Archive for category 04 Ecosystems
The tyranny of change and telling fortunes
Posted by jayvanzyl in 04 Ecosystems on July 8, 2010
I’ve had some push-back on my views about socially driven innovations and that in turn means a push back on open innovation. When “The Process Innovation Imperative” was written (leading up to 2002), the 4th Generation of R&D was in full swing. The focus was on using learning theories and knowledge based approaches to drive new innovations. I do not think that learning is less important today, it is just more imbedded in the make-up of our organizations as we are educated on the possibilities of what this can bring. With regards to 4th Gen R&D, the premise of getting the customer more involved in your business is a modern phenomena; and here to stay.
Some pertinent questions are being raised in light of a more open and transparent approach to innovation:
1. Our culture and organization does not function like this, so how will this work?
2. Our industry does not work like this, where can it be applied?
3. As an innovation leader I have no control over the more federally designed business units, how open can we be?
There are some undeniable evidence that movements towards a more open world is moving at a consistent pace. We do, as humans, have a problem in telling the future though. Our mental pictures of what’s possible are always different to those views of what actually happen. the result is that when we look back things don’t look so well crafted and planned.
Look at “Back to the future” Marty McFly arrived in the future (a few days ago) after hitting 88mph in a Delorean in 1985. What were you thinking about innovation in 1985? Remember the hovering skateboard?
There are some signs of change, especially those that are socially driven, that normally go unnoticed. This one isn’t; we are in a world where humans demand rights, want to be treated well, and feel they have the right to the benefit of their actions. Having just experienced the soccer world cup in South Africa, I once again feel that a movement like “against racism” is driving a society to believe (rightfully so) that inequality is wrong and that individuals should be valued.
A colleague just returned from China (Guangzhou an economic powerhouse). He found that after interviewing some prominent business leaders the result was quite clear. “So, why do you want to do open innovation again?” Let’s leave it at that for now…
Idea ecologies, the new frontier of innovation?
Posted by jayvanzyl in 04 Ecosystems on June 29, 2009
Idea ecologies are exploding by using open innovation based principles. Until recently it was very difficult to tell your suppliers (the many retail and other suppliers that fill our everyday life with goods and services) what you need from them. Now with crowdsourcing and idea ecologies you can become part of these organizations and participate in swarm based innovation behaviour. In my previous post about these ecologies I discussed some examples. This is an update with more organizations joining the “crowdsourcing of ideas” phenomena.
eBay, Amazon and others pioneered and popularized the concept of rating and reviewing of deals in the world of commerce. In this digital world we trade with ideas and intellectual assets.
Check the Ubuntu community’s ability to elicit ideas and have the best ones implemented by an open source community.
Innocentive is one of the first successful idea ecologies that was founded by Eli Lily. Ideas are captured and solved by the crowds of people interested in making an impact. Communities are brought together to solve problems and prizes are set in monetary and other soft measures.
Idea Bounty is a community that elicits ideas and then crowdsource the best ideas as a solution to the problem (ideas). A bounty is set where the prize money is promoted as one of the biggest draw cards of the crowd. In this community you have creatives and clients. Clients set bounties and creatives respond to these with great and useful ideas. You can also be rewarded if your friends have winning ideas; they call it “Share the Love”. I like this statement; “Idea Bounty was started by a guy who saw the light and a guy who was frantically waving a torch.”.
Idea Connection is a great community with lots of information on the concept of crowdsourcing. With the vision statement: “To give businesses access to the world’s most creative and innovative minds, who work collaboratively to solve problems and develop innovations.” they have a mountain to climb as the world is jumping on the ecology wave. They follow the same approach; ideas are needed to solve problems, ideas are captured and rewarded.
Netflix Prize wants to achieve: “The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.” In the world of media and especially in a disruptive world of on-line media, the viewer uses ratings extensively. This community tries to incentivise crowd participation for rewards.
IDEAnet has a noble cause. This is their purpose: “The IDEAnet is a global collaboration of individuals and institutions that provide medical services and humanitarian relief. The mission of IDEAnet is to foster collaborative efforts to use distributed learning and volunteer telemedicine to address health disparities and foster effective, sustainable health services.” It is mostly designed around Communities of Practice based concepts where ideas and discussed and developed for benefit to the community.
