GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

How do we become innovation fit? 

Stop and survey the world from a new advantage point

Can you imagine standing on top of a mountain, looking out across a vast expanse of nothing but mountains and valleys stretching out before you? If you squint hard enough you can just make out that somewhere in the hazy distance, the end point of your travels. The distance you have to travel towards that much-needed innovation understanding, that is made up by so many different dynamics that make you and your organization that much fitter to compete in today’s challenging world seems so really far off, or actually is it?

Exhilaration can quickly turn to reality

Clearly, while you are on top of this mountain you feel exhilarated to have even got up to this point. To even get to there you have already made a decision that you and your organization needs to become a more innovation one and needs to look beyond what you have, to what is possible, you are curious to explore this further, you have to, innovation is a strategic imperative for, adding value, growth, and improved wealth creation.

You have innovation choices

You had some vague ideas on what that might mean when you set out on that first climb to achieve this first advantage point. What you never expected once you had got to this particular mountaintop was just what the vista that had so suddenly opened up in front of you, would actually mean. The sudden shock of what might be in front of you suddenly became overwhelming; it stopped you in your tracks. You felt suddenly confronted on what all this might actually mean. Do you go on or go back down?

Starting any journey always needs a first step

While you had lived fairly comfortably down in the valley below, you simply kept looking up wondering what it would be like to become a more innovative organization. What was beyond that one mountain you constantly looked up too? You had survived, sometimes you even thrived but much of that ‘success’ was actually outside your own hands, it was often determined by some luck, often those abilities to react to something quickly enough on what went on around you.

You followed others, you adapted and adjusted to changes going on and kept simply going but you felt this was not a really sustaining position. You wanted to change this, you felt you just wanted to be more in charge of your own innovation destiny. The question was how?

The big idea – choosing a new path with an end in mind

Then the big idea came to you. The way to change was to make a critical decision, to move on by following a new path, a path towards innovation fitness. Why innovation, why the need to get fit? What was the journey end you had in mind? It might change as you move forward but the critical aspect is to make the move, staying where you are is not an option today.

To help on your journey I believe we need to raise our game and provide a greater fitness to the way we manage innovation. The dynamics of innovation need to be understood.

A new website dedicated to making your organization fit

Innovation Fitness Dynamics is a structured approach, you might want to find out about. The blog is about offering you a pathway towards achieving your own innovation fitness dynamics. The journey has many peaks and troughs, mountains and valleys to forge. Firstly you have to understand your present fitness to travel on any ‘change’  journey and in this particular case, to achieve any innovation fitness is highly dynamic and challenging. There are lots of fitness points needed to transform your innovation potential from a simple follower to a leader, recognized and respected for your ability to consistently deliver innovation in a sustaining way. www.innovationfitnessdynamics.com is intended to be an innovation work-out gym.

The end goal

The end goal of your journey is simply “the greater fitness you can achieve in innovation capability the more it can equate to a new value creation“.  The exploring of the terrain that suddenly is opening up in front of you as you look over the mountains and valleys is in need of exploring, of traveling, of searching out those different combinations you require to get you to your own dynamics of innovation fitness understanding.

The first step towards achieving any innovation fitness is to decide that you are are not going to stay where you are and so you become aware, the second step is a clear acceptance that you have to take a journey. The first step leads one to the second.

“One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything – and one’s last is to come to terms with everything”  –  George Christoph Lichten- physics professor and scientist 1742- 1799.

We begin our journey, a journey full of innovation fitness dynamics. Start walking, start exploring, let us go climbing into your need for personal and organizational innovation fitness. I offer a clear advisory service in building your innovation capabilities and competencies and suggest you make a call or email so we can have an opening exchange on how I can help you build your capacity to innovation.

image credit: bigstockphoto.com

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

I have been having some writer’s block recently and I was not sure how to unlock some random thoughts I was having in the past weeks, then in a great conversation I had today, with a fellow innovation colleague, it started to “reveal itself” in where I needed to go to give a new sense of repurpose.

A collaboration is being mooted between us but until there is a point of common understanding much stays under partial wraps until we both get to a more comfortable point, where we feel it can go for us but it certainly triggered this post as a starter.

The thinking hinges around the state of innovation today, how it is fragmenting in  a myraid of parts, all seemingly contributing; yet it seems learning has been replaced by personalized experience and the chase for individual knowledge. Mostly this does not get embedded back in the company, the ones who are paying for this exposure.

I was wondering if there was a decent ‘return on investment’ being made by the company or was it just being front-loaded on the individual, so they gain and then can take that understanding elsewhere, or simply set up their own shop of ‘innovation expertise’. The ROI and the Return on Learning seemed to be mostly heading out of the door, leaving the organization that made the investment, devoid of a return.

My feeling is this should change and we firstly establish a “System of Record” for innovation that brings the individual learning into a collective one, a “system of collective engagement” that enables all within the system to gain from and design innovation solutions, from a more ‘whole’ system thinking perspective, that gives innovation sustaining power connecting the individual to the organizations needs.

To get to any change point and simply not go with the flow of lots more practicing and advising on specific innovation concepts, we needed some greater system thinking to be applied here. If we don’t look at the ‘whole,’ all we might be doing by adding more and more innovation experiences is simply layering on limited perspectives and simply sending it even more into a fragmented market of innovation consulting, one of “atoms and bits” that never combine into delivering innovation differently.

I recall a piece by Rick Karlgaard of Forbes entitled “Atoms versus Bits: where to find Innovation as we increasingly need to find answers on not whether you mean innovation in the world of atoms (physical things) or innovation in the world of bits (software). We need to combine them.

In the article he was suggesting ‘Atoms’ are slowing as the pace of improvement has become more incremental but the ‘Bits’ are accelerating like crazy. We have been locked in a world of not transitioning, we are working out how the “bits” are changing the way we are using our “atoms” or things (transport, reading, listening to music) but trying to apply old practices and systems to work this through.

It is from my perspective we have not redesigned innovation away from these ‘physical atoms’ into the ‘speed of bits’ or found better, more sustaining ways, in our the ability to combine them into the world of the really new and really different. Some have achieved the combination effect but many are not, simply stuck in a ‘given’ world. I just think we need to think differently about the whole innovation system to release a new dynamism for innovating.

Innovation really does require system thinking

My potential collaborator is steeped in systems thinking and change learning and this is where any rethinking can take place, to pull back from (my view) this rapidly fragmenting market in innovation advice still caught in product outcomes and repurpose it back us back into a whole picture understanding and the corporate need to bring out both the atoms and bits that make up innovation and combine all the parts of learning.

So to begin with,  I have begun my searching back into my collection of files on system thinking, complex adaptive thinking, the changing way we are all learning, the incredible value of technology in collecting data and then translating it, etc., etc.

I remembered one post I wrote some while back, to remind me on recognizing there are many parts to any journey that requires a fresh change of perspective.

There is a growing need for having some dynamic tension within the innovation system; this helps generate the better conditions for innovation to thrive. We are learning more on the better tools, techniques, and approaches available but here are some general thoughts to put some opening stakes in the ground for my (our) future thinking around.

1) A common language is essential

Any dynamics in the system needs that ability to talk the same language, something that becomes common and embedded to support the routines and move quickly to the concepts and solutions, as others can ‘understand’ them as well. It is through working on the inner stories and appreciating the history, it is having an appreciation of events, good and bad, it is through local slogans, your jargon, and dialogues that bring people together. The power of storytelling helps gain adoption and identification to those needs for working on a common cause.

2) Creating constant opportunities for conversations

So many organizations don’t work on the ongoing conversations, design workshops, road shows and dialogue sessions that give everyone linkage and growing identification. You begin to identify your sense of purpose and value contribution if there is a consistent diffusion of messages; these should be always lead from the top or moved up and down the organization to allow for these ongoing conversations.

3) Using the knowledge that resides

Organizations like to believe they are building domains of expertise but often they are actually building the silo’s to restrict the flow of knowledge. Knowing where the right functional expertise lies, the relevant skills, experiences or relevant insights ‘reside’ is increasingly important to throw open to all, to tap into, extract and contribute. This expertise can help with our daily routines by offering different thoughts, ideas, and practices that may have a real impact on how you can change.

4) Wrapping up intelligence to give it real value and knowledge understanding

The bundling of intelligence is becoming critical. It needs to be increasingly shared across the organization at real-time speed. As we look increasingly outside our organizations, our focal markets sensing and seizing the information and being able to connect it, to bundle it into knowledge that has potential application or relevance allows for absorptive capacities to really come to life. Those are able to learn to bring into the organization by accessing, anchoring and diffusing that external capacity for creating and exploiting new value.

5) Capturing and extracting tacit knowledge

Our ability to capture and access the tacit knowledge that resides in all our employees is a critical issue to achieve new dynamic tension. How do we harness tacit knowledge, capture it, even recognize its value we need to encourage a continuous learning environment, we need to have clear organization learning strategies. Tacit knowledge helps us tackle the unknowns associated with discovery. The more we share, put effort into collaborative ventures the more we learn. The more we engage with external experts the more we should gain from these exchanges. Context becomes vital, as does striving for that common language and association.

6) Allowing time to explore and improve our human capital

Tacit knowledge as it becomes embedded in shared values, assumptions and beliefs you can qualify and map tacit knowledge.  Our tacit knowledge increases the human capital. It can, through creative acts give strong feeling and give a real sense of commitment. The more we explore, the more we ‘ignite our passions’ but you need to consciously find the time to explore by clearing the path to allow the absorbing to take place and then extract the knowledge through putting any challenge into context, allowing time to access, anchor and diffuse.

7) The ability to harness our dynamics is vital

The ability to make our environments more dynamic, more engaging, more challenging, more a place to learn and contribute allows greater movement and potential for innovation and growth. A growth that is for the organization and its people, to provide all the different intellectual capitals to combine, be those human (knowledge, skills and experiences), relationship (social and through our networks) or through the structural ones you put into place (where you pool knowledge, use routines, and systems).

