building a lasting innovation engagement | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

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”

One great visual paints a thousand innovating words

One great visual paints a thousand words
This visual I came across some years back, and for me, is outstanding in providing the feedback loops that go into developing the right innovation vision. To get to a definitive endpoint of having an innovation vision, you are faced with some complex challenges. These are well shown here.
Each influences the other and constantly loop back, making an improving vision success hopefully.

The critical feedback needs for constructing an innovation vision

The different challenges seen in this terrific depiction provide the sort of dialogue and efforts that needs to go into ‘crafting’ the innovation vision. It is hard, thoughtful work. Let’s look at each of these a little more.
The Time Challenge
Continue reading “One great visual paints a thousand innovating words”

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.”

The Critically Important Innovation Narrative

Whatever we do, we do far better when we become emotionally connected. Often understanding a good story builds this emotional connection or simply puts you off. Stories can inspire and spark even greater ideas. The art of storytelling and making connections with the listener or reader has incredible value. Yet, a story has limited value. For me, it is the more powerful narrative that drives innovation, inspiring and gaining identification in multiple ways.

A story is linked to a series of events that take a character from one state to another. In contrast, a narrative is a system of stories that links values and events to establish a broader and often new cultural meaning.

Let’s draw down on so much of John Hagel’s work on narratives. It has shaped my thinking. Continue reading “The Critically Important Innovation Narrative”

Going beyond the known of today

There are so many places where innovation is essential within the Energy Transition due to the magnitude, size, and complexity of the change needed to achieve a decarbonized world. There is a world of innovative possibilities.

One of the most important catalysts for changing the energy system into a sustainable green one is by taking our thinking beyond the known into the possibilities we need for a sustainable future of energy based on the ability for renewables to generate all our electrification needs.

We need to build out all our renewable possibilities that include solar, wind, hydro, green hydrogen and nuclear energy.

In this combination of pursuit, nurturing, and expanding our thinking through the thoughtful construction of a vision built on knowledge, exploration and understanding, we can mobilize the changes needed.

My energy journey is being navigated across the three-time horizons. Continue reading “Going beyond the known of today”

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.”

Mapping Out Your Innovating Way Forward

Mapping any innovation journey can be complicated. There is a fairly detailed journey needed to be undertaken for mapping out your future direction of innovation.

Let’s get straight into it and the process and sequence needed within any innovation journey.

Firstly you have to work through the Strategic Needs– this needs to cover the type of approaches, the scope and intent, the assessments of the required impact for the end customer and organizational value, the understanding and outlines of this becoming organizational-wide in its integrated needs.

This approach does need a systematic approach, continuous up-dated toolboxes and visible metrics and tracking. Lastly, to build and quickly test, adopt and scale as knowledge and understanding are gained.

Second, there is the need to build reference points for future innovation activities, so duplication and learning can be built into understanding. Here it is vital to have gained the continued support and engagement of high-level participation, where we recommend the Leadership Alignment work Mat approach, Continue reading “Mapping Out Your Innovating Way Forward”

Fitness Landscape Dynamics for Innovation

Fitness Landscape Dynamics

Innovation is not so easy. There are so many dependencies that you need to work through. The importance of recognizing innovation needs a systematic approach becomes clear when you begin to work through all the needs and issues to understand and translate. Here are some thoughts:

By exploring and modelling the mutual dependencies, you get to see how the existing and alternative future innovation system will behave as you begin to map out and recognize the different emphasis points that make up your innovation system.

You can begin to identify the more important dynamic ones that require a more dedicated focus and place more of your resources behind. In contrast, others can evolve at their own pace or simply improve as they are far more dependent on the dynamic ones than you realized initially. These can get simply get ‘pulled along’ and rise equally in their performance. Continue reading “Fitness Landscape Dynamics for Innovation”