In a series exploring cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations, this is the third post discussing different aspects and the approach to this that needs to be taken as my suggested starting point.
All the elements of skills, processes, tools, capabilities and behaviours are important in supporting an effective collaboration across sectors that might need to be involved.
Clarifying the design and common points is essential
This month I am completing a series on cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations. This is the second post that I am sharing on both my dedicated ecosystem thinking site and also through my paul4innovating posting site, which has different audiences to discuss this with.
For me, cross-sector collaborations are becoming essential to our future in tackling highly complex challenging issues that need collaborative resolution.
Cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations do have real differences and my aim is to draw these out in this series.
Collaborations form the essence of discovery, relationships, innovation and new knowledge exchange.
As we move increasingly towards more open innovation hubs and increased ecosystem management the recognition is that many of the challenges and problems have not just become too complex to tackle alone, or even in a single industry but require cross-sector innovation (ecosystem designed) collaboration (CSIC) in consortia-developed approaches.
Sharing in collaborative arrangements enables the potential for improved operational productivity, and shared application development, tapping into a wider ongoing customer engagement and skill enhancements for all involved to gain from.
When you begin to evaluate cross-sector collaborations, the potential in building out initiatives that can only be achieved with a diversity of partners, different industry entities and drawing in the varied business networks get recognized.
For me, cross-sector collaborations are becoming essential to our future in tackling highly complex challenging issues that need well-organized and coordinated collaborative resolution
Yet we have to be careful as cross-sector innovation collaborations do have differencesand can be complicated. I hope this post series helps in your thinking about these cross-sector collaborations
So why is finding the right skills and competencies for innovation a real challenge but so essential?
How do we know the critical skills, competencies and capabilities for innovation? Also, what are the additional dependencies for sustaining innovation capabilities that are becoming vital to understand so an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them, build upon a sustainable future and leverage these innovation dynamics?
We often miss or fail to ask which skills or attributes are critical to providing a more significant impact for a successful innovation solution. What naturally occurs can be only having access to a fundamental building block, like a dedicated innovation team. This will often stay limited in outcomes as it may lack the necessary skills, understanding, or capabilities to tackle complex challenges. The result will provide a limited impact on finding the best solutions to these complex challenges and problems we often need to tackle.
We stifle and lose the real potential by not having the correct dynamics of innovation on offer. Recognizing the skills, competencies, capabilities, and capacity needed does constantly differ by the problem tackled. We must identify what is needed and the gaps to be plugged through a comprehensive fitness framework that can be applied constantly.
Completing transitions through innovation, ecosystems and sustainability thinking
Today, our innovation activity needs to transition through collaborating and co-creating, applying ecosystem thinking and platform designs for business. We increasingly recognize the future value and impact for businesses to grow, is through combining innovation, and external collaborations, and ensuring solutions are more sustainable.
We need to have a new open architecture for undergoing this transformation that is scalable and built, combining technology and tools, for speed and effectiveness.
Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building requires a new ecosystem-designed way that connects the parts.
Let me tell you my story of what I believe; it continues to evolve
Today’s challenge is to build the capacity, competencies and capabilities to be different, more resilient and resourceful. These need to be built upon a deep appreciation of what innovation can provide; the stimulus for creative solutions that have sustained lasting growth.
Converging ideas and thinking brings out creativity and different innovative solutions
Innovation ecosystems are gaining good traction to build out a more robust innovation management system that can offer the interconnected network of organizations the opportunity to create and commercialize new ideas, concepts, products and services.
Participating in innovation ecosystems does have a number of advantages
Greater access to a wider range of resources and expertise through the bringing together of a diverse set of organizations that can bring together technologies and customer insights from different perspectives, drawing in different resources not usually available to one organization to offer a greater potential to innovate more effectively, in choice, options, shared thinking and risk.
Increased collaborations and co-creation through innovation ecosystems can foster the greater potential for collaborations and co-creations between associated parties that can “trigger” innovations that feed from these growing cooperations forming between the parties
Greater scalability and speed. By leveraging the resources and capabilities of other organizations, the potential to scale the innovation efforts in new ways, across different channels, not open to one organization and give different levels of speed from the establishment and reputations the partners have built up in their respective markets.