Good use of our intellectual capitals and knowing what these are does allow for a greater unlocking of innovation value. The more we ‘work and encourage’ our learning capitals,  combining the power that lies in the dynamic linkages we can forge, in acquisition, in assimilation and then into eventual transformation then this allows known knowledge to become new wealth-generating innovation

8) Knowing your innovation ‘stock’ and  ‘capital’ potential

We need to know our ‘innovation stock’, a large part of our wealth generating capital and where it can be best put to use. We are valuing the knowledge perspective far more and with this, we are increasingly recognizing the importance of the intellectual capital that makes up the organization.

We need to ‘master’ our understanding of the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure, and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate innovation as this is increasingly needed for participating in more complex open collaboration efforts. To achieve this, we first need to know ourselves and our capacity to innovate, both the strengths and weaknesses.

9) The ability to map the landscape for making increased inquiry

This landscaping for me is one of the exciting outputs we can get from gathering data, from understanding all the sources of activity, of harnessing our learning experiences and then translating those into a form of inquiry to then build from.

Outcome delivery: Coherence in purpose & consistency is what we all desire that organizations are presently lacking in innovation

It is accepted wisdom in today’s environment, enterprises cannot design and impose from the top down, it stifles far too much and limits creativity. Strategies do not only emerge from the whole but from the sum of all the parts and it is the diversity of the parts gives the ‘richness’ to innovation. It is the ‘combination effect’.

It is the embedding of these that build the eventual innovation design of a ‘whole’ innovation system

It is drawing together all the ‘bits and pieces’ into the whole. It is ensuring all the ‘collective experiences’ are captured and put to work, not just for the individual exposed and learning from all the great innovative thinking going on ‘out there in organization that the individuals are working for, so we need to ensure their personalised learning is put to ‘collective productive use’ for giving real returns on investment and learning and it is this constant input puts the dynamic back into innovation for the organization they work for.

It is drawing together all the ‘bits and pieces’ into the whole. It is ensuring all the ‘collective experiences’ are captured and put to work, not just for the individual exposed and learning from all the great innovative thinking going on ‘out there in organization that the individuals are working for, so we need to ensure their personalised learning is put to ‘collective productive use’ for giving real returns on investment and learning and it is this constant input puts the dynamic back into innovation for the organization they work for.

Within an organization we seek to have coherence in purpose and through this a consistency in behaviour. Innovation needs that collective behaviour as well, it needs to be dynamic, constantly evolving, explring and experiementing and we must design it into our innovation experiences, so we can achieve a more collective tension that continues to improve the total design of the system, not just its parts.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

Over the past twelve or eighteen months, I was asked to explore and explain different frameworks that the innovator might need to know, or at least have an opinion upon. These were for Hype Innovation and posted on their blogs. Some of these investigations or explanations were fairly long so I decided to not reproduce them here but to have an opening summary and then set up the links onto their site for you to read the ones that are of interest or curiosity to you.

So far I have covered ones that were asked for, there are a few more that need covering or even deepening out in explanations in my mind, let’s see. The first group are recent ones and provide depth.

The first one shown,  you could argue is more introducing the concept of mapping not explaining how to go about it and point to a recognized authority on this. I’m happy to explain this mapping journey some more if needed, although others have contributed on this site! Let me know.

There is a lot of depth to explore in all of these, a valuable real point of reference, with so much more within the Hype site for innovation knowledge and viewpoints.

Why mapping the customer journey is the top driver for digital transformation

“Organizations are struggling to understand the behaviors of the ‘connected’ customer. Partly it seems executives don’t engage with their brand or business in the way that their customers do”.

The difference between DMAIC, DMADV, and Innovation Management (tackling a critical part of Six Sigma)

“Six Sigma aims to take any uncertainties (variability) out of a process while innovation by definition induces uncertainties.  However, Six Sigma and Innovation are both essential for an organization”

Where does Triz fit within our growing organizational practices for Innovation?

“TRIZ is a problem solving method based on logic and data, not intuition, which accelerates the project team’s ability to solve these problems creatively”

Using the FORTH Method to Navigate Your Innovation Journey

“Gijs van Wulfen has created a wonderful innovation method, the Forth Innovation Methodology, to provide a systematic way to take ideas into tested business case concepts”

The Baldrige Framework: In Pursuit of Excellence

“The value is that Baldrige is intentionally non-prescriptive. It does not tell leaders how to manage their organizations”

An introduction to Design Thinking for Innovation Managers

“The key today is to think like a designer in the way you lead, explore, create and innovate”

Some were provided before this over the last year or so, but I feel are worth exploring.

Some  contributions here were actually  around my own framework or my specific focus of innovating work. The integrated framework was constructed in a collaboration with Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation and then I added a post for building this integrated framework out from this by taking out specifically, the Business Case Building, as an important need.

Others came up as useful to explore as they delve into different issues we need to tackle when contemplating different frameworks or methods associated with innovation. These represent a smorgasbord of frameworks and methods that I have contributed to the Hype Innovation site.

Valuing an integrated framework:  introducing the Executive Innovation Work Mat

“The strength of the Executive Innovation Work Mat as a framing document to provide this leadership dialogue becomes essential for organizations wanting to gain complete organization engagement”

Building a compelling business case for an integrated innovation framework

“Delivering an integrated framework would be for many, a strategy that is innovative in itself”

Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems has a powerful effect

“We are forming external relationships in many different ways as this increased diversity does matter to each organization for building different competitive positions in their innovation offerings”

Sorting Through the Management Tools and Trends

“We all are caught up in handling and understanding different management tools. The numbers are accelerating, and if anything it’s adding more confusion to the pile we already have”

The critical aspects for an innovation vision

“We can miss some different and crucial components in building the vision, which reflects on many of the intangibles surrounding any view“

Strategic and Innovation Alignment: the Choice Cascading Model

“To achieve alignment, a cascade of better choices is needed that keeps mapping back to innovation activities and strategic need”

Get Out of the Building and Go Cross-Industry to Seek Radical Ideas

“By applying a set of development principles where combining rapid iteration, making constant pivots, becomes central to a business model’s customer discovery and validation”

Applying the Four Lenses of Innovation

“That is why the Four Lenses of Innovation has a real value to you to read, absorb and experiment and then to continually apply to your own innovation thinking needs”

Using the Three Horizons Framework for Innovation

” Thinking in different horizons prompts you to go beyond the usual focus of fixing innovation just in the present. It connects the present with the desired future and identifies the ‘seen’ disruptions which might occur in moving towards a vision”

Shifting our present Measurements and Metrics to Ultimate Outcomes

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

Exploring the Intrapreneurial Way in Large Organizations

“Large organizations sense they are missing out on radically different business opportunities and cast their envious eyes towards the young start-ups”

Digital transformation – are you ready to transform and change your innovation approaches?

“So we recognize digital transformation needs to lead somewhere, well it is really most likely to fundamentally alter your (innovation) business model“

Crowdsourcing needs dedicated focus to yield great results

“Will crowdsourcing provide predictable outcomes? No, everything you do to make for a good result still might not eventually deliver on this for all the preparation work you put in”

Evaluating Crowdsourcing – has it a bright future?

“Crowdsourcing does have a sound potential to compliment or simply become your principal source of turning concepts and challenges into solid ideas that do have an impact”

Tackling the Internal Jobs-to-be-done for Improving Innovation

“We need to map the jobs and generate desired outcome statements that are specific and of real interest to the customer, not our list of multiple ideas generated based on where we are or what we think we know”

The need for a modern engagement platform

“Organizations that encourage and set about learning consciously set about the search for new ideas and by having this already established ‘learning’, are far better at recognizing new ideas that might lead to innovation“

Exploring Diffusion and Adoption of New Innovation – Part 3, part 2 and part 1 (this links to part 1)

Over three posts I will look at the aspects of “diffusion and adoption”

Are you opening up the Stage Gates to let the new innovating world in?

“There is no question the Stage-Gate process has had a significant impact on the conception, development and launch of new products. Yet there have been consistent criticisms as the world of innovation has moved on”

Forget Best Practice, It Is All About Next Practice

“The trouble with best practice is you are looking at someone else’s practices and these are highly individual, made up of different groups of methodologies, processes, rules, theories, values and concepts”

Balancing Exploitation & Exploration for Changing Performance

“Being ambidextrous” in organizations is the ability to successfully combine the exploiting of all the investments that have been made to date, to constantly build on these achievements by exploring new areas and opportunities. This calls for dual thinking and organizational design to optimize the two orientations”

The value of exploring frameworks that ‘ inform’ innovation cannot be overstated.

Of course there are numerous others also provided within the Hype Methods & Frameworks, written by other contributing authors giving their own slants to these. These cover Lean, Co-creation, Collaboration, Ecosystems, Open Innovation, Ten Types of Innovation, User-Led Innovation and many others.

Great views, opinions and contributions have been building in a very methodical way

This growing collection is really building into a very useful “go to site” to begin to relate too and refer for anyone involved or interested in innovation. The posts can help you determine if these suggested tools, framework or method work for you and/ or advance your innovation work. All the contributors make some really excellent contributions, providing a great understanding of many of your choices to deploy.

The complete list of all the blog posts is here, certainly worth digging into and going back to refer too.

We all learn when we look back, to then move forward differently with fresh perspectives

For me, each one I have written upon I have constantly been reminded on their value and place within our innovation work. I found I was re-learning some principles that had been buried in the back of my mind and although researching and referencing back on them took some time I thought it was useful, to me and to the innovator who needs to ‘relate’ to these and apply them as and when needed.

So I do encourage you to explore the links and recognize these all have innovating connecting value to bring into your own thinking and referencing of innovation capability building.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

I firmly believe we are on the cusp of a new innovation era. When you step back and recognize all the different advancements we have been making in designing tools and frameworks, in understanding innovation, it holds promise.

Yet it is this recognition that the present is not working anymore with existing innovation systems, you do need to search for a real lasting change that does transform and connect all the parts into a new innovation designed ‘whole’. There are a number of intersections and driving forces that are coming together and what is emerging is this new innovation era. Now we have to weave them together.

