gaining innovation momentum | Innovating in the Age of Ecosystems

Getting the Business Model Story Right.

Framing the business model needs a compelling story so that it can be quickly and well understood by others. This is absolutely core. So, how do we go about it?

Recently I provided this contribution to Patrick Stähler’s blog that forms part of fluid minds, a think tank and consultancy for strategic and disruptive innovations. They focus discussions on their very distinctive version of the Business Model and its design.

This was on some thoughts on how to explain your business model through a story or your business narrative. The original post is here

The hard part comes after designing your new Business Model when you have to explain it. Continue reading “Getting the Business Model Story Right.”

So are we all all suffering innovation disillusionment?

You get this increasing sense that the ‘fizz’ has gone out of the innovation bubbly.

The innovation party presently feels a little flat.

The numerous delicious canapés to choose from are turning up at the edges as we are becoming disillusioned, just being fed on a present unexciting incremental innovation diet, lacking any real substance.

People are milling around with that bored look on their faces, some are also slumped down checking their watch or smartphones on when is the best time to cut out and find somewhere else to be, rather than be here. Has the fizz gone from innovation?

Are we being moved by innovation anymore?

Is innovation becoming a boring place to be seen for hanging out and being involved? Are we all feel that there is a less creative buzz going around?

Perhaps, it depends for each of us yet collectively you might agree we do feel something is definitely missing. The excitement has left the room, innovation has become too predictable. Continue reading “So are we all all suffering innovation disillusionment?”

Learning favours the brave who respond faster

The challenges we are facing today seem to be coming faster at us, more complex to decipher and then re-evaluate how we should respond.

To achieve a faster response we certainly need to educate the organization more than ever.
We need to absorb more, we need to encourage learning more especially to pursue innovation.

We need to actively set up learning ways within our organizations to establish their abilities to recognize the value of new, external information (knowledge), assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends.

Innovation within the organization needs not just greater recognition of its vital parts, but also of its status as a value-enhancing and organizational life-changing event that we need to move towards increasingly in more organized ways.

Innovation needs to be recognized as a clear discipline, new expertise that is as powerful as Marketing became some decades ago. Continue reading “Learning favours the brave who respond faster”

Organizations are in a constant dilemma of the innovation fit.

The issue of “where does innovation fit?” is one of the most difficult ones to address in many organizations. It seems to fit uncomfortably for many.

At the top of our organizations they ‘require’ innovation but will often not want the potential disruption this might entail.

Yet the organization today is being challenged like never before, it has gone from managing the predictable business to responding to the unpredictable, more opportunistic and alert to change, a place innovation can fit within the need to respond to this different environment.

This is the final post in the series that has focused on the innovation work mat components
Continue reading “Organizations are in a constant dilemma of the innovation fit.”

Are you evolving the innovation function and design

source: prophet.com — image credit www.prophet.com

Organizations are struggling to forge a new path in innovation function and design that captures opportunities fast and also exploits the increasing need of being adaptive and flexible.

Organizations are looking at structures for their innovation activity that are taking a more agile and focused approach, wanting to push for constantly accelerating the process. New practices are emerging.

This is demanding more radical redesigns of the function, processes and structures around innovation. Innovators are being more challenged.

Against this need for new, more radical designs there still lies that underlying concern, often at the top of our organizations, on how to manage innovation risk without significant organisational disruption.

There is this lingering fear that pushing for more radical innovation can create significant upheaval within the organization. Innovation is being challenged by the view of “we want predictable innovation but radical enough to make sure we grow.”

Innovation has to manage within this conflicting message. It is through the well-designed system, processes and function that this can happen but this needs redesigning fairly radically to adjust to today’s world of wanting innovation faster than ever.
Continue reading “Are you evolving the innovation function and design”

Successful Innovation needs a common language, context and communicating

The story of Babel — The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

People disconnect because they lack what is needed to connect! Innovation thrives from the knowledge and you need to make sure this is allowed to flow.

