Framing Corporate Innovation
Supply-led innovation – the traditional model - which relies on idea generation to fuel an innovation pipeline; privileges short-term thinking, fuels a bias for often ill-informed action, and iterates on the business of today rather than on the business of tomorrow. Corporations – especially incumbents in older industries - cannot incrementally change their way into the future, one good idea at a time. Disruptive change will outpace and dislocate their best...
Four Key Competencies to Build a ‘Sense and Respond’ Capability
An early 2019 survey of corporate leaders found 42% agreed that an ‘inability to act on signals crucial to the future of the business’ was one of the most common obstacles to innovation in large companies. Further analysis revealed that while 82% of the respondents had an awareness of potentially disruptive change, the core problem was acting on those signals. My own experience suggests few businesses have a formalised approach to connect ‘sensing’ and...
How to bring the future into today’s decision making
In my innovation work, I’ve encountered scepticism about futures thinking amongst decision makers with a business as usual (BAU) mindset more concerned with optimising the status quo rather than growth based on new value creation. A dominant BAU mindset can place limits on thinking and make it harder to hold possibility as a key consideration in decision making. Neglecting possibility - arising from deliberate future thinking - risks missing the strategic...
How to Make Sense of a Changing World
Peter Drucker (1997) was speaking to the importance of horizon scanning when he observed that ‘Executives are so enchanted by the internal data the computer generates, that they have neither the mind nor the time for the outside. Yet all great change comes from outside the firm, not inside.’ The business environment in which we are operating provides a context for our strategy, policy, programs and projects. Context allows us to assign meaning and to assess...
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