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.

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021

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Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021After a week of torrid voting and much passionate support, along with a lot of gut-wrenching consideration and jostling during the judging round, I am proud to announce your Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021:

  1. Janet Sernack
    Janet SernackJanet Sernack is the Founder and CEO of ImagineNation™ which provides innovation consulting services to help organizations adapt, innovate and grow through disruption by challenging businesses to be, think and act differently to co-create a world where people matter & innovation is the norm.
  2. Greg Satell
    Greg SatellGreg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His first book, Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age, was selected as one of the best business books in 2017. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.
  3. Braden Kelley
    Braden KelleyBraden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, workshop leader, and creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

  4. Jesse Nieminen
    Jesse NieminenJesse Nieminen is the Co-founder and Chairman at Viima, the best way to collect and develop ideas. Viima’s innovation management software is already loved by thousands of organizations all the way to the Global Fortune 500. He’s passionate about helping leaders drive innovation in their organizations and frequently writes on the topic, usually in Viima’s blog.
  5. Robert B Tucker
    Robert TuckerRobert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.
  6. Rachel Audige
    Rachel AudigeRachel Audige is an Innovation Architect who helps organisations embed inventive thinking as well as a certified Systematic Inventive Thinking Facilitator, based in Melbourne.

  7. Howard Tiersky
    Howard TierskyHoward Tiersky is an inspiring and passionate speaker, the Founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, innovation consultant, serial entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. IDG named him one of the “10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today”, and Enterprise Management 360 named Howard “One of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers That Will Change Your World.”
  8. Paul Sloane
    Paul SloanePaul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader and editor of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, both published by Kogan-Page.
  9. Pete Foley
    A twenty-five year Procter & Gamble veteran, Pete has spent the last 8+ years applying insights from psychology and behavioral science to innovation, product design, and brand communication. He spent 17 years as a serial innovator, creating novel products, perfume delivery systems, cleaning technologies, devices and many other consumer-centric innovations, resulting in well over 100 granted or published patents. Find him at pete.mindmatters@gmail.com
  10. Nicolas Bry
    Nicolas BryNicolas is an International Innovation Executive, expert in corporate innovation programs, and innovation labs, designing place where good innovation thrives! He currently helps the 20 innovation managers of Orange Africa to develop their projects locally. In 2019 he wrote The Intrapreneurs’ Factory, a practical guide to leverage intrapreneurship for your company, and is the writer of the innovation blog RapidInnovation.fr.

    11. Build a common language of innovation on your team

  11. Arlen Meyers
    Arlen MyersArlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at www.sopenet.org
  12. Linda Naiman
    Linda NaimanLinda Naiman helps executives and their teams develop creativity, innovation, and leadership capabilities, through coaching, training and consulting. She brings a multi-disciplinary approach to learning and development by leveraging arts-based practices to foster creativity at work, and design thinking as a strategy for innovation.

  13. Anthony Mills
    Anthony MillsAnthony Mills is the Founder & CEO of Legacy Innovation Group (www.legacyinnova.com), a world-leading strategic innovation consulting firm working with organizations all over the world. Anthony is also the Executive Director of GInI – Global Innovation Institute (www.gini.org), the world’s foremost certification, accreditation, and membership organization in the field of innovation. Anthony has advised leaders from around the world on how to successfully drive long-term growth and resilience through new innovation. Learn more at www.anthonymills.com. Anthony can be reached directly at anthony@anthonymills.com.
  14. John Bessant
    John BessantJohn Bessant has been active in research, teaching, and consulting in technology and innovation management for over 25 years. Today, he is Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Research Director, at Exeter University. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship with the Advanced Institute for Management Research and was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy of Management. He has acted as advisor to various national governments and international bodies including the United Nations, The World Bank, and the OECD. John has authored many books including Managing innovation and High Involvement Innovation (Wiley). Follow @johnbessant
  15. Mike Shipulski
    Mike ShipulskiMike Shipulski brings together people, culture, and tools to change engineering behavior. He writes daily on Twitter as @MikeShipulski and weekly on his blog Shipulski On Design.
  16. Scott Anthony
    Scott AnthonyScott Anthony is a strategic advisor, writer and speaker on topics of growth and innovation. He has been based in Singapore since 2010, and currently serves at the Managing Director of Innosight’s Asia-Pacific operations.

  17. Jeffrey Phillips
    Jeffrey Phillips has over 15 years of experience leading innovation in Fortune 500 companies, federal government agencies and non-profits. He is experienced in innovation strategy, defining and implementing front end processes, tools and teams and leading innovation projects. He is the author of Relentless Innovation and OutManeuver. Jeffrey writes the popular Innovate on Purpose blog. Follow him @ovoinnovation
  18. Phil McKinney
    Phil McKinneyPhil McKinney is the Author of “Beyond The Obvious”​, Host of the Killer Innovations Podcast and Syndicated Radio Show, a Keynote Speaker, President & CEO CableLabs and an Innovation Mentor and Coach.

