Author Archives: Braden Kelley

About Braden Kelley

Braden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, and creator of the FutureHacking™ and Human-Centered Change™ methodologies. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change (Second Edition) from Palgrave Macmillan. Braden is a US Navy veteran and earned his MBA from top-rated London Business School. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Update – Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

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Beginning on October 5, 2010 my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – A Roadmap to a Sustainable Culture of Ingenuity and Purpose will begin shipping from online retailers in the United States. It will be available from book stores and retailers outside the United States a week or so later.

If you’re curious about the book, you can look inside it on Amazon, or use Google Preview on the publisher’s web site.

Getting a copy of the book is a great way to support the blog and keep it free.

Click here to pre-order the book

Attendees of the Spigit Innovation Summit and readers of our monthly Innovation Insights newsletter have already received a free sample chapter from the book. This sample chapter will be made publicly available on September 20, 2010 when we announce the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2010.

And, for those of you with Apple iPads, Barnes & Noble Nooks, a smartphone, or a PC/Mac, you could be the first one on your block with the book thanks to our friends at Barnes & Noble. Check out the Newsflash:

Newsflash!

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for eBookStoking Your Innovation Bonfire is available as an e-book in advance of its hardcover release at Barnes & Noble.com. Enjoy the book on your iPad, Nook, PC, or Mac before it is widely available.

Visit Barnes&Noble.com

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Don’t Believe the Innovation Hype

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Don't Believe the Innovation HypeThere are some strange rumors circulating out there that I’ve written a book. Before these rumors spin out of control, I thought I should address you, the loyal and valued readers of Blogging Innovation, and set the record straight.

I have not written a novel, an autobiography, or a tell-all book. Let us be clear. Despite what some people might be saying, I have not written a book about how to fix the sorry state of the global economy, or anything that might even in a small part include tips about how to find the perfect job. I also do not, nor have I ever pretended to be able to give you a new look or make you fashionable, either by writing about fashion or by speaking any magic or even mildly interesting words about the subject.

But I must admit, that yes, I have written a book about innovation. Get your rotten tomatoes ready.

Now, some of you might be wondering, why on earth would I do this?

And, some of you might be wondering why I haven’t addressed these rumors before now.

Well, in regards to the timing, it didn’t feel right to say anything before now. It just felt too premature.

Stoking Your Innovation BonfireAnd, in regards to why I would write a book? Well, it’s not to become the next Julia Child or John Grisham. I’m not very good at cooking, and I couldn’t stomach being a lawyer. But, I can finally come clean and say that, yes, I am passionate about innovation. There, I’ve said it, and if you want to know what I think about the subject, you can now read the sordid details in the pages of this book.

Instead of fashion or fine cuisine, I’ve chosen to write about identifying and removing barriers to innovation. The full title of the book is Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – A Roadmap to a Sustainable Culture of Ingenuity and Purpose and it is available for pre-order wherever fine business books are sold. The book is being published by John Wiley & Sons, officially launches in October 2010, and features a foreword by Rowan Gibson.

With this all out in the open, I promise that my blogging game won’t go to hell in a hand basket, and I hope I won’t be missing the Postrank cut anytime soon. If you want to get the inside scoop and read more information about the book, please visit http://innovationbonfire.com.

Now that I am publicly humiliated and exposed as the author that I am, I might as well offer you the opportunity to be one of the first to preview the sample chapter from my new book. All you have to do is join our mailing list by August 31, 2010 and you will receive an electronic copy of the chapter on ‘Sustainable Innovation’ from Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire on September 1, 2010. If you’re already receiving our monthly Innovation Insights newsletter, then you will automatically receive the free sample chapter.

I promise you won’t have to wait in any silly lines (queues for the Brits and Aussies among you) and I guarantee that you will still be able to read it no matter how you choose to hold your device. Finally, please don’t tell too many about this, I’m not sure I’m ready to face Maria Bartiromo quite yet.

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Joy is BMW – Marketing Innovation or Marketing Failure?

