Why
Should innovating be approached as a one-time reformation, or a transformation?
- Innovating as reforming acknowledges changes in the environment, and responds with an approach of "unfreezing-changing-freezing".
- Innovating as transforming embraces continuing changes in the environment, and continually evolves an open innovation approach.
The Trito Innovation Colab encourages organizations to move away from innovating as "communicate-and-hope", and towards enskilling mindful attention. Innovating is not just an idea; innovating requires that individuals and group bear agency in a material world.
Collaborating
To solve all of your customers' needs, "It's better to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals", said Bill Joy. "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else".
- Well-articulated context:
- Bounding collective action with an unambiguous framework empowers individuals to align their individual activities without dictating the specific means to be taken.
- Listen-and-comply:
- Sensing changes in the environment and responding to each and every customer with appropriate offers is a service-driven adaptive enterprise.
- Anticipate-and-preempt:
- Making decisions within the system about the system, enables foresight on collective behaviours, structures and rules, and purpose.
Innovating
Moving beyond an organization prioritizing invention, establishing an appropriate dynamic stability strategy manages the formation around product change and process change.
- Mass production:
- Organizing for a stable product with stable processes bases on the premises of predictable specifications, standardization and routinization.
- Continuous improvement:
- Producing a stable product with dynamic process changes allows incremental modifications through organizational learning that advance quality, speed and cost.
- Mass customization:
- Creating a dynamic product change with stable processes enables unique responses to unpredictable customer demands where articulating specifications is difficult.
Researching
Knowing earlier is more than skating "to where the puck is going, not to where it is". Extrapolating the past into the future is insufficient.
- Scientific method:
- When a phenomenon has a history of recurring, investigating produces a body of theoretical knowledge with which deductions are validated with empirical or measurable evidence. Collecting data enables testing, with hypotheses validating for changes, refinement or rejection.
- Design synthesis:
- To "create the future", a an abductive approach to design thinking involves synthesis, which is putting things together (in counterpoint to analysis, which is taking thing apart).
- Unbounded systems thinking:
- Sweeping in knowledge through an open system of inquiry can combines objective forms and subjective forms together.