Insights, and thinking from Paul Hobcraft for orchestrating ecosystem strategy designs
We often constrain our innovation because we ‘shoehorn’ any conceptual thinking into a given time, usually the yearly budgetary plan.
This shoehorning often dominates the actions decided and can exercise a large influence in this constraining of ideas to realization.
We should make the case that different types of innovation operate and evolve over different time horizons and need thinking through differently.
We have three emerging horizons that need different treatments for innovation.
So do Art and Science combine for innovation?
First of all, what we do does come from us as humans, in our actions and needs,these are also the starting point for innovation, pushing for something new; it is linked to experiences and questioning, seeking out and wanting to explore “all things possible”.
The powerful combination of designing and providing something that pushes our existing knowledge, our boundaries, understanding or expectations and capturing it in thought, in explanation or detailing out the discovery makes up the art and science of innovation.
We just need to find even-better and consistent ways to combine them continuously.
Science chases progress, Art really does not. Art just looks to make a change, sometimes evolving, sometimes in powerful new ways and it does this from the evolving multiple perspectives and studies of much that is existing, both physical and within the mind to express this to others.
Sometimes, Science is often constrained by a far too linear approach and this needs somehow change where we need to think in less rigid, structured ways today.
In the past twelve months or even more, I think there have been some exceptional reports and thinking coming out of Deliotte’s group on business issues
These have been from their dedicated practice centers, their University Press and the Deliotte Consulting LLP, mainly from the US practice.
I would regard their thought leadership as close to the top or even at the very top of any of the big consulting firms.
I’ve certainly gained some richer understanding as I am sure many others have and for me Deloitte deserve significant praise for investing in their thought leadership thinking.
Each organization needs to understand its strategic resources to build continuously innovation, so as to sustain and grow the organization; otherwise, it will eventually die, starved of what is vital to sustaining itself.
The resources provide the lungs that give oxygen; they need to constantly be nurtured, too breathe and pump new life into the existing.
For innovation the same applies, we need to consistently build our innovative resources, they give delivery of the healthy living cells to promote and sustain us in new value potential.
The problem is we often are not very good at maintaining our resources and innovation activity. We just simply do not sustain our efforts, we tend to allow them to drift along or become lopsided from one individual team’s efforts, while the others simply ‘wallow’
I wanted to depart from just focusing on extolling innovation within this post – a sort of sound off, of sorts, it is a real need to look to the future.
It seems in all I keep reading that we are being extorted to disrupt our enterprises before someone else does.
The constant threat of both those known to us and those unknown competitors who can simply raise money based on a disruptive concept, provide a different business model and then attack tomorrow. It is not a comfortable feeling is it?
We are told It is in our ‘complacency’ that we are losing our competitive advantages, even face extinction from those that attack and tear down, replacing it with something different and supposedly better. Did we really need it?
Can we learn to adapt as fast as all that is seemingly coming toward us?
There is so much disruptive power being harnessed that we are all facing an exponentially more complex and challenging environment. Why is there seemingly this determination to tear down many parts of the fabric of our society by challenging institutions, businesses and government structures?
The typical linear and often siloed mindset that we have for much of our innovation thinking within our business organizations has to rapidly fall away.
We are in the ‘cusp’ of a fundamental change that technology, platforms and connected ecosystems will bring into the mix for connecting and collaborating in dramatically different ways than in the past.
One of the implications will be our need in measuring the metrics within companies. The measurement of inputs, throughout and outputs need to become far more focused on delivering speed and scale potential as the critical points. We are far more needing to focus on the outcomes as our primary point of measurement.
This is a further post on discussing outcomes as the focal point of our innovation measurements, following my recent one of “Shifting to Ultimate Outcomes”
The outcome economy which is emerging has many implications within it and how we measure and value these will become increasingly important. Companies will need better data to calculate costs, evaluate its potential value and will be modelling far more the risks and tracking the factors required to deliver within any outcome-based value promised.
Recently I have been hearing a lot about different innovation equations that will deliver value on the efforts you put in.
I think the activity behind all of this is actually very encouraging, it shows the current dissatisfaction with what we have and the quest for providing a formula for overcoming this ‘present state’.
I think they are all contributing to a promising future. Yet we need to consider the balance within any innovation understanding or equation to derive its real value.
Many organizations are struggling with their metrics and ways to measure the progress and success of their business.
From this writer’s point of view, their innovation activity gets caught up in plenty of unintended consequences, to put it mildly, in wasted debate, discussion & bad decisions through wrong measurement criteria.
Firstly, we are still locked in the old paradigm of thinking this is an industrial economy where we set about measuring inputs to innovation (R&D expenditure, capital investment) and then focused on the intermediate step of throughput and then outputs (publications, production units, patent filing, end products).
We also perceive innovation far too much still as an activity within just one company – viewed as linear, with considerations for services more of an afterthought (like ‘bolt-ons’). Production systems remain far too often the driving force of performance judgement.
How often do you pause for thought, testing yourself, questioning even simply for ‘just those few minutes,’ to allow yourself to openly challenge where you are and what you are attempting to do?
We keep relentlessly moving on, like a wandering herd of buffalo, always looking for fresh pasture, those new feeding grounds. It’s not good.
Of course, I often get caught up in this restless pursuit of gathering more, when I spend a growing amount of my time researching innovation. I keep coming across so many things that ‘trigger’ the thinking, pushing me on.
Do you let them go, ignore them, quickly pass over them, or attempt to capture the issue as something well worth investigating further at a later stage, or just get them simply behind you in the here and now.
We so often struggle to articulate our innovation activity and then can’t seemingly project our plans into the future in consistent and coherent ways. We often lack the framing necessary.
If this rings true of the innovation activity in your organization, then it is in danger of being seen as isolated, one-off events, that fail to link to your organizational strategy. Furthermore you’ll be missing out, or not capitalizing on emerging trends and insights where fresh growth opportunities reside.
I so often come back to the messages we need to learn, which centers around the three horizon methodology.
I just wish this framework would be adopted far more within organizations. wanting to build a sustaining dialogue around innovation, it can be such a powerful enabler.