Please, we need a different Innovation narrative

I have been struggling for quite some time with innovation’s increasing difficulties in influencing growth and achieving real impact.

I see many comments on the failure of innovation, in its inability to be at the core of an organization’s ambitions for growing and changing. Actually it is a long list of issues and concerns that we so often paper over and don’t fully address. There is a time for making a real change and I feel that could be now by shifting our thinking towards innovation ecosystems.

Let’s reflect first on the constraints or barriers that innovation faces, much self-imposed.

Innovation “fights” to attract resources, to gain management attention or to appreciate fully the difficulties and uncertainties in the time it takes, in its potential risks and its need often for a more ambitious and bold commitment of support and belief.

Our innovation processes stay locked in islands of knowledge, stubbornly not flowing across organizations, informing others and giving the right levels of insights, support, or collaboration needed. Innovation software management continues to be sold piecemeal, so often just bolted onto the other selected parts already in place, not being optimized.

The innovation process is often ignored or constantly adjusted to meet ad hoc requests or external pressures. The approach to innovation is often subject to the whims of the individual, accountability is reduced to a few ‘selected’ KPIs.

Innovation solutions are seen as limited, and the pressures often felt for giving straightforward immediate returns of value are often overriding the sustaining potential with more patience or investments in resources and time. Often innovation activity frustrates senior management. The work undertaken is often seen as a drain, not repeatable, and poor on the efficient definition of understanding we have in place today as the work undertaken, not yielding the returns if the concept is more radical due to time horizons or business model constraints..

The knowledge captured often doesn’t have integrating capabilities with other core enabling processes or is not seen as a building block to greater value. Innovation knowledge often simply dies or moves away with the person that gained from the time they spent focusing exclusively on innovation

We have the need to re-think innovation, we need a new level of innovation integration and optimization.

What we see increasingly is “innovation ecosystems.” Is this the potential answer to overcoming and giving innovation that chance to be more central to the core of the business? These are being built increasingly on digital platforms that seek to offer the technical and organisational context and knowledge, so a community of innovators or solution solvers can build out a wider community and begin to interact on a more shared purpose of common understanding.

For me, ecosystem thinking and design are accelerating mutual learning, and through this innovation, outcome potential for sharing and knowledge building. As we build an understanding of the power of digital platforms and ecosystem thinking, we can see gains and new values and realize different opportunities denied to us in the past by a lack of clarity, depth of understanding of what was in front of us but not appreciated, as we were looking at it differently and not seeing its potential in a combined value or bundling.

Firstly, we need to ask, “Why change the innovation narrative?“

Organizations today are no different from the past; they seek fresh growth and establish new competitive positions. The difference is the straight jacket they often “wore.” constrained them.

Today we live in a more connected world, technology has enabled this. We are becoming far more networked and have a growing awareness of hyper challenges that we are part of resolving and blurring boundaries across market positions, competitors and global trade. We are in a more complex world needing different approaches within business organizations.

We hold the promise of liberating potential in resolving wicked problems and opportunities, providing we embrace the potential to combine and share outside our organization and tap into the rich diversity of knowledge, equally keen to collaborate and cooperate to achieve a more cross-cutting innovation that provides solutions to these more complex problems.

The need for digital platforms and ecosystem designs has grown to achieve this collaborative environment. The ability to evolve enterprise capabilities is evaluating value webs, and artificial intelligence, pushing the need to reshape structures to be more outwardly facing, open to receiving new knowledge and prepared to share and exchange in return.

We are shifting critical capabilities that are growing the agility to trial, pilot and learn quickly as information flows in. We are achieving a faster adaptation and exploring mentality. The ability to combine data, and human knowledge is revealing this new collaborative potential and a new set of competitive opportunities.

The increased ability to deploy, activate and utilize resources and assets requires these digital platforms to constantly exploit latent potential through the network and relationship engagements that engage in mutual pursuit.

To achieve this, we do need a better conceptual innovation framework, this innovation ecosystem one.

What is needed is something more radical and cohesive than we presently have. Let’s call it a “co-evolutionary dynamic ecosystem.” It moves from systems to ecosystems of innovation activity. It is knowledge-based and well-grounded.

It needs much of what we have been arguing for over many years. Clear strategy leadership, a different organisational culture but with an emphasis more on partner engagement.

Organizations need to be well-equipped in supporting knowledge, data, insights and people in their data handling, its management, analysis sharing and processing.

To achieve this evolution, which has been called for over many years, is to facilitate and allow innovation to thrive and work. This means we do finally need to address controls, and provide different structures and emphasis by re-orienting at faster rates of learning on the reliance on the technical aspects.

Seeing the end result

The end result needs to be robust, dynamic and holistic in its dimensions, it has to be systematically designed and implemented, knowledge-driven by events and process design, and driven by dynamic interactions.

This call for a different end result does require this profound shift in the business landscape. Ecosystems and platforms become the core of any design. Ecosystems fundamentally challenge the way we currently are doing things (in isolated actions) and rearrange the way innovation is being managed today. It cannot work through stand-alone systems or software components it needs “digital platforms that offer the technical and organizational context soi a community can interact for a shared purpose” (adapted from Yochai Benkler)

It relies increasingly on a network of interconnected organizations organized around one or a few valuable focal points, firms that can contribute and on a shared platform that offers both producers of value but constantly engages with user-side participants helping to shape, offer and provide insights and criticism on what they see as value to them.

It is in this ecosystem design that organizations can act differently on strategies, business models, leadership commitment and encouragement, building out different capabilities to build collectively new value creation, breaking down previously complex or challenging problems by having in place capturing systems and organizational models that reflect a common ecosystem design thinking.

It is this recognition that today, innovation rarely succeeds in isolation to achieve real, lasting impact but needs this growing dependent type of complementary innovation that ecosystem design provides.

Any new narrative has many parts of a story to tell.

Those willing to listen and recognize a story that needs to be built out that they can identify with. My work over the past few years is gaining the experience and insights to attempt to tell this story of needed change.

I often speak of my innovation journey; I sometimes call myself the innovation journeyman. I recently wrote a post “innovation passion led me here“

My personal energy is drawn from all the challenges we face, looking to help find solutions.

We must promote more dynamic environments and the constant desire that organizations and their people have to be fit for innovating purposes, adaptive and fluid in such highly challenging and confusing times.

Transitions towards (real) innovation ecosystems

It is all about the translation points in innovation guidance and finding the time to engage with the external catalyst of innovation understanding. That is my place.

Relating and understanding the potential in adopting an innovation ecosystem design and thinking can potentially offer an exponential return to you, your team and your organization’s innovation activity. That is, of course, if you have the desire to build your innovation capabilities in new ways that are more based on “innovation ecosystems”.

For that, I need to change your innovation narrative. Have you the time? Contact me