Finding strategic innovation

One does not simply have an idea

How does one have an idea?

Strategy can be developed internally and externally. We can look at what we have and determine how best to focus on it. One approach is the VRIO tool to look inside your organization and note what is Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, and Organized. This is a good way of determining your organization’s value and differentiators; a resource-based view. Every organization should understand why it is different, what stakeholders look for in their interactions, and what customers want to buy. In larger entities, key values can be lost, and some regular introspection is helpful.

But just looking inside is limited. Around us, the world is changing, and with those changes come interesting capabilities and opportunities. Let’s consider a few ways of creating opportunities to find and evaluate new capabilities.

Sensory Feedback

Any organization needs to be able to sense its surrounding market. I talk in more depth here: sensory organizations. In short, an organization that becomes too insular risks being forgotten or ignored. Markets do change, and technology does advance, so a market-sensing feedback loop, formal or otherwise, is essential. This feedback loop could be linked to conversations with business developers or engineers. These conversations could simply be about understanding market trends, industry needs, or changing comfort around certain technology trends.

A cliched example is cloud adoption. A decade ago, the cloud was new; now, it is a business expectation. At least, the benefits of the cloud: scalability and reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), are expected. Even though the cloud is now well understood, there are numerous companies and organizations that are yet to adopt cloud technology. This story, in itself, reminds us that technology adoption sits on a spectrum. Understanding where your organization typically sits on this spectrum is useful. Are you an early adopter? Or does your company culture encourage a wait-and-see approach?

Weak Signals

If your organization can build those sensory feedback loops, how is that feedback consumed? At Sparkgeo, we talk about weak signals. For us, weak signals are the macro trends that have a massive cumulative impact. In Strategic Geospatial, I have often talked about complementary assets. These two concepts overlap a great deal. Weak signals usually point to evolving complementary assets, which are becoming more important to the industry. Having a sensory capability allows an organization to develop a working knowledge of weak signals and conceivably place them on an innovation curve. Having a series of signals placed on innovation curves allows an organization to strategically engage with a technology at the right time. This notion also references the paragraph above because different organizations want to engage with different technologies at different stages in a technology’s adoption (hype?) cycle. For instance, Sparkgeo typically adopts geospatial technologies early, especially around web and cloud applications. However, we are more circumspect with hardware and have not meaningfully jumped into augmented reality yet. Within our organization, we all know augmented reality will happen, just not quite yet. This might be because of a lack of consumer applications or because we think the chunky headsets are a barrier. We have a sense that augmented is not prime-time enough yet, for us. But, we are tracking the augmented reality trend because it would only take a small innovation in consumption technology to make AR the obvious technology choice suddenly. A small evolution in a complementary asset for geospatial and a massive consumer market will suddenly open.

Be Zoomy

What effect does one word have on the disposition of an essay? Can one word change a philosophy? Can one line of code change an industry? Maybe. As a strategist and as an executive, it really pays to be zoomy. Think about how to look at the details, then zoom out and consider the broader implications. Train yourself to be able to zoom in and out of various levels of industrial or corporate concern.

Here is an example. In small start-ups, epic heroes emerge, and these 10x developers can have an enormous personal impact on a project. But, with some success, the start-up grows, and those heroes quickly become villains. Their epic work becomes a bottleneck because only they can understand it. Epic heroes are not scalable because they are individuals. To meaningfully scale a technology business, a team must be able to iterate quickly over a piece of code. That code could be both arcane and wonderful, but if no one else can understand it, then it doesn’t scale. That 10x developer is not zoomy; they cannot zoom out far enough to see how their work must be consumed by others.

In strategy-land, we need to be able to zoom out to see how the industrial stage is set, then apply that directly to the positioning of a product, the layout of a user interface, or even a typographical choice. Broad strokes matter, but the devil is in the detail. In your zooming, don’t forget the middle. Decisions are made at a leadership level, but execution happens, and checks are signed in the middle zooms. people who can zoom in and out will quickly observe the hows and whys of organizational processes.

Collide

Taleb is a divisive character. But his work around black swans* is hard to ignore, and the notion of building robustness against negative black swans while attracting positive black swans is just good sense. In essence, his advice is to protect yourself and your organization against bad fortune while creating opportunities for good fortune. One of the key ways of attracting those positive black swans is simply by seizing the opportunity.

In terms of idea creation, this simply means:

1. take the meeting

2. go to new places and talk to new people

3. be open to challenge

4. be humble enough to listen and bold enough to question

5. foster directed curiosity

Look for good events where people congregate with the intention of sharing. Selfishly, I would encourage readers to look at North51. for exactly this kind of opportunity (that’s why my team is involved).

Sparkgeo @sparkgeo

“#NORTH51 has consistently focused on bringing together influential geospatial thinkers in a beautiful, inspirational environment. In the end, a geospatial consulting company like ours is defined by our ideas. Events like @N51Conference are our fuel.” - N51 Co-Chair, @geo_will

Hopefully, I’ll see you in Banff in May. We can tear geospatial apart, then put it back together better.

Previous Relevant Articles

Geospatial innovation strategy & the resource based view

Sensing markets