Practice Currently Fails Perception: A Study of Services Innovation In Australia

Accurate analysis around innovation activity in services and the services industry in the Australian economy is very difficult to track down. Firstly there are issues of definition of what the services industry actually constitutes and possibly lots of overlap with other supposed “non-service” categories such as Agriculture, Manufacturing and Mining & Resources. Secondly there is a paucity of understanding of how the innovation systems in services industries typically operate. In one sense the services sector has been a victim of its own success – because it has been steadily growing and has not been in decline like, for example, Automotive Manufacturing Sector, it has not ended up being the focal point for in-depth studies about its innovation characteristics. On the definition side, the Australian Bureau of Census and Statistics writes.. “a service industry produces services valuable to consumers as a final product, such as services provided by cafes and restaurants, or valuable to other service and goods producers as an intermediary input, such as wholesale trade and accounting services.” Hardly helpful!! While ABS reports that in 2012 services made up 71.2 percent of Gross Value Added economic activity and provided jobs for 86.1 percent of employed persons, there is only poor data and limited understanding about the operations of the many services sub-sectors, which are increasingly niche focused and which also increasingly defy simple ABS categorisation methods. As I started to look for detailed data and evidence to better understand the dynamics of the local services sector and its innovation practices I quickly started to draw a blank. I googled various variations on the theme of innovation research

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The Blind Spot Phenomenon in Innovation and How to Discover It.

The cumulative creative behaviours of senior leadership teams offer a strong indicator of whether an organization can successfully work their way through an innovation or transformation initiative. I stumbled across this phenomenon when I started to witness impediments and then the breakdown of well intentioned and well planned innovation initiatives on an organizational scale. It was clear to me these impediments occurred at senior levels not because of any deliberate subterfuge. They occurred because of “the blind spot phenomena” in creative skills and capabilities within teams working on innovation. The cliché “what you don’t know, you don’t know” occurred to me as best way to describe these circumstances. Creativity, that element of discovery, experimentation, invention, perception and risk which drives innovation, creativity’s output, is subjective. It is influenced by our personal creative attitudes, behaviours and practices. It is an area of skills development that goes to the very heart of who we are and how we behave and is very difficult to talk about directly. In my own journey as an innovation practitioner, the “blind spot phenomenon” revealed itself slowly over a period of six months as a result of the application of

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Why It Is Important To Speak About Organizational Creativity and The Future in 2014

The Current Climate With the US economy finally starting to turn around, China continuing to grow, albeit a little slower, and the awakening of global regional economies with relatively stable governments such as Central and South East Asia, skilful and measureable strategic innovation will emerge in 2014 as a key organizational capability. Yet, for all the millions of articles, interviews, tweets and videos offered almost daily on the topic of innovation, there is little real understanding and experience at senior leader levels around the length of commitment and type of experience required to make innovation a key driver for business or organizational success . In 2013, in particular, I had conversations with senior leaders in which they declared the time had come to grow their business again. Over the last six years since the global financial crisis, they have successfully managed the business by

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The Digital Toolbox Landscape

The recent report Navigating The Digital Future, part of Booz & Company's Global Innovation 1000 2013, whilst superfical in many senses, is an important piece of work and worth reading - one of the better pieces of research around the emerging digital technology driving the future of innovation.

Why An Organization Should Build Its Own Digital Innovation Process and How It Can

Every organization is systemically and uniquely creative, made up of its employees’ cumulative creative capabilities and experiences. To make innovation work in that context requires a way of devising an organizational framework that recognizes the unique creative contribution of each person whilst fitting it into the individual uniqueness of the organization’s creative culture as a whole. Digital collaboration technologies, currently the digital rage such as ideation platforms (the process of creating and capturing ideas), take a one shoe fits all approach to organizational creativity, regardless of the inherent uniqueness of the creative culture of the organization. Further, ideation platforms create disruption to organizational process when they are layered onto existing technology infrastructure currently driving the organization. Unless there is genuine intrinsic motivation for an employee to participate, the ideation platform will die along with the innovation initiative, subsumed into the myriad of current digital technology processes employees are required to engage with on a daily basis. My recent research shows a failure rate as high as 80% on money spent

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