Innovative Alliances in a connected World
Rough notes of my last talk in Eindhoven
Today, I highlighted at Global Forum five perspectives and toolkits to think about innovation layers, knowledge and business models.
I use those toolkits for my own research on open innovation 2.0. It is neither the Business Model Canvas nor the Ten Types of Innovation.
The big question is for me: Do we have to innovate with technologies or alliances ?
I can sense what technologies will emerge, but what about alliances and for which reasons ?
So today, I want to talk about accelerated growth factors, customer values, collaboration types, conducive knowledge, and connectivism. Yes, I didn’t say connectivity.
First model: The Pentagrowth, designed by Javier Creus.
50 startups in 2013 were analyzed for their growth factors during 5 years. A very interesting model that I’m using at Elium. My startup is playing in a very competitive environment, in front of Google, Microsoft, even Facebook. So what can I learn from the best startups such as Medium, Pinterest, Airbnb who succeeded to do an accelerated growth ?
5 levers: Knowledge sharing, Connections, Collections, Empowered users, Enabled partners
I have an opportunity to develop partnerships, in a similar way to Slack. Opening the platform to new usages and values.
I can embrace Google or Microsoft ecosystems, but choose to focus on only one. Or I can choose to embrace them all!
Questions for you
How do you plan to select your future digital and physical partners ?
How do you map your company strategy on those new digital levers ?
Second model: The 30 Elements of Value
Yes, it is about empathy, and how to transform your company into an empathic one. It’s even more than that.
How can you create new values on your product ? What are the perceived values of your clients and employees regarding current values ? I’m not talking about your company values. I’m talking about the ones embodied by your products and services.
4 groups of elements: the functional, the emotional, the life-changing, the transcendental.
I am using this holistic model to do:
- a survey with my employees
- a workshop at the next customer club
I expect to see where there are biases, surprises and have some serious conversations on it. Of course I hope my clients will perceive my product as life-changing, transformative. And if it’s not the case, I can decide to make it clearer and change my messages and functions.
Question for you
Who’s in charge to define the future values of your company’s product ? If you answer a small team, then you might have a problem
Third model: the Double X
Collaboration. So critical for Open Innovation ! I’m in the process to understand what are the key needs to master collaboration. I could sense that people had different visions and expectations. I created a very small toolkit called Double X to collect collaboration needs and try to see patterns emerge.
This on-going process will be completed with more workshops. All data will be share in open data.
The learning outcomes I have yet from that toolkit resonates with Paul Dolan researches (“Happiness by Design”, 2015) and Google’s internal study of 100 Google teams concluding that the most performing ones are those who are just nice !
People collaborate for pleasure and for purpose, the two pillars of happiness
Question for you
Is your company open to embrace multiple collaboration types, for instance very creatives ones, something that might be new for you ?
How do you promote happiness and kindness within your company ?
Forth model: the quintuple helix
Once you have started your digital transformation, now what ? Artificial intelligence ? Yes and No.
Transition (global warming, new energies…) will be the major challenge we will face, impacting values, economical levers, collaboration types, purposes and pleasures.
Those changes are emerging from everywhere. Just read a Facebook feed and you can sense a global awareness which as to get inside companies.
Context awareness is one of the most critical challenge for leaders and leadership.
In order to prepare the transition and give your coworkers a chance to prepare for the future, we need to create spaces for the unknown and invite them to connect emerging and existing knowledge.
Question for you
Who should be the stakeholders/sponsors to support your internal knowledge sharing network ? IT ?
I know that you still have to transform your company. It’s a never-ending process.
Fifth model: The Knowledge Sharing Canvas
Because nowadays Knowledge Sharing is done through Enterprise social networks such as Jive, Yammer, Chatter, Slack, Elium (“Tome 8”, Lecko 2016)… (disclaimer: I work for Elium, providing Knowledge Sharing Networks), I created a canvas to help project managers to understand the key building blocks of knowledge sharing and realign employees to invest more than just sharing files in folders… Connections need to be done, silos need to be broken (“The Magnetic Organisation”, Meijer, E.Nicholson, Priester, 2016) and for those two critical leadership challenges, you have to empower your employees to put key information into the right containers, feel supported to come with stories and embrace a healthy feedback loop.
Question
Are you a wiki company ?
If not, start with workshops, surveys, some communities with internal high-potential people and come with evidences and new strategical goals
Conclusion
Open Innovation 2.0 is embracing diversity & uncertainty (“Innovating together”, Bror Salmelin, 2015) to find new ways to solve the right problems. Maybe Artificial Intelligence will help us to retrieve new customer/citizen values, to connect further people and objects, to find new ways to collaborate and do business. Meanwhile we have the choice to do it today by enabling people and ecosystems with platforms, co-creation, learning, co-strategy, design-thinking and collective knowledge. What George Siemens called Connectivism.
I hope those toolkits will help you to reflect and change.
