I’m proud to share with you the link to my latest radio interview – this time with the popular program Entrepreneur on Fire.
Podcast: Download | Play in new window
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I have big news that I’m extremely excited to share with you today.
I’m proud to announce today that I’m setting The Nine Innovation Roles free.
What does that mean exactly?
It means that for the greater good, I am now providing all of the tools that you need to conduct a Nine Innovation Roles workshop or team meeting inside your organization to enhance the success of your innovation teams – for FREE.
Some people think I’m crazy to help people not hire me, but because of my collaborative and people-centric approach to innovation I would like to give everyone five free gifts:
The Nine Innovation Roles is one of the most requested workshop topics in the keynotes and masterclasses that I conduct for companies all around the world, and comes directly from my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, that is being used by universities like Creighton and companies like Microsoft and AB Inbev to help establish a common language of innovation.
Here is an excerpt from my book that talks about The Nine Innovation Roles:
“Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.
I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.”
I hope you take the time to download and learn and utilize these FREE Nine Innovation Roles resources to improve the success of your innovation efforts and of the innovation teams in your organizations.
Keep innovating!
Get the Free Nine Innovation Roles Resources Now
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Old School vs. Old School
As the saying goes, ‘what’s old is new again’. Only this time robots and hand-held computers (aka smartphones) are involved.
I was having a conversation recently with a colleague about the retail industry and I made the point that all retail stores are warehouses, only some are prettier than others.
Walk into the average Macy’s or other department store and you’ll see piles of inventory out on display in the store, of every size (from small to XXXL) and variety (white, black, brown, etc.) with even more in the back. 
All of this inventory has been tagged for individual sale and is there every day, just in case the person who wants that size, color, style, whatever, walks into the store ready to take it home today.
Contrast this with Argos in the UK or the now-defunct Best and Service Merchandise in the United States whose business model was to have only certain items out on display in the retail store, with the rest of the inventory in the back ready to be picked (much like an eCommerce environment) once the product(s) were ordered.
Apple Stores are a hybrid between the two. Accessories are out on the floor boxed for individual sale, while iMac and iBook computers, iPad tablets, and iPod mp3 players are all out of the box and display in droves for customers to try out and hopefully purchase. Then if they do, the box appears from the warehouse in the back.
But there is a new wave of entrepreneurs trying to bring back the catalog retailing business model into the modern age. Version 1 was standard eCommerce where the catalog was available online instead of in the store and no physical retail stores had to be maintained, leading to a financial advantage for online retailers like Amazon. But eCommerce has a weakness, and that is in product categories need to know how something fits or feels or otherwise fits their style or life.
This has led to the rise of what physical retailers rail against, the concept of showrooming. If you’re not familiar with what showrooming is, it is the pattern of behavior where potential customers come into a physical retail store, explore the product, try it on if necessary, and then leave the store and buy the product online from a competitor like Amazon.
Some entrepreneurs are beginning to recognize the collision of some of the mobile technologies that underlie the showrooming trend together with automated robotic picking technologies and the recognition of inefficiencies in the traditional retail warehousing model.
One example is a Seattle area entrepreneur who left Amazon to launch a business called Hointer that while they are talking about how they are revolutionizing the premium jean shopping experience for men, their real strategy is to use their store as a rapid prototyping and testing environment to develop a technology platform supporting the browsing, trying, and checkout process that they hope to sell to a number of different retailers all around the world. Their modernization of the catalog showroom business model is predicated on reducing the square footage and personnel required to operate a store, thus increasing (hopefully) the dollars per square foot ratio that most retailers use as their success metric. One side benefit of the approach is that salespeople will be able to spend less time folding clothes and more time helping customers. Imagine that.
Will this robotic retailing concept catch on with more than utilitarian shoppers?
Image Credits: Daily UW, Hointer
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As organizations become more mature in their process excellence efforts, an increasing number of organizations are turning their attention to try and achieve innovation excellence.
