Building the future business | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

A really worthwhile report on Innovation not to be missed from Innovation Leader.

There has just been a highly useful benchmarking report released by Innovation Leader with KPMG LLP sponsoring this and providing some of their collective insights into the different aspects of “Benchmarking Innovation Impact 2018″

At present, you can download the report before it might slip behind a paywall at some later stage. I would take advantage while you can. The report provides insights from 270 innovation, R&D and strategy executives and considerable work on structuring the conclusions in highly thoughtful and valuable ways to the reader.

If you are not familiar with Innovation Leader, they were created to be a growing and essential resource for innovation, especially in the bigger organizations. It has a more specific focus on the US scene but much of what it has found is universal in my opinion. It’s editor and Co-Founder Scott Kirsner (editor@innovationleader.com) and his team are building a great point of reference and meeting point for innovators to exchange and learn from each other. Maybe you should join?

Why do I think the report is well worth you investing time to read? The report provides an excellent document that enables good discussions to be drawn from the benchmarking of many organization, to compare with your own organization. The report is laid out into four parts: 1. Creating Strategic Alignment, 2.Funding Innovation, 3 Delivering Impact and 4 Moving forward.

It offers up great suggestions on tactics, relationships and obstacles you can face in any sort of innovation program, be it an early forming one or at a more mature stage. It can allow you to communicate and suggest the needs for a new innovation approach where you need others involved but they would expect to see a validation. This report helps in all these and much more.

I am going to just focus on three parts that really caught my eye Continue reading “A really worthwhile report on Innovation not to be missed from Innovation Leader.”

So I keep asking myself “What is the role of social media in innovation?”

Social media haunts us all. For many years you first become aware, then very aware and then fully aware that social media is changing our lives.

Let me confess: I am not alone I am sure but I seem to be presently suffering from Social Media Return Dilemma. There I’ve said it, it is out in the open, “I suffer from SMRD”.

To be honest I am struggling with social media in innovation, struggling to get my head around it for my business, for me for a long time. It often seems overwhelming, do you feel the same? I worried about this years ago and still do. What is the best social media to have as part of your communicating strategy, how much time do you network?

It starts with a realization

I can see daily the amazing power that social networking can provide, it is certainly eating into my day, more and more. Is this a good thing or bad? What suffers, what benefits? The time issue has to increasingly be managed, and I have yet to come up with a repeatable plan to manage social media consistently each day into my work. I get so much from viewing, commenting, relating and learning.

I don’t have a clear enough strategy for it or where to direct my social media energy, does anyone? It continues to evolve in front of our eyes, are you cresting the social media wave or swimming like crazy to get back up on the surfing board?

I am still learning, experimenting, exploring through a combination of writing blogs, contributing to others, updating my connections, tweeting sometimes like crazy, publishing, promoting or simply clicking on a retweet or offer a “like” back to the author or the one that has publicized something that interests me. Often I do wonder all this frenetic energy leads to what end. It does nag away at me?

Continue reading “So I keep asking myself “What is the role of social media in innovation?””

What goes around, comes around, in Innovation

It is funny but that often-used phrase “what goes around, comes around” seems appropriate here.

I was catching up with my often collaborator and sparring partner on “all things innovating” Jeffrey Phillips recently, and within our conversation, some of our discussions sort of triggered a reflection back to some fundamental work we undertook some years back.

In revisiting it, I felt it does stand the test of time and does seem to make this “come around” seem true. Let me provide a quick introduction along with some brief explanations : Continue reading “What goes around, comes around, in Innovation”

Return Value Back to Knowledge

“Let’s return knowledge back to knowledge!” “Let’s return value back to knowledge” This held my attention.

So now I want to draw this to your attention, the underlying story. I was recently invited to join the Future Shapers as a contributor and I was delighted to be accepted as a future shapers contributor. this is my profile link.

There are some strong reasons to add my voice to this group so I wanted to share this with you here on my main posting site

Normally I would not try to merge my posting site with others unless I have some growing level of involvement, contribution or strong identification with. Well, this is one of those but I first wanted to wait before I publicize it here, as the official launch of a funding project kicked off late last week in Madrid,(link) that radically gives it a really different meaning, one to draw to your attention as it is radically different.

So let me explain why, so I have provided the outlines of the story below in their words Continue reading “Return Value Back to Knowledge”

The Arrival and Potential of Knowledge Graphs into Our World

Making connections through Knowledge Graphs — https://www.ontotext.com/products/ontotext-platform/

Knowledge Graphs have a real potential to become highly valuable, topical and relevant. If only we can get them prised out of the engineer, data scientists, or software experts hands.

We simply should so we can get this concept fully out into the real world, that of applying as solutions to real client problems, it would really help. I get tired of hearing about “use cases”, where concepts like KG often get caught up in, that never-ending validation.

Is this validation simply because it does not work, it is too much hard work delivering the promise within the concept? Or the approach has too much complexity around it and needs massive resources to undertake?

