“Connecting dots” is a weekly consolidation of top ten articles read on weareinnovation.org, combining experts’ thoughts with readers interests.

Although innovation impacts a vast diversity of topics and projects, building an intelligent conversation between experts and initiatives enables to closely listen to how change takes place across sectors and organizations. Such an exchange of ideas and thoughts is enabled by a business, legal, social and technological framework that binds innovation skills and aspirations for a sustainable future into a single story. As a result, businesses and individuals are able to connect to relevant expert communities and platforms that can help them develop appropriate projects for growth while mitigating risks by sharing resources and partnering with appropriate skills. This open dialog is necessary to make the most of people-centric innovation while building an adaptive ecosystem for growth.

Scoping a multi-dimensional change

By including a variety of ideas and thoughts into a single conversation, innovation leads to discovering new concepts and values which can potentially generate ground breaking ideas. Diversity is a core element of making that conversation wide enough to incorporate dissimilar angles and views, covering unearthed inputs that can generate novelty.

Diversity is everything I have discovered since I live here, writing this blog, singing as part of my music band, living inner and outer diversity as a philosophy. My hope is that this experience of faithfully being and acting as diverse as I can be inspires others do the same and create a virtuous circle where creativity, truth, honesty, care, love and freedom transpire from the choices we make.

Read more: Creative Loneliness, WAI November 2015

In order to make sense of on-going conversations leading to new ideas, innovation needs to be structured so that differences can be constructive. One of the approach to build such a constructiveness is developed while clarifying misunderstandings to better apprehend the background and reasoning of diverging views.

For all of these reasons, writing and reading can be considered as on going dialog between knowledge and emotions, spreading a constantly changing message around specific topics or philosophies. By doing so, reading also enables to understand the value of having different viewpoints, the value of misunderstandings. As explained in the e-book “Diversity as a success story“, misunderstandings enable to:

• Highlight differences: identify in author’s viewpoints, historical context and experience the reasons behind his reasonings
• Analyze differences: question differences so as to build a constructive explanation leading to differing views
• Learn from differences: consider situations with a varying angle by listening to others’ emotions through reading their words
• Build on differences: outline the positive additions of combing dissimilar views to generate new solutions
• Set new common ground: define new attitudes and visions from newly integrated knowledge
• Cultivate differences: keep meeting, reading and analyzing different views as a virtuous knowledge cycle for growth

Read more: We Are Innovation because we read, WAI November 2015

The objective of driving a multi-dimensional dialogue within innovation is to better align complex goals entangled in a moving innovation ecosystem. For example, incorporating social and economic conditions is now seen as a mandatory requirement for sustainable growth.

William Sand from Strategy and Business provides an essential thought on cities: “But no matter the indicators we’ve tracked or the elements we’ve added to the mix, one thing has remained absolutely clear since the study’s inaugural year: No single overriding strength can assure lasting growth, or shelter a city from reversals, if social and economic conditions are out of sync.”

Read more: The disrupted society and the last mile, WAI November 2014

Connecting business, legal, social and technology

From new business models to environmental friendly initiatives, sharing ideas and resources enables to improve results while lowering costs and efforts. Collaboration not only works within companies, it helps ecosystems find the right connections to generate new businesses while delivering higher value.

AirBnB and Uber get one thing right: sharing means less costs and greater reach, even though complex difficulties. Same goes for environment. Sharing resources, knowledge, findings and enabling technology to find its right place in overall efforts leads to result. As a proof, the ozone layer is starting to recover, mentions Live Science: “an evaluation, conducted by 282 scientists from 36 countries, credits much of this recovery to international action that phased out the production and use of ozone-depleting chemicals”.

Read more: Privacy, sharing 2.0 and synergies that could save more than money, WAI October 2014

Innovation as an open dialogue needs a better defined legal framework to enable ideas to reach appropriate projects while hindering the loss of ownership and freedom of thought. As global issues grow even more complex, building such a framework remains a significant hurdle to building an efficient dialog across borders, businesses and sectors.

Although countries and governments are making tangible progress to define a legal framework around Big Data, press and media remind how looming mass-surveillance threatens our privacy and freedom in the online world. In the meantime, with the arrival of the COP21 in Paris at the end of the month, analysts outline hopes and risks around countries commitment to change, while presenting partnerships and initiatives that could help gain further impact.

