Innovation Ecosystems | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Innovation Software, is it facing the Innovators Dilemma?

*The Winds of Change- Innovation Software facing the Innovators’ Dilemma*

In my research, I am getting a real sense that the current Innovation Management Software model is about to be upended and disrupted as per Clayton Christensens’ “Innovators Dilemma.”

The book the “Innovation Dilemma” published in 2016 was written by innovation expert Clayton Christensen suggesting even though even the most outstanding companies can do everything right–yet still lose market leadership.

Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.

Today if the technology software solutions are not advancing and adapting to new ways of building open, collaborative exchanges across not just a single organization but multiple ones. This need of all coming together to co-create, often solving more complex problems, ideas are lost or not being spotted by the incumbents and over time, others recognize these “blind spots” will present opportunities to offer new approaches to solve problems.

In this book it expands on the concept of disruptive technologies, a term Christensen coined in a 1995 in an article “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave”. It describes how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appear to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from the established business. (source Wikipeda)

Today the reversal is happening.

Benchmarking Innovation Impact, from InnoLead

I have always welcomed the KPMG LLP-sponsored InnoLead benchmarking report; this is for the third year.

I received a note from Scott Kirsner, who leads the team at Innolead, and he offered me a chance to read the report before its official release today at 12 PM ET time and suggested I can post anytime, so here goes. This is longer as a post as this benchmarking report brings out a lot in my view.

This report provides a definitive innovation benchmarking document for leaders in strategy, R&D, design, and other innovation roles inside large organizations. It includes survey data, interviews with senior executives, and perspectives from KPMG leaders.

The report link “Benchmarking innovation impact from InnoLead” by @innolead and @KPMG_US does offer an excellent stimulating overview that still reflects on so much of what still needs to be done in the innovation world.

The report, as suggested in the opening Welcome by Cliff Justice, U.S. Leader, Enterprise Innovation at KPMG, does provide a variety of ideas and considerations for those seeking innovation understanding.

What was collected was 216 qualified survey responses from professionals working predominantly in innovation, research and development, and strategy roles, and conducted eight interviews with senior leaders at companies across a wide range of industries, including Colgate-Palmolive, Mastercard, NASCAR, and Entergy, the New Orleans-based utility operator.

Where will Innovation Management Software go?

This morning I decided to have an exchange on ChatGPT on the future of Innovation Management Software, I asked a number of questions in a short series and can well-relate to the answers provided incredibly quickly.

What do you think?

Do they make sense and are the suggestions a competitive threat or a trend towards a future that needs fully embracing before others do?

chat.openai.com/chat

Helping discover your innovation pathway

*You need to discover your innovation pathway*.

I started posting my thoughts on innovation in August 2010. I have written on this site alone, www.paul4innovating.com, by just coming up to a milestone of 700 posts focusing on innovation thoughts and opinions, so I just wanted to pause and think about all the different places I have tried to get the innovation message(s) out.

I always find the post-New Year to be a reflective part of the year of reviewing, deciding, and then setting new goals. This is a post about the sources of my knowledge that feeds my innovation passion.

Let me start. I often wonder whether the posts and articles I’ve written have been hitting the right buttons, helping solve the needs of those involved in innovation; I hope so. I have pushed out and explored various aspects, learning myself as I go. I have followed a number of great innovation thinkers and read different books on the areas of innovation.

It amazes me. How much is talked about, advice offered and sometimes that deep down nagging feeling, innovation understanding does not really change; it is the people managing it as they often seem to be simply passing through this innovation period onto other things or vanishing in pursuit of different career interests.

Innovation: the accelerator for the changes in our energy transitions

Innovation is the accelerator in our energy transitions.

No energy transition will be achieved without invention and innovation, yet we are currently failing badly to fund research, development and deployment. We are losing the race to stop our planet’s warming as our innovative human endeavours are not at the level they should be, or we lack the “will” to make the changes we so desperately need to undergo to protect our planet.

The sheer scope of the energy transition often pulls me in so many different directions. Still, the foundation stays in place, that of making the contribution of my understanding of innovation as my focal point of contribution- the accelerant to energy change.

The linkages of innovating purpose

Whenever I get into conversations about innovating, we always hit difficulties on the question, “how can I build this well and be sustainble?” Hence, I often try to build an extended narrative for what makes up the innovation capability building and understanding for the future. I frame this as the linkages of innovation purpose.

