The Power of Global Collaborative Innovation | Paul4innovating Innovation Views

Understanding cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations

I completed a series of posts in April 2023, published on this posting site, on cross-sector needs when considering or working in innovation ecosystems.

To get to a good understanding of cross-sector innovation ecosystems collaborations, you need to take a very considered holistic view of what is needed in any collaboration, let alone cutting across sectors to generate a successful outcome. All the elements of skills, processes, tools, capabilities, and behaviors are essential in supporting an effective collaboration across sectors that need to be involved.

I have summarized the key points of these four posts; click on the links referred to. I have outlined the multiple needs to consider so you are more aware of the differences and needs of managing within an ecosystem of collaborators.

The Growing Value in that Crowd- Encourage it Out.

The use of crowdsourcing: the goal for me, is to engage and move the crowd towards a new direction, by encouraging out individual thinking and discovery, searching for combining these contributions; ones that lead to novel, new answers that move a challenge forward into a solution, one that has improved value over the existing.

The community is encouraged to form, lead and build, taking ideas and thinking onto discovery journeys, seeking out and building on each other’s contributions.

The individual building blocks (like Lego) connect into a collective whole, that piece together, progressively being combined, to solve a problem, to frame something that leads to an answer of meeting the challenge initially set up.

The overriding need is to release the forces within the crowd, by seeking out and gaining their engagement and connection as something ‘they’ believe they can contribute into; as here lies the discovery of many, combining and ‘feeding off’ of each other, to change the existing into the preferred.

This is the third post on crowdsourcing that might offer some general background statements. Part one is here and part two is here.

Crowdsourcing can be powerful if harnessed well.

After a fairly detailed exploratory working through crowdsourcing in this mini-series, I wanted to offer my ‘take’, to help our thinking though in formulating clearer positions in this, to see its increasing value as contributing into an innovation management system.

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So Are You Thinking Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing does have a real potential in my mind but does seem to have some formidable issues to work through, to be well understood and managed.

Partnering with experts in this field will help overcome many of these barriers or at least have reassuring suggestions for resolving them. Let’s take a look at some of these here in this post.

Certainly, I think over time we will learn what works for us and what becomes leading practice, so we can become a lot clearer on crowdsourcing position and value to us, within our context, terms and circumstances.

That is why it will be really hard to cite ‘best practice’ as each crowdsourcing challenge will need different inputs and will yield very different outcomes for each unique challenge or problem raised.

Continuing with my exploring crowdsourcing. Part one is here. Within this second post, I want to offer some different thoughts to work through around the issues and concerns that came out in my researching the subject. There is a part three coming out in a few days to finish this mini-series off.

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Evaluating Crowdsourcing – offering a bright future?

Crowdsourcing has been growing in interest for some time to change our thinking in innovation discovery. It can hold a key for us to help solve vexing questions, real challenges, and connect different voices, that builds into a community that can combine and open up the fields of opportunity for new solutions.

Crowdsourcing does have both the potential to point towards disrupting possibilities, extends the concept of open innovation into a wider source of participation from a diverse community not possible to reach by other means as effectively. It can simply connect a ‘crowd’ of people to a common purpose. All in all, if applied carefully it can provide you with a leading edge of innovation knowledge and insight.

I wanted to step back a little and take a more measured look at crowdsourcing over three posts. This is part one.

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In the blink of an eye, it gets something bigger

So in the past week or so we have seen the announcement that Capgemini has acquired Fahrenheit 212, at present for an undisclosed sum, now that one was a real surprise.

I have a friend when he is presented with something that stops him and makes him really have to think he would say “intriguing”. This joining forces is one of those ‘intriguing” moments for me.

Capgemini have been leading much within the transformation process around technology with all things digital, they have been pioneering and offering some significant advice around transitions. It seems they are ‘pulling’ in the innovation promise with this acquisition to add to their solution offerings.

