Improve Collaboration & Communication | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

The Challenges of Real Change Required by Innovation Consultants

Recently I was reminded of an article by Daniel Krauss, writing on the Forrester blog site (http://blogs.forrester.com) about the “Path to Revolution In Management Consulting” which lead me to reply to his question of “what constitutes a management consulting firm 2.0?”

I’ve adapted my view here to reflect where it becomes even more relevant to the innovation consulting companies that I feel are in general struggling in today’s environment, for multiple reasons.

The challenge today lies for many in that they are not providing real consulting value to clients, and unless this will change it will continue to erode the client’s confidence in these service providers.
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Questions raised on a collaborative innovation framework

Yesterday, 5^th May, there was an interesting exchange on #innochat relating to collaborating frameworks for innovation. We have a wiki on this http://cirf.pbworks.com if you care to take a look so you get the context and the suggested framework we are proposing.

#Innochat is a lively, informative and inspiring one-hour(ish) discussion on Thursdays at noon (Eastern US time). Usually the best way to follow along is to head over to TweetChat – sign in with your Twitter credentials and follow along and participate. Take a look at www.innochat.com and join in.

Jeffrey Philips @ovoinnovation and myself @paul4innovating have been suggesting that we need to organize more around a common approach to innovation and has recently published this we decided to put this forward within this discussion hour to learn more from many established innovation thinkers.

The fact that Twitter decided to go ‘whaling’, stalling and generally misbehaving to create some bottleneck in exchanges, did seem to generate a lot of ‘chat’ and a great diversity of opinion.
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The shaping of innovation- future directions

Rethinking innovation after a week where I have argued for a more common approach to innovation (see some of my recent posts )- as one that can be well structured and managed – I feel needs to be discussed next. I do fear if we don’t radically rethink innovation we are in danger of missing out on much that is coming towards us.

If we do not adopt and gain a clear understanding of (basic) innovation, its structure, process and differences in approaches we need, we will certainly struggle to move beyond the basics to the ‘promise’ of advancement that innovation should be offering.

I would like to offer some of the factors that I feel will be shaping innovation’s future; many are presently taking place but in pockets of expertise and experimentation, that we have to investigate more to understand the implications further.

What is holding innovation back?
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Managing different open innovation roadblocks

I always find thoughtful lists extremely helpful to prompt my thinking on different issues, it often helps to unblock my own thinking and for me, this one certainly did for open innovation and possible roadblocks.

One such list I compiled from mainly two sources on roadblocks to open innovation. The main source was Dr Brian Glassman. He wrote a paper “Open Innovation’s Common Issues & Potential Roadblocks with Dr Abram Walton. (http://www.innovationtools.com/PDF/OI_issues_and_roadblocks.pdf) and different thoughts that I found as well worked through.

The other source to make up this list was from P&G’s experiences gleaned from different sources. Together I feel they make for a solid list of roadblocks or issues to think through. Let me share these:

Firstly the core need or use of open innovation

Generating ideas for new products and services
Solve technical problems that are vexing or too complicated or expensive to solve internally
Co-development of difficult problems, services, products, technologies

Issues & Potential Roadblocks
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The new extended innovation funnel

The ideas funnel has been with us a long time. We put our ideas into the funnel and then through a process of elimination out ‘pop’s’ finished products.

Henry Chesbrough’s famous depiction of the Open Funnel has continued that concept, that ideas enter the more ‘open’ innovation process and go through a more ‘staged gate’ or equivalent process to emerge as the finished product or even spun-out- all well and good.

In the past few weeks the funnel has been constantly coming back in my life. It has been bugging me. Recently I was at a European Innovation Conference and we got into a roundtable discussion on managing ideas and up pop’s the fuzzy front end and the funnel and putting ideas through this.

To be provocative I said “well ideas are actually in the middle of the innovation process” and we got into a significant debate on this and concluded that we all did not share a common language on this or understanding of what I was struggling to articulate.

So let me lay out my view. Firstly this was not as inspired as an insight I can fully lay claim to as mine. I had read somewhere this very point, that ideas lie more in the middle of the innovation process but just could not remember where I had read it- grey cells are my excuse.
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Going behind the outside-in of imagination at GE.

In the past few months, I have become interested in GE and how it is managing innovation. Often you read a number of negative reports on GE but is this just the big guy being picked upon by more nimble observers that have limited insight into what is going on behind the walls of GE?

What is under the innovation bonnet at GE?

There does seem an awful lot going on in GE around innovation on what we can observe from the outside looking in. Of course, you would expect this in an organization the size of GE employing 300,000 people across 100 countries and generating $150 billion dollars in revenue.

In Jeffrey Immelts (Chair and CEO) own words “the toughest years of my life were 2008 to 2009”.To drop 31 billion dollars in revenue in two years is tough to manage through, and to see net earnings drop by nearly $6 billion dollars in this period to where it is today, of $11.6 billion dollars, must have been very hard.
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Shortage and Plenty- the growing shift towards Social Innovation

On 16 and 17 March 2011, Social Innovation Europe will be launched in Brussels. Funded by the European Commission, Social Innovation Europe will create a dynamic, entrepreneurial and innovative new Europe with the intent for Europe to embrace the broader concepts within innovation and set an example globally for this social movement.

The aim is by 2014, Social Innovation Europe will have become the meeting place – virtual and real – for social innovators, entrepreneurs, non-profit organisations, policy makers and anyone else who is inspired by social innovation in Europe.

This can provide the opportunity for social innovation – for so long on the margins – to take its place alongside business innovation at the centre of the economic stage.

Social Innovation Europe

The intent will cover the following:
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Social innovation comes of age in Europe

“Social innovation is about new ideas that work to address pressing unmet society needs”

The shifts taking place in Europe

The competitiveness and challenges that Europe faces in the next ten years are significant. Innovation has been placed at the heart of Europe’s 2020 strategy.

It is this clear recognition that innovation is the best means of tackling issues that will affect our future living standards is not new in itself, but it is this real political recognition of its place and importance, now that is.

Innovation is also our best means of successfully tackling major societal challenges, such as climate change, energy and resource scarcity, health and aging and becoming more urgent each day to address in more systematic ways.

European funding of innovation in recent years has perhaps placed far too much emphasis on research and development to deliver the growth and jobs it requires.
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Dedicated Innovation Scientists and Engineers Group – the Growing Imperative

I believe we are arriving at a point of real value by organizing dedicated innovation scientists and engineers into a specialised innovation unit. Innovation has emerged into part science, part art and design, and plenty of engineering (social and process).

Today successfully managing innovation is getting increasingly challenging and placing considerable strain on the present design and structures of organizations.

A dedicated unit or group that draws from a range of disciplines and combines these into a new organisational unit has significant value to be at the forefront of designing the organizational change needed for innovation to be more embedded and integrated.

Let me explain why?
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Everything seemingly comes in seven or does it?

Recently I was going through my files and was amazed how the use of seven came up to form some sort of magic seven frameworks. I’m not sure if we can blame this all on the “seven wonders of the world” but ‘seven’ has some magic perhaps when it also comes to listing. Is it because our attention span can’t absorb more than seven things at a time?

Ok, I can hear my wife say “Seven, you, huh!”
Let me give you a flavour of this use of ‘seven’

Seven keys to designing your innovation
Seven success factors
Seven habits of effective people
Seven innovation myths
Seven kinds of consequences
Seven deadly sins of Road-mapping
Seven levels of sustainability
3M’s seven pillars for innovation

The list could go on….and on. So why does seven seemingly loom so large for us?
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