Integrated Innovation Thinking | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

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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The Promise of Open Services innovation

Absorbing the different messages coming out of Professor Henry Chesbrough’s new book has been interesting. The book “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your business to grow and compete in a new era”, published by Jossey-Bass was just launched in January 2011.

The book can go the way of a lightning rod to bringing service innovation up in many people’s thinking both in academic research and corporate agendas.

Professor Chesbrough is absolutely right, services are critical to developed countries’ economies and within our organizations. It is time to move service innovation up in our thinking by combining the internal capabilities within organizations and by enlisting the efforts of many others in support of their business.

The challenge is to combine the customer and the supplier on the same platform for Open Services Innovation to work. It is thinking through platforms more that catches my interest and what this means in generating new, innovative business models.

Taking services into a more open approach is not so easy.
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Service innovation- can it become more open?

For a better understanding of what makes up service innovation, we need to fill in far too many gaps at present, can it become more open?.

I’m hopeful that the forthcoming book of Henry Chesbrough: “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era”, published by Jossey-Bass and being launched officially next week, 18^th January 2011, will go some of the ways to be a lightning rod to bringing this up in many people’s agenda if it is not already!

I felt with his past books on Open Innovation and Open Business Innovation they were the catalysts for deeper thinking. He provided the stimulus to find better answers with his many reflections and case studies through his solid research work and his ‘open’ and questioning thinking to prompt community ‘reactions’. This galvanized significant innovation movements and this time hopefully, it will be to open up and manage service innovation more effectively.

I will be completing a book review on this latest open innovation thinking by Dr.Chesbrough for www.innovationmanagement.se as an early February publication and I’m certainly looking forward to reading the final edition of this book when it arrives.
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Social will dominate innovation thinking in 2011 and beyond.

Putting the word social into our innovation thinking is going to be a really important thing to do in the coming year, if you haven’t already, it will dominate our actions increasingly.

The challenges of ‘social’ is everywhere; within organizations, in all sorts of collective movements, in politics, across government, society, markets, academic institutions and effecting our personal lives in a host of ways.
Society has to face up to some really tough challenges and only innovation can solve these with human beings inventiveness and ingenuity. Regretfully we have still an accelerating ‘creative destruction’ and we are often more Schumpeterian than ever.

Something has got to give and it will be within the broad social domain where it will all come together, many social things are converging or feeding off each other. Let’s take a brief look at all this social orientation going on.
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Reflections from a tough 2010 for innovating differently in 2011

So here we are already in December. Budgets are being argued, numbers fixed, concepts and plans discussed, and those higher hopes that you can build out for a successful 2011 through innovating differently beckons.

Tell me what did we learn from 2010 from an innovation perspective that we can build upon in 2011? Here are some of my thoughts

For me, a number of important lessons or impressions come out of 2010 that I’ll continue to build upon in 2011 as areas of opportunity for changing, challenging or clarifying. These I simply summarize in ten points for this blog:

I felt 2010 was a ‘crossing point’ in innovation maturity to position us in 2011. We began to consolidate what we know, explore with growing confidence what we didn’t know and experiment in-between.

That was healthy in such a tough year of uncertainty. Now we need to build on this in different ways.
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Achieving a sense of renewal to your innovation activities.

Innovating for the future lies with a fresh approach and for that, we need to constantly have this sense of renewal within ourselves.

There is a time when your innovation efforts may need a serious renewal and for many this might be now. Knowing when to invest in an innovation renewal and organizing for it is like any other organizational activity.

Those that are honest enough to admit that what they have achieved to-date in innovation activity is just not going to ‘cut it’ for the future will be making a very ‘tough’ call but it might be one of the best ones you are about to make.

I think we all need to think of a renewal of innovation as essential in our thinking as over time many things have changed and moved on.

We need not just to adjust in our objectives but more importantly to adapt and acknowledge that our innovation understanding has greatly improved, so we need to reflect this in our innovation structures, processes and systems.

Challenge the ‘legacy’ within. Continue reading “Achieving a sense of renewal to your innovation activities.”

Building for the Innovation Business Case

One of the toughest aspects within Innovation is making the Business Case.

Much of the information is imperfect, the returns are often fuzzy and unclear in the early stages and the doubters line up ready to block and deter new ideas from entering the commercialization process.

Justifying new innovation can be often really hard to make for others.

How can you reduce down many of these uncertainties?

Often what is missing is ensuring the innovation business case takes a clear methodical approach and builds the arguments up in a sound structured way.

Far too many cases are based on emotion and gut feel. Some of these clearly work but an awful lot get lost along the way, especially in the more structured organisation.

So often good ideas are ‘killed’ because the Business Case was not as well thought through as possible. It simply became the necessary chore at the end of a set of events that were in themselves a mountain to climb.

It is putting together the best possible business case is the last nine yards, sometimes the hardest to achieve but the accumulation of all your efforts rest on this document in many cases.
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Making untested hypotheses compatible to Business model innovation success

An email from Business model innovation hub (http://bit.ly/bnTd6G) landed on my laptop that stopped me to think a little harder on the whole momentum of Business model innovation. It summarized the ‘breaking’ collaborative work going on between Alexander Osterwalder, Steve Blank, Alan Smith and Bob Dorf.

This is around untested hypotheses coming out of new business models, that need a better structured and systematic way of exploring these to test assumptions, as early as possible within the lifetime of the model.

A breaking collaboration that seems really valuable

Steve Blank has summarized this first step in the collaboration in an entry on his site www.steveblank.com under http://bit.ly/9cElPf. He stopped me in my tracks (well briefly) with the statement that the “Business model canvas was at the end of the day a tool for brainstorming hypotheses without a formal way of testing them”- “a static planning tool”- the very thing I thought the canvas was taking us away from. Continue reading “Making untested hypotheses compatible to Business model innovation success”

Simplicity drives Adoption often in Innovation

Keeping it simple can often drive adoption. This week I had the pleasure of attending a Brightidea (https://www.brightidea.com/) “Birds of a Feather” event in Zurich. A pleasure clearly, why? Simply because it turned out differently than I had expected. Let me explain.

I have a tendency to be wary of claims or statements like “global leaders in innovation management” and “driven more success than any other innovation management solution provider” as it is hard to validate that from simply what I can read on Brightidea’s website, or through verification of independent research.

What can be said as a growing validation though is that they are clearly being increasingly recognised by many global customers as an important platform contributor to their collaborative innovation process. Continue reading “Simplicity drives Adoption often in Innovation”

The Pathway Curve of Innovation Understanding

The pathway curve methodology is a well structured way to move up in innovation understanding.

One of my recent articles outlined a three horizon framework for innovation, let me extend this a little further into a pathway of innovation understanding.

I’m sure we all agree Innovation needs to be worked, it needs to be understood and often many people do get confused by not taking a more measured approach to the need to break innovation down into its manageable parts.

Innovation does not just have a time axis that the three horizons framework refers to but it has a complexity and scope axis in learning as well.

By taking a more systematic approach to any innovation you achieve a greater understanding over time of what is involved. Continue reading “The Pathway Curve of Innovation Understanding”