Of course, much of what we have will still remain. We are still in need of finding innovations that provide new products, services or business models. These outcomes remain constant, it is the way we approach these that is in need of being seen as dramatically different. We require a more evolutionary, fresh perspective.

The sad part is that many of our existing consulting firms offer solutions that are unfit for todays need, or ill-equipped for offering advice on tomorrow’s purpose and the designs necessary. Equally, nearly all our larger business organizations are still locked in the past, or attempting to catch up to the present but in random ways. This does need a real change but can we achieve it?

Innovation is advancing but most of it has been designed for a different time, the old era of stable markets, predictable solutions and having a clear sense of your competition. All that has changed dramatically. We have all been trying (very hard) to stay relevant in an ever-increasing uncertain world, applying solutions left over from a past era. Something has had to suffer and I believe this is our innovation outcomes, that are not shifting the growth needle as we keep our innovation systems and thinking trapped in the 20th-century mindset.

Even though we have so many new initiatives going on in the larger organizations to keep the troops happy and hopefully engaged, they are not making the level of difference that innovation is expected to achieve. Even with the proliferation of concepts like lean startup, design thinking, innovation labs, accelerator programs, hackathons and innovation marathons, crowdsourcing and a host of designer canvases that keeps pushing our advancement along, success is still piecemeal and random. Innovation certainly does not lie at the core of the business for the majority.

Often today I am constantly hearing it is all about “innovation theater”, those activities that make us feel good are enjoyed until the harsh reality of returning to working in corporations kicks back in. It sobers us all up until we can find those excuses to go on another innovation ‘bender’ that allows us to personally learn more but then face this return back inside. Yet does it need to be like this?

Innovation is hard work yet we seem to make it harder because we “freeze” our understanding of it.

We hang on to all the legacies built up around the existing innovation system, we manage innovation in efficient and expected ways, yet is is often clearly not predictable, it often remains uncertain even when it arrives in the market place to be judged by the consumer. We continue to push our innovation concepts inside an organization that seems determined not to listen. We constantly judge innovation on established ROI criteria, established for ongoing businesses.

Innovators often feels isolated, remote and starved of the resources and the recognition they should be achieving. We still lack the alignment to strategy as this remains unclear, often fuzzy, poorly communicated and lacking in this critical connecting up of strategy and innovation. It would be great if we could just resolve this.

We are still operating in a world where we expect it to be predictable. What we design in organizations is far too rigid and not highly adaptive and that is not reflecting the speed of response we need in facing up to more volatile markets today. A VUCA world of volatility, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous. Today we are far more on this quest for novel insights but fail to fully relate those to the true consumers need.  Much of what we will achieving will become increasingly transient and short lived. We are seeing much that was seemingly enduring in the past being challenged, even ripped up and replaced. It is within this fluid environment that we must all be encouraged to become adept at those ‘feeding frenzy’ activties of constant experimentation, challenging, learning and being adaptive, being fluid and agile.

We need to keep checking back on what we do in our innovation activities to find the ‘sweet spot’ of customer needs and why, where and what they see value in and then how ‘we’ can design and respond to this evolving need. We need to be highly adaptive.

We need a change, we are facing such constantly changing environments and challenges. We need to recognize the future is going to be totally different from the past. If we get to this recognition point then we will quickly recognize that innovation does need to change and usher in this new innovation era.

The new innovation era beckons – are you ignoring it or embracing it?

I have written specifically about parts of this new innovation era. Firstly Bringing New Innovation Together is Stretching the Mind back in November 2016.  Then I followed this up with Why we are Entering a New Innovation Era in 2017 and then The Perfect Conditions for Entering A New Innovation Era in 2017.

I then wrote about Advancing My Applied Innovation Thinking discussing the automating the innovation process, way beyond the present, taking an automated and augmented view in the innovation process design. This was working with the view of creating a fluid, adaptive, agile innovation system unique each time, where we find ways to be highly adaptable, agile and fluid in grabbing and taking the parts of the innovation system and constructing them into that design and process that works for that specific challenge?

Becoming adaptive in organizations that are often highly rigid and standardized is so conflicting, so different, you must separate the two that many are arguing even stronger today than ever require a dual innovation process or organization design.

We do have more tools, processes and theoretical understanding of innovation and its management to make each design that more of a specific applied innovation service, we have the capability to construct this. Can we go that route in our organization design? We need to apply what we need to get the “job” done and this becomes specific to the challenge and its complexity and engagement needs.

Reaching further with my own design in a new era

Each of us has a part to play in innovation. It is the sum of all the parts that will build the new design. What is essential is to challenge much of the existing and replace it. I have this constant need to “refresh, rebuild and redesign” many of those innovation parts to keep turning theory learned into practice gained.

I keep in constant need to “sharpen the translation points of innovation“. I’ve reflected on this and have determined five broad themes of innovation that radically alters the way we design our innovation processes and where I have a place to play and advise upon. These are:

1. Exploring innovation and pattern recognition through more facilitated conversations and investigation designing pathways, roadmaps, blueprints. These are more expeditions of discovery with a shared intent to alter the thinking and understanding around innovation. This is far more in recognizing the future and bringing higher levels of sensing and amplification into our innovative thinking. We must constantly explore the evolutionary perspective in the face of an unknown and uncertain future, to find the emergent properties that will generate the new.
2. Structuring for Asset Orchestration. This is built on the intent that you must orchestrate the capabilities constantly, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result and then rebuild them specifically for the next requirement or solution need. We need to build this on three primary stages of structuring, bundling and leveraging resources. In one post I highlighted on this: “orchestrating is a function of (1) changing the rules of the game to keep the game alive and (2) avoiding disruptions, thus ensuring continuity through the connection between the old and the new, or between past behavior patterns and the present and future ones.” (Javier Busquets). For me to manage and orchestrate means to lead, to frame, conduct and set the tempo but it is constantly changing and for that we need to be far more adaptive and fluid in our asset deployments.
3. Aligning People, Technology, and Innovation in Design. While experimentation speeds the time to a viable business innovation, it does not necessarily lead immediately to the kind of large-scale growth or increased market share that are usually the barometers of performance in the core business. It is the “combination effect” of building this alignment between people, technology that is evolving at increasing speed and complexity and innovation, in the way it responds and achieves the engagement
4. Impact and Intensity becomes the new mantra. We need to be more agile, iterative, to be encouraged to be experimenting and exploring. Our world is shifting from scalable efficiency to scalable learning.  It is the degrees of adoption, the investments made, the multiple levels of activities and the focus of the intensity given to building capabilities to innovate will yield the eventual impact. Execution and Value Delivery needs to drive the whole innovation process.
5. Exploring and Aligning. Here I am pushing for a new management model where we are pushing to seek increasing ‘fusion’ but still want degree’s of separation, we are seeking out ‘flows’ through new knowledge to break down barriers that restrict new insights so as to turn these into new value creation, and we are encouraged to seek out and establish a higher ‘fluidity’ in what we do and reduce the rigidity we presently have in place in our current organizations.We need to operate in ‘dual minds’ and structures is at last constantly striving for the innovation balance: between exploring and exploiting.

It is until we recognize that a large part of our present innovation struggle to date is that innovation remains hard to manage well, constantly and in a repeating fashion; we strive to systematize it and then attempt to replicate any success we then have, so as to achieve more, to repeat and extract efficiencies, yet more often than not we fail.

We do not take into account all the variables that came together for that one particular winning outcome. Often this does not work on a repetitive basis as the variables that make up each innovation can be so different, they are unique for each innovation event or activity. Yet we can learn under a growing ‘range of’ differentiating capabilities but it is this need to be more adaptive, fluid and being adept each time, changes the innovation system we know today.

We need to radically alter our thinking and redesign innovation. It is not predictable, it is based on being inherently unpredictable and we have to design our innovation systems and structures for this.

Summary

Here in what I am doing, or proposing, is that I am exploring solutions along an evolutionary path, that search for the unique innovation dynamics that are needed, so you will arrive at the distinct and adaptive ones to manage in this new era. I am positioning these as a more central part of my advisory practice, for clients who understand the need for innovation change and want to explore how innovation is changing.

Nothing is standing still anymore, it is evolving constantly and we equally need to design our innovation to adapt to this new innovation era.

image credit: bigstockphoto.com

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

We can chose to simply go on in the many ways we have evolved our problem-solving techniques or methodologies, as those help the innovation and discovery process; incremental, piecemeal and experimentally. Yet we still get caught out by not resolving or addressing the essential building blocks of innovation (culture, environment, climate, governance, alignment). Yet, we have never ‘cracked’ the full innovation management system. We must try harder today.

Many of those innovation tools that have been emerging in recent years have now built up a powerful body of validation, and they become necessary to know and practice yet often miss the basic building block needs of innovation. We need to do better, we need to design a completely new innovation process that takes into account all that has evolved in our understanding and experiment in recent years.

A new cycle of innovation

We need to adapt our system thinking to the challenge identified, not the other way round.

In some ways, we are at a point of completing a full circle for much within innovation and its management and this is becoming far more based on Applied Innovation, with that need to take a greater hold of all these promising and emerging tools and methodologies to achieve selected jobs. Also alongside these grow the theoretical underpinning of innovation management in more ‘collective’ and uniquely ‘combined’ ways, so as to establish innovation more formally, in formalized and structured ways, as a distinctive process, designed to the business needs and mission, not ‘lifted’ from copying best practices of others or adopting generic processes.

But for me, the really radical way forward is to have all these solution parts constantly available and adaptable to the situation. We relate to the problem on hand and set out in designing the process needed in frames, tools, process designs. We go and simply ‘grab them’ to fit the innovation we are working upon. We design the innovation system we need after we know what we are trying to achieve in the challenge or idea. We “pull down” what is needed. Can we design a totally ‘adaptive’ innovation process to fit the specific need? Why not?

