building the innovation business case | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Innovators – are you thinking about Ecosystems?

Thinking about ecosystems certainly allows us to go out of our normal scope of internally generating new products.

It opens up a host of possibilities, that can add significantly to a new service design, new capabilities and solving more complex problems.

In opening up to managing within ecosystems, you begin to see your ability to contribute and tackle societal problems within a collaborative system.

You can see new opportunities that can allow you to enter new markets that would have been impossible as an individual organization.

You begin to see the power, scale and strength of having the collective collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional thinking design. You go beyond the utilization of leveraging existing infrastructure, building on others’ specializations and leveraging through technology powerful new concepts to tackle increasingly complex innovation design.
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Technology leads, innovation exploitation is lagging

There is a growing, perhaps even an overwhelming business case, for transforming the innovation management structure.

The new combination is the new connections through people and things (IoT) that we can achieve a new innovation potential.

We will obtain increasing more powerful insights that have the real potential of being turned into new innovation outcomes, through the connected businesses we are presently needing to build. This can generate new value and business propositions.

Today the virtual world of digital is moving much faster than the physical ‘enacted world,’ of turning insights into actual innovation activities, through the innovation pipeline. Our innovation systems are lagging significantly behind. We need to radically redesign them and bring them up to date, fit for managing innovation in the 21st century.

The whole discovery to final execution, is for most organizations still a very fragmented, often disconnected system. It is highly reliant on manual systems with people often disconnected from the real innovation engagement making decisions on inadequate data or insights.

We are failing to leverage all we have gained from our innovation understanding over the years. We have this ongoing inability to adapt, to connect the innovation system through the use of technology and growing value networks, so as to provide the integration, the dedicated resource and accountability to deliver successful innovation outcomes that our customers require.

Successful outcomes are certainly possible, from a well-designed innovation management system brought up to date, adaptive, flexible and responsive, if we apply the time and effort to conceive and construct it.
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Our inabilities to adapt needs changing.

Erosion is everywhere, it just seems inevitable, we somehow get caught up in the process of time and our organizations seem to ‘freeze’ before our eyes, then simply age.

They become fixed, rigid and locked into their established ways, not adapting to the changes occurring around them. We often give up and leave, moving on to better places and challenges.

We seemingly are reluctant to undergo any transformation, experimentation or adjustment in our organizations until it becomes a matter of survival, then its often far too late.

Then it becomes a mad scramble to transform ourselves, often with damaging consequences of deteriorating performance, battling more competition that are sensing our weakness, never capable of returning to those previous highs.

We simply hate adapting or adjusting, certainly on a constant basis, we resist any form of ‘greater’ transformation – why?

If we can’t adapt to changing times, we simply struggle to survive, that is the growing reality operating in today’s environment. Simply put companies ‘die’ due to their inability to adapt to change and transformation projects fail because the message somehow fails to register and never gets completed to the original objectives.

According to a survey by McKinsey in 2011, 72% of our transformation programs fail to deliver on their original targets. Also one out of every two of our top organizations in the Fortune 500 will be gone, history, dust, taken over in ten years, according to the OECD.

Unless we create a strategy to transform, how can we re-imagine our innovation processes?
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The innovating power of ecosystems and platforms

Our whole understanding of innovation is changing; there are numerous shifts occurring.

We are moving towards a new management of innovation where ‘greater’ collaboration is fueling new business models built on platforms, formed around ecosystems of communities with vested interest, contributing and extracting value.

Today and in the future, the value is created outside the individual company and not within. It is far more working as a constellation, drawing from an evolving network effect seeking out combined solutions from this design.

This third post of an extended series on my thoughts on “moving towards a new way of managing innovation” that explores the potential for changing the management of innovation, this looks at the significant value of platforms and ecosystems.

We need to find a new way of doing things differently around innovation and its management.

This is based on a relationship-based, networked designed concept built for collective activities. Relationships where shared value leads to a value creation that no one single organization can provide.

This requires open collaboration and an environment seeking mutual promise from individual input, contribution and extraction, delivering an integrated set of services and solutions being constructed on the platform from a sharing of knowledge, for delivering into evolving value propositions, all benefiting from, both collectively and individually

I am proposing in this series a view that innovation management needs to radically adjust and will be based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently through technology where platforms dominate.
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Moving towards a new innovation service model

The realization that innovation goes way beyond product innovation is a massive hurdle for many of our existing organizations to overcome, certainly in what they are offering today as solutions.

We are also witnessing such significant erosion of long-standing practices, and established boundaries between suppliers and customers, you get this feeling that everything is blurring.

This is part two of an extended series on my thoughts on “moving towards a new way of managing innovation” that explores the potential for changing the management of innovation.

How can the innovation process capitalize on all the changes we are undertaking at present in new ways, in broader engagements and collaborations, to deliver more effectively on the promise within our innovation potential?

Well I would suggest we do need to refocus

There is a very strong case we need to rethink the whole management of our innovation activity, as innovation is failing to deliver on its potential promise in the current ways we are attempting to undertake it, highly constrained and under-resourced.
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Shifting Radically the Innovation Business Model

Changing the innovation business model — Shifting Radically the Innovation Business Model

I have been spending some significant time questioning the current innovation business model, from both the customer’s (clients) perspective and the innovation consultants’ one.

Now we all know not all things are equal, many companies have invested significantly in improving their innovation capabilities.

Many of these have been heavily reliant on outside help in achieving this position yet all the effort has led to limited returns for many and still a work-in-progress.

Yet far more of our business organizations are continuing to really struggle on their innovation activity for a whole host of reasons that seem never-ending, disappointing in end result and stuck in management quicksand to ever really change.

For me, the process and management of innovation really does need to be definitely questioned.
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The Arrival of the Digital Monsoon for Innovation

If you ever have lived in the tropics you know of the arrival of the monsoons.

Skies darken, clouds gather, often thunder and lightning combine, the wind picks up and the rain ‘announces’ its arrival in sheer torrents of heavy, drenching, wave-upon-wave of unrelenting force.

It is hard to stand upright or know what to do. Everything around you transforms. Dry, often parched land quickly turns to rivers of water, seeking out everything to shift and move along and eventually going everywhere to transform the landscape.

We are presently being told we are at the beginnings of a digital revolution; it has been likened to a tsunami in its eventual (devastating) effect on our organizations and by inference, the impact it will have on each of our lives.
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The growing need is to move innovation into the cloud.

As business organizations continue to struggle with the decision of ‘if and when’ and then ‘what’ within their systems and processes should go into the cloud, one should ask where does innovation sit in this gathering, if not compelling and overwhelming view, that the cloud will bring IT closer to the business needs of today in very radical ways.

Innovation is certainly one of those in need of concerted effort to bring up to date within organizations, to make it more inclusive and that can come through delivering it across the organization within the cloud. Highly visible, agile and core to the organizations future, seen by all and truly valued.

Let me outline my initial thoughts here, put the seat belt on for the ride please: making the business case.

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