Guardian article rightly stirs it up even further by asking about Wall Street extracting wealth by companies constantly busy in buybacks. They are paying out increasing dividends rather than invest in risk and their capacity to really grow, apart from picking up the acquisitions of all these insanely overpriced success stories, to keep being seen as “in the share price game” but also transforming, really? Can that change, will that change to wealth creating through innovation, job creation or new capital investments?

The West countries are certainly not growing their economies in new dynamic ways

We are struggling with really bad growth in most of the Western economies, we have seen a hollowing out of the middle class, we have seen real wages drop and wealth constantly heading ‘north’ to the ones already rich.

The writer finished his piece by asking “is capitalism eating itself alive?” I find that challenging, perhaps it is. The article is a disturbing piece for me because much of it is sadly true and that is the most uncomfortable part. We are not investing in real, breakthrough innovation, we are ‘burning’ our resources and money in ways that are leaving us increasingly devoid of a future where real sustaining growth lifts us all up, wealth is being unevenly distributed.

So are we committing just economic suicide or increasingly political suicide for those in power if we don’t change the dynamics of investment? Or is the entrepreneur that promising engine of our growth we all encourage, are they going to benefit broader groups of us all or just a selected few?

I am left wondering

I just sometimes wonder if we are all caught up in the success stories that are occurring but it is like the shop window we all stop and look into, we are simply gazing at what we ourselves are not able to achieve? Innovation can be so much different if we allow it to become part of all our lives. Yet it is not being allowed to become just that, part of our jobs, our way of thinking and evolving.

So, is innovation liberating us or keeping us caught up in a trap because we are investing our innovation dollar or euro in wrong ways or simply just hoarding them? It seems as science declines, technology gains but is the balance getting us all out of whack, delaying any promising future? Any thoughts?

Additional: My sparring partner on Innovation, Jeffrey Phillips, added this observation which I can only agree with: “The government does a lot of early ground breaking research but needs the private sector to turn it into usable products and services. Then other parts of the government create regulations and compliance issues that slow adoption of the new product”.

It seems commercialization is everybody’s problem.

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The post Are We Crushing Real Innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

HOCA International Consultants

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

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

Agility Innovation Specialists

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul4innovating

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

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

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

Innovation fitness dynamics

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

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

Innovation Ecosystems

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

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

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

Guide4innovating

Advocating the practice and understanding of innovation

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

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

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

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

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

In summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The edge is our new emerging adaptive core

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget the past reliance

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

So the edge will radically begin to transform the core

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

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

Thinking at the edge can be very transforming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can explore this more if you are interested?

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

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

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

We are pushing further away from the old core.

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

Let me explain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deloitte Centre for the Edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the edge can begin to transform the core

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are so many forces coming together that require this reworking. We are moving from diverging into one of converging, we are at a changeover point for innovation; let me explain each of the contributing factors but firstly, a brief overview.

The Merging Conditions and Forces

The very different political and economic conditions that will be arising in 2017, the continuing shifting social conditions, profound shifts we are undergoing in business and our own personal ones, makes it a world that is moving from being complicated to complex.

Any renewing does need innovation to become more central in our design but it will be managed differently far more collaboratory.

There is a lot of change occurring around our innovation abilities. There is the shift to more open-sourcing, the profound shifts that technology and digital transformation is having upon all our worlds is allowing a very different “connecting” innovation to come into play. We will see a significant acceleration of more innovation ecosystems, we are increasingly recognizing all the different collaborative tools increasingly at our disposal, we are exploring both platforms and forming ecosystems to radically alter the competitive edge previously seen to reside inside the single company.

A more opening out, forming more connections into customers, engaging them in appreciating their needs is leading us to recognize the value and power in the seamless customer experience. All of this comes from achieving a greater access and deepening the connections across networks. It is becoming the network economy

So I am exploring here each of these conditions that I believe are coming together for a really important transforming storm built around a new innovation management, increasingly making it the core to the future for growth. There is a time where each business has to become highly adaptive, agile, open and mutually dependent on others to deliver in this ‘connected’ world to exploit these conditions and explore the opportunities that will emerge.

Today I believe we are on the cusp of a new innovation era and it is a powerful set of enablers that are combining to bring us to this point. In my last post “We are entering a new innovation era in 2017” I outlined this briefly and spent some time looking back, recognizing many of the points of transformation that have been forming, well at least for me.

So what do I see that is combining to give us the true ability to transform the way we undertake innovation.

Political and Economic Conditions

The surprises of elections and referendums continue to rebound on us all. The new president-elect is looking to make the USA great again. Greatness comes from invention and innovation. “ Brexit means Brexit” and this will require a fundamental rethinking of the UK finding new solutions to their standing independently from the EU. The need to renew is calling for a new innovation momentum.

We have France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, and Italy in a state of flux as we go into the New Year. Each has to find a new model of moving away from austerity in 2017 and find ways to grow as the political tensions are drawing out more extremist views, innovation again is the means for this. The EU is facing a crisis that needs a very different approach to overcome the virtually stagnant growths in most of the 27 countries and the present digital recession that is holding it back in today’s connected world.

There is an increased call to foster innovation at Government level, the need to boost productivity and find different ways of competing on the global stage need to be found as there are this increasing need and demand for real growth and jobs.

The economies in many countries remain weak, the currencies are in a highly fragile state and our banking system has resisted wholesale change and any economic crisis cannot be met by flooding the markets with liquidity but this time around it needs to be on high levels of creativity, collaborations, and innovations. Will we address the EU or China’s Yuan Renminbi that have been ‘artificially’ propped up for long periods? Where will blockchain figure?

Innovation beckons, it is the pathway to begin to get us out of many unsustainable positions caused by political policy and disappointing economic management. Out of crisis, comes renewal and innovation responds to this need.

The Shifting Social conditions

We have seen an amazing transformation in how we socialize through the use of technology and the smartphone. The expectations continue to rise as technology pervades our world. We are more reliant on what it gives us, to undertake our business, social and day-to-day activities. We have more ability to monitor ourselves, our partners and friends and track daily events and be a ‘click or two’ away from our leaders to provide our opinions.

