Innovation Structure | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

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 ongoing challenge is making change our constant

Thinking about the managing of change has been occupying my mind in recent weeks. It will continue into the next few weeks as Jeffrey Phillips of OVO Innovation and I have co-authored a White Paper called “the critical interplay among innovation, business models and change” as it rolls out.

In this we provide a foundation document that highlights the important interplay between innovation, business models and change. To launch this, we have kicked off our thinking with a feature of the week on Innovation Excellence introducing the themes that have multiple interplays we often fail to exploit when it comes to innovation.

The opening post is entitled “the interplay surrounding innovation”. Please take a read

Our opening argument revolves around the recognition of change as part of an interplay

We argue that we are failing to manage the different and multiple interplays that are constantly taking place when innovation occurs. We are often ignoring them and failing to extract the best or optimal value out of the innovation we are introducing. The change effect is often being ignored. Continue reading “The ongoing challenge is making change our constant”

Innovation needs different time and thinking horizons

We often constrain our innovation because we ‘shoehorn’ any conceptual thinking into a given time, usually the yearly budgetary plan.

This shoehorning often dominates the actions decided and can exercise a large influence in this constraining of ideas to realization.

We should make the case that different types of innovation operate and evolve over different time horizons and need thinking through differently.

We have three emerging horizons that need different treatments for innovation.
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The Connected Art of Selling Outcome-Based Solutions

The typical linear and often siloed mindset that we have for much of our innovation thinking within our business organizations has to rapidly fall away.

We are in the ‘cusp’ of a fundamental change that technology, platforms and connected ecosystems will bring into the mix for connecting and collaborating in dramatically different ways than in the past.

One of the implications will be our need in measuring the metrics within companies. The measurement of inputs, throughout and outputs need to become far more focused on delivering speed and scale potential as the critical points. We are far more needing to focus on the outcomes as our primary point of measurement.

This is a further post on discussing outcomes as the focal point of our innovation measurements, following my recent one of “Shifting to Ultimate Outcomes”

Recognizing the emergence of the outcome economy

The outcome economy which is emerging has many implications within it and how we measure and value these will become increasingly important. Companies will need better data to calculate costs, evaluate its potential value and will be modelling far more the risks and tracking the factors required to deliver within any outcome-based value promised.

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Shifting to Ultimate Outcomes

Many organizations are struggling with their metrics and ways to measure the progress and success of their business.

From this writer’s point of view, their innovation activity gets caught up in plenty of unintended consequences, to put it mildly, in wasted debate, discussion & bad decisions through wrong measurement criteria.

Firstly, we are still locked in the old paradigm of thinking this is an industrial economy where we set about measuring inputs to innovation (R&D expenditure, capital investment) and then focused on the intermediate step of throughput and then outputs (publications, production units, patent filing, end products).

We also perceive innovation far too much still as an activity within just one company – viewed as linear, with considerations for services more of an afterthought (like ‘bolt-ons’). Production systems remain far too often the driving force of performance judgement.
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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.
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What makes up your innovation capital?

If someone came to you and asked the question: “tell me what makes up your financial capital?”

I expect you could answer this fairly comfortably.

It might need a little added help from your finance department but you could produce and show significant details that we are all ‘schooled’ to understand and generally have accepted, under common definitions and standard practice.

Our businesses are measured constantly on their financials, we produce a constant flow of reporting documents that provide useful insight and allow for a more informed judgement by present and future investors on the health of the company. We are ‘wedded’ to our financials and ignore the real value within our organizations of all the other critical capitals that generate and strengthen the business.

What if that same person came to you and asked instead: “what makes up the innovation capital of the company?’” could you answer this as clearly as the financial one – I would suggest most probably not. (By the way, if you feel you can then please let me know I would be more than interested).

We are focusing more on past performance and not future generating potential by staying fixated on just the financials within all that makes up our organizational capital

So what makes up our innovation capital and why is it important to know?
Should we care, does it matter? I would argue it does, increasingly so. Within the innovation capital lies the future of the organization and holds one of the real golden keys to the sustaining performance of the company, or not.
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Building Innovation Capability Through Three Interlocking Platforms

A little while back I was reading somewhere an academic paper and it triggered a thought on interlocking platforms for innovation, so I set about capturing it for this post, and then it somehow got filed away.

So this is the reworked opening thought to record the idea to ‘capture’ it, so I can reflect later on, on how I should build on this further. I show a number of hyperlinks to help in pulling this together…..well for me anyway!

So this is a work-in-progress and should be taken as a thinking out loud at this stage.

Linking capability through interlocking platforms
We are in need of a different “sustaining” capacity build around innovation as its continuous core, constantly evolving, adapting, learning and adjusting, in perpetual motion.

How? Innovation has many ‘touch points, a myriad of dimensions that need to be aligned and integrated. How can we achieve this more holistic view, so innovation management can make a significant advancement on where we are today?

Making the business case for innovation to change is not easy but essential
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Are you engaging with all the different voices around you?

Having different perspectives and voices will enhance your innovation activities, they provide diversity, stimulus and greater options for you to consider the future innovation journey.

How do we set about engaging with all these different voices surrounding innovation?

Have you ever worked with the three horizon framework?
It is really useful for managing your innovation activities, drawing out the often conflicting voices within the organization on how to take innovation forward. The approach can unlock you from just being caught in the present, to one of envisaging a future that then allows you to begin to build different capabilities, competencies and capacities.

Find out more here and here and here on the three horizons or within this blog site put “three horizon approach ” into the search box. You will find I have provided a considerable overview in different posts’ thoughts on the 3H thinking and why I place such value in it for innovation’s evolution.
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