I wrote about their Applied Innovation Exchange announcement recently and how I felt it was thin, a more “a tenuous toe in the water” and I finished the post with “I hear you Capgemini on the intent…but “there is a real need to put some ‘red meat’ on the bone here,” and that is what they seem to be doing in a “blink of an eye,” with this Fahrenheit 212 acquisition, or at least allow the tissues to be grafted on and take hold, so it can challenge where and how innovation transforms the business process.

David meets and marries a Goliath.

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Is this really breaking the traditional model on Innovation?

I came across the recent launch of Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange today, it left me puzzled. Firstly the latest part of their hub network opened up in San Fransisco in mid January, yet I’m wondering why this is the first time I have come across this?.

Putting that aside the website, the current point of reference, leaves me puzzled, a little unclear on its ‘compelling’ proposition. I think I get it but it simply strikes me as a launch as ‘thin,’ on really spelling it out for me, or surely the very clients, in its value and potential. It actually seems a very minimum viable product. I just had to go in search of a better understanding.

The concept of having any “applied innovation exchange” coming from Capgemini should be promising, as somewhere to go, as they are a leading technology consulting practice. It ‘seems’ to be offering a connecting platform, well-established ecosystem advantages but it seems so understated here.

Why? It seems so tenuous, a toe in the water. I would have expected a much bigger bang here. The website told me just enough but I think it should have delivered more.

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That sudden surge within the crowd

Have you ever been caught up in a sudden surge within a crowd, when it all suddenly moves, temporarily sweeping you off your feet.

This is making the pulse race a little more until you actually begin to enjoy the sensation?

It brings out a sudden rush of emotions. It can be intense, it moves you in a particular direction, often you are struggling to regain control, and everything around you heightens in your awareness. You love it or you hate it.

Either way it gives a real rush.
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Where are the new feeding grounds of innovation?

Credit Wildebeest migration, Kenya, by Bonnie Cheung — Wildebeest migration, Kenya by Bonnie Cheung

I am presently reading an early release draft of a book written by Mike Docherty of Venture2, on innovation, and I would certainly recommend the read when it comes out.

The book Collective Disruption will be available as of February 2015.

The book as Mike wrote to me, is aimed at corporate leaders, both in large and small companies, charged with new sources of transformative growth and makes the case for co-creating new businesses with entrepreneurial partners.

It builds on a foundation of open innovation, but is focused specifically on new business creation (vs core business support).

I know that Mike is passionate about the intersection of corporate innovation and entrepreneurship for co-creating new businesses and business models. As CEO of Venture2, a consulting and new ventures firm, he works with leading brand companies and start-ups to commercialize breakthrough new products and businesses.

Mike has experienced disruption many times.
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Achieving a higher collaborative gear

For a big majority of us, open innovation is now well established, it is part of our innovation furniture. The quest for many, today, is the search for richer engagements, possibilities and exchanges. We need to move beyond the existing boundaries and go deeper into the collaborative space.
I regard collaboration as the active ingredient, the yeast that allows our ‘daily innovation bread’ to rise. Getting all the parties ‘gathered around’ puts increased vitality, energy and commitment into working together over a project or idea.
As we learn to reach out and collaborate, exchanging perspectives and our different thoughts, it is in these interactions, in the many exchanges on-line and off-line that we move towards a real sense of achievement.
Allowing outside ideas through our doors
Open innovation has literally thrown open the doors, many of our research and development activities are increasingly relying on the input from outside. Open innovation is changing our behaviours.
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Building Collective Agility for Innovation

Agility is important to me. For me, agility and innovation have needed to always go together.

I named my company Agility Innovation Specialists and at its core, we state that the value of this focus can offer a real “intensity in innovation” that we believe reflects today’s world of need.

We encourage you to disrupt the accepted, to constantly challenge the current ways and push into uncomfortable territory. We suggest you seek out customers’ unmet needs, and unexplored opportunities to give a new diversity to any thinking, and then we set about accelerating these ideas to fruition. Those all need abundant and constant agility.
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