During this week, commencing 15th October 2023, I am discussing and explaining a framework for building innovation ecosystems on my ecosystem4innovators.composting site.
I have been exploring for some time a transformative concept to move innovation into the world of ecosystems. I outlined my proposed innovation framework in the building blocks necessary. The extended series of posts over thirteen or so, are all here on this posting site, summarized in this post of “The building out of the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework.”
The focus was on proposing to single entities, and now I want to extend this into the future need to build innovation ecosystems that enable and connect the essential components required.
The interplay potential in exploring the combination of humans, technology and AI
This interplay between humans, technology, and AI is dynamic and involves continuous interaction, collaboration, and feedback between these elements. The future of innovation, by combining these, offers a very rich promise to provide a fascinating and different future.
Firstly, this interplay needs some higher-level thinking to put some insights into what this interplay might look like and lead to:
Exploring the interplay between Humans, Technology and AI for design thinking
Why is design thinking regarded as so crucial to the future of innovation in a world of accelerating interplays between humans, technology and generative AI?
By embracing Design Thinking principles differently in the future of innovation, organizations can foster a more profound culture of creativity, empathy, collaboration, and user-centricity. This can lead to the development of innovative solutions that address real-world problems while considering the interplays between humans, technology, and generative AI.
Firstly, we have the interconnected global marketplace as our context
The change toward an interconnected and conscious global marketplace has been of significant importance, reshaping business strategies, consumer expectations, and societal values.
Innovation is certainly a complex and dynamic process that involves many factors and actors and I certainly feel it has been shifting in its focus. I have been thinking of where we have been placing the emphasis over the past ten years.
I decided to ask GPT-4 what major shifts have occurred in how we approached innovation ten years ago and today. It was suggested that these were the following.
Do you agree, what do you feel is missing? I like the broad shifts indicated but what has been missed?
I wrote a mini-series of three posts to introduce a radical concept that envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy.
It aims to trigger innovation engagement and activation strategies to change the energy transition dynamics within a community setting, offering decentralized community energy.
It focuses on the community in a decentralized way for its energy. It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment through innovation, creativity and ecosystem thinking and design.
Imagine transforming the energy transition into a holistic ecosystem of interconnected businesses, each contributing unique value to accelerate sustainable energy adoption.
The links to take you to the sites where you can read the proposed solution are at the bottom of this post.
Introducing the Energy Transition Nexus: A Living Energy Organism” that challenges the Conventional Approach to the Energy Transition
“Making something harmonious” often means we have to reconcile differences to balance out the tensions and issues to enable and make them compatible to work.
“Fusing” human engagement with technology enablement involves creating a harmonious integration of human collaboration and technological tools to enable an ecosystem’s successful development and operation. Is that possible?
How do we go about evaluating all the possible needs of customers, as they are mostly our success arbitrators? We must gain insights and refer through multiple information sources- digital data and direct human responses – than ever before; these insights are becoming essential to our businesses.
Calibrating the right way to use technology to create mutual benefit is an increasing theme across businesses, which means we need high levels of interdependence.
I wrote a post in June 2012 on thinking about the dark side of the innovation moon. As India quite rightly celebrates its first landing in lunar exploration, near the south pole of the moon, the dark side, it prompted me to look back at this post and decide to republish this again here.
Have you ever wondered what is on the other side of the moon when you look up towards it? Do we need to look beyond our horizons in our daily lives? Should we question beyond our existing horizons in how we innovate, explore, and push ourselves into the unknown?
What about the other side, the darker, unknown side of the moon? Are you ever curious about what lies behind what we can see? I certainly am.
Innovation is perhaps like the moon. We only see a part of it wherever we stand; we appreciate that part and value what we see and work within. It is even better if we can repeat it again and again. It can even offer something reassuring and comfortable; we grow comfortable within our known borders of innovation activity.
Innovation has the power to unlock the Energy Transition. Innovation thinking and design are needed everywhere within the energy system. Technological and systemic innovation is incredibly important to the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings, as well as replacing and upgrading much of the overall system design and operation of delivering energy to power our economies.
Innovation needs to be everywhere in transforming our existing energy systems. Each day, there seems to be some level of innovation development or fresh concepts breaking through, challenging the accepted or pushing the thinking in imaginative new ways.
Innovation has a central role to play in the energy system.
We need to keep pushing for discoveries, experimentation, and demonstrating. We must nurture innovation and continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway. Innovation comprises many enabling technologies; it needs to be built in a highly systematic way. The need is to continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.
Within the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework lies the core, the different innovation stacks, and the learning components. Here, I want to briefly talk about the importance of the learning components that support the innovation design and especially the different innovation stacks.
The elements of the innovation stack are designed to support innovation’s core tasks, including learning, absorbing, assessing knowledge management, creativity, design, experimentation, and testing. By modularizing these tasks and their interfaces, organizations can assess their innovation progress by having a complete innovation system available to them, designed on specific stack elements to address knowledge operation requirements in the stage of development to commercialization.
The Innovation Stacks are ready to support different steps in the innovation engagement process
Additionally, with the upgrade in technology and platform approach, we can support the rapidly emerging human-AI collaboration needed for each building block and component and provide a step-by-step validation.
Yet it is the sequence of how we learn that becomes vital to “feed” and build the innovation stacks.
During May and June 2023, I worked through and concluded my thinking on why we needed to change our Innovation approach from far to often a linear one, and consider a new, more up-to-date, and dynamic solution for managing innovation, one that recognises the non-linear nature of so much of our undertakings today in innovation, from discovery to commercialisation.
I have called this the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework– here is why and what went into this proposal that I feel should be adopted for managing innovation in the future.
As the investigation, validation, and viewpoints were built up over several posts, I felt summarising the series here gives you the appetite to delve into the posts themselves.
We need to shift our innovative thinking from static to dynamic.
We have been in very static, traditional approaches to innovation, very segmented and often insular, and as so often happens in innovation, it has complexities that seemingly grow and multiple changes, partly from what we discover in the development of new solutions but partly from far more rapid changes in the business landscape and our current innovation process often breaks down and limits the ability to manage this across the whole development to delivery lifecycle.
We need systems and processes that are flexible, adaptable, and can enable continuous improvements but are fully connected, transparent, and integrated across the entire business. We need to approach innovation differently through connected agility, have speed and automation more central, and provide roles for a great diverse set of participants.
A system that encourages forming strategic alliances, partnerships, and knowledge sharing to drive innovation and create shared value in open, thoughtful, and collaborative ways. This is where technology enables these connections and triggers different thinking in the quest for moving toward more extraordinary valuable solutions—the “connected” value of behaviours thinking ecosystems and operating on collaborative platforms.
