I delivered the opening keynote on Shaping the Future of Business and also a workshop on Building and Implementing an Innovation Strategy.

Since it was a brief workshop to cover a very big topic I shared an Innovation Strategy Cheat Sheet with attendees, shown below, and as an interactive workshop took them through the issues they need to consider in creating an effective innovation strategy. Click here or on the image below to download the full page pdf.

Why an Innovation strategy?

Not every organization needs an innovation strategy. It may be implicit or central to overall corporate strategy and not need separate articulation.

In theory for some organizations innovation may not be a high enough priority, however I find it difficult to imagine any entity – commercial, government, or not-for-profit – that can assume their current model will remain relevant for the indefinite future.

Often an innovation strategy helps the board, shareholders, or executive team confirm that it does have a clear frame around the ongoing renewal of the organization in a rapidly changing world. It identifies what there is that is tangible beyond the usual innovation rhetoric.

As importantly, it provides structure and guidance to those in the front-line driving the organization forward, so their efforts are aligned with company’s vision and intent.

How to use the Cheat Sheet

There is of course no substitute for the deep examination and reflection which a solid innovation strategy requires. However for many who are effectively responsible for innovation, it is not evident where to start on the journey of articulating a clear innovation strategy.

The Cheat Sheet does not provide answers, but poses the most important questions that need to be answered or explored in building an effective strategy.

These questions can be examined by boards, executive teams, innovation committees, or other compact groups to frame the role of innovation and how the organization can enhance its capabilities and effectiveness in renewal. All of the questions need to be considered in some form.

The output does not need to be a document or other explicit ‘innovation strategy’. Simply carefully engaging with these questions and possible answers can raise awareness of the relevant issues enough to make innovation intrinsic to all strategic conversations.

Innovation Strategy Cheat Sheet: content

Carefully considering these questions will give you a sound outline for your innovation strategy. Suggested possible responses are examples only.

Role of innovation

What is the role of innovation in your organization’s future success?
Driving growth
New markets
New customer scope
Transformation
Differentiation
Evolve business models
Survival
Other

Responsibility

Who is responsible for driving innovation and innovation strategy?
Board
CEO
CIO
CTO
Head of innovation
Innovation committee
Innovation champions
Other

Priority innovation domains

What are the relative priorities of the main innovation domains?
Product or Service
Marketing
Process
Organizational structure
Business Model

Frameworks

What framework(s) will guide your innovation strategies?
Disruptive innovation
Innovation Landscape
Lean startup
Three horizons
Business Model Canvas
Blue Ocean Strategy
Gartner Open Innovation
etc.

Risk

How will you frame and govern innovation risk and opportunity?
Clear risk tolerances
Exception risk tolerances
Risk of lack of innovation
Innovation pace risk
Investment limits
Talent loss risk
etc.

Culture

What innovation culture do you want and what initiatives will shape it?
Visible leadership
Future scenarios
Experimentation
Awards
Customer focus
Diversity
Networked collaboration
etc.

Structures

Where should innovation be positioned in the organization?
R&D
IT
Innovation group
External group
Spinoff
Venture arm
Open innovation
Other

Processes

What innovation processes will you implement?
Idea generation
Stage gate
Competitions
Hackathons
Design thinking
Funding decisions
Closing experiments
Other

Measures

How will you measure innovation to better manage it?
Innovation inputs
Innovation activity
Innovation outputs
Revenue from innovation
Value creation
Customer response
Pace of innovation
Other

Communication

How will you effectively communicate your innovation strategy internally and externally?
Dedicated innovation comms
Integrate into corp comms
CEO driven
Manager driven
Innovation events
Other

In short, as the pace of change accelerates organizations that are not changing fast enough are being left behind, while the front-runners are actively seizing the opportunities of change.

Recently more evidence has emerged to support this.

A recent Wall Street Journal article The Problem With Innovation: The Biggest Companies Are Hogging All the Gains draws on a rich array of research and case studies to highlight the issue.

