Monthly Archives: October 2011

The Story Behind X PRIZE and Shell Partnership

I had the opportunity to chat with Russ Conser about Shell’s three year partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation to sponsor the Exploration Prize Group.

This video explores the journey that Shell went through to end up partnering with the X PRIZE Foundation and the implications internally for Shell.

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Free Event – Social Product Innovation Summit

Free Event – Social Product Innovation SummitOn October 18, 2011 I spoke at a free virtual event focused on social product innovation, called coincidentally the Social Product Innovation Summit 2011. The event took place on October 18, 2011 but the sessions are still available.

This free, four-hour event offers opportunities to learn, discuss and celebrate the best uses of Social Product Innovation across the product lifecycle, including open innovation, crowdsourcing, expert identification, collaboration platforms, social product development, sentiment analysis and more.

Top industry speakers and winners from the 2010 SPIKE Awards will present real examples of success and attendees will have the opportunity to network with experts, vendors and each other to maximize value.

Sessions will be presented in a flexible, a-la-carte format. Attend the sessions you want, when you want.

In addition to featuring presentations and chats with several industry thought leaders, the event will also feature the announcement of the 2011 Spike Awards.

Here is a snapshot of the agenda:

11:00-11:20am – Trends and Insights on Social Product Innovation
– Jim Brown, Tech-Clarity

This session will introduce the use of social computing techniques to enhance product innovation and product development, including some exiting results from a related research project. The presentation will share some insights from the recent survey, discuss trends in social innovation, and help establish a common scope and language for our discussions.

11:20-11:40am – Get Real – Practical Starting Points for Social Product Innovation
– Bill Poston, Kalypso

This session will examine the various touch points for Social Product Innovation and the existing innovation and product development processes. It will also offer a pragmatic approach to getting started in the Front End of Innovation. Companies have tried to use open innovation initiatives to help drive growth through innovation, but they often end up being more costly and work-intensive than originally assumed. Semi-open innovation models like Virtual Private Expert Networks (vPEN) with a defined, contingent social network of external experts are a practical way to get started.

12:30-12:50pm – Connecting with Employees and Customers for Innovation
– Braden Kelley

Innovation is a team sport, and in this session we will take a look at how to engage your workforce and customer base in the innovation process by building engagement with these communities and ideally – loyalty. Engaging a broad cross-section of employees and customers can help you be more successful in identifying new value creation opportunities that will resonate with your customer base and help you attract new customers. Engaging your employee and customer bases can help you mobilize an army of eyes to drive your innovation efforts forward – but only if you’re ready to truly connect with them. Are you ready?

12:50-1:10pm – Web 3.0 – Your Product Innovation Strategy
– David Feinleib

Investor and entrepreneur David Feinleib will discuss the future of social product innovation – Web 3.0. Mr. Feinleib will discuss how integrating social and mobile into new products from the start will deliver a wider, monetizable audience, key customer insights and customer feedback and input for new products.

1:45-2:00pm – 2011 SPIKE Award Announcements

The event will culminate in the announcement of the 2011 SPIKE Award winners for the best use of social strategies, processes and supporting technologies to improve innovation, product development and product management. 2011 Winners will be announced for the following categories – CPG, Life Sciences, Technology, Manufacturing and People’s Choice. The winners will share their stories of success.

I hope to see you there!

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Why do you prize exploration?

It is by exploring the frontiers of our natural world that we challenge ourselves and discover new knowledge and wonders that will benefit us all. If you are an explorer, Shell and the X PRIZE Foundation want to know why you do it and the meaning and impact of your exploration. They invite you to create a video that expresses your passions and illustrates your pursuits. Please join the X PRIZE Foundation as they delve deeper into the mysteries and beauty of our world and our universe. Upload your video and inspire us; why do you prize exploration?

VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE

The X PRIZE Foundation wants to spread the word about the importance of exploration in today’s world. As humanity faces an increasing number of challenges, it has become increasingly important to explore the boundaries of our knowledge, and to uncover innovative new ways of thinking about our planet and ourselves.

Shell and the X PRIZE Foundation invite you to upload a video about why you prize exploration. What drives you? Where do you explore? What do you hope to achieve?

There are four prizes up for grabs worth over $10,000 in the video contest sponsored by Shell and the X PRIZE Foundation.

The grand prize winner (1) will receive $10,000 to spend on a National Geographic Expedition of their choosing. There are more than 40 trips available, including expeditions ranging from the icy chill of Antarctica to the tropics of the Amazon and the high altitudes of the Himalayan Mountains.

Three semi-finalists (3) will each receive an adventurous flight with Airship Ventures in California. Imagine floating serenely on a cloud, sailing the skies at 1,200 feet, taking in the spectacular scenery of the world below, enjoying the sweeping vistas of spectacular scenery through a 360-degree view…

VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE

Why not contribute a video using the assets available to you, or create your own, and help the X PRIZE Foundation spread the word on the role and importance of exploration.