Today innovation is more complex, we must be highly adaptive

We need to increasingly rely on problem-solving techniques. So as we seek out greater applied science knowledge we will use it to support and develop practical applications based on technology and innovation. Utilitarian in its principles, seeking real-world use and implementation through a more creative, collaborative environment, leading to more discoveries that distinctly ‘blend’ the lab application with the customer discovery of unmet need.

We are encouraging a more abstract thinking as we are increasingly focused on “engineering” our business in new or different ways and this becomes the unique requirement of applied innovation to meet specific needs.

We have seen a consistent change over the years to move towards a more inventive engineering and discovery mindset within our innovation approaches. We started in manufacturing, continued in logistics and supply chain and have seen an evolution of our labs and thinking to keep advancing our processes, thinking, and growth inside our organizations.

Now we are looking far more outside, connecting more specifically with the customer’s needs, the jobs they want to complete in better, more effective ways. These evolutionary steps need to rethink how we look and management innovation. We actually need to re-engineer our processes as they have become “not fit for purpose”.

We have been steadily learning to adapt what we knew inside an organization with what we should increasingly listen to outside it. There has been an increasing emphasis on linking concepts in new and novel products and services, increasingly closer to these customer needs and desires.

We have moved from the inside looking out of organizations to focusing on the outside coming in, working more in ecosystems and far more closely with the customer in growing collaborations. To support this ongoing journey we have been evolving our problem-solving methods.

We need to consider how big data and analytics, technology and a far more creative thinking needs to be applied collectively. Each of these mentioned will begin to have a change in everything we have in place today, their ‘productive’ lifecycle and their growing legacy problems in the coming years as we re-evaluate them, integrate the design to adapt to a very different future, constantly adapting and evolving them into a more structured innovation process.

Innovation management itself must become “fluid” in design, in adaptation so the right approach is to be constantly ‘adaptive’ and put together what is needed to tackle the challenge that needs resolution. We need a constant redesign to meet the circumstances.

Create a fluid, adaptive, agile innovation system – unique each time

Can we find ways to be highly adaptable, agile and fluid in grabbing and taking the parts of the innovation system and constructing them into that design and process that works for that specific challenge? Becoming adaptive in organizations that are often highly rigid and standardized is so conflicting, so different, you must separate the two that many are arguing even stronger today than ever, a dual innovation process or organization design.

We do have more tools, processes and theoretical understanding of innovation and its management to make each design that more of a specific applied innovation service, we have the capability to construct this. Can we go that route in our organization design? We need to apply what we need to get the “job” done and this becomes specific to the challenge and its complexity and engagement needs.

The emerging principles of Applied Innovation Services

To get the best out of any idea or innovation concept we need to design the process around the idea or the challenge, not try and force these through the wrong standardized process we try to “work” innovation through today. Often innovation outcomes end up totally different from the original intent or vision and become highly compromised in their value and impact.

• We do need to think very differently in designing the process to the job /challenge on hand to give it the best chance of getting from as ‘great’ idea to a great commercial success.
• We do need to think very differently in designing the process to the job /challenge on hand to give it the best chance of getting from as ‘great’ idea to an even greater commercial success.
• I believe we need a radical redesign of how we manage innovation.

For this to happen we need to radically redesign how we manage innovation and that is through highly adaptive applications that are selected to do the job on hand. We seek out and pull down, connecting them up for that specific job. We reject those that are simply superfluous to this specific need or make sure those operating in the background are not dragging down our performance. What needs to be clearly recognized, to take each innovation concept through its design will require not the current approach of ‘one-size fits all’ process that we have today.

We need a consistently adaptive innovation design process. We must step away from the present process that destroys much creative thought and innovative thinking and slows down the eventual outcome.

We need to be highly adaptive in what innovation applications, processes, tools, and frameworks can be grabbed, perhaps from the innovation cloud and formed into the individually designed innovation process that looks capable of delivering the challenge or idea or can be adjusted as we learn and go.

That’s where we should be going in our thinking of our innovation (process). Just my Friday afternoon contribution, even before the “happy hour.”As Steve Blank often says “It’s a big idea.”

image credit: bigstockphoto.com

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

I continue to investigate and explore as much of the thought leadership on innovation as I can, it continually points to a change in how we approach innovation. Delivering this changing message becomes simply a cause in itself as so many are failing to recognize it as radically different from their past innovation management.

I have written about the new innovation era in 2017 made up of higher levels of needed collaboration, where platforms, ecosystems and customer experience understanding become increasingly central.

I felt I needed to provide a more dedicated perspective on these in a collaboration with my established sparing partner Jeffrey Phillips over at Ovo Innovation in our website of Ecosystems4innovators.

We do stand at the cusp of a new innovation era but where do you stand?

We need to push well beyond our existing core of (existing) innovation understanding, we actually need a new innovation institutional design that recognizes the “core” lies at the edges of discovery.

The tenet of each organization in the past has been in protecting its core.

This is changing as the very core is changing to adapt to more volatile conditions, changing landscapes and more disruption. The core is not so much in what we know or own but in what we can learn from all that surrounds our core and this is increasingly found at the edges and externally.

The edge is our new emerging adaptive core

The new core can only be found at the edge, the customer edge. The customer is critical, they are absolutely essential to any innovation. If their needs are not fully understood, to turn the present fuzziness from not fully understanding their needs and unmet needs into opportunity to grow our business, you are at a real disadvantage today.

We need to really engage and have a real depth of understanding of the customer, their needs, their individual journey, by discovering and engaging with them constantly at all their current touch points and experiences of what they are wanting to do, that is different from today and this comes from new combinations.

We are rapidly appreciating the combination effect of technology, the data exchanges, and the analytics we gain from this, the insights and discoveries. The combination effect is changing the starting point of innovation, it is not beginning in idea generation found inside the building, and it is discovery found outside brought in, to then turn into potentially commercial ideas.

The world of discovery is rapidly opening up through software and technology solutions

There is a host of digital solutions that can bring discovery and insight into our innovation thinking.We have a growing selection of innovation software all looking far more at the “edge” to then bring this into the new core.

For example we can automatically identify trends and technologies that might shape our world, we can scan different corporate environments by applying a more disciplined radar scanning approach, we can capture more inspirations and ideas “on the go” through all our mobile options, scanning, sending and collecting in dedicated ‘idea’ repositories.

We have multiple choices of collaborative platforms, we can quickly mount crowdsourcing campaigns, validate different concepts and prototypes, have corporate idealization platforms, construct road maps that can steer discovery, technology, resources and ideas so as to ‘quickly’ translate these into a portfolio of options to judge and decide.

We can collaborate in ecosystems of mutual understanding, working to a desired end or range of new solutions, we have multiple platforms to leverage and work through. We have data inflows, analytic solutions, and insights, all crowding in on us to deliver sometimes overwhelming choices. The ability to reorganize differently becomes paramount to seizing the new potential that lies at the edges of external discovery.

No, our discovery side is so rich in possibility yet we often stay stuck in our existing core. Why?

I can liken it to an old heart, ticking away but not as capable of a great amount of real exertion as it used to be. It has had multiple bypasses, an odd heart attack and plenty of emergency interventions. We need a transformation, a new beating heart of innovation possibilities, recognizing these as continued infusions, becoming the essential (blood) flow that feeds the innovation heart. It has never been as healthy as today, of being able in providing a constant flow of possibilities that circulate and provide the new innovation oxygen.

Forget the past reliance

The old concept of a complete reliance on internally thinking, of “we have the best ideas and understanding” are totally out of date. Believing our growth is simply being reliant on internal product and service extension is failing to move this growth needle apart from limited short-term gains. We can’t rely on simply ‘tweaking’ the existing core anymore. We need to think differently. We need to be utterly outwardly orientated to all of the customer and market dynamics and it is through technology capture we can begin to translate these into new innovation opportunities.

So the edge will radically begin to transform the core

To become more aggressive and combat the disruptive forces at work all around us we must go to the edge. The edge can be still made up of products, services, and market opportunities but we need to consider the underlying forces that are at work within this and these lie outside our own domain of physical building, experience or our existing techniques to exploit the known.

We need to find the unknown, we need to pick up on the weak signals we can only find at the edges and begin to build a very different institutional innovation set of capabilities.

Thinking at the edge can be very transforming

Edges require different practices from the core; they, over-time impact the core, hence why we need to begin to think through institutional innovation change to accommodate this leading from the edge.

The value of considering platforms and ecosystems within this redesign allows you to accelerate outside learning, leverage the knowledge available across a broader community and can deliver internally new understanding and knowledge in areas where the core lacks, or is inadequately set up in expertise.

What was the internal competence of knowledge inside the organization is becoming increasingly an inhibitor. It only contains the core of the existing business; it does not allow you to tap into opportunities of tomorrow in new, openly shared ways.

Collaborations across organizations can defray the cost; it limits risk but encourages experiment. You achieve ways to gains quickly differently learning opportunities and connect with different areas of specialization not found within the one organization.

A different understanding: stocks and flows that come from our edges

Today it is not “stocks of your knowledge” as these rapidly lose value, it is the “flows of all knowledge” and these come increasingly within the relationships you form at the edges and platforms and ecosystems can accelerate these flows and leverage knowledge and discovery.

We do need to re-conceive innovation – our new core is found at the edges if growth is important to you. It is how you apply all that is potentially available to you today, to leverage and learn what is valued and needed becomes the critical investment time, you need to put into the discovery of the edge and all it can mean to your existing core.

We simply need to transform our framing and much of this is outside not within. Have you made this recognition that your core is at increasing risk unless you discover the edges that will transform everything you do and you will want to protect as your new connected intelligent core highly connected to the outside world?

We can explore this more if you are interested?

image credit: avande.com

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

The significant transformation taking place around exploiting technology and digital management has made ecosystems and platforms a mainstream prospecting need, in most of our businesses today. We must engage in what all of this means and its business impact. I certainly believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery.

Platforms, strategic partnerships, new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and ecosystems through platforms are the organizing environment to enact these.

