Work Packaging is the Second Stop of the Future of Work Journey
Why Innovation is not a discrete process
The very definition of Innovation must be understood as the “Pursuit of Excellence”. Which means it is continuously evolving and will lead to disruption with its outcomes. In the context of our current life, digital offers us sustainable alternatives in materials through Biotech, 3D/4D printing and Nanotech as well as in infrastructure with enmeshed networks, Robotics, Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence and Pervasive Computing.
The two things essential for Continuous Innovation, both from an Individual as well as an Enterprise perspective are a Sandbox / Experimentation facility coupled with a Collaborative and Sharing Community.
Those who embrace the concept of Innovation, especially the Contributing Individuals and the Creative Startup enterprises must examine closely whether they have access to these two significant resources that will catalyze their Innovation. And of course, the infrastructure must have an osmotic relation between the Innovation of the Conceptualization and Engineering to the Operation of Industrialization and Commercialization.
A Pipeline of Intellectual Property
Innovation is a two wheeled locomotive. The young startups more than any incumbent and established enterprise must realize this. They have not been funded to compete with existing monoliths but rather to create new markets and bring about a new customer world. Not engage in the game of attrition but rather create new Structures (Ecosystems & Relationships in them), Synergies (Culture including Values, Beliefs and Assumptions) and Systems (Solutions and Applications) to life. This demands a more disciplined approach to establishing the twin aspects of Mind 2 Market and Time to Market; that will enable disruptively transformational and sustainable growth for them and their customer universe.
Innovation is Cost Intensive and Venture Capitalists cannot keep funding an Enterprise forever, can they? Therefore at the very outset, there needs to be a method to an effective exit strategy not just in theory but in real practice.
The old economic model of Valuing an Enterprise based on its Pipeline of Customers is slowing, giving way to Valuing with the Pipeline of Intellectual Property (IP). Addressing the dual challenge of bringing in new and premium revenue along with reduced cost of customer acquisition made possible by the reduction in customer attrition. This is the continuous part of innovation that no enterprise can miss. It is more important for startups as we have seen many of them die or acquired by the incumbents and that has denied societies the energy of fresh thinking and progress.
The Flow of Work
As we begin to Visualize and Implement the Future of Work, the most central question that preoccupies us at Giggr and that needs to be answered for you is whether or not the entire Flow is being brought into perspective. It starts with Talent Transformation as the first stop (https://bit.ly/3E2YYKV) that was addressed in my previous edition. This edition addresses Work Packaging as the second step. The preamble about Innovation was necessary to address the modern challenge of Orchestrating both Work and Innovation concurrently.
The five things that go into producing work are Data, Talent, Materials, Finance and Infrastructure in that order as depicted in Illustration 1. The modern enterprise, be it a startup or an incumbent, must consider packaging the work in an effective way for it to be executed. We have arrived at this strategic inflection from the last two years of the Covid Pandemic exposing the inherent inadequacies of enterprises using various strategies of OutSourcing, InSourcing, CoSourcing and / or Shared Services to effectively package their work and produce Profitable and Productive Outcomes. Each one of those management trial and errors have had their moment under the sun. But the Future of Work clearly belongs to a different risk assured model that cuts the chase to getting work done with an accurate definition and greater leadership accountability for outcomes.
Data and Talent must fuse to be Cognitively Intelligent in their dynamism to adapt and transform processes and work outputs in real time establishing new patterns. The focus of intelligence must shift from Commerce to Creation.
Accuracy in Planning & Preparing is what Work Packaging is about. And this can happen only with Intelligence as an input funneled through the Processes of Value (Customer, Industry & Life Ecosystems), Intellectual (Technology & Data) and Human Capital (People & Talent). The Third Stop of the Flow of Work will deal with the three processes in details but the relevance here is how People & Technology fused with Cognitive Intelligence will benefit from Creating Solutions and Applications continuously with a Work Package that addresses the duality of Mind & Time to Market.
Isn’t it a travesty that all those bright and shiny startups that have been trying to earn their stripes as the disruptors of the world have just managed to perpetrate their drills from the past whereas what is required is for a new discipline to be established.
At Giggr — The Future of Work, we are concerned with this Transformation driven Innovation that starts with framing the status quo and seeing the journey into the future, departing from the present. The digital platform that we are creating therefore looks at the journey in continuum assuring that each of the stops is well serviced for the rest of the journey to be a unique engagement and experience for its customer universe. There is a lot to unpack here and clearly an engagement will help dialog this in more detail.
Authors Jean-Louis Barsoux, Cyril Bouquet, Michael Wade in their September 2021 Harvard Business Review article opine that Innovators who experiment solely to validate their idea are making a dangerous mistake, pointing out to the inventor of the Segway as a prime example. The purpose of experimentation should always be twofold, they say: to test an assumption and learn from the testing, so you can decide whether to persevere, pivot-or pull out. They show how ‘radical innovators’ use experiments to validate and investigate. Their investigation is a more open-ended form of experimentation, designed to illuminate overlooked factors or preferences. Most importantly, it leaves room for unexpected insights to emerge along the journey to product launch.
As the above Illustration 3 and the preceding paragraph indicates, Giggr’s digital platform advances from Conceptualization (Models) to Engineering (Solutions) to Industrialization (Applications) to Commercialization (Customers & Consumers). We will deal with this in greater detail in the next edition that addresses the Third Stop on the Journey of the Flow of Work.
