Connecting Dots is a strategic story combining 10 most read articles on weareinnovation.org over last week.

As digital trends gain a wider space in the economic, political and social area, the place of people, both as civilians and human beings, necessitates to be reassessed by future technology developments. While new learning tools need to be developed to align business priorities with human needs, the development pace of technologies needs to be followed up by business model innovation, built in the appropriate economic framework. To reach this objectives, experts suggest to diversify strategies by varying angles and thinking framework, thus creating the necessary space for growth and birth of breakthrough ideas.

Governance, Intelligence and Influence

The digital influence can be identified in economic policies and choices as analyst outline initiatives taken by governments in Europe.

While governments in Europe start to build and invest in digitally driven initiatives to modernize democracy, economists question the potential opportunities and threats of the sharing economy, as well as our ability to analyze and fix the way our current economies develop.

Read more: “The Digital Challenge: Politics and Economics“, WAI August 2015

Global searching tools reflect the mass of information now spread across people connected knowledge.

Innovation and technology hold other kinds of influence over politics. As Severin Carrell from The Guardian mentions, “Analysing live data on Google searches for the name Alex Salmond combined with commercial polling figures allowed the researchers to predict the yes vote would hit 45% – five days before that actual result in the referendum on 18 September.”

Read more: “Leading through change: Politics and Economics“, WAI March 2015

As a result, it is high time new rules are considered to take into account growingly digitalized interactions between businesses and people.

Ryan Fuller suggests a number of new indicators to evaluate performance, including collaborating times, interactions with managers. As he reports, “Now, with the ability to directly measure engagement, there is no telling what organizations and employees themselves will learn about what drives them.”

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

The human question in technologies

These technological influence and ensuing evolutions push analysts and experts to reassess innovation ability to focus attention on human needs.

The Internet has thrown us in an virtual environment of virtual freedom, opinion variety and sometimes conflicts. Information and data that can be used either for good or bad purposes. It leaves us with the responsibility of judgement, which is a great, if not the most important one. How do we, as one global community interacting on one global platform, draw the line between good and bad, that is sharing freely and protecting our freedom of privacy?

Read more: “Privacy, Sharing 2.0 and synergies that save more than money“, WAI October 2014

Education is seen as a leading engine to align learning tools with identified goals that favor human dignity over economic priorities.

In following article, he explains “the intellectual starting place to create and evaluate multiple scenarios is doubt”. In following article from Forbes, Jordan Shapiro mentions how “Education becomes the structure within which narratives of personal and collective identity are contextualized using the intellectual structures and academic skills that we’ve inherited from preceding generations. But we need to make sure that these tools are also aligned with learning outcomes which prioritize human dignity rather than haste, consumption, and algorithmic metrics”.

Read more: “People centricity in the age of robots“, WAI October 2014

But technology deployments have long surpassed business models maturity and are driving requirements, highlighting the need to better scope human place and role in defining future developments.

Although AI brings a strong appetite to market, the dependencies surrounding the delivery of adequate services and solutions seem to outweigh the business model maturity. With an on-going debate on long term value add of such services with regards to the economic changes AI may generate, and questions on human place in technology, experts and analysts provide a dynamic market overview of automation, machine learning and neural network researches, with the Internet of Things and Big Data as key enabler for future AI services.

Read more: “The human questions behind AI business models”, WAI September 2015

Further detailing innovation pathways

Strategy experts remind that accessing a wider array of data is also the potential opportunity to vary angles while considering innovation.

Innovation has yet to be seen in different angles, as the levels of issues it want to adress can vary from simple, complicated to complex. As this SSIR article explains, each of these problems requires a different strategy. Emergent strategy is highlighted as an adaptative plan that accepts “realised plans” which are affected by environmental changes unidentified in prior versions.

Read more: “Global Challengers, Innovation Styles and Complexity” WAI September 2014

On top of an ability to evaluate issues under different dimensions, strategies should also develop a stronger pragmatism, and resilience to achieve agreed goals.

As Michael Giusti from ISO & Agents mentions, “Just because there is new technology to implement, doesn’t mean we don’t need to finish implementing the old technologies,” said Gil Luria, managing director for Los Angeles-based Wedbush Securities.

Read more: “The payment chess board“, WAI November 2014

Beyond creating new strategies, experts and analysts encourage innovation practitioners to vary their thinking frameworks.

As innovation experts and analysts urge to develop smart strategic innovation policies, they outline how networks and development frameworks are basic patterns of organizational successes and growth. Beyond the need to work in smarter and connected models lays the need for a new breed of democracy where socially driven ecosystems instigate change on the long term, including through education. By breaking away from existing ways of thinking, innovation explorers are urging to present more answers than questions while connecting dots between experience and aims.

Read more: “Daily Pick: 9 requirements for a new way of thinking“, WAI February 2016

In the end, having the opportunity to vary thinking angles for innovation is a necessary condition to revive ideas pool and develop a smarter approach to market.

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: “14 trends driving smarter innovation“, WAI November 2015