Connecting innovation activities | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

What value does an Innovation Ecosystem offer?

*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.

Innovation Walkabouts we all need for learning and testing ourselves

*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.

The power of ecosystem thinking for resolving the innovation complexity of today

*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.

Innovation Software, is it facing the Innovators Dilemma?

*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)

Today the reversal is happening.

Benchmarking Innovation Impact, from InnoLead

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.

We are possibly at a series of inflexion points. Here’s one

*A shift in managing differently*, *a possible inflexion point*

We are possibly at a series of inflexion points in our current business environment. Here’s one you will be required to address.

What seems to be occurring increasingly in many different market spaces is defining an opportunity that directly impacts the current status quo and then seeking to make some radical moves to achieve that differentiation. Technology is a fundamental disrupter or enabler; it is the catalyst for making this change.

Markets are changing significantly, and collaboration and partnerships are rapidly forming and coalescing around the concept of Ecosystem thinking and Platform design. This potentially is a radically different business entity design.

These might already be happening around you, changing the accepted market space or definition. Still, you are reluctant to recognize their impact or be ready to make the level of change needed to ‘ready yourself’ for all the potential disruption or different thinking these Business Ecosystem designs require and bring. Shifting to a different business model or business design is hard, complicated and systematic work. The last thing it needs is to be rushed.

Fears of those unknowns

*The fear of the unknowns explodes upon those not ready*

When the established order begins to creak and dismantle, seemingly in front of our eyes, those fears of the unknown can kick in, especially if you have been used to managing in an established (slowly) evolving way for most, if not all, of your business life.

We seem confronted with rapid change, and it is primarily within the business world related to technology and market uncertainty that is driving this. We need to counter “fear” with a different approach, recognizing most of what we feel might be the ‘unknown’ is actually ‘known.’

We need to recognize our unknowns, search out others who might be experts in that point of not knowing and gain their help in piecing the parts that might be fragmented together to bring that need for recognition and clarity in our mind.

Fear can immobilize us.

In a recent exchange I had within one innovation community discussion, it was suggested that Innovation Business Ecosystems did not have the expected uptake because of this “fear of the unknowns”.

What initially prompted this was my post on making the business case for “Thinking about Innovation Ecosystems” Well, we need to address fear to get past this mental blockage of the “fear of those unknowns”.

So this short post is on tackling fear and dealing with the unknowns.

Where will Innovation Management Software go?

This morning I decided to have an exchange on ChatGPT on the future of Innovation Management Software, I asked a number of questions in a short series and can well-relate to the answers provided incredibly quickly.

What do you think?

Do they make sense and are the suggestions a competitive threat or a trend towards a future that needs fully embracing before others do?

chat.openai.com/chat

Helping discover your innovation pathway

*You need to discover your innovation pathway*.

I started posting my thoughts on innovation in August 2010. I have written on this site alone, www.paul4innovating.com, by just coming up to a milestone of 700 posts focusing on innovation thoughts and opinions, so I just wanted to pause and think about all the different places I have tried to get the innovation message(s) out.

I always find the post-New Year to be a reflective part of the year of reviewing, deciding, and then setting new goals. This is a post about the sources of my knowledge that feeds my innovation passion.

Let me start. I often wonder whether the posts and articles I’ve written have been hitting the right buttons, helping solve the needs of those involved in innovation; I hope so. I have pushed out and explored various aspects, learning myself as I go. I have followed a number of great innovation thinkers and read different books on the areas of innovation.

It amazes me. How much is talked about, advice offered and sometimes that deep down nagging feeling, innovation understanding does not really change; it is the people managing it as they often seem to be simply passing through this innovation period onto other things or vanishing in pursuit of different career interests.

The needs of Innovation Coherence

Innovation often fails to align with strategic needs. It is a known, well-discussed fact. This is often not the fault of the innovator but the very people designing but not sharing the strategy or failing to recognize all the implications this might mean in shifting resources, investing money or simply under-appreciating the complexities that often lie with innovation to conceive, validate, contribute and deliver the contributions into that strategy.

Sadly many innovators are simply happily working away with no specific guidelines, apart from the general remit of “we need to be more innovative”, and this lack of coherence merging from the boardroom, failing to cascade down the organisation leaves this strategic part that innovation should plan as far to vague. They are not drawn into the need for change and its implications from an innovative perspective. Alignment should be a rigorous evaluation.

Building our capacity to innovate needs understanding and reflects the organization’s business activities. Innovators need to grasp the value creation aspects that will deliver the necessary capital-efficient and profitable growth and then ‘go in pursuit’ to achieve their contribution to these goals.

Even the basic questions often remain unclear: “How are we looking to grow revenue, save costs, reduce working capital or improve our fixed capital?” What is specifically being deployed or recognized needs to change and to get into the necessary detail becomes essential.