The social effect is influencing government, business, and whole communities. As we learn the value and power of these tools we become more fluid, more flexible and agile but equally more influenced. The whole network effect is changing us, it may be broadening our views or defining them and it is allowing for increased possibilities to influence and materially gain. Innovation will continue to drive this dynamic social condition and demand and expectancies will continue to increase as the connected social phenomenon is in the ascendancy.

Managing The Profound Deepening Shifts in Business

We are facing more complex challenges than ever before. Innovation is increasing becoming “innovation as a service”. Traditional borders are blurring, business sees more opportunities in merging those past traditional market conditions into new ones, built increasingly on the powerful effect of technology, digital transformation and tapping into the new network means of platforms and ecosystems, exploiting new technologies.

The Business Model seems to have a reduced shelf life, we are witnessing more disruption and transformation of existing formats. The usurper is in the ascendency and will be even more encouraged by the political need to renew, due to the increased funding to undertake this.

There grows a real need to change the enterprise innovation portfolio into ones that take a higher risk-taking position to regain dominating positions. It is the battle of the platforms and the ecosystem selection that will decide the winners and losers. To achieve a repositioning increasingly will require a greater reliance on a connecting into and having knowledge access outside the one business, it will need broader network collaboration

Our Personal Shifts and Growing Recognition of our Influence

We are all in need to personally relearn. Everyone is in need of finding new skills to play in this network economy. We recognize this being always connected and aware is offering increased personal gain. We are becoming far more need driven. The digital tools we have in our hands or at our finger tips are changing all our previous assumptions and attitudes.

Each of us is raising up in our expectations, pushing for answers to our positions, constantly forming alliances that are fluid and adaptive. We expect a more open governance or will dig until we find what impedes it and we are constantly questioning or joining forces to champion what each of us believes in.

Catering to this personal world is getting highly complex and shifts the power away from a few into the crowd. The source of our needs is increasingly coming out in different ways, often a venting of frustration and anger and this can be highly destabilizing. The power of the connected world is shifting to the consumer of ‘connecting’ knowledge and they are voting with their pockets or offering their voice of dissension if the solution does not meet their need. Each of us has a growing voice to influence and change others through our network and opinions, good or bad!

Moving from the complicated to complex

Innovation has to deliver in all these different forces to satisfy the different opportunities in far better, highly connected ways. This becomes a highly interwoven set of interconnected parts. No one party or organization has a complete map, they must learn to rely upon and collaborative with others.

The world is not a linear one anymore, no more predictable, it is becoming everywhere one that needs a non-linearity in approach to markets, ways to solve and solutions offered, it has to be agile and constantly adjusting. The system behavior is fluid, feedback loops are constantly surprising up to adapt in different responsive ways. We need to manage complexity daily and find a pathway through it and be ready to respond and react to the next hurdle immediately.

The feeling of being in (total) control is giving way, we are replacing that self-driven behavior to be increasingly reliant on others, working alongside you, to connect and combine together to find mutual solutions to the opportunities ‘out there’ at increasing “speed, scope and scale” – the mantra I hear increasingly. This needs collaborations and connections to deliver the type of innovation solution expected today – a seamless set of experiences that gives real connected value for the ultimate consumer, rendering what they have as obsolete or dated, as it only achieved one job and not address the multiple jobs that always surround the task on hand.

So What are the Critical Parts of the New Innovation Era?

The World of Collaborative Tools

The explosion of collaborative tools in recent years has certainly been transforming. The communication means, the choice of apps and software, the growing use of the cloud are allowing us to change. Yet for innovation, it has been the transforming effects applied to a very cumbersome innovation system that is undergoing a real force of change.

The adoption of Lean and Agile, of Design Thinking, of being encouraged to invest in rapid experimentation and build prototypes that can quickly advance understanding of customer need, design and how it will provide functionality in the marketplace is accelerating innovation. We are encouraging more innovation hacks, providing different designs of crowdsourcing for funding, ideas, and understanding.

We are designing a host of easy to use canvases or work mat’s to frame the problem or challenge and then go out and work through a whole customer validation journey, testing the hypotheses and learning to pivot constantly to give us a higher level of fluidity and understanding. This is becoming the accepted way to innovate and confirm the business opportunities.

We are establishing living labs, innovation centers of excellence and having increased access to a vast array of collaborative design tools. Technology is allowing us to build through 3D printing, we can synthesize and trial in faster ways through new design and portability. The power of computer graphics, modeling and simulation are moving at a real speed of advancement. We can rapidly design software to capture the knowledge we need and we can exploit the power of “apps” in quick and purposefully designed ways to do a specific job

There is a whole world of collaborative tools that are intent on speeding up the innovation process but we have not yet fully mastered these and built our complete toolkit. It needs a base.

Why platforms, ecosystems, and customer experiences become central in 2017

If we do recognize all the above forces are converging, then innovation does become central to what we do. Yet in a complex world, we need to learn how to collaborate and network among our peers and with our consumers. This needs technology, digital and designs that we are determining are based around platforms and ecosystems.

Platforms become our new operating base, often the connecting brand

This is the technology infrastructure where producers of knowledge can come together and create new value and equally enables the consumer to become plugged in, contribute and then influence and consumer the value. It is how the parties coalesce around the platform gives it its value as it is the place for interactions.

Platforms bring the knowledge exchange together, in its related architecture lies the ability to perform, reducing tensions, exploring opportunities in collaborative ways. As knowledge is shared and exchanged you have the greater potential to leverage the assets. Utilization of the resources becomes essential to coordinate.

The learning process of shifting from a pure linear pipeline thinking into one that recognizes the multiple options available in working on a platform as opportunities to exchange information that is relevant to the goal of the collaborators, it becomes the place for the exchange of goods, both tangible and intangible and finally an exchange of different currencies.

A good platform requires a high quality of liquidity in content, resources, data, the potential for dollar capture and knowledge flow. It is a place designed to scale, adapt and adjust and be easy to enter, engage and interact. It becomes a true exchange source based on technology design. Within any platform design you need your gatekeeping and rules; otherwise, it can quickly lose its value.

Ecosystems are needed to be formed

Today individual organization resources are simply not good enough to compete in what you own it is how, where and what you can access. It is the tapping into new or different skills, deep, specialized knowledge and those fresh perspectives to alter the thinking, changing the impossible into the possible, through these connections.

