Thinking about the bigger challenges in innovation consulting.

I’m thinking through some of the present challenges within the innovation consulting industry, those that might be holding it back to provide a greater contribution and set of services into clients.
So some of the barriers and challenges are:
1. Clients are facing an increasing fragmenting industry of many niche consulting players. This is becoming more the ‘boutique’ service providers who have limited scale and global practice but is really matching the clients’ ideal profile of global span and support? It is a constraint that requires clients to continue to build internal capability with its different but perhaps similar cost profile.
2. Consultants often do not have the ability to provide broad innovation experience or capabilities. This is another negative working against many consulting firms. Many of the partners have been out of their respective industry for a number of years and fail to appreciate the real ‘heartbeat’ and massive changes occurring that someone closer to these can detect and appreciate in the depth and implication applicable to them.
3. Forward thinking innovation centers within consulting are rare. There is so little contribute into the fresh knowledge stock, always needed by consultants to present their constantly updated “case of relevancy”. Often research is simply a re-hash of older material. A new solution has to be found to strengthen the innovation knowledge stock.
4. Sophistication & specialization is highly sought after but expensive to keep around. Having this expertise sitting on the bench within one consulting company is regarded more as a cost liability and not as a valuable asset.
5. Strategic understanding in fast changing, complex markets and organizations is extremely hard for outsiders (consultants) to grasp in the detail required. To be able to contribute into clients that are facing complex problems and to navigate these ‘fast flowing rapids’ needs a real sense of the pulse. All these are within the challenges to be resolved within the consulting industry.
6. Limited experiments are currently being undertaken in the innovation consulting practices. The focus is far more relating to taking best practices and applying them to as many clients as possible. Critical thinking in innovation is hard to justify. Experimental innovation is something clients are very unwilling to pay for yet they actually should be crying out for this, so as to gain competitive edges from these insights. This is a huge challenge to overcome.
7. Partners need to change their remuneration models that drive the consulting business. They focus in industry specific domains in general yet clients are seeking beyond their own borders increasingly to gain fresh insights and competitive advantage. Are innovation consulting companies leveraging across industries enough?
8. I get the distinct impression the focus of most innovation consultants is still locked into product innovation or improving the process of the pipeline / portfolio, they are not working actively at changing this. They are often stuck in the idea generation and project execution model. It is not evolving into broader services or accounting for the transformations underway at the clients end.
9. Often the consulting firm stays closed up, intent on delivering their own solutions will mean they are often far too busy catching up, lagging in their own emerging practice and due to this ‘lag’ have lost any thought leadership position in many things relating to innovation. To overcome this you need to be engaged, to be able to piece together fragments of information to gain the insights that independence can offer. Consultants need to explore and experiment themselves in a laboratory environment, that allows clients to work alongside them to learn and gain from this in collaborative ways.
10. Sadly general well experienced innovation practitioners are actually thin on the ground. You do need to search hard for these but they are available. This exploring and extracting insight requires dedicated experience and constant involvement in broader innovation understanding
11. Clients often lack real deep insight or have drawn out all the implications from emerging practices, they want to work more alongside others in experimental practice spaces to truly figure out how to respond to them or understand the implications to their own business. It is only part of the innovation knowledge puzzle for the client. Consultants often get in the way.
12. Innovation itself is going through really significant change. The need is increasingly to understand ecosystems, platforms, the greater use of analytics, big data and reliance on technology. The emphasis on thinking through new business models, combining design thinking, lean management, customer development, prototyping, experimenting outside the lab, collaborating with clients, finding different partners, the different exploitation of research techniques are all breaking out in different forms and combinations.
13. Collaborating and networking are far more in the fore of innovation exchange, and you need to be involved in this, it is hard to pick up in the middle and consultants coming in, really have to run hard, to simply catch up. Often in this catching up they miss vital signals. This is increasingly not just at the early idea forming stages but increasing in the development and execution of innovation solutions. Partnerships are diverse, delivering on the need of the job-to-be-done.

So what am I missing here? Any other thoughts?