As Victor Hwang wrote in a Forbes article last April (2014), “…in actuality there aren’t many new business ideas. Most of the time we just slap new labels on old things.”
So we when we hear or read about an actual new idea, it’s time for us to sit up, take notice and think about what makes it a new idea and the implications and applications of the idea. The new idea is the term from the natural world “ecosystem”, as applied to the term “business ecosystem, and more importantly for our consideration, the “Innovation Ecosystem”.
Hwang notes that the term seemingly “spikes out of nowhere” when looked at using Google’s NGRAM viewer and phrase search trends around 2007 (the actual charts are in Hwang's article). Interestingly, the phrase “innovation ecosystem” began trending in Google searches in late 2010 and continues today.
When we considered the concept, read more about it, and talked about with our partners and clients, the application of the natural world concept of an ecosystem applied to innovation has some very real questions and implications for organizations in
- How they approach innovation,
- The design of their innovation programs,
- How they manage their innovation process, and
- Where their innovation ideas come from.