  19. Gijs van Wulfen
    Gijs van WulfenGijs van Wulfen helps organizations to structure the chaotic start of innovation as author, speaker and facilitator. He is the founder of the FORTH innovation method and author of the innovation bestseller The Innovation Expedition. He was chosen by LinkedIn as one of their first 150 Influencers. Follow Gijs @gijsvanwulfen

  20. Kate Hammer
    Kate HammerKate Hammer is a joint founder of KILN, working with large-scale companies in the USA and Australia to transform their internal innovation processes. Kate works as a business storyteller. In 2012, she created StoryFORMs to help others articulate their commercial & organisational stories. Kate offers workshops & 1:1 coaching.

    21. Accelerate your change and transformation success

  21. Phil Buckley
    Phil BuckleyPhil Buckley is an award-winning author and change management strategist with over 32 large-scale change initiatives, including co-leading global change management for the $19.6 billion Kraft Foods acquisition of Cadbury. He is the author of two books: Change on the Run and Change with Confidence. You can find Phil’s podcast and monthly newsletter at www.changewithconfidence.com.
  22. Tamara Ghandour
    Tamara GhandourTamara Ghandour of GoToLaunchStreet is a TED speaker and entrepreneur. From building and running multimillion dollar businesses, advising Fortune 500 like Disney, Procter and Gamble and RICOH on fostering innovative ideas and people. Tamara’s life is about breaking through the status quo for game-changing results, and that’s what her keynotes, online programs and assessments can do for you.
  23. Tom Koulopoulos
    Thomas KoulopoulosTom Koulopoulos is the author of 10 books and founder of the Delphi Group, a 25-year-old Boston-based think tank and a past Inc. 500 company that focuses on innovation and the future of business. He tweets from @tkspeaks.
  24. Michael Graber
    Michael GraberMichael Graber is the cofounder and managing partner at Southern Growth Studio, a Memphis-based firm that specializes in growth strategy and innovation. A published poet and musician, Graber is the creative force that complements the analytical side of the house. He speaks and publishes frequently on best practices in design thinking, business strategy, and innovation and earned an MFA from the University of Memphis.
  25. Yoram Solomon
    Four Rules to Snap Judge a New VentureDr. Yoram Solomon is the author of The Book of Trust and 12 more books, a TEDx and keynote speaker, the founder of the Innovation Culture Institute, and an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship. You can follow him everywhere on @yoramsolomon.
  26. Shilpi Kumar
    Shilpi KumarShilpi Kumar an inquisitive researcher, designer, strategist and an educator with over 15 years of experience, who truly believes that we can design a better world by understanding human behavior. I work with organizations to identify strategic opportunities and offer user-centric solutions.
  27. Shawn Nason
    Shawn NasonShawn Nason, founder and CEO of MOFI, lives his life with a commitment to make everyone he meets a part of his family. Armed with the gift of discernment, he has the uncanny ability to walk alongside people as they struggle to connect with their deepest passions and engage their most debilitating demons. He challenges the world around him to be fully present, get real, and knock down the barrier that separates the various compartments in their lives.

  28. John Carter
    John CarterJohn Carter has been a widely respected adviser to technology firms over his career. John is the author of Innovate Products Faster: Graphical Tools for Accelerating Product Development. As Founder and Principal of TCGen Inc., he has advised some of the most revered technology firms in the world.
  29. Jeff Rubingh
    Jeff RubinghJeff Rubingh is a technology innovation expert, consultant and analyst. Focused on the intersection between technology and business, Jeff helps clients identify ground-breaking solutions that maximize ROI across existing and emerging technology disciplines.
  30. Ludwig Melik
    Ludwig MelikLudwig Melik is CEO of Planbox, whose mission is to help organizations thrive by transforming the culture of agile work, continuous innovation, and creativity across the entire organization… Connect with him on LinkedIn or join the conversation by following Planbox on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

    Get the Change Planning Toolkit

  31. Soren Kaplan
    Soren KaplanSoren Kaplan is the bestselling and award-winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an affiliated professor at USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, a former corporate executive, and a co-founder of UpBOARD. He has been recognized by the Thinkers50 as one of the world’s top keynote speakers and thought leaders in business strategy and innovation.
  32. Shelly Greenway
    Shelly GreenwayShelly Greenway is a front-end innovation strategist and partner at The Strategy Distillery – a brand innovation consultancy that specialises in opportunity hunting and proposition development. Their success rates are driven by their proprietary consumer co-creation IP. Follow @ChiefDistiller
  33. Eric Eskey
    Eric EskeyEric Eskey is a Managing Director at Strategyn, an innovation consultancy. Eric is in the business of creating the future. I aim to use the resources he has – his work, investments, voice, and imagination – to encourage innovation and defeat the hidden forces that resist it.

  34. Mick Simonelli
    Mick SimonelliMick Simonelli is an innovator with 20+ years of implementing change and positive disruption at USAA. As a military veteran, he held transformation roles in numerous military organizations; and as a business executive, he purposely hired vets to help launch numerous innovations as the Chief Innovation Officer for a Fortune 500 company. Mick currently serves as an innovation consultant and can be found at www.micksimonelli.com Follow @MickSimonelli

  35. Mitch Ditkoff
    Mitch Ditkoff is the Co-Founder and President of Idea Champions and the author of “Awake at the Wheel”, as well as the very popular Heart of Innovation blog.

