@paul4innovating | Innovating in the Age of Ecosystems

Why do we need to change our thinking about innovation?

The Innovation Ecosystem Cascading Effect

I have been arguing in recent posts about the need to change how we approach innovation. We need to think about designs around innovation ecosystems.

In a series that builds the argument so far, I have provided the essential context within this post” Please, we need a different innovation narrative” followed by “Building out our innovation ecosystem in design and thinking.”

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.

Achieving this innovation ecosystem thinking does require a profound shift in how innovation is viewed and approached in the business landscape today and in the future.

Building out our innovation ecosystem in design and thinking

*Finding the new building blocks of innovation ecosystem design and thinking.*

Why change our thinking and designing around innovation ecosystems?“

For me, ecosystem thinking and design offer fresh ways for 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.

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 in part resolving. Still, we face many blurring boundaries across market positions, competitors and global trade that need combining our talent and expertise to provide a new set of solutions, delivering on promise and impact. 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.

Please, we need a different Innovation narrative

(Visual adapted from AFSC explaining a narrative, in this case, social justice)

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.

Innovation Passion led me here

So many multiple strands constantly need to be pulled together to build a complete innovation picture.

We need to build theories, explore multiple connections, and build continuously on the patterns, the signals, and the interactions by extracting from all the different ‘cells’ of knowledge we all possess, which makes the application of innovation often highly unique to each of us.

Innovation ‘speaks to us all in different ways and has multiple meanings.

Then, when we grasp what we understand, we have to translate these thoughts into practical, workable solutions. By sharing, you learn and continue to build on this knowledge. You actually blend your own creation and learn from others, and that combination effect curates even greater knowledge and application.

To build a comprehensive view of any innovation built in a digital world needs is bringing together multiple strands of understanding, and that is tough, demanding and time-consuming.

Innovation needs to speak to us.

Gaining energy and idea generation

I have been asking myself how a combined effect of innovation and ecosystem design thinking will support the energy transition we are undertaking to give it additional traction and generation.

Let me share my thoughts and proposition here.

The vital “infusion” of innovation in thinking, approaching and building this into the front end of any energy transition provides a greater discovery structure and process that can greatly facilitate the changes, with more informed knowledge, insights and validation of a path to travel.

Finding fresh ideas and momentum Continue reading “Gaining energy and idea generation”

Establishing an innovative business platform adoption approach

The Combination Effect for Adoption in today’s world

The level of interest in business platforms in the B2B space has rapidly grown. Platforms are more viable and relevant today than ever. The platform’s ability to offer multiple values will influence many of the client’s adoption decisions over the choices their business will engage with.

I wrote a recent article on my ecosystem and platform posting site, “Exploring points of value in adopting business platforms.”

I suggested in this post, “Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.”

Recently in Stanford Social Innovation Review, an article on the “Adoption of Innovation” by Benjamin Kumpf & Emma Proud is well worth the read as adopting any innovation process is a tough, slow one.

They take a position on looking at behavioural approaches suggesting when behavioural insights have been adopted, innovation has ceased to be “innovative.” When a method, technology, or approach to a problem has moved from the experimental edges of an organization to the core of its work: no longer a novelty but something normal and institutionalized. My fear here is this becomes “static” and losses its dynamism. Continue reading “Establishing an innovative business platform adoption approach”

New innovation approaches to counter the fear of Business Contagion

Choosing new innovative approaches to counter the fear of Business Contagion

What has been changing in how we approach innovation, and have we taken the opportunity to radically revise the innovation system and process accordingly?

Many of our innovative approaches or systems are based on very often just an internal perspective, restricted in available resources and limited knowledge and insights, often constraining the evolving new solutions and then limiting the impact and outcome.

For many years open innovation has been encouraged to be adopted to break out of this very narrow internal focus. Having a real diversity of opinion with this greater access to different knowledge and experiences does open up our thinking, but it is, on its own, not enough to make a real difference, especially in times of acute change. We need to put to use a different innovation model or approach.

We are at the cusp or already into significant changes to how the world, society and we as individuals will manage or engage going into the future.

This is my second post discussing the belief that we are being to see a real contagion breaking down how we have been operating and living in the world.

We are facing the potential of unprecedented change, and we need to recognize how a different approach to innovation can help offset or mitigate many of the destabilizing aspects and provide a pathway to managing differently in a new environment that will inevitably come from this contagion. Continue reading “New innovation approaches to counter the fear of Business Contagion”

The fear of business contagion requires different innovation response

Business contagion requires different innovative responses.

We are presently facing a profound set of changes in the conditions that businesses operate within the immediate years ahead, that of the fear of business contagion; these will need a different set of innovation shifts and responses to counter this and seize new opportunities.

Over two posts, I want to lay out the underlying concerns (here) and the new dynamics we can deploy by changing how we undertake innovation as my second post.

This first post discusses what is changing, and there is a growing argument in what I am seeing that we are facing one of those contagion periods where one set of conditions is triggering another, followed by another.

Continue reading “The fear of business contagion requires different innovation response”

Innovation requires a more dynamic systematic approach

All companies talk about innovation and its growing importance, but why is it that still so few succeed in actually doing it on a repeatable scale?

What inhibits innovation? What would drive innovation success? What aspects of innovation are critical to achieving such innovative growth? Where should a company place its emphasis to gain both an improving impact on its performance and strengthen its innovation capabilities?

The difficulty for many is that innovation is a complex process that has many intangibles within the total mix to manage. Management today is far happier managing the ‘harder’ aspects of business, the current physical ones of everyday organization, not the ‘softer’ more intangible ones, where innovation often lies or emerges from. Continue reading “Innovation requires a more dynamic systematic approach”

Positioning my innovating approach

I want to find a new way of approaching innovation, a new positioning, and these are my opening statements to be questioned and built upon

Chasing dedicated focal points, looking for big transforming “impact points”
Helping to deliver them
Opening need to achieve

This needs to be complementary, synergistic, clarifying and building new intersections of opportunity

The value-adding impact and business model needs to be central

The need is the bringing together of many strands of thinking, ideally in a “living and dynamic” designed way”
Aspiring to achieve

*Innovation touch and value maps

*Evolving constantly over time in ecosystem design thinking

*Building out the dynamic environment

* Structuring the activities in a Landscape journey

*Making it a sustaining one

Until we understand the scope and impact of innovation, we can’t fully grasp the nature and the amount of change that innovation can unleash
@paul4innovating.

We need to cover the breadth,depth and scope of all innovation possibilities

It is the ability to seeing patterns, synergies and different connections that give us new avenues of convergence and value
We need a distributed, interconnected and networked environment
Agility Innovation

Recombining offers or concepts offers greater value creation in the short term but it is the ability to look out and see a different future will bring the higher value returns that innovation aspires too

We need to look to build Dynamic Innovation Ecosystems and radicially different Business Models to change the nature of innovation discovery, validation and implementation.
Paul Hobcraft