Building Innovation Capability | Navigating the Next Evolution of Ecosystems

The Arrival of the Digital Monsoon for Innovation

April 28, 2022November 1, 2014 by @paul4innovating

If you ever have lived in the tropics you know of the arrival of the monsoons.

Skies darken, clouds gather, often thunder and lightning combine, the wind picks up and the rain ‘announces’ its arrival in sheer torrents of heavy, drenching, wave-upon-wave of unrelenting force.

It is hard to stand upright or know what to do. Everything around you transforms. Dry, often parched land quickly turns to rivers of water, seeking out everything to shift and move along and eventually going everywhere to transform the landscape.

We are presently being told we are at the beginnings of a digital revolution; it has been likened to a tsunami in its eventual (devastating) effect on our organizations and by inference, the impact it will have on each of our lives.

Lay out the path, get out of the way but give me ambition please.

April 28, 2022October 22, 2014 by @paul4innovating

Today we see a new commission elected in Europe. As a European you always want this to be a new beginning, a new hope, having plenty of ambition, perhaps a new start for Europe.

Jean-Claude Junker has become the new president of the European Commission and along with his new Commission team has been setting out their priorities for regaining momentum for Europe.

I was re-reading Mr Junker’s policy agenda based on “Jobs, Growth, Fairness and Democratic Change” and you realise not just the complexity and challenge all this entails, bringing 28 countries along still, it seems, a pathway that still talks “a single union.”

It prompted this post.

Are you hearing all the voices for ideas?

April 28, 2022October 17, 2014 by @paul4innovating

So where do ideas come from? The most popular one is the ‘voice of the customer’ yet this is one of the many ‘voices’ that need to be allowed to speak.

In this fuzzy front end of innovation where ideas are generated, there are many places we can ‘discover and listen’ to the voices that will provide concrete ideas and concepts.

Let’s take the time to recognize these and ask you, the reader, do you have a systematic plan to capture all these voices?

The Voice of the Customer
The most talked-about place to find the ideas that are closer and relevant are the search for new ideas around the jobs needing to be done (jtbd).

We get closer to these voices when we use a variety of techniques that give this voice its chance to speak.

We do this through customer focus groups, user panels, customer surveys, lead-user research, direct observation of the user in their environment, and allowing ourselves to become fully immersed in a customer’s experience.

The Real Race is to Invest in Knowledge Assets and Grand Innovation Challenges

April 28, 2022October 5, 2014 by @paul4innovating

We need to connect our knowledge and put these assets into solving grand challenges.

Lets focus on the bigger picture here.

Developing our knowledge and then putting it to good use gives us the potential for securing a competitive position- that goes without saying, perhaps.

Living in Europe offers us enormous history, diversity and a constant respect for the make-up of its different cultures.

Europe is a very proud continent forged from this history of competitiveness but it is grappling with its place in the global world where others seem to have a greater present-day advantage.

Building Collective Agility for Innovation

April 28, 2022October 1, 2014 by @paul4innovating

Agility is important to me. For me, agility and innovation have needed to always go together.

I named my company Agility Innovation Specialists and at its core, we state that the value of this focus can offer a real “intensity in innovation” that we believe reflects today’s world of need.

We encourage you to disrupt the accepted, to constantly challenge the current ways and push into uncomfortable territory. We suggest you seek out customers’ unmet needs, and unexplored opportunities to give a new diversity to any thinking, and then we set about accelerating these ideas to fruition. Those all need abundant and constant agility.

The growing need is to move innovation into the cloud.

April 28, 2022September 23, 2014 by @paul4innovating

As business organizations continue to struggle with the decision of ‘if and when’ and then ‘what’ within their systems and processes should go into the cloud, one should ask where does innovation sit in this gathering, if not compelling and overwhelming view, that the cloud will bring IT closer to the business needs of today in very radical ways.

Innovation is certainly one of those in need of concerted effort to bring up to date within organizations, to make it more inclusive and that can come through delivering it across the organization within the cloud. Highly visible, agile and core to the organizations future, seen by all and truly valued.

Let me outline my initial thoughts here, put the seat belt on for the ride please: making the business case.

Opening Ourselves Up to the Innovation Mashup

April 28, 2022September 10, 2014 by @paul4innovating

Sometimes some things come slower than others, and then they suddenly rear up and hit you, opening you right up to completely new ways of innovation.

We don’t make all the connections we should; we are too caught up in our little world, beating our existing drum, drowned out by its own noise, to step back and appreciate something new is really happening.

Recently I was investigating one strand of thought and then bingo! Something else leads to something else and the rest, so to speak, becomes history.

I’ve been reflecting on the new era of innovation and opening myself up to exploring alternatives, different thoughts, discussions and viewpoints.

Seeing Your Innovating Future Across Different Horizons

April 28, 2022September 5, 2014 by @paul4innovating

The three horizons offer us much to frame our innovating future
Following a couple of recent posts on reflecting on the three horizons methodology, firstly here and then here, I wanted to come back to where I see real value, in managing your innovating future.

The 3H methodology enables us to look out into the future, across three different horizons that can manage the transition between the short, medium and long term in our innovation activities, something often badly lacking in most organizations’ thinking.

It allows us to gauge the challenges, adding aspects we are beginning to gain a sense of, transitioning from one position to another. It allows us to deepen our evaluation of the innovation portfolio of activities, resources and skillsets across different delivery frames of the short, medium and longer term.

Three Horizons – fields of future, full of foresight.

April 28, 2022September 2, 2014 by @paul4innovating

I’d like to relate to parts of a book that came out in late 2013 from Bill Sharpe, actually more a booklet, called “Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope”, published by Triarchy Press, has some really helpful insights that is truly fields of future, full of foresight.

In this book, Bill outlines his distinct ways of creatively working through many of the unknowns, by framing and connecting through the Three Horizons, (3H) as his contribution to the patterning of hope for all our futures.

I draw out a lot from his thinking, experiences and approaches within the book. Some of these initial thoughts outlined here, re-affirm my own thinking and focus on the 3H, specifically for innovation and its management.

Here are some of the ‘triggers’ I connected with strongly from his book:

Asset Orchestration is Required for more Dynamic Innovation

April 28, 2022August 21, 2014 by @paul4innovating

We all should recognize the incredible power of orchestration that is needed in innovation to bring the initial idea into a final successful commercial concept.

We have an ongoing need to create, extend and modify resources constantly and to achieve this we need to orchestrate and enable those resources to exploit and execute our innovations.

We need to ‘asset orchestrate’.

One of our blind spots is perhaps the focus on pursuing and organizing around innovation just within an organization and not being as aware of all that is externally going on around us.

There are continued and rapid shifts taking place outside the walls of our organizations, constantly occurring and changing, often it becomes a ‘race’ between spotting an opportunity and executing on it before your competitors do, or the market further moves on and it becomes a lost opportunity to have exploited.