Advancing innovation | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Deepening the Thinking Around the Innovation Mandate – part two

Building out the clarity of any robust innovations mandate needs a depth of thinking

Following on from my first post “Constructing the Innovation Mandate” we should look further into aspects of the innovation mandate that need considering and clarification

Any innovation mandate needs to consider what is meant by the following and provide explanations:

Corporate Objectives: The innovation mandate should clearly align with the organization’s corporate objectives and business strategy. It should articulate how innovation will contribute to achieving these objectives, and what specific goals and metrics will be used to measure the success of the innovation program.

Value Goals: Innovation should create value for the organization in various forms, including revenue growth, cost savings, improved customer satisfaction, and enhanced brand reputation. The innovation mandate should clearly define the value goals for the innovation program and how they will be measured and tracked over time.

Innovation Policy: An innovation policy provides guidance and direction for the innovation program, defining the types of innovation that will be pursued, how innovation projects will be prioritized, and how intellectual property will be managed. The innovation mandate should articulate the organization’s innovation policy and how it will be implemented.

License to Operate: License to operate refers to the organization’s social and environmental responsibilities and obligations. An innovation mandate should consider how innovation can help the organization fulfil these responsibilities and enhance its reputation as a responsible corporate citizen.

Constructing the innovation mandate

So often innovation struggles to be recognized for what it is. Innovation is a critical source of future competitive advantage. It is our ability to consistently capture, build and develop new ideas within organizations or in open collaborations with others that have a direct effect on revenue growth and the ability to provide future sustainability. So why is it not more central within an organization’s core?

This is part one of a two-part post around the construction of an innovation mandate.

We need to understand successful innovation actually touches all aspects of a business, by contributing to improving business processes, identifying new, often imaginative, ways to reduce costs, building out existing business models into new directions and value and discovering new ways and positioning into markets. To get to a consistent performance of innovation and creativity within organizations you do need to rely on a process, structure and the consistent ability to foster a culture of innovation.

The innovation mandate is often overlooked or undervalued.

What value does an Innovation Ecosystem offer?

*Converging ideas and thinking brings out creativity and different innovative solutions*

Innovation ecosystems are gaining good traction to build out a more robust innovation management system that can offer the interconnected network of organizations the opportunity to create and commercialize new ideas, concepts, products and services.

Participating in innovation ecosystems does have a number of advantages

Greater access to a wider range of resources and expertise through the bringing together of a diverse set of organizations that can bring together technologies and customer insights from different perspectives, drawing in different resources not usually available to one organization to offer a greater potential to innovate more effectively, in choice, options, shared thinking and risk.
Increased collaborations and co-creation through innovation ecosystems can foster the greater potential for collaborations and co-creations between associated parties that can “trigger” innovations that feed from these growing cooperations forming between the parties
Greater scalability and speed. By leveraging the resources and capabilities of other organizations, the potential to scale the innovation efforts in new ways, across different channels, not open to one organization and give different levels of speed from the establishment and reputations the partners have built up in their respective markets.
Greater flexibility and adaptability in different, more collective and imaginative ways. Multiple alerts to market changes, conditions and customers’ needs can stimulate a growing adaptability and solution design, more modular or progressive in response
Greater potential for sustainability and social impact. Innovation ecosystems increasingly need to be designed to offer more sustainable and socially responsible solutions, having partners who manage different parts of the lifecycle, can create opportunities in designing redundancy and ease of replacement that extends and expands a product’s solution, giving an ongoing positive impact while achieving re-occurring business success.

Having a purposeful innovation ecosystem, well-designed and built for highly collaborative partnerships can yield very different results than managing innovation alone. These are not one-size fits, the understanding of what is needed to turn an ecosystem concept into a winning one may have specific needs for one group, compared to another. Multiple ecosystems allow for the ability to bring together the specific partners needed to achieve one goal but recognize these changes, depending on the challenges and complexities of any innovation concept requiring this collaborative approach.

Innovation ecosystems should be dynamic and highly adaptive, as participants join, others leave as different solutions are sought and evolve from collaborations, co-creation, new technology and new business model emerges

The key is to create an environment that encourages and supports the flow of open sources of ideas and resources among like-minded participants and enables them to collaborate and learn from each other in mutually beneficial ways to advance their specific business.

Innovation Walkabouts we all need for learning and testing ourselves

*photo credit: Walkabout (1971) film by Nicolas Roeg*

How often do you pause for thought, testing yourself, questioning even simply for ‘just those few minutes,’ to allow yourself to openly challenge where you are and what you are attempting to do?

We keep relentlessly moving on, like a wandering herd of buffalo, always looking for fresh pasture, those new feeding grounds. It’s not good; we often hear and see things differently when we find the time to stand still.

