Category Archives: Innovation

Consulting Industry Faces Threat From Artificial Intelligence

by Braden Kelley

Previously I explored the value of eminence and thought leadership to consulting firms, and how unfortunately the power of inbound content marketing has a dark side that forms part of a three-pronged attack on the consulting industry.

Meanwhile, the tireless invention and innovation efforts of research teams in companies around the world have helped to keep the pace of technological advancement in computer processing power at or above Moore’s Law for several decades. This has given technology companies the ability to put more computing power than the entire Apollo space program into the pockets of more than a billion people around the world.

It seems like everything has become digital, including music, books, and even movies. Increasingly intelligent digital technologies and mercurial customer expectations threaten both people and enterprise at every turn. With all of this technological change, the last few decades have been an amazing time for consultancies, full of revenue and opportunities. Clients desperate for solutions to help them cope with these challenging times helped management consulting firms grow in size and scale, expanding to cover multiple technology, and even marketing, specialties.

But the same technologies that have led to the growth of consulting companies over the last couple of decades, will begin to lead to a shrinking of those same consulting firms. The increasing diversification of the large global consultancies into other specialties is the first step to what is an inevitable shrinkage forced upon the industry by the three factors I detailed in my last article titled Consulting Industry Caught in the Crossfire.

The same forces that are causing a feeling of disequilibrium for the firms that consultancies serve are also causing the same unease, trepidation and challenge for the consulting firms themselves as they find themselves attacked on three sides from:

1. Increasingly Available Intellectual Property
2. Internal Consultants
3. Artificial Intelligence

In my previous article on the Consulting Industry Attacked on Three Sides I looked at each attack in turn, but in this article I would like to dig a bit deeper into the final threat.

Artificial Intelligence

Roboadvisors, chatbots, and other implementations of artificial intelligence have captured people’s imaginations and led to both an increase in the number of articles written about artificial intelligence, but also in the practical implementations of artificial intelligence. People are becoming increasing comfortable with artificial intelligence thanks to the recommendation engines on Amazon and Netflix and IBM Watson’s appearance on the game show Jeopardy and battles against chess grandmasters.

But what does consulting have to fear from artificial intelligence?

Perhaps viewing this short video might give you a glimpse:

In the short run, maybe consultants don’t have as much to fear from artificial intelligence as workers in transportation, retail, or manufacturing. But, in the grander scheme of things, over time enterprising technology vendors will inevitably build upon publicly available artificial intelligence frameworks made publicly available by companies like Microsoft and Google (who are seeking to increase the sale of cloud services) to automate some of the tasks that recently minted undergraduate analysts or Indians perform now for the large consulting firms.

What we are starting to see is exactly what Roger Martin described in his landmark book The Design of Business, from which I would like to highlight one of the key concepts called The Knowledge Funnel highlighted in the image from the book below.

Is Jack White's Lazaretto Ultra LP a Vinyl Innovation? Source: The Design of Business by Roger Martin

The key point here is that as we understand our business and our interactions with our customers well enough, what was once a mystery we start to identify patterns inside of (heuristics), which then eventually allows us to create algorithms that can be captured in Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) and then eventually in code. The power of artificial intelligence is the ability to move the role of the machine to the left in The Knowledge Funnel, away from pure manual coding by a human, to computer programs that write themselves and eventually to heuristic identification and algorithm creation at some point in the near future. This is what crowd computing, machine learning and deep learning ultimately make possible, and which I explored in a previous article titled Welcome to the Crowd Computing Revolution in more detail. The fact remains that as computer programmers and the artificial minds they create become more adept at watching the work that consultants do and recognizing the patterns in their recommendations, the pressure on consultancies will build.

Conclusion

These are challenging times for large consultancies and small independent consultants as consultancies are forced respond to these attacks from three sides. Part of that three-pronged attack will come from a growing legion of automation engineers taking to cubicles around the world to design people out of jobs. In the same way that mechanical engineers build robots to replace our human muscles with machine muscles, automation engineers are computer programmers tasked with creating inexpensive machine minds with sufficient artificial intelligence to replace our more expensive human minds. Professions like that of the automation engineer will attract increasing numbers from workforces around the world, but not nearly enough to offset the losses in job opportunities that these individuals are tasked with eliminating. Only time will tell how quickly and how broadly artificial intelligence (AI) threatens the core business of consultancies.

If you are in the consulting industry, what is your strategy for responding to this threat?