This opening narrative becomes increasingly important when you argue the move from our present way of thinking and building innovation systems, often linear and spread across different teams and islands of internal knowledge. into future ones built far more around innovation ecosystems in thinking and design that are integrated and connected, to open up conversations and exchanges, seeking common points of value in a broader network of solution providers.

I outlined in a post in May 2022, “linking sense of innovating purpose“, my ten points of linkage need, and I want to build on this further here in some explanations for each of the linkages..

I want to go deeper into these ten linking parts, breaking them down a little further.

What makes the Innovation Ecosystem different?

In the past few months, I have been writing consistently on the need to change our innovating process, thinking and designs into Innovation Ecosystem ones.

In October, for example, I wrote, “Why do we need to change our thinking about innovation“. I continue here with some more arguments of “why” we need to move towards an innovation ecosystem in design and thinking.

I continue to gather, reflect and construct the “how and what” structure of this redesigned innovation (ecosystem) process/system. This will be my initial view of how this needs to be shaped as the overriding architecture of an Innovation Ecosystem. I’m coming closer to the point of sharing this in the coming weeks.

I am focusing here on arguing for changing our innovation process on the Business-to-Business or Industry-to-industry, not the retail or consumer ecosystems and their designs.

Let us first provide the top view of the difference in need and the offer of new values.

Barriers to innovation, the cause and effect.

*Seeing the barriers, the causes and effects*.

I am on a personal mission to convince innovation software providers, corporations and innovators to change how they undertake innovation.

In some recent posts, I argued that we need to adopt a broader innovation ecosystem thinking and design. I stated in one recent post, “We must promote more dynamic environments and the constant desire that organizations and their people have to be fit for innovating purposes, adaptive and fluid in such highly challenging and confusing times.”

I do think we need to restate the current barriers to innovation.

These barriers do not ‘magically’ change by delivering what I believe moves us to a better system for innovation, that of an ecosystem and platform architecture. Still, barriers do need to be consciously built into any new thinking as ones “to be resolved” in any new solution design.

Recognizing the present and ongoing barriers to innovation needs solutions to be built into any future design. Let me outline many of these here, building further the case for necessary change.

Today most organizations have barriers towards creativity, ideas and innovation.

Building out our innovation ecosystem in design and thinking

*Finding the new building blocks of innovation ecosystem design and thinking.*

Why change our thinking and designing around innovation ecosystems?“

For me, ecosystem thinking and design offer fresh ways for accelerating mutual learning, and through this innovation, outcome potential for sharing and knowledge building.

As we build an understanding of the power of digital platforms and ecosystem thinking, we can see gains and new values and realize different opportunities denied to us in the past by a lack of clarity, depth of understanding of what was in front of us but not appreciated, as we were looking at it differently and not seeing its potential in a combined value or bundling.

Today we live in a more connected world; technology has enabled this.

We are becoming far more networked and have a growing awareness of hyper challenges that we are in part resolving. Still, we face many blurring boundaries across market positions, competitors and global trade that need combining our talent and expertise to provide a new set of solutions, delivering on promise and impact. We are in a more complex world, needing different approaches within business organizations.

We hold the promise of liberating potential in resolving wicked problems and opportunities, providing we embrace the potential to combine and share outside our organization and tap into the rich diversity of knowledge, equally keen to collaborate and cooperate to achieve a more cross-cutting innovation that provides solutions to these more complex problems.

Please, we need a different Innovation narrative

(Visual adapted from AFSC explaining a narrative, in this case, social justice)

I have been struggling for quite some time with innovation’s increasing difficulties in influencing growth and achieving real impact.

I see many comments on the failure of innovation, in its inability to be at the core of an organization’s ambitions for growing and changing. Actually it is a long list of issues and concerns that we so often paper over and don’t fully address. There is a time for making a real change and I feel that could be now by shifting our thinking towards innovation ecosystems.

Let’s reflect first on the constraints or barriers that innovation faces, much self-imposed.

Innovation “fights” to attract resources, to gain management attention or to appreciate fully the difficulties and uncertainties in the time it takes, in its potential risks and its need often for a more ambitious and bold commitment of support and belief.

Our innovation processes stay locked in islands of knowledge, stubbornly not flowing across organizations, informing others and giving the right levels of insights, support, or collaboration needed. Innovation software management continues to be sold piecemeal, so often just bolted onto the other selected parts already in place, not being optimized.