Fresh thinking | Innovating in the Age of Ecosystems

Focusing on the Learning Components of the Composable Innovation Framework

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.

The building out of the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework.

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.

Visualizing the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework

The design concept of the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework

After a series of posts introducing and explaining the thinking and design behind the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework, I thought it would be a good idea to put this into a sequence of visuals that should take you through this to provide a decent understanding of its make-up and logic.

Organizations in today’s business environment need to adapt rapidly and dynamically, have the need to bring the innovation management process into a constant technological advancement, and be more tailored in its design 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.

If you are interested in reading more in the series I have been posting then here are the links in the order of posting.

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.

The planning out of this Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework

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 Potential Returns of the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework

Unlocking potential returns from the Composable Innovation enterprise Framework

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.

Building Up to the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework Validation

Introducing the Compüosable Innovation Enterprise Validation

On Monday 12th June 2023 I made a proposal that innovation is in need of a radical redesign. The post was my “The Final Perspective: A Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework“. This recommendation had been built out over the past three months toward this final conclusion.

Here I want to summarize the posts that were part of this build-up, that build the compelling business case for the need to change our thinking about innovation.

I looked at the present limitations of existing innovation software, emphasizing the value and contribution that having more of an innovation ecosystem thinking and design and then introducing different more technology-related concepts such as building blocks, innovation stacks, and key component relationships built on a platform approach were highlighted and explained in these posts.

The “final perspective” post proposed the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework as a comprehensive approach to addressing today and the future complexities of innovation management.

Gaining a Different Perspective on Innovation through Platforms, Blocks, and Stack Designs

Building Blocsk and Innovation Stack Designs

Innovation is a complex process that requires effective connections and collaborations among individuals and teams.

Stepping back, I want to draw down on a series of perspectives I have found invaluable. A very inspirational article by Larry Schmitt on the Innovation Stack added to my thinking about innovation stacks. Then the depth of work Sangeet Paul Choudary has explored around Platforms and his Building Block Thesis is terrific.

Both of these contributions have helped me build further upon all the diverse viewpoints and strands of thoughts I have been researching for my solution framework, one of building out innovation stacks, building blocks, and the modular and component approaches for challenging the existing designs for any innovation management process.

My fun has been piecing these together to lead me to my suggested Vertical and Horizontal Framework for achieving a different innovation management design. I will go into the final proposed components in my next post. Here I offer a different perspective of innovation that leads to proposing such a change.

Building the innovation stack

The need to think of innovation stacks for new design concepts

Developing the innovation stack takes the view that innovation is a series of building blocks stacked on top of each other with different layers to work through. These stacks follow an established logic, such as working through idea discovery, relating to given problems, exploring solutions, and determining the final model or design and the execution delivery to achieve this. Combining these “building blocks” modularly in innovation stacks creates a unique design that adapts to your specific needs and goals.

Today, innovation processes are partly designed this way but are more rigid and hold knowledge often as “islands” within a possible solution. We can mix and match different emerging or established innovation approaches but sometimes miss valuable points and due to this lack of “being connected up” we lose flexibility, sometimes meaning and miss some of the potential value as the parts are not as well interlinked or dynamic; we screen out more than we add-in. Our approach today is to reduce complexity as early as possible and make decisions perhaps too early; we often stop the additional learning by further probing and gathering.

I believe in approaching innovation differently by combining the ingenuity of human and artificial intelligence in a more modern way, through the application of building blocks delivering specific API solutions, and innovation stacks that connect it all up, based on a technology platform that flows across all our innovation processes.

Recognizing the Building Blocks of Innovation

Recognizing the value of having building blocks of innovation underrstanding

I finished my last post, “Are we EVER going to embrace innovation?” With the argument, we need to change the innovation narrative and significantly update the innovation approach and processes to meet today’s and tomorrow’s business challenges.

I am working through what I think this should become in design and application, involving providing the key innovation building blocks as components of the innovation stack, using the innovation stack to guide platform development and the platform to support this innovation stack.

It is the “fit” of this framework that needs more of my time as we need a new powerful innovation engine that leverages the strengths of each but to ensure innovation flows across organizations transparently and openly so collaborations can utilize all that we have in proven innovation thinking to take advantage of and build this out in new ways of thinking and design.

To look forward, I would argue we always need to look back and account for the progress made in managing innovation over the years. The need today is not to dispense with this but to link it fully up.

So this post reviews many great contributors to advancing innovation over the years.

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.