Connect + Develop from P&G is a great open based innovation community that brings together many parties in making innovation work. This is a comment from Bruce Brown: “It’s our version of open innovation: the practice of accessing externally developed intellectual property in your own business and allowing your internally developed assets and know-how to be used by others.” This is a great summary of many parts of the crowdsourcing based innovation concepts: “Today, open innovation at P&G works both ways — inbound and outbound — and encompasses everything from trademarks to packaging, marketing models to engineering, and business services to design. It’s so much more than technology.” P&G has Innocentive, NineSigma, Yet2, and yourEncore as partners making their innovation initiatives some of the most successful today.
Socialtext is a social community platform where many components of what’s needed to construct complete collaboration communities are built. Their value statement: “Socialtext was founded on the vision that technologies emerging in the consumer web offered far better social dynamics than any enterprise software. The opportunity we saw was to create a new social context for organizations and the people who make up those organizations.”
Social computing as a platform for social networks are now in the corporate space. For those that believe that the old paradigm, and those set in their ways, is going to get you to compete with the highly integrated and well connected generation has some else coming. This is the era of social based ecological activity. Consumers are educated that their voices will be heard and that the eras gone by, where CRM and other half-baked attempts to solving customer problems, are gone. There is an explosion of social communities, check these entries; 50 Niche Social Media Communities and top social networks for entrepreneurs. And, yet senior people shun social networks. We are in a paradigm of socialization.
Making the case for Social Based Innovation
Posted by jayvanzyl in 02 Reframed Thinking, 03 Business Philosophy, 04 Ecosystems on May 26, 2009
I’ve been discussion many concepts relating to innovation over the last few years. But kept the development of our new approach under wraps as we are testing some of the constructs. So, let me give you a sniplet of what’s been going on.
Working globally with financial services, manufacturing, and other services firms we discovered some interesting concepts in innovation. You would’ve noticed that I have a number of posts on social networking (the hot topic of the day I guess), and other social related phenomena. All these contribute partly to the concept of Social Based Innovation.
The initial definition is:
Social Based Innovation is the ability to influence social actions in such a way, that benefit is obtained by the social group in its tribal setting, behaving in a way that value is captured by the collective.
Shadow organizations as they are called, refer to the social interactions that happen outside of the formal structures as defined by leadership. These shadows are often overlooked as sources of value and not nurtured. Social Based Innovation as an approach is used to capture value holistically by allowing all dimensions of the community to interact. This drives the tribal approach where common beliefs and ideas are developed even if these are from customers, employees, competitors, or other traditional constructs. Crowdsourcing, Co-production, crowd spirit, etc are concepts that try to capture the emerging world of social mobilization. Leveraging communities as crowds that influence your innovation mandate has become a new topic of discussion.
Some notes on where reward systems (check out McKinsey&Company’s And the winner is… paper) and Social Based Innovation intersect:
- Identify excellence through social rating approach and tribal acceptance and co-development of ideas and innovations.
- Influence public perception by exposing a wider community to rewards for great ideas and innovations.
- Focus a community by getting the entire social group involved in collective activity for common purpose without the traditional organizational boundaries.
- Identify and mobilize new talent by allowing individuals to have creative freedom during idea development and guidance through implementation.
- Strengthen the community by getting tribes actively involved in problem solving.
- Educate and improve skills by getting champions of innovation to emerge based on their attitudinal and aptitude towards innovation. These people can then assist others in achieving more in the network.
- Mobilize capital once the strategic intent of the campaign and involvement of the formal and social structures have delivered a verdict.
Is innovation as a discipline evolving faster than before due to the effects of social networking?
Emergent idea ecologies
Posted by jayvanzyl in 04 Ecosystems, 08 Participative Customer on November 30, 2008
The use of community oriented idea management systems has emerged as the primary means of managing useful ideas from customers, employees, competitors, and any other networked member. Where is this leading? Have a look at these attempts to deal with idea management by organizations:
Starbucks uses this: “We know you’ve got ideas – big ideas, little ideas, maybe even totally revolutionary ideas – and we want to hear them all.”
BMW’s Virtual Innovation Agency uses a context setting mechanism to attract ideas. “If you have innovative solutions for our complex challenges, then you are on the right road with us.”
