Innovation’s power lies in the ability to adapt, evolve, and collaborate, and our need is to make this as much of a dynamic ecosystem as possible to tackle the growing complexity and challenges we are facing today and in the future.
In recent weeks, I have been deepening my thinking on innovation ecosystems and the dynamics within these that can make them different by giving them this “dynamic focus.”
So, it is time to embrace the power of dynamic ecosystems – where innovation excellence isn’t just a goal; it’s the very fabric of sustained success.
Dynamic ecosystems are not just about collaboration and innovation. They are also about adaptation and resilience. In today’s business landscape, where change is the only constant, businesses that can adapt quickly and effectively will be the ones that thrive. Dynamic ecosystems provide a framework for businesses to do just that.
Dynamic ecosystems are not just about individual businesses; they are about creating value for the entire ecosystem that businesses participate in.
Innovation thinking in Ecosystem and Gen AI design
I believe there is a real need to construct a different innovation process. We are rapidly seeing the past of innovating simply in terms of operating on our own.
We must question partnerships we have seen work in the past and ask if they are suitable for the future.
Innovation is undergoing a radical change, in opening up to technology, collaborative thinking and the value of generative AI thinking.
For me, ecosystem innovation and generative AI have arrived at that pivotal point to significantly influence future innovation design. It is where we need to question workflows and processes, as openness has become increasingly central to our thinking and development-building process.
Innovation needs reinventing. There are new ways to capture, extract and deliver value. Adopting ecosystem thinking combined with Generative AI will augment, automate and rapidly scale innovation.
I have been exploring this to support those recognizing change is happening to support this innovation transformation. This follows from several posts in building this into a new approach and thinking over innovation designs.
It has been amazing how AI generative thinking (GenAI) has taken hold. It has only been one year since the launch of ChatGPT, then with a follow-up of GPT-4. In a really fascinating routine or guide to how Generative AI developed, then you should read Bernard Marr’s post It is well worth the read.
As he points out, “Today, Generative AI stands as a testament to the power of human imagination and technological innovation. It has grown from humble beginnings into a sophisticated technology capable of producing remarkable output.”
As Barnard Marr opens his post “Generative AI has the unique ability to create. It can generate new content like audio, art, and text, all by learning from a set of data without explicit instructions.” I feel “explicit instructions” need to be carefully managed.
For me, the last six months or so I have been working with ChatGPT to learn different ways to look at focus areas I spend in advising and mentoring and where innovation links into my different work.
This is rethinking the innovation process, how ecosystem thinking and design can shape our collaborative worlds differently, looking much harder at innovation ecosystems and applying different triggers of thought in how AI generative thinking will influence and shape much of the Energy Transition, as my endpoints.
Recently, I have been looking specifically at the way the (traditional) innovation management process will change. The deployment of AI-driven thinking utterly alters my perspective of “delivering” innovation.
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.
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
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.
There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we manage innovation, which needs the power of ecosystem thinking and design. Not only in thinking and design but in how we structure its architecture, one based on platforms, open apps, and a marketplace where like-minded people and organizations go and participate in building new impactful innovation solutions together. This needs to be in open, highly collaborative ecosystems.
We need a better conceptual framework to build, one based on knowledge-based intelligence and well-grounded, driven by dynamic and constant interactions, events, and processes, so all involved can be engaged in building solutions that have fresh impact and value within the market space identified.
My mind map of the over-arching aims of a new innovation narrative is shown below.
Innovation & Ecosystems need to be our new thinking of design and delivery
An ecosystem approach on a common, shared technology platform that can significantly enhance the discovery, experimentation, exchange, exploring, and exploiting all the diverse skills and expertise from idea to commercialization and life cycle development and maturity.
The increased pace of change requires the ability to deploy, activate and utilize resources and assets to extract the potential through the diversity of the network formed within the ecosystem and the relationships engaged in the mutual pursuit
The end result needs to show actual robustness, genuinely dynamic and holistic in its dimensions and offerings, proving among its metrics faster learning rates, leveraging all that a technology-enabled platform offers, actual collaborations and shared engagements, supporting knowledge, data, insights, and people.