Jeffrey Phillips and I have collaborated around different innovation thinking for some years and in a late August  2016 discussion, over Skype, we realized that what was emerging from our usual exchanges and insights was that the area of Innovation within Ecosystems was gathering pace and what did that mean for innovation in future business and practice implications?

In Jeffrey and my latest collaboration what became different, is instead of a series of stand-alone posts or thought papers, we would place this collaboration into a dedicated “ecosystem” posting site was created to reflect the world of ecosystems we need to explore.

Why not take a look, it is building in its diversity of understanding, exploring this fascinating area of platforms and ecosystems and what this means for innovation. I believe this is heralding in a “new innovation era”

Why the difference in having a dedicated website?

It is our growing understanding that all of ‘the dynamics of the innovation system’ we all operate within, is evolving all the time and in this particular intersection that we have chosen, is highly dynamic and fluid. Understanding ecosystems and platforms is evolving in front of our eyes. So to put our thinking and collaborative time into this we felt a dedicated website allowed us to post insights, knowledge, experiences and discoveries on a constant, evolving basis.

The reality beckons: Today larger organizations need to face the stark truth

Either organizations will adapt or die.  We are undergoing a fundamental transformation in business. Technology offers us the transforming means but can we, as leaders, as innovators, as customers take all of what this means on board? It needs bold leadership. The structure of our business today cannot afford to try to stand alone, it needs to extend beyond its traditional supporting partners. It needs to learn to collaborate with a whole new range of partners, even some of your existing or previous competitors, to radically adapt to the different world we live in. We need to adapt.

Learning to collaborate in new, more open ways

Yet moving from the present position of offering specific stand-alone, unconnected products and services into ones built on technically connected ones, where they collaborate and be part of an ecosystem of partners, that are pushing to provide greater customer experience, that they learn to connect into becomes of a higher value, as against discrete products is a massive strategic and organizational change in learning how to open up and collaborate.

The delivering of totally different value propositions for the ultimate consumer is a highly daunting challenge. It ‘upends’ much, if not all, of how our business organizations have been organized around, mostly within themselves, it is going to need radical change, the organizations is needing inverting. It calls for bold management to instigate such a transformation and open up to external collaboration and exchanges.

Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems will have a powerful effect

Our whole understanding of innovation is certainly 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 for finding greater value and that will increasingly coalesce around innovation ecosystems. We are in need to ‘form’ in many different ways, significantly build more relationships that increasingly matter to each organization, ones that add value, insight and bring external expertise inside, to work on ‘greater’ innovation solutions. We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services that extend beyond the stand-alone discreet offering, that would be delivered by only having the one organization attempting it into broader collaborative offerings that provide a greater customer experience. Complexity is on the rise, offering discrete products is on the wane. Value is in the connecting of experience.

We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services that extend beyond the stand-alone discreet offering, that would be delivered by only having the one organization attempting it into broader collaborative offerings that provide a greater customer experience. Complexity is on the rise, offering discrete products is on the wane.

Have you asked why are business ecosystems emerging as a real competitive force?

As we begin to open up our thinking and begin to focus on the concept of ecosystems, it will increasingly have a powerful effect on our future growth perspectives in considering alternatives and possibilities. The network of different partners will all contribute to this often ‘emergent’ thinking and will very quickly increase the total sum of the value, the ‘combination effect’ will bring to the ‘party’. Diversity in innovation is a powerful catalyst.

The single industry and business-specific approach are seeing change, many companies are exploring the value of becoming involved in a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries to build new communities that have the capacity to transform existing environments.

A whole new battlefield of connecting

One has to recall the “battle of devices has now become a war of building the better ecosystem.” It is not one single product that is chasing in crowded, highly competitive fields. We are looking to increase the share of minds, engagement, offer increasing preferences that are reflecting these changing habits, tastes, and lifestyles. To plugin to achieve this ‘paradigm shift’ the search is on for forming the ecosystem or set of ecosystems that can deliver on this ‘transformation’ going on in front of our eyes.

To plug into achieving this ‘paradigm shift’ the search is on for forming the ecosystem or set of ecosystems that can deliver on this ‘transformation’ going on in front of our eyes that works for us. We can’t afford to wait, we must experiment, explore and extract different learnings from our own involvement. Standing back never wins the race, it only relegates you to being a bystander and to achieve any successful innovation outcome demands engagement and involvement.

Can you imagine working with Innovation Ecosystems and Platforms?

Just imagine each silo has to plug into the same platform to engage, build into and extract. Visibility quickly rises; collaboration becomes increasingly the order of the day. Through the cloud, platforms and across business application, all are operating on the same operating system, not multiple versions, waiting for IT and budget justification to update.

The engagement becomes where and when the network and collaboration parts grow in importance, as it feeds into and lives off of others making a living, engaging ecosystem, where mutual dependency generates a greater ‘return’.

Turning from being inwardly driven

You turn from being inward to engaging outward, in all your measurements, metrics, and rewards. ‘Reacting and responding’ becomes more central to employee incentive to pay against as “the effectiveness measure” needed today falls away replaced by ways to accelerate the essential collaborating need.

You then begin to turn from being inward to engaging outward in all your measurements, metrics, and rewards. ‘Reacting and responding’ becomes more central to employee incentive as you consistently engage and collaborate, building more knowledge and value into the system, This becomes critical criteria to pay and reward in building new value. This becomes “the effectiveness measure” needed today to the essential collaborating need to build upon the ecosystem’s collaborating knowledge.

Consistently being engagement becomes common place

Equally, the ability to have different and more diverse ways of connecting with the customer managed in real-time, in the cloud and on connecting platforms becomes increasingly essential. In collaborations and engagements, we built on evolving knowledge, insight, and understanding, where the data flowing in, from the multiple touch points and deliver back innovation that is more closer to their needs.

Imagine all being captured, understood, personalized and built into a ‘web of understanding’ that drives the insights that generate the next level of innovation.

Then as you build your awareness of the ecosystems of your own business and its capabilities, mix in the customer’s engagement and needs you begin to recognize the value of others, within the design chain, those other stakeholders who are the experts in different parts of the connected need of customers.

We move even faster from ‘dumb devices’ to smart products

‘Dumb’ or discrete products turn into ‘smart’ ones and ‘stand-alone’ products become ‘connected platform solutions’ that those within the ecosystem jointly work upon, as they  extend the potential through technological and innovative change. Through this collaborative work they extend out in surprising new ways, feeding of the diversity within the ecosystem, so the customer experience goes way beyond what is established today, it captures their imaginations and quickly becomes their choice, as it connected parts that make the job or need easier than before.

Increasingly the value is residing in this complex web of collaborations, working towards delivery of seamless experiences, made up of multiple brands building constantly on what they are learning in the ongoing engagements.

A pipe dream or our beckoning reality – your choice?

We are witnessing the connecting of technology, people and things in dramatically different ways. The recognition that moving towards the goal of providing ‘customer seamless experience’ lies in leveraging across platforms, ecosystems, different vested parties and working to align all of what this means in open, collaborate ways.

In making the customer the center of the focus, so by connecting, relating and deepening their experience, the value in return is greater than what one individual organization can offer today, as it stays part of a disconnected process, locked in a narrow ecosystem that ‘forces’ the customer to connect their parts they need, instead of offering solutions they can connect and value, as it makes their lives easier and more seamless.

It is hard, demanding and risky work, working on solutions that customers unmet needs. The rewards are not crystal clear, they evolve through experimentation and dialogue.

No one is suggesting this is an easy journey, far from it

I do believe we all need to embrace and explore platforms, join different ecosystems and push harder to relate more to real customer needs. I believe it will make a difference to our ability to deliver innovation that can have a real impact in totally different ways than we are capable of delivering today. Of course, you can be the ‘lucky one’ or exceptional. that ‘hit’ the mother lode of innovation growth but these are very few, for most of us, we need to travel the harder route towards discovery, step by organized step.

The end result we all are needing to deliver in innovating solutions is to find distinctly different ones. Increasingly these will come from being in highly connected ways, that are built from contributions from a broader ecosystem of vested parties, offering solutions that are really different, ones that really can add value and meets customer needs.

Welcome to the transforming world of Innovation Ecosystems and platform delivery systems, it offers our new innovation era. I do suggest you explore this dedicated site, (see the link below) it offers a growing source of insights and knowledge that will give you a real value in relating to the changes going on all around us, and attempting to solve the questions we need to answer on how you are shaping up to participate in this different era of innovation.

For more from our co-collaboration, see  Two Authors – Diverse Opinions: Recapping our ecosystem and platform thoughts

image credit: europarl.europa.eu

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

It always catches you by surprise when one of the leading players within the innovation space makes a change. In this case, Innosight has been acquired by Huron, a fellow professional services firm, one that has the vast majority of their business in the United States. Huron focuses specifically on Healthcare, Education, and Life Sciences and has been to-date far more operationally driven in its delivery solutions.

Being fairly curious you search for the fit and its meaning to both parties as Innosight has been continually shaping their offering to focus more on the strategic positioning of innovation over the past few years as the market has been undergoing a significant change in client demands and innovation solutions. I wanted to work through all of what this might mean and some more.

The transaction overview is ” Huron will purchase Innosight Holdings, LLC for $100 million upon closing, consisting of $90 million in cash and $10 million in Huron common stock, plus contingent consideration of up to $35 million if specific financial performance targets are met over a four-year period.”

This time last year we saw another acquiring of a pure innovation firm

This time last year we saw the takeover of Fahrenheit 212 by Cap Gemini and I wrote about it here under “In the blink of an eye, it gets something bigger.” I had suggested at the time that “David meets and marries a Goliath” and worried over the deal for Fahrenheit’s future.

Recently I went back and took an updated look and from all accounts the relationship is thriving (on the surface) and the Fahrenheit team seems to be well on track to achieve their stated aim of being a global innovation strategy and design firm  where their stated objectives are “we challenge the belief that innovation is inherently unreliable and have spent the last decade designing the method, building the model, and assembling the minds to make innovation a predictable driver of growth for our clients’ businesses“.

