Approaching innovation through the lens of innovation ecosystems
Approaching innovation through the lens of innovation ecosystems is a strategic and holistic way of fostering creativity, collaboration, and value creation within a complex network of interdependent players.
This perspective shifts the focus from isolated efforts to a more interconnected and dynamic approach where multiple stakeholders—such as businesses, governments, academic institutions, entrepreneurs, and consumers—work together to drive innovation.
I have spent a far amount in different posts on the importance of Innovation Ecosystems and this post is simply a prompter of its value points
Embracing Innovation Ecosystems for Enhanced Competitiveness
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, innovation is paramount for organizations to thrive and achieve sustainable success.
Traditional approaches to innovation, often isolated and siloed within a single organization, may not be sufficient in addressing the complex challenges and opportunities presented by the modern business environment.
Organizations must embrace innovation ecosystems to harness the power of innovation and drive transformative change effectively.
A shift in managing differently, a possible inflexion point
We are possibly at a series of inflexion points in our current business environment. Here’s one you will be required to address.
What seems to be occurring increasingly in many different market spaces is defining an opportunity that directly impacts the current status quo and then seeking to make some radical moves to achieve that differentiation. Technology is a fundamental disrupter or enabler; it is the catalyst for making this change.
Markets are changing significantly, and collaboration and partnerships are rapidly forming and coalescing around the concept of Ecosystem thinking and Platform design. This potentially is a radically different business entity design.
These might already be happening around you, changing the accepted market space or definition. Still, you are reluctant to recognize their impact or be ready to make the level of change needed to ‘ready yourself’ for all the potential disruption or different thinking these Business Ecosystem designs require and bring. Shifting to a different business model or business design is hard, complicated and systematic work. The last thing it needs is to be rushed.
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 often fails to align with strategic needs. It is a known, well-discussed fact. This is often not the fault of the innovator but the very people designing but not sharing the strategy or failing to recognize all the implications this might mean in shifting resources, investing money or simply under-appreciating the complexities that often lie with innovation to conceive, validate, contribute and deliver the contributions into that strategy.
Sadly many innovators are simply happily working away with no specific guidelines, apart from the general remit of “we need to be more innovative”, and this lack of coherence merging from the boardroom, failing to cascade down the organisation leaves this strategic part that innovation should plan as far to vague. They are not drawn into the need for change and its implications from an innovative perspective. Alignment should be a rigorous evaluation.
Building our capacity to innovate needs understanding and reflects the organization’s business activities. Innovators need to grasp the value creation aspects that will deliver the necessary capital-efficient and profitable growth and then ‘go in pursuit’ to achieve their contribution to these goals.
Even the basic questions often remain unclear: “How are we looking to grow revenue, save costs, reduce working capital or improve our fixed capital?” What is specifically being deployed or recognized needs to change and to get into the necessary detail becomes essential.
Innovation & Finance needed for the Energy Transition in developing countries
Innovation has a very tough job of attracting the necessary money to take a concept or idea all the way through to commercialization. There is always that constant asking about the economic return and the associated risks.
Financing game-changing investments, replacing something existing or simply providing something new have tough financial questions always to be answered.
Here I am taking an innovation need in a different way than most are used to reading about. So what are right conditions to invest and realize innovation?
The Energy Transition is one of the toughest innovation challenges ever. We must remove fossil fuel as a source of energy, decarbonize our planet and replace it with clean energy alternatives of solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear and green hydrogen solutions. To make the transformation in just under 30 years is a massive task. So far, we are doing a poor job of this as markets, solutions, opinions, and financial support are all highly fragmented.
Tacking emerging and developing markets is even harder to achieve an energy transition.
Can you imagine what it is like in a developing country that lacks sufficient energy and infrastructure yet is faced with the sizable task of expanding its economy to meet growing population expectancies and the need for rising incomes to give that essential potential for growth that having energy available can provide?
Transformational innovation is increasingly needed to cope with the change needed in many organizations to find a new or repositioned value proposition.
Transformational innovation is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, to achieve. When you are required to become (really) different at the core, you face the inherent conflict that making change is where clear leadership can only bring about, guiding the changes required through this highly disruptive period and providing the compelling story of the compelling future that provides a fundamentally better state than the one occupied today.
We have many innovation outcomes to choose from, including incremental, distinctive, radical or disruptive. Today we focus more on open innovation where a greater external diversity combines with internal expertise to generate the potential for something fundamentally different. Today we have technology as an enabler and applying innovation ecosystem thinking in designing open platforms so this network of experience can be exchanged, shared and developed.
Yet transformational innovation does require something really different.
To become different, you have to go beyond adding innovation at the periphery, bolting new concepts onto the existing core, you need to dismantle the core fundamentally.
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.
I was recently working through a set of older presentation files and came across this extract concerning innovation again and thought I must share this. Sadly, it rings true as much as it did those (many) years back.
“Strategy is useless without innovation; innovation is directionless without strategy”.
Below is an extract from “Reinventing Innovation” by John J Kao. For me, it is sadly as relevant today as when I first came across it, some years back. Are we making real progress in our innovation activities? Continue reading “The lost innovation pathway”
As demand is more volatile today what becomes more important is the work to be done, not the work done.
Surprisingly Adam Smith identified this important difference back in 1776.
This can be explained as the work done is the accumulated knowledge, which has built up and been embodied in the firm’s results with the innovations achieved in the past and is seen as the tangible capital.
The work to be done is how well it can adapt to change. In the past century, we operated in the mass production era, with systems with standard goods and stable market conditions, the work done was equivalent to the ‘work to be done.
In today’s global market, with its rapid technology diffusion, disruptive and constant change with an emphasis on servicing the work to be done is more important than the work done and intangible assets are fundamental to this. Continue reading “Transforming What? Delivering Future Impact”
