Month: January 2011

Dedicated Innovation Scientists and Engineers Group – the Growing Imperative

I believe we are arriving at a point of real value by organizing dedicated innovation scientists and engineers into a specialised innovation unit. Innovation has emerged into part science, part art and design, and plenty of engineering (social and process).

Today successfully managing innovation is getting increasingly challenging and placing considerable strain on the present design and structures of organizations.

A dedicated unit or group that draws from a range of disciplines and combines these into a new organisational unit has significant value to be at the forefront of designing the organizational change needed for innovation to be more embedded and integrated.

Let me explain why?
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Everything seemingly comes in seven or does it?

Recently I was going through my files and was amazed how the use of seven came up to form some sort of magic seven frameworks. I’m not sure if we can blame this all on the “seven wonders of the world” but ‘seven’ has some magic perhaps when it also comes to listing. Is it because our attention span can’t absorb more than seven things at a time?

Ok, I can hear my wife say “Seven, you, huh!”
Let me give you a flavour of this use of ‘seven’

  • Seven keys to designing your innovation
  • Seven success factors
  • Seven habits of effective people
  • Seven innovation myths
  • Seven kinds of consequences
  • Seven deadly sins of Road-mapping
  • Seven levels of sustainability
  • 3M’s seven pillars for innovation

The list could go on….and on. So why does seven seemingly loom so large for us?
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The Promise of Open Services innovation

Absorbing the different messages coming out of Professor Henry Chesbrough’s new book has been interesting. The book “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your business to grow and compete in a new era”, published by Jossey-Bass was just launched in January 2011.

The book can go the way of a lightning rod to bringing service innovation up in many people’s thinking both in academic research and corporate agendas.

Professor Chesbrough is absolutely right, services are critical to developed countries’ economies and within our organizations. It is time to move service innovation up in our thinking by combining the internal capabilities within organizations and by enlisting the efforts of many others in support of their business.

The challenge is to combine the customer and the supplier on the same platform for Open Services Innovation to work. It is thinking through platforms more that catches my interest and what this means in generating new, innovative business models.

Taking services into a more open approach is not so easy.
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Taking the Open Services Innovation Road.

Open Road to Innovation

I have been looking forward to this book; it addresses one of the most important areas of innovation that we have, the service sector and discusses open services.

In this last week, I have been reading Professor Henry Chesbrough’s new book “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your business to grow and compete in a new era”, published by Jossey-Bass, released last week on 18th January.

Services are critical to understand and focus upon, for our continued economic growth, for the ability to offer an often distinct and unique competitive advantage, as well as provide much of our future employment opportunities, especially crucial in the Western economies. Services today comprise roughly 80% of economic activity in the United States, and 60% of economic activity in the top forty economies of the world (source OECD).

Mixed Emotions
After reading this book a couple of times I must admit I had a set of very mixed emotions.
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Service innovation- can it become more open?

For a better understanding of what makes up service innovation, we need to fill in far too many gaps at present, can it become more open?.

I’m hopeful that the forthcoming book of Henry Chesbrough: “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era”, published by Jossey-Bass and being launched officially next week, 18th January 2011, will go some of the ways to be a lightning rod to bringing this up in many people’s agenda if it is not already!

I felt with his past books on Open Innovation and Open Business Innovation they were the catalysts for deeper thinking. He provided the stimulus to find better answers with his many reflections and case studies through his solid research work and his ‘open’ and questioning thinking to prompt community ‘reactions’. This galvanized significant innovation movements and this time hopefully, it will be to open up and manage service innovation more effectively.

I will be completing a book review on this latest open innovation thinking by Dr.Chesbrough for www.innovationmanagement.se as an early February publication and I’m certainly looking forward to reading the final edition of this book when it arrives.
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Social will dominate innovation thinking in 2011 and beyond.

Putting the word social into our innovation thinking is going to be a really important thing to do in the coming year, if you haven’t already, it will dominate our actions increasingly.

The challenges of ‘social’ is everywhere; within organizations, in all sorts of collective movements, in politics, across government, society, markets, academic institutions and effecting our personal lives in a host of ways.
Society has to face up to some really tough challenges and only innovation can solve these with human beings inventiveness and ingenuity. Regretfully we have still an accelerating ‘creative destruction’ and we are often more Schumpeterian than ever.

Something has got to give and it will be within the broad social domain where it will all come together, many social things are converging or feeding off each other. Let’s take a brief look at all this social orientation going on.
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