Do you let those moments go? Do you ignore them, quickly pass over them, attempt to capture the issue as something worth investigating later, or just get them behind you in the here and now? We often do need to slow down and figure it out there and then.

Of course, I often get caught up in this restless pursuit of gathering more when I spend a growing amount of my time researching innovation. I keep coming across so many things that ‘trigger’ the thinking, pushing me to feel I am more often the “hunter-gatherer.”

By long-term habit, I keep reverting more into a hunter-gatherer, in my case, upon innovation insights, collecting the raw material that I am looking to translate and distribute as this growing knowledge stock eventually.

The outcome of appreciating both “reflective” moments and collecting more understanding I trust is moving me slowly towards becoming an innovation curator who, hopefully, is valued by others. Well, it’s a goal of mine.

The power of ecosystem thinking for resolving the innovation complexity of today

*Applying ecosystem thinking to innovate complex and challenging problems*

“Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems will have a powerful effect,

it alters the way we will approach problems today and in the future,

ecosystems offer a greater potential for collaborative growth, impact and sustaining innovating value”

Our understanding of innovation is changing; we are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into open and far more collaborative innovation (external orientation), with our collective thinking offering the acceleration into improving our innovation performances, leading to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success.

The search is seemingly on to find greater value, which will increasingly coalesce around different innovation ecosystems. In many different ways, we need to form significantly more relationships that increasingly matter to each organization, add value and insight, and bring external expertise inside to work on ‘greater’ innovation solutions.

Innovation Software, is it facing the Innovators Dilemma?

*The Winds of Change- Innovation Software 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.

Where will Innovation Management Software go?

This morning I decided to have an exchange on ChatGPT on the future of Innovation Management Software, I asked a number of questions in a short series and can well-relate to the answers provided incredibly quickly.

What do you think?

Do they make sense and are the suggestions a competitive threat or a trend towards a future that needs fully embracing before others do?

chat.openai.com/chat

Helping discover your innovation pathway

*You need to discover your innovation pathway*.

I started posting my thoughts on innovation in August 2010. I have written on this site alone, www.paul4innovating.com, by just coming up to a milestone of 700 posts focusing on innovation thoughts and opinions, so I just wanted to pause and think about all the different places I have tried to get the innovation message(s) out.

I always find the post-New Year to be a reflective part of the year of reviewing, deciding, and then setting new goals. This is a post about the sources of my knowledge that feeds my innovation passion.

Let me start. I often wonder whether the posts and articles I’ve written have been hitting the right buttons, helping solve the needs of those involved in innovation; I hope so. I have pushed out and explored various aspects, learning myself as I go. I have followed a number of great innovation thinkers and read different books on the areas of innovation.

It amazes me. How much is talked about, advice offered and sometimes that deep down nagging feeling, innovation understanding does not really change; it is the people managing it as they often seem to be simply passing through this innovation period onto other things or vanishing in pursuit of different career interests.

Innovation comes in different forms and problems, all requiring financial support.

*Innovation & Finance needed for the Energy Transition in developing countries*

Innovation has a very tough job of attracting the necessary money to take a concept or idea all the way through to commercialization. There is always that constant asking about the economic return and the associated risks.

Financing game-changing investments, replacing something existing or simply providing something new have tough financial questions always to be answered.

Here I am taking an innovation need in a different way than most are used to reading about. So what are right conditions to invest and realize innovation?

The Energy Transition is one of the toughest innovation challenges ever. We must remove fossil fuel as a source of energy, decarbonize our planet and replace it with clean energy alternatives of solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear and green hydrogen solutions. To make the transformation in just under 30 years is a massive task. So far, we are doing a poor job of this as markets, solutions, opinions, and financial support are all highly fragmented.

Tacking emerging and developing markets is even harder to achieve an energy transition.

Can you imagine what it is like in a developing country that lacks sufficient energy and infrastructure yet is faced with the sizable task of expanding its economy to meet growing population expectancies and the need for rising incomes to give that essential potential for growth that having energy available can provide?

Innovation: the accelerator for the changes in our energy transitions

Innovation is the accelerator in our energy transitions.

No energy transition will be achieved without invention and innovation, yet we are currently failing badly to fund research, development and deployment. We are losing the race to stop our planet’s warming as our innovative human endeavours are not at the level they should be, or we lack the “will” to make the changes we so desperately need to undergo to protect our planet.

The sheer scope of the energy transition often pulls me in so many different directions. Still, the foundation stays in place, that of making the contribution of my understanding of innovation as my focal point of contribution- the accelerant to energy change.