Lately, economists have discovered an unsettling phenomenon: While top companies are getting more productive, gains are stalling for everyone else. And the gap between the two is widening, with globalization and new technology delivering outsize rewards to the titans of the global economy.

“Whatever good stuff is happening at the high end is not diffusing down to the tail,” says Andrew Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England.

Source: WSJ, OECD

Some of the reasons cited for the slowing diffusion of productivity gains include automation, scale, intellectual property protection, and a concentration of talent at the best firms.

Adding to the case, last week Wall Street Journal followed up with a piece Why Do the Biggest Companies Keep Getting Bigger? It’s How They Spend on Tech, providing an additional angle on the increasing performance gap.

Your suspicions are correct: The biggest companies in every field are pulling away from their peers faster than ever, sucking up the lion’s share of revenue, profits and productivity gains.

Economists have proposed many possible explanations: top managers flocking to top firms, automation creating an imbalance in productivity, merger-and-acquisition mania, lack of antitrust regulation and more.

But new data suggests that the secret of the success of the Amazons, Googles and Facebook s of the world—not to mention the Walmart s, CVSes and UPSes before them—is how much they invest in their own technology.

Source: WSJ

The article digs into similar research to the previous article, though focuses on size and investment in proprietary technology as the key differentiator.

While scale is a significant factor, notably in technology, it remains there are a number of factors driving the divergence in performance. These could be most aptly summarized as “innovation”.

In essence, the most innovative companies own the future. The rest will be left behind.

Image: Kurt Haubrich

The delight and enticement of all the possibilities of a rapidly evolving world are irresistible to me.

Pushing back at the startup mantra of focus

Having spent many years ensconced in startup communities I have heard over and over again the mantra of Focus Focus Focus.

I always pushed back at this, at one time considering writing a book titled ‘Unfocus’ to help balance out the conversation.

In many ways I don’t believe in focus. Certainly the only way I can do my job of futurist properly is to be all over the place, pushing out in different directions and following intriguing ideas.

Also I simply lack the attention span; I couldn’t spend all of my time and energy on a single endeavor.

The lure of parallel entrepreneurship

For a couple of decades now I have been strongly attracted to the idea ‘parallel entrepreneurship‘: building multiple ventures simultaneously rather than one after another as is the case for serial entrepreneurs.

In more recent years ‘company builder‘ has become a more common description for the model. I have spent some time delving into the enablers of the company builder model (more on that another time), and how the intrinsic lack of focus at the group level can be addressed.

The perils of lack of focus

The business model for Advanced Human Technologies Group was explicitly as a company builder, with multiple scalable ventures funded by cashflow from our (non-scalable or partially scalable) services businesses, and the underlying premise relying almost exclusively on globally distributed part-time talent to enable full scalability.

I always acknowledged that it was an extremely ambitious model, but I thought that it was possible and it was an undertaking worth trying, in demonstrating the viability of a highly non-traditional organizational structure.

In short I effectively failed. The group grew to five companies, yet I was still spending half my time working globally as a futurist, with the remaining 50% of my time split across a dozen ambitious projects across these companies. A couple of our ventures succeeded on a small scale, but my attention and our resources were divided too thinly for the rest to get traction.

Pushing the model further

Given this situation I accepted an offer to become co-founder of a new future-focused agency and ventures group Rh7thm, drawing on its significant capital and broader resources.

The key challenge for me was that in my role of ‘CEO and Chief Futurist’ of a growing group of companies I was effectively in the same position that I had been before, stretched too thin and unable to do either of those roles properly.

Back to the future

After spending over a decade as a ‘futurist and entrepreneur’, with many lessons learned from both of those domains and their intersection, I decided that I needed to be more focused, and left the group to concentrate fully on my work as a futurist.

As has been reported on my move I noted that:

“The reason for this shift is that for too long now I have split my time between my futurist and entrepreneur roles.

“While I will never be able to hold myself back for too long from entrepreneurial ventures, I have not enjoyed having more on my plate than is possible to do.

“I deeply love working as a futurist – it is my truest calling – and for now I want to focus on that rather than trying to run multiple ventures simultaneously.”

