How do we show the real difference that innovation can provide?
I believe we have eight needs to achieve.
Each of us will arrive at our own personal understanding of what this “all means”.
Innovation is about achieving difference so if we all arrived at the same point of understanding then we actually are defeating ourselves from the very beginning
So what are these eight ‘triggering’ points? Briefly: Continue reading “Differentiating Yourself in Innovation Part One”
This is the excerpt for your very first post.
I’ve been working in the innovation forge arena for coming up to sixteen years; relating, learning, designing, shaping and writing about innovation, trying to translate this into value for clients and their innovation challenges.
Innovation Advocacy needs strong guidance. As a “go to” trusted authority that can influence, argue, advocate new directions, and provide clear options for change, I can push the ‘edges’ of today’s status quo, perhaps be your required catalyst to trigger ideas or offer different insights.
We have to remember that innovation is always restless and constantly changing and I want to bring about meaningful up-to-date thinking in innovation practices adding further to your own.
Balancing the ‘inflow’ of knowledge about innovation with the necessary customer ‘insights’ is not easy, you have to be well positioned to advocate and show value, to guide different conversations and provide ‘impactful’ results.
Over the years we all see the business model has evolved Continue reading “Forging our future through innovation”
Much of what we read about artificial intelligence, deep learning and robots can present fear of a new paradigm that our jobs are simply going, or vanish fairly soon, so we should find ways to release our human ingenuity.
Technology, machines and information solutions will take over in this new world of accelerating technology with the concern of “so then, what do we do?
Well, I believe we have a real chance to, at last, celebrate. Yes celebrate, we can finally be liberated! Ever since the industrial revolution, we have been caught up in the productivity and efficiency trap, in the monotony of repeating work.
Today we are on the cusp of changing that. Can you imagine all those boring, repetitive jobs we are faced with today can be simply handed over to machine intelligence, just happy to do the task at hand?
Surely, if we manage this correctly it can release us up, it can enable our ingenuity to thrive and the answer lies in the work to be done Continue reading “A new paradigm of focusing on ingenuity lies in work to be done”
There is a lot of change occurring in our innovation abilities. There is this constant shift to more open-sourcing and collaborating. We are seeing profound shifts that technology and digital transformation are bringing us to deliver innovate differently. These changes are influencing all of our worlds, allowing a very different “connecting” innovation to come into play and provide ‘greater value’
Nothing succeeds in isolation anymore, it needs fully connecting up, to bring increased value to the market and customer needs.
There are major shifts taking shape. What is radically changing how we innovate? We are seeing a significant acceleration of innovative collaborations through ecosystems. We are increasingly recognizing all the different collaborative tools increasingly at our disposal We are exploring both platforms and forming ecosystems to radically alter the competitive edge previously seen to reside inside the single company.
A more opening out, forming more connections into customers, engaging with them. so as to fully appreciate their needs and working with them to find solutions. This is leading us to recognize the value and power of the seamless customer experience. All of this comes from achieving a greater access and deepening the connections across networks. It is becoming the innovation network economy, to bring all the parts together.
For some time we have recognized the present innovating was simply not working Continue reading “Connecting Innovation is the New Order of Play”
Managing cash, balancing this out with your liabilities and obligations, knowing your market dynamics, and equally, having a good understanding of where the future growth lies, are all essential for managing any healthy business.
It is then by utilizing robust research and development projects, combined with an acquisition strategy that augments growth, management creates sustainable and evolving business model.
These are the hallmarks of effective leadership. through managing your future development, mostly through research and development, that when combined with a sound acquisition strategy, that you believe will augment your present internal growth, so as to look to sustain the business, longer-term, becomes your contribution as a leader. These are the bedrock of good corporate management. It seems within GE, all of these have been forgotten or collapsed. Why, I mean how can that have happened?
For a company reputed to have a good management discipline and focus, yet this year, 2017, for GE, it seems all of these are lying in tatters, or some parts will lose out as a consequence, into the future. What has gone wrong at GE?
The last few months have been some of the most shocking ones in GE’s history. GE has been around since 1892 and was one of the corporate titans of the 20th Century. Since the crisis of 2008, GE has been struggling to fully regain its position but all its actions were regarded very highly as “making good progress” as it maintained a relentless momentum of shedding and acquiring operations, as well as pursuing a buying back of its shares, and paying out the beloved GE dividend. This certainly provided a highly dynamic environment for managing the business. There has been a consistent muttering that this was not fast enough or clear enough. Well, GE faces a very different set of realities today.
Today, GE is in a very dark place at this moment. It is managing a full-blown set of crisis, that has investors highly spooked and demanding answers. Its share price is hovering around $17 per share, whereas, in February of this year, it was ranging in the $31- 32 price. Its market valuation, once over $400bn, is now closer to $150bn.
This is a long read, as the story itself is only just emerging and is a complex one. I simply have to step outside my own innovation comfort box to try to get to grips with the breaking GE story. It has shaken me. I assume you already have some awareness of what is happening in a company that has been held up over so many years, as a model of good management. Continue reading “The enemy is already within. The flood gates are open. Can GE recover?”
We have seen the incredible rise of platforms that have become part of our everyday lives. Be these Apple, Google, eBay, Amazon, Android, Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba, Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal and many more, all becoming some of the hottest companies in value. They have built out their business on powerful platforms for us to simply connect into and draw down what we value.
