Monthly Archives: April 2012

Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 18, 2012


“Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn.”

– From the movie ‘The International’


“Incremental innovations can often be explained to customers, but disruptive innovations often require you to educate them on how they will fit into their life.”

– Braden Kelley


“Acquire with the intention to retain, and retain with the intention to grow.”

– Lester Wunderman


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 17, 2012


“Successful organizations understand that attracting and engaging external talent is as important as finding and hiring the best internal talent.”

– Braden Kelley


“There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.”

– Bill Joy – Sun Co-Founder


“There is an innovation war beginning, and you need to make sure you are fighting it outside your organization — not inside.”

– Braden Kelley (from commissioned white paper – FREE from InnoCentive)


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 16, 2012


“Innovation can come from anyone, but it is required from everyone for an organization to remain successful.”

– Braden Kelley


“When it comes to innovating, the only limit is the one of our creativity.”

– Cristina Caiado Rocha


“Innovation can come from anywhere, but you must be looking everywhere to find it.”

– Braden Kelley


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part Two

How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts - Part OneIf you missed How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part One, you can find it here.

So what do leading organizations do to encourage the successful use of external talent?

They build a solid foundation:

  1. Seek to understand where the challenges will lie in the transformation
  2. Have passionate business owners
  3. Secure top level support
  4. Make a long term commitment to the use of external talent
  5. Negotiate master agreements with external talent providers at the center
  6. Create a common language of innovation and external talent
  7. Implement the processes and systems to manage and measure innovation efforts

They get strategic:

  1. Create an external talent strategy
  2. Make a plan for achieving the strategy
  3. Attach goals to the strategy (e.g., P&G’s 50% goal)
  4. Communicate the goals of the strategy and measure goal achievement

They focus on communications and ownership:

  1. Do not underestimate the importance of communications, education, and dialogue
  2. Create guidelines for when and how to use different external talent sources
  3. Have someone own and manage the external innovation efforts
  4. Have owners and champions in place in different business units or product groups
  5. Educate employees on how to engage owners and champions

They continuously reinforce their efforts:

  1. Recognize and reward those who go outside
  2. Weave external focus into internal systems (e.g., innovation system prompts)
  3. Get cross-functional input into problem definition and challenge formation
  4. Make resources available for integration
  5. Work to make the organization more flexible and adaptable

In addition, successful organizations understand that it is about making and maintaining connections and community – you build it for when you need it, instead of building it when you need it. Successful organizations understand that attracting and managing external talent is as important as finding and hiring the best internal talent, and are changing their budget allocations to fit this new paradigm. The role of HR in the near future will not be just to recruit, develop, and manage staff, but also to build and curate talent pools. The HR profession will have to build new core competences in network orchestration and managing talent – no matter where the talent lives (inside or outside the organization). It is time to start preparing.

Build a Common Language of Innovation

Before moving on to the final section, let us look at a few brief examples of different companies engaging external talent for business success and one case study of a leader pushing farther:

  • Threadless decided to base their whole business on external talent and build a community of designers and customers that they could leverage to come up with the t-shirt designs that they sell.
  • Quirky has taken the Threadless model of utilizing external talent to simultaneously make invention accessible and build a consumer products company. You submit your idea, the community curates it, the company evaluates it, and actually produces and sells the chosen inventions online, and even at a handful of retailers.
  • P&G went outside with a plastic technology and created a joint venture with competitor Clorox that focuses on trash bags, food storage, and related areas.
  • Intuit uses its Collaboratory web site to connect with entrepreneurs and to publicize their open innovation challenges, and their Labs web site to engage with the developer and customer communities to get immediate feedback on some of their experiments in order to engage in some level of co-creation.
  • Psion Teklogix has built one of the more robust corporate open innovation communities – Ingenuity Working – complete with a video from their CEO front and center.
  • SAP has started The Global SAP Co-Innovation Lab Network (aka COIL) with HP, Intel, NetApp, Cisco, VMware, and F5 Networks to facilitate project-based co-innovation with its members and to enhance the capabilities of SAP’s partner and customer ecosystem through an integrated network of world-wide expertise and best-in-class technologies and platforms.
  • MyStarbucksIdea.com is an example of engaging the creative energy outside your organization that most companies will not want to follow. They throw things wide open for all idea submissions, not focused on any particular challenges, for all to see. As a result, Starbucks exposes the company to the risk of brand equity destruction from not following through on suggestions. At the same time, this approach provides free market research for competitors and creates a lot of sifting and communications work for internal resources.

