Spot the Next Innovation Wave

Ambassador Series, Part 3 — Written by Ubald Kragten, Comintelli Ambassador and founder of EyE on I, Innovation scouting consultancy, and Kari Syrjä, Head of Growth at Comintelli

Join Ubald Kragten and Kari Syrjä for a webinar on identifying and acting on emerging innovation

Key takeaways

• Expanding your view beyond your company's existing value drivers is the key to spotting the value drivers
• While the tools may remain the same, the “manual” of usage is different, as the outcome will focus on your future value-generation options

Introduction

Spotting the next innovation wave needs to be on the agenda of every company. Nevertheless, your current insights to grow and defend the value of your company are essential for daily operations.

We argue that these are two sides of the same coin. Identifying today's innovations being one side and catching the value of emerging future opportunities, the other.

Why Does Looking at Both Sides of the Coin Matter?

It can be very challenging to look at both sides of the coin at the same time.

A Global Scenario

Consider the B2B context of the European energy supply situation. Many countries and businesses are being heavily impacted by the Ukraine war and their dependency on Russian natural gas. To replace the risk, new contracts are required with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) suppliers, for instance. And such massive changes are not decided nor implemented overnight.

In this context, what is the alternative side of the same coin?

Already a long time before the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Western economies had committed themselves to transition towards fossil-free energy generation, which requires a drastic system change. Even though energy price hikes have pushed up renewable energy investments to record levels, the benefits of those investments on scale take time. LNG short-term solutions represent carbon outputs and work against climate goal commitments.

A Retail Perspective

If global energy matters sound too far away from a local business perspective, let’s showcase the same matter with another B2B2C example with retailers.

A retailer will typically look at its market share compared to a well-defined set of peers. They adapt pricing and campaigns and may change the look and feel of shops compared to competitors.

Most retailers, however, will not be too worried about some small shop that recently opened just around their corner, even though or especially, if that particular shop represents some entirely new concept leveraging the potential of digital opportunities. Most often, the retailer does not even notice that a brand-new channel has opened.

A B2C Example

Finally, from the consumer B2C angle, if you’re in the movie and TV series business, growth is increasingly about where and how the produced entertainment is consumed in addition to what people would like to watch.

Future Value Drivers and Innovation

With these three examples, you can see that future value drivers may require changing your entire business model. It means implementing new technologies, developing new distribution channels, and engaging your customers in completely new ways.

To keep an eye on innovation and to capitalize on these emerging futures, one must look at both sides of the coin to secure both the current and the future value of the company.

What Are Your Knowledge Management Challenges?

Within most organizations, the following knowledge management challenges are reported frequently:

• Reserving time on your agenda is the very first mandatory requirement. Calendars tend to be busy with daily routines. You must dedicate time slots to start looking at the hidden side of the future value of your company.
• With more eyes and ears you can capture more. Secure internally cross-functional engagement to discuss the signals of change. Build a shared understanding of why these signals can trigger a new wave of innovation and growth.
• Finally, look outside of your traditional “usual suspects” list and comfort zone. Expand your search window by subscribing to new external sources, attending different events, and engaging with a new group of external influencers and domain experts.

Day-to-Day Needs

From a knowledge management and insights process perspective, it is important for a company to address both sides of the coin while keeping them separated.

If you’re fully focused on running your day-to-day business needs, adapting your prices and portfolio based on seasonal demand and other operational factors, your time for innovation is scarce and focus is everything. Hence, you do not want to be disturbed by the noise from somewhat unrelated events happening on the outskirts of your industry. You will simply pass and move on.

Longer-Term Considerations

At the same time, longer-term developments require continuous attention. Every company needs to address long-term opportunities and threats while the frequency and intensity of such scanning will be industry-dependent.

Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) focused companies tend to look at next year's portfolio with new product introductions, minor product improvements, and new offerings, whereas further on the horizon, a complete category change might create better opportunities to accelerate growth.

One such example is the growing trend of non-animal-based meat and dairy alternatives in food production, which has started to create impact throughout the industry.

How to Secure YOUR Spot on the Next Innovation Wave AND Create Impact

As highlighted above, knowledge management and insights processes discover opportunities. The focus is on identifying and amplifying the signals spotted from the haystack of messages, issues, and priorities.

This is a shared responsibility of both business leaders and product development researchers. The difference is that competitor moves, new emerging companies, new business models, new ecosystems, venture capital investments, and governmental support programs are usually on the table of business leaders. In contrast, scientific developments, intellectual property, patent filings, and emerging technologies are more the focus of the R&D community.

Change will not happen overnight but spotting signals needs to be a continuous effort.

The first step in amplifying trends can be set by combining these signals. Connected findings paint a picture of opportunities for a company to grow. These pictures can be translated into narratives, alternative scenarios, triggering brainstorming workshops, and more. All of these efforts are preparing an organization to decide where to invest and why.

What Is Different?

Spotting signals of change require a different set of lenses. It starts with the natural curiosity of the people involved in innovation as part of the knowledge management and insights-producing process.

Furthermore, it is crucial to realize that your current set of sources must be extended significantly. The good news is that most of your existing tools can continue to be used. In other words, this doesn’t necessarily translate into a steep cost increase.

Many excellent reports are available (almost) free of charge, such as annual trend reports by leading global consulting companies. Similarly, venture capital and public sector governmental reports highlight where both private and public money is directed to.

Conclusion

In summary, you can keep your current set-up while expanding it to discover new areas. You only need a different set of lenses to start looking beyond the core focal areas for today's business landscape and to create internal stories that trigger the discussion across business units and stakeholders about the next innovation wave and how to capture it.

Overwhelmed? Curious about how to move forward? Ubald Kragten and Comintelli are glad to help you on your innovation journey to spot the next innovation wave.