Digital technology is about to become the precursor for all the changes we have put off for years within our organizations.
We need to radically improve our abilities to engage, relate and discover new innovation opportunities at a completely different level of faster and more meaningful performance.
It is through new forms of collaborations that will allow us to connect, by combining the concepts of ecosystems, platforms and seamless customer experience through digital technology, that is allowing this to happen.
Technology is presently moving way ahead of the systems that our organizations have presently in place, many are failing to extract the value and insights that others are beginning to clearly see and capitalize on, through the connection of technologies and market insights.Many lack the ability to connect and gain valuable insights.
Unless larger organizations fail to see the significant changes occurring then we will see the disruption of existing organizations simply accelerate. A way forward comes through the use of platforms and participation within ecosystems. It can be the way to reconnect and harness the power of technology in a collaborative form. We need to rebuild our organization’s ability to connect and collaborate differently with the outside world.
Today’s established organization needs to be fundamentally redesigned.
We are in a new age, the technology age and much needs to be challenged. This is no different from the arrival of the industrial age, it changes society dramatically.
We are dealing with a completely different set of mindsets, skills, procedures, governance, processes and responsibilities. To gain from the digital evolution taking place we need a robust, comprehensive and radical overhaul of much of what is going on within our organizations or they will not survive the current revolution occurring all around us.
Innovation is hugely caught up in this transforming change.
To be an innovator, you are always restless but the present structures and frameworks that innovation operates within have been often highly constraining and heavily reliant on existing operations. Innovation as a system has often conflicted within the approaches taken by our present organizations, it has been both constrained and under-valued in its contribution and growth value to future prosperity, strange as this may seem, as we have failed to exploit all its potential. We tend to have played innovation at the ‘edges’.
There is an urgent quest in finding different approaches to allow the human side to shape, interpret and extract the value not just in what they want to see but through different lenses and it is through technology that allows this ‘greater’ connection to take hold and finally allow for a new level of innovation activity to occur.
It will be through the effective leveraging of all the different technologies that will fuel the innovation activity but in these new platforms of collaboration and ecosystems required to deliver game changing or game reversing innovation offerings that will counter the usurper and strengthen the competitive advantage as a community of innovators can require a lock-in of considerable value, uniqueness and power.
What needs changing is the innovation process to accommodate these changes that are occurring all around us. We will need to transform much within our systems but more importantly to orientate our skills to receive, translate and diffuse new knowledge, in significantly different ways.
The balance in innovation activity is changing
Whole new business propositions are emerging, where technology drives the change and many established organizations we know today are powerless to stop as they are unable to adapt fast enough to transform their business model, it is far to ‘vested’
They will need to adjust radically to a new collaborative model that leverages the assets of many, that combine these with an ecosystem of partners that can deliver global solutions that can scale, through sharing resources, assets and investment commitments. It will allow the parties participating something the individual entrepreneur will struggle with and is less capable of scaling and continually building, unless they have such a radical set of solutions, partly heavily protected by IP and technology prowess, that allows them time and game-changing attraction that fundamentally shifts the markets. Time and resources to scale can be a wicked inhibitor unless you really have a unique offering, unable to be replicated.
The need is to transform many of the existing organizations into radically different forms of collaborative entities that have intelligence, innovation, customer understanding of their real needs, deep connections, global reach in technology and resource capability and access to meet market needs, to scale and scope, delivering to each customer’s specific needs and this presently can only come from participating or building specific and unique platforms and ecosystems.
New combinations can lead to real competitive advantage
It will be how and where a business or entities of business come together and see where ‘people, things and their business offering’ can come together for mutual value, based on the unique combinations that serve identified customer needs, with all the different technologies available and the innovative way these are combined, as the value offering.
There will be a constant evolving evaluation of the assets both internal and externally that make up this digital world (people, the business and things) that will take this out beyond the control of one company, out into the need to participate in platforms and ecosystems.
Business understanding will evolve into a system of connected ecosystems as we enter 2017 as they recognize the value of working at a constantly evolving speed to gain identification and partnership adoption, founded on customer need and opportunities gained by data and engagement.
