ISSUE 03 2014
INNOVATION
23
Rather than there being just a few dozen innovating product and services companies for CSPs to talk to, there are instead tens of thousands – or even hundreds of thousands – lurking in the digital undergrowth
Social network analysis here can help executives diagnose their existing human networks, understanding things like the frequency of collaboration and the levels of cross-functional interactions, identifying and enabling those individuals who are central nodes in the sharing and dissemination of important information and insight. An understanding of the behaviour patterns of these key people – the human catalysts of an organisation – can act as an essential building block in creating an effective innovation network.
Concepts such as Collaborative Innovation Networks – known as CoINs – are being adopted widely and arguably involve the same concepts as those that have driven the explosion in open source software.
The democratisation of innovation There’s also the growing potential of the democratisation of innovation. The argument is that small companies have recently become greatly empowered by a combination of affordable access via the Cloud to potentially transformative technologies and the wide and ready availability of angel funding. With only a few tens of thousands of dollars, an entrepreneur can take a great idea from vision to working reality, without ever having to go begging to big companies or the major venture capital outfits.
The CSPs will still obviously have the really important brand, process, system and infrastructure assets that we all
recognise, that the small innovative players want to exploit, but the relationship will ultimately be a far more balanced one. Rather than there being just a few dozen innovating product and services companies for CSPs to talk to, there are instead tens of thousands – or even hundreds of thousands – lurking in the digital undergrowth. Just take a look at
www.bobbil.com – a new approach to classifying these companies developed by my team in conjunction with the book.
Any service the CSP’s executives imagine in their wildest dreams has probably been developed already by ten different companies, while thousands of companies are about to do things that the CSP couldn’t even conceive of. The democratisation of innovation has dramatically increased both the supply of ideas and the hybridisation between different domains of expertise. The difficult job is now working out which ones are going to be viable – and hopefully profitable. LTE
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