So where should your journey of a thousand innovation steps begin?
As your organization begins its innovation journey it is helpful to know where you are starting from in terms of your innovation maturity level and where the strengths and weaknesses of your innovation culture lie.
In my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, that many organizations are buying in bulk and using to help establish their organization’s common language of innovation, I promised to share my 50 question innovation audit on this web site, and so here it is.
The audit is designed to examine many different areas of your innovation culture and help you identify both what your level of innovation maturity is, but also the areas where you have a strong base to build from and where you need to invest more effort.
To properly use my innovation audit, you should have large sections of your employee population fill out the survey (both in management and operational roles) across several different business specialties and office locations. The data can then be looked at by department, business specialty, office location and other groupings that make sense to identify both commonalities and differences.
If you would like assistance interpreting the results, please contact me to see the different options for engaging my services. Many companies combine this with an innovation speaker engagement or some innovation training for their employees.
I hope you find this innovation audit of use, and I thank you for buying the book (or considering doing it now)!
Download my FREE innovation audit
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Somewhere across the vast reaches of social media (I can’t remember where) I came across a small but growing internet television service called Aereo that allows you to stream live television over the internet on any device or even to record up to two shows at once like you would with a DVR – for only about $80 per year. Imagine a roof antenna or rabbit ears on your TV that happened to be somewhere you never had to see them. Aereo makes that possible. Here’s how:
1. They’ve made the TV antenna unbelievably small
So small it fits on the tip of your finger. But it still gets awesome HD reception.
2. They’ve connected those antennas to the Internet
They designed a way to put tons of these antennas in data centers, along with massive amounts of storage and super-fast Internet connections.
3. They give you control of your own antenna
They’ve built a simple, elegant interface to let you control this antenna. With any device you want, over the internet. All without boxes, cables, or cords.
The company has been around for about one year now and is now expanding to 22 additional cities. Cable Television Distributors are of course fighting back against this potential disruption, but Aereo maintains that their solution is legal. The bigger questions though are:
What do you think?
UPDATE (2022): Eventually the cable companies won in court and Aereo was forced into bankruptcy where Tivo ended up buying them for $1 million. Sad but true. And now we have multiple offerings like YouTubeTV that have not been forced to cease operations – but at a much higher cost.
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A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to receive a shiny new Nokia Lumia 810 in the mail courtesy of Nokia USA. This was very welcome because I’ve been subjected to what I can only describe as a technology torture inflicted upon me for more than a year by a horribly designed Samsung Galaxy S. So anything would have been a step up, but so far the Nokia Lumia 810 has been a BIG step up.
My Samsung Galaxy S used to decrease my productivity, but the Nokia Lumia 810 now adds to my quality of life.
This isn’t exactly a product review, because that’s not typically something that I do. I will however give you my honest reaction to the Nokia Lumia 810 and how it has fit into the life of this busy innovation and marketing professional so far.
To date, the Nokia Lumia 810 has yet to crash a single time. My old Samsung Galaxy S in contrast crashed at least once every one to two days, and because of what seemed to be a flawed design I was never really able to download and successfully use applications on the device that weren’t loaded at the factory (despite a 16gb SD card being installed).
Thus far on the Nokia Lumia 810 I’ve been able to set up Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, GMail, Twitter, Outlook, Linkedin, CNN, ESPN and other applications. I’ve also been able to load 15GB of music successfully onto the phone and use all of these applications multiple times every day and keep them synced without issues. Bottom line, the Nokia Lumia 810 has been a much smarter smartphone than my Samsung Galaxy S.
The one thing I haven’t found to be as good on the Nokia Lumia 810 as my old Samsung Galaxy S is the voice command functionality. The Nokia Lumia 810 doesn’t seem to recognize my voice as well with my new Motorola Elite Sliver bluetooth headset.
