IdeaPort : strategic innovation, fringe scanning, and futures thinking.

If you are after a good overview of disruptive/discontinuous approaches to innovation, then look no further than the UK organisation Advanced Institute of Management.  It has compiled an Executive Briefing that is comprehensive in its coverage of the field. The blurb reads:

In a fast moving world, one of the biggest challenges facing organisations is dealing with discontinuous innovation (DI).  This briefing document  focuses on at what some leading organisations are doing in this area it suggests 12 different strategies for developing a search capability to detect triggers of discontinuous innovation. These strategies are also useful for more conventional innovation, and all organisations should employ some at least, if they aim to remain both competitive and durable.

The Futures approach we use at Innovaro with clients such as Shell and GM (Europe) is referenced, although not quite in the full context.

Direct download of the PDF is also available.

I’ve been flat out with clients over the last couple of weeks, but my attention has been drawn to an interesting special report in the Economist about the future of energy. It makes the same points that have come out of the Technology Futures workshops that we’ve been running for the Shell GameChanger team. In a nutshell, these are that the hydrogen economy will never take off (too much infrastructure to build), the jury is still out of biofuels and that ‘electronification’ (an electron economy) is one of the most likely paths for energy.

One of the articles also succinctly states the case against wind power:

The ultimate goal is to harvest the sun’s energy directly by intercepting sunlight, rather than by waiting for that sunlight to stir up the atmosphere and sticking turbines in the resulting airstreams.

Recommended reading.

I’m really interested in science fiction as a predictor of technologies. As Paul Saffo remarked in his (highly recommended) Long Now speech, science fiction starts “meme bombs” in the minds of teenagers. These bombs detonate when they’re in a position to do something about them - usually when they are going through a midlife crisis soon after they reach 40.

If you Google on the term “science faction” you’ll find a rich sampling of material that refers to this (meme bombs that is, not midlife crises).

So when the opportunity came to put a question to William Gibson - the originator of a science fiction genre called ‘cyber-punk’ - I was interested to know his views on the extent to which science fiction is an indicator of the future. His response (in part) was as follows:

“I don’t actually see science fiction influencing the future much now […] Science fiction was a big part of the culture of our future in the previous century but the previous century was a century where we actually believed we had a future. We took it for granted that we had a future and in the 21st century we can’t take it for granted in the same way that we have a future.”

Gibson then goes on to talk about how if he went into a publishers office in 1981 - the year he started writing - and proposed a novel based on the destabilisation of Earths weather systems, AIDs, terrorists flying planes into buildings in New York and the USA invading the wrong country - they would have said “too much!”

He makes the point that actually the world is much more complex than this, and

“…we don’t have the luxury of dreaming of a Star Trek future because we have too much ‘how do we get there from here’ going on to make that realistically possible. You can still do that kind of science fiction but it require far too much wishful thinking to convince me.”

You can download the entire William Gibson interview here.

(As an aside he says a similar comment in this Rolling Stone interview)

Over at the New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell has written as essay on insight - more specifically - how to cultivate it artificially. Besides being a damn fine read, there’s some great sections on cross-sector discovery.

Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn’t realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didn’t realize were problems. At one point, Myhrvold asked the surgeons what, in a perfect world, would make their lives easier, and they said that they wanted an X-ray that went only skin deep. They wanted to know, before they made their first incision, what was just below the surface. When the Intellectual Ventures crew heard that, their response was amazement. “That’s your dream? A subcutaneous X-ray? We can do that.”

Insight could be orchestrated: that was the lesson.

For many people the concept that they can look across industries and learn from others is an amazing discovery. I’ve used it to great effect in learning workshops where I’ve had C-level executives looking at a massively diverse set of industries. The results are always incredibly rich in all sense of the word.

Southland Tales is a very odd movie. Very odd indeed. However the character played by Sarah Michelle Geller has a line in the film which was just too good not to share:

“Apparently, the future is much more futuristic then scientists thought.”

Here ends the Thought-For-Today.

A quick pointer to a highly recommended post (and article) from John Hagel (and John Seely Brown) about how changes on the edges impact the core. John Hagel writes:

Instinctively, I have been drawn to various edges because of the opportunity and challenge they represent. Over time, I have focused more sharply and explicitly on the importance of the edge as a source of value creation and strategic advantage.

