gaining innovation momentum | Innovating in the Age of Ecosystems

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.”

Disruption, Destruction, Digital Our Way of Future Life?

I wanted to depart from just focusing on extolling innovation within this post – a sort of sound off, of sorts, it is a real need to look to the future.

It seems in all I keep reading that we are being extorted to disrupt our enterprises before someone else does.

The constant threat of both those known to us and those unknown competitors who can simply raise money based on a disruptive concept, provide a different business model and then attack tomorrow. It is not a comfortable feeling is it?

We are told It is in our ‘complacency’ that we are losing our competitive advantages, even face extinction from those that attack and tear down, replacing it with something different and supposedly better. Did we really need it?

Can we learn to adapt as fast as all that is seemingly coming toward us?

There is so much disruptive power being harnessed that we are all facing an exponentially more complex and challenging environment. Why is there seemingly this determination to tear down many parts of the fabric of our society by challenging institutions, businesses and government structures?
Continue reading “Disruption, Destruction, Digital Our Way of Future Life?”

Balancing Our Innovation Understanding

Recently I have been hearing a lot about different innovation equations that will deliver value on the efforts you put in.

I think the activity behind all of this is actually very encouraging, it shows the current dissatisfaction with what we have and the quest for providing a formula for overcoming this ‘present state’.

I think they are all contributing to a promising future. Yet we need to consider the balance within any innovation understanding or equation to derive its real value.
Continue reading “Balancing Our Innovation Understanding”

Shifting to Ultimate Outcomes

Many organizations are struggling with their metrics and ways to measure the progress and success of their business.

From this writer’s point of view, their innovation activity gets caught up in plenty of unintended consequences, to put it mildly, in wasted debate, discussion & bad decisions through wrong measurement criteria.

Firstly, we are still locked in the old paradigm of thinking this is an industrial economy where we set about measuring inputs to innovation (R&D expenditure, capital investment) and then focused on the intermediate step of throughput and then outputs (publications, production units, patent filing, end products).

We also perceive innovation far too much still as an activity within just one company – viewed as linear, with considerations for services more of an afterthought (like ‘bolt-ons’). Production systems remain far too often the driving force of performance judgement.
Continue reading “Shifting to Ultimate Outcomes”

Moving innovation into our core – Part three

This is the third and final part of this series on the rethinking within the management of the innovation system and how to view the core.

Part three– Technology will drive innovation change.

We are in need of a different sustaining capacity, one build around innovation as its continuous core; constantly evolving, adapting, learning and adjusting, in perpetual motion.

We are heading for transformational change

Digital technology and the cloud are offering us a radically different conduit to achieve a new engagement process within our organizations. Innovation is going to be very much caught up in this transformational change.
Technology and data will be innovation’s catalyst for change.

Continue reading “Moving innovation into our core – Part three”

Moving innovation into our Core- Part One

Innovation has sat outside the core of organizations’ central systems for long enough.

Arguably this lack of being a core as the central need of providing sustainable growth holds the deeper understanding of innovation back.

A core that could offer up the sustaining value and contribution innovation can make, to the growth and future well-being of organizations and having available the level of resources and commitments it needs. Today innovation seems to be falling short in delivering on its promise. Why?

A three-part series on rethinking the management of the innovation system.

Part one, building the business case of needed change in how we manage innovation.

This part is about those constant top-level concerns that needs finally to be addressed, if innovation ever can become core
Continue reading “Moving innovation into our Core- Part One”

Are you going all digital on me?

Well then, are you going all digital on me from your innovation activities?

Take care, it does change our view of the world, as we look inside-out or even, outside-in

So there we all were, getting really very comfortable in our open innovation activities, learning to collaborate and co-create outside our organizations.

Even our management has finally got “open innovation”.

We are encouraged and allowed to collaborate outside our four walls of the organization as the penny has finally dropped that “not all knowledge resides within the company”.

We had worked through some of the cultural stuff, shifted around the team who like to collaborate, pushing others less collaborative to the back; the conflict points, we had established the process, practice and tools.

We even have our legal teams on board helping sort out all the conflicting positions that open innovation can mean when it comes to dividing up the IP spoils and even had our leadership tuned in, singing our praises and even (heavens forbid) getting engaged in the process.

When the world shifts, we all need to as well, or we get left behind.
Continue reading “Are you going all digital on me?”

What makes up your innovation capital?

If someone came to you and asked the question: “tell me what makes up your financial capital?”

I expect you could answer this fairly comfortably.

It might need a little added help from your finance department but you could produce and show significant details that we are all ‘schooled’ to understand and generally have accepted, under common definitions and standard practice.

Our businesses are measured constantly on their financials, we produce a constant flow of reporting documents that provide useful insight and allow for a more informed judgement by present and future investors on the health of the company. We are ‘wedded’ to our financials and ignore the real value within our organizations of all the other critical capitals that generate and strengthen the business.

What if that same person came to you and asked instead: “what makes up the innovation capital of the company?’” could you answer this as clearly as the financial one – I would suggest most probably not. (By the way, if you feel you can then please let me know I would be more than interested).

We are focusing more on past performance and not future generating potential by staying fixated on just the financials within all that makes up our organizational capital

So what makes up our innovation capital and why is it important to know?
Should we care, does it matter? I would argue it does, increasingly so. Within the innovation capital lies the future of the organization and holds one of the real golden keys to the sustaining performance of the company, or not.
Continue reading “What makes up your innovation capital?”

Dealing with Your Darwin Effect through Innovation

I have been working away, as my labour of love, frustration and sheer determination, on my thinking through the ‘harnessing’ of the dynamics within innovation, to offer organizations their innovation fitness and future landscape design, so as to radically alter their present capabilities and capacity to innovate.

The aim is to relate these to where your organization is in their existing capabilities, where they need to go, in identifying and clarifying the necessary capabilities they need to have, so as to achieve certain strategic goals and then, “we”, together, collectively prioritize the critical ones as ‘must have’ and then set about filling the gaps.

This is the innovative fitness journey needed to be travelled.

The building of those more ‘dynamic’ capabilities and competencies are the ones you need so as to provide for a more dynamic innovation environment and deliver unique capacity for your ongoing strategic goals.
Continue reading “Dealing with Your Darwin Effect through Innovation”

Questioning internally those many product failures

There is a variety of different views on our product failure rates. According to some, the failure rate for new products launched for instance in the grocery sector is 70 to 80 per cent in the US. For smaller US food businesses launching new products, the success rate is even lower around 11 per cent.

These are really high failure rates but is this a myth or reality? How does your organization evaluate product failures? Do you really want to talk about them?

Continue reading “Questioning internally those many product failures”