Are we EVER going to embrace innovation?

Why have we not embraced innovation?

I will not apologize here; this will partly be a “rant” and then begin to suggest a way forward on embracing innovation fully.

I was thinking of having the headline “Innovation as our eternal doom or shame” or “innovation groundhog day”. Let me begin in why.

I really am fed up with constantly seeing claims that “innovation is core to our business” and that we are “constantly seeking fresh growth” Both of these are simply bullshit statements from the vast majority of our businesses.

Is managing innovation too complex or fragmented? Do organizations have a clear understanding of their innovation activities?

How many people are full-time employed in the innovation team, and how many in driving strategic growth? Ten, twenty, perhaps fifty out of thousands in medium to large companies.

In the bigger scheme of things, thousands within large organizations are working on innovation. These are from different functions such as R&D, Engineering disciplines, Technologists, Designers, Application and Digital. Do they work on standard innovation platforms or individually, left over from a legacy position or have they individually found a given application more suited to their specific needs?

How many of these “dedicated” people are consistently trained, assessed and verified that they are equipped with the innovation management skills they are asked to do? How many constantly upgrade their skills, not just attend events? Can these islands of innovation activity be integrated to enable a better overview and access to broader tools or methodologies that give more significant benefits?

How much does a business organization spend on its ERP system compared to its innovation system? SAP does provide a limited innovation software module. Still, it is currently constrained due to its limited approach to innovation.

The efforts to extract efficiency and effectiveness from operations, supporting services and customer engagements to track productivity, do the same efforts and management focus go into innovation? No.

Why does innovation seem to get such a LOW level of sustaining commitment when an organization constantly states its commitment to fresh growth and deploying growth mindsets?

Organizations detest uncertainty and taking risks as they would need to explain these to the advisory board, to shareholders, so it often hides nicely behind the consulting company whose reputation lies in the work it has often been associated (note this word) with others or has the additional resources and more significant expertise to support the inner workings of the organization to enable them to deliver.

Organizations need balance, and innovation tends to push to upset this need constantly; that’s its nature as it seeks to change. Organizations of the future will always be in constant flux.

Can innovation be something different than it is for the vast majority today?

The market for investing in innovation management tools remains fragmented. Many small vendors provide limited scope, more in idea management to grow innovation in organizational ways; they “sweat” the one idea or big challenge. Is that really the sum of innovation?

The most significant activities for investing in innovation management software are presently for events, challenges and campaigns, idea assessments, especially at the early stage, and product development filters.

Then we have PLM solution providers (Aras, Siemens Teamcenter) offering the customer application lifecycle management on a concept to customer positioning.

The providers of these solutions have them reasonably refined and offered in all shapes and sizes, but is that REALLY the sum of our innovation programs needed? I do believe there is a concerted effort to break out and build different, more comprehensive innovation platforms; take a look at Ezassi, for example.

This needs radically changing if we genuinely believe that innovation is the organisation’s lifeblood and that a proper growth mindset exists. We need a more integrated and transparent innovation process that takes foresight, ideation and realization into one system.

I wrote a post, “We require a shift of innovation management software providers stating, “The universal software market for innovation solutions is vast. I suggested in this post we are in a world where open innovation is in the ability to connect to other organizations and, in this mutual collaboration, look to generate significant advancements in present-generation products offered by a single company.

I don’t buy into all the innovation hype jargon unless we begin to recognize the changes we are undergoing in our business landscape today need a comprehensive and robust innovation structure and design. We need to speed up, collaborate and execute faster than before, as markets are more demanding and evolutionary as technology determines so much.

Something needs to change as the ground is shifting beneath our executive feet.

We are all operating in a different era. Uncertainty, volatility and a rapidly changing environment with complex challenges confront us daily, not occasionally. Raw material supplies, supply chain uncertainties, inflation, growing trading hostilities and employees demanding to see the future differently in sustainable solutions are all shifting our needs to rethink our future and respond accordingly.

Innovation will be central to this; it will be based more on agility, being highly adaptable, flexible and acting at speed. These were often seen as potential threats destabilising our past working methods focusing on efficiency and effectiveness. That was nicely handled by putting innovation activities in safely corralled groups, ring-fenced, start-up hubs, innovation centres or dedicated groups etc.

Today we require a different reliance on new thinking where innovation MUST become a core for the whole organization from idea to commercialization and greater attention to lifecycle management.

This requires broader perspectives, being more experimental, deploying faster, more flexible teams and achieving this mindset that is “fixated” on growth that is more intrinsic, purpose-driven and not fearing failure but embracing it in very different measured ways through a more dynamic organization.

There is a need for a rapid update on how we conduct innovation.

I have argued for some time; actually, it feels like forever, we need to place our innovation approach, process and thinking into this century, not keep it locked into 20th-century solutions offered with existing software solutions and methodologies, worked upon by small groups of people, often in isolated teams. We need a fully integrated approach, transparent and available to all the organization.

As we transform towards digital businesses, we will heavily rely on AI, technology, and digital approaches offering higher levels of customer connectivity and growing collaborations across organizations. There is nothing new in that message, but the current innovation processes currently being deployed are not fit for purpose as they only adapt piecemeal to these essential needs.

Organizations need new ways to innovate by leveraging new technologies, new (ecosystem) thinking and designs, approaching it through system thinking, and more mission-led innovation that combines into a new way of work.

Developing a new discipline that gains knowledge differently (from the past) and applies the application of innovation in stacks and building blocks, all layered on a technology platform that enables and transforms the work we undertake. Ideas, concepts, and work-in-progress.

We need the information to flow across organizations, as often, the innovative result is far more complex in design and application. Are our innovation systems designed to handle today’s complexity and collaborative environment?

Finding the appropriate thinking through time is demanding.

I have been working on a fair amount of my time thinking this through. I am only partly there. I see this as the “rise of innovation ecosystems in thinking and design”.

I am working through the key innovation building blocks as components of the innovation stack, using the innovation stack to guide platform development and using the platform to support this innovation stack.

It is the “fit” of the frameworks that are keeping me busy at present as we need a new powerful innovation engine that leverages the strengths of each.

How feasible is this?

The factors to consider include resource allocation, integrations with existing systems or supplanting them, the cultural alignments this requires, more experimentation and risk-taking and the implementation challenges are real challenges.

Over the weeks ahead, I want to “flesh this out” in a series of conversations, questioning and finding answers. It is a complex problem.

This framing question is core for me to settle upon.

At present, I am framing this, do I apply the core design principles of composability for “the innovative composable enterprise“, determine it as a “modular innovation framework“, emphasise and name it “the building block innovation methodology” or go for this, “the stackable innovation architecture” to emphasise the scalable and flexible approach it needs to have for future innovation purposes.

It is not all “questions, questions, questions”. Answers are emerging; they are all around me in the work I have undertaken so far. The pulling together of these “strands of thinking” will be part of this thinking “out loud” in the weeks ahead.

I am going through the theory, application and impact. It “seems” promising to change the innovation narrative and significantly update the innovation approach and processes we need to meet today’s and tomorrow’s business challenges.

Watch this space; I hope it’s worth it.