On a different and slightly facetious note when people - including myself - talk about edges it always reminds me of the term “cutting edge”. This is the sort of phrase that got rolled out during the dot com bubble - as in “We’re on the cutting edge of ………….. (insert industry name). Except companies like boo.com who weren’t so much on the cutting edge, but more on the Bleeding Edge…

Umair Haque has a nice - very unHBR - conversation started over at HBR (of all places).

He has a thought-provoking post about hacking and innovation, of which one paragraph resonated with me:

Big problems aren’t solved overnight, and they often can’t be solved in a tightly structured way. Hacking goes (way) beyond the limits of structured, rigid thinking.

It’s another way of looking at how people beyond your own industry, own networks and own paradigms, can blindside your business. It also ties into my thinking about the speed of disruptive innovation today - as your business becomes digitalised, the barriers to innovation fall. Hackers have always been on the edges, the fringes and the periphery, and Umair follows this thread well.

What business model would you like to hack?

Banking? Too late - Zopa and Prosper are already there.

Airlines? Too late - Ryanair did it.

Top of my list - until lately - was roaming charges on GSM mobile networks. Who hacked that business model? Skype via Fring via Symbian (read Nokia N95)

The latest edition of the Innovaro publication “Innovation Leaders” is now available. As the name suggests, it looks across a number of sectors to identify the companies that are leveraging innovation to the maximum benefit. You can download the summary or buy the book from the Innovation Leaders website.

If you are in The States this week, and want to hear more about the book Innovaro, then the founder of Innovaro - Tim Jones - will be doing a live interview discussing the research innovation in Ireland on CNBC for the “Business of Innovation” 2008 series which goes to air in the next couple of weeks.  USA this Thursday at 8pm/ET (1am GMT).

(edited update reflects the changed focus of the interview)

The Foresight Department of the UK Government Office for Science has released a new update to The Horizon Scanning Toolkit. “Exploring the future: tools for strategic futures thinking” discusses 24 different futures techniques.

If you are in any way interested in futures approaches, methods and case studies, this is a treasure trove of information which will keep you occupied for days.

It is a project that has been put together by the ever enthusiastic and sound futures/innovation/branding thinker Patrick Harris of thoughtengine.

I’ve made a small contribution to the toolkit via a recording of my thoughts on the subject of using folksonomies.

Over at HBR, there’s a great article entitled “Strategy as a wicked problem.” This month (May) is a good time to read it, because HBR has a limited time offer of free access this month.

The summary reads:

Many corporations […] have replaced the annual top-down planning ritual, based on macroeconomic forecasts, with more sophisticated processes. They crunch vast amounts of consumer data, hold planning sessions frequently, and use techniques such as competency modeling and real-options analysis to develop strategy. This type of approach is an improvement because it is customer- and capability-focused and enables companies to modify their strategies quickly, but it still misses the mark a lot of the time. Companies tend to ignore one complication along the way: They can’t develop models of the increasingly complex environment in which they operate. As a result, contemporary strategic-planning processes don’t help enterprises cope with the big problems they face. Several CEOs admit that they are confronted with issues that cannot be resolved merely by gathering additional data, defining issues more clearly, or breaking them down into small problems. Their planning techniques don’t generate fresh ideas, and implementing the solutions those processes come up with is fraught with political peril. That’s because, […] many strategy issues aren’t just tough or persistent—they’re “wicked.”

The article goes on to explore the characteristics of a wicked problem, and how complexity is one of the key definers.

It also reinforces the need for constant scanning:

Companies must constantly scan the environment for weak signals rather than conduct periodic analyses of the business landscape. (See, for example, George S. Day and Paul J.H. Schoemaker, “Scanning the Periphery,” HBR November 2005.) It’s increasingly difficult to identify the boundaries of the arenas companies should watch. Changes in one industry or segment often affect companies in others. For instance, who could have imagined that changes brought about by the computer industry and the internet would affect the music industry so radically? Businesses should scan sources of regulatory and technological change in addition to monitoring suppliers, competitors, potential entrants, and customers all over the world.

Increasingly a lot of the work I am doing encompasses not only strategic innovation, but innovative ways of developing strategy. For example during a three day health sector strategy event last year for a multi-billion dollar organisation , I had the attendees examine a massive diversity of learning - from complex marine ecosystems to award winning hotels.

The resulting strategy map - one of the key outputs - delivered an entirely new level of understanding about the future direction of the organisation and the path it needed to take.

It’s interesting to see this sort of different approach to strategy development make it into HBR.