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.

Find Your Nerve Guest Post

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Are you going to be nervous in the downturn, or nervy?

It is much easier to lose your nerve than it is to regain it, so better not to lose it in the first place. I have lost my nerve before and made decisions I regretted for a long time after they were made. Acting out of fear leads to poor decision making and a lack of leverage that, in turn, leads to unfavorable outcomes. That is why you must maintain your nerve and focus on the actions you need to take to create positive change, rather than allowing yourself to be overtaken by fear. Fear is one of those emotions that grows to fill the space.

When this downturn began, I had a client that wanted to extend our contract at half the previous rate in order to cut costs. Without any other projects in hand it would have been very easy to take their offer and hope that something better would come along. It’s much harder to walk away from guaranteed income and focus on winning new clients during the biggest downturn in a generation, but I did. The outcome?

Not losing my nerve, refusing this offer, and fully dedicating myself to revitalizing my business has led to the signing of two new clients outside the United States, the signing of a top literary agent to represent my book project (and very soon a book deal), and to Blogging Innovation expanding to become the leading innovation blog on the web with more than 15 contributing authors and upwards of 200,000 monthly page views.

So before you lose your nerve and start asking yourself all those questions about what could go wrong, focus instead on asking yourself about the actions you could take now to make sure that things go right.

Are you going to be nervous in the downturn, or nervy? If you act fearful, your clients will be afraid to do business with you, but if you’re confident that you will do great things, then your clients will want to do great things with you.

This article originally appeared on Find Your Nerve

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Apple Tablet or iPhone Accessory?

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There is a lot of chatter out there focusing on the possibility of a new Apple Tablet being announced at Apple’s next media event on September 9, 2009.

Will Apple launch a tablet computer?

Does it make sense for Apple to do so?

Let’s look at the current state of the market for computing devices:

Many companies and individuals have recently made the switch from desktop computers to laptop computers

Yet, still IDC forecasts laptops like the Apple Macbook to represent only 55% of worldwide sales in 2009

People are only now beginning to make the switch from dumb phones to smartphones in earnest

Yet in Q4 2008, only 23% of handsets sold in the USA were smartphones like the Apple iPhone (according to NPD group)

Netbooks are currently the hot computing category
Mobile operators in many countries charge by the device for Internet access

Adding an Apple Tablet would likely add $60/month to a mobile phone bill in the USA

So, given that a huge majority of individuals don’t even have a smartphone, are starting to keep their hardware longer, and may have just purchased a new laptop or netbook, does it make sense for Apple to launch a tablet or netbook computer?

I may be completely wrong, but personally I think that:

Apple will not announce an Apple Tablet or Apple Netbook on September 9, 2009

Even if they wanted to, I don’t think they could make such a launch before January 2010 at the earliest

Apple may never launch an Apple Tablet or an Apple Netbook

Experimentation with touch screens of various sizes could also point to a wireless iPhone and iPod Touch accessory

A Shift in How We Compute

People’s behavior is changing. As people move to smartphones like the Apple iPhone, these devices are occupying the middle space (around the neighborhood), and the mobility of laptops is shifting to the edges – around the house and around the world.

Personally, I believe that as smartphones and cloud computing evolve, these devices will become our primary computing hub and new hardware will be introduced that connects physically, wirelessly or virtually to enhance storage, computing power, screen size, input needs, output needs, etc.

– This would be thinking differently.
– This would be more than introducing a ‘me-too, but a little better’ product.
– This would be innovation.

And this would allow Apple (or someone else), by embracing this concept, to link up with pervasive, mobile, wearable computing efforts like those underway at IBM Research and elsewhere.

What will Apple really do?

What do you think?

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Innovation Multiplication

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I came across an interesting video with economist Alex Tabarrok talking about the incredible rate of progress in idea creation in the last 50 years and the prognosis for the next 100 years. His main premise?

“One Idea, One World, One Market”

Check out the video:

The video does a great job of visualizing part of the reason that the rate of technological advance is increasing – there are more people working to create ideas and solutions than ever before. Despite the incredible growth in idea creation over the last 50 years, Alex Tabarrok talks a lot about the need to increase the number of idea creators. Currently, less than 1/10 of 1% of the world’s population are scientists and engineers (1 in 1,000).

Innovation Multiplication If you think about the world’s population as one interconnected cloud computer, and follow that analogy through – billions of our processors are offline. If the rest of the world were as wealthy as the United States, there would be five times as many scientists and engineers.

The United States may be losing its idea leadership, but that is a great thing because it means that the number of idea creators is increasing.

For example, in the ten years from 1996-2006, the number of university students in China increased from 1 million to 5 million. Dr. Tabarrok didn’t present the data, but I imagine there was probably a similar increase in India during the same time period.

“We all benefit when other countries get rich”

greater demand for ideas

increased supply of new ideas

Who will be the idea leader over the next 50 years?

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Innovation Through Design Thinking

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Here is another video from Tim Brown of IDEO, this one is “Innovation Through Design Thinking” from a visit to MIT (skip ahead three minutes if you’re pressed for time):

According to IDEO, Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation.

This video highlights how companies use design thinking in their businesses, from Motorola thinking about strategy to P&G thinking about moving into new markets to Microsoft thinking about the application of new technology.

I’ve always believed that:

Innovation = Invention + Insights

It was good to see Tim reinforce this core belief when he says “Insights are the fuel for innovation.”

Some of the key things to consider when looking to use design thinking as an approach to innovation:

Analogous situations (example: hospital operating teams versus pit crews)

Insights come from the extreme users (example: working with kids on cooking tool project)

Getting out there to look, listen, try

Building to think – prototyping for thinking and learning not as an outcome of what you’ve done

Using storytelling to develop and express ideas

Design thinking is not just about methodology, it is just as much about culture

Finally I’d like to leave you with one thought from the video:

“Many great ideas fail not because they were not great ideas, but because they could not navigate the politics and processes of the organization.”