For more information and to enter the video contest, please go to https://iprizeexploration.org.

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Into the Top 80,000 Web Sites

Innovation Excellence - Into the Top 80,000 Web SitesIt is has been just a little over two months since we launched Innovation Excellence, and thanks to your great support, we already have cracked the Top 80,000 web sites on Amazon’s Alexa web site rankings – putting us in the Top 0.26% of the millions of web sites out there.

Innovation Excellence is home to more than 3,750 innovation-related pieces of content and brings an innovation community together every month from over 170 countries now.

At the same time we have passed 2,250 fans on Facebook, more than 5,400 Innovation Excellence Weekly subscribers and 9,100 members on Linkedin.

We are working very hard to utilize the platform we are building to deliver the very best innovation-related content to you that we can as often as we can while also giving you a place to connect with innovation practitioners from all around the world.

Share your innovation story, news, or video with the community at any time by joining our community and clicking the ‘Add Content’ option in the main menu at the top of the site. Innovation Excellence is home to 150+ contributing authors and growing.

Thanks to our growing sponsor list which includes Planview, Imaginatik, Clearworks, Hype, Kalypso, and others, we are able to operate and grow the site. The more sponsor dollars we are able to attract and directory listings we are able to sell, the more we are able to re-invest in gathering and sharing outstanding innovation content. Should your company become a sponsor or advertiser or list in our directory?

On behalf of myself and my other co-Founders Rowan Gibson and Julie Anixter, I would like to thank you all for getting Innovation Excellence off to a running start. The site started as a labor of love, and continues to be, and the more you can help others find out about the site, the more great content we will be able to attract for you.

For me personally, it’s all of you and your stories and my belief that innovation can help create more efficient organizations and societies that motivates me to get up at 5am every morning and keep the content flowing and the platform growing. So again, thank you for inspiring me!

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Exploring for Innovation by Space, Sea, and Land

Exploring for Innovation by Space, Sea, and LandI had the privilege of being invited to be a guest today at the announcement of Shell’s sponsorship of the XPrize Foundation’s exploration prize group in New York City at the historic Explorers’ Club. Speaking of explorers, here is a simple challenge for you:

Name a famous explorer.

Now name a famous explorer that isn’t dead.

The average person’s response to this challenge might make you think that the human race is done exploring, that we’ve explored every inch of the earth, but that’s just not true, and today Shell brought together a fascinating modern day roster of explorers who are still very much alive – in part to prove that humans are still exploring and that there is still much to be explored.

The roster of explorers who shared some of their experiences today in an inspiring live streaming event, that I attended in person (along with in-person intimate round table sessions with the explorers), included:

  • Richard Garriott, Vice Chair, Space Adventures, Ltd., legendary video game developer and entrepreneur; among first private citizen astronauts to board International Space Station, America’s first second-generation astronaut; and X PRIZE Foundation trustee
  • David Gallo, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, renowned undersea explorer, among first oceanographers combining manned submersibles and robots to map ocean world; co-leader of recent Titanic exploration; project leader, successful search for missing Air France Flight 447
  • Mark Synnott, global mountain climber who has climbed some of the biggest rock faces and ice walls on the planet, ventured into among the least-visited locales on earth, photographed the globe’s most spectacular sites; and is a senior contributing editor of Climbing magazine.

The partnership between the Foundation and Shell has been more than a year in the making and is part of Shell’s ongoing commitment to innovation. Shell is widely known within the innovation community for its Gamechanger internal and open innovation initiative that many other organization’s have endeavored to learn from. Now Shell has chosen to continue its innovation efforts outside its four walls by beginning an innovation journey with the X PRIZE Foundation.

The goal of X PRIZE’s exploration prize group is to inspire the exploration of space, our Earth and its oceans in ways that could lead to breakthrough innovations. It is interesting to note that this week is the seven year anniversary of the winning of the Ansari X PRIZE – an overnight success after only ten years of hard work. Here are a couple of key paragraphs from the press release:

XPrize and Shell Partnership“Shell has long been on the cutting edge of innovation, and we are proud to bring them into the X PRIZE family, supporting a prize group that advances innovation, exploration and tomorrow’s discoveries,” said Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation. “We are closely aligned in our goals to motivate and inspire brilliant innovators from all disciplines to leverage their intellectual capital to explore new frontiers that could result in significant global achievements.”

“Continuous innovation and pioneering spirit is part of Shell’s DNA. As a technology leader in energy, we constantly drive new solutions responding to the global energy challenge,” said Gerald Schotman, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Innovation, Research & Development, Royal Dutch Shell. “We are delighted to support the X PRIZE Foundation’s Exploration Prize Group and look forward to the exciting discoveries that come from the next generation of incentivized competitions.”