  36. Peter Cook
    Peter CookPeter Cook leads Human Dynamics and The Academy of Rock, providing Keynotes, Organisational Development and Coaching. He is the author of seven books on business leadership. His three passions are science, business and music, having led innovation teams for 18 years to develop life-saving drugs including the first treatments for AIDS and the development of Human Insulin. Peter is Music and Business editor at Innovation Excellence. You can follow him on twitter @Academyofrock.

  37. Mukesh Gupta
    Mukesh GuptaMukesh Gupta is Director of Customer Advocacy, SAP India Private Limited. He also served as Executive Liaison for the SAP User group in India, and as a Global Lead in Sales & Business Development. He blogs, and shares podcasts and videos, on his site rmukeshgupta.com

  38. Paul Hobcraft
    Paul HobcraftPaul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities. Follow @paul4innovating
  39. Ralph Christian Ohr
    Ralph OhrDr. Ralph-Christian Ohr has extensive experience in product/innovation management for international technology-based companies. His particular interest is targeted at the intersection of organizational and human innovation capabilities. You can follow him on Twitter @Ralph_Ohr.
  40. Randy Pennington
    Randy PenningtonRandy Pennington is an award-winning author, speaker, and leading authority for helping leaders deliver positive results in a world of uncertainty and change. To learn more or to engage Randy for your organization, visit www.penningtongroup.com, email info@penningtongroup.com, or call 972-980-9857 (U.S.).

If your favorite didn’t make the list, then next year try to rally more votes for them or convince them to increase the quality and quantity of their contributions.

Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2015
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2016
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2017
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2019
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020

Download PDF versions of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020 and 2021 lists here:


Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020 PDF . . . Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021

Happy New Year everyone!

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Entrepreneurs Must Think Like a Change Leader

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Entrepreneurs Must Think Like a Change Leader

Some entrepreneurs start a business because they want to be their own boss doing something they understand. But many startup entrepreneurs start a business because they want to change something, to deliver more value for customers than existing solutions, to disrupt an industry, to become a unicorn, etc. Entrepreneurs like this will need to become masters of change.

You have a great idea.

And you’re hoping to launch a business and change the world, making a dollar or two along the way.

Does this describe you?

If so, you will need to know how to build and operate a business. You will need to be able to profitably manufacture and sell your product and/or service. But you will also need to be really good at something that many people don’t think about when they’re creating a startup.

You must become good at leading change because you are going to be asking people to change their behavior, and people don’t do this easily and may even resist.

But it is possible to understand and harness the Eight Change Mindsets™ that cause people to choose change. These include:

  1. Mover ’n’ Shaker: give these people the chance to be first

  2. Thrill Seeker: these people like to try new things and experiment

  3. Mission-Driven: these people need reasons to believe

  4. Action-Oriented: these people just want to know what needs to be done

  5. Expert-Minded: teach these people how to do it, and they will seek mastery

  6. Reward-Hungry: these people want recognition for adopting the change

  7. Team Player: these people are happy to help if you show them why the change will be helpful

  8. Teacher: show these people how to get others to choose change

Getting people to choose change is important because you’ll be asking people to abandon their existing solution to adopt yours – even if it is the do-nothing solution. This is not easy because people get comfortable using their existing solution and will be uncomfortable with the idea of doing something different.

Eight Change Mindsets to Harness for Success

If you read through this list and imagine what might happen if you haven’t addressed these mindsets in your business plan, you should quickly find yourself with eight potential explanations for why people might resist your new product or service and start having ideas about how to create initiatives to leverage them to overcome potential resistance.

When we break out the trap of thinking about all customers as the same or out of demographic segmentation traps we can start to see our potential customers as people and to identify their different motivations that will determine whether our business is a raging success or a humbling failure.

This is of course assuming that you’ve leveraged my Innovation is All About Value approach to make sure that you’re hitting on all three cylinders with the product or service that you’re bringing to market:

  1. Value Creation is pretty self-explanatory. Your innovation investment must create incremental or completely new value large enough to overcome the switching costs of moving to your new solution from the old solution (including the ‘Do Nothing Solution’). New value can be created by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or create new psychological or emotional benefits.

  2. Value Access could also be thought of as friction reduction. How easy do you make it for customers and consumers to access the value you’ve created. How well has the product or service been designed to allow people to access the value easily? How easy is it for the solution to be created? How easy is it for people to do business with you?

  3. Value Translation is all about helping people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Value translation is also about understanding where on a continuum between the need for explanation and education that your solution falls. Incremental innovations can usually just be explained to people because they anchor to something they already understand, but radical or disruptive innovations inevitably require some level of education (often far in advance of the launch).

Doing well on two of them and poorly on the third will still lead to failure. Too often people only focus on value creation – to their own detriment. Helping people access the value you’re creating and to understand how it fits into their lives are equally important.

If you invest in doing all three well for your product and/or service and leverage the Eight Change Mindsets™, introduced in my latest book Charting Change, you will be unstoppable!

