Shifting dynamics in innovation | Navigating Intelligent Business Ecosystems

Business Needs Innovation Ecosystems

September 17, 2022March 14, 2017 by @paul4innovating

The significant transformation taking place around exploiting technology and digital management has made ecosystems and platforms a mainstream prospecting need, in most of our businesses today. We must engage in what all of this means and its business impact.

I certainly believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery. Platforms, strategic partnerships, new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and ecosystems through platforms are the organizing environment to enact these.

The future innovation core lies at the edge.

April 24, 2022January 16, 2017 by @paul4innovating

Boundaries seem to be continually pushed in business, nothing seemingly is standing still, yet we are faced with many things that stay caught up in simply not being changed. Something eventually has to change, there is increasing pressure. We need to jettison old ways and establish new ones. In with the new in 2017, out with the old.

I continue to read and explore as much of the thought leadership on innovation, it continually points to a change in how we approach innovation.We need to embrace this need for change.

I have written about the new innovation era in 2017 made up of higher levels of needed collaboration, where platforms, ecosystems and customer experience understanding become increasingly central. We need to push well beyond our existing core of innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design.

We are pushing further away from the old core.

Swimming along a road in a flood of digital transformation

April 25, 2022November 5, 2016 by @paul4innovating

I am so caught up in transformation, no, actually I am swimming in it. No gentle backstroke for me lapping in the digital transformations that are being written about, this is a hard swim, one I’m not sure I can stay afloat and make headway, yet I must, well actually we all must. We all need to learn to swim along this new digital transformation road.

Recently I was asked to complete a review of digital transformation, to gauge where it presently is, to take a look at the leading emerging practices and ‘professional ‘wisdom’ and turn these insights into a report due out before the end of the year.

There are many innovation implications in this digital transformational journey that hold my increasing attention. For most of this last twelve months I have been increasingly tracking, researching and responding to supporting clients need about digital transformation, so I was happy to take this on. Little did I realize how this digital transformation has become a flood, a torrent of wisdom, many offerings different, often varying views and advice.

Bringing New Innovation Together Is Stretching the Mind

April 25, 2022October 25, 2016 by @paul4innovating

There is a profound shift taking place, relating to innovation. Increasingly we are seeing a growing dissatisfaction on the impact that innovation is having; in growth, in returns, in market and customer impact. There is a search for new solutions.

One of the implications is this growing recognition that innovation is rarely succeeding in isolation but it is growing on a more highly dependent type of complementary innovation, a collaborative network, working around this new emerging innovation to deliver a more connected, radical experience, requiring innovation ecosystem management.

This dramatic change we will all be undergoing will have a significant impact on organizations innovation management design and it requires new connecting’ thinking.

So how do you manage exploiting and exploring for Innovation?

April 25, 2022September 7, 2016 by @paul4innovating

So how do businesses organise their structures to be able to simultaneously manage the needs to exploit and explore innovation?

In this post I wanted to explain my thinking through on this ability to be ‘ambidextrous’, knowing the difference of when to exploit and when to explore as essential to leveraging innovation, in all its forms and watching out for some of the traps in not managing this well.

Managing this, in all honesty, though, is hard to get the balance right but highly valuable if you do achieve it, it can transform the business. Many of our organisations struggle to manage both successfully as they tend to focus more on separation mostly in organisational structures alone as their attempt to become ambidextrous. It is far more than ‘just’ this. Get the balance right across the organisation’s design and in its leadership management, it becomes a very powerful mechanism for accelerating performances by delivering significantly new innovation and equally sustaining and leveraging the core business you have today.

Recently I contributed a blog post over on the Hype Innovation Blog ” Balancing Exploitation & Exploration for Changing Performance” that opens up the subject but then extensively dives into three examples of Apple, GE and Google that are working in highly ambidextrous ways, pursuing exploiting and exploring in their own unique ways.

Digital transformation – the need to transform our innovation approaches

April 25, 2022July 25, 2016 by @paul4innovating

Business digital transformation, it can certainly get your pulse racing as you start looking for the nearest exit. Digital transformation is being asked of everybody to get involved in but do we have a sufficient understanding of it?

Add in the magic ‘need’ so innovation can benefit from this business digital transformation and we begin to shift around in our chairs even more. What would it mean if we ‘went’ digital and transformed ourselves for innovation within our organisation?

I’ll be honest here, all the answers can’t be distilled here in this one post as digital is all evolving but I thought an opening set of thoughts on ‘digital transformation’ might trigger greater discussion and identification.

So what is a digital transformation?

Exploring the Intrapreneurial Way in Large Organizations

April 25, 2022July 18, 2016 by @paul4innovating

Are we seeing a change in mentality within large organisations towards encouraging individuals to ‘break out and become more intrapreneurial within their part of the business?’

Is this tapping into the increasing desire to be part of creating something new, to grab back the engagement needed, that sense of identity and a growing sense of ownership?

Large organisations sense they are missing out on radically different business opportunities and cast their envious eyes towards the young start-ups, not just coming up with original ideas to solve existing problems and pent-up needs, but seeing the work as potentially disruptive to those managing in the existing space.

This start-up and entrepreneurial spirit are making many senior executives nervous and they want to find ways to harness this within their own organisations, and thus the intrapreneurial movement has been born and is growing fast.

Applying innovation thinking in different horizons

April 25, 2022June 11, 2016 by @paul4innovating

In the past few days, I have had some exchanges on twitter with Jairo H Venegas and Ralph-Christian Ohr on different thinking around the three horizon methodology. We share similar views on its value and partly how it can be applied.

Ralph and I exchange constantly and occasionally meet up together. Actually, we need another meeting Ralph to catch up and explore these mutual innovation value points.

Ralph in a reply to Jairo suggested this: “That’s why a portfolio approach is so important” – with his take here: bit.ly/1Rn5Svq under his excellent Model for Integrative Innovation article.He ‘talks’ of cornerstones and offers different premises to anchor these a little more.

Treating Innovation Risk Differently, Dealing with Uncertainty

August 8, 2022May 18, 2016 by @paul4innovating

We need to open up our thinking about risk and innovation management.

We should aim for a really healthy construct that does help all involved or associated with innovation and managing risk, that gives a better chance of pushing beyond the incremental innovation that avoids most risk and disappoints those seeking real growth.

In this post two, within a three-part series, I build the argument on why we need to treat innovation differently within any risk assessment. Part one focused on linking risk into an innovation strategy that needed to align with the corporate one.

Each organization finds its own level of risk appetite. Regretfully innovation, often by default, gets swept up in this generalization of “risk management” that is corporately driven and the serious message of “risk” dampens exploration. There is a real need to make a clear argument that innovation should be treated differently. It can still come under the broad risk umbrella but judging innovation risk is utterly different from organizational strategic risk.

The Pressing Need to Link Risk into an Innovation Strategy- part one

August 8, 2022May 17, 2016 by @paul4innovating

I want to bring together some thoughts on risk and innovation. This is the opening part and sets the scene.

I feel we spend less time on managing risk within our innovation initiatives.

We so often simply measure risk on established risk/return lines of known existing business criteria, treating it as part of our existing ongoing business, and that is plainly wrong.

Risk assessment within our innovation activities needs a different, far more distinct framing that reflects the nature of the unknowns we are working with, in my opinion.

Our organizations need to relate to the differences far more, to allow this ‘innovation risk assessment’ to play an increasing role in ‘advancing’ innovation and its understanding at the boardroom level to relate to and take a different risk-related profile position that many take today.