One of the questions that I posed during the day sounds simple on the surface, but I think it is a complex one for us all to think about and respond to:

In your mind, what is the relationship between exploration and innovation?

For me, in some sense they are the same thing. Companies must continuously struggle to balance exploration against exploitation, or innovation against operation. But in another sense, exploration can be pursue knowledge without having an absolute goal in mind (think basic research), where innovation tends to be pursued with an intended outcome (think applied research). Does this distinction make sense, is it splitting hairs, or is there another way we should think about distinguishing between exploration and innovation?

So if you’re Shell (or any other typical company) and most of your innovation outcomes tend to be incremental in nature, then increasing your investments in exploration (or connecting to the exploration efforts of others) can help to stretch and diversify and better balance your innovation portfolio amongst incremental and disruptive innovation projects. The key is that every organization needs to innovate not just for today via incremental innovations, but for tomorrow as well by investing in more disruptive innovation efforts that have the potential to change the paradigms of the industry or to change what’s possible.

In speaking further with Gerald Schotman during the day, it came out that one of the key aspects to the Gamechanger program at Shell is that he and the other business types have no say in the first 2-3 stages of their process – intentionally – because many submissions are a slightly different way of looking at old problems and so it is more appropriate for the science and technology folks in the organization to look at the submissions and bring in the business leaders later in the process. In addition they have a lot of handovers from one set of experts to another as the expertise needed to move each project from one stage to the next often changes as you go along.

Gerald also talked about how a lot of the idea submissions come not just from outside of the traditional technical and R&D areas, but even from outside of Shell. He also spoke of his view of his own role – and that he sees it as being the person who manages the turbulent flow of the idea pipeline and the determination of the width and the orientation of that pipeline (what they’re focused on).

So, now that the X PRIZE Foundation and Shell have formed this partnership on this $9 million sponsorship of the exploration prize group, it will be interesting to follow BOTH what new challenges come out of it to drive innovation exploration by space, sea, and land AND what the implications are for Shell’s own innovation pipeline.

What do you think?

Special Bonus

Download 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire' sample chapterIf you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

Download the sample chapter

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Will Big Data Drive Big Insights or Big Costs?

Will Big Data Drive Big Insights or Big Costs?

IBM today is announcing a broad portfolio of new software that applies its expertise in analytics in a new way to the infrastructure of an organization.

Now that we are surrounded by data and organizations are accumulating more and more data about their operations, their customers, their processes and more, analytics can be applied for the purpose of identifying hidden patterns and using that knowledge to gain industry insight. Whether it’s financial opportunities, traffic patterns, medical treatments, or even science breakthroughs, organizations are finding smart ways to harness this flood of data and make sense of it in real time to make predictions and take actions.

Data may not be sexy, but having done a lot of work to extract insights from large amounts of data for organizations like Homeaway.com and Microsoft Windows Live I know first hand that with the right mindset and the right tools, you can turn data into information, information into knowledge, knowledge into insights, and insights into innovation.

Data is just the beginning of that transformation from data into innovation, but a lot of great innovations have come from identifying anomalies and connecting unexpected dots in the data.

Data can even sometimes help you identify where the problems and unmet needs lie, those that we are always hoping to find to drive innovation, but you’ll only be able to find them if you are willing to look and know where to look and if you have the right data for the purpose.

The trouble is that not all data is ones and zeroes, nor should it be, and that many organizations focus on gathering every conceivable piece of data instead of being strategic in their data gathering, so that they can be strategic in their data analytics. The key is not how much data you have but how much actionable data you have. When I work with clients and their data to extract insights, I always ask three simple questions:

  1. Why do you want to know that?
  2. What are you going to do with that information?
  3. What action will you take or not take based on the answer to that data request?

You must differentiate between interesting data and actionable data. Believe it or not, it is possible to gather too much data, especially if you are a big company with millions of customers. Gathering too much data on millions of customers can result in analytics tasks that take too long to complete to be actionable or even useful, so proceed with caution.

Another risk to be aware of when it comes to data, insights and innovation is that some companies tend to rely too much on the data they can easily measure, that’s binary or numeric, and miss the true insights that lie beneath. To combat this and to make your innovation sustainable, I encourage you to build a global sensing network to give you a well-rounded data set to give you lots of different views on your innovation possibilities. Make your actionable big data bigger, your interesting big data smaller, swing for the fences in your pursuit of big insights, and make sure that your data pursuits don’t result in big costs but instead in big sources of innovation.

Finally, it’s a bit ironic that in the middle of writing this article I got the blue screen of death from Windows 7. I’m not sure quite what to make of that, but one thing is for sure – everybody needs a backup. Have you made yours recently? 😉

Special Bonus

Download 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire' sample chapterIf you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

Download the sample chapter

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