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I came across the following video of a BMW advertising installation thanks to a tweet from Blogging Innovation contributor @RowanGibson and I think it serves as a perfect case study of how one firm – in this case BMW – can succeed and fail in utilizing some of the modern incremental innovations in the traditional marketing methods (including social media) to bond itself to an emotion – in this case ‘joy’.

First, watch the video, then we’ll examine where BMW has done well and where they have failed to harness the power of social media in creating the perception that ‘Joy is BMW’.

Successes:

1. BMW attempts to stake a claim to an emotion (joy) that no other car company is pursuing
2. The video has already had 115,000 views in one week
3. Lots of people are re-tweeting the video and including ‘BMW’ and ‘joy’ in their tweets on Twitter

Failures:

1. If you do a search on Google, Bing, or Yahoo! for “joy” – BMW is not in the top ten search results
2. Compounding this failure is that BMW is not doing any search engine marketing on the term “joy”
3. The startup video was herky-jerky after waiting a long time for it to load on the Joy is BMW page
4. The ‘Joy is BMW’ page is boring, not search engine friendly, and not social – there is no way for people to participate – no real value to the page
5. The 3D building projection event from Singapore is not featured on the ‘Joy is BMW’ page
6. There is no way for people to have conversations about the video (other than on YouTube)
7. BMW is not active on Twitter and makes no mention of Singapore event or ‘Joy is BMW’ campaign
8. No videos or photos related to ‘Joy is BMW’ on Facebook or mention of it by any of their 679,000+ fans
9. http://www.joyisbmw.com not purchased by BMW before launching the campaign
10. http://www.miseryisbmw.com also not purchased by BMW before launching the campaign

Unfortunately the failures list could be much longer, but I will stop here in the interest of brevity. The really sad thing about the ‘Joy is BMW’ campaign is that people want to be more social with BMW, they crave it, but they are not really being provided the opportunity.

To be honest, after watching the video of the experiential event I was expecting BMW to have created this forward-thinking integrated conversational marketing campaign to go with it, so imagine my surprise when the emperor’s new clothes fell off when I started looking around the social media universe.

BMW, there is still time to save the campaign. If you need some help (which it looks like you do), let me know and I’ll be happy to jump in, line up some great creative teams around the world, and knock out a great conversational marketing strategy to salvage the campaign.

What do you think? Has BMW blown a golden opportunity to go social with ‘Joy is BMW’?

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Creating Customer Value and Conversation

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On playfool.com I came across a very interesting potential partial solution to the societal problem of drunk driving using an integrated approach, that combines an interactive game with advertising and the services of the local taxi association. And of course, the bars and clubs are happy to participate in order to reduce their risks (or maybe out of the goodness of their hearts). This is a great example of how to create customer value and conversation instead of just shouting at potential customers via traditional advertising.

So, without further ado is an interactive marketing experience not likely to be mistaken for the Wii:

Are you creating customer value and conversation with your marketing efforts?

Can you think of other interactive experiences or innovations to help combat societal ills?

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Study of Innovation Risks

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Altin KadarejaBuilding upon the Boston Consulting Group innovation study, Altin Kadareja has configured a research study for his graduate thesis titled: “Quantification of Innovation Risks“.

He is focused on developing a model that can identify, analyze and quantify the risk of innovation projects. This model stands besides innovation project management practices and is based on a step by step structural framework empowered by a PRA (Probabilistic Risk Assessment) analysis.

He is closing out his research this week, so please help him out by filling in a
short online survey (only 13 questions).

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Innovation a Prisoner of Inductive and Deductive Logic

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I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted by the Seattle office of design firm NBBJ yesterday. The event featured Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of “The Design of Business” and “The Opposable Mind.” I’d like to share a video interview I did with Roger before the event:

Interview – Roger Martin – Author “The Design of Business” from Braden Kelley on Vimeo.