Now obviously today’s Samsung Galaxy S3 is probably a better device than the Samsung Galaxy S, and the iPhone 5 is for sure a solid device. But so far I find the Windows 8 OS on the Nokia Lumia 810 to provide a much more attractive user interface than iOS or Android thus far and to provide roughly a level of parity in overall functionality with these other competitors and a serious competitor to the market leaders.
Is parity and a better UI enough to help Nokia and Microsoft get back into the game?
Only time will tell, but it is my opinion that Nokia and Microsoft will need some kind of a killer app to truly gain traction towards regaining market share. Unfortunately, as I’ve written before, I think that Apple will introduce the next killer function to the smartphone – truly useful and viable mCommerce. But, only time will tell to see if this theory plays out or not.
What do you think?
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Okay, I admit it, I came across the History Channel’s series Ancient Aliens recently and I’m intrigued, mostly because it is fascinating (and frightening) to me how long it takes to develop true knowledge and insight, but how quickly it can be lost.
Leaving the whole ancient astronaut theory thing out of it, it is obvious looking at the historical record that throughout history, civilizations around the world (more than once) have developed advanced scientific understanding only to have their civilization (and its knowledge) destroyed by a natural catastrophe or fade away for some other reason. At the same time, another thing that is clear as we look across our history as a species is that there are certain periods of time during which innovation accelerates and often this increase in the velocity of innovation is linked to an increase in the velocity of knowledge and insight sharing.
The Renaissance coincided with the arrival of paper in Europe, culminating with paper making its way to Germany in 1400 AD and inspiring the development of the printing press in 1450, which then accelerated the spread of books, magazines, and newspapers in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The Age of Enlightenment coincided with early semi-public libraries that were only available to a learned few, but those few were inspired to create important and transformative thought in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The 19th century was a golden age of invention and innovation, ushering in the era of modern medicine, and technologies like the telegraph and the telephone which enabled information, knowledge and insight to finally travel faster than the horse.
The modern public library, as we now know it, came into its own in the the United Kingdom in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th century (thanks to Andrew Carnegie) and new communications technologies like radio and television brought information and knowledge to the illiterate and enabled people to see and hear things they would never have imagined before.
And by the close of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, human beings had gained the ability to learn from each other no matter where they live in the world, in real time, in words, pictures, and now even through the sharing of videos sharing knowledge and insight, and even by showing people how to do things.
It is my contention that the pace of innovation accelerates when the speed of knowledge sharing accelerates, that knowledge acceleration leads to innovation acceleration. As we have developed more efficient ways of accelerating the pace of knowledge sharing, our pace of innovation has sped up.
It is shocking to think that if you go back only two hundred years as a species we had no idea how disease was transmitted, couldn’t send a message from one side of an ocean to another without using a ship, and that most human beings on this planet would not travel farther than 50 miles from the place of their birth during their lifetime.
Now we can travel to outer space, levitate objects using sound or magnetism, create life, destroy whole cities in an instant, build things smaller than the width of a human hair, and do some other things that even twenty years ago would have seemed impossible.
We are inventing and innovating today at an astonishing rate, and for companies or nations that want to outpace their competition, they should be laser-focused on accelerating the pace of knowledge sharing if they are intent on being faster and more efficient than their competition at innovation. But it isn’t even the speed of knowledge or information sharing that is the holy grail, it is the speed of insight sharing that leads to faster and more efficient innovation, and many organizations mistakenly restrict access to the voice of the customer. And when you cut off your employees from your customers, how can you expect to can anything but inventions instead of innovations?
It is because of these important linkages that I believe the below ten items are the Top 10 Innovations of All Time:
Caution – We May be Becoming Too Reliant on Technology
But there is a cautionary tale contained in this list and the Ancient Aliens reference at the beginning. You will notice that this list is increasingly dependent on technology – especially the existence of electricity.
What would happen if there was a major natural catastrophe (flood, famine, major volcanic eruption or meteor strike, giant solar flare) and for some reason all of our electrical devices ceased to function?