If you missed How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part One, you can find it here.

— Download the rest of this FREE white paper to continue reading —

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 15, 2012


“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

– Albert Einstein


“In addition to identifying the value that you can bring to the external talent community, you must also identify which connection points will multiply the attractive power of the sources of value you choose to focus on.”

– Braden Kelley (from commissioned white paper – FREE from InnoCentive)


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 14, 2012


“We decided to embrace open innovation at Psion to be faster and competitively unpredictable.”

– John Conoley – Psion Teklogix


“The role of HR in the near future will not be just to recruit, develop, and manage staff, but also to build and curate talent pools. The HR profession will have to build new core competences in network orchestration and managing talent – no matter where the talent lives (inside or outside the organization).”

– Braden Kelley (from commissioned white paper – FREE from InnoCentive)


“Open innovation has proved to be a successful business strategy for General Mills.”

– Mark Addicks – General Mills


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Software Design Challenge – Less is More

Software Design Challenge - Less is MoreI originally posed this software design challenge to application developers in September 2008 based on an InfoWorld article that warmed my heart, but have yet to see any major changes in how most software applications are designed.

For far too long, especially on the PC, software developers have been building applications with a feature arms race mentality. Because of rapidly expanding memory and hard disk space on customers’ machines, developers have not had to write tight code in the same way they had to in the early days of the PC.

Now, hopefully Symantec’s focus on creating Norton applications that install in under a minute and consume far less memory will spread to other industry players. Just because I have 4gb of RAM and 160gb of hard disk space does not give software developers the right to consume it thoughtlessly or to make my computer run slower.

Why can’t software developers give us adaptive software?

If I don’t use a feature of a product in 30 days, it should uninstall itself.

Why can’t I choose lean and mean (give me only the basic features) as an install option?

Software should be smart enough to minimize its footprint, while at the same time giving you the opportunity to add a feature easily later. So, an unused feature should get uninstalled, and simplify the menus as a result. But, if I hold the bottom of the menu it should expand to show uninstalled menu features in grey. If I select a greyed out feature it should tell me it is going to re-install it and then do so automatically.

I can only imagine how much smaller Vista, Office, Photoshop, and other applications would get if they were designed in this way.

If you know of applications designed in this way, please feel free to let me know by commenting on this article.

What do you think?

Build a Common Language of Innovation

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 13, 2012


“Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.”

– Jeff Bezos
– Submitted by Mim (Milana Karlo) Bizic


“Knowledge Management is more about ‘How do I?’ while Innovation is more about ‘Why don’t we?'”

– Braden Kelley


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 12, 2012


“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

– Steve Jobs
– Submitted by Lorna Tyrtania


“When you’re playing king of the mountain, you don’t stop playing when you get to the top.”

– Braden Kelley


“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

– Albert Einstein
– Submitted by Carlos Torres


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Should I use 99Designs or Crowdspring?

I’m working to get a card deck, posters, and a mobile app designed for my Nine Innovation Roles and I have a simple question for my readers out there:

Do you think I should use 99Designs or Crowdspring for my design challenge?

Or does someone out there already have an awesome design idea for a deluxe tarot-style approach for the visuals to go with my Nine Innovation Roles product offerings?

Build a Common Language of Innovation

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.