I’d also like to share some of the key insights from Roger’s talk at the event:

  • People think in ways that form rules in their brains, and they are not always aware of the ways that those rules constrain them

  • That which tends to get you more reliability often gets you less validity

    • IQ tests have test/re-test reliability, but only 30% of life outcomes are related to IQ, 70% is attributable to other factors
    • Emotional intelligence measures may be more valid, but not reliable

  • If you insist on reliability, you can’t prove in advance that your heuristic of a mystery is correct

  • Innovation is a prisoner of deductive and inductive logic

  • We learn to analyze quantities, but what matters more often are the qualities

  • Abductive logicians welcome variance because they want to try and understand the outliers. Our modern education system beats abductive logic out of you. Are you focusing on quantities or qualities?

  • We depend too much on quantities – Having more Science Technology & Math (STeM) graduates is not the way to invent the future

  • Our businesses run on abstractions to help us understand the world, so new ones can be created and existing ones can be questioned

  • Outliers in data can be significant sources for growth and innovation. Take the example of Intuit’s QuickBooks – it was created because of the persistent existence of Quicken outliers trying to use the program to run their business instead of their personal finances.

  • From the book – “It’s not necessarily that some young whippersnapper’s going to come up with some better idea than you. They’re going to start from a different premise and they’re going to come to a different conclusion that makes you irrelevant.””

  • Sometimes you have to marinate on wicked problems. Instead of trying to simplify them, wade in a ways and then take a break and ruminate.

  • If you live in a way that sets up your mind to determine whether things are true or false, then you can’t invent the future.

  • Innovation is more about combining and synthesizing existing conceptualizations and models. There are three main ways to do this:

    1. Disaggregation – Target is a good example – In packaged goods, they focus on price, but in soft goods the focus on design.

    2. Doubling-Down – To get the buzz of exclusivity that Cannes gets, the Toronto Film Festival pushed so hard on inclusivity that they created the buzz through the People’s Choice Awards

    3. Mixing – Hidden gems

  • “It’s not the job of the customer to invent the future.”

    • Quantitative and qualitative surveys force customers to make something up when they don’t know how to answer

    • Customers only know themselves and are happy to talk about themselves

  • Interesting question – Should we be teaching intuitive thinking to science, technology and math majors? – Yes! – We should focus more energy in science on the intuitive leaps of the mind necessary to come up with interesting hypotheses.

  • CEOs should see themselves as the Chief Validity Officer because of the overwhelming reliability-focus of our organizations

  • Heuristics are a drug for strategy & design consultants – Often they are so busy with the heuristics that they don’t take the time to push heuristics down into algorithms or to explore new mysteries

My book review of “The Design of Business” can be found here.

My previous interview with “The Design of Business” author Roger Martin can be found here.

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Book Review and Innovation Summary – “The Design of Business”

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The Design of BusinessA few weeks ago I received “The Design of Business” by Roger Martin in the mail. “The Design of Business” is a relatively short, easy, and pleasant read.

The main premise of the book is that our organizations, and the business schools that fill out their top leadership ranks, are too focused on analytical thinking at the expense of intuitive thinking. This focus creates too much emphasis on reliability at the expense of validity.

“The most successful businesses in the years to come will balance analytical mastery and intuitive originality in a dynamic interplay that I call design thinking.” – Roger Martin

One of the key concepts of the book is the introduction of the Knowledge Funnel – a visual element that shows how knowledge progresses from mysteries to heuristics to algorithms. It all begins with a question at the top of the funnel, and at each stage transition, knowledge and execution can typically be transferred to lower cost labor (and possibly handled by a computer when they reach the algorithm level).

The Knowledge FunnelAt the same time, there are other tensions in our organizations that managers in the era of the creative economy will have to become attuned to, and these include managing an appropriate balance between exploitation and exploration and not falling victim to the false certainty of the past when making business development decisions.

Ultimately, the exploration of the mysteries at the top of the knowledge funnel and exploitation of the algrithms at the bottom of the funnel are equally important. Companies that focus too much on one, at the expense of the other, risk their very future.

Creating a design thinking organization is not easy, and several pages are devoted to describing the struggles of A.G. Lafley and Claudia Kotchka in transforming P&G;’s organizational culture to be more design-centric.