How much of our accumulated knowledge and technology would we lose?
Despite the growing decline of print and rising usage of digital media, the book has one major advantage, it doesn’t require power to operate. Stone tablets don’t decay as fast as paper.
Should we as a society be transcribing our most important knowledge onto something that could survive a major catastrophe (including the potential loss of electricity for an extended period of months or years), so that we as a species don’t have to start over again as we obviously have had to do in the distant past?
Technology is wonderful and allows us to do many amazing things but we should be careful about becoming too reliant on it, or we risk potentially losing the knowledge that allowed us to create it in the first place.
Just a thought…
And if you are intent on accelerating the sharing of knowledge, information, insight and innovation in your company or country, let me know, I could help with that.
Image source: kansasbob.com
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I came across an IndieGogo project that is focused on building and trialing a gravity-powered power station that can serve either as a lantern or as a flexible power source that can be used to power a task light, recharge batteries, or potentially other things that users might dream up that the designers can’t yet imagine.
Check out their video from IndieGogo:
They have already raised FIVE TIMES the money they set out to raise on IndieGogo.
I found it interesting in their promotional video that initially they started with a design challenge of designing a system that would charge a light for indoor use using a solar panel, but that they decided to abandon the approach specified from the outset and pursue alternate power sources.
Also interesting from the IndieGogo project page are the following facts:
The World Bank estimates that, as a result, 780 million women and children inhale smoke which is equivalent to smoking 2 packets of cigarettes every day. 60% of adult, female lung-cancer victims in developing nations are non-smokers. The fumes also cause eye infections and cataracts, but burning kerosene is also more immediately dangerous: 2.5 million people a year, in India alone, suffer severe burns from overturned kerosene lamps. Burning Kerosene also comes with a financial burden: kerosene for lighting ALONE can consume 10 to 20% of a household’s income. This burden traps people in a permanent state of subsistence living, buying cupfuls of fuel for their daily needs, as and when they can.
The burning of Kerosene for lighting also produces 244 million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide annually.
So, what do you think, a meaningful innovation or an interesting but impractical invention?
More information available on their web site here.
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Too often we all run around trying to pluck a gamechanging idea out of thin air that nobody has ever seen, solving a problem that has never been solved, when really if the truth be told, there are still lots of existing problems with lots of solutions that are still waiting for a simple, elegant solution.
Is Quirky’s new ‘Pluck’ one of those simple, elegant solutions that you wish you had thought of? Are there other products that do this job better. Are you jealous of the margins they are likely to earn on such a simple product (assuming people are willing to pay the $12.99 asking price)?
Well, whatever you think, the Pluck is a great example of how innovation can come from the simple just as much as it can come from the complex, because innovation after all is about transforming the useful seeds of invention into solutions valued above every existing alternative – and then making the result widely adopted.
So, are you overcomplicating things in your search for innovation?
Moral of the story – Don’t be afraid to break a few eggs in your quest for innovation.
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Steve Jobs was a notorious perfectionist. Apple engineers and designers went through hundreds of revisions on every prototype that made it into his hands. But Jobs’ maniacal obsession paid off. No gadget on the market is as instantly recognizable nor as coveted as the latest iteration of an Apple product. The company’s dedication to sleek design and intuitive, user-friendly technology has made each iPad, iPhone and Macbook launch an enormous success.
And how did Jobs and Apple do it? The company follows a set of simple but strict rules to ensure that every product meets Jobs’ standards for clean and flawless design. First, design must complement and improve the product’s usability, never detract from it. And of course, Apple’s sleek and uncomplicated aesthetic must be reflected by every component of the product, no matter how small.
Apple’s design philosophy sounds simple, but putting it into practice is more difficult. Check out Online MBA’s latest video to see Apple’s philosophy boiled down into five principles that any designer or brandmaker can leverage in their own work.
A GUEST POST from my friends at OnlineMBA.com
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