Read more: The luxury of freedom and green lights of hope, WAI November 2015

Fortunately, social innovators are already engaged in shaping open ecosystems to highlight the necessity of connecting private and public interests to define an intelligent path to change. Although their political support is limited, results and concepts highlighted by social innovation underscore a well identified need to establish partnerships with a wider variety of skills and company types in order to better address social challenges.

As societies, economies and policies struggle to define models and strategies that efficiently answer challenges faced on a global basis, social innovation led in limited yet impactful initiatives showcase the talents and skills needed to drive intelligent change. By outlining the shortcomings and opportunities identified in our current business, economic and social models, experts call on organizations to be inspired by social innovation and replicate attitudes that can lead to measurable benefits for all. As key players, companies and businesses partner and initiate new programs as a way to better include social impact in their objectives. They are yet to be supported by a political willingness to drastically invest in social changes.

Read more: How social knowledge shapes new models, WAI November 2015

From a technological perspective, interconnections are even more obvious and highlight the need to hold global dialogues to refine requirements for developments. As an example, Artificial Intelligence is so closely linked to the Internet of Things and Big Data that better defining the value and business models for the latter areas is seen as a critical enablement to elaborate a suitable Artificial Intelligence deployment.

The forecasted market sizes for AI components and the investment activity around them reflect the same “uncertain enthusiasm” with regards to solutions launched to market. Compared to IoT market forecasts over similar periods, machine learning potential revenues are still nascent and show that from a business planning point of view, many other digital components will need to generate substantial benefits to enable AI full market potential. The on-going investments and discussions around AI oriented projects keep the topic on experts mind although consumer-led IoT and Big Data topics seem to currently outrun AI discussions, leaving them in a debate with high dependencies.

Read more: The human questions behind A.I. business models, WAI September 2015

Creating smart interactions

In order to build a constructive dialog, innovation should also focus efforts on content shared with appropriate targets. This idea segmentation is necessary to drive the conversation towards identified goals while creating the appropriate awareness and action plan as the dialog rolls-out.

Efforts should be concentrated on shaping the right content for the right target audience. Aurora Partners reminds: “There are also the pitfalls of reading too much into data and drawing out factitious results. For example, the practice of commissioning studies in order to support a new policy, theory or solution which has already been decided upon. An approach which is of course flawed and likely to result in failure.” The objective is described by Douglas Karr on Marketing Tech Blog: “This provides incredible opportunities for both segmentation and personalization – the holy grail of marketing: placing the message at the right time and right place to your customer or prospect without annoying them.”

Read more: New Strategy, New Marketing, WAI July 2015

Consequently, the interaction between internal strengths and external opportunities, as well as between internal weaknesses and external risks, includes the innovation dialogue in a dynamic that enables to better scope technological, social and economic requirements and impact. The rise of collaborative ecosystems and expert communities defines a smarter innovation that helps shape intelligent solutions and services for a sustainable future.

The development of new ideas necessitates the appropriate inclusion of external resources that meets internally identified strengths and weaknesses within companies’ ability to deliver value. As a way to better identify and drive innovation, organizations need to revive their talent pools while properly adapt their approach to disruption and transformation. Whether leaders or challengers, mitigating risks through collaborative ecosystems and shaping the right thinking processes for change are seen as determinant abilities to offset companies structural weaknesses. The technological advances brought by a smarter use of data holds the potential to harness the power of open innovation.

Read more: Daily Pick: 14 trends driving smarter innovation, WAI November 2015

As a core element of an open innovation dialogue, smart questioning and collaborative answering also calls on best talents and skills while nurturing a common knowledge to drive intelligent change. With people centricity and ecosystem dynamics at heart, innovation promises to connect inspiring ideas born beyond known barriers to help build adapted solutions for global issues.

Innovation requires learning. By constructing connected global knowledge communities, innovation experts and analysts encourage individuals and organizations to engage with a wider variety of thoughts and ideas to define intelligent change. Those global communities need to include the best of our entrepreneurship talents while smartly questioning the framework needed to foster a new ecosystem where people-centricity drives innovation. With humans at heart, new strategies and projects are able to reach to a diverse, open and equal crowd eager to build sustainable solutions for global issues.

Read more: The learning path to innovation, WAI November 2015

Innovation experts and analysts highlight the need for intelligent questioning and collaborative answering to better define a sustainable future through initiatives and projects launched to market. By connecting skills and ideas into a constant exchange of ideas, experts are in a better position to define adaptive solutions and tools that can help address growingly complex social, technological, legal and business challenges. This dialogue results in a continuous improvement of processes, strategies and project developments, using people-centricity and ecosystem dynamics as core engines for growth.