So what is hot, what is not in innovation at present? Any thoughts?
What do we need to remind ourselves about as we go about our ‘daily’ innovation business?
Some of my top of the mind quick thoughts:
- Innovation is not the preserve of the (selected) few but the domain of the community. Driving this message home yields a real upsurge of new, often exciting activities that you would have missed out upon without engaging the broader community.
- This absolute growing need to move on from the reliance of symbolic projects to justify innovations’ existence. Stop dipping your toe in the water, just jump in and get wet. Get everyone involved and want to contribute.
- Recognizing innovation is traversing functions, entities and boundaries faster than ever. Find ways to get out of the way to allow it to flow where the energy goes and then ‘attempt’ to capture it for the good of all.
- Open Innovation is moving out of the R&D Lab and moving very fast across an organization for a more Open Enterprise approach. Keep breaking down those barriers of resistance to allow this openness to further take hold, expand and contribute to your everyday thinking.
- Collaboration is formed at the hip with Co-creation. Make sure you are extracting your fair share of value from all these exchanges.
- Design is certainly coming increasingly to the fore and working through how and where it fits within the innovation mix and valuing it for its ‘added’ worth.
- The combination of great design and appropriate functionality giving your customers what they need and feel good about is a powerful combination to achieve.
- Platforms and ecosystems are emerging to manage complex innovation challenges and knowing where and how you can fit into these to extract more is essential.
- The power of social innovation and linking your product to societal needs Scaling becomes important to expand this out.
- We need to “reconnect to dominant economic activities of the larger society”, add a ‘higher’ purpose into our innovation activity.
- The bottom of the pyramid thinking is really ‘hot,’ very relevant in today’s more cost-conscious market conditions.
- Reverse innovation and its ability to be rescaled to adapt across different markets is equally a valuable source of growth within organizations. We do need to learn from others on what is actually possible so a product can enter previously untapped markets.
- There is a growing hope we are in the final death throes of the organization, of moving even further away from the linear process of cause and effect that has dominated much of the 20th-century thinking.
- Innovation needs to respond to the market and the needs. It does need to be more ‘frugal’ or match more closely the pockets of your consumer. Equally, there is always a wish for something to ‘wow’ us. The two ends just need understanding more to get right.
- For me, the one that stays always top of mind is setting innovation in its context so this can be understood by others so they can find their ways to contribute.
I’m sure you have some that are important to you. Just remember to keep them in focus as we go around our daily work, or at least we sometimes forget.