Axel Magnuson

“…for business concept innovation to flourish, the responsibility to strategy making must be broadly distributed. In this sense, you can’t have innovation in business models with-out innovation in political models.”

Increasingly, the complexity of problems, the proliferation of formally educated specialties, and the pace of globalization require that the problem solving activities involved in new product development be shared across disciplinary, cognitive, geographic and cultural boundaries.

What’s our response to the challenges of complex business concept innovation?

Designing a number of linked innovations across an entire organization requires a method of design that permits a business-wide set of design interactions. That method has to be some form of process that brings in more parts of an enterprise, is intensely collaborative, creates movement towards action and breaks down previous patterns of making decisions.

There is a whole class of business design technologies, or planning media, available to use within organizations to create concepts and direct them into business innovation. Many of the most successful large-scale innovators use varieties of such processes to move into continuous innovation modes, and strong competitive positions.

They all arose from strands of thinking that centered on changing how people work together to accomplish common aims, especially groups in large and complex organizational forms.

These processes use large-group, open-system work technologies to generate innovative ideas, model their implications for the rest of a system, challenge feasibility, and then develop designs for execution.

In what has come to be recognized as the counter-approach to command and control management, these technologies all follow some basic common principles. They all work to create common goals that embody the aspirations of the system as a whole, individuals and corporate. They engage large numbers of people representing all aspects of the commercial ecosystem in which the firm exists, including many normally thought to be out-siders, like customers and suppliers. They employ democratic norms and processes that break down existing habits of thinking and fiscal attitudes. They enable wider knowledge to be brought to bear on visions, conditions, problems, and goals.

They work because they enable conversations that would never have taken place other-wise. The conversations change the ideas, and the ideas change the conversation.

They address several of the major blocks to business concept innovation.

Alignment and a “big direction”

Organizational structures and processes are very often silo-like. In most organizations getting movement toward a radical concept seems like a pipe-dream. Vision-based planning is one approach to getting alignment. To develop a shared vision requires a strong suite of whole-system design technologies.

Shared vision replaces command-and-control in terms of direction-setting mechanisms. The typical leadership challenge of getting “buy-in” for far-reaching innovation fades in significance in this way of work. The “why?” and the “where to?” are firmly, and widely, established. Robert Fritz in his Path of Least Resistance describes the effect of having a vision this way: “When an organization chooses a result, the members can more easily mobilize the resources of the organization. The processes that will aid in the direct creation of that result are more easily found or invented and executed.”

This alignment gets a big push from the fact that the “whole system is in the room”. This fundamental shift in the way that people work, and which people are working, has a variety of effects in creating an aligning vision. Probably the most important is that it is a base for integrating innovation concepts among people with similar aspirations in hereto-fore disconnected parts of the organization. Not surprisingly, the same phenomenon surfaces competing conceptions of what is desirable and feasible to be worked out.