I finally got some time today to visit our new office. I really like this space as it has three sides of window in a very hip area. We were trying to visualize how all our innovation space should come together and what to do with each "innovation playroom". Here are some photos. I guess it will take another 3-4 weeks before it is fully functional when other Herman Miller (They did a partial delivery today of 30 Mirra chairs) furniture arrives. It is a 6 week order cycle. My batch of new MacBook Air will probably come before the desks.
I’ve also met with a couple of very talented people today who were exploring opportunities with us and they were all excited about how we bring customer-focused innovation to organizations. Today customer-focused innovation is definitely on many corporate agendas, but what exactly are they doing and who’s in charge of it? These questions often remain unanswered.
When people talk about exploring white space, they are mostly referring to adjacent sector innovation; they like this because it is next to the core. So what is needed is to extend outside the core? The easiest way is to explore adjacent sector innovation to correspondingly bring in new ideas from outside and into their core markets or product sectors. Organic growth is seen to be more successful and generally more manageable than acquisiiton- driven growth. Questions are asked about the ability of organizations to achieve higher levels of growth from existing operations only by continuing to deliver new products or extending them into new experiences. Due to converging technologies and blurring channels and markets, new approaches to enable better identification and transfer of ideas and technologies across sectors are desperately needed. Help is also welcomed. Companies are searchng for best approaches to do this, adjacent sector innovation is the most convenient white space. To explore this space need external provocateurs acting as “thought leaders”. We can’t expect teams to be imaginative and visionary if they have an inwardly-focused world view. Without fresh stimulus it’s hard to think differently. External thought leaders that include inspirational provocateurs and visionaries – are the essential catalyst for organizations that seek breakthrough innovation.
The open innovation movement is more about licensing concepts in and out of the organization from and to wherever new revenue can be generated, adjacent sector innovation is more focused on proactively spotting trends in parallel spaces and identifying ways to adopt and exploit them within your sector. In this case, comparative analysis rather than competitor analysis is needed. The more sophisticated companies have chosen to use new tools (design thinking) to uncover wider opportunities that may lie over the home sector horizon. Adjacent category innovation is growing in response to the need for greater, faster and higher impact innovation across sectors; both in ‘customer-visible’ products/services as well as in ‘customer-invisible’ processes. It is simply being driven by a change in strategic perspectives of where new innovations can come from and go to. In order to deliver the promise, there is also a demand for a change in internal capability to identify, enable and manage associated innovation opportunities. Organizations that are successful in this area are building efficient innovation networks to highlight opportunities. That’s what we are doing with our clients (and sometimes their ad agencies), we work with them to create future growth aspirations with a range of opportunities by bringing in fresh, future-oriented perspectives from outside the organizations. The interim deliverable of the process a set of “industry foresight” and with that we create “tangible futures” that organization can touch and feel. In fact, we are prototyping business opportunities across the adjacent sector innovation spectrum.