Ecosystems can provide this connectivity coalescing around a common purpose. Competition and Co-dependency are blurring, what were at one time a major competitor can become a partner to combine different parts of a puzzle to offer increased value to the consumer. It is all about challenging the business model constantly and searching for different possibilities that can provide a new competitive advantage, ecosystems can help in achieving these.

The combination effect provides for a greater value creation, it can deliver a far greater collective impact, it allows companies to have focus zones to explore. Ecosystems open up innovation potential; they can co-evolve if they are dynamic and mutually recognize the collaborative value.

Digital Transformation is Upon Us

To transform is hard at any time. Today we are grappling with digital transformation, changing, adapting and learning what new technologies can provide. This is stretching many organizations in their beliefs, challenging their existing operating systems and pushing the abilities to transform in ways that minimize disruption. The call is every company should become a “digital consumer company” where it can recognize the shifts taking place and take advantage of them, digitally.

There is a magnitude of the speed of change required. We need to think mobile, digital, cloud and social far more. We need to become increasingly comfortable in all the analytics and big data mining expected to yield new innovation opportunities. Digital transformation will keep pushing us to become even more efficient and effective in what we do but it will equally expect a high level of adroitness and innovation outcomes.

We really don’t know the end game, yet we do have to play the game. This is the game theory on speed, where we don’t know where it will all end up as it has some many unpredictable variables all coming into play. What we need to do, to start, is the need to keep believing and pushing in three places of real potential value on where we are positioned today.

Firstly achieving a greatly enhanced customer relationship, where they make greater contributions to the ideas of the future to meet their needs. Secondly, we need any digital transformation to provide this deeper streamlining of operational efficiencies and thirdly, to have in place the structure, system and approaches to handle new connected lines of business, different emerging business models all based far more on this digital connectivity and network potential it can provide.

It will be how you connect, translate the technology challenges into winning models and engage with the outside, this is where it will make or break you. As we think the value of technology and digital transformation, we need to recognize there is no the same, it will be different and offer the real potential to seek out completely new innovation opportunities. You will require a digitally connected fitness.

Seamless Customer Experiences are the Order of the Day

We have been poor at connecting all the touchpoints that customers engage into our organizations, to link them up and provide back more tailored experiences. Customers today expect seamless experiences, supported, maintained and enabled by complex ecosystems of products, services, business models, channels, information, and complementary products and services.

Customers aren’t interested or willing to acquire disparate products and services and integrate them. Increasingly customers prefer to acquire seamless experiences, and this expectation will dramatically change how companies innovate.

For decades, companies have organized around their own products or services. This needs a radical rethink. Rather than “a product produced by us” perhaps we should call the necessary outcome a “whole ecosystem” or “whole experience” as these will have this connected difference.

Now, the innovator must define the totality of the seamless experience and then determine which components or portions his or her company can provide, which of the components or solutions that other companies or partners will provide, and work to ensure that these disparate components, services, business models and information will work seamlessly for the customer.

Our Need in Building Our Own Portfolio of Innovation Ecosystems

We are recognizing in multiple ways that ‘innovation ecosystems’ are denoting a departure from an old reality and system of working into a new one. It is often requiring an underlying shift in organizations mainstream thinking from an existing to a new paradigm.

Innovation ecosystems have been ‘constrained’ to date in more geographic, economic, industrial or entrepreneurial terms, often part of economic policy. We have seen successful value in having innovative regions (Silicon Valley, Bangalore), successful ICT platforms (iPhone, Android) or in combining technology companies for establishing new industries (cloud computing) and entrepreneurs clustering together in centers deliberately built up and funded.

Innovation ecosystems are being established that fundamentally are challenging the way we are managing currently and in the future our innovation activities, setting about our innovating of “doing things” in very radically different and more connected ways.

These are threatening to dismantle the way innovation is being managed today, and due to this, we require a radical adjustment in our approaches to achieve a far more collaborative one built on innovation ecosystem thinking.

Purposeful Innovation Ecosystems through can liberate, accelerate and realize business options, that can have a radical effect on the organization. They can radically shift the core, they can tap into the edge of discovery. We need to recognize ecosystems accelerate learning for innovation and where collaborators will be ‘seeing’ increased value in what can be offered by combing resources, to sustain and grow their businesses.

Innovation ecosystems today seem to offer a more focused approach to the management of a more radical but highly collaborative form of innovation.To help a new dedicated site has been created here on:

https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com .

This is a dedicated blog posting site, for ecosystems, platforms and customer experiences, as it can help you understand and forge a new direction and momentum for innovation to travel, dedicated to the changes occurring.

In Summary

It is the powerful effects of different conditions, solutions and forces combining that will deliver the new innovation era in accelerate forms in 2017.

We have a perfect merging of conditions that will have a transforming storm effect on innovation based on the ones outlined here. They are converging rapidly so please be ready to clear that existing agenda of innovations within your present (very) linear pipeline and be prepared to rework the entire innovation space. It will be radical as the forces coming to bear are exactly that, disrupting forces and they will require an awful lot of management’s attention in 2017 to steer and manage.

What we will be seeing I am suggesting that the changes will be radical, as all the forces coming to bear are exactly that, disrupting forces. They will require an awful lot of management’s attention in 2017 to steer and manage for tapping into real growth that is not just expected but required.

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The post The Perfect Conditions for Entering A New Innovation Era in 2017 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I wrote this recently in a post entitled “Bringing New Innovation is Stretching the Mind“. It opened with this view:

“There is a profound shift taking place, relating to innovation. Increasingly we are seeing a growing dissatisfaction on the impact that innovation is having; in growth, in returns, in market and customer impact. There is a search for new solutions.

One of the implications is this growing recognition that innovation is rarely succeeding in isolation but it is growing on a more highly dependent type of complementary innovation, a collaborative network, working around this new emerging innovation to deliver a more connected, radical experience, requiring innovation ecosystem management.

This dramatic change we will all be undergoing will have a significant impact on each organization’s innovation management design as it will require new connected thinking, built upon a substantial network of collaborations and partnerships

I believe innovation has been in the need for change for some time and 2017 will be the transforming year.