Part of their magic sauce lies in the Applied Innovation Exchange that had been designed and launched by Cap Gemini some weeks before Fahrenheit 212 was acquired. Still taking a fresh look at the underlying changes of that marriage is for another post, let’s return to Innosight’s move of being acquired by Huron.

Back to Innosight

I consistently look at different innovation consulting firms and the directions they are taking as it makes sense to gauge the directions that client demand is taking. Innosight is one of those first port of calls for me. They have been undertaking some internal moves in recent years, to reflect the changes and challenges around a ‘pure’ focus on innovation and where it fits within the larger organization,  by attempting to move further up into the strategic design and alignment in building greater C-Level engagements, searching for larger project sized contracts.

Innosight has been continually shaping their offering to focus more on the strategic positioning of innovation. They break down their offering into three core parts- 1. Create Growth Strategies that “Strengthen and extend today’s business – while harnessing the disruptive innovations of tomorrow”, 2. Develop Innovation Capabilities of “the talent, culture, and systems to make innovation repeatable and reliable” and 3. Build New Business to “discover opportunities, design new business models, and launch high-impact new ventures.

Understanding the rationale. Working through it.

Innosight is a partnership so it was not so easy to gain the type of understanding you require, relating the aspirations, reality with hard numbers. As Huron is on the  NASDAQ (HURN) it becomes a little easier in what they need to declare for this acquisition.

I was a little surprised that Innosight had a turnover of $43 million in 2016, I was expecting more from a team of 90 people. Also how the breakdown of revenue by industry specific their business profile was not as I would have expected. Although these clearly change by the demand of the clients and the recognition that the consultant can deliver the work, compared to others, in a very tough competing environment.

According to the first webcast on this acquisition (17/2), Innosight has 31% of their revenue in Life Sciences and 15% in Healthcare in 2016, so on the surface, they have a 46% ‘fit’ to Huron. The big difference coming in the fact that Huron is servicing around 500 health organizations mostly individual hospitals and academic medical centers, with 400 universities and institutions. Innosight has focused far more on Corporations, one notable one being Aetna. Huron has around 2,000 employees and having present revenues (excluding Innosight) of $726m in 2016. Is it such a fit?

What did surprise me on how the Consumer Products part of Innosight’s business had fallen away from what I can see and that might reflect the growing gap still to be found at ‘appealing’ to the C-Level on strategic innovation and the ongoing need for operational delivery of innovation capabilities and competencies.

These insights show Innosight has been adapting and responding to changing innovation needs and market opportunities as they felt they could work the horizontal, across industry, for many of the innovation capabilities and designs, although it is certainly becoming more complex at strategic design level. Yet this across-industry has been going against the ‘competitive’ grain when you are facing large vertical and horizontal consulting practices that claim they offer both a real depth of industry and innovation-specific knowledge. Often I do question these claims, in what I see, with notable exceptions.

I think it is this positioning as a strategic consulting company, competing in an extremely tough environment with the big strategic consulting companies of McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, Strategy& and a whole host of full consulting and service solutions where EY, KPMG, and others all compete for a slice of the innovation pie is a very tough one for Innosight to gain the momentum they would have liked.

Equally, at the operational and integration end, we see Cap Gemini, Accenture, TCS and many others offering digital and transformation services. No, a very tough market to compete in and I think for Innosight this must have been a constant ongoing struggle.

Rooting for the specialist.

I will instinctively root for the focused business that has innovation at its core and Innosight has been one of these. Their focus on strengthening and relating growth needs coming from innovation and its necessary alignment was a good but perhaps too niche a position to constrain their growth against such global competition. The disruptive message they offered, although a powerful one needs a highly receptive audience and most organizations leave their changes until they are often in the middle of a crisis and then they tend to panic and call in the ‘big guns’ of the consulting world.

The disruptive message they offered, although a powerful one, needs a highly receptive audience and most organizations leave their changes until they are often in the middle of a crisis and then they tend to panic and call in the ‘big guns’ of the consulting world.

Finally, in this section, Innosight’s growth route through innovation was a good position. They focused increasingly on alignment and taking a ‘future back’ approach to eventual strategic design, to determine new innovation business models was a good targetted focus and has been, I suspect, the reason for their compounding 20% yearly growth. Yet I can imagine they were not achieving that critical mass and scale I suspect they wanted, to stay independent and became open to an offer. For some to perhaps ‘cash out’ while others stay for varying reasons.

In the announcement of this acquisition Huron made the following overview:

When combined, Huron and Innosight will use their strategic, operational and technology capabilities to help clients across multiple industries develop pioneering solutions to address disruption and achieve sustained growth.

“No industry is immune to disruption. Faced with increased competition, often from unconventional sources, organizations are forced to rethink their historical strategies to stay ahead of market forces and changing customer preferences,” said James H. Roth, chief executive officer and president of Huron. “Together, we will provide a full spectrum of services – from strategy to execution – that will help organizations think, plan and act differently to confront disruption and accelerate growth.”

Built by leading strategic thinkers and co-founded by renowned strategy consultant Mark Johnson and Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen, the world’s foremost authority on disruptive innovation, Innosight is a trusted partner to Fortune 500 companies and other leaders looking to strengthen today’s business while creating tomorrow’s growth engines. The firm’s innovation and transformational strategies have proven successful in industries undergoing disruptive change such as aerospace, automotive, energy, financial services, healthcare, insurance, life sciences and retail.

“Companies are under mounting pressure to satisfy a range of competing interests,” said Scott Anthony, managing partner at Innosight, who will become a Huron managing director. “But shifting stakeholder expectations, combined with disruptive change, create significant opportunities for today’s leaders. Huron and Innosight’s combination of capabilities in strategy, operations, technology, and analytics will enable us to offer transformative change to address these opportunities.”

Formed in 2000, Innosight recognized that traditional approaches to strategy and growth were not enough to help companies accelerate transformational change. This became the basis for its “future back” approach to strategy. Organizations that apply Innosight’s approach build leadership alignment on a vision for the future and create portfolios of new innovations and growth businesses that address changing customer needs and outpace their competitors.

Applying the same methodology alongside Huron’s deep industry expertise in healthcare, education and life sciences, the combined firms will help leaders in these critical industries successfully navigate changing market dynamics, regulations and consumer expectations to grow for the long-term”

“No industry is immune to disruption” Here lies the rub.

I think this disruption thought underscores the joint rationale for this acquisition. Heron is facing some massive forces of disruption in their primary business of Health as well as Education. With a Republican party looking really hard on how it will unwind or redirect the Affordable Care Act (ACA) The comprehensive health care reform law enacted in March 2010 (sometimes known as ACA, PPACA, or “Obamacare”) has given much of the past growth to Huron. Today they are seeing declines in this sector while this uncertainty continues. Clients are downsizing in projects while the political and macro conditions are sorted out.

The same is about to possibly ‘hit’ in Huron’s Higher Educational offerings as the new Administration has signaled large questions of necessary change in the general direction of Education- Presently with all the uncertainties of the new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos and the directions she takes in what some are assuming is a radical agenda of change, leaves the higher educational institutions in a potential ‘state of flux’.

As this potential set of policy disruptions will need time to get the level of clarification and granularity clients required, it exposes Huron and 70% plus of its business to many uncertainties.

Arguably, it will be well positioned when these policy decisions become clarified but that is potentially arriving over the next two to even four years between being decided and enacted, into policy and clarity for the individual institutions to react too.

This present operating environment for Huron does make for real uncertainty, especially in larger transformational consulting projects but it needs to manage the interim in different ways. So positioning for disruptive change and managing strategic and operation transitions become essential to help manage this period of great industry uncertainty.

Transformational guidance becomes the key mutual focus.

Innosight has been positioning itself increasingly as a growth strategy consulting firm focused on helping organizations design and create the future, instead of being disrupted by it. As a leading authority on disruptive innovation and strategic transformation, these identifications of new growth opportunities, making changes through new ventures and designing the capabilities to accelerate to significant industry and organizational change. will require a lot of guidance to support organizations as they contend with the change transforming their industries and businesses.

For Innosight does it make any changes with its direction? Open questions perhaps?

Innosight had a global footprint, it seems Huron withdrew from its international business expansion back in 2015. Although Innosight has 80% of its business in the US, will it continue to pursue growth outside?. It has an office in Singapore and one in Switzerland and when you are servicing Global fortune 500 equivalents you need this broader presence. Huron has really a 100% business in North America.

Do they compliment and focus only on the US market or will they stay global in ambition, if the C-Level remains as an essential focus, it stays both a necessity for one (Innosight) and an aspiration for the other (Huron). That will have its integrating challenges perhaps or will they combined have and global appeal in the focus sectors Huron currently serves as very US centric?

Equally, although Innosight has been growing its Healthcare and Life Sciences business the blending of very specific work on operational matters by Huron with Innosight’s C-Level future back work and the search for growth, new business models and launching new ventures needs some radical aligning to leverage well, it needs some dedicated work.

Innosight by spanning more the horizontal position, across industries needs some recalibrating possibly with Hurons’ more vertical depth and very deep operational engagement. Possibly not so easy but a challenge to extract and leverage the complementarities in many ways quickly, or it gets likely to becomes ‘bogged’ down in those past entrenched internal positions that are highly vertically focused.

Will this be a prelude to a new operating structure? Maybe it is the time.

Having this aspiration of Hurons in dealing at C-Level becomes a reality with the leadership team that resides in Innosight and the thought leadership that constantly emerges in the form of innovation thinking, books, and academic work.

Will Clayton Christensen, along with Mark Johnson and Scott Anthony give Huron the entry point into the C-Level and Government Corridors? I’m not sure it the core leadership team of Innosight is staying or cashing out?. That has yet to be fully and specifically clarified. How does that move across the 2,000 seemingly highly industry specific plus consultants, I think will be an equal challenge.

