Foster Performance | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Innovators – are you thinking about Ecosystems?

Thinking about ecosystems certainly allows us to go out of our normal scope of internally generating new products.

It opens up a host of possibilities, that can add significantly to a new service design, new capabilities and solving more complex problems.

In opening up to managing within ecosystems, you begin to see your ability to contribute and tackle societal problems within a collaborative system.

You can see new opportunities that can allow you to enter new markets that would have been impossible as an individual organization.

You begin to see the power, scale and strength of having the collective collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional thinking design. You go beyond the utilization of leveraging existing infrastructure, building on others’ specializations and leveraging through technology powerful new concepts to tackle increasingly complex innovation design.
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The sharks that prey are arriving a lot earlier now

Change is all around us, it is accelerating not abating. Do you feel you are trapped, encircled and just a little concerned.

You often hear of volatile trading conditions, a more complex market and situations changing constantly and moving faster than ever. ‘Much’ seems to be closing in on us.

We do know we need to re-equip ourselves for constant disruption; we are really beginning to see a shift from the classic bell curve into more of a shark fin for adopting change.

One that is characterized by sudden, even violent success or an event, some moments of brilliant dominance, followed by a dramatic change in conditions as others have spotted the same opportunity and you hit a rapid decline, the race to the bottom of competition constantly negating one another.

Market are segmenting, the life cycle is shortening or having an even longer tail of dealing with slow decline and constant erosion of any competitive position. The sharks are arriving even earlier and in a greater need to show their dominance.

It does seem “creative destruction” is a central force in many of our activities. Activities where innovation is continually replacing not just in products and new services but in designing radically different business models, searching to replace less adaptive competitors in the marketplace at faster rates.

Adoption is far earlier, the pace of change is quickening and from this, the competition is responding in new ways, often surrounding the new innovation with their version, built on often a really ‘fast follower’ principle to keep in step, and throttle off any different adoption, knowing what it costs to have to win this back over time if it can at all when it switches.

The life cycle is becoming even more important to manage in all of its stages, as its traditional shape I feel, is radically altering. It is coming faster and fading away quicker unless you manage its parts very specifically.
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Making an impact on an organization’s innovation environment

Where do you set about to intervene and begin to change the organization’s ability to innovate?

There are seemingly so many intervention points it can get bewildering.

The innovation environment can be made-up of how well you collaborate and network, the level of the group and individual interactions, the presence and commitment of leadership towards innovation, as well as the organizational set-up and structures.

You can explore the make-up of the innovation environment in so many ways.

So what makes up the environment to innovation?

It is the culture, management and its people who have a mutual dependency. Culture can enhance or inhibit the tendencies to innovate, it certainly has a profound influence on the innovative capacity and provides the rich nutrients to nurture innovation or kill it. Culture has always been regarded as a primary determinant of innovation.
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The Interplay Surrounding Innovation

Innovation should be the primary source of real change. Often when exciting new innovations occur they have the power to significantly change our habits, and choice of product, preferences and ways we set about our daily lives.

Yet why is it we often ignore the power of change when we design innovation?

We often fail to fully appreciate the changes that are occurring from the innovation we produce, it often seems an afterthought, there is this lead and lag effect and needs, firstly recognition and then addressing in how we manage innovation going forward.

In a recent series introduced initially and given a feature of the week prime spot on www.innovationexcellence.com on June 7, 2015, we discussed the importance of the emerging interplays.

This series will be re-produced here as it is an important concept to consider all the aspects within any innovation interplay.

The emerging concept of “interplays” Continue reading “The Interplay Surrounding Innovation”

The "C" change within innovation

We all want innovation but often we take a ‘selected’ focus on the changes we are bringing about.

It is either in the external market place in new products, services and even new business models, yet we often ignore the amount of change we should be considering within our own organization.

As we ‘learn’ to innovate we ourselves change but often we are poor at recognizing these changes and the greater impact this might have on on all that is around us.

We miss opportunities to alter our processes, systems, structures or methods. We often fail to ‘advance’ in all the positive change innovation can bring.

We tend to ignore the change part of innovation
I believe we need to rethink this and evaluate the significant changes that should be taking place within our internal organizations as we expand our innovation activities.
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The challenge for the CIO is the fusion of business and IT.

Field guide Practicial IT Deloittes 1 — Taken from the Field Guide for Practical IT by Deloittes

In the past twelve months or even more, I think there have been some exceptional reports and thinking coming out of Deliotte’s group on business issues

These have been from their dedicated practice centers, their University Press and the Deliotte Consulting LLP, mainly from the US practice.

I would regard their thought leadership as close to the top or even at the very top of any of the big consulting firms.

I’ve certainly gained some richer understanding as I am sure many others have and for me Deloitte deserve significant praise for investing in their thought leadership thinking. Continue reading “The challenge for the CIO is the fusion of business and IT.”

Delivering the innovation core: building capability, capacity and competency.

Each organization needs to understand its strategic resources to build continuously innovation, so as to sustain and grow the organization; otherwise, it will eventually die, starved of what is vital to sustaining itself.

The resources provide the lungs that give oxygen; they need to constantly be nurtured, too breathe and pump new life into the existing.

For innovation the same applies, we need to consistently build our innovative resources, they give delivery of the healthy living cells to promote and sustain us in new value potential.

The problem is we often are not very good at maintaining our resources and innovation activity. We just simply do not sustain our efforts, we tend to allow them to drift along or become lopsided from one individual team’s efforts, while the others simply ‘wallow’ Continue reading “Delivering the innovation core: building capability, capacity and competency.”

The Connected Art of Selling Outcome-Based Solutions

The typical linear and often siloed mindset that we have for much of our innovation thinking within our business organizations has to rapidly fall away.

We are in the ‘cusp’ of a fundamental change that technology, platforms and connected ecosystems will bring into the mix for connecting and collaborating in dramatically different ways than in the past.

One of the implications will be our need in measuring the metrics within companies. The measurement of inputs, throughout and outputs need to become far more focused on delivering speed and scale potential as the critical points. We are far more needing to focus on the outcomes as our primary point of measurement.

This is a further post on discussing outcomes as the focal point of our innovation measurements, following my recent one of “Shifting to Ultimate Outcomes”

Recognizing the emergence of the outcome economy

The outcome economy which is emerging has many implications within it and how we measure and value these will become increasingly important. Companies will need better data to calculate costs, evaluate its potential value and will be modelling far more the risks and tracking the factors required to deliver within any outcome-based value promised.

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Walkabouts are needed for learning and testing ourselves

Walkabout picture — 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.

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 on.

Do you let them go, ignore them, quickly pass over them, or attempt to capture the issue as something well worth investigating further at a later stage, or just get them simply behind you in the here and now.
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Eight possible pitfalls or sinkholes around innovation

Why is it we always seem to fail back into the same traps or pitfalls?

Bad habits seem to always reoccur even when we work on trying to eradicate them.

Or we ignore the warning signs that were ‘signalling’ the problem until it is too late?

For me, innovation has eight possible pitfalls or sinkholes that we need to consciously try to avoid. Some are in our hands, others are clearly out of our hands but all we can do is try to be aware of them so we can avoid them as best we can. We sometimes need to be more prepared for these traps based on our judgement and experience.

We need to become more explicit Continue reading “Eight possible pitfalls or sinkholes around innovation”