I sense innovation will change dramatically in 2017 as we are coming very quickly to a refraction point in how it’s going to be managed. The underlying change is the contribution of technology and digital, enabling the opening up of our world of possibility, through ecosystems and platforms that provide the collaborative base for a new, complex, diverse set of connections.

This ‘connected world’ can deliver a new higher’ value set’ of innovation solutions, increasingly based more on understanding the customer’s demand for a seamless connected experience, through a greater set of contact points and the increasing levels of data and analytics gained from theses ongoing engagements

Innovation has for a long time been struggling to gain a new growth momentum for many.

For many years there have only been many disappointing incremental steps in how we innovate. Now innovation will require significant changes as the digital transformation momentum takes hold. This transforming will require a radical overhaul of the innovation management process as we will increasingly be operating in this different world of ecosystems and platforms.

Today I believe we are on the cusp of a new innovation era and it is a powerful set of enablers that are combining to bring us to this point. My next post will lay those out but before this but before we move forward we should look back, to reflect on the many aspects of change that all are part of the radical redesign that will be required.

I have argued consistently innovation required changing. I want to recap here before we move on

There have been many potential innovation change points I felt needing challenging over the last few years. Below I have shown links into previous posts of mine that are part of this innovation transforming journey we all need to undertake. They are here as prompters into our thinking about change.

Each of these is a link to the post itself. If you feel inclined take a dip, if not stay dry.

Bringing New Innovation Together Is Stretching the Mind, Posted on October 25, 2016

The New Innovation Need: Organizing within a Networks of Collaborators, Posted on October 3, 2016

Developing a new framework for risk and innovation. Posted on May 19, 2016

Establishing a new mentality for innovation Posted on April 28, 2016

The New Innovation Value Chain Perhaps?, Posted on September 25, 2015

Moving towards a new innovation service model, Posted on August 12, 2015

A new innovation perspective – change to fluidity, Posted on June 29, 2015

Where are the new feeding grounds of innovation? Posted on January 4, 2015

As new digital technology dawns for innovation. Posted on November 22, 2014

Redesigning the organizations middle for a new innovation shape., Posted on August 15, 2014

Seeking a new middle management’s innovation perspective. Posted on August 20, 2013

Reducing confusion, promoting diffusion of new knowledge in innovation. Posted on November 9, 2012

A new raison d’être for HRM through Innovation. Posted on July 30, 2012

Making the first crucial steps towards innovation renewal. Posted on September 21, 2011

What are the new paradigms in innovation? Posted on August 26, 2011

Impact investing for social good through new innovation- a growing momentum? Posted on July 27, 2011

Renewing Innovation through the Social Innovation Agenda. Posted on July 22, 2011

Learning to absorb new knowledge for innovation. Posted on July 12, 2011

The forming of new structures- the business ecosystem of innovation federations. Posted on July 5, 2011

The new extended innovation funnel. Posted on April 13, 2011

The beginning of a new era for innovation, truly global. Posted on February 13, 2011

Welcome to the brave new world of innovation ecosystems. Posted on February 12, 2011

Orchestrating the new dynamics of innovation fitness. Posted on February 7, 2011

The intervening years between the first “burst of 2011 / 12 and 2015 / 16 were collaborative ones. A short recap on these.

The period of 2012 to 2014 was a far from quiet time, it kept reinforcing my belief that innovation needed to change. It helped me make up the arguments towards a new way of thinking about innovation but through a collaborating relationship with Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation really advanced this thinking.

We initially concluded innovation required a common framework This has included “collaborative-innovation-reference-framework” (paper one) that argues for the establishment of  the-need-for-a-common-framework-model-for-innovation-management (paper two) and they developed this as a Collaborative Innovation Reference Framework. It can be found at http://cirf.pbworks.com and explores the necessary business architecture, provides a detailed innovation reference framework and examines the different innovation types through a unique lens.

Then we recognized a lack of an organizing around an integrated innovation framework, so we went into the second substantive collaboration was around the development of the Executive Innovation Work Mat with the “innovation-executive-work-mat-initial-whitepaper here. In a series of blog posts, articles and an initial Whitepaper, this fills a vital  and often “missing gap” in innovation. Often the leadership at the top of our organization fails to fully engage in innovation, it remains unclear of its pivotal role in drawing together the vision, mission, and goals of the organization and achieving a strong and clear alignment to the innovation activity that can deliver on these strategic intents. The use of this Executive Innovation Work Mat is designed to resolve this “gap”.

The third collaboration we had together was focusing on “the Interplay Surrounding Innovation” where through two whitepapers ( the-critical-interplay-among-innovation-business-models-and-change and why-innovators-need-a-new-change-paradigm)  and a series of blog posts we provided a focus on innovation that requires an interplay with business models and systemic change as essential in today’s more volatile and disruptive world. We argued that innovation almost always impacts three constituents: the customer, the competitors or markets they are in and the innovator themselves. These all have high levels of impact on business models and increasingly an end result of an innovation, regardless of its initial outcome and can become a business model innovation in themselves.

Our latest collaboration is presently around innovation ecosystems and all that it connects into for innovation

So we come to this our fourth substantive collaboration here. We are entering the world of innovation ecosystems where broader, more complex innovation challenges, through greater collaborations can be achieved. So this site is dedicated to building the arguments here on  https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com . We decided to ‘house’ this in a dedicated blog posting site as it can forge a new direction and momentum for innovation to travel, dedicated to the changes occurring.

So a new innovation era is upon us, do you recognize it or simply want to stay ignoring it?

2017 will be a defining year for innovation, well actually it will be a transforming one. Both Jeffrey and I believe innovation needs to enter a new era of prosperity and for me, that requires this recognition we are moving towards a new innovation model, one highly connected, and collaborative and this will come about in 2017 for most organizations to embrace.

The big change will come increasingly around the growing participation upon digital platforms and the being involved in multiple ecosystems of solution providers, all leveraging technology and highly digital. It’s transforming potential will be how it will increasingly connect into the customer needs in collaborative ways, to provide greater seamless experiences.

The ability to form new networks, to collaborate, to connect into others on common cause through technology working through platforms and ecosystems is going to revolutionize the way we think, and certainly manage innovation in the future.