Dell uses IdeaStorm to elicit ideas from the public. “Where your ideas reign.”
SalesForce.com has Idea Exchange and uses it to obtain ideas and allow customers to interact with other customers’ ideas.
Cisco has their Human Network initiative; “When technology meets humanity on the human network, the way we work changes. The way we live changes. Everything changes.” For me this is the move towards the Human Mash-up.
Coca Cola has a number of concepts to elicit ideas from the public by allowing people to design their own bottles and other seasonal events by using on-line tooling. Check the Bottle Mash-up concept.
Lego has “Creator” where members of the public can ask questions, design their own units and upload digital design ideas. It is a window into the design world of Lego.
3M’s “YourIdea” is one approach used to obtain ideas from the public. Command products has its own idea capturing environment.
Apple also has a number of approaches, but the 
Learning Interchange stands out as a great community based initiative. Ideas collected during teaching (well before and after is also needed) can result in great new products, business ideas and a number of other positive side effects.
Idea based Wiki’s are also emerging. IdeasGrande 
is a project to get creatives and practitioners from the advertising and marketing industry to share ideas through an unstructured wiki.
Internally oriented idea management systems (in contrast to the examples above) are challenged as they try to capture many different dimensions in getting new thoughts, concepts, proposed opportunities, etc into the every discourse of business execution. There are a number of companies selling these types of technologies; but most implementations are challenged. Some key issues with traditional Idea Management Systems:
1. It becomes an administration nightmare. The more enthusiastic the organization the bigger the problem. Hundreds of ideas and only a few people to check, review, approve and re-direct ideas.
2. Volumes of ideas that have nothing to do with the business or its current challenges.
3. Dependence on specifically skilled people and a review process that is overly controlling.
4. Little- or no- follow-through on ideas to the individuals that participated in capturing ideas; resulting in damaging any further idea generation campaigns.
So, if these are some of the problems experienced inside organizations, how successful are idea management systems that include a wider and more diverse community.
Can banks really re-invent banking?
Posted by jay in 04 Ecosystems, 07 Offerings on July 24, 2008
Social banking models are set to create some disruption on the banking landscape. But, can traditional banks solve the “Innovators Dilemma” challenge that is so prominent in the world of changing business models? I have yet to find an alternative to Clayten Christensen’s model/s – it provides clear guidelines as to the landscape issues when trying to re-invent an industry.
Is the innovator’s dilemma also applied to the Service Dominant Enterprise. Largely, Christensen’s model is about tech dependencies and component level disruptions. Service based businesses have entirely different issues to deal with when trying to re-invent a service offering. Are banks trapped in a traditional model of dealing with money? Are they really able to cannibalize their money making machines? Who will cause the disruptions in an industry driving towards consolidation, globalization, local relevance, and strong global legislation riddled business models?
Community money systems – is it the future where we rethink the value of currency?
Heritage products and the link to innovation
Posted by jay in 04 Ecosystems, 07 Offerings, Exploring the World on May 5, 2008
Heritage products are everywhere and we can’t live without them. We become even more dependent when our taste buds or emotions are influenced. Take products for example chocolates, beer, soft drinks, deodorants, toothpaste, etc all have an element of stickiness and brand loyalty that span across generations. The challenge of launching a new product with a different taste is quite a risky affair, let alone messing with its branding.
In contrast look at electronic products. There is some degree of loyalty, but most people will defect if another great design comes along that is more feature rich or cool. Does this mean that there is no heritage component? I visited a number of interesting companies in the last two weeks (part of my project portfolio) all with different products, services, and all operating from different geographies. Well, I’m writing this from a train traveling from Zurich to Baar in Switzerland – arrived from London a few hours ago where I visited some clients.
Spending time with a global software company based in Durban, South Africa opened my eyes once again as to the level of expertise available in the region. Innovation is driven architecturally and strategically in cycles that need to coincide with trends and shifts in the ways your product will be used. Software businesses that execute their products on the Internet actually don’t sell products. They provide access to participants in the platforms they produce. Software businesses often see “heritage and legacy†in a negative light; or see it as a constrain in moving into a next era.