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Technology Not Always the Key to Innovation

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Technology Not Always the Key to Innovation

Humans love technology and often we make the mistake of thinking that technology is the only path to innovation.

But there are many examples that prove this is often folly…

The wine industry offers a couple of great examples.

Alternative Wine Innovation Opportunity #1 – Barn Owls

Some vintners in Napa Valley, California are eschewing potentially harmful high-tech rodenticides in favor of fluffy little barn owls to control the local rodent population and to reduce damage to the vineyards. Low-tech or no-tech sometimes provides more sustainable solutions than seemingly convenient high-tech solutions.

Alternative Wine Innovation Opportunity #2 – Music

Mozart in the Vineyard…

A winemaker in Tuscany, Italy has taken to the airwaves to improve the quality of his wines, installing speakers around his vineyard that caress his vines with Mozart during the growing process and the barrels of juice during the winemaking process.

One of the primary benefits of the continuous music is said to be a decrease in the use of insecticides because pests like crickets are forced to leave the area because they can communicate with each other. The music is also said to operate in similar frequencies to running water, causing the grapes to grow better the closer they are to the speakers.

One of the most brilliant parts of the clip is the part where the vintner lets it slip that he has partnered with Bose on the project.

Creating a win-win partnership with a company that might benefit from helping to fund an alternative approach is a great way for an entrepreneurial innovator to reduce the risk and the cost of their experiment.

It is also a great way to work with the partner to create equipment fit for purpose that will ultimately perform better than off the shelf components and for the partner will represent solutions they can use to open up a new market.

Conclusion

Technology is not always the path to innovation, but it is easy to forget this.

It is easy to take shortcuts and not spend enough time finding problems worth solving and to not carefully define the right problem to solve.

Technology is seductive and marketers are skilled at making a technology-based solution seem like the easiest solution or even – the only one. But often, if we keep our minds open and our field of vision spread wide, we may notice low-technology solutions that solve the problem either better or in more sustainable ways or in ways with additional benefits.

So keep your eyes and ears, and all of your other senses, peeled for all potential solutions, not just the high technology ones.

Fast Company is Wrong

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Star

Starbucks the Real Winner in Amazon Go Collaboration

Recently Starbucks announced a collaboration with Amazon Go on a New York City store that combines Starbucks Pickup concept with Amazon’s Go concept.

A Fast Company article titled Starbucks and Amazon team up on their first store, but I can’t see what’s in it for Starbucks tries to assert that the collaboration is ridiculously titled in favor of Amazon Go.

I respectfully disagree.

Customer Experience Learning Delivers Starbucks More Learning Than Amazon Go

Lost on Fast Company’s Mark Wilson is the incredible value to Starbucks to not only learn about Amazon’s Go technology, but more importantly to observe how their customer experience is impacted by the introduction of the Amazon Go fortress gates and related surveillance technology.

Starbucks can gather incredibly valuable customer insights from the answers to these and other questions:

  1. How does dwell time in the concept store compare to other New York City traditional Starbucks locations nearby?

  2. How is purchase size per customer visit impacted?

  3. Is there an uptick in grab ‘n’ go purchases versus Starbucks’ own grab ‘n’ go items?

  4. How do customers feel about the presence of the Amazon Go security gates and all of its necessary surveillance cameras?

  5. How does the composition of the customer experience in the Amazon Go concept test location affect visit frequency?

  6. How does the composition of the customer experience in the Amazon Go concept test location affect brand perception?

  7. How does the composition of the customer experience in the Amazon Go concept test location affect customer loyalty?

There is more to ongoing success in business than the quest for hyper-efficiency or profit above all else. Creating a valued and differentiated customer experience matters. In the same way products can become commoditized, services, and even experiences can be commoditized to.

Continuous Experimentation is Worth the Investment

Continuous experimentation is just as important for customer experience design as it is for mature product design and service design practices. Companies like Chick-fil-A, Kaiser Permanente, and OSF HealthCare have invested in facilities to prototype and test potential alterations in their service and experience delivery. I’ve had the opportunity to visit all three of these facilities in person and the privilege of advising one of these three organizations. It is harder to conduct experience experiments, but not impossible – and incredibly important.

It is because of the greater challenge of prototyping experiences and gathering accurate feedback that Starbucks stands to gain more from this collaboration with Amazon Go. And while Starbucks could easily replace Amazon Go with a competitor, Amazon isn’t likely to start their own global chain of coffee houses.

If you haven’t already come across this article, this article by Larissa Gomes is worth a read:

Amazon Go has competition: Meet 6 other automated stores transforming retail

Not mentioned in the article is startup Standard Cognition:

Final thought: You may also notice in the picture at the top of the article – if you look closely – the last minute technology investment I highlighted in my last Starbucks article.

Keep innovating!

Image credits: Starbucks

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Building a Better Change Communication Plan

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ACMP Standard Visualization

by Braden Kelley

In the ACMP Standard for Change Management the second phase is to “Formulate the Change Management Strategy” and its first step is to “Develop the Communication Strategy.”

