The Platforming of Innovation Psychology

In the last decade, the topic of emergent technologies has triggered a near-constant refrain for another topic, that of innovation. But is the assumed relationship warranted, or of value?

Early spoiler: The two are not as close bedfellows as many believe them to be in their native form. Indeed, Solow’s Paradox, where the increased investment in technology causes a reduction, instead of an increase, in the effective productivity of the workforce, raises its head in unexpected and different ways.

Nevertheless, the word ‘innovation’ is the Kardashians of the business world. Everyone seems to talk about it, even if they don’t quite get it. Articles, social media posts, webinars and conferences, all drip with the term and its conflation with technology proliferates.

Which leads us to the future.

Innovation is, of course, born of the notion that we do, or create, new things or better things, to improve future scenarios. However, just because someone may perceive trends within technology, that does not remotely make them a ‘futurist’, a field demanding far more methodological rigour than many who assume the mantle realise. To be sure, the overly simplistic straight-line correlation between innovation and the digital era is a faulty tower.

And yet, there is one such correlation that holds water.

Platforming

Not that long ago, the awe-inspiring frontier of technology was the base ability to develop new applications that, for example, enhanced business processes or advanced the customer franchise. Software development was the new gold. It was the specific act of making a thing, a capability of such scarcity, that was most esteemed. This new competence, in high demand but short supply, was like magic, and those who knew its tricks were the new breed of guru.

Innovative thinking was largely, if erroneously, framed as the art and science of making, as the rockstars of analogue industrialisation gave way to their digital peers. It was in this paradigm, that the conflation of technology and innovation took hold, a grip that remains today.

And yet, whilst that conflation was at times dubious, the next cycle of technology gives the relationship more credence. It is a distinction missed by many, but one that offers genuinely transformative powers when understood. That cycle, of course, was the rise of platforms.

Without digging into the technology pillar per se, or the stratosphere of generative AI that dominates its current headlines, it is the more corporate, strategic, and philosophic mental shift that should have your attention. I say again though, it is not the technology itself, but the effect of the technology that matters, and it bears some resemblance to the evolution of leadership through the macro-economic eras. For instance, it used to be that leaders focussed exclusively on delivering their commodities at the right time of year to buyers in the market square. Then, after industrialisation, the focus shifted to the economics of efficiencies and scale, which again, evolved after the 1950s Services Revolution, to consider the customer perspective (allegedly).

In each cycle, the mental models and demands on focus and energy were altered.

Today, with the rise of mainstream platform infrastructure, executives must modify their focus from the act of making – the north star of the early digital era – to that of creation. Without the inhibited psychology of asset manufacturing, digital or otherwise, there is now significantly less constraint on possibilities.

Instead, now is the time for creation, a capability at the heart of innovation-thinking. Yet, this is not as easy as it sounds. Attempting to break out of your mental paradigm necessary to create, is perhaps the greatest leadership (and personal) challenge that there is.

A few years ago, I had the distinct privilege of studying under the renowned Professor Sohail Inayatullah, Chair in Futures Studies at UNESCO and the late Doctor Robert Burke, then the Futurist in Residence at Melbourne Business School. Said they:

It is very important we understand that strategy is what you actually do. Strategic and business planning, although very important, is still just espoused strategy – it is not strategy in action. This is why futures thinking matters - it is the thinking you need to do before you even think about strategy. It is the rigor needed to create the relevance.

Rigor creates relevance.

The psychology of dated worldviews (or irrelevance), and a struggle to engage in deep pre-strategy thinking, is the weight that holds most back from their potential. No longer can technological capability, or its lack, be impugned.

Knowing What to Know

So, in the age of the platform where there is less and less limit to functional possibility, the real frontier has moved from knowing how to manufacture to knowing what to create in today's context, rather than yesterday's. What business models, what alliances, what brand extensions, what process reinvention, what distribution pathways?

As Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) said:

To know that we know what we know, and to know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

For leaders who can evolve their self, worldviews, and a personal sense of what is possible well outside an overbearing current paradigm - a matter of perception, after all - the sky is the limit. Mind you, none of us will master this because of the technology - that conflation is still erroneous I'm afraid - but the horizons that are now within reach, are unprecedented.

We need only to see them.