In addition to other examples of organizations pushing themselves more towards design thinking, there is also a great deal of focus in the book on the transformation of mysteries into heuristics and heuristics into algorithms.

Overall, the book is another way of looking at the challenge facing innovators everywhere who are looking to embed design or innovation (or both) into their organization.

So, are you ready to tackle the challenge of achieving a balance of analytical thinking with intuitive thinking in your organization?

My interview with “The Design of Business” author Roger Martin can be found here.

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Balancing Intuition with Analysis

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Interview – Roger Martin of “The Design of Business”

Balancing Intuition with Analysis - Roger MartinI had the opportunity to interview Roger Martin, the author of “The Design of Business” about the challenges companies face when they fail to balance analytical thinking with intuitive thinking. We also discuss a variety of other innovation topics including: barriers to innovation, education, and risk taking.

Roger Martin has served as Dean of the Rotman School of Management since 1998. He is an advisor on strategy to the CEO’s of several major global corporations. He writes extensively on design and is a regular columnist for BusinessWeek.com’s Innovation and Design Channel. He is also a regular contributor to Washington Post’s On Leadership blog and to Financial Times’ Judgment Call column. He has published several books, including: “The Design of Business” and “The Opposable Mind”.

Here is the text from the interview:

1. When it comes to innovation, what is the biggest challenge that you see organizations facing?

It is the dominance of analytical thinking which holds that unless something can be proven by way of deductive or inductive logic, it is not worthy of consideration or investment. No new idea in the world has been proven before being tried. So as long as analytical thinking is allowed to dominate, innovation is deeply and profoundly challenged.

2. Why is it so important that organizations teach their leaders to be design thinkers?

Design thinkers are capable of balancing the inductive and deductive logic of analytical thinking with the abductive logic of intuitive thinking. So they are capable of both honing and refining the past and inventing the future. Thus they can overcome the innovation challenge. Without design thinking leaders, an organization is likely to slowly but surely stultify – like most large corporations over time.

3. Why is it so hard for hard for managers to take valid risks?

Two main reasons. First, they live in cultures that value only analytical thinking. And second, they get Stockholm syndrome and begin to believe that is right. First they get dissuaded from innovating by others, then they dissuade themselves.

4. What most impedes the risk-taking necessary for innovation?

The problem is processes that imbed requirements for proof through inductive or deductive logic. And then the culture that this breeds.

5. Since the book was published, have you come across other leaders that have transformed their organizations to take more of a design approach?

Leaders from two of the world’s largest companies read the book and both have asked me to help them transform their organizations to take a design thinking approach. So far, so good. They are very committed.

6. People often talk about not having time to innovate. How can people find the time for themselves or their employees?

That is a lame argument. People have time to do anything for which they are passionate. People blame lack of time for every single thing that they think they would like to do but lack the sufficient passion for. Innovators innovate regardless of their environment. Some get fired for it and go somewhere else and start over again. A leader can make it harder or easier for employees to innovate. But the innovators innovate regardless and the non-innovators complain about the difficulty finding the time to innovate – regardless.

7. What skills do you believe that managers need to acquire to succeed in an innovation-led organization?

They need to nurture their originality. Very few people in life are good at anything without practice. If you practice mastery all your life, you will be masterful. If you practice originality, you will get good at innovation. Most managers spend their time deepening their mastery and not nurturing their originality. Over time, they become fearful of innovation.

8. If you were to change one thing about our educational system to better prepare students to contribute in the innovation workforce of tomorrow, what would it be?

Make art a required subject for as long as we make math a required subject. We send a powerful signal to students that analytics are important and artistry is not. Artistry is the foundation of innovation. Most technologists will never innovate a single thing because their training drove out any artistry from them.

My book review of “The Design of Business” can be found here.

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Innovation Perspectives – Cash, Plastic or Free?

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This is the first of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?‘. So to kick it off, here is my perspective:

Innovation Perspectives - Cash, Plastic or Free?There are lots of industries that are desperate for innovation, especially in this recession, but my choice is the publishing industry. First let me say that far too often the publishing industry is too narrowly defined as relating to the publishing of books. Or, if it is thought of in a more holistic manner, then it is still spoken about in terms of its isolated silos – books, magazines, newspapers, music, software, etc.