The quality of your communication strategy and its execution is one of the most important determinants of success for your change or transformation initiative. But let’s be honest, most of us studied something other than communications in our university education and as a result don’t know the keys to successful communications. Because we have all learned how to write and speak in high school we make the mistake of thinking that we are expert communicators, but we’re not – at least without work and a conscious focus on the key principles of effective communications.

The most important of these is to know your audience and to speak to them as individuals. When it comes to change, there are many different motivations for people to choose change.

When crafting your communication strategy for your change or transformation initiative it is incredibly important for people to refer to the best practices of marketing communications. Chief among these is the recognition of the importance of segmenting your audience so you can send relevant communications to the different segments of your audience.

One of the best ways to segment your audience for change communications is to leverage The Eight Change Mindsets:

1. Mover ’n’ Shaker

  • give these people the chance to be first

2. Thrill Seeker

  • these people like to try new things and experiment

3. Mission-Driven

  • these people need reasons to believe

4. Action-Oriented

  • these people just want to know what needs to be done

5. Expert-Minded

  • teach these people how to do it, and they will seek mastery

6. Reward-Hungry

  • these people want recognition for adopting the change

7. Team Player

  • these people are happy to help if you show them why the change will be helpful

8. Teacher

  • show these people how to get others to choose change

You can download The Eight Change Mindsets as a PDF from Slideshare here:

Leveraging The Eight Change Mindsets in your change communication strategy will enable you to focus on creating the messaging, symbols and artifacts that will help each mindset choose change.

But many change managers either aren’t familiar with the basic principles of marketing communications or choose to take shortcuts and treat the entire organization as a single audience and craft a single set of communications. This is a mistake.

It’s actually a bit ironic because ProSci’s ADKAR methodology is clearly a re-purposing of marketing’s AIDA view of customer progressions:

  1. Awareness
  2. Interest
  3. Desire
  4. Action

As a quick refresher, ADKAR as a comparison is:

  1. Awareness of the Need for Change
  2. Desire to Support the Change
  3. Knowledge of How to Change
  4. Ability to Demonstrate Skills & Behaviors
  5. Reinforcement to Make the Change Stick

If you really want to build a better change communication plan, then crash these two things together:

  1. The Eight Change Mindsets for the segmentation of your audience
  2. ADKAR for the creation of a communications sequence

Download the PDF of The Eight Change Mindsets above or go here to get the infographic if that’s easier for you.

If you need a little more guidance or just want to save time, then I’ve added a worksheet to v13 of the Change Planning Toolkit that I introduced in my latest book Charting Change.

The “Eight Change Mindsets Communication Strategy” worksheet is but one of the 70+ tools and frameworks that you’ll get when you purchase an annual license or a lifetime license of the Change Planning Toolkit developed as part of the Human-Centered Change methodology.

I’ve designed it as an 11″x17″ work mat to use with sticky notes. But this tool, and the others in the Change Planning Toolkit, can also be provided as 35″x56″ posters to licensees on an as needed basis. In addition, these tools are also designed to be used with virtual collaboration tools like Miro, Mural, Lucidspark, Microsoft Whiteboard and others.

So, start building a better change communication strategy today!

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Black Friday Shows No Loyalty

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Black Friday Shows No Loyalty

Marketers love to hold up points-based loyalty programs as proof of their contribution to their company’s financial success through repeat purchase behavior.

But traditional loyalty programs are nothing more than complicated, and expensive to manage, discount programs.

Black Friday is a faux holiday devoted to the religion of discounting.

This begs the question…

Do Black Friday deals do anything to create loyalty of any kind?

The idea behind Black Friday deals is almost as old marketing – the loss leader.

By offering one or more items at a substantial discount, the company and its marketers hope that a larger than normal group of potential customers will flood the shop (physical or virtual) and buy the loss leader (aka Black Friday deal) AND many other items they may (or may not) have been intending to buy.

Whether this is how it plays out in practice is a closely-guarded secret and debatable at best. Complicating the situation is the fact that Black Friday has become a virtual arms race that companies of all shapes and sizes are almost forced to participate in.

This means that nearly every retailer is offering some sort of Black Friday deal today, resulting in consumers:

  1. Best Case — Your existing customers start at your shop (online or virtual) and make a transactional purchase of one of your Black Friday deals (usually unprofitable for the company) and hopefully many other products or services to make your existing customer’s overall purchase profitable, plus they tell their friends and families to shop with you

  2. Worst Case — Your existing customers buy nothing or only your Black Friday deals, tell none of their friends and family, and you spend a lot of money on advertisements to attract non-customers to your shop that only buy your Black Friday deals

One of my marketing professors at London Business School – Mark Ritson – recently published a very funny video on the relationship between marketers and consumers:

Bridging the Gap Between Black Friday Deals and NextGen Loyalty

Marketers have an overly optimistic perspective on customer loyalty and their implementations of customer loyalty programs.

The reality is that very few customers are loyal and much of what we speak of as customer loyalty is no more than repeat transaction behavior.

In my article Next Generation Loyalty – Part One I look at how to excavate sources of NextGen Loyalty using Loyalty Archaeology™.