When you also look at the present advisory heavyweights of Academia, advising Innosight in the form of Vijay Govindarajan, Rita McGrath, Hal Gregersen, Jeff Dyer, Clark Gilbert as well as Clay Christensen, along with numerous others that work with Innosight to varying degrees, it should have greater ‘growth’ gravitas.

If the advisors to Innosight stay involved then the potential to gain leading academic insight, to help open corporate C-Level doors and clarify much, has a powerful ‘enabling effect’ that Huron will need to relate too. Hopefully, they, (Huron) are not losing this in the acquisition as it harnesses a really powerful brains trust in my opinion at the right point of organization entry.

I was a little surprised that Huron has 120 plus client-serving Managing Directors.

From what I understand is that Scott Anthony, the present MD of Innosight, will become one of these Managing Directors positioned in the Business Advisory service area. I wonder about this, for positioning around so much uncertainty and potential disruption if this is the right place?

Of course, I don’t have details of any of the Innosight teams new positioning but to transition from a partnership to a (highly) structured consulting firm as Huron seems to convey. The question becomes perhaps one of utilizing talent in the best way not ‘just’ fitting into given structures.

Maybe something more radical will emerge

I would argue with so much ahead in many corporate strategic redesigns, as well as coping with industry disruptions, both in the US and global markets, the scarce resource becomes those that can articulate and energize the set of strategic decisions needed, experienced in disruption and planning out new business models becomes the critical one to nurture and transfer.

That is not easy as it calls for a combination of change management skills and strategic grounding at C-Level ‘speak’. Then you gain the operational outcome ‘flowthrough’ from this and the challenge is harnessing those fairly rare resources both across vertical and horizontal challenges with the strategic dialogues delivered at the right level.

This managing of an internal design change can become the critical enabler and criteria to judge how this acquisition works in identifying, leveraging and harnessing the diverse resources across the ‘disrupting’ landscape ahead.

The existing structure at Huron is a classic consultants – seemingly siloed.

In Huron’s recent risk assessment (Form 10-K) it stated on its employees ” the managing directors are the key drivers of the business. They work externally to serve clients as advisors and engagement team leaders, originate revenue by developing new and existing client relationships, and enhance our reputation. Internally they create our intellectual capital and develop our people. Our senior directors, directors and managers manage the day-to-day client relationships and oversee the delivery and quality of our work product.”

I would wonder how the dynamics and flow of a partnership differs in where it places its emphasis, time, management and energy. I feel it will require some adjustments for Innosight to relate into a much larger organization set up more vertically in focus and structured in the traditional lines of a larger consulting practice?

Finally Huron’s headquarters are located in Chicago with domestic and international (?) offices including those located in the following major metropolitan areas: Atlanta, Bangalore, Boston, Buffalo (N.Y.), Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Madison (Wis.), New York, Pensacola (Fla.), Portland (Ore.), Raleigh (N.C.), San Francisco, Toronto and Washington, D.C. Whereas Innosight is located in Boston (80%) of the team, Switzerland, and Singapore. The domestic US market perspective will clearly dominate, will it become all-dominating? Are we going to see a growing global footprint or a retreat into America?

I think the acquisition does come as a surprise.

I had not, in all honesty, heard of Huron but that is not so surprising because I am not so focused on Health Care, Hospitals and Medical Institutions, or the operational matters they have clearly built a strong business upon, specifically in the United States. So I initially wondered on the attraction between the two. Just simply why?

It boils down to a significant cash consideration for the partnership of Innosight to distribute, partly knowing being independent is a long hard slog. It is equally this growing recognition that “no industry is immune to disruption” including consulting, often working on perhaps outdated consulting models. It is also a crisis of revenue need for Huron, a publically quoted organization recognizing the deteriorating state of the US healthcare market.

There is this increasing realization that greater disruptive forces are coming into play, in the form of even more competitors, increased pressures on margins, a struggle to achieve the bigger projects in uncertain time and the debate on where to focus, vertically or horizontally.

A further choice of  managing all the forces of change domestically in the biggest consulting market of the USA at a significantly changing time politically, or taking out a global footprint further out becomes a real challenge to manage well and keep shareholders happy. Global footprints come at a far higher higher cost to utilization of assets, facing the growing, diverse and challenging consulting market where big seems to be getting bigger and more diverse, offering such scale and access to deep resource to call upon any time. Some tough decisions have to be made here beyond the aspirational.

In summary

Both Huron and Innosight trade on close client relationships once established, a focus on clear reputation, harnessing either industry experience or subject matter knowledge (disruption theory, innovation, business model change) to then deliver to the client’s explicit needs. in potentially more meaningful and focused ways as highly specialized.

Do they achieve a balanced portfolio of services with this deal? Perhaps no, they certainly fill or plug some essential gaps but the ability to really leverage this is the “real ability to straddle“, not just diverse client needs but the one that for me, makes or breaks this, the internal straddling required to integrate and leverage each of the parts into a cohesive whole. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

The macro and micro forces are in play across all the consulting industry, it is not immune itself. So many questions are being raised on global uncertainties that will impact both the US & global focus for many. Many political and Government decisions will be forcing change but while this stays unclear, for many this is a growing time of uncertainty.  It is the ability to “focus out”, design and determine what are the real disruptive forces each client has to double down upon, will provide options and alternatives to thrive in this age of transformation.

As I said earlier that is a rare ability to harness the strategic patterns and design new innovation business models and this takes a specific skill set, which seems Huron are buying in this acquisition of Innosight. Time will tell on the acquisition success as the internal design of Huron to take advantage of these changing market forces does need further fleshing out. It needs a very different language of (client) design and articulation, I believe.

Hopefully, that clarity comes in the coming days in further investor and webcast calls.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

We so often get caught up in the building of our capabilities. In some ways, I keep attempting to “peel the innovation onion” in explaining the need to focus on building the capabilities in different ways but to be honest, it needs these various approaches to an ever-changing environment.

A different intensity of innovation onion perhaps? Why, well we have the business of today, the emerging business of tomorrow and the future business that will provide a radically different set of capability building needs?

The struggle to date is that innovation remains hard to manage well; we strive to systematize it and then attempt to replicate any success we then have, so as to achieve more, yet more often than not. We do not take into account all the variables that came together for that particular winning outcome. Often this does not work on a repetitive basis as the variables that make up innovation can be different for each innovation event or activity but we can learn under a growing ‘range of’ differentiating capabilities.

I would argue there is the real, urgent need is to make the innovation capabilities and capacities as distinctive and unique as the circumstances ‘we’ are facing today and in the future but also highly adaptive and flexible, so you can be ready to call upon each of the components when needed, in new combinations that deliver on the result.

We spend far too much time copying others and not deliberately setting about building our own ‘distinct’ capabilities and capacities to innovate, building the necessary building blocks through our own learning experiences. These are always shaped by the context and content of your innovation, the organization’s position, its resources, commitment and leadership appetite for innovation. Each of our choices takes up on our own evolutionary paths, we can never truly understand other ones because we never really  “walk in someone else’s shoes” Copying only renders us the same, not a great ‘winning position in highly competitive market conditions, is it?

Can we find you a unique set of critical innovation capabilities?

I believe we can, as I outlined here on discussing dynamic capabilities. Here I am exploring solutions along an evolutionary path, that search for the unique innovation dynamics that are needed so you will arrive at the distinct and adaptive ones to what the CEO and board want to achieve out their strategic goals from its innovation investments. You take a fairly structured approach. It is knowing the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy and the present organization’s innovation fitness to lay out the pathway to learning how to improve, focus and execute these distinct capabilities needed in a highly focused manner and move progressively towards them.

 As previously written, I often break building core competency into eight parts.

We have two levels to it. The first (or higher level) is the need for a (1) Unifying framework and (2) to gain alignment and this needs two essential aspects to be well-clarified. We need to establish (3) a working blueprint and a clear understanding of (4) the business focus orientation for innovation to reside in.

The outcomes of this top-tier framing then we can begin to construct the underlying level of (5) well-designed competencies and capabilities that need to be pursued so we need to move the organization or the innovation activities into ones that are seeking out this constant alignment, and this needs building (6) critical enablers and behaviours, a seeking out of (7) motivators and finally, (8) the dependencies we must map back so as to advance our core and build our innovation competencies upon.

The innovation accelerators model

I often keep coming back to this. I have been working on arguing you can have a unique model for some time. I think the way I have it structured is it is a formula for an innovation acceleration model. I’ve outlined this solution in a previous post. I think it is worth working through, it seems to move with the times of what we need to focus upon. Building an innovation framework that has real capabilities at its heart.

I have worked on a formula SCA = II + OC + EE + MLC + RNE for this.

SCA Formula Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) comes from the combining effects of the following:

• II Innovation Intensity – its degree of adoption, the investments made, the multiple levels of activities and the focus of the intensity given to building capabilities to innovate.
• EE Entrepreneurial Energies – this os more on how you set about, promote and generate the internal environment as entrepreneurial to enable innovation in all its different forms to take hold and be seen as a learning environment people want to get involved with as they can readily identify with.
• MLC Market Learning Competence – these give a clearer awareness on what and where to acquire from and then take the market lessons from. The key need is to orientate always towards, and generally get to the heart of, where innovation takes place- in the marketplace and with your customers, knowing their real needs and also figuring out their unmet ones also!
• OC Organizational Learning – knowing the differences in the different ways of learning by linking the different intellectual capitals and combining the complementary assets needed to make them more dynamic.
• RNE- Relationship & Networking Effects – the supporting and enhancing aspects of making greater connections, collaborations and exchanges so as to speed up the process of innovation, reduce or contain costs and enhance your understanding through these external relationships and getting closer to knowing where latent knowledge lies, to assist and share this internally for greater impact and result for all.

I would encourage you to explore it, work it around in your own situation, it can provide a powerful catalyst to get everyone working at the critical parts of the formula and it is easy to remember.

My additional ‘peeled onion’ to add to the stock of capability building for innovation is here:

We do have to adapt out capability building increasing towards the future. We need to continue to differentiate ourselves and I would offer seven ‘generic’ thoughts or broad theme clusters that you might want to build around, to build your capabilities that will make you far more ‘innovation fit’ for the future.

