The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact
There is a lot changing in and around innovation, are we accounting for it as much as we should?
The shifts taking place around innovation are been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. How it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs.
It is forcing us to reconstruct our innovative thinking, so as to gain from all this transformation occurring all around us.
The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period have come from a great explosion of Lean Management principles and practices and the incorporating of Design thinking into our work. Both of these are being rapidly embraced by our organizations, large and small.
How these are fully and successfully integrated remains a challenge for most to resolve today. New tools, methodologies, and frameworks are rapidly shaping our innovative thinking.
Then, the most prevailing change is our growing quest in the understanding of relating more to individual customer needs. The need in building new business models has been greatly encouraged by the real need to “get out of the building” and learn to pilot, experiment and build a growing system of prototyping on what we learn from these engagements and testing, many emerging from innovation labs, encouraging an intrapreneur spirit, set up on entrepreneurship principles.
Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around that are about to massively change the way we collaborate and build solutions that are more complex and require many parties to come together and attempt to solve greater challenges. The movement towards the different crowdsourcing techniques and all the variations (or derivations) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’ have changed the game.
Innovation is constantly opening up when you combined diverse thinking with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much.
The raw power of knowledge needs harnessing and translating
We are being pushed faster and faster in our need to acquire new knowledge. It is increasingly being pushed at us. We are equally constantly seeking it out. It is a constant 24 x 7 race to keep up to date and aware. We are creating our own pressures to keep knowledge updating. But why are we actually in this type of race?
It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks that need deeper capture and translation, so as to extract new value.
We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the construction of minimal viable products and rapid experiment and design to increase in focus, so as to accelerate innovation discovery and delivery. We must keep adapting and adopting.
We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before with our innovative concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.
It has moved well into the “how” from the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it certainly still seems. Speed is dominating at present then we all are in need to “Scale” and resolve the constant worries over the “Execution” of the new value proposition.
Where does all this frantic search for meaning leave us? More exhausted, more fearful, more determined to keep pushing. We are on a treadmill of change, sometimes it might be very useful to get off of it and allow our world from continually spinning.
There is this constant, pressing need, to absorb, synthesize, and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovative thinking. It becomes a constant task to manage just this new understanding, translating it and embedding new practices as difficult, time-consuming, and tough.