Welcome to the new innovation era, coming your way in 2017.

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The post Why We Are Entering A New Innovation Era In 2017 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

How and where does innovation fit will clearly depend on this transforming effect. We are fairly clear that incremental innovation is just not cutting through to give the types of growth expected. There are many outside our existing organizations, standing impatiently at the gates, waiting to come in and take over with market breaking concepts through different business models .

We need to transform, be disrupted or certainly re-imagine and this is where knowing your ecosystem comes in.

Our existing organization needs to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical change. To meet different challenges, to be highly adaptive it needs to begin to organize around ecosystems to deliver on a vision that recognizes it has to be part of a greater collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected world.

Today larger organizations are having to face the stark truth.

Either they adapt or die. Technology offers them the transforming means but can they, as leaders, take their people with them? It needs bold leadership. The structure of our  business today cannot afford to try and stand alone, it needs to extend beyond its traditional supporting partners, it needs to learn to collaborate with  a whole new range of partners, even some previously competitors, to radically adapt to the different world we live in.

Yet  moving from the present position of offering specific products and services into a collaborating one, where they are part of an ecosystem of partners, that are ‘connecting  experience’ as against discrete products building upon the delivering of totally different value propositions for the ultimate consumer, is a highly daunting challenge. It ‘upends’ much, if not all, of how our business organizations have been organized around, mostly within themselves, it is needing radical change. It calls for bold management to instigate such a transformation.

Ecosystems that produce ultimately new business models often rest on a large capacity for agility, openness, and mutual dependency, sharing and appreciating the values amongst a peer group that all relate to this ‘need for change’ and buys into that collective vision outlined.

An ecosystem that is made up of a broad, diverse group of partners, who all value each other and where each can bring to a final set of solutions added value that has the combined potential to redefine new markets can be exciting and empowering. Ones that transforms current offerings within the participating organizations each contributing and working on a designated platform, pushing each other’s ‘edges’ of understanding, to radically alter the value proposition and deliver new customer experience. A tantalizing prospect, full of innovation

Network collaborators that work towards transforming current offerings within each of the participating organizations, each contributing their piece and working on a designated platform, pushing each other’s ‘edges’ of understanding, to radically alter the value proposition and deliver new customer experience.

Today we do have this  tantalizing prospect, full of innovation promise, well within our reach with today’s technology potential. We are living in a connected, constantly adapting, world where networks and relationships are the essential wiring connections we all need to construct.

Adapting to collaborating never fully in control can be unnerving.

In the past, we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process, they dictated the value chain and determined the end result they felt was the right one, not anymore.

Today you can argue differently, why what you see as needed is not the best managed alone, it needs a collaborative effort, as the final arbitrator is the consumer and they have increasingly demanding needs.  As any idea or concept evolves the more you ‘flesh this out’, it changes by this fresh input, energy, and understanding but it needs greater engagement and collaboration to meet these increased customer experience demands.

The Status Quo is history

The promise needs to be clear, it allows for far more breakthrough innovation, greater challenging of the existing status quo to gain that substantial competitive advantage but it will constantly take organizations out of their existing comfort zones. It needs a very different level of focused leadership that see’s the real value of a connected future and is willing to drive through the changes this will take and the risks it can mean. The status quo offers no hiding place.

Setting about changing any status quo is tough, seeing something totally different, in a larger context and in a more sharing partnership calls for radical shifts in thinking. We have to develop those “sense and respond” capabilities, build a greater capacity to “read and react” far more, and then we need to “learn and leverage” what this all means in new potential by placing this into a context that has greater value than the existing ways.

The end result we are needing to deliver is increasingly calling for constructing innovating solutions in distinctly different highly connected ways, that are built from contributions from a broader ecosystem of vested parties, into solutions that offer really different, radical new customer experiences they really can value and meets their needs.

If we think ecosystems, we need to think differently.

Think carefully through any move to join innovation ecosystems, they do have potentially a high, immensely attractive return if managed well, and highly valuable to the participants; yet they are nearly always disruptive to the existing markets and require immense focus and resourcing to make a transformation. Yet the prize can be a sustaining competitive position unable to be matched due to this ecosystem lock-in of vested parties

I certainly believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery. Platforms, strategic partnerships, new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and ecosystems are the organizing environment to enact these.

Innovation ecosystems are clearly not for everyone but this type of innovation thinking around ecosystems and platform thinking will be a growing source of disruption across many, if not all, of our industries as well as the organizing means to tackle those complex societal problems needing radical solutions.

Welcome to the transforming world of Innovation Ecosystems

To this end, a new dedicated site discussing ecosystems, platforms and our need in forming seamless customer experiences has been created in a further collaboration with Jeffrey Phillips. The collaborating purpose is described here in this opening post that “innovation is not working anymore” and then Jeffrey picks up on the rising expectations of customers in “using ecosystems to build seamless experiences”  A further post on extending the seamless experience thinking  of “widen the aperture, narrow the focus” has just been published also.

We are at the early stages of discussing the changes coming our ‘innovating way’ on this new site. Why not come and join us as we travel this journey. A new innovation era is at hand and we all have the wish to understand it. Innovation ecosystems become essential.

START HERE:

https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com/

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The post The New Innovation Need: Organizing within a Networks of Collaborators first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Part Three of the Cognitive Traps we find ourselves in. Go here for Part One and Part Two

I’ve always valued one terrific observation of Professor Clayton Christensen (of many thoughts) where he talks of the core theories of innovation. One small part:
He states “theory helps to block out the noise and to amplify the signal”

So I looked back at a theory to go forward to reduce our cognitive traps

If we link back into Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovation for much, it is not a bad place to go. He firstly offers us his five stages of adoption or the decision stages of the innovation-process of Knowledge, Persuasion, Decision, Implementation and Confirmation.
Within this five stage approach he raises the issue of cognitive dissonance, where people do have the (eventual) motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of these dissonant elements

Rogers also teaches us that knowledge acquisition, risk evaluation, value acceptance, social/economic/political constraints, adaptation to specific situations, time, money, and the expertise of change agents all influence the adoption of an innovation.  We need to bring these far more into our thinking so they can, over time, alter our cognitive biases to allow for ‘greater’ innovation.