When you operate in a mature industry, innovation takes on a different shape than the fast paced digital, telecommunications, media, etc industries. Are there different models of innovation for fast paced versus slow paced industries (making the assumption you can use as one of the definitions of “pace†as rate of product introduction). What is relationship between heritage product and the maturity of the industry? Are the lessons learnt in high tech industries applicable to more traditional industries? Look at Jack Daniels for example, the entire company and product positioning story is about heritage. You buy the product because it has not changed in the last 100 years – would you accept this from Microsoft or Apple?.
The specificity of the implementation of the “model of innovation†is always under debate. Which generic models can be transported between industries? Look at the “innovation funnel conceptâ€, a model that has been used since the 80′s. I would reason that service industries have very different needs when ideas need to be ranked and rated. The concept of the funnel needs to change quite considerably seeing that ideas develop differently when the dependency of heritage is strong?
“Keeping the ground solid while continuing to grow†is used by Toyota to show the ability in keeping heritage and traditional product brands alive (Corolla) while experimentation with new technologies and brands (Scion) push the company ahead. By using an innovation portfolio concept you can allocate project/initiative priorities based on the current context. This can be done in contrast to what needs to be done in the future to keep the business growing.
From risk to uncertainty and the pace of innovation
Posted by jay in 01 Why Built to Thrive, 04 Ecosystems on March 24, 2008
Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote a piece on the 19th of March 2008 called “From Risk to Uncertainty”. He reasons that the current problems in the world economy are systemic, and I agree with him. There are three major reasons, all happening at the same time, that pushed the envelope of the current reasoning about capitalism and global financial systems.
1. Sheer productivity gains of modern capitalism – The world’s businesses are on a treadmill focusing on increased productivity, innovation and execution ability. There is almost an obsession by businesses to reduce costs, and focusing on flooding markets with products and services. Factories must stay busy, people (and their skills) must be world class, practices applied must be lean and all inefficiencies removed from the business system. And then on top of this focus, credit is/was available at low cost as financial institutions explore new markets and drive growth plans.
2. In the last three decades there has been a focus on developing a “neoconservative ideology” that influenced the thinking of global financial thinking. Individual global opinion leaders had an overly powerful impact on the movements that influence big businesses today. I will discuss some of Sumantra Ghoshal and Gary Hamel’s work at a later occasion; they reason that businesses are in trouble because practices and business concepts are copied and used universally.
3. Technology innovation has pushed the limits of human social capital and speed of financial transacting to levels never thought possible before. Hardware, software, and communications technologies like fiber-optic allowed people to conduct financial transactions instantaneously and independently of the complexity of the underlying financial system. So, how do you define money in a modern world? Is the Linden dollar, Neopoint or Everquest platinum pieces (and others like these) more important than the US dollar?
Watch this video on neoconservatism and you can relate the concepts to some of our challenges today.
We need to find a new way to think about business ecosystems and human reasoning about business (built to thrive in an emergent ecosystem). Consider this; military strategy is about risk, human oriented strategy is about uncertainty.
Understanding the innovation ecosystem
Posted by jay in 04 Ecosystems on March 1, 2008
I guess that understanding an innovation ecosystem can be equated to understanding a business landscape. The challenge is however that “landscaping†can only be done if the boundaries are drawn widely, and kept open enough, to ensure that tunnel vision does not occur. I’ve been working on a construct to visually represent some of the key dimensions in describing innovation related concepts. NOTE that I’m only focusing on the [internal] dimensions of the company in this section. So, this is it:
Firstly, we need to understand the context within which we operate. This context is set largely by the “BIG IDEA†or overriding business idea that needs to be explored, developed or even re-invented. An example is that the big idea for a camera company is “the ability record, and reproduce memoriesâ€.
Secondly, an understanding of some of the capabilities in the “entity†is needed. These capabilities will lead any innovation initiatives and assist with prioritizing cultural development programs. A process innovation focus will depend on a [will] and need to execute better, product innovation depends on the ability to understand unwanted market needs, etc. But, the future is in understanding OFFERING innovation. I will devote some posts in the future to this concept.
And lastly, understanding the ability to absorb CHANGE will make or break any initiative. Pursuing an innovation strategy that will result in a complete business rethink can be seen as Radical Innovation. Disruptive Innovation is the ability to disrupt either/or capabilities and offering. The story is not complete unless you have active Incremental Innovation initiatives.