Archive for category Innovation Models
Towards a metaphor for innovation
Posted by jayvanzyl in 09 Economies of Scope, Innovation Models on May 30, 2010
Being in a position where I’m fortunate enough to work with students who are interested in studying the subject of innovation; metaphors are used to shape our understanding of how new ideas come into being and are then allowed to develop into fully developed real-world outcomes. One such metaphor is the role of the architect in shaping our physical environment. The architect, client, designer, builder, designer, financier, etc are all part of a complex constellation of value creation.
Some thoughts on the process of creativity that results in real world outcomes, as seen by an architect:
1. We all live in a setting that is determined by crowds and social structures.
2. We have the ability to either accept this setting or challenge it.
3. Our fit with this environment is determined by how our views are adopted.
4. There is always a sense of permanency once we have decided to pursue a certain course of action.
5. It is cumbersome to change our thoughts once we spent time formulating our reasoning.
6. To change the physical manifestation of our thoughts are time consuming and ego-trapped.
7. Moving into a new world or a new way of going things requires a new setting or paradigm to develop.
Look at these key reasoning areas from some architectural greats some 80- years ago:
Adolf Loos wrote “Ornament and Crime” in 1908 outlining that we should remove ornaments from everyday life like buildings, as it will hasten the demise of the design that was made permanent.
In “Theory and Design in the First Machine Age”, 1936, Reyner Banham reasons that functionism has rules and patterns that guide us as we moved into the era of modernism.
“Towards a New Architecture” by Le Corbusier in 1922, focuses on the understanding of basics that allow for flexible and agile change of all non-structural elements.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe spent his life changing the world’s view of how architecture and technology live together in harmony where most forms of excessive ornamentation is removed for functional design.
As we moved from the eras of mystical reasoning to science and pragmatic thinking, our focus of how we live as humans is shifting towards a far more integrated existence. We woke up one day realizing that our actions are far more impactful than we thought, and that our understanding of mystical behaviors have caused us much pain. Believing in individual value and group well being, got us to think about the basics of how a new world would operate. It is almost like we are going through a human reasoning evolution as what happened in the 1920-1950′s. A new form of pragmistism is emerging that allow crowds and individuals to co-exist in diverse opinion.
Humans express themselves through the physical outcomes of their thinking, as we have seen in the changes in architectural styles over the years. Furthermore, our access to technologies shape our minds as to the possibilities of creation in the realm of “what’s possible today”. We live in built up urbanized areas, malls, social gathering areas, crowds watching great acts of arts (like music), etc more than ever before. The integrated world of technology and human behavior is allowing us to socialize more efficiently than ever before as we live close together. And all this in light of our self destruction of the world, global population growth, and religious wars. Even crowd oriented corrections like the financial crises will shape our minds in new ways as to the “possibilities of creation and correction”.
Innovation is entering an era where the strict rules and decorative processes and procedures of past are all under scrutiny. A more integrative and social approach is emerging where we need the individuals in our constellation to perform at their best. Even Open Innovation is developed on the platform of the past; taking an old construct and evolving it. Is this good enough for this era? The new rules of change will force you to integrate the creative genius of all these people in ways frowned upon in eras gone by. Our ability to create new ideas, evaluate and rate those in light of the setting, collaborate on the development and outcomes of those ideas, and finally the ability to find valuable ideas; all will determine our success in achieving success in a new world.
History of Innovation Poster
Posted by jayvanzyl in Innovation Models on October 9, 2009
We have been trying to find different ways to depict the history of innovation (this is a draft version and work-in-progress). The posted does not show any “time bands” of change nor does it provide any detail as to the inventor. The idea is to represent some of the major changes from the industrial revolution onwards that changed our lives.
What should a great innovation software product look like?
Posted by jayvanzyl in Innovation Models, Technology Stuff on May 21, 2009
We have been working with innovation related projects for many years now – and observed many different approaches work. This creates a challenge in that “innovation practices” are still emerging. The approaches followed are almost as diverse as the number of books published on the subject. There are however a number of common things that need to be looked at; some of these include:
- focus on understanding your approach first
- commit to the approach and work on embedding it into your culture
- get people energized to apply the newly acquired knowledge
- let ideas emerge (similarly to the way you’ve always done it)
- work on one change at a time and move forward from there
- reward successes and ensure that company measures are not undermined
- make it a long-term journey…
Based on some of these heuristics, innovation software products should contain some(or all) of these features as a minimum:
Manage ideation, innovation and adoption cycles:
- create observations (general learnings, market scans, landscaping)
- create ideas (as result of individual genius, workshopping, creative sessions, etc)
- create innovations (as result of reviewing ideas, etc)
- create projects (decide to spend money on realizing the ideas/innovations)
Staged idea/innovation capture:
- basic idea recording mechanisms (to simplify the process)
- deadlines, and other time based information
- investment needed and other monetary related information
- process and staged based information collection (especially for clients with stage-gate based approaches)
Project management integration:
- realize ideas through creating projects from the selected ideas
Setting of challenges and prizes:
- set a challenge on an idea with deadline, prize, and intended outcome
Define innovation campaigns based on strategic initiatives:
- define innovation campaigns based on context setting approaches
- target innovators to participate
- set challenges
- reward winners and achievers
Invite specialists:
- invite specialists to assist with developing your ideas (maybe through tribes?)
