Business Finance - Management Assignment 1 White Paper

Student Resource

Chapter 2: Digital is different?

Chapter 2: Digital is different?

• In the following PowerPoint slides you will find the key headings from CHAPTER 2 together with the main illustrations, tables, etc.

• There are also slides summarizing the key messages in bullet-point fashion, and a wide range of activities which you can use to help students explore around these themes.

• Finally there are some reflection questions which can be used as the basis for discussion or assignments.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter you will have an understanding of:

The nature and origins of digital innovation

The case for seeing it as a transformative technology with pervasive impacts across all sectors

The role it can play in innovation management by providing powerful new tools to support the process

The wider management implications, especially in learning to operate at a system level

Core themes and material

from the book

Digital innovation…

• ….the suite of technologies around the creation or capture, storage/retrieval, processing and communication of information and their combination into high level systems with emergent properties.

Simplified model of digital innovation

Is it new?

Is it revolutionary?

Key features of digital

technologies

• Low cost leading to widespread application potential

• Common language – digital code – enabling communication and interoperability of software

• Fast easy communication - connectivity was the barrier back in the 1980s, even with advanced protocols like ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and similar.

• Increasing wireless connection potential

• Low cost enables intelligent functionality to be built into the simples of devices and then connected into systems – the ‘internet of things’

• Learning via machine (artificial intelligence)

• Potential to collect and work with Big Data – massive increases in the volume, variety and velocity of collection allows for pattern recognition and exploiting of network-level effects

What does it mean for innovation management?

The new digital toolkit

Stage in innovation process

Digital tools

Search Broadcast search / crowdsourcing Cross-sector pattern matching Patent mining Innovation contests Innovation markets User communities Netnography Internal collaboration platforms

The new digital toolkit

Implement Simulation and prototyping tools – e.g. 3D printing Collaboration platforms Co-creation communities Virtual teams AI/machine learning

The new digital toolkit

Select Idea markets Voting via collaboration platforms Crowdfunding Decision support tools Machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI) applied as decision tool Simulation and prototyping to extend the exploration phase at low cost

The new digital toolkit

Capture value

Networking and viral marketing to accelerate diffusion Platform models to concentrate and deploy knowledge Ecosystem construction AI/machine learning

Front-end innovation tools

• Innovation contests and crowdsourcing solutions

• Innovation markets

• Innovation communities

• Innovation toolkits

• Innovation laboratories, makerspaces, collective co-creation

Collaborative innovation platforms

• Finding ideas – crowdsourcing, broadcast search

• Selecting ideas – idea markets, comments and collaboration

• Implementing ideas – on and offline support for development and collaboration

• Targeting innovation – via campaigns and missions

• Knowledge management – capture, sharing, recombination

Digital tools across the innovation process

Driving new approaches

to innovation management

• Systems level thinking

• Platform thinking

• Changing role of knowledge

• Skills and capabilities

• Responsible innovation

Summary

In this chapter we have explored the potential of digital innovation, defined as the suite of technologies around the creation or capture, storage/retrieval, processing and communication of information and their combination into high level systems with emergent properties.

We have seen that although not new the momentum behind this technological wave has been building and has reached a maturity in development of key components and infrastructure that now enables system level solutions to be widely available across all spheres of social and economic activity

Such a trend and the accompanying emergent properties of such systems qualify digital innovation for being considered as transformative, having many characteristics associated with long waves of economic and social change

Summary

Digital innovation has two key implications for innovation management. First in the outputs of the innovation system; there is enormous scope for applying the technology and the challenge is to explore innovation space as effectively as possible to find and exploit these opportunities. At the same time the take-up of the technologies is limited by the availability of skills, structures and business models to enable them and so building these into digital innovation strategies will be important.

In terms of its implications for the process of innovation itself digital innovation offers a wide range of new and improved tools with which to work right across the process. Once again this has skills and capability building implications

Summary

There are also new challenges for innovation management emerging from the need to learn to operate at system level, co- ordinating and orchestrating the efforts of multiple actors and stakeholders in wider innovation ecosystems

The transformative potential of digital innovation raises questions about the purposes and consequences of such a trajectory and this underlines the need for a ‘responsible innovation’ approach

Videos

There are several videos which can help explore and present the key themes of the chapter: • David Simoes Brown of 100% Open talking

about the challenges of working in open innovation with especial emphasis on digital channels

• Catharina van Delden talking about her company Innosabi which has grown to be a successful business in the field of online community development to support agile innovation

• Michael Bartl talking about using digital tools for market research

• Pedro Oliveira talking about Patient Innovation, a healthcare innovation platform

• Francisco Pinheiro, Strategic Innovation Manager with Atos talking about the challenges of getting innovative ideas from employees via internal online platforms in the company

Blogs and podcasts

• There are several podcasts and blogs picking up key themes around managing innovation as a process and some of the key variables:

• Birth of the internet

• An innovation birthday party

• Alan Brown also has an excellent blog on digital innovation here

Tools

• There is a rich variety of tools to help with innovation and many of these have been significantly upgraded through the use of digital approaches. You can find a full list here.