Tackling innovation | Innovating in the Age of Ecosystems

Getting back to the Future about Innovation

Paul Hobcraft and Jeffrey Phillips in conversations around innovation

I have just finished the first of a planned series with one of my favourite long-term collaborators Jeffrey Phillips.

Here is the link to the recording. In this series, planned to be only of 10 to 15-minute conversations, we are picking up on many of the fundamental building blocks of innovation.

Jeffery and I go back within the innovation space a long way. We have actively collaborated and designed tools and frameworks over the years that we believe had some of our insights “baked” into them to offer valuable reference points to help us all work through connecting innovation in hopefully better ways.

We have often got into frequent discussions between us on the basics for innovation, those that we deem as central or the core. We will attempt to focus on one of these in each short video produced.

We started with Divergence and Convergence as our framing part Continue reading “Getting back to the Future about Innovation”

Technology, inspiration and connected innovation

Visual from Siemens Digital Industries SPS Event November 2021 The recognizing of digital threads are connected to the new drivers.

I have been virtually attending the Siemens SPS Event this week taking technology, inspiration and connected innovation to a new level. Siemens does do these events well. I have been associated with Siemens for nearly four years in an external influencer group, #SIEx. This association provides me with a significant focus on what they are doing in a rapidly changing market for mobility, smart infrastructures for cities and grids, and their digital industries business.

The evolution (perhaps transformation) of Siemens in these last few years has been a significant one. Siemens has separated or spun-off companies, such as Siemens Healthineers and Siemens Energy, and reorganizing the remaining core businesses around these three core areas of mobility, smart infrastructure and digital industries.

The SPS Event Continue reading “Technology, inspiration and connected innovation”

China the story of innovation and disruption.

Disruption is all around us; it never seems to go away; it simply appears in a different and often entirely new form. The result is the same; it disrupts what we know and often in how we suddenly need to set about doing it differently.

Much of the innovative disruptions seem so obvious; you wonder why we were not doing these before. They connect up lots of the “dots” we have previously been focusing upon and make them blur into one bigger dot that becomes the new norm. Think Amazon, Airbnb, Uber. Think China.

Many of these are defined today as marketplaces, where innovation has pushed the boundaries and stretched thinking to combine aspects of multiple transactions into connected and seamless ones. Continue reading “China the story of innovation and disruption.”

The Cascading Innovation Effect.

Visual source; http://www.adaptivecircularcities.com/

We need to think about a choice-cascade integrative model for innovation. Often we fail to understand our role in contributing to innovation; we need a cascading effect. Here I want to explain my thinking behind this and provide the visual cascading steps I feel help us succeed in innovation.

For me, the “cascading effect” for innovation is “a sequence of events in which each produces the circumstances necessary for the initiation of the next”.

It presents an idea, a concept, a prototype, a piece of knowledge that provides the catalyst to be exploited in a broader community as the next step and so on. It cascades. It is where we fit understanding and fresh knowledge within the innovation web.

Getting innovation through any process of understanding is hard. Knowing what is required to generate innovation throughout an entire organization is even more so.

We need to deploy the cascading effect on innovation to support this supporting “effect.” Continue reading “The Cascading Innovation Effect.”

Thinking sustainability needs a mix of future scenarios.

The accelerating need to build a sustainability pathway

Sustainability is near top or close to the top of a board’s agenda.

The growing concerns of several intertwined issues need addressing as they will initiate a significant change to the Business and how it operates and presents itself to the world.

Boards are asking where our business fits within and alongside society, both in who we serve and society in general, coupled with realising that the planet is heading towards a critical crisis and what we can do to reduce these pressures?

Not just sustainability forces a sharper need for strategic choices but the ability to undertake the product reinvention. A reinvention that concerns itself with reducing waste, minimizing carbon emissions, valuing the full life cycle and the ability to show the increasingly important end-of-life part of the lifecycle model.

Extracting precious, rare earth minerals and recycling parts reduces the demand for future mining or heat intensive materials.

Any products need to have a clear understanding of all their stages for the clarity of sustainability. Continue reading “Thinking sustainability needs a mix of future scenarios.”