What do you think?

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

My View on Crowdsourcing Published on BusinessWeek.com

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Helen Walters, Business Week’s Editor for Innovation and Design, recently gathered opinions on crowdsourcing, via Twitter.

I replied with a quote via email and Business Week published it recently with a dozen others. Here’s mine:

You can find the whole slide show here.

“The future of crowdsourcing will be as an integrated and required part of the front end of innovation. Its role, however, will be limited in order to protect brand perception and competitive differentiation. Crowdsourcing will serve as an input into the innovation process that must be filtered by internal resources and built upon as necessary. The most forward-thinking organizations will invite the wisest of the crowd to participate in this idea refinement side by side with internal resources.”

What do you think?

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

Creativity versus Literacy

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I came across this video of Sir Ken Robinson speaking about how schools kill creativity.

He contends that more emphasis should be placed on teaching creativity in schools, and that teaching creativity should be as important as teaching literacy.

Here are some of his other key thoughts and insights:

The great thing about children is that if they don’t know, at least they’ll have a go – “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Unfortunately, by the time we become adults, most of us lose this capacity.

“We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or we are educated out of it.” – Sir Ken Robinson

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Every society has the same heirarchy of educational subjects:

Mathematics and Languages

Humanities

Arts

Art and Music

Drama and Dance

As children grow up we start to educate them from the waist up, then just their heads, and then we focus slightly to one side. Meaning that the most successful people produced by this system end up being university professors who live in their heads and view their bodies as transport systems for their heads.

The public education system was created during the industrial revolution and primarily serves to educate the workforce and to serve as a protracted process of university entrance.

The consequence is that many brilliant, talented, creative people are left feeling that they are not.

At the same time we are going through a period of academic inflation – the jobs that used to require a bachelor’s degree now require a master’s and those that used to require a master’s now require a PhD.

We need to think about intelligence differently. Intelligence is dynamic, interactive, and inter-disciplinary.

“Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson has collected a lot of this thinking into a book called The Element.

What do you think?

Braden (@innovate on Twitter)

Definition – What is Innovation?

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Innovation has been defined many ways by many different people.

In January 2009, innovation was defined forty different ways in under 140 characters for a Twitter contest (many of which can be found here) .

These of course aren’t the only possible definitions for innovation, but here is a video of my innovation definition (along with an example):

“Innovation transforms useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.” – Braden Kelley

What is your innovation definition?

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

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Twitter in the Classroom

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During Clayton Christensen’s talk at the World Innovation Forum about innovation in education and healthcare, Dr. Christensen made a point about how technology will move more of education out of the classroom and onto the Internet.

He was mostly speaking about augmenting home schooling, but also about school leavers earning their equivalency online, and online advanced placement courses for kids at schools who might not have the resources to provide these courses.

This sparked some humorous debate amongst those in the Bloggers Hub at the World Innovation forum about the possibility of teaching kids 140 characters at a time via Twitter.

Well, teachers are not exactly doing that, but they have been using Twitter in the classroom since at least January 2008.

At the University of Texas at Dallas, History Professor, Monica Rankin has been using hashtags for classroom discussion in the hopes that it would lead to increased student involvement. Here is a video made by film students at the university about the experiment:

Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota has been partnering with Roosevelt High School to integrate Twitter and other social media tools into the curriculum to successfully increase student engagement. Here is a video that the University of Minnesota put together about their experiment:

Out here in Seattle, National Public Radio (NPR) recently did a segment on how a local private school is using Twitter to facilitate improved communications between students and parents about what is going on in the classroom. As a parent, this is probably my favorite example of using Twitter in the classroom. You can hear the four minute audio story here (sorry, link broken) and see examples of The Meridian School‘s classroom tweets above.

For teachers considering the use of Twitter in the classroom, you should also check out this blog article on thirteen ways to use Twitter in academia (sorry, link broken).

So, does Twitter have a place in the classroom?

I think so. What do you think?

Braden (@innovate on Twitter)

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Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators

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HSM Global recently hosted a webinar with Dr. Vijay Govindarajan of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in the run up to the World Innovation Forum. In 2010 he gave a similar speech at the London Business Forum. Here it is:

One of the main points of the webinar is that managers need to consciously look at how they allocate time between:

Box 1 – Managing the Present
Box 2 – Selectively Forgetting the Past
Box 3 – Creating the Future

When Dr. Govindarajan speaks of the future, he is speaking about planning ten years out.

He asked webinar attendees how they allocate their time between the boxes, and the unscientific results were that 92% of the participants spend up to 90% of their time in Box 1.

According to Dr. Govindarajan, the rule of thumb for a world class company is to spend 50% in Box 1 and 50% in Box 2/Box 3. Even in a recession the ratio should still be no more than 70-80% in Box 1 and 20-30% in Box 2/Box 3.

His research shows that the economic expansions following recessions usually last about three times as long as the recession, and that the best time to prepare for expansion is during the recession. The competitive landscape usually fundamentally changes after recessions.

Here is one way to look at the three boxes and strategic balance:

Box 1 is about:
— Closing the Performance Gap
— Restructuring

Box 2 & 3 are about:
— Closing the Opportunity Gap (projects for 2020)
— Renewal

At the end of his presentation there was a Q&A session including one from yours truly. 🙂

What do you think?

You can see Dr. Govindarajan in person at the World Innovation Forum 2009 and still save up to $610 on registration if you register by May 1, 2009 using the discount code – INNOVATE.

@innovate