In his work it is suggested we must encourage more comparisons that allow us to make greater connection, attempt to understand the innovation-decision (thinking through) process, encourage all around us changing attitudes, different behaviours and supporting structures and finally mitigate the risk and consequences when we push for adoption.

Isn’t there within all these connections a cognitive resolution pathway?
The more we share, the more we learn. The more we participate in open communities the more we can gain. The more we spend time in seeking new knowledge the more we see fresh alternatives.

Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations can be a more than useful frame for our learning strategies for gaining adoption that we are presently struggling with. In our board rooms the cognitive bias is partly because much of the thinking is based on their past experiences, often gained in different times and circumstances.

They are often more uncertain than you are, due to these increased complexities and volatiles, feeling less equipped to deal with them, so our role is to increasingly bridge these anxieties.

The challenge we have as innovators is to convince those within the boardrooms that there are new tools, new ways, new approaches that do not place the core business at more risk but can provide the foundation for experimentation, for exploring in new ways. If there is no pushing of our thinking and staying within our comfort zones, well it leaves us at greater risk.

So we need to have a clear approach to allow this wanting to experiment but for it to occur in ‘concurrence’ and support by those that are around us.

We need an adoption process to take into the boardrooms

If we agree still with Everett Rogers characteristics of innovation then perhaps we can start here for raising change in our board rooms more often.

To overcome these cognitive traps spoken off by Henry Chesbrough and others, then we do need a framework to unify around and use. We need a thinking through process to work through to reduce these cognitive traps. One that engages others in this agreed structure.

I think we have a terrific one offered up by Everett Rogers to tackle cognitive traps.
To get anyone out of their own thinking trap we need to associate it to what would be valued. We can offer an uniformed path based on Everett Rogers five steps principle

• What we must always offer in any conversation is a clear relative advantage to what is presently available, so we can gain permission and set about to explore better alternatives, to clarify this and gain general acceptance.

• If we can offer compatibility with our own and other people’s existing values, and explore a migration path from their past experiences we might get more space to experiment. We need to draw others in and so we have to align ourselves to their experiences to frame it to their thinking bias. This becomes a job-to-be-done on unearthing unmet needs or the needs that can be improved upon.

• The new tools, methods and techniques can certainly help us to explain complexity to reduce the perceived difficulties of adopting new practices. The whole gambit of gaming, the canvas techniques, visual mapping, design thinking all help considerably here.

• We then can offer new ways for trialability to experiment in safe and limited risk ways. Lay out a clear path of experimentation and result milestones to manage expectancies and gain increasing support commitment. Steve Blank’s contention of “getting out of the building” and his customer development process offers one of many ways to learn, pivot and progress in bite-sized steps.

• Finally, we can provide observability, so others can see the results we can make progress. By keeping this open, it can be clearly challenged and blocked in many ways but openness and transparency does eventually reduce resistance. If we can clarify change and our progress in learning we give others understanding. It is when we fail to communicate what they need to hear, we are more likely to be blocked or our project cancelled. We need to ‘demonstrate’ progress and show its value.

Everett Rogers five steps might offer up a possible pathway to unlock much within innovation and reduce our cognitive biases we all have that traps us often not to move forward.

We need to break free of our personal and collective cognitive traps.
To innovate differently, we need to open our thinking to as much of the diversity that is going on all around us as possible. We need to unlock innovation in new, imaginative ways.

The more we open our minds, our organizations and allow new tools, new thinking in concepts, experiences and ideas, then the more we permeate and change existing beliefs. We need to start looking around us and see the multiple ways we can get out of our traps and biases in thinking.

Our rationale and reasoning change progressively as we expose ourselves to new experiences and new knowledge, then innovation can surely follow.  I think we do ‘play’ into to many innovation bunkers.

We can’t ignore the cognitive traps all around us but if we become more conscious of them I do believe with constant practice we can easily  avoid many of them with the right mind frame, the right approach and the awareness of what others are seeking within the collective frame we need to work through.

Avoiding the cognitive traps  needs consciously working upon in discipline and resolution.

Cognitive traps are not good for any innovation, especially transformational work. They are vital to understand if we are reliant on others. We can work far more consciously at surfacing differences but within a clear, open and transparent approach.

A cognitive bias is a mental error that is often consistent and predictable. We can often anticipate them and be ready to offset them, in ways that ‘appeal’ to those with these biases.

So by making innovation a process where we work on reducing all those places of variance where we might not have a clear process, structures and design for innovation we might get less (cognitive) resistance.

Equally if we can work more consciously being open, showing ‘increasing’ evidence, talking through probabilities, risks and returns and finally working harder on understanding the pressures, uncertainty and needs of others we might reduce many of the (hidden) barriers and ‘draw out’ those that have reservations.

Open conversations based on mutual knowledge can go an awful long way to reduce these cognitive barriers. Irrespective we need to be constantly aware of others and their opinions.
So we need to consciously  craft the alternative.

I leave you with this final contribution of “we need to craft an alternative path” a visual by John Hagel. It sums it all up at the end: “our actions individually and collectively will determine whether opportunity or challenges prevail“.

For me, innovation needs the challenges of working collectively together, so we all can move towards the opportunities, We need to avoid those cognitive traps and play out of the innovation bunker well and the best way to do this is to learn to seek out knowledge.

We need to recognize, value and exploit together in open and collaborative ways to reduce these personal biases and cognitive traps we can often fall into.

We need to leverage all of today’s cognitive structures all around us that include mental structures, mental tools, and patterns of thought offered to us in new exciting ways with a little bit of older theory perhaps, thrown in.

The post The Innovation Bunker – Avoiding Cognitive Traps Part Three first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Part two of the Cognitive Traps we find ourselves in. Part one is here

So how can we break free from what holds us back?

As we have these cognitive biases then we have to consciously work on reducing their effect in our judgements, decisions and actions.

