Tag: Focus our Innovation Energies

The Cascading Innovation Effect.

Visual source; http://www.adaptivecircularcities.com/

We need to think about a choice-cascade integrative model for innovation. Often we fail to understand our role in contributing to innovation; we need a cascading effect. Here I want to explain my thinking behind this and provide the visual cascading steps I feel help us succeed in innovation.

For me, the “cascading effect” for innovation is “a sequence of events in which each produces the circumstances necessary for the initiation of the next”.

It presents an idea, a concept, a prototype, a piece of knowledge that provides the catalyst to be exploited in a broader community as the next step and so on. It cascades. It is where we fit understanding and fresh knowledge within the innovation web.

Getting innovation through any process of understanding is hard. Knowing what is required to generate innovation throughout an entire organization is even more so.

We need to deploy the cascading effect on innovation to support this supporting “effect.” Continue reading “The Cascading Innovation Effect.”

Our innovation era: creative destruction or destructive creation- which?

I keep coming back to the dilemma often faced in innovation- do we practice “creative destruction” or “destructive creation?

We are entering some perilous times in climate change and what this will mean in destruction in what we know, what we value and what we are used to.

I can’t imagine when Joseph Schumpeter outlined his groundbreaking efforts for explaining “creative destruction” he or anyone else could imagine this being flipped around to what we are facing more of today, that of “destructive creation”. We live in a throwaway society, and simply this is not sustainable.

Schumpeter saw “creative destruction” as the renewing, through innovation, society’s dynamics that would lead to higher economic development and welfare levels. At the same time, recognizing that this destroyed a few of the incumbents to benefit many more newcomers and increase value creation for broader society.

Today we are in a destructive creations world. Continue reading “Our innovation era: creative destruction or destructive creation- which?”

Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress

Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress

Building a sustainable competitive advantage

Today’s challenge for me is not only to be building the innovation capacity but also to be establishing clear ways on how we should set about sustaining it. Increasingly, organizations must have the capability and capacity to sustain innovation to provide the stimulus for lasting growth and resolve the complex challenges we face today and in the future.

To get there, though, it does seem this must be through continued learning. Hence, your capabilities become stronger, evolving and more unique, thus making them more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate.

Let me outline an innovation framework that builds capability through a sustained approach.

When you set out to build capability to be sustaining, you need to consider there are two types of capabilities, distinctive, which are the characteristics of the organization which others cannot replicate and reproductive, which can be bought in by the competition but always need to need to be appropriate to any objectives you are trying to achieve. Continue reading “Sustainability is central to innovation’s future progress”

Learning to collaborate in a rapidly changing world

visual from www.amle.org collaboration-the-missing-standard/

We clearly need to find ways to navigate ourselves back into some (new) order, to stabilize the chaos we are in, or beginning to feel we are finally moving out of the crisis and chaos of the last 18 months..
What we first need to do is make sense of what is going on around us.
Then, we need to determine what actions to take and the level of action, resource and support each part needs.
For this we need help, we need collaborators wanting to not just navigate back but more to navigate forward.
We are in a period of (great) change. How are we thinking about adjusting, not just to the immediate challenges but the greater ones that are certainly heading our way?
Within business, the present crisis offers a chance to make significant changes to how we operate in the future. However, I am not sure many of you feel the same; it seems disruption is in everything we need to undertake in what is coming towards us in change.
Continue reading “Learning to collaborate in a rapidly changing world”

Are we losing the Energy Transition Battle? Innovation to the rescue?

The growing fears are that we are falling behind the need to meet the Energy Transition required goals to the World has agreed to by 2050, set to meet the Paris Climate Agreement.

The climate is about to get really difficult to predict. We are facing some of the natural consequences of our present inability not to reduce greenhouse gases at the rate they are required.  We as humans are the perpetrators of generating all these greenhouse gases, and global warming is ruining this one and only planet we have.

Each part of the world is pursuing its energy agenda, understandably so in many ways, but the shift from the dependence on fossil fuels and recognizing all future solutions should be clean energy.

Our environment is in such a significant crisis when you witness the changing weather patterns increasingly becoming unstable and unpredictable. Then we have the increased frequency and amount of flooding or drought many places in the world are facing, let alone the melting of our ice caps and arctic regions.

Our planet is under great stress. Continue reading “Are we losing the Energy Transition Battle? Innovation to the rescue?”

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”

Walkabouts are needed for learning and testing ourselves

Walkabout picture
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.

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 on.

Do you let them go, ignore them, quickly pass over them, or attempt to capture the issue as something well worth investigating further at a later stage, or just get them simply behind you in the here and now.
Continue reading “Walkabouts are needed for learning and testing ourselves”

Lay out the path, get out of the way but give me ambition please.

European Commission and FlagToday we see a new commission elected in Europe. As a European you always want this to be a new beginning, a new hope, having plenty of ambition, perhaps a new start for Europe.

Jean-Claude Junker has become the new president of the European Commission and along with his new Commission team has been setting out their priorities for regaining momentum for Europe.

I was re-reading Mr Junker’s policy agenda based on “Jobs, Growth, Fairness and Democratic Change” and you realise not just the complexity and challenge all this entails, bringing 28 countries along still, it seems, a pathway that still talks “a single union.”

It prompted this post.
Continue reading “Lay out the path, get out of the way but give me ambition please.”