Tackling innovation | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

25 years of Innovation- how has it evolved? Has it been successful?

25 years looking back at Innovation’s evolution

I decided to hold a conversation with Google’s Gemini about how innovation had changed and hopefully progressed since I first became involved 25 years ago, when I lived in Singapore and was heavily involved in my MBA, which had innovation as an elective.

The MBA elective “hooked” me on innovation, and here I am 25 years later, still going on about innovation, championing, cajoling and encouraging innovation to be more central, disciplined and structured.

So I have taken the educational looking back from Gemini lense of perspective and broken this into three parts. I find it interesting and reaffirming. This is the first of these posts looking at the development, thinking and design of innovation from 1999 to today 2024, twenty-five years.

Innovation can be both highly frustrating and rewarding. It is good to gain a real sense of progress in these past 25 years; otherwise, where have I been?

I often feel innovation has not advanced in these past twenty-odd years, but having all the changes nicely summarized here makes me feel there has been a shape and purpose to be so actively involved in the evolution of innovation over these 25 years and been part of that evolution.

Firstly, this post outlines how innovation has evolved since 1999 and does a further recheck for 2019 until today. So, it covers a twenty-five-year period but recognizes that the last five years have seen a very different set of innovation accelerants.

The critical differences in understanding Dynamic Ecosystems.

The need to understand Dynamic Ecosystems

I believe dynamic ecosystems require a richer understanding of the characteristics, environmental factors, and critical differences that can shape the dynamism of the business system.

This post highlights the essence of Dynamic Ecosystems and how they differ or provide active support for other ecosystem models, as they do have different roles to play in Ecosystem thinking and design:

Working together to shape innovation for meaningful change

Shaping Innovation for a Meaningful Change

Following on from my initial post, “Our Need is to Shape Innovation Dynamically, ” this post outlines the eight value-adding points that I can help build out and deliver alongside you in different delivery modules to fit your circumstances and budgets.

My value proposition is to work together to create something that shapes innovation for a meaningful change. To support you in building out your innovation competencies, capabilities and capacity that requires a deeper investment in skill development in a culture of continual learning.

It’s a journey, but it promises the rewards of being at the forefront of industry evolution and transformation. It is a journey of building innovation, fitness and dynamics drawn out in a new way of thinking and design within innovation ecosystems.

Within the value proposition, we actively shape these journeys, building adaptability, agility and innovation for long-term success in the changing business environment we all face today.

Has innovation changed over the last ten years?

Innovation is certainly a complex and dynamic process that involves many factors and actors and I certainly feel it has been shifting in its focus. I have been thinking of where we have been placing the emphasis over the past ten years.

I decided to ask GPT-4 what major shifts have occurred in how we approached innovation ten years ago and today. It was suggested that these were the following.

Do you agree, what do you feel is missing? I like the broad shifts indicated but what has been missed?

Visiting the dark side of the innovation moon.

I wrote a post in June 2012 on thinking about the dark side of the innovation moon. As India quite rightly celebrates its first landing in lunar exploration, near the south pole of the moon, the dark side, it prompted me to look back at this post and decide to republish this again here.

Have you ever wondered what is on the other side of the moon when you look up towards it? Do we need to look beyond our horizons in our daily lives? Should we question beyond our existing horizons in how we innovate, explore, and push ourselves into the unknown?

What about the other side, the darker, unknown side of the moon? Are you ever curious about what lies behind what we can see? I certainly am.

Innovation is perhaps like the moon. We only see a part of it wherever we stand; we appreciate that part and value what we see and work within. It is even better if we can repeat it again and again. It can even offer something reassuring and comfortable; we grow comfortable within our known borders of innovation activity.

Innovation is essential to unlock all parts of the energy transition.

Innovation has the power to unlock the Energy Transition. Innovation thinking and design are needed everywhere within the energy system. Technological and systemic innovation is incredibly important to the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings, as well as replacing and upgrading much of the overall system design and operation of delivering energy to power our economies.

Innovation needs to be everywhere in transforming our existing energy systems. Each day, there seems to be some level of innovation development or fresh concepts breaking through, challenging the accepted or pushing the thinking in imaginative new ways.

Innovation has a central role to play in the energy system.

We need to keep pushing for discoveries, experimentation, and demonstrating. We must nurture innovation and continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway. Innovation comprises many enabling technologies; it needs to be built in a highly systematic way. The need is to continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.

The building out of the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework.

During May and June 2023, I worked through and concluded my thinking on why we needed to change our Innovation approach from far to often a linear one, and consider a new, more up-to-date, and dynamic solution for managing innovation, one that recognises the non-linear nature of so much of our undertakings today in innovation, from discovery to commercialisation.

I have called this the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework– here is why and what went into this proposal that I feel should be adopted for managing innovation in the future.

As the investigation, validation, and viewpoints were built up over several posts, I felt summarising the series here gives you the appetite to delve into the posts themselves.

We need to shift our innovative thinking from static to dynamic.