True loyalty (customer or otherwise) is when someone engages in a behavior that is not in their most obvious best interest because of a higher commitment.

Very few customers will ever behave against their best interests, but engaging in Loyalty Archaeology™ you can better understand where the value comes from in your products & services and work backwards to identify potential sources of customer loyalty.

Continue reading Next Generation Loyalty – Part One here.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Free Customer Experience Maturity Assessment

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Free Customer Experience Maturity Assessment

HCL Digital & Analytics Customer Experience (CX) Strategy practice lead Danyel LaGow recently published a new white paper titled:

5 Practical Strategies to Boost Your CX Success

“Driving a seamless customer experience alongside fundamental business decision-making is indispensable for business profitability. In this constantly evolving customer expectation landscape, how you cultivate your relationships will speak for your brand.

Danyel LaGowThe tectonic shift in how consumers engage with brands demand attention to new ways to enthuse customers with the intent to deliver next gen customer experience. Having an end-to-end customer journey roadmap in place is the first and foremost step towards creating a serious customer experience strategy. A customer journey map not only showcases the end-to-end customer interactions but also enable the visibility of every touch point. This further reveals internal bottlenecks and customer pain points – primary identifications to work on a customer experience management program.

It is important to assess your current CX to realize where your company stands in CX maturity, before you outline your strategy. This paper will help you dig deep and understand the five key components of successful CX, which are paramount to promoting customer success across organizations.”

Download the whitepaper to know more

Included with the white paper is a free Customer Experience (CX) Maturity Assessment.

“While many organizations have an idea about their customer experience (CX) maturity, a thoughtful assessment gives you a frame of reference to help develop a strategic roadmap. Regular assessments, as part of your annual activities, help measure the progress of your CX efforts.

This assessment is divided into six key CX components that are critical in fostering customer success in customer-centric organizations. There are three questions for each CX component, amounting to a total of 18 questions.”

The survey should not take you more than five minutes to complete.

Take the FREE CX Maturity Assessment

Image credit: Pixabay

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Next Generation Loyalty – Part One

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Next Generation Loyalty - Part One

Loyalty Archaeology™

Excavating Sources of Next Generation Loyalty

Marketers have an overly optimistic perspective on customer loyalty and their implementations of customer loyalty programs.

The reality is that very few customers are loyal and much of what we speak of as customer loyalty is no more than repeat transaction behavior.

Customer Loyalty Programs Are Really Just Discount Programs

If we are honest as marketers, today’s typical customer loyalty program is no more than an a way of automatically gathering purchase data and distributing discounts. Today’s traditional points-based customer loyalty program is actually just a fancy and often costly discounting program because smart marketers only use discounting to capture sales that would not otherwise have occurred. As soon as you begin distributing discounts to people that would have purchased anyways, then you are cannibalizing your own profit margins.

If you want to dispute that a points-based loyalty program is nothing more than a discounting program, you have to look no further than web sites that quantify the value of points given for airline miles, hotel stays, etc.

So what is customer loyalty?

According to the Oxford Dictionaries, loyalty is a strong feeling of support or allegiance.

In a business sense, most people look at customer loyalty as a measure of how likely a customer is to do repeat business with a company or brand.

But this way of looking at customer loyalty is too easy to “achieve” and is more related to repeat purchase behavior than true loyalty. The definition of loyalty in Oxford Dictionaries is too weak as well.

True loyalty (customer or otherwise) is when someone engages in a behavior that is not in their most obvious best interest because of a higher commitment.

A United States Marine putting himself or herself in harm’s way to recover a wounded comrade from the battlefield is a demonstration of true loyalty.

A customer paying a higher price for an identical product could be a demonstration of loyalty, but could also be an example of brand value or linked to other intangible, often emotional sources of value not directly linked to the product itself (desire to support a company’s social purpose, affinity for cartoon characters used to promote the product, etc.)

A customer paying a lower price for an identical product because you’re giving them a “loyalty program” discount is not a sign of loyalty.

Focusing on the interfaces and experiences related to your products, services and solutions and their surrounding emotional components are more likely to engender loyalty than building a points-based program.

I’m not saying points-based programs are bad, but let’s be clear – they’re not loyalty programs, they’re great for gathering customer purchase data and helping to drive repeat purchase behavior. But, if your competitor offers a better points program you’re likely to lose your supposedly loyal customers.

What does a Next Generation Loyalty program look like?

A Next Generation (aka NextGen) Loyalty program has very little to do with points and promotions, but instead focuses on identifying and leveraging the variables that represent opportunities to create actual loyalty for your brands and their associated products, services and solutions.

Next Generation Loyalty programs can only be created if you understand where the value comes from for each of your products, services and solutions.

Innovation Resonance Venn Diagram

In my popular article “Innovation is All About Value” I highlighted the fact that there are three key value considerations in the pursuit of innovation:

  1. Value Creation is pretty self-explanatory. Your innovation investment must create incremental or completely new value large enough to overcome the switching costs of moving to your new solution from the old solution (including the ‘Do Nothing Solution’). New value can be created by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or create new psychological or emotional benefits.