We need to break out of those cognitive chains that can hold us back and limit our innovation thinking

I think there is so much help at hand

If I take www.innovationgames.com, as one example, of where Luke Hohmann and his team are taking us.  I think there is this important emerging ‘rush’ into games-based tools partly because they can significantly help offset cognitive bias. They allow us to become more engaged in collaborative thinking.
On www.innovationgames.com site they offer this as their value statement: “our on-line and in-person games help organizations solve problems across the enterprise by using collaborative play to tap into true innovation”.

“Games bring your ideas into Action” in our ability to come together and then actively collaborate, helps you discover market opportunities and uncover customer needs and challenge your thinking in new and stimulating ways. Engagement in imaginative ways allows you to break free of some of your cognitive traps.

Have you explored the different books around games, for example Gamestorming: a playbook for innovators, rule breakers and change makers.  They state “we’re hardwired to play games. We play them for fun. We play them in our social interactions. We play them at work. That last one is tricky. “Games” and “work” don’t seem like a natural pairing. Their coupling in the workplace either implies goofing off (the fun variant) or office politics (the not-so-fun type)”.

The authors of Gamestorming, have a different perspective. “They contend that an embrace and understanding of game mechanics can yield benefits in many work environments, particularly those where old hierarchical models are no longer applicable, like the creatively driven knowledge work of today’s cutting edge industries”

I’d suggest that in any industry there is this pressing need to open up the thinking to see ‘things’ in new ways. The challenges are becoming more complex, faster paced and needing far more agile minds. These game storming approach are allowing us to alters our cognitive biases in new ways.

Have you read the article by Jordan Shapiro on “How gamed-based learning can save the humanities” where he discusses example of game-based learning platforms that uses the magic of interactive storytelling–video game design–to bridge the catastrophic gap that undervalues the humanities in education.

He goes on to suggest “Metaphors, signs, and symbols are useful. As the building blocks of language, they let us articulate our experiences through a shared system of meaning-making”. Any shared language reduces personal bias.

Take a look at this slideshare “Building a sustainable innovation ecosystem” for exploring translation pathways to new ways of learning in the 21^st century. Game-based learning is significant to alter our perceptions and challenge our thinking.

The Blank BM Canvas

Following the success of Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas we are all getting more comfortable in building off a ‘blank’ canvas our new business models. Since this canvas there are countless other alternatives that can help us to overcome bias and prompt different thinking around most of the aspects of business design.

Collaborative and visualization tools are equally making a difference
We are seeing the art of storytelling, of taking part in simulation work, making better use of the different visualization techniques and we are opening up in allowing ourselves more time for strategic and concept conversations.

If we take the Heath brothers suggest in their book “Made to Stick” I certainly believe this can help in ‘chipping away’ at cognitive bias. It reduces bias though drawing out, more often than not collectively and giving time to debate. This shifts our personal perspectives and allows us to see things differently as ‘I’ moves to ‘we’ in association and assembled knowledge of the broader community engaged in the conversations and exploring.

Can we use the tool from “Make It Stick” for reducing cognitive traps?
For example in their book “Made to Stick” they (Heath brothers) lay out the critical elements of a sticky idea of Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, Stories. This encouragement makes for more conversations, both within our own minds and in greater participation with others.

This idea for structuring conversations will be great offsets to our cognitive bias in my view. It certainly can become a great starting point.

So taking the Heath Brothers suggested acronym of ‘SUCCES to reduce Cognitive Bias

• Simple — find the core of any nascent concept and allow it to permeate.
• Look for the Unexpected —let it surprise us so we can see its possibilities
• Concrete —Grasp it and its potential effects to share this new insight with others
• Credible — work on the association to give it ‘growing’ believability
• Emotional — help people see the importance of this to achieving innovation that transforms.
• Stories and Narratives — for crafting a compelling narrative to change our cognitive biases into new logic and value propositions.

Knowledge diffusion I believe can reduce cognitive bias also

For me the more we can diffuse knowledge, the better, for recognizing its potential new value in enabling innovation to be translated into “exploitive learning”. I’ve previously suggested absorptive capacity as a help in knowledge adapting.

I wrote a piece called “Moving towards a more distributed innovation model” can allow your thinking to absorb and have a greater flow.

Envisaging different states for innovation needs clear application.
Scenario thinking is a more than helpful place to go for changing our perspectives. What we have to guard against is that these do not become another cognitive trap where we want scenario thinking as long as it is on ‘our terms’.

I believe if we only ever construct scenarios in one ‘mindset’ we miss so much. As many who have been reading my posts I strongly prescribe the three horizon methodology for approaching innovation.

Take a look at mapping innovation across the three horizons to see where this can ‘shift’ our thinking beyond accepted present day thinking norms for innovation to be advanced more effectively.

Langdon Morris wrote in a book called “The Innovation Master Plan” there are four devious mindset traps of 1) fixation on the status quo , 2) short-term thinking dominates at the expense of longer term, 3) too much incremental innovation and 4) ignorance of the real meaning of change, its rate and impact. We need to radically alter these traps. Fixation, biases simply do have innovation consequences.

Seeing across multiple horizons ‘frees’ us from many cognitive traps
I believe we can go well beyond the present value of ‘just’ fitting your existing innovation portfolio and directional management into a one-dimensional framework, viewed in our present ‘here and now’ mindset.

You can see opportunities completely differently beyond the existing mindset and activities, if you think in different time horizons. These different thinking positions take innovation from tactical to strategic, then into foresight in your three different mindset evaluations.

This three horizon approach challenges your cognitive biases as you really do just have to let go and open your mind right up, to see and that is in different thinking frames.

Perhaps I can go one step further, a final step, by reflecting back.
So in my final post coming up (part three) on the Innovation Bunker – Cognitive Traps I offer a simple framing technique that I think has value.

One that we all can relate to it, not so much to each other’s cognitive biases but on how we can manage innovation and its progress in a ‘common’ approach It can reduce differences and allow for better results.

We certainly do need to encourage adoption and decrease the rejections in innovation.

The post The Innovation Bunker- Getting Out of Cognitive Traps Part Two first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I suspect we are all caught in a cognitive trap most of the time. We are all more ‘hard-wired’ than we would care to admit too.

That cognitive bias that ‘permits’ us to make constant errors of judgement, ignore often the advice around us and certainly gloss over the knowledge provided or staring us in the face. Innovation does need us to break out of these cognitive biases if we want to really develop something very different, more transformational.