Accelerating Clean Energy Innovation

“Without a major acceleration in clean energy innovation, reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 will not be possible.”
A groundbreaking report, “Net-Zero by 2050: a roadmap for the global energy system“(referred to as NZE here) by the Internation Energy Agency (IEA), has been emphasising that this decade is pivotal to reaching net-zero by mid-century.
This 2050 target is in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, the foundations of global consensus to limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5c. This requires nothing short of a total transformation of the energy systems.
The report is the world’s first comprehensive study of how to transition to a net-zero energy system by 2050 while ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access, and enabling robust economic growth.
The report sets out a cost-effective and economically productive pathway, resulting in a clean, dynamic and resilient energy economy dominated by renewables like solar and wind instead of fossil fuels. The report also examines key uncertainties, such as the roles of bioenergy, carbon capture and behavioural changes in reaching net zero.
The role of innovation has a crucial one to play.
In the near term, the report describes a net-zero pathway that requires the immediate and massive deployment of all available clean and efficient energy technologies, combined with a major global push to accelerate innovation. Continue reading “Accelerating Clean Energy Innovation”

Five Bold Steps suggested for the American Innovation Agenda

I have been reading a report written by Stephen J Ezell of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) along with a guru of innovation, John Kao, of ILSi on their concerns that something is amiss with the U.S. innovation system.

The report “Five Bold Steps Towards a Reimagined American Innovation Agenda“, written in February 2021, argues for embracing these five bold steps of story, stewardship, strategy, scaling, and system reimagine innovation for the decade ahead.

In all honesty, it is a little underwhelming, not just the bold but simple five steps but the short document of five pages. It assumes a position, and that is dangerous.

Their argument regarding innovation is that Americans have come to see U.S. leadership as a birthright, as a matter of course. In my view, they lost the leadership mantle for innovation years back. I totally agree it should and needs to come back as a bedrock of future growth, prosperity and dramatically altering today’s landscape. Continue reading “Five Bold Steps suggested for the American Innovation Agenda”

Human-centred innovation in a digital world.

Today we are facing many current disruptions where we need to react fast and intelligently. There are many situations we are facing that are a race against time. As we continue to respond to Covid-19, technology has the power to reduce the complexity often faced, speed up and contribute to solutions that help resolve pressing issues.

We recognize that equally as important as the technology are the people using the technology. Having people at the centre of designs enables more intelligent, rapid and lasting innovation. The Digital Twin is where data from the physical and virtual world come together and is increasingly where people and technology come together to resolve many of today’s challenges.

Applying human-centred innovation

Continue reading “Human-centred innovation in a digital world.”

Leadership Alignment Work Mat for making Innovation fully connected.

I believe the value of working the seven domains of this framework, named the Leadership Alignment Workmat has significant value within and across any organization. It brings innovation together, a unifying point for the activity and momentum of innovation to become central to the core of the business in its future investment and value impact.

The Leadership Alignment Workmat provides a unique examination of the executive’s role in innovation; it offers a framework that the organisation’s leadership can adopt to ensure linkages and synergies between strategy and innovation, innovation and capabilities, innovation and culture.

They often lack the communicating medium to help clarify and shape the innovation story to provide the guidance necessary for achieving that essential engagement and encouragement they would like to align organizational efforts required from innovation to the strategies envisioned.

Benefits of applying the Leadership Alignment Work Mat

From an investment in an executive work mat exercise, you receive four significant benefits. Continue reading “Leadership Alignment Work Mat for making Innovation fully connected.”

The crucial role Innovation must play in the Energy system

Innovation is vital to the energy system’s integration and operation design, and we need to further recognize its crucial role. I believe we undertake a radical transformation in the way we supply, transform, and use energy. This requires a profound transformation in technologies, systems, and infrastructure.

Innovation is made up of many enabling technologies that support energy. This complexity requires innovative approaches to be built in highly systematic ways. Its ultimate result is to offer innovation that can continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.

Innovation needs to be transformational, offer greater value than what it is replacing, show the real advantage, set out to achieve competitive gains and offer a higher level of sustainability, value and impact.

We need an innovative mantra for energy.

Energy is a vital part of any country’s ability to be competitive. Today half the world’s capital is invested in energy and its related infrastructure as it is the backbone of any industrial and urbanization strategy.

Our need is to keep pushing for discoveries, for experimentation, for demonstrating. We must nurture innovation, and we must continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway. Continue reading “The crucial role Innovation must play in the Energy system”