Open Collaboration needs to be top of mind
Innovation needs to rely increasingly on interconnected organizations organized around a central focal point of value and impact. An ecosystem design so organizations can act differently on strategies, business models, leadership, and customer engagement to build new value and worth.
We all need to recognize that Innovation and Ecosystems go together they make the potential for more sustainable solutions, they are the new combination that enables your thinking and design of new concepts and solutions to be “worked upon” in a more open, collaborative way where a richer diversity of thinking “comes into play” and the end result has that potential to be so much better than the sum of all the parts, it magnifies the sum!
As I mentioned in a previous post, for any innovation enterprise change, I do not recommend a “big bang” solution; it should be phased to validate and grow to understand, build up validation, justify making the changes, bedding in the thinking needed and approaches to provide the level of returns and the growing understanding of cost/ benefit conversion.
The potential returns, including increased agility, improved innovation outcomes, enhanced collaboration, and long-term competitiveness, make this radical change worthwhile for organizations aspiring to thrive in today’s dynamic business environment. The ability to build the context and show its (ongoing) value makes the difference. You need a systematic approach and project staging plan.
The importance here is recognizing the shift in mindset and thinking towards a Building Block approach to build up the Innovation Stacks. Each stack “sits” on a technology platform. Thinking through what this means requires understanding, relating, and putting a clear context of innovation, what you want to achieve, and how to set about this.
How difficult would it be to embrace this Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework, as it is often argued that most people want to keep innovation management and its process simple? I wonder if that is the current incumbents, be these current innovation management software providers or individuals inside the organizations resisting change, as it brings significant uncertainty of change and disruption to the (inadequate) process, one that I feel is not fit for today’s and tomorrow’s innovation purpose.
So how to set about making this change and who should be involved as it is a more radical design of a holistic nature is what I am outlining in this post and the next one focuses more on the project organization needed.
Organizations in today’s business environment need to adapt rapidly and dynamically, the need to bring the innovation management process into a constant technological advancement, and more designed by their own specific needs and not “offered” as a rigid set of solutions. We need to embrace a significant change in the way we “set about” innovation.
It needs increased agility and looks to have innovation consistently redesigned to meet different challenges and needs. It needs a better set of flexible design elements and system thinking to gain from reuse and redesign rapidly. I like the term I saw the other day “systems of gravity” to get tasks completed faster than what is being offered today in innovating software solutions.
The need is to set about building a compelling business case to make the move to embrace this (radical) design change and its potential value in returns and flexibility. I want to begin to sketch out the pathway of change this might need. It will be hard work, but doing this in stages gives growing understanding and value, and I believe ultimately rewarding.
We cannot afford not to avoid changing our innovation processes as we deal with a far more complex and challenging world. We seem to be keeping innovation as a disappointing and often frustrating outcome for many leaders of organizations today, innovation needs to be top of mind and better equipped to deliver.
I proposed a new Framework for managing innovation this week, called the Final Perspective: A Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework. This is approaching innovation and its management in more of a holistic, technology-enabled way based on the use of a cloud-enabled Platform and Ecosystem thinking and design.
The thrust of the framework is “Organizations can create a more comprehensive and effective innovation ecosystem by utilizing building blocks as components of the innovation stack, guiding platform development using the innovation stack, and supporting the innovation stack with a platform. Equally, components are oriented towards learning, knowledge, creativity, design, and testing—essential tasks in the innovation process“.
I am suggesting a vertical and horizontal design applying innovation stack and building block approaches, which may be new concepts for many. Still, they do have value in enabling a more dynamic environment for innovation to connect to the potential it so often promises but fails to deliver upon.
Much stands in the way of taking an idea or concept and getting it to a successful launch, recognition, and, most importantly, adoption. Innovation management and its process need changing, seriously updating with more of an enterprise framework. I am proposing one.
I wrote a post “Building Up to the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework Validation“, providing the investigations and subsequent posts I provided to build the argument towards this solution. They are concise synopsises to get this base for my thinking and understanding of why innovation processes and their management need to change.
