Swimming in the innovation soup
Some food for thought around the innovation challenge
Every country has its version of the all-in soup. You know, the one where you throw in all the leftovers, add some herbs and spices, bulk it out with potatoes, dumplings , rice or whatever you have to hand and there you go — instant and tasty fuel. Whether it’s bouillabaisse in Marseilles, aalsuppe in Hamburg or plain Irish stew you’ll find some version of it anywhere in the world. It’s sustainable, low cost and most important, usually very tasty.
Estonia is no exception. A fascinating place, tucked away on the corner of the Baltic Sea and with a long tradition of seaborne trade via the Hanseatic League and beyond. Home to around a million people and several thousand times that number of trees it has its own delightful cuisine built around seafood and game including, of course Hernesupp, an all-in-soup. Which serves you well in the dark winters up there but also occupies a very pleasant place on the table when partaken under the summer night skies when it hardly bothers to get dark at all….
It’s an interesting place, with much to offer beyond the food. Not least it can lay claim to being the most digital country in the world, with almost all of its public services fully online (the exception being divorce — you’ll have to wait until next year for that!). It’s retained a strong entrepreneurial spirit boasting, amongst other things, the highest per capita number of ‘digital unicorns’ in the world. (Think Skype, Bolt, Wise and others rather than imagine the city full of prancing electronic quadrupeds…)
But it also has a long history and rich culture of which the inhabitants are proud, happily taking their digital ease while dressed in traditional costumes and dancing to traditional tunes. A wonderful mixture of the past and the future…
Which is why it made an excellent location for the 50th ISPIM conference last week. ISPIM — the International Society for Professionals in Innovation Management — was founded in 1974 to create a community of practice around innovation management. It was an early response to the challenges of actually making it happen — and it remains one of the best meeting places to mix-up academic researchers and teachers, policy makers and practitioners, consultants and anyone else wiht an interest in making innovation happen. And this year’s conference, with its 500 or so people swirling around, offered a kind of all-in-soup for ideas with plenty of flavoursome mouthfuls to be had.
Amongst my takeaways were some old favourites, serving up again some important stuff on persistently important themes, in particular around sustainability. This year’s papers and workshops were very much aimed at the system level challenges — it’s not just a matter of putting you own house in order but rather thinking of the network level. In these days of rising costs and availability scarcities conserving energy and physical resources becomes a no-brainer, plus there are significant new opportunities in the entrepreneurial space opened up by the ‘green’ challenge. The frontier has now moved to the multi-player game which is about creating high impact change by mobilising ecosystems — for example in really getting the circular economy from idea to practice.
Which links well with the open innovation theme — now celebrating its silver jubilee (Chesbrough’s book was published back in 2003) but it of course picks up on an older theme around distributed innovation. Here again the continuing stream of papers and tools on offer spoke more to system level interaction — how to find partners, form relationships with them and get the emergent properties of collaborating ecosystems to come through.
Another perennial ISPIM theme is ‘responsible innovation’, particularly focusing on the question of inclusion of users and other stakeholders. Once again the discussion and presentations leaned heavily towards this systems challenge -– how to bring multiple perspectives into a co-creation process of innovation? By now the ‘why?’ of user engagement seems obvious — users demonstrably have ideas which can add to the stock of insights and inspiration at the front end of innovation. And they also hold the key to downstream diffusion because understanding their world and creating solutions which fit that world is the key to what Rogers calls ‘compatibility’ — a rock on which otherwise great ideas can often founder. Users can help throughout the process and there is plenty of evidence to advance that cause in sectors as diverse as healthcare, agriculture and high tech manufacturing. But there’s still a conundrum — why are firms often so reluctant to move from the rhetoric (it’s easy to spout the slogans about ‘innovation working for you, the user…’ ) to actually building users into a process which, as Eric Von Hippel notes is essentially ‘free innovation’?
One element of this is around where such involvement might take place and particularly the role of ‘laboratory’ environments where different players can come together and co-create in a safe experimental way. This idea of ‘boundary innovation spaces’ is exemplified in the experience of ‘Living Labs’ which have developed a suite of methods and tools to help support co-creation with users in a variety of sectoral and regional contexts — and whose stories are regularly shared at ISPIM. Given today’s interest in having some form of ‘innovation lab’ as a must-have fashion accessory for any organization the value of research and experience-based conversations about how to make such spaces actually work was welcome.
As an good chef knows there’s also value in trying out new ingredients, bringing new flavours to the fore. And the conference had some of these as well. I was particularly interested in the way that the early discussions from pre-pandemic days around possible standards for innovation management have matured — and moved centre-stage. In many ways this is a codification of what’s been accumulating for over 100 years from research and hard-won experience about what to do and not do to make innovation work. ISO 56002 moves the conversation forward, providing a reference model for both organizational systems and , possibly, the innovation mangers who design and operate within them.