Greater flexibility and adaptability in different, more collective and imaginative ways. Multiple alerts to market changes, conditions and customers’ needs can stimulate a growing adaptability and solution design, more modular or progressive in response
Greater potential for sustainability and social impact. Innovation ecosystems increasingly need to be designed to offer more sustainable and socially responsible solutions,having partners who manage different parts of the lifecycle, can create opportunities in designing redundancy and ease of replacement that extends and expands a product’s solution, giving an ongoing positive impact while achieving re-occurring business success.
Having a purposeful innovation ecosystem, well-designed and built for highly collaborative partnerships can yield very different results than managing innovation alone. These are not one-size fits, the understanding of what is needed to turn an ecosystem concept into a winning one may have specific needs for one group, compared to another. Multiple ecosystems allow for the ability to bring together the specific partners needed to achieve one goal but recognize these changes, depending on the challenges and complexities of any innovation concept requiring this collaborative approach.
Innovation ecosystems should be dynamic and highly adaptive, as participants join, others leave as different solutions are sought and evolve from collaborations, co-creation, new technology and new business model emerges
The key is to create an environment that encourages and supports the flow of open sources of ideas and resources among like-minded participants and enables them to collaborate and learn from each other in mutually beneficial ways to advance their specific business.
photo credit: Walkabout (1971) film by Nicolas Roeg
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; we often hear and see things differently when we find the time to stand still.
Do you let those moments go? Do you ignore them, quickly pass over them, attempt to capture the issue as something worth investigating later, or just get them behind you in the here and now? We often do need to slow down and figure it out there and then.
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 to feel I am more often the “hunter-gatherer.”
By long-term habit, I keep reverting more into a hunter-gatherer, in my case, upon innovation insights, collecting the raw material that I am looking to translate and distribute as this growing knowledge stock eventually.
The outcome of appreciating both “reflective” moments and collecting more understanding I trust is moving me slowly towards becoming an innovation curator who, hopefully, is valued by others. Well, it’s a goal of mine.
Applying ecosystem thinking to innovate complex and challenging problems
“Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems will have a powerful effect,
it alters the way we will approach problems today and in the future,
ecosystems offer a greater potential for collaborative growth, impact and sustaining innovating value”
Our understanding of innovation is changing; we are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into open and far more collaborative innovation (external orientation), with our collective thinking offering the acceleration into improving our innovation performances, leading to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success.
The search is seemingly on to find greater value, which will increasingly coalesce around different innovation ecosystems. In many different ways, we need to form significantly more relationships that increasingly matter to each organization, add value and insight, and bring external expertise inside to work on ‘greater’ innovation solutions.
The Winds of Change- Innovation Software facing the Innovators’ Dilemma
In my research, I am getting a real sense that the current Innovation Management Software model is about to be upended and disrupted as per Clayton Christensens’ “Innovators Dilemma.”
The book the “Innovation Dilemma” published in 2016 was written by innovation expert Clayton Christensen suggesting even though even the most outstanding companies can do everything right–yet still lose market leadership.
Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.
Today if the technology software solutions are not advancing and adapting to new ways of building open, collaborative exchanges across not just a single organization but multiple ones. This need of all coming together to co-create, often solving more complex problems, ideas are lost or not being spotted by the incumbents and over time, others recognize these “blind spots” will present opportunities to offer new approaches to solve problems.
In this book it expands on the concept of disruptive technologies, a term Christensen coined in a 1995 in an article “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave”. It describes how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appear to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from the established business. (source Wikipeda)
I have always welcomed the KPMG LLP-sponsored InnoLead benchmarking report; this is for the third year.
I received a note from Scott Kirsner, who leads the team at Innolead, and he offered me a chance to read the report before its official release today at 12 PM ET time and suggested I can post anytime, so here goes. This is longer as a post as this benchmarking report brings out a lot in my view.
This report provides a definitive innovation benchmarking document for leaders in strategy, R&D, design, and other innovation roles inside large organizations. It includes survey data, interviews with senior executives, and perspectives from KPMG leaders.
The report link “Benchmarking innovation impact from InnoLead” by @innolead and @KPMG_US does offer an excellent stimulating overview that still reflects on so much of what still needs to be done in the innovation world.
The report, as suggested in the opening Welcome by Cliff Justice, U.S. Leader, Enterprise Innovation at KPMG, does provide a variety of ideas and considerations for those seeking innovation understanding.
What was collected was 216 qualified survey responses from professionals working predominantly in innovation, research and development, and strategy roles, and conducted eight interviews with senior leaders at companies across a wide range of industries, including Colgate-Palmolive, Mastercard, NASCAR, and Entergy, the New Orleans-based utility operator.