We have been in very static, traditional approaches to innovation, very segmented and often insular, and as so often happens in innovation, it has complexities that seemingly grow and multiple changes, partly from what we discover in the development of new solutions but partly from far more rapid changes in the business landscape and our current innovation process often breaks down and limits the ability to manage this across the whole development to delivery lifecycle.

We need systems and processes that are flexible, adaptable, and can enable continuous improvements but are fully connected, transparent, and integrated across the entire business. We need to approach innovation differently through connected agility, have speed and automation more central, and provide roles for a great diverse set of participants.

A system that encourages forming strategic alliances, partnerships, and knowledge sharing to drive innovation and create shared value in open, thoughtful, and collaborative ways. This is where technology enables these connections and triggers different thinking in the quest for moving toward more extraordinary valuable solutions—the “connected” value of behaviours thinking ecosystems and operating on collaborative platforms.

The Building Blocks of the Innovation Ecosystem Narrative

There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we manage innovation, which needs the power of ecosystem thinking and design. Not only in thinking and design but in how we structure its architecture, one based on platforms, open apps, and a marketplace where like-minded people and organizations go and participate in building new impactful innovation solutions together. This needs to be in open, highly collaborative ecosystems.

We need a better conceptual framework to build, one based on knowledge-based intelligence and well-grounded, driven by dynamic and constant interactions, events, and processes, so all involved can be engaged in building solutions that have fresh impact and value within the market space identified.

My mind map of the over-arching aims of a new innovation narrative is shown below.

Innovation & Ecosystems need to be our new thinking of design and delivery

An ecosystem approach on a common, shared technology platform that can significantly enhance the discovery, experimentation, exchange, exploring, and exploiting all the diverse skills and expertise from idea to commercialization and life cycle development and maturity.

The increased pace of change requires the ability to deploy, activate and utilize resources and assets to extract the potential through the diversity of the network formed within the ecosystem and the relationships engaged in the mutual pursuit

The end result needs to show actual robustness, genuinely dynamic and holistic in its dimensions and offerings, proving among its metrics faster learning rates, leveraging all that a technology-enabled platform offers, actual collaborations and shared engagements, supporting knowledge, data, insights, and people.

Open Collaboration needs to be top of mind

Innovation needs to rely increasingly on interconnected organizations organized around a central focal point of value and impact. An ecosystem design so organizations can act differently on strategies, business models, leadership, and customer engagement to build new value and worth.

We all need to recognize that Innovation and Ecosystems go together they make the potential for more sustainable solutions, they are the new combination that enables your thinking and design of new concepts and solutions to be “worked upon” in a more open, collaborative way where a richer diversity of thinking “comes into play” and the end result has that potential to be so much better than the sum of all the parts, it magnifies the sum!

The planning out of this Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework

As I mentioned in a previous post, for any innovation enterprise change, I do not recommend a “big bang” solution; it should be phased to validate and grow to understand, build up validation, justify making the changes, bedding in the thinking needed and approaches to provide the level of returns and the growing understanding of cost/ benefit conversion.

The potential returns, including increased agility, improved innovation outcomes, enhanced collaboration, and long-term competitiveness, make this radical change worthwhile for organizations aspiring to thrive in today’s dynamic business environment. The ability to build the context and show its (ongoing) value makes the difference. You need a systematic approach and project staging plan.

The importance here is recognizing the shift in mindset and thinking towards a Building Block approach to build up the Innovation Stacks. Each stack “sits” on a technology platform. Thinking through what this means requires understanding, relating, and putting a clear context of innovation, what you want to achieve, and how to set about this.

The implementation of the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework.

Planing out the Composable Innovation Enterprise framework, unlocking its power

How difficult would it be to embrace this Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework, as it is often argued that most people want to keep innovation management and its process simple? I wonder if that is the current incumbents, be these current innovation management software providers or individuals inside the organizations resisting change, as it brings significant uncertainty of change and disruption to the (inadequate) process, one that I feel is not fit for today’s and tomorrow’s innovation purpose.

So how to set about making this change and who should be involved as it is a more radical design of a holistic nature is what I am outlining in this post and the next one focuses more on the project organization needed.

Organizations in today’s business environment need to adapt rapidly and dynamically, the need to bring the innovation management process into a constant technological advancement, and more designed by their own specific needs and not “offered” as a rigid set of solutions. We need to embrace a significant change in the way we “set about” innovation.

It needs increased agility and looks to have innovation consistently redesigned to meet different challenges and needs. It needs a better set of flexible design elements and system thinking to gain from reuse and redesign rapidly. I like the term I saw the other day “systems of gravity” to get tasks completed faster than what is being offered today in innovating software solutions.

The need is to set about building a compelling business case to make the move to embrace this (radical) design change and its potential value in returns and flexibility. I want to begin to sketch out the pathway of change this might need. It will be hard work, but doing this in stages gives growing understanding and value, and I believe ultimately rewarding.

We cannot afford not to avoid changing our innovation processes as we deal with a far more complex and challenging world. We seem to be keeping innovation as a disappointing and often frustrating outcome for many leaders of organizations today, innovation needs to be top of mind and better equipped to deliver.