Monthly Archives: April 2012

Please Help Pick Nine Innovation Roles Card Design

We are in the final day of the CrowdSpring $500 design contest for designing the Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck. Once I pick a winner then I will need to pick a printer for the large format cards.

There are some very interesting and widely diverse designs to choose from for the Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck and I’d love to hear your vote on which winner I should choose in the comments below by adding a comment that says “Design One” or “Design Seven” or “Design Nine”, etc.

Here are the designs so far:

Design One

Design 1 - Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Design Two

Design 2 - Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Design Three

Design 3 - Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Design Four

Design 4 - Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Design Five

Design 5 - Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Design Six

Design 6 - Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Design Seven

Design 7 - Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Design Eight

Design 8 - Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Design Nine

Design 9 - Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 30, 2012


“Albert Einstein wrote, ‘Everybody is a genius! But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid!’
We are all capable of doing one thing better than any other person alive at this time in history!”

– Matthew Kelly


“In order for innovation to reliably happen at every level of the organization, it will be extremely useful for all members to have access to the voice of the customer.”

– Braden Kelley


“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

– J.K. Rowling


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!

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Free Innovation Keynote May 2nd in Seattle

Come Join Me May 2nd in SeattleOn May 2nd I will be the keynote innovation speaker for the Invista Performance Solutions launch event in Seattle, WA (well, Mercer Island actually). Invista is a partnership of Northwest Colleges dedicated to providing high quality workforce training to meet and exceed client expectations. Formed in July 2011, Invista has a strategic mission: To help companies gain a competitive advantage in the global economy by increasing the skills of their workforce.

I will be speaking about the attributes of highly innovative companies amongst many other innovation topics. Praveen Gupta will also be speaking, so two great speakers for the price of one, and that price is one that you can’t refuse – FREE.

There will also be an interactive session following the speeches.

If you live in the Seattle/Tacoma area, come join me on May 2nd.

Register Now

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 29, 2012


“If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you’ll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.”

– Jim Jarmusch


“One of the ways that you can attract people to your innovation efforts is to leverage the power of passion. Seek to identify what people are passionate about when it comes to your company or your products. Passion can be extremely contagious.”

– Braden Kelley


“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

– Albert Einstein


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 28, 2012


“Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.”

– Barack Obama


“Being successful in the innovation aspects of social business requires an organization to establish a place and a reason for mutually beneficial dialogue to occur.”

– Braden Kelley


“I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.”

– Alexis de Tocqueville


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.

Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck Coming Soon

People have been asking me to do more with The Nine Innovation Roles since I started speaking about them at conferences and events around the world, and now I am finally doing something to answer these requests.

I am pleased to announce a crowdfunding project on Indiegogo to fund the creation of an interactive card game focused on The Nine Innovation Roles – after finding out innovation is not allowed on Kickstarter.

At the same time there is a $500 design contest underway on Crowdspring to create the designs for the card deck – and possibly posters too!

Nine Innovation Roles Crowdspring Project

I am trying to raise $2,500 on Indiegogo to cover the design contest prize and fees, and the initial printing costs for 1,000 Nine Innovation Roles Card Decks.

You can show your support for this project by pledging any amount or by picking any of the great perks available for as little as $15.

If you are an innovation product seller or service provider, for $300 you can reserve one side of a card in the deck to be your very own in every pack sold (starting with an initial print run of 1,000 card decks), or for $500 you can have a whole card to yourself (FRONT and BACK).

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 27, 2012


“If you put fences around people, you get sheep.”

– William McKnight (former CEO of 3M)


“For people without passion and talent, information has no value.”

– Jef Staes


“We must find a way to strike a balance between what employees need to do for the organization and what they want to do for the organization. Otherwise, human capital is being wasted, flushed down the drain.”

– 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.

Free Innovation Keynote May 1st in Tacoma

Come Join Me May 1st in TacomaOn May 1st I will be the keynote innovation speaker for the Invista Performance Solutions launch event in Tacoma, WA. Invista is a partnership of Northwest Colleges dedicated to providing high quality workforce training to meet and exceed client expectations. Formed in July 2011, Invista has a strategic mission: To help companies gain a competitive advantage in the global economy by increasing the skills of their workforce.

I will be speaking about the attributes of highly innovative companies amongst many other innovation topics. Praveen Gupta will also be speaking, so two great speakers for the price of one, and that price is one that you can’t refuse – FREE.

If you live in the Seattle/Tacoma area, come join me on May 1st.

Register Now

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 26, 2012


“The thing you push against is the thing that lifts you up.”

– From a Delta Airlines advertisement


“Mommy, how come Daddy is not out in the garage inventing things if he is in innovation”

– My 7 year old daughter


“Pathmaker, there is no path. The path is made by walking. By walking you make the path.”

– Antonio Machado


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 Not Allowed on Kickstarter?

Kickstarter Logo - No Innovation AllowedI’m in the throes of bringing The Nine Innovation Roles to life in an interactive card game for use in workshops and team meetings, and as someone who writes about harnessing external talent, it only made sense that I should post a project on Kickstarter to engage in a bit of crowdfunding to fund:

  • A design contest on CrowdSpring or 99Designs
  • The costs of an initial production run of the Nine Innovation Roles card decks.

Imagine my surprise when Kickstarter rejected my non-fiction publishing project submission.

Is innovation not allowed on Kickstarter?

I re-read the guidelines, submitted an appeal figuring there must have been some sort of mistake, and waited for a favorable response.

But, again I was surprised to receive notification that my appeal was rejected.

An email asking for clarification, in advance of this article, went unanswered.

So I am left to assume that yes, innovation is not allowed on Kickstarter. I should have seen the writing on the wall when I did a search for “innovation” on Kickstarter and it returned a nearly empty set of search results.

I guess crowdfunding the publishing of a tool to help make teams and organizations more successful at innovation wasn’t sexy or artsy enough for Kickstarter.

But, the news isn’t all doom and gloom.

Some of you may remember that I put out an open call a couple of weeks ago asking for opinions on whether I should post my design contest on CrowdSpring or 99Designs. I also tweeted the same question, and well, CrowdSpring answered one of my tweets and the folks at 99Designs didn’t. And as someone who also writes about social business, guess who I’m trusting to host the design contest for The Nine Innovation Roles card decks?

You guessed it, CrowdSpring.

Luckily, unlike Kickstarter, the folks at CrowdSpring believe in supporting innovation projects and I’ve launched a $500 design contest on their platform that is open to the world here:

Nine Innovation Roles Crowdspring Project

I really look forward to seeing how the global community of graphic designers will interpret the Nine Innovation Roles and help me breathe life into them and create a beautiful, fun deck of cards to be used along with some interactive exercises in workshops and team meetings to increase the innovation success of teams or organizations.

Oh, and if you’re looking to fund your innovation project, you might want to invest your time somewhere else other than Kickstarter – where innovation is not allowed.

I will now be considering some secondary platforms for my crowdfunding project. Do you have any favorites?

UPDATE: I’ve launched a crowdfunding project on IndieGoGo after being rejected by Kickstarter.

Happy innovating (and designing)! 🙂

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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