At first that seems like a paradox — how can something as volatile as innovation be confined within a standard? — but a closer look reveals that it is all about what Peter Drucker would call the discipline of innovation. It’s not a case of one size fits all but rather a framework within which organizations (public or private, large or small, for and not for profit) need to work out their version of a system which will help them repeat the trick. There’s still a long way to go but the growing evidence (and interest in the standard) suggests that taking a systematic and systemic approach is an approach which pays off . (Which is a source of comfort to people like me who have built courses and textbooks on that premise!)
Perhaps the most topical and widespread (not to mention well-attended) sessions were around AI — this sudden (relatively) new arrival which seems to offer enormous potential to impact the innovation management task. Take so many aspects of it — creating ideas, finding opportunities within emerging complex markets, selecting …and AI has demonstrable form already and is being adopted by an increasingly large number of organizations. Does this spell the end of innovation management as a field of practice and research (and possibly the last rites for conferences like ISPIM)? Or — as the conference tended to suggest — is it more a case of learning to work with a ‘co-intelligence’, an assistant or pilot adjunct which can amplify and help? Plenty of room to explore but also some valuable reality checking — it’s not there yet.
In particular there was extensive discussion of the ways in which AI needs to be adapted and shaped by its users — it is emphatically not a ‘plug’n’play’ solution. Its potential to automate certain kinds of jobs has been widely publicised and there is a degree of concern bordering on panic that we are facing a bleak future for human work as the machines take over. But we need to remember that other technological revolutions have held out similar promise and posed similar challenges. Experience suggests that in the long term we may underestimate their full impact but in the short term there is a long period of learning where and jhow to deploy them to advantage. Steam power wasn’t an overnight game-changer; it took decades for us to learn to use it well and to change our approaches to accommodate and deploy it effectively. Perhaps the most important research we need in this space is less around developing ever more powerful Large Language Models and their like but instead on developing the ‘absorptive capacity’ in out organizations to make good use of the technology.
And then there are the surprising mouthfuls, something which hits the taste buds and makes you think differently for a moment about what you’re eating. For me there were several such moments — for example the presentation of a case study of bank in Kazakhstan. We don’t often think of central Asia as a melting pot for high tech ideas, our mental picture may well focus more on yurts pitched on wide empty steppes and nomadic herdsmen tending their flocks. Yet this bank and the services it provides to a rapidly growing market beyond Kazakhstan itself suggests that a lot is happening behind the mountains. The Estonian claim to be one of the most digitalized places in the world was challenged by a set of public services offered on the Kazakh banking app which not only allow you to pay taxes, identify yourself and get married but — ahead of their Estonian counterparts, also get divorced!
A simple reminder of just how global the innovation game is but also of the growing number of radical innovation ideas which emerge form very different contexts. It made me think of M-PESA and the quiet revolution around mobile money which has been taking place in Africa for close on a quarter of a century. We default too quickly to our conventional role models, the usual suspects and sometimes neglect the creativity and market opportunity which offers an alternative crucible for innovation
One surprise which gave me plenty of food for thought was a poignant reminder of the challenges for innovation; a paper jointly authored by Ukrainian and Finnish researchers which looked at the potential for an innovative approach to reconstruction. Citing the (hideous) figures about damage to things like energy infrastructure it reframed the destruction as an opportunity for the future, not just to rebuild but to do so in new and more sustainable directions,
When I eat all-in-soup I tend to save my favourite parts until last and this conference overview is no exception. My big interest is in how we communicate the ideas and skills around innovation and its management — how we teach, coach, guide, mentor it. And this year offered some rich bites, from plenty of AI-linked inspiration and practical tools, through to hands-on workshops around the many different ways in which we can engage in the learning space (classroom, lecture room or wherever). More to the point the rise of online delivery of key messages opens up space for exploration around those concepts and building up of real skills through gamified projects, simulations and other angles.
Which is just as well since it’s becoming clear that the skills involved in innovation and entrepreneurship are moving from being delivered via specialist electives/ minor courses or the subject of small-scale specialist Master programmes. Now they are seen as ‘life skills, important for anyone looking to take their career forward, or make a mark on the world, and for organizations who need such skills to enable them to deal with their challenging goals. So the ‘market’ for innovation management skills is huge and growing ; the challenge is one of innovation around how to meet these most effectively.
All in all a good trip, plenty of food for thought and, once I’ve managed to digest it all, hopefully some exercise to follow, putting some of those ideas into practice. But maybe first I’ll just close my eyes to better enable my concentration…..
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