Focusing on the future

I am now more focused than I have been for well over a decade, putting all my energy into my role as a futurist, including working globally as a keynote speaker and strategy facilitator and creating future-focused content and insights for major organizations.

Our future-focused publications are doing well, so I still have some scalable ventures running, but all within the futurist fold.

This focus on my work as a futurist of course can hardly be described as overly narrow. Exploring the future requires an unlimited purview. Which is why it suits me perfectly – I can be focused, certainly relative to the last decade of my life, without feeling constrained.

Searching for the balance between focus and unfocus

Today I acknowledge more than before the importance of focus. It is almost certainly the heart of growing a successful business from scratch.

Yet I certainly don’t envy those who have an overly tight focus for years – and often more years – on end. Life is an adventure, and you need not only to look around, but also to delve sometimes in different directions.

For each individual that balance between focus and unfocus will be different, and will change over time. For me I will always be drawn to broader vistas.

For now I am completely focused on the future. But I know I won’t be able to keep myself away from other ventures indefinitely.

Being conscious about how focused you choose to be

What is most important is to be conscious about what you gain and lose through your degree of focus. There are choices to be made, so choose well how focused or unfocused you should be at this stage of your unfolding career and life.

Image: HiggySTFC

The heart of the workshop used scenario thinking to broaden their perspectives on change and strategic opportunity in their industry. We also wanted to provide a useful framework for the executives to develop and implement effective strategies for their respective country operations.

I was not able to find any strategy frameworks that were sufficiently relevant and pragmatic, so created a summary framework designed to be useful to any executives or entrepreneurs who need to develop practical, actionable strategies. I distilled the approaches and frames I have been successfully using for facilitating strategy development over the years with many executive groups, bringing it together into a succinct 6-step guide.

See below the diagram for a detailed explanation of the framework.

VISION
A vision describes where you are going, it is literally something you should be able to see in your mind’s eye. There are 7 characteristics of powerful visions, the most important of which are that they people see them as Compelling, Achievable and Clear.

In addition to describing evocatively where you intend to go, the vision should describe WHY the vision exists, the purpose behind it, and the values that support and shape the vision.

OFFERS
Every business must be clear on what they are offering their clients in terms of products, services, or outcomes. And they must be absolutely clear in what way those offers are distinctive in the marketplace, in terms of features, quality, price, positioning, brand or other defining characteristics.

In particular any good strategy must be framed on the distinctive value created for clients, from a genuine client perspective rather than the company’s perspective.

CAPABILITIES
Key to good strategy is clarity on the distinguishing capabilities of the organization that support the vision and how the company creates value for clients. It is critical to define what additional capabilities will need to be developed, and what is required to build these moving forward.

For almost all organizations collaboration is one of the most important factors underlying performance, both internal collaboration, and the ability to draw effectively on external capabilities and resources.

PRIORITIES
Any strategy of course needs to be crystallized into a clear, actionable plan that identifies the few top priorities that executives and managers need to focus on in addition to their everyday responsibilities. Each priority needs to be associated with defined actions, with clearly allocated responsibilities.

These priorities need to be set over multiple timeframes, giving clarity on what needs to be worked on over the longer-term, for example a three year timeframe, down to medium term and finally current and immediate priorities, often over a 3-6 month horizon to give clarity to efforts in the present.

METRICS
Executives need to know what to measure to see that they are on track to achieve their vision and objectives. These will certainly include absolute financial measurements, but should also include relevant business ratios, market performance and non-financial metrics, since no good vision is defined purely in financial terms. As importantly, metrics need to be established that give insight into the likely future performance of the organisation, for example indicators of innovation, employee motivation, or capability development.

From these metrics individual and team KPIs need to be designed that align personal activity and performance with the defined directions and intent of the organization.

ENGAGEMENT
A wonderful strategy will fail if it is not communicated effectively through the organization, resulting in a clear understanding of what needs to be done and broad-based engagement and buy-in. For this the strategy needs to be intelligible and able to be conveyed clearly and succinctly. Performance against defined strategic metrics should be visible across the company so people can see what progress is being made or how they need to adjust their efforts.

