Digital discovery | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Digital transformation – the need to transform our innovation approaches

Business digital transformation, it can certainly get your pulse racing as you start looking for the nearest exit. Digital transformation is being asked of everybody to get involved in but do we have a sufficient understanding of it?

Add in the magic ‘need’ so innovation can benefit from this business digital transformation and we begin to shift around in our chairs even more. What would it mean if we ‘went’ digital and transformed ourselves for innovation within our organisation?

I’ll be honest here, all the answers can’t be distilled here in this one post as digital is all evolving but I thought an opening set of thoughts on ‘digital transformation’ might trigger greater discussion and identification.

So what is a digital transformation?

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Our longer term winner is clearly open digital innovation

In my last post I was discussing the effect digital would be having on our innovation activities, be these presently opened or closed.

The impact of digital innovation changes the innovation paradigm significantly.

Organizations can stay digitally closed in their innovation activities, moving beyond simply developing innovation solutions themselves into a connected (closed) network, where the platform becomes the enabling force and those that join share common ground or purpose but are pursuing separate value propositions that required this ‘extended’ collaboration to achieve this position.

These ‘closed systems’ can give a level of competitive advantage but these are increasingly transitory depending on the complexity and uniqueness of the eventual value proposition. Collaborative platforms are clearly the way to go to open-up innovation that allows more radical and complex solutions to be provided.

We will see a new wave of open digital innovation Continue reading “Our longer term winner is clearly open digital innovation”

Are you going all digital on me?

Well then, are you going all digital on me from your innovation activities?

Take care, it does change our view of the world, as we look inside-out or even, outside-in

So there we all were, getting really very comfortable in our open innovation activities, learning to collaborate and co-create outside our organizations.

Even our management has finally got “open innovation”.

We are encouraged and allowed to collaborate outside our four walls of the organization as the penny has finally dropped that “not all knowledge resides within the company”.

We had worked through some of the cultural stuff, shifted around the team who like to collaborate, pushing others less collaborative to the back; the conflict points, we had established the process, practice and tools.

We even have our legal teams on board helping sort out all the conflicting positions that open innovation can mean when it comes to dividing up the IP spoils and even had our leadership tuned in, singing our praises and even (heavens forbid) getting engaged in the process.

When the world shifts, we all need to as well, or we get left behind.
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So Welcome to the Age of Digital Innovation

Digital technology is about to become the precursor for all the changes we have put off for years within our organizations.

We need to radically improve our abilities to engage, relate and discover new innovation opportunities at a completely different level of faster performance.

There are many issues both strategic and tactical to work through, to extract the rich potential from any digital transformation for new innovation growth outcomes

The final part of a seven-part series – new dawn or your worst nightmare?’
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The Need to Automate the Innovation Process

There has always been a consistent call to automate the innovation process.

Now it might turn into a stampede, based on real ‘digital’ need.

We have made solid progress in the use of out-of-the box software for capturing ideas at the ‘fuzzy front end.’

We have developed pipelines and use product life cycle software systems to manage this through to commercialisation.

Yet today we still have a fragmented, often broken innovation process, very reliant on the manual processes, where the human intervention dominates.

Can this be changed? Technology must form a greater core of the innovation process.
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The need to respond quickly to new business objectives

The business objectives will change as we invest heavily in digital technologies, as we increasingly recognize and embrace this changing world where digital knowledge and insights begin to challenge and change our existing frameworks of innovation thinking.

Part five of a seven-part series

The outcomes of the investment are expected to provide clear returns and these might include but are not limited to:

1) different customization of services 2) quicker response to market trends in new offerings 3) identifying real-time cost optimizations, 4) concentrating on faster, more accurate decision-making to give new competitive edges 5) better and more holistic R&D 6) automating even further the supply chain management, 7) alter your approach channels to market, 8) move your business into new adjacencies or even white spaces and finally 9) design new business models and value propositions.

There will be lots of new moving parts to grapple with to be future innovation agile.
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IT is Struggling to be the Digital Technology Master

There is so much occurring in new applications and alternative solutions, it is a very tough position for most dealing in technology to truly master all of these breaking options they might have to consider.

It must be a little overwhelming when many responsible for IT have for years not had any strategic involvement and not been given clear line-of-business oversight.

Business management equally has over the years built up an ‘arm’s distance’ to IT and found ways to overcome barriers they felt were seemingly put in their way when it came to ‘bringing in’ the technology they deemed as essential.

Something needs to change going forward. Both the business manager and the IT need to find ways to exchange, collaborate and share. It is in their ‘vested’ interest but more importantly for the future health of the business itself.
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Aligning digital discovery with physical innovation outcomes.

We really do seem to be in a really evolutionary period, with the explosion of change taking place in the post-digital world of cloud, big data, social and interconnected devices.

The discovery of insights from all this embedded intelligence, social activity and data analytics is leading us to realize a potentially significant wave of new innovation opportunities from this digital knowledge.

The question is “are we internally ready for this?” Are our innovation systems and structures able to adapt to a need for exploiting ‘breaking’ opportunities where speed and agility become a critical deciding factor to capitalize on breaking commercial advantage by tapping into all these fresh insights?
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Is the balance in innovation activity about to change?

Is the digital technology we see emerging today going to be able to provide the positive tension between rational and randomness that takes place in our innovation activities today?

Will digital begin to dominate our innovative thinking, will we lose this randomness, this spark of human creativity or will it be allowing this to connect multiple strands in new, more exciting ways? How are we going to adjust to the changing way technology will impose itself on our innovation activities and needs?

How will all this Mobile Connectivity, Cloud Computing, Social Media, Crowdsourcing, Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, Big Data, Analytics, 3D Printing and Scanning be presented and managed as a part of successful business scenarios and intertwined with changes in social behaviour?

Are our existing innovation systems ready for this potentially set of sweeping changes in knowledge inflows and translation, so they can be successfully commercialized into new innovation?

Part two within the series of seven
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As new digital technology dawns for innovation

Digital Technology is significantly challenging for organizations to re-think and re-equip due to the emergence of big data, smart mobile connectivity, social media, cloud, analytics and the growing commercialization.

These are all driving external technology change, all clearly pointing towards a significant disruption of the existing ways we conduct business internally. So we need to ask “how are we going to take advantage of the potential business transformation?”

The issue is how to capitalize and create the value from all this change for innovation and performance enhancement?

***This is the first of a seven-part exploratory ‘open thinking’ about digital technology and its potential impact on innovation as we know it today. These will be published daily over the next week. The intent at this stage is more about raising our thinking on what might need changing or at least re-orientation within our innovation management approaches.***

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