  2. Value Access could also be thought of as friction reduction. How easy do you make it for customers and consumers to access the value you’ve created. How well has the product or service been designed to allow people to access the value easily? How easy is it for the solution to be created? How easy is it for people to do business with you?

  3. Value Translation is all about helping people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Value translation is also about understanding where on a continuum between the need for explanation and education that your solution falls. Incremental innovations can usually just be explained to people because they anchor to something they already understand, but radical or disruptive innovations inevitably require some level of education (often far in advance of the launch).

All three are defined in the article on the link above and were created in an innovation context, but there is no reason they couldn’t also be used in a marketing context to identify potential sources of customer loyalty to be leveraged or enhanced.

Another great way to work backwards to identify potential sources of customer loyalty is to leverage A Practical Model for Jobs to be Done (JTBD) from Jim Kalbach. The six components laid out in his graphic below being:

  1. Situation
  2. Motivation
  3. Desired Outcome
  4. Functional Jobs
  5. Emotional Jobs
  6. Social Jobs

Practical Model for Understanding Jobs to be Done from Jim Kalbach

Using Loyalty Archaeology™ to Uncover Sources of NextGen Loyalty

These two simple frameworks give you a great place to start your quest for Next Generation Loyalty. Using Loyalty Archaeology™ to understand potential sources of loyalty will provide the foundation for building a potential program of loyalty enhancements.

You might be sensing that there is no one size fits all when it comes to NextGen Loyalty, and you’d be right.

What insights about the sources of your customers’ loyalty do you think these frameworks can provide?

What other tools do you think would be useful in excavating sources of potential customer loyalty?

In the next article in this series we’ll look at how to take the insights on customer loyalty sources and build a program of initiatives to enhance and accelerate your sources of unique customer loyalty. We’ll also look at how to go beyond points and redemption to leverage different parameters in your program of initiatives to build Next Generation Loyalty!

Image credits: Pixabay, Braden Kelley and Jim Kalbach

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Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

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Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

Innovation is all about change, and change only succeeds when people are put at the center. Therefore, people are also the heart of innovation.

It is because of this fact that I continue to build out my Human-Centered Innovation methodology and toolkit.

Keeping with the spirit of placing people at the center of innovation and change I have not only resurrected Blogging Innovation as Human-Centered Change & Innovation (follow us on LinkedIn) – complete with a weekly newsletter – but am also creating this curated collection of human-centered innovation tools.

I will give this page a start with some of my free tools from my Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit along with other well-know people-centric innovation tools.

BUT, this page will always be under construction, so please contact me with your suggestions of free tools to add.

Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

Assessments

1. Innovation Maturity Assessment

Free Innovation AuditTo help people evaluate their level of innovation maturity against the above graphic, I am sharing the 50 question innovation maturity assessment I use with clients. The assessment is most powerful when answers are gathered at multiple levels of the organization across several groups and several sites, but you can also fill it out yourself and get instant feedback – for FREE.

Click here to visit the Free Innovation Maturity Assessment page

Strategy Tools

1. Play-to-Win Strategy Canvas

Play-to-Win Strategy CanvasMatthew E. May designed and developed a wall canvas to be used when facilitating strategic choice-making with small teams. Over time, the canvas has evolved as he learned more and more about the art and discipline of strategy facilitation… what people struggle with most, where the resource of time is best spent, etc.

He introduced v3.0 of the canvas a few years ago in a short post, but here’s a little content to both explain what’s different (and why) and a few tips.

The first thing you’ll notice is that strategy-making is in three big steps:

1. Choose (strategic choices using the Play-to-Win framework)
2. Reverse Engineer (what must true for the choices to be good ones)
3. Test (validating what must be true is in fact true, or true enough)

Click here to download the free Play-to-Win wall size canvas

Click here to download the free Play-to-Win 11×17 canvas (aka A3)

Planning Tools

1. Visual Project Charter™

Visual Project Charter™The Visual Project Charter™ helps organizations:

  • Move beyond the Microsoft Word document
  • Make the creation of Project Charters more fun!
  • Kickoff projects in a more collaborative, more visual way
  • Structure dialogue to capture the project overview, project scope, project conditions and project approach

This download includes a premium 35″ x 56″ scalable PDF that I am making available to project managers for use in planning their projects in a more visual and collaborative way for greater alignment, accountability, and more successful outcomes.

The download will also include a JPEG version for use with online whiteboarding tools like Miro, Mural, Lucidspark and Microsoft Whiteboard for when your sticky notes need to be virtual.

Click here to get the Visual Project Charter™ for free

2. Business Model Canvas

Business Model CanvasThe Business Model Canvas is a popular tool from Strategyzer than can be used collaboratively to sketch out and iterate on potential business models for a new business or innovation opportunity. Why use the Business Model Canvas?

  • Map Existing Business Models – Visualize and communicate a simple story of your business model.
  • Design New Business Models – Use the canvas to explore new business models whether you are a start-up or an existing business.
  • Manage a Portfolio of Business Models – Use the canvas to easily juggle between “Explore” and “Exploit” business models.