I personally believe that strategy should be participative, not simply something handed down from on high. Employees’ understanding of the company’s strategy and how its execution is performing enables them to contribute to strategy formation and feel fully engaged in the organization’s strategy.

There are many lenses through which to view strategy, as strategy doyen Henry Mintzberg beautiful describes. This strategy framework provides one perspective among many. What characterizes it is that it is designed to be as practical as possible for executives who are defining their path forward for the organization.

I hope you find the framework useful. Please let me know if you do.

Image: James Petts

The two short videos below were excerpted from the interview, with summary notes below.

Some of the points I make:

* The future of the economy is more and more with small and fast-growth businesses, who will take a larger share of the economy

* Large corporations will still exist, but will be leaner and smaller

* As the world is moving faster, we need more agile organisations; corporates are finding that harder and are sourcing much of their innovation by acquiring smaller more nimble companies

* Everyone needs to be learning all the time – learning should be framed a joy and opportunity

* However no-one can know everything, we shouldn’t put ourselves under pressure to do so, but we can be open to look for ideas and knowledge where we can find it

* Crowdsourcing levels the playing field – every business has ready access to useful, relevant talent

* Building a flexible workforce requires combining those at the core who understand the organisation’s values and culture, with those outside who can do specific tasks

Image: Kenny Louie

You can listen to the podcast below.

Points I make in the podcast on the role of CIO and technology leadership include:

* Any technology leader must understand how the industry in which they work is and may be evolving

* They need to build roadmaps on how technology might change the shape of their industry, including enabling new competitors and opening up new, broader opportunities for incumbents

* It is critical to have a long-term timeframe on this, at least 5 years out, in order to build and implement effective strategies today

* We need to explore how technologies can make cities and communities more effective, efficient, and liveable

* There is a need for visionaries to envisage and communicate the potential of technologies to drive value – who better than technology leaders?

These themes were explored by leading futurist Ross Dawson in his keynote at the 2016 Ericsson Services Forum in Mumbai. Dawson’s talk related to the event theme of “Turning Wants into Wows” by discussing how organizations can create value in a connected world through harnessing the power of networks, consumer expectations, integrated systems, and unique branding. The full keynote is shown in the video below.

Here are four key insights drawn from Dawson’s keynote at the forum.

1. Networks are driving change and transforming the structure of the economy

Today, all layers of our lives are becoming intricately networked, changing the ways in which value is created. As Dawson told the forum, we have shifted to a society in which “the unit of value creation in the economy is now the individual, as they are connected, as they are able to share and create value”. Consequently, he asserted,

“The network is the birth of the global brain: we are collectively becoming something beyond ourselves.”

What does this mean for organizations? Firstly, that there is an explosion of possibility and opportunity as more and more of the things around us become connected. From the cloud to crowdsourcing to the Internet of Things, a social trend towards openness is shaping technology, which is in turn reshaping social attitudes. This cycle is fuelling a networked economy in which scale-free networks are growing, creating winners and losers.

Winners such as Uber and Airbnb exemplify the power of crowd sharing and how “social change is as vast as technological change”, like Dawson said at the forum. As a result of social change, organizations are grappling with rapidly changing consumer expectations, affecting how they understand and approach innovation, business structures and strategy.

2. Consumers expect more on every front

Fuelled by the vast possibilities of technology, “Our expectations for everything are going forwards, not backwards,” said Dawson. “We expect more on every front.” Here are some of the points he raised about consumer expectations:

We expect immediacy. In 1998, with dial-up Internet, you could download a webpage in approximately one minute. In 2017, ten seconds is too slow for most of us to wait.

We expect to participate. The pervasiveness of social media has put consumers “inside” and behind information as sharers and co-creators, critics and influencers, empowered in a networked economy.

We expect choice. We subject our demands for features such as speed, functionality, price and efficiency to intense comparisons both before and after purchasing.

We expect beauty. Even enterprise technology is now commonly scrutinized for the beauty of its user interfaces.

We expect world-class products and services. Our standards for quality are on the rise, driven by our knowledge of the competition, what other people are receiving, and our desire to have the best experience possible.

