Building innovation ecosystems allow both the network effect and relationship building to form outside your one existing environment to build greater potential solutions to customer needs
Completing transitions through innovation, ecosystems and sustainability thinking
Today, our innovation activity needs to transition through collaborating and co-creating, applying ecosystem thinking and platform designs for business. We increasingly recognize the future value and impact for businesses to grow, is through combining innovation, and external collaborations, and ensuring solutions are more sustainable.
We need to have a new open architecture for undergoing this transformation that is scalable and built, combining technology and tools, for speed and effectiveness.
Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building requires a new ecosystem-designed way that connects the parts.
Let me tell you my story of what I believe; it continues to evolve
Today’s challenge is to build the capacity, competencies and capabilities to be different, more resilient and resourceful. These need to be built upon a deep appreciation of what innovation can provide; the stimulus for creative solutions that have sustained lasting growth.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
Innovation is the accelerator in our energy transitions.
No energy transition will be achieved without invention and innovation, yet we are currently failing badly to fund research, development and deployment. We are losing the race to stop our planet’s warming as our innovative human endeavours are not at the level they should be, or we lack the “will” to make the changes we so desperately need to undergo to protect our planet.
The sheer scope of the energy transition often pulls me in so many different directions. Still, the foundation stays in place, that of making the contribution of my understanding of innovation as my focal point of contribution- the accelerant to energy change.
What an utterly strange year, 2022 has been. We have been confronted, reflective and seemingly having to “kick start” our lives again after the challenges of living through the impacts of a global pandemic.
We go into 2023 far more in personal and business conflict. We do need to find a new way of working. It is not throwing away the technology, tools or established processes, it is transforming these in new and different ways. We have not found the “real-time” to stop, explore and approach concepts and innovative ideas in different ways. Our mindset or conditioning was fairly hard-wired from our past ways of working, we felt unable to justify “permission” to change how we undertook work and have found it challenging with the impact of being remote. Many have simply walked away from their past established ways of working. We are confronting unsettling times for many reasons.
In many ways, it felt all we knew or needed was suddenly not good enough. We have lost our understanding of many things we became used to, and suddenly it all seemed challenged in far bigger ways. War, flooding, famine, shortages, and illness challenges began impacting our lives. We were indeed been confronted with a series of crises and the need for a fast, thoughtful set of responses which we were unprepared or incapable to give as each challenge has been highly complex.
We were beginning to be more open to being more reflective but we have been constantly pushed to take us back to “business as usual”. In many ways, we are struggling with a need for a “reset” but it is far more complex than that as we are in the middle of multiple crises.
This return to the old normal is a non-starter for me, we are in a rapidly changing world
We are in need of recognizing and discerning how much our world is upside down, so we can begin to understand how we need to re-equip ourselves to a new way of working, thinking and responding. We need to “righten” what is wrong with this feeling of much of what we are doing being out of balance.
We are all struggling to transform ourselves. Our businesses are grappling with the current economic difficulties we all presently facing including shortages, disruptions, and dealing with inflation and economic downturns and massive climate change challenges. We are not only confronted with the potential of the toughest downturn in modern times but with all the pressures with the speed of decision-making, and technological advances that seem to ‘suck up’ more of our daily lives instead of helping to resolve it. 2022 was unsettling for me.
