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.
The fear of the unknowns explodes upon those not ready
When the established order begins to creak and dismantle, seemingly in front of our eyes, those fears of the unknown can kick in, especially if you have been used to managing in an established (slowly) evolving way for most, if not all, of your business life.
We seem confronted with rapid change, and it is primarily within the business world related to technology and market uncertainty that is driving this. We need to counter “fear” with a different approach, recognizing most of what we feel might be the ‘unknown’ is actually ‘known.’
We need to recognize our unknowns, search out others who might be experts in that point of not knowing and gain their help in piecing the parts that might be fragmented together to bring that need for recognition and clarity in our mind.
Fear can immobilize us.
In a recent exchange I had within one innovation community discussion, it was suggested that Innovation Business Ecosystems did not have the expected uptake because of this “fear of the unknowns”.
What initially prompted this was my post on making the business case for “Thinking about Innovation Ecosystems”Well, we need to address fear to get past this mental blockage of the “fear of those unknowns”.
So this short post is on tackling fear and dealing with the unknowns.
This morning I decided to have an exchange on ChatGPT on the future of Innovation Management Software, I asked a number of questions in a short series and can well-relate to the answers provided incredibly quickly.
What do you think?
Do they make sense and are the suggestions a competitive threat or a trend towards a future that needs fully embracing before others do?
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.
Over this weekend, I spent a fair amount of reading time working through the World Economic Forum Whitepapers I have collected to remind me of this incredible source of knowledge across many world issues and challenges, grasping the risks, potentials and value opportunities discussed in these papers.
These reports (Whitepapers) are a storehouse of knowledge, facts and suggested actions that need to be taken. The Whitepapers found here cover Climate issues, Green Deal views, Resilience, Circular Transformation, Global Value Chains, Electricity views, Securing the Energy Transition and plenty more.
For me, the weekend focus was specifically on the Energy Transition, following on from their recent Davos event and the series of reports and whitepapers co-sponsored with different organizations built up over many years.
One whitepaper I took some time to find more time to re-read. It was from a white paper “Accelerating Sustainable Energy Innovation, released in May 2018 and prepared in collaboration with KPMG.
Why is this whitepaper a timely one for me to relook at? It looks at the Energy Innovation (eco)system
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?
Innovation is the accelerator in our energy transitions.
No energy transition will be achieved without invention and innovation, yet we are currently failing badly to fund research, development and deployment. We are losing the race to stop our planet’s warming as our innovative human endeavours are not at the level they should be, or we lack the “will” to make the changes we so desperately need to undergo to protect our planet.
The sheer scope of the energy transition often pulls me in so many different directions. Still, the foundation stays in place, that of making the contribution of my understanding of innovation as my focal point of contribution- the accelerant to energy change.
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.
What an utterly strange year, 2022 has been. We have been confronted, reflective and seemingly having to “kick start” our lives again after the challenges of living through the impacts of a global pandemic.
We go into 2023 far more in personal and business conflict. We do need to find a new way of working. It is not throwing away the technology, tools or established processes, it is transforming these in new and different ways. We have not found the “real-time” to stop, explore and approach concepts and innovative ideas in different ways. Our mindset or conditioning was fairly hard-wired from our past ways of working, we felt unable to justify “permission” to change how we undertook work and have found it challenging with the impact of being remote. Many have simply walked away from their past established ways of working. We are confronting unsettling times for many reasons.
In many ways, it felt all we knew or needed was suddenly not good enough. We have lost our understanding of many things we became used to, and suddenly it all seemed challenged in far bigger ways. War, flooding, famine, shortages, and illness challenges began impacting our lives. We were indeed been confronted with a series of crises and the need for a fast, thoughtful set of responses which we were unprepared or incapable to give as each challenge has been highly complex.
We were beginning to be more open to being more reflective but we have been constantly pushed to take us back to “business as usual”. In many ways, we are struggling with a need for a “reset” but it is far more complex than that as we are in the middle of multiple crises.
This return to the old normal is a non-starter for me, we are in a rapidly changing world
We are in need of recognizing and discerning how much our world is upside down, so we can begin to understand how we need to re-equip ourselves to a new way of working, thinking and responding. We need to “righten” what is wrong with this feeling of much of what we are doing being out of balance.
We are all struggling to transform ourselves. Our businesses are grappling with the current economic difficulties we all presently facing including shortages, disruptions, and dealing with inflation and economic downturns and massive climate change challenges. We are not only confronted with the potential of the toughest downturn in modern times but with all the pressures with the speed of decision-making, and technological advances that seem to ‘suck up’ more of our daily lives instead of helping to resolve it. 2022 was unsettling for me.