3. Aligning internal and external systems can drive value for customers

In order for organizations to fulfil and exceed consumer expectations, Dawson emphasizes:

“The way in which you interface with your customers, or the world at large, needs to absolutely mirror and be integrated with the way you work internally.”

This is vital because the dividing line between the outside and inside of an organization is blurring, partly due to open data and public expectations around transparency. Consequently, organizations should aim to be “extraordinarily well networked”, Dawson said, with their culture, connections and idea flow integrated in networks that drive value for external customers. This process can also promote efficiency and innovation, as well as clarify brand values and messaging.

4. Organizations must be unique to succeed

In a fast-paced world of widespread disruption, the least performing and best performing organizations are growing in divergence. Building on the ideas of Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson in Race Against the Machine, Dawson declared:

“All organizations are becoming more and more different…Now we are seeing the potential for the merging of the technology and culture and history of an organization to create something that is absolutely unique. And that is not just an opportunity, it is an imperative.”

A unique organization, in Dawson’s view, “cannot be copied by others however much they look at it, because they are not able to embody what it is”. In order to achieve this, leaders must help their organizations to transcend the boundaries and become as flexible as their environment. Otherwise, according to the Law of Requisite Variety, organizations and their employees will simply be buffeted by the winds of change, unable to take a lead and shape the world around them.

Therefore, in order to create a unique vision and vibrant future for their organizations, leaders should understand how networks impact the flow of innovation and value creation. As Dawson wrote in his book Living Networks, we have shifted to a society where, ultimately, “value is created by the network, not by the organization”. Those organizations that create value across systems and communities will be best equipped to benefit from—and contribute to—our connected world and its future.

Images: Adapted from Polychorosket and Khalid Albaih

In the lead-up to the conference, an article Healthcare 2020: what will the future of healthcare look like in Australia? draws on an interview with me to explore this space. Below are just a few excerpted quotes from the extensive interview with me:

On big data and data sharing

“One of the things that is critical not just in the health industry but more broadly, is the ability to find and share data more effectively as an industry.

One of the major challenges the healthcare sector faces in achieving this, is privacy, both from a regulatory and individual perspective and the attitudes towards how information is shared. An education process is needed to show the value of sharing personal data, as well as providing the structures to be able to share data using appropriate tagging or classification of data.

“If you think about data from the big picture or the potential of the sharing of individual genetic data more broadly, this could lead relatively swiftly to a transformation in healthcare efficiency. While there still might be reluctance from people to share personal information about their health, it will be the individuals and organisations that will need to provide leadership to drive this effectively.

Because data sharing won’t happen by itself. There are so many blocks in terms of attitudes and regulations that are currently stopping data sharing.

There are also some layers of resistance in the technology infrastructure currently being used in Australian healthcare, especially when it comes to medical health records. These records are sometimes being designed to be held within organisations rather than to be shared in any way.

The format of these medicals needs to change to promote sharing and this requires leadership to establish and propagate these standards to drive value.

But this is an ongoing journey and for more than a decade we have already had people working on these issues and yet we don’t have a very good sate of medical data sharing at the moment. But at the same time, we need to look at how far we have come and find ways to improve, because we are going to have to move in a world of dramatically different levels of data availability.

In the future industry leadership is required and we need to look at data sharing as not just a sharing of personal health records, but as how we can use data to create more value for the community.”

On tele-health

“A big part of the future of healthcare will be tele-health and the ability to deliver healthcare remotely. We are already beginning to see more and more medical consultation with medical professionals done remotely, using everything from Skype through to richer services, which allows the doctor to instruct a patient to do particular tests on themselves.

This is part of a shift from responsive to predictive medicine. Instead of waiting until something goes wrong and then treating the patient, doctors will be able to anticipate when things might go wrong and take appropriate actions to prevent sickness. This transformation is partly based on data as well as connectivity.

