Entering 2019 – What Do Each of Us Need to Focus Upon?

As we enter 2019 I always like to take a day or so, to reflect and think about what I should be focusing upon in the next year, around innovation. What has influenced me in 2018 and what I feel is shaping my thinking going into 2019?

I can honestly say, it never fully works out as the year progresses, there are distractions, subjects that attract my eye, hold my attention or simply ones become bigger in my wish to pursue as important to understand or become more focused upon.

Innovation is constantly shifting in customer needs and issues to absorb, relate too, build into our thinking, in a world where many within the business community are “time-starved, often knowledge poor” I look to help them on different innovation insights.

What about you? Here are my thoughts coming from 2018 that are leading me into 2019

Firstly in the year just closing I have been taking a look back at what I wrote about in 2018. Digital and innovation dominate.

On this site paul4innovating, I wrote 34 posts, a drop on past years, but increasingly with the shift into the constant integrating of digital into all things innovation, continuing as the emerging trend and theme, I seemed to spend the most time upon. On my other main site focusing specifically on ecosystems and platform related work, I wrote 25 posts.

Also in this year I began to put some fresh  life on two new posting sites, one focusing specifically on coaching and mentoring “guide4innovating” and the other “connecting digital and innovation” looking more at the critical part of digital and innovation that is forming most of my posting and researching work in recent months to break it out. My one other continues a very tortuous journey of building the dynamics when linked, become the connecting points in building innovation in the needed capacity, capability, and competence, that I term the pursuit of “innovation fitness dynamics“

Why do I run so many posting sites?

Some people just look at me, rolling their eyes until I explain that each has a specific innovation purpose or focal point that needs this separating out, as more specialized reference sites for the work I do, it is easier to “point” to these. Well, that’s my excuse! I post to deliver specific content and context that I want to inform.

They are simply clear “points of reference” specifically focusing on building blocks, based on my work focus.

So let me provide my leading posts in 2018 on: www.paul4innovating.com

The stand-out posts were ”Shifting our thinking within the 4th Industrial Revolution“, followed closely by  “The arrival and potential of Knowledge Graphs into our World” then followed by Applying the Three Horizon Thinking to a Fresh Perspective of Innovation Design and close behind “A New Integrated Innovation Engagement System“

The one that consistently performed at or near the top, has been every single year since I published it in late 2010, eight full years of posting has been “The Three Horizon Approach to Innovation”

The one that disappointed me?

I had expected this to do as well as the others mentioned above.  “There are Known’s and Unknowns in Innovation” For some reason it did not but this could be that it was published first over on another site, at Hype Innovation.

Then on my other main posting site www.ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com

The three most popular published this year were “The Emerging World of Connected Industrial Ecosystems”followed by “Platform Providers need to think more about Ecosystems Principles and Design” then“When is a partner not a partner?”

The one I was disappointed with as it did not get as many reads as I would have expected was “Defining Ecosystems in Industry” I really thought that offered a lot of insight into the developments of IIOT ecosystems and their platforms

So an interesting mix, I get the impression that innovation posts as stand-alone tend not to be as popular, they do need to be attached to something else (digital, platforms) or help sove a problem, offer a solution or otherwise they simply get caught up in the “mass” of these “helpful suggestions of useful lists” that are constantly coming out daily. Nothing wrong with those, they remain popular and I do a fair share if I feel I can add some new level of insight or help.

So as for 2019?

I have been contemplating a shift of tack. Again innovation runs through them all but it continues to be linked into the bigger picture and the power of technology and all things digital.

Here is my mind map as my starting point. Will I succeed in covering off all of these, actually should I? Let’s see.

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Innovation is in a constant shift in emphasis, in placing it in context and the context-specific work that I am looking to post about to give better learning value. The value creation emphasis is critical anytime but I feel in my coming year of advisory, mentoring and coaching it will have an even more central place alongside the constant “Interplay” between digital and innovation as the dominant factors..

I can’t get away from the belief we are in a “new innovation era”. It runs through all of the different focal points outlined in the above mind map.

I certainly wish you, my reader, a really great 2019. It is going to be a very tough year, unrelenting in change and innovation pursuit.

So onto 2019. I wish everyone that does invest their time in reading my posts a really big thank you.

I would like to do, even more, invest more in my thinking about innovation but these themes, outlined above, come more from the work I undertake or look to advise upon, on behalf of others, or in pursuit of my own researching interest. I hope they offer you some level of interest.

I laid out my original blogging intent here and so are attempting to be laying out my agenda for 2019. With this, I have hoisted my innovation flag, laid out my themes and put that proverbial ‘stake’ in the ground on my posting intent for the coming year.

My best wishes for a successful, productive and great innovating year ahead of you in 2019.