We should all recognize this constrain we all have, it might help our innovation activity. We are often guilty of being overconfident, actually staying nicely in a rut. Just how many times do we offer ill-framed challenges from lazy thinking or fail to offer the proper context into the discussions early enough, to avoid conversations that wasted our times or reduce the recommendations based on inadequate information.

We also simply allow poor idealization because we did not prepare enough or we want to immediately link back something new into our realm of experience, screening out emerging alternatives. We do these, all of the time.
Have you ever checked out the number of cognitive biases we have? Do, it is staggering. They are everywhere, in our daily decision-making, in our belief systems and of course our behavioural stances. We have social biases, memory errors ones that are just within us.

We simply want to make sense of the world and you take it back to your experiences, your rationalities, those specific conditions so you can replicate it, map it back to something.

We all end up in the worst innovation bunkers

For innovation we often fall into the equivalent of the worst bunker in a round of golf and then what happens next can often make or break your day (like your golfing round). We firstly try to make sense of the situation before deciding on the course of action or do we simply resort to our past experiences as our norm?

Often we quickly fall back and rely on past experience, and ‘blast’ away, in our wishful thinking that we are all Tiger Woods, not recognizing the need for a certain detachment and more rational assessment by having the right combination of experience and the tools to do the job. We end up in even worse traps.

Recently for me cognitive thinking has been triggered twice.

Firstly, the first trigger was one comment made by Henry Chesbrough at the recent Business Design summit. He suggested boards of many large organizations are “cognitively trapped” when it comes to opening up to new business models and different thinking and approaches.

Often it seems, that our leaders ignore new ways to do things,  to understand, claiming either no time or the approaches look complicated. They chose to not explore new business models as they are often simply cognitively trapped.

Henry Chesbrough has written about this in his books, one being “Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape” and how the prevailing wisdom is so entrenched, it looks only to fit existing logic and simply filters out any variance or alternative. This dominating logic becomes their trap, in not recognizing the changes taking place before their eyes, dismissing all the growing logic of exploring new business models.

They are in the locked-in innovation trap. They ignore what is actually going on around them and then get caught out. How can we change this?

The second was in an article written by Andy Zynga, the CEO of NineSigma International on “The Innovator Who Knew Too Much”.

Here he brings out the ‘curse of knowledge’ and cites the book “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath on this ‘curse of knowledge’ leading to communication failures.  In an article they offer this thought “The problem is that once we know something—say, the melody of a song—we find it hard to imagine not knowing it.

Our knowledge has “cursed” us. We have difficulty sharing it with others, because we can’t readily re-create their state of mind.”

I wrote back to Andy: “The curse (of knowledge) goes well beyond that of a particular industry, it is the curse of specialization in a given field, subject, research topic, etc. Cognitive bias sits in the boardroom, throughout organizations holding innovation back.

The barrier for open innovation is to not be allowed to challenge this – the increasing difficulty is that determination to structure an appropriate brief, set screening targets that dismiss everything looking “left field” is placing constraints in our thinking, evolution or engagement processes”

So we are both equally cognitively trapped and cursed with existing knowledge. Not a good place to be when it comes to innovation.

Also we seem to “lock in” our decisions far too early

I’ve offered up before that much of the “fuzzy front end” seems to ignore or downplay so much that could be more than helpful to us in exploring innovation that ‘makes a real difference’.

In a past argument of mine I have suggested we need to extend the innovation funnel back before we bring it into the more traditional innovation funnel process. In an article on this “the New Extended Innovation Funnel”

I am suggesting we spend far more time in the depth of (alternative) evaluation, well before even the idea stage. It can offer up a different richness of thinking.

We need to start thinking more in ‘concepts’ where we can explore as so many of the different connecting points that we can come across from our increasing open networks that can offer such a variety of trigger points.

Today we screen these out as the brief is encouraged to be ‘tightly written’ or the time we have been given is ridiculously limited. If we could only open this up and use the open innovation principles more in ourselves being more receptive in thinking and possibility, we might see different innovations emerging that offer a more ‘transforming’ effect on our innovation activities..

If we could allow our minds to be open to possibilities that whole lot earlier, being less fixated, to explore richer possibilities that might be far more transformational, we might have less incremental moments. We lock in to ideas that ‘simply’ aligned to what we already do they ignore real innovation breakthroughs .

We need to open up our thinking to these nascent concepts. Ones that show early signs of where there might be some ‘weak signals’ that should be picked up upon as offering promise if we work on them and make the different connections to make these transforming to our business.

We often allow our fixations, bias and the consequences to make it all intensive on the incremental, this huge bias on the ‘here and now’ for the necessary delivery within the existing time horizons.

My very argument for seeing innovation across three horizons is this lack of breakthrough in products, in our thinking, that organizations need and eventually this leads to the innovation deficits that catches so many organizations unaware.

We need to open our minds to possibilities
We need to challenge our cognitive bias far more. Hopefully in that less pressured early concept stage, to allow the ‘forming’ idea to ‘percolate’ before it enters the established and traditional innovation funnel.

You know the one, that magical place, where it has to perform in jumping the hurdles, crossing the barriers that we have lovingly set up to make us more efficient and productive in our innovation processes. Sadly those that often give us even more self-inflicted wounds where logical fallacies take hold to win arguments.

Why do I suggest trying to make connections so early on, doesn’t that conflict with cognitive bias and that aspect of our need to make our necessary connections? So as to relate it to our experiences so that we can filter and judge it.

No, because we do suffer from this ‘curse of knowledge’, the more we know, the more we make a personal judgement, that can often be so wrong or just outside our existing experiences.

How can we overcome cognitive bias? Tackling this differently.

We need to fight those very cognitive traps as the more it is like something we know the more we will shape it to this. That is the very reason we must open our minds, to allow a new fresh thinking to emerge into something more transformational, more new to the world and challenge our existing thinking.

I believe there are ways we can tackle these traps, solutions are actually all around us if we can make some new connections.

In my next post I’ll attempt to tackle some of my thoughts that might reduce our bias traps and allow us to get out of our innovation bunker in better ways.

The post The Innovation Bunker – Our Cognitive Traps Part One first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.