Clearly there will be times when people need to physically go into hospitals, which will mean the most significant driver in healthcare globally will be cost. With an ageing population with increasing expectations on how to manage health, costs are rising. This could begin to be a massive social problem, so one of the things that will become important is the ability to minimise the amount which people have to go to hospital, both by pre-emptive care and being able to consult doctors remotely.”

On community care

“The vast amount of healthcare expenditure is currently going towards ongoing chronic conditions which can last a life time. A shift to community care in the future will provide an opportunity to not only reduce costs, but also shift the focus to patient centered care.

For example, community care will mean that people will be able to live in their homes much long. They will have the data and facilities to be able to monitor their own health. As we are also going to face an increasingly ageing population, community centered care will enable us to support elderly and unwell people to stay in their homes longer in much better conditions than they would today.

This can be achieved through simple robots in the house which through memory aids can help elderly people remember things, such as something as simple as where they left their glasses. These robots can also be supplemented by people in the community can drop by and support them. We have already seen the rise of mobile nurses and in the future the need for mobile nurses is going to be far greater.

Community centered care will improve people’s quality of life, because they are receiving care in their own home and have people around the support them. This will be a more structural and systematic shift that will be driven by cost and the quality of care that people seek. To a degree, it will also change the role of government in how they can best fulfill societal needs as efficiently as possible.”

For additional insights on other aspects of the future of healthcare go to the conference website.

Graham Kenny, President of Reinvent Australia, described the organisation as a collaborative initiative to create a conversation on a shared vision for the nation. The bottom line of its endeavors is to increase the quality of life for all Australians, by influencing government and business in how they work.

Kenny quoted Henry Mintzberg in a recent Harvard Business Review article, Rescuing Capitalism from Itself.

Kate Eriksson, Head of Innovation at PwC, described the landscape of the participants in creating a vision for the future of Australia, and noted that being polite is one of the biggest impediments to progress. The big questions are ‘What we can do? How can we do it?’

Oliver Freeman, Vice President of Reinvent Australia, talked about the crisis of parliamentary democracy, in which powerlessness is a recurring theme, resulting in a “manifestation of misalignment”. We need to realize James Surowiecki’s idea that collectlvely we are smarter than the elite few.

Michelle Fitzgerald, the newly appointed Chief Digital Officer of the City of Melbourne, spoke about using technology to reimagine our cities, to enable better human experience. The most important part is to co-create a vision for Melbourne as a smart city, with all stakeholders involved. Melbourne has many assets, including its open data platform, sensor on rubbish bins, and much more, but it needs to be ready for dramatic further change, including the impact of driverless cars.

Paul Schetler, CEO of the Australian government’s recently formed Digital Transformation Office, noted that the big difference between government and private sector is that government doesn’t participate in a market, they are sole providers of government services. There is an ethical imperative to provide the best possible services. We must do better. The costs of computing and storage have gone through the floor, completely changing the economics of service delivery. This opens up the opportunity to focus on service design.

Reinvent Australia seems like an excellent initiative, complementing existing efforts to form useful visions and catalyse action to build a better national future. I look forward to seeing what comes from the group.

One of the most interesting broader issues around the film is very simply the degree of interest people have in the film, which captured people’s imaginations about the future, even though it was primarily a comedy.

ABC’s 7:30 Report on Wednesday ran a segment on Back to the Future 2 and tweeted this quote from me:

In a syndicated piece by AFP on Back to the Future and in an earlier article in Newsweek I made the same point:

The reason people have been trying to create a hoverboard is that it was in the film and it captured people’s imaginations. They weren’t trying to predict the future, they were trying to create an interesting film, but I think it’s interesting that everyone is saying “Where is my hoverboard” and now people are trying to create that. We discover what we want. Science fiction creates the desire for the technology that we see, which means that entrepreneurs can see if there is a desire and they then work hard to be able to create the technologies that we’ve discovered that we want.

Countless technology innovators have said how they were inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to create essential elements of the connected world we know today.

Science fiction in movies and books has shaped what we desire, as well as what we fear. It is a critical driving force in helping us shape our future, as it uncovers what we want to happen and don’t want to happen. Let us celebrate all science fiction, from the most serious to light-hearted comedy.