To achieve those essential knowledge connections, you need a shared understanding of innovation, that common sense of purpose as a framework. This will though, always stay a work-in-progress.

You need to begin to build a common language of greater understanding. We need to unite around innovation. Imagine if you work consciously to put knowledge in the hands of people willing to make innovation happen, what the potential might be?

Give people the power of the context for their innovation engagement and that shifts everything to give them a clearer shape and meaning. You are laying out the conditions, criteria and circumstances, giving innovation its foundations.

Continue reading “Successful Innovation needs a common language, context and communicating”

Taking the hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement

Taking the hill. Pfc. John J. Allen of Company E in the 25th Infantry Division leads his men in attack on the west central front in Korea, March 30, 1951.

How do we move innovation forward? We need to see this as a battle of hearts and minds, of overcoming dogma and fixed mindsets, using skirmishes to advance the innovation advancement. We need to break out of entrenched positions and lead innovation forward.

Many people feel innovation is an uncomfortable place, it often is at the edge, it deals in both opportunity and risk, it is uncertain to commit to joining the innovation battle. Sadly the majority working within our organizations do not understand innovation, it is too intangible, it seems shrouded in mysteries, yet it offers challenge, excitement and satisfaction. To achieve ‘something’ is highly motivating.

We firstly need to mobilize around innovation

To mobilize the organizations troops you have to give them objectives, they need to identify and be given a clear understanding of the ‘cause and its effect’. Over time they can recognize the positive effects and begin to understand the consequences if they don’t join in and engage.

Let me use a military metaphor, in war for this post.

Continue reading “Taking the hills, one at a time, for innovation advancement”

Developing talent to drive innovation

I recently participated in a survey for APQC that was looking to identify the hot topics within product development and innovation. One or two hot spots surprised me, others less so.

In the round-up of results almost two-thirds of survey respondents have placed refining the identification of customer needs and remaining competitive in terms of profit at the top of their product development agendas. I like the increasing emphasis on identifying customer needs

Among the potential research areas respondents were asked about, they felt that developing talent to drive innovation was the most important. The second one was around rapid product development: How to Move Products to Market Faster.

The one that really caught my eye was organizations have allocated the most funds to improvement in developing talent to drive innovation. This is heartening but also a worry.

Continue reading “Developing talent to drive innovation”

Facing the future or staying locked in the slow lane of the past?

Today we face unprecedented change; organizations are being hit on multiple sides, often by a bewildering set of forces to make them feel the immediate need is to go back into themselves, to be more inward than looking out and being open to facing the future. There is this feeling today of being battered. Organizations are feeling the full force of the winds of business and global change.

Stopping, reflecting and then moving on.

Organizations are grappling with how to navigate through an unprecedented set of early 21st century challenges. How can they adjust to a more open and transparent world, a more fluid and adaptive one, that needs to be replacing the one we have been operating within all of the last century? One that seems to work no more as its very foundations seem to be crumbling. Organizations are in a period of relearning and understanding these ‘new’ forces at work. Continue reading “Facing the future or staying locked in the slow lane of the past?”

Innovation requires the nesting of all capital

Innovation cannot exist without all the capitals that contribute to its make-up. Yet we simply fail to appreciate all the capitals that innovation requires. It is a real pity as they are truly nested.

Equally many innovators are simply not prepared to put in the necessary work to achieve this understanding and the organization’s innovation looses out, stuck in perpetual incremental mode, lacking in anything really new or radical.

All the capitals ‘fire’ innovation. They make innovation combustible.

More often than not when we talk within business of capital we tend to default to the financial kind. Of course providing the financial capital into innovation is vital; it provides the potential ‘burn’ but what is often understated and certainly under-appreciated is the other capitals. These have been ‘tagged’ under intellectual capital or are often ‘lumped’ into our intangible assets.

What we need is to recognize the real “nesting effect” all our capitals.

Continue reading “Innovation requires the nesting of all capital”