I wrote in an earlier blog called “the new extended innovation funnel” (http://bit.ly/hQTEJz) my reasoning for thinking differently from our traditional view of how the innovation funnel should look like. I feel it should look more like this.
The ‘classic’ innovation funnel talked about is wrong for todays job!
Continue reading “There are two distinct parts to any Innovation Funnel”
I have planned to explore in three simultaneous blogs, a trilogy of blogs, the three horizon model more extensively. It is a most valuable one to build into your thinking about strategy and innovation.
This is the final blog of the trilogy on the Three Horizon Framework and offers my thinking on an emerging framing to help in navigating through this.
The need is to define your different horizons.
Continue reading “The Navigation of the Three Horizon Framework- An Emerging Guide.”
Today managing innovation is complex; often success is measured and valued by the creative destruction of others.
The ability to ‘evolve’ is very determinant of the knowledge base, either within a given economy or within a ‘federation’ to bring together as something new, offering more value than what is on offer today.
Innovation is highly dynamic in its constant change but also in its need of constant coordination of its parts.
Nations are Very Different
No one nation can just copy another, the same as one business entity cannot simply copy another, each has distinct characteristics, a history and a certain set of ‘physical’ boundaries on where it is located.
Different cultures, and different histories set each Nation apart.
Continue reading “Economic growth is an outcome of the innovation trajectory we set.”
A growing group of investors around the world are increasingly seeking to make investments that generate social and environmental value as well as financial return. Sound impossible?
Well, no actually. There is a growing recognition of the need for effective solutions to social and environmental challenges that have increasingly real threat and growing inequalities.
Impact investing or more often housed under the broader heading of “Impact Economy” is about finding the ways to combine investors, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and business executives along with governments in finding new and different ways to explore the changing economic and social landscape.
Through this emerging newer type of investing there is potentially that the promise of new jobs and profits, mixed in with improved social impact, can be derived from new innovation activities.
It needs this convergence and seems to be gathering in pace and broader recognition.
Continue reading “Impact investing for social good through new innovation- a growing momentum?”
The challenges are growing in their social dimension across Europe, the United States and a host of other countries, both developed and developing, that are needing new fresh responses.
Social demands will inevitably increase as nations are being confronted with budgetary constraints, increased deficits and mounting debts to resolve.
Social needs will become more pressing and innovation, social innovation, will increasingly explore opportunities to extract ‘more from less.
Innovation can play an increasing part in resolving social challenges that are increasingly confronting us.
Starting a new movement on social innovation in Europe
Recently I became a member of www.socialinnovationeurope.eu . I certainly feel this is going to offer something exciting and vibrant. It is a growing community of thinkers, creators and innovators with the knowledge and skills to change the way we face Europe’s most pressing issues.
Contributors to the site will take a strong hand in shaping the direction of social innovation across Europe, breaking down silos and raising a unified voice. I need to find my own part in this, as there are multiple ways for contribution, which I’m still presently figuring out.
Continue reading “Renewing Innovation through the Social Innovation Agenda”
Some weeks back the International Herald Tribune (June 7th, 2011) offered a view by Chandran Nair, the CEO of Global Institute for Tomorrow, under the title “Can the planet support more Americas?
Then this week an article “Over-innovation makes US firms suck at Sustainability because they are too innovative” by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen (http://bit.ly/oGDObX).
Each makes me stop and come back to my deepening view we have to decouple growth and consumption through innovation.
This is not an easy subject but let me lay out some opening views and thoughts. Why bother? Well, I really do believe we need to radically change our approaches through the use of applying innovation in new ways.
These two articles added further to my personal concerns that we do need to (quickly) come out of the denial we seem to have in all societies. Innovation needs to be radically applied in new ways that alter the present mindsets of politicians, economists and business people who feel that the only path is continued consumption and growth.
This approach is simply not sustainable and we need to find a radical alternative that still offers all of us progress but in a radically altered world.
The two articles in summary first
Continue reading “How can we decouple growth and consumption through innovation?”
In a blog I wrote in November last year entitled “Moving-towards-a-more-distributed-innovation-model”( http://bit.ly/b38ixv) I outlined some thoughts on the flow of knowledge in a distributed innovation model and discussed the Absorptive Capacities more from an internal organizational perspective.
Increasingly we are looking outside for new knowledge that needs internally managing.
As organizations seek increasingly outside their own walls, the appreciation of how they are managing knowledge, learning and interpreting this is becoming a critical aspect of open innovation to be successful.
There is a growing need to absorb, integrate and apply this in new and novel ways for accelerating innovation performance.
The more we seek, the more the knowledge increases in complexity as markets are rapidly changing. The more we are relying on knowledge flowing into the organization the more we have to strengthen our inter-dependence and collaboration efforts to extract the knowledge we are acquiring for it potential value.
Are organizations recognizing the value of structuring their knowledge flows? Do they have the right learning mechanisms to accelerate and exploit new potentials from this knowledge?
Organizations tend to be set up for incremental learning.
Continue reading “Learning to absorb new knowledge for innovation”
At present we are seemingly in a state of flux, we are learning to move from linear innovation models into more dynamic ones that are increasingly forming around innovation ecosystems to provide for new collaborative structures.
Our whole understanding of innovation is changing; we are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into open (external orientation) thinking for accelerating and improving our innovation performances.
Regretfully we are not yet fully equipped to manage within these new innovation ecosystems. We need to give the factors an increasing focus and lead into a better emerging theory of leading or good practice.
Measuring innovation in different ways is becoming important Continue reading “The forming of new structures- the business innovation ecosystem”
Innovation is very often swimming in uncertain waters that rise and fall just like the waves in a sea: they are choppy, demanding and exhausting to fight against.
As uncertainty constantly arises as we discover more, and expend more energy, the very nature of our original starting point set down in a well-thought-out, and well-crafted strategy actually begins to suddenly have a realization that needs a radical change in direction..
Then we are left with more ‘open-ended’ questions than answers. Welcome to real innovation where faith and belief play an important part.
There often seems to be constantly arising critical unknowns and sometimes all you are left with as your innovation emerges is just actually and simply a new starting point.
A new starting point as the concept is so different to cause you to rethink dramatically. Innovation and its journey of discovery take you into so many new areas you never expected when you first thought of the idea or concept.
What do you do? Do you abandon this or press on? What helps us maintain a commitment and a course?
Continue reading “Innovation is swimming in uncertain waters”
Innovation should always deliver on a specific purpose or promise, often it simply doesn’t. It needs to be suitable to our needs; it needs to resolve a given job-to-be done.
In the developed world we are consistently over-delivering innovation for many and there is a given cost to that, which we all pay for even though we often don’t really need it in the first place.
Take, for example, the software provided by Microsoft for its windows application, in its office versions, they all are over-specified for our personal needs.
The majority of these ‘sit’ on our computers taking up space and never used. This continued requirement which we are forced to constantly upgrade requires us to seek more computing power yet it is really inappropriate for most people’s needs.
Continue reading “Appropriate Innovation Makes Good Sense.”