- create “call for review” notifications to elicit feedback
- create innovation workshops with directed purpose statements to facilitate specialized input
Define key measures for dashboarding:
- have the basic measures on dashboard depending on your position in the org structure or social network
- produce an automated innovation portfolio based on key measures
- have “socially aware” ideas move to the top automatically
- have “socially inept” ideas move sideways into “please review”
Integrate with NPD (new product development):
- define product and service targets (which to get ideas for)
- have idea approval and grouping by version/release/platform numbers for products
- integrate with legal process especially for trade marks, patents, copyrights, company secrets
Idea value analysis:
- group ideas by external and internal related criteria
- value the market potential of ideas for external use
- value ideas based on cost saving etc for internal use
- define portfolio balancing criteria
Knowledge management platform:
- integrate patent portfolio and other legal innovation constructs
- integrate field knowledge acquired throughout field testing and trials
- get information from various sources through mash-ups
- flag ideas as “company secrets” or secret ideas
- initiate prototypes, etc
Idea evaluation analysis:
- ideas that are discovered and copied
- entirely new ideas
- science based processes, etc
Idea and innovation clustering:
- search for like ideas and relate together with reason code
- allow idea consolidation
Idea and innovation workshop manager:
- define workshop purpose and objectives
- collect many ideas; but don;t “commit” to them
- review the collected ideas and produce an approved set
- measure effectiveness of session
- get participants involved electronically by viewing ideas on-line in real-time
- map ideas onto the Opportunity/Capability or other innovation models
Innovation e-learning integration:
- get access to all basic innovation terminology
- allow for brief learning sessions before ideas are captured
- track learning on the dashboard
Innovation tracking and energizing:
- track and monitor innovation “energy”
- understand who are creating ideas and at what pace
- automatically generate “innovation stimulation” activity for eg. e-mails, SMS’s etc
Community:
- structural and social based community collaboration to be allowed
- allow customers to see certain ideas and capture their own
- allow certain external intellectual and other providers to participate in the innovation process
- allow your legal firm access to key legal challenges
This is by no means a complete list of the features needed to manage automated idea management approaches in organziations, but it provides some insight into some of the important features. The simpler the approach the more effective the adoption will be.
Have a look at www.ReframingBusiness.com.
Top-line growth for banks by using innovation
Posted by jay in 11 Information Epistasis, Innovation Models on October 1, 2008
These are some of my ideas as take-aways from the Banking conference:
Take Away 1: “Cost saving is not a strategy” as some banks might think. You can only have a “top line growth” based strategy. This means that you use innovation to drive more relevant and competitive financial services across the portfolio. It might also require a rethink of your customer profile.
Take Away 2: Tracey’s model on Value Discipline’s got me thinking that industries have moved on since this model was created. The three dimensions used in his model are: Product Leadership, Customer Intimacy, Operational Excellence.
You have no choice these days but to be good at all of these dimensions. This is a strategic question: can mass market retail banks be customer intimate? Can private banks be operational efficient?
Take Away 3: “Life stage” based banking is still a challenge by understanding your life stage as student, married, married with children, divorced, etc in segmenting markets. Another model used in “Life style” based assessment is where you try and understand the markets financial status.
Take Away 4: You can’t learn from Europe and the US as the population spread in age, growth and wealth is fundamentally different to Africa, South America and Asia. Looking over the last 1000 years the use of money has shifted and acts of value sharing has shifted aggressively from the 1500 onwards. The Black Death outbreaks of the 1400′s got the populations to decrease across Europe and wage rates increase as skilled labour was in short supply. Moving ahead to today: are the children of today using the money systems designed in the past? E-mailing money, sending money via cellphones, getting cash from automated teller machines without a bank card and only access to a mobile phone.
Take Away 5: Can banks provide financial management dashboards to their clients to manage three major components; what to grow (assets, etc), what to shrink (credit card, car finance, etc), and cash flow. The bank can then analyse these results and start doing fine grained segmentation to understand the ways in which people use money.
