For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this hypercompetitive world, you can expect your competitors to strike back just as fast and as hard as you can. The days of settling for quick responses in hopes of catching up fast are far behind us. These action and reaction forces mean that you need to be at least one step ahead as you plan a series of second acts to maintain your lead. How can you create a sustainable competitive advantage that becomes your lifetime fountain of creativity?

For starters, squeezing out more process efficiency from your existing solutions is not the be all and end all that is going to help you get there. The 2020s will be remembered for many reasons, but I predict this will be the decade when building innovation ecosystems will become “the thing” to do — just as significant and powerful as the six sigma initiatives were in the 1990s and agile practices in the 2000s. Before you know it, efficiency and agility will be usurped by cognitive diversity. As many organizations moved to a subscription and service-based model, the upper hand belongs to those who build and leverage value-creation relationships. 

With industry lines blurred, many organizations are reaching into each other’s businesses and fighting over the same customer. You can think of it as a never-ending tug-of-war where the one who pulls ahead is the one with a steady grip. It is not about brute strength; rather, it is about knowing when to tug and when not to. It’s quality over quantity just as it is effectiveness over efficiency. This advantage is achieved with the strategic use of your co-innovation network. Know when and how to use them to better serve your customers and stakeholders. 

The eleventh principle from the Future-Fit Manifesto states that “The best models, methods, and concepts emerge from Community interactions.” The community, or ecosystem, consists of your employees, customers, partners, academia, and governments. You cannot depend solely on self-organizing teams and highly motivated individuals as agile thinking purports. 

The nature of collaboration has evolved exponentially and at a scale that has become difficult to grasp. For your organization to connect and stay connected with the right contributors from the inside out and outside in, you need to design the right ecosystem model that fits your business. This means pairing up the right people to identify the right opportunities and challenges that create significant value well beyond the efficiencies and continuous improvements realized with the six sigma and agile initiatives of the past.

Getting the Right People to Join In

Constant tension and pull create motivation. Using the right rhythm to create a race against time centers on sound people strategy. Many campaigns go nowhere fast because they lack the right communication and gamification plan. With many competing priorities, community participants will be scant unless there is a compelling force that pulls them in and keeps them engaged. To achieve this, consider the following two areas:

  • Outreach Campaign: Finding the right contributors is half the battle. Identify which ecosystem to tap into and decide on how you are going to get their attention. This means creating a clear strategy that lays out how your invitation will reach the right people and draw them in. Here, the little details come together to make it a big hit. The tagline, messaging and any tidbits that highlight the socioeconomic, environmental and cultural impacts should be short, sweet and to the point. Using the 80-20 rule, this means your target audience will at best involve 20% of who you reach out to. Overestimating how many people will actually take interest in your initiative is the primary reason for failure in this area. Go wide and go as deep as you can to get to a dependable and motivated 20% group.

  • Recognition and Rewards: How meaningful your incentives are to your community  makes up the other half of the battle. Gamification is a science that often suffers from malpractice, as it requires careful planning and consistent fine tuning to deliver the results you expect to achieve, otherwise people will lose interest and pull out fast. The 80-20 rule applies here too. You need to ensure recognition extends to 80% of people but rewards are limited to the 20% who will bring in the majority of the best ideas. This means everyone has a chance to be recognized, but the key contributors are the ones you are empowering to make it worth their while and worth your investments. 

Getting Ideas Over to the Right Side

We live in a world of overabundance: There is too much of everything but not enough processing power, knowledge, resources and time to take advantage of it all. The mistake many organizations make is to think they already have enough ideas. Instead, they should  multiply their efforts to connect with and learn from new people with different perspectives. Thinking through the process of how to create positive momentum and make sure ideas come to fruition can be managed using the following approaches:

  • Head-to-Head Evaluation: Ideas that make it to commercialization can potentially fail in the market due to the lack of feasibility, desirability, or viability (Forrester, 2020). You can avoid these pitfalls by assessing your top ideas against each other — head-to-head. While doing so, it’s important to factor in the business criteria you want to use to decide which idea should be pursued. The three factors mentioned above are a great start, including other considerations such as financial impact, alignment with strategy and level of risk to identify the different scenarios and business lenses you want to consider for various types of innovations and their value to the business. By indicating the degree of agreement of one criteria over another, you can make quick decisions and easily consider a range of ideas depending on the different lenses you want to apply to the ideas you want to retain.

  • Collaborative Business Canvas: Creating large, complex and arduous financial models to justify new investment kills business momentum especially on game changing opportunities. Instead communicate your value proposition using a simple collaborative business canvas that allows you to be nimble and easily present your pitch to stakeholders in a concise one-page format. Business model, business innovation, lean, SWOT or flourishing canvases are great examples of models you can use to zoom in on untapped opportunities. 

You can think of your stakeholders as the drivers who are on the sidelines but make the call when to pull and when to release. The tug-of-war in innovation is much more than just pulling the rope, but one thing is certain: having a whole ecosystem of partners on your side will definitely stack the weight in your favor.


Ludwig Melik

CEO at Planbox and author of the Future-Fit Manifesto. I help organizations build a sustainable culture of innovation. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.