So there is an innovation virtual summit about to happen between 28th November 2017 and 8th December 2017. Each day you can watch for free the different video sessions, with new video sessions released on a daily basis. The final schedule will be sent by email after your registration.
For some weeks this has been in preparation and as I am lucky enough to be one of the curators and hosts, I had the chance to chat with SIX terrific and highly knowledgeable people around different subject that are dear to all our hearts, overcoming barriers and resolving many tough issues surrounding innovation.
So What Is Your #1 Question or Challenge in the next 6 to 18 months?
There is a very good chance there is an answer or a trigger into getting you closer to resolving your questions and challenges by tuning into and listening to some 28+ Innovation Experts Sharing Their Strategies and Tactics That Work.
The organizers crowdsourced the questions from their global community of 29,000+ corporate innovators, and they never imagined they would get such a huge response. The point is “Whatever challenge you’re trying to tackle right now, someone else already has figured it out. So by asking these 28 innovation experts to answer them, we clustered the questions into broader themes and then explored these in exchanges that had different depth and breadth to them that can give real value to many of the ‘burning’ questions we, as innovators, have to face.
It’s free, and you can attend on any device, from anywhere you have an internet connection. The interview talks will be available online to watch at your own convenience – there’s no strict schedule to follow.
Continue reading “Are you coming to the Innovation Virtual Summit?”
It is always welcome to read a thoughtful article that reminds me, no, it actually inspires me, by reinforcing my own belief that innovation is progressing, even if this is sometimes frustratingly slow. The innovation architecture is progressively being recognized and put into place, it’s forming the building blocks of the innovation platform we need to build upon, ones for more radical innovation outcomes.
So the article “Want to Win at Business Model Innovation? Put these Four Pillars in Place” was written by Rick Waldron, ex Nike, and Intel.
He grabbed my attention with this comment early on in the article:
“ Little attention has been paid to the architecture required to stand up a sustainable, impactful new business innovation capability. Those of us battling it out in the trenches are left to learn the hard way”
I so very much relate to this central recognition that most organizations lack a solid, well thought through innovation architecture, it is one of the real reasons innovation is constantly under-delivering.
Rick points out:“Corporate innovation efforts by and large continue to fall far short of moving the needle in any significant, sustained way or of delivering on the promise of future-proofing companies against ever-increasing disruptive forces.
While a growing number of companies have begun to find some success in implementing design-centered thinking, lean innovation techniques, jobs-to-be-done analysis, and empowering employees to solve customer and internal process problems, much of the focus has been on supporting current business models – i.e., on incremental rather than game-changing innovation. But this work is merely the table stakes for staying in the current game”
The view offered in this article suggests four pillars to be put into place: 1) A Committed and Engaged Leadership, 2) A Comprehensive Innovation Strategy, 3) A Sustained Mindset Shift and 4) A Comprehensive Tool Kit.
Rick’s article just gave me the chance to go back and review my thoughts and relate his excellent suggestions and thinking into some of the work I have written about in this area. So I wanted to link them up a little more in my mind on some diverse and previous thoughts that I have written about and hopefully link them far more into yours and this article of Rick’s. Continue reading “Building upon the four essential pillars for innovation”
We all spend our Sundays in different ways. Some spend it recovering from the Saturday night, other spend large chunks of the day traveling to meet up with friends or family. Others go off to the gym, jog, take a run, or simply enjoy a day of pursuing something differently from their working week. We do different things. Mine is usually a mix of exploring and researching around innovation in the morning, a couple of hours at the gym, a walk to finish off and then a mixture of enjoying a nice home-cooked meal and a relaxing evening.
That part of the day spent on innovation, researching and reading, tends to partly stimulate my week ahead in different ways, as I try to reinforce what I’ve learned by applying this to the work gathered around me at that point in time. I am looking to see how it does help shape and influence it, it ‘fuels’ the coming-in week in some part. Of course, this greatly depends on what I am working on, for others and, for myself. Some weeks I just don’t find the opportunity to apply it, so that “Sunday thinking” sits there for another day or week, or even months before I revisit it or connect it back up. Continue reading “Innovation System Thinking on a Sunday! What, no roast or glass of wine? Later.”
Transformation is very hard at the best of times for all of us to undertake. Digital transformation forces us to work with mostly emerging, constantly evolving technologies, and then apply these in an integrated way into an existing business. This stretches our abilities significantly, as we may remain unclear of the finished design for quite some time.
We have to evolve it, as we go. With anything that is evolving in front of our eyes, we will need to recognize some of the decisions we will make will turn out to be wrong but made as a good judgment at the time, on ’emerging’ evidence, not proven. Achieving a digital transformation is becoming really essential for innovation, helping to enable your ability to deliver sustained growth through making all the ‘connections’ come together in different ways than ever before; in evaluations, analysis, in collaborations and in the process from discovery to eventual commercialization.
Digital transformation executed well is a really big undertaking. It goes way beyond making a series of incremental improvements to become cloud-ready as are supposed to build in and reflect social, mobile and digital technologies in the solution set. We need to fundamentally transform our processes by opening up and engaging with customers in dramatically different ways, in real-time, in constant exchanges and connected ways. Everything needs to be tracked and traced. Continue reading “Moving to a Digital World totally across your Business is highly challenging”