Click to visit Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas download page

People & Culture

1. Nine Innovation Roles Card Deck

Nine Innovation RolesI’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.

Click here to visit the Nine Innovation Roles free gifts page
(multiple languages available)

Frameworks

1. Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation

Eight I's of Infinite InnovationThe Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation framework is designed to be a continuous learning process, one without end as the outputs of one round become inputs for the next round. It’s also a relatively new guiding framework for organizations to use, so if you have thoughts on how to make it even better, please let me know in the comments. The framework is also ideally suited to power a wave of new organizational transformations that are coming as an increasing number of organizations (including Hallmark) begin to move from a product-centered organizational structure to a customer needs-centered organizational structure. The power of this new approach is that it focuses the organization on delivering the solutions that customers need as their needs continue to change, instead of focusing only on how to make a particular product (or set of products) better.

Click here to download the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation PDF from LinkedIn
(go into fullscreen mode to download)

2. Building a Global Sensing Network

Building a Global Sensing NetworkThe purpose of a global sensing network is to allow an organization to collect and connect the partial insights and ideas that will form the basis of the organization’s next generation of customer solutions. This involves collecting and connecting:

  1. Customer Insights
  2. Core Technology Trends
  3. Adjacent Technology Trends
  4. Distant technology trends
  5. Local social mutations
  6. Expert Communities

Click to read more about Building a Global Sensing Network

Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download

Prototyping & Testing Tools

1. The Experiment Canvas™

The Experiment CanvasThe Experiment Canvas™ is designed to help people instrument for learning fast in iterative new product development (NPD) or service development activities. The canvas will help you create new innovation possibilities in a more visual and collaborative way for greater alignment, accountability, and more successful outcomes.

Click to read more about The Experiment Canvas™

Click to download the Experiment Canvas™ as a 35″ x 56″ scalable FREE PDF poster

Add to this list of Free Human-Centered Innovation Tools

This page will always be under construction, so please contact me with your suggestions of free tools to add.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Don’t Forget to Innovate the Customer Experience

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Don't Forget to Innovate the Customer Experience

Too often we speak about Innovation, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Employee Experience and Organizational Change as very distinct and separate things.

But is this the right approach?

Those of you who have read both my first book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire and my second book Charting Change know that the main reason that the second book even exists is because innovation is all about change.

Apple couldn’t bring the iPod, iTunes and the iTunes store to market without inflicting incredible amounts of change upon the organization and building many different new organizational capabilities and hiring many new types of people with many types of expertise new to the organization.

I’ve also written about BIG C and little c change, with BIG C change including transformations of many types (including digital) and little C change including projects and other small initiatives. And yes, every project changes something, so every project is a change initiative. And so yes, project management is in fact a subset of change management, not the typical wrong way ’round that change management is usually made subservient to project management.

Stop it!

Architecting the Organization for Change

For an invention to have any chance of becoming an innovation, the organization must transform, and to do this well we must design corresponding changes in both employee experience and customer experience to accelerate and integrate:

  1. Value Creation
  2. Value Access
  3. Value Translation

See my important article Innovation is All About Value for more background on these three phrases.

Because of the interconnectedness between innovation, change, transformation, customer experience and employee experience we must look at these different specialties holistically and in a coordinated way if we are to maximize our chances of successfully completing the journey from invention to innovation.

Service Design and Journey Mapping have a role to play, as does Human-Centered Design because people are at the heart of innovation and transformation. These tools can help uncover the customer needs and help visualize what the NEW experiences must look like for both employees and customers to maximize the holistic value created and the ability of customers to access that value as effortlessly as possible.

As we work to design the potential innovation as a product or a service or a combination of the two, we must also consciously design the customer experience and employee experience to enhance to possibilities of this invention becoming an innovation. This includes potentially designing OUT touchpoints in current journeys that people may taken as a given, but maybe no longer need to exist if we are truly keeping the customer and their wants/needs at the center of our focus.

As part of your innovation activities, consider creating customer and employee journey maps, printing them poster size and placing them front and center on your innovation wonder wall so that you can ask your innovation team the following questions:

  1. What is different about this customer or employee touchpoint when considering our potential innovation?
  2. How could we design out the need for this customer or employee touchpoint?
  3. With our potential innovation, what customer or employee touchpoints may no longer be necessary?
  4. With our potential innovation, what new customer or employee touchpoints may we need to create?
  5. What organizational and employee knowledge and capabilities are we missing, that we must have, to deliver the necessary and expected customer and employee experiences?

As we explore these questions, they allow us to look beyond the product or service that forms the basis of the potential innovation that we are creating and create more value around it, to make our customers’ and employees’ experiences of our potential innovation better, and to increase our chances of more successfully translating the holistic value for its potential customers.

Customer and employee experiences are not detached and separate from the new products and services forming the basis of your innovation activities.

The change and transformation that accompany innovation are not separate either.

We must look at all of these specialties together and not see them as isolated things, otherwise we will fail.

So keep innovating, but be sure and consider the change and transformation necessary to help you be successful and how you are going to innovate your customer and employee experiences at the same time!

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