KG needs a real resource momentum and a determination to break through uncertainty. Its huge value should drive it, and caution should be modified and lets go out and validate it, in the real world.

If any of these “constraints” are the case, then we do need to “hack this” differently, as Knowledge Graphs has what I see an incredible potential, as an application solution that should be deemed as far too important to keep under wraps. We need to instill a sense of urgency into this. Why, well read on. Continue reading “The Arrival and Potential of Knowledge Graphs into Our World”

Applying the Three Horizon Thinking to a Fresh Perspective of Innovation Design

There is huge value in applying the three horizon framework into your thinking. It is as useful a framework that you can get, to help decide where you are heading.

It is not just for innovation application, that can determine innovation activities. It has multiple values in any organization thinking and alignment.

The 3H informs the decisions to be taken, by recognizing their importance to the future and ‘frame’ resource allocation, identify current capability gaps to resolve.

It helps to enable the whole organization to “get onto the same page” and move towards that desired future.

This 3H thinking helps break down complex issues. Thinking in different horizons prompts you to go beyond the usual focus of fixing innovation just in the present it provides the connections of the present with the desired future. The 3H builds portfolio design, outline the steps to resolve in any complex challenge, it ‘informs’ strategy and builds the business case for taking a specific direction to that ‘desired future’.

If you want to read more on the three horizons then take some time out to explore the “insights and thinking” resource page shown under the ‘tabs’ above.

I recently applied the three horizons thinking to ‘frame’ a new innovation design Continue reading “Applying the Three Horizon Thinking to a Fresh Perspective of Innovation Design”

The Dynamics within Agility.

There has been an awful lot to absorb when it comes to skills and how organizations need to be designed for the future. The suggestions have come ‘thick and fast’ from so many sources.

The number of helpful reports, observations and suggestions are constant and becoming overwhelming to translate effectively.

How can we map a new pathway for shifting current practices and transform them?

Where do we focus, what do we recognize as organization practices that can begin to transform the organization and re-equip it for a different future?

After working through a number the one that held my attention and has become central to my thinking to take organizational practices forward was provided by a recent report from McKinsey “How to create an agile organization”. This report has been part of a broader ‘agile’ series from them but this one specifically gave me my necessary anchor point, to move forward with my own design thinking for agility and innovation.

Agility for me is vital, it allows us to increasingly be adaptive in an uncertain world.

As innovation continues to be central to growth far more in the future it is our ability to adapt and adjust to all the uncertainties and this requires the ability to be agile. Continue reading “The Dynamics within Agility.”

Learning a new innovation language

We all in the middle of a re-orientation of our ways to undertake innovation as a process and in its design.

The past belief was that a product was your island and pathway to secured profits, today this alone no longer works. We are learning to connect in completely different ways.

We are learning how to interact with a connected system as products move into products services, and digital, all connected and combined.

It is how we design and explores “smart” products and for this we are reliant on others, having a growing dependency on external parties. We are building our innovation in new collaborations and diverse networks of expertise and understanding.

The emergence of platforms and ecosystems within our connected product design are increasingly taking a central role.

So are you learning a new innovation language? Continue reading “Learning a new innovation language”

So Where Is Innovation Heading?

I have written a fair amount about the new innovation era, offering a view on its future design.

One that is jumping to a fresh cycle of innovative design

We are in the middle of it, some of you may not have noticed its impact and change but it is significant on the understanding of innovation, in it’s future design.

Often this era of change is not as well-recognized or being faced up to, as you would expect.

Many companies are still in denial or not wanting to address the significant legacy and change required.

Innovation has gone from being islands of knowledge, developing new products and services exclusive to that one company, then quickly copied by the competitors, into something radically different.

We are moving into innovation activities that are built more on collaborative and co-creation approaches, where cooperation and exchanges are more built around platforms and formed in ecosystems.These ecosystems gather around a concept or transformation that requires this collective approach and require a more radical design and become very unique in the end result .To achieve this innovation has gone digital, pure and simple. Continue reading “So Where Is Innovation Heading?”

There are Knowns and Unknowns in Innovation: Let’s Manage Them Differently

This quote is from the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Henry Rumsfeld, who mentioned: “unknown unknowns” (Rumsfeld, 2002).

Since then, people have started using quadrants of knowledge, i.e., known known, known unknown, unknown known, and unknown unknown, to understand and explain the nature of risk but also of leading to an opportunity.

For innovators so much of innovation is hard to detect, it needs discovery and working through these quadrants of knowledge as well. We need to treat ideas the same on how anything needs assessing but it needs to pass through a different thinking about knowledge understanding, as there are ‘known knowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ and we need to prepare for both within our innovation activities.

Our pursuit in life is often the same as our innovation efforts, it is in the search for discovery. Often it happens, that we already feel better equipped for exploring and observing by just getting out of our usual everyday working environment.

Continue reading “There are Knowns and Unknowns in Innovation: Let’s Manage Them Differently”