Innovation Practitioners as enablers and value integrators

"The bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly" - David Epstein

Working in innovation can mean many things across organisations, industries, and markets. In some organisations, innovation practitioners can be a "marketplace" doing many things and making it hard to pinpoint what is the unique thing they do. In other organisations, they are taking specific tasks, for example, aiming to uncover and build a value proposition that can be commercialised. I love the first case if I am seeing extraordinary human talent architecting differentiated configurations, offerings, and experiences with their everyday results.

Innovation Practitioners know that innovation isn't just product innovation. Innovation practitioners know that their minds, teamwork, and context awareness can:

1. Overturn configurations by exploring profit models, networks, structure, and processes. They constantly ask: How can profit models be improved? How can we improve the ways revenue is generated? Where is the differentiation? How we can create networks or new connections with others to create value? How we can improve structures or alignment of our talent & assets? or how we can create a signature or superior methods for generating value?
2. Re-imagine offerings by transforming product performance and product systems. They are excellent at unearthing shared visions of value, translating across teams & organisations, distinguishing features and functionalities, and identifying complementary products & services.
3. Create unforgettable experiences by identifying opportunities in services, channels, brand, and customer engagement. They can identify the enhancements that surround your profit model and offerings, how you can better deliver your offerings to your customers & users, how you represent your offering & business, and the distinctive interactions you foster with your innovation.

In synthesis, at the heart of our discipline lies a playground for creative minds in love with diverse, complex and uncertain value challenges. As per Keely, Pikkle, Quinn, and Walters ( 2013), our playground at least includes the following:

Image N|1. The Ten Types of Innovation. An Overview.

Reference: Keely, Pikkle, Quinn, and Walters (2013).

That's right! There's more to it. Now more than ever the practice of innovation incorporates system innovation too. Something that looks like this:

Image N|2. Innovation Spiral.

Reference: Nesta (2019).

Innovation practitioners now more than ever have a window of opportunity to impact gender balance, sustainability, technology uptake, and democratisation (at the least). For example, we have seen the extraordinary emergence of gender analytics for innovations, or frameworks to make sure that innovations integrate ESG criteria.

In a world continuously expanding, innovation practitioners have a lot more to contribute than ever before and a playground that shouldn't be lessened. It is fantastic that we have these enablers and value integrators ( a.k.a marketplaces ?? ).

Hasta pronto,

Nastasha Velasco