Managing innovation - creating value from ideas john

We spend so much of our time thinking about important innovation but maybe we should spare a thought for what might be called ‘irrelevant innovation’? And explore round the edges of this phenomenon — is it all wacky stuff or are there circumstances where it has more to offer? Is it a matter of framing, are we missing an innovation trick or two by dismissing such ideas too early?

This podcast offers a suggested outline typology, a first shot at mapping the territory — feel free to add your own examples and categories….

You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.

You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.

Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here

Innovation is a multi-player game. The image of the lone hero innovator is a myth. Even celebrated soloists like Thomas Edison or James Watt had their army of assistants working behind the scenes. Alexander Bell wouldn’t have been able to bring the telephone to the world without being able to demonstrate the device by having Mr Watson on the other end of the line when he famously told him to come in from the next room….
Ask any entrepreneur and they’ll tell you about the networks they needed to bring their ideas to life; creating a valuable solution isn’t a simple lightbulb moment but a complicated journey drawing in resources, ideas, time and energy, (not to mention money), most of it coming from other people. Deconstruct any successful start-up and you soon have a cast of characters on stage, taking their bows as the audience recognise the shared creativity which has made the performance possible.
And once we get beyond the initial pilot, the hard work really begins. The journey to scale is a tough one, takes time and has to negotiate some uncertain conditions on the way. The evidence is very clear, it’s a team effort and it needs plenty of external help.
‘Complementary assets’ is the technical term for the answer to the question of ‘who else and what else do you need to scale your innovation?’. The key point about them is that they lie beyond what you can bring to the party. By their nature they represent resources you need to find and work with; the trick is in assembling suitable partnerships to deliver them.

This podcast explores the challenge of assembling and working with networks to deliver innovation value at scale

You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.

You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.

Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here

Another innovation song....

Last week I was helping run a series of workshops supporting social innovators from across the United Nations system in thinking through how they were going to scale their great innovations now that they had successfully piloted them and proved their value. 
Scaling innovation isn’t easy but it’s increasingly important if we’re to have real impact with our ideas. It’s got a lot in common with mountain climbing — a visible goal but a long journey through very uncertain conditions to get there. It needs a strategic approach, a clear idea of the pathway to the summit which we’ll follow and plenty of preparation and pivoting to help us get there. 
In particular we should pay attention to three key questions:
· Have we got a solution which is ‘scale ready’? Is our innovation stress-tested to make sure it is replicable, adoptable, ‘rights ready’ and otherwise configured to be scaled in different contexts?
· Have we got an organization in place which can build on our strong innovation team but also grow to meet the very different demands of scaling? Do we have the right structures to help us retain fast, flexible and inclusive decision-making? Have we got cash flow models which support us on the journey, balancing new sources of revenue and reducing our costs?
· Have we got a value network of ‘complementary assets’ — the ‘who else?’ and ‘what else?’ that we need to bring our innovation to scale? Can we find relevant partners, form them into an ecosystem and then align their varying interests to get that whole to perform, delivering more than the sum of its parts?
One way of helping the participants in our programme to think about and reflect on these challenges was to create a short song with the highlights embedded in the lyrics. So in the spirit of helping reinforce the learning I thought it would be worth sharing — you can find it here….

And you can find the lyrics here



If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.

You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.

Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here

Necessity may the mother of invention — but in today’s world she’s a pretty fraught mum, trying to deal with thousands of kids tugging at her skirts, pulling at her arms and wrapping themselves around her legs. All screaming out for attention. We’re not short of challenges which affect the very basics of trying to live our lives — getting enough to eat, clean water to drink, a roof over our heads and some peace to allow us to sleep at night. It might look neat and tidy to package these up into something like the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals but we shouldn’t forget that beneath those critical targets for change lie thousands of things that need improving.

In other words we need to “….be bold, be revolutionary… and disrupt… because without innovation, there is no way we can overcome the challenges of our times.”

Wise words and an urgent call to action from Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations. And of course he’s not alone; the case for social innovation on a global scale is clearly made every time you open a newspaper or scan a news website. The question is not one of whether or not we need innovation but how to deliver it?

This podcast explores some of the ways in which social innovation is being organized to try to help deal with the major challenges facing our future.

You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.

You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.

Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here

What have ollies, decks, trucks, popsicles, cruisers and kicktails got in common? If you’d asked me that back in December I would have quietly assumed you were from another planet. But now I’m happy to say I’m in a good position to enlighten you…

They are all terms used in skateboarding, a subiect in which I;ve had a crash course courtesy of taking my daughter to lessons in the art at our local skateboard park.  Turned out to be an education for me too; while sheltering from the noise of kids shouting encouragement and challenge at each other and the rumble of wheels over plywood ramps and chicanes I sipped my coffee and thought about some of the innovation lessons it was demonstrating….

You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.

You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.

Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here

Why waste recycling and reuse may represent a valuable entrepreneurial opportunity…

There's a well-known piece of Yorkshire wisdom, ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’. Waste needn’t be a problem to be hidden away — buried or burnt to get rid of it. Instead there are real opportunities in waste — as plenty of innovators have already found out. Think for example of Earl Tupper whose efforts to turn the black sludge emerging from 1940s oil refineries paid off when he created the bright shiny plastic kitchenware which bears his name.

Rethinking waste in this way takes not only money but the classic entrepreneurial skill of reframing — of seeing what others don’t see. At its core, the Trash-to-Cash business model is all about reimagining waste as a valuable resource. It requires an open mindset but also a long-term vision; the changes which might make such a business model viable may take time to materialise. But somewhere in that future of uncertainty about resource availability, concern for pollution and an increasingly strong regulatory framework lie the seeds of significant opportunity.

(This podcast was co-funded by the European Commission's Erasmus Plus Programme.
Project Number: 621672-EPP-1-2020-1-DE-EPPKA2-KA
This communication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein)

You can find a transcript here

And a video version here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.

You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.

Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here