1.  Linking to a clear sense of purpose. If we are aware of the direction we can ‘open up’ the discussions about our needs to achieve this sense of purpose. A clarity of what ‘we’ have along with the gaps we need to bridge to get to this future purpose. This was my own attempt some time back to get at my own “Finding our true purpose”
2. Translating knowledge into value. Are we allowing knowledge to be gathered, understood, applied and diffused with our organization’s in thoughtful, well-structured ways. We need to learn how to amplify the signals in why this resonates and then we need to share these. I can never get away from the Absorptive Capacity needed to have in place and to ‘allow’ this knowledge to flow across the organization.
3. Achieving impact and intensity. We do have to strength our resolve to perform. Innovation work needs to arrive at distinct outcomes that offer impact and intensity. This conveys’ change, it challenges the existing by delivering something better.
4. Building the capacity to perform. How we assess and improve needs to be ongoing. We need to articulate the values and core needs within the organization, we need to set aside learning and exploring time and we have to show the commitments to sustaining this building ethic. We need constant walkabouts for testing and learning. The future depends on it, as we are in far more in fluid and adaptive situations that the past where agility, creativity, and ingenuity are all required.
5. Aligning People, Technology, and Innovation. Technology is dominating much of what we do and how and what we do it upon. We are having higher degree’s of connectivity, interactivity and sharing opportunities than in the past to be engaged in networks, ecosystems and different relationship forums than ever before. We need to harness the essential interplays this requires.
6. Exploiting and Exploring. The realization that we need to operate in ‘dual minds’ and structures is at last beginning to be recognized as essential to master. We need to be constantly striving for the innovation balance: between exploring and exploiting. We need to tackle innovation in tow different thinking hats These are about learning, searching and delivering the winning value of ‘new generation activity’ by recognizing how we balance out exploitation (extending the life) and exploration (new understanding). These need separation and different approaches.
7. Creating Sustaining Value. So many organizations require re-energizing, of being re-equipped for the future in different skills and behaviors. There are so many spaces to connect into and explore and this will come from the asset orchestration that you provide (structuring, building and leveraging).

We need to not just know the appropriate resources; we need to work on the skills, processes, routines, organizational structure and disciplines that enable firms to build, employ and orchestrate mostly our intangible assets relevant to satisfying customer needs and which cannot be replicated by competitors.

Assets that deliver the new innovation needed, through attracting in collaboration efforts and integrating these into you own evolving resources by turning them into being far more dynamic and evolving in nature to met the future challenges.

Under these seven broad ‘capability building’ approaches we can build your future innovation into being ‘sustaining’. We need to distinguish ourselves from others, as we equally have to compete with them. If we do believe we have the unique potential both in our people and in the opportunities out there, then you have to be highly purposeful in your committed intent to build the capabilities, capacity, and competencies on a very consistent basis that offer that uniqueness.

If we do believe we have the unique potential both in our people and in the opportunities out there, then you have to be highly purposeful in your committed intent to build the capabilities, capacity, and competencies on a very consistent basis that offer that uniqueness.

How you set about this building I have, within this post, suggested a number of ways to ‘peel the innovation onion’ and can only state my willingness to engage with you individually in this. This is of course if you believe innovation is essential to your future, as I certainly convinced it is increasingly becoming mission-critical to master, which is my starting point always for building the capacities to innovate.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Paul Hobcraft

Taking advantage of emergence for discovery

This week my research was moving around issues of complexity within innovation and I came across a great paper, written by Deborah Dougherty, Organizing for innovation in complex innovation systems.

Although she is addressing within this paper the bigger more complex social and economic challenges we are facing in healthcare, alternative energy, water scarcity, climate management, poverty and economic revitalization, she is attempting to reframe these into problem resolutions from breaking down discovery into four distinct channels. I liked this thinking.

Her opening insight is in the twenty-first century we are all requiring more reliance on social technologies that are designed to allow the different technologies to emerge and be allowed to integrate, due to the diversity and diffusion of knowledge. This is different from past practices found within organizations. Dr. Dougherty points out much of what takes place today is still based on nineteenth-century practices where organizations were designed to stabilize, scale up and optimize, mostly internally, the scientific and technological knowledge into large working configurations.

Today, in the 21st century, we need to reply on social technologies that allow for emergence, anchor it far more into the region, or specific problems or challenge, and not so much scale up into large working configurations that might be limited and to integrate more than optimizing. She discusses as examples drug therapy, cancer cures, or developing a technology platform to integrate the creation, storage, and distribution of wind power.

Innovation needs to be more external in its outreach in creating, combining and recombining knowledge, so it can accomplish particular uses and can materialize all this gained knowledge into something new that actually works in the real world but can be dealing with different configurations in different situations. As she points out knowledge is fragmented, partial and widely dispersed, where we are constantly seeking out all the unknown, unknowns. This is why I value the absorptive capacity framework for knowledge.

The complexity today is being faced with any innovation challenge that spans the globe.

The success of extracting knowledge is in the connecting, capturing those unique insights and interdependencies in new contexts that capture the ‘nuggets’ of local knowledge applied in local situations or applied to solve and overcome situations and bring these together to accumulate all these diverse nodes of knowledge.

Today with technology, with platforms and the recognition of ecosystems we can really tap into these point of diverse knowledge and harness them in new innovative ways and deliver them far more specifically to closer customer needs by understanding these. The whole network and relationship building opens us up to discovery and the communication platforms and social types allow for a greater exchange, so new knowledge emerges.

The framework of discovery suggested

What I liked about her thinking was suggesting to “disentangle the ecology of complex innovation into distinct problems of discovery“. These were broken out into four: 1. the Project discovery Problem, 2. The knowledge integration discovery problem, 3. the strategic discovery problem and 4. the governance discovery problem.

This is suggesting that these four discovery pathways can help develop a more robust 21st century for understanding and then managing innovation in a more social related way within organizations.

Let me describe the four discovery pathways as direct quotes from her paper as it does a good job of the why:

“The project discovery problem is at the heart of innovation. It concerns building and materializing the product, program, or service so that it works to actually resolve problems. Project innovators ferret out specific elements that might constitute the emerging product and how they go together to generate desired functionality. Project work is very hands-on, concrete, embodied, iterative, and multi-functional, but occurs in large networks because emergent knowledge is noisy, fragmented, and far-flung”.

We need less work on general network structures among scientists based on patents (patents are inventions or inputs to innovation, but not innovation), and more work on how particular relationships enable the ongoing confluence of knowing and doing for innovation across many potential participants in concrete settings. We need less work on small teams and more work on how to collectively integrate noisy information, on the nature of experiments for particular kinds of problems, and on the reasoning processes, people use when deductive confirmation cannot work.

The knowledge integration discovery problem redefines R&D as an ecology-wide challenge of integrating diverse knowledge in ways that support project problem setting and solving. Knowledge integration brings together different technologies to solve problems, selects alternative paths as projects move forward, supports general questions that span projects, or sets up experiments and testing regimes.

We need less work on investing in science and technology in general and more on how these investments lead to actual innovation. Studies might examine the types of organizing that enable knowledge co-evolution among disparate knowledge communities for different grand challenges, how governments, universities, and publishing regimes may perpetuate the myth of the linear flow of knowledge from basic research into application, and how to make basic knowledge actually usable without thwarting the basic research goal of fundamental insight.

The strategic discovery problem involves creating the strategic direction to channel resources, focus efforts, and incorporate the new with the old. In complex innovation systems, the question becomes how to strategize across the ecology, and how to map forward into the long-term future so that innovators can persist with projects that take decades to develop, or with problems such as education or health care that will never be fixed once and for all, because these problems keep emerging.

We need less work on short-term collaborations or open innovation, and more work on ecology-wide strategizing over the long-term. For example, how can strategic managers use knowledge from projects and knowledge integration efforts to develop a variety of potential value creating opportunities? How can they use these potential opportunities to map the future, and how far into the future can they see? How can managers of individual organizations use this mapping for their own needs, and how can they work together with others and still compete? What alternate temporal structures and metrics enable managers to work toward very long-term goals, and how can these be organized?

The governance discovery problem involves creating mechanisms of interaction among organizations and agencies that sort out who gets what is accountable for what, and for how long. Complex innovation requires orchestrating collaboration among many organizations, institutions, regulators, and other agents. We already have many examples of non-market systems of interactions such as regional agglomerations, industry platforms, social movements, strategic alliances, or self-designing standards-setting bodies.

Research can consider how such existing mechanisms might evolve to enable people to come together for complex innovation. In addition, societies invest enormous resources into supporting commercial development, education, basic research, and so on. Research can consider the kinds of governance mechanisms that effectively leverage society’s knowledge resources for particular problems.”

In summary

We need to rethink our discovery pathways for innovation in our new socially connected world. We do need to integrate emerging knowledge in new ways

Deborah Dougherty is suggesting disentangling the ecology of complex innovation into distinct problems of discovery: generating new products and programs; developing and integrating knowledge across the ecology; strategically framing
innovation for long-term development across the ecology, and enabling new governance mechanisms in the ecology.

Each discovery problem is an essential part of complex innovation that involves many players. Each must be set and solved in its own right, yet each is entangled with the others. All four discovery problems encompass the entire process of problem setting and solving and in a more “connected” world, we do need to manage these to emerge and fragmented knowledge in new ways.

I think this outline of four discovery approaches helps us to think about this a little more. I am thinking about how to take this forward in my own thoughts.

To cite this article: Deborah Dougherty (2016): Organizing for innovation in complex innovation systems, Innovation, DOI: 10.1080/14479338.2016.1245109

To link to this paper: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14479338.2016.1245109

This paper was published in late 2016 by Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice and © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Deborah Dougherty has written a more extensive book on this ” Taking Advantage of Emergence: Productively Innovating in Complex Innovation Systems”, published 25 Feb 2016, Publisher: Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0-19-872529-9
 

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.