Take Away 6: Islamic banking in the US is now called “moral and ethical banking” as there is a move by markets to wanting more transparency in banking services.
Take Away 7: The “can-do banks” have moved their problem solving philosophies from western to eastern models. This means that you try and solve problems by getting the group together and finding the root of the issue instead of finding the guilty party and penalizing them. Can this be used by the client facing people in a bank?
Take Away 8: A new agenda for top-line growth: focus on value for customers, clarity by understanding your customers, revenues in the different clients, profit focus, strategic thinking and execution.
Take Away 9: “A skill bankers need to develop is how to use technology” was a great statement made in response to how banks can become more competitive by using innovation.
Take Away 10: I’m not sure if I believe Jo’s sentiment as we’ve seen value in networking way beyond the financial transaction: “I see that there is no value in social networking” (by Joseph DiVanna) and no immediate conversion of value because people only use their networks for: Trying to obtaining great investment ideas from me, try to sell a product to me, people trying to get introduced to people in my network, or generally someone that wastes your time.
Check out some of these interesting innovative organizations:
Dubai Bank customers start by depositing E10million to start.
Aboriginal Banking at Bank of Montreal follow customers around by using GRS tracking for those that move around.
Exim Bank in Tanzania focuses on women in jobs and those at home.
First Women Bank in Pakistan focuses on women entrepreneurs. There is a network of women working together to do business.
AKBANK for technocrats and under 30 movers and shakers.
Capital One Card Lab where customers design their own credit cards.
Ingenico with innovative payment solutions.
Reframing: Innovation Eco-System
Posted by jay in 02 Reframed Thinking, Innovation Models on August 24, 2008
Leaders in thriving companies know how to use reframing as a tool, to not only transform themselves over time, but guide the entire business through its journey to an unknown destiny (somewhere in the future). Why somewhere? One of today’s key thinking patterns (in strategic innovation and other disciplines) that focuses on guiding organizations, is the ability to plot the path of execution during uncertain times.
Reframing, as a method of thinking about the future gets us to question the reasoning behind why we do things in a certain way. Reframed Reasoning might include the ability to leave parts of the business open to innovation where emergent trends and signs are used to guide execution.
So, do we need a strategy and execution plan then? Maybe I’m a bit harsh on this topic, but it is true that our strategies are constructed based on yesterdays understanding of tomorrow’s challenges. But, now that tomorrow is here, what are we doing to correct the thinking problems of yesterday? The business that is built to thrive knows how to create the careful balance between the completely unknown and the highly articulated business models. It known that the only way to get this right is to reframe the thinking of the leadership in all areas of the business and then to allow this thinking to be executed.
On the subject of scenarios and where they fit, reframing does not relate to the act of scenario construction. It relates to the process of thinking, reasoning, and inductive stimulation of the experience, while trying to articulate some alternate futures. Various methods exist to define scenarios and then to play out scenarios. One such example is where we guide our thinking by trying to articulate the things that will stay the same and that are not really changing, from the things that we have control over and can change. Playing out a scenario is when we discuss the potential paths of execution and look at the barriers that need to be overcome to achieve some alternate future.
Again, the value is in the process of thinking of the alternatives and debating and internalizing the many options that will influence your thinking subconsciously. Reframing is about getting a group of people to believe in an alternate future to the extent that they take ownership of the reasoning needed, in order to explain the potential roadmaps needed to get there. Having a well described and documented set of scenarios actually means nothing without it being reflected in the behaviours of the people. Having the ten step plan or the one thousand activity action list does not make you successful.
What makes companies that are built to thrive successful, is the ability to propagate the reasoning and thinking into the heart of the organization?
A model for understanding your innovation portfolio
Posted by jay in 07 Offerings, Innovation Models on June 20, 2008
Much has been written on the subject of innovation portfolios. I’ve found that there is a difference between models used in the service sector versus the industrial sector (stating it like an assertion). Innovation portfolios need to be managed over time to ensure optimal leverage of initiatives driven by innovation campaigns.
Innovation projects affect two major areas of the business namely; the offerings presented to the world and the capabilities needed to deliver. An offering is the combination of key elements that include; product and service, actors involved in acquisition and deployment, time of the presentment of the offering, and the location of where the offering is delivered. Capability includes; people and their abilities, talent and genius, processes and practices.
A key challenge is to determine the measures needed to polarize the “new” from “existing”. Existing capabilities, when enhanced, will result in a slight shift in execution capability. But, when capabilities are renewed an entirely new model might be required, that includes challenging the dominant paradigms in the existing organization. Offerings in well established industries shift at a slower rate than those in emerging industries. This shift might require a rethink of the capabilities needed to monetize new ideas.
…to continue…