Yet what is the publishing industry but a group of businesses that make their living distributing the work of “artists” to the masses. And no matter which of these silos you choose to read about, you’ll come across stories of their pending demise (even software). Taken at face value, the publishing industries are facing an apocalypse and should be desperate for innovation – and they are…

Recently I came across an article talking about how now instead of paying 99 cents a song as on iTunes, users will be able to download and listen to the music they want for free after watching a 15- to 30-second advertisement at sites like FreeAllMusic.com. As a concept, advertising-supported music you can share is not new. It used to be done with the radio and a cassette recorder, but now it is possible for downloads and sharing and social media to all be combined together. For a music industry struggling against piracy, it needs to innovate further in areas like this.

The magazine industry is shrinking at an accelerating rate with magazines like Business 2.0 (one of my favorites) closing up shop, and rumors swirling about Newsweek possibly disappearing as well. Two newspaper towns are becoming one newspaper towns and the art of the newspaper business (feature stories and investigative journalism) is quickly being replaced in the dailies by more stories off the wire.

Both newspapers and magazines are hoping that devices like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and their own e-reader creations will save them. Some magazines are getting a little more creative. National Geographic is offering their entire archive on a portable hard disk, and Sports Illustrated is preparing for the new generation of rumored slate computers with a new interactive format.

The book industry is coping with the fact that on Christmas Day, for the first time in history, Amazon sold more digital books than paper books, and also with Google’s designs on digitizing every book they legally can. So, as you can see all of the silos in the publishing industry are desperate for innovation.

But what does the future hold for the publishing industry?

If you watch the embedded video in my Apple Tablet Sneak Preview article, or if you watch the embedded video of Coursesmart’s offering in my Microsoft-Apple-Google in Tablet Battle article, I think you’ll get a sense of where things are going and the kinds of innovation that the publishing industry silos will need to consider.

The bottom line is that when people start carrying around high-definition multimedia devices with them that are always connected to the Internet, then the boundaries between different media types are going to feel artificial. Customers will flock to more integrated content.

This will require companies delivering information or entertainment solutions to customers to innovate new partnerships and deal structures, new business models, and new product and service offerings to better meet customers’ quickly evolving entertainment and education expectations. Industry structures and silos are about to be transformed.

So, what kind of publishing industry innovations can you imagine in this new world?

You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles from the different contributing authors on ‘What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?‘ by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Barriers to Innovation Workshop

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Barriers to Innovation Workshop

This week I will be leading Workshop B on identifying and removing barriers to innovation on December 2, 2009 at the Open Innovation Summit in Orlando, Florida at the Crowne Plaza Orlando Universal.

Adding a front line perspective to the workshop will be:

  • Greg Fox (Cisco Systems) – Chief Marketing Officer, Strategic Alliances, WW Operations & Business Development

  • Helene F. Rutledge (GSK Consumer Healthcare) – Director of Open Innovations

  • Hutch Carpenter (Spigit) – Vice President of Product

The workshop will be a discussion with participants about identifying the barriers to innovation that can cripple the innovation capabilities that make organizations successful. This interactive workshop will also examine how to make immediate changes in your organization to start removing participants’ particular barriers to innovation and accelerate their organizations’ innovation capabilities.

Highlights will include:

  • An examination of how successful organizations go from nimble David to sluggish Goliath

  • An introduction of a framework for identifying barriers to innovation

  • Group Exercise – How to identify the barriers to innovation within your organization

  • An analysis of how others have removed barriers to innovation in their own organizations

  • Group Exercise – How to remove barriers to innovation in your organization

There is still time to register for the Open Innovation Summit and my Workshop B for $1000 off with code YPY692 online or by phone at 781-939-2500.

After the workshop I will be covering the rest of the Open Innovation Summit on Twitter as @innovate at the hashtag #OIS09, and will be writing up some blog entries after the event for Blogging Innovation.

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