Innovation Software, is it facing the Innovators Dilemma?

In my research, I am getting a real sense that the current Innovation Management Software model is about to be upended and disrupted as per Clayton Christensens’ “Innovators Dilemma.” 

The book the “Innovation Dilemma” published in 2016 was written by innovation expert Clayton Christensen suggesting even though even the most outstanding companies can do everything right–yet still lose market leadership.

Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.

Today if the technology software solutions are not advancing and adapting to new ways of building open, collaborative exchanges across not just a single organization but multiple ones. This need of all coming together to co-create, often solving more complex problems, ideas are lost or not being spotted by the incumbents and over time, others recognize these “blind spots” will present opportunities to offer new approaches to solve problems.

In this book it expands on the concept of disruptive technologies, a term Christensen coined in a 1995 in an article “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave”. It describes how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appear to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from the established business. (source Wikipeda)

Today the reversal is happening.

New companies can gain access to robust technology quickly, piece it together and launch alternatives that reflect a more relevant, current and needed set of solutions.

Within the Innovation Management Software space, two good examples I came across in this past week, emerging to “confront” the established provider of innovation software services may be the tip of this iceberg that has been under the surface for some time.

The shifting towards Ecosystems for Innovation

Firstly in an article written by Trevor Gorden on mini-ecosystems “Can an Innovation Management System Help with Experimenting with Mini-Ecosystems?” by arguing innovation management platforms could play a critical role in supporting co-creation through mini-ecosystems. By providing a central place for stakeholders to collaborate and exchange ideas, organisations can more effectively drive co-creation and innovation, both internally and externally.

I found that intriguing for equally supporting the dynamics of ecosystems .of ecosystems

He referenced Hypsous (https://www.hypsous.com/) plus I came across another one that is building a Business Intelligence Platform for Neuro Innovation Software. They are based in Zurich and Paris and only beginning to gain momentum from starting up, I think mid-last year (https://bluecallom.com/) but are challenging how we “think” innovation and the solutions we need

I like some of the movement going on, I was spending time on QMarkets (https://www.qmarkets.net/) and digging a little deeper into what and where they are evolving too.

I believe each of the established leading innovation software providers must be looking at how they can adapt (or die)

I feel those “stuck” in providing innovation management software in incremental components are about to be taken out unless they move from their current BM. I wrote an article “Where will innovation management software go? On this recently.

I think we are a point of disruption of the existing providers of innovation software, with a refreshing group of experimenters getting the importance of AI, Intelligence, Platforms and Clouds, Network building and open collaborations, exploring and finding new ways to combine these

The customer needs are for greater innovation change that brings significant new value and impact.

Why the needs of organizations are not achieving the level of impact, growth or transformational innovation they need, they are struggling to break out of their current straight jacket of open innovation into a greater collaborative, sharing, networking environment where partners are coming together looking to work on solving greater complexity or have growing visibility.

Innolead recently released a new Benchmarking Innovation Impact report, co-authored with KPMG with plenty of good insights but a few big nuggets where the innovation teams were struggling to get leadership excited about the (innovation) vision, a growing worry over improving alignment around innovation is an urgent priority” and the most worrying- the significant drop-off, in general, over three recent surveys, a decrease in focus on transformational — or Horizon 3 — work. Innovators reading this report should start worrying about how to get back the impact and value new innovation needs to deliver.

Yet, the one I pick up upon is “The Pain Points of External Innovation.” This points towards the trend that all big companies are trying to figure out how to access that external innovation more effectively. Be that through working with start-ups, collaborating, venturing, consortiums etc., etc. I think of more open, collective innovation where diversity of opinion, greater knowledge and intelligence can contribute to ideas and concepts towards new innovation.

The report link “Benchmarking innovation impact from InnoLead” by @innolead and @KPMG_US does offer an excellent stimulating overview that still reflects on so much of what still needs to be done in the innovation world.

I was asking in a fairly lengthy article on this benchmarking report: “are organizations becoming more risk-averse or organizations settling for less out of the innovation work? Is that due to it being “too risky” or the appetite for change, is less but due to what? This needs more investigation.

I believe most of the innovation we do should be placed on a “burning platform.”

Where does innovation software fit in this set of worrying indicators?

Is software solutions recognizing the growing dissatisfaction that seems to be a growing trend coming from this sort of benchmarking taking place?

Am I right? Arguably time will tell but more importantly, new Software providers coming on stream show that classic bottom-up thinking and recognition that there is a need to challenge the existing business model as constraints to make innovation more compelling might be partly held back by the technology application or lack of it, inside organizations.

The tipping point is where a threshold or boiling point arrives for a more radical change to occur. Here it might come when the trust of customers and their needs for innovation software begins to be questioned. Do their present arrangements and the internal worry over staying relevant within the organization to shift the dynamics? Is there this growing recognition that renewing the increasing licence agreements, and that specific model is constraining? Is constantly trying to justify increased budgets for adding more licence fees in exchange for a “snail’s pace” of new module releases making future sense? When the innovator continues not to connect up the whole of the ‘needs to innovate’ must start questioning existing arrangements. A new solution model needs to be found.

When does the reluctance of the innovating team give way to try and convince senior management to recognize that change is needed and all the significant “invested ” legacy gets taken away and replaced by the search and scouting for different connected software solutions?

Migrating to new technology, platforms, and software solutions has become commonplace across the core of organizations’ business operating solutions.

Innovation software solutions need to be fully integrated across organization operating solutions, this gives greater visibility into the innovation (black) box, it opens it up to a wider audience of participants that can offer input and new insights, it enables a closer alignment to measure and assess innovation progress by management and a host of other “productivity and effectiveness” gains.

If there are ways for the transfer of data and ease of change to become “manageable” if the incentive of better technology, greater transfer of exchanges, data and insight exchanges becomes well laid out.

Timing, all depends on the possible alternatives and ease of transfer. Selling new software solutions to an organization is slow and demanding. Internally the need for compatibility, for security, for being sold that this new solution provides greater productivity, and access to creativity and offers a platform of better solutions than the current ones needs a powerful enabler for making the change.

Solving many of the past restrictions of keeping software inside the organization, constantly being updated is by having solutions in the cloud, built on platforms of “trusted” providers like AWS, SAP or Azure and achieving greater interoperability of software components to talk to each other and scale. Updates are more automatic and not requiring constant renegotiation of licence fees. Ones that do not get locked into restrictive licence practices of software providers but offer greater pay-as-you-go and data storage and broader and deeper analytical abilities to leverage the intelligence being collected and evaluated for new innovative concepts.

Are we about to see this or is this still caught in a market design where one provider against another has little incentive to make the change?

The key is the application of disruptive technology and new approaches, for me that means the application of ecosystem thinking and technology platform designs.

Any thoughts? Am I “wistfully thinking or sensing the shift winds? Are we seeing disruptive forces coming into play in the Innovation Management Software industry, simply because there is a better approach through applying this Ecosystem thinking and design in offering a more productive and scaling solution that enables greater collaboration? I think we are in need of change, as we have the technology converging to make this happen. Do you agree there are “winds of change within the innovation software solutions?”