Because, make no mistake, the threat is real. The only question is how quickly it will materially impact your bottom line.

BONUS:

You might enjoy this interview with David Cope, the creator of Emi (Emily Howell) the algorithmic composer, whom he later killed:

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What April Fool’s Day Teaches Us About Innovation

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What April Fool's Day Teaches Us About Innovation

April Fool’s Day was this week. Did anyone have a good prank played on them or come across a good corporate April Fool’s?

My favorite this year was from my alma mater, the University of Oregon. Go Ducks!

We try to think a little differently at the University of Oregon and specialize in helping the world run a little faster (and more comfortably), and with some of Nike’s founder behind the football team, why shouldn’t they have the world’s most advanced field, say, an LED field?

Watch the video:

The best corporate April Fool’s Day pranks are the ones that are believable and almost seem feasible.

What does this tell us as innovation professionals?

The insight is that the best corporate April Fool’s Day pranks find a resonance point, a place where the outlandish intersects with what people are ready for, what they may actually desire, and what they believe should be possible soon.

Consider asking your innovation teams to design their own April Fool’s Day prank and see where it takes you.

Ask yourself questions like these about their designs:

What must be true for this to be possible?
What stands in the way of this being possible?
What would it take to remove the barriers that are preventing this from being possible?
Are our customers truly ready for this?
What would it take to prepare them for it?
What capabilities do we need to build to prepare for this eventuality?
Is this idea more feasible in a different context? (i.e. basketball courts instead of football fields)
Etc.

One final thought…

Is there any reason why the field shown in the University of Oregon LED field video couldn’t become a reality?

Why couldn’t it be built out of some of kind of fiber optic material that maintained both the sports performance characteristics and the multi-color transmission capabilities?

Would it be easy to design such a thing? No. But it seems possible, and that’s where innovation begins…

Keep innovating!

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Let’s Start a Change Revolution

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The pace of change is accelerating, and for many people (and companies) things are changing so fast that they feel overwhelmed and retreat to the familiar instead of embracing the change. In fact we are approaching a tipping point where what is becoming interesting to the young is not the new, but the old. Vintage Michael Jordan sneakers, vinyl albums, rotary telephones, and analog amplifiers all have growing numbers of fans. In fact, vinyl album sales are increasing as CD sales decrease.

People are becoming so overwhelmed by the speed of change that the next new thing doesn’t always feel so new, and so those seeking to be on the cutting edge are increasingly looking backward for inspiration. Beards and hats have made a comeback, and before you know it the tattoo craze will have run its course. But is it the accelerating pace of change that people feel overwhelmed by, in their work lives and their personal lives, or is it a lack of tools for successfully planning and executing change that leads to people feel overwhelmed and paralyzed by the constant need to change?

Some people would argue that the pace of change is outstripping our ability as humans to cope with all of the changes we are being expected to absorb. I would argue that we are in the middle of a period of discontinuity thrust upon us by the rapid advances in computing and mobile connectivity that have put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket and a target on most companies’ backs.

Digital Transformation is Being Forced Upon Us

Because we as consumers are seeing better customer experiences enabled by digital technologies in parts of our personal lives and more efficient and effective business processes in parts of our business lives, we are now expecting every company and every aspect of that company to deliver an efficient, effective experience and information exchange in whatever channel we choose, whenever we want to experience it.

This incredible change in expectations is being thrust upon all organizations simultaneously and threatening the very existence of entities that have existed for dozens or even hundreds of years. This discontinuity has created immense technical debt for organizations large and small to overcome and the only way for an incumbent organization to recover and to survive in this new digital age will be to undergo a complete digital transformation. This doesn’t mean creating a digital strategy to address one part of the organization or a single constituency, but a path to a complete transformation that brings digital approaches to both every part of the organization and its operations, but also to all of its constituencies, at the same time.

This means re-imagining every system, every policy, every procedure, and every process as a digital native company looking to enter and disrupt your industry might, and then make a plan for transforming yourself. This will require IMMENSE amounts of change, and is no small task given the 70% change failure rate, but it is the key to your organization’s survival.

A Problem and A Solution Emerge

The problem is that in twenty years of research, travels around the world delivering keynote speeches and workshops interacting with countless audiences on the topics of innovation and change, I have not uncovered one set of tools that makes change seem less scary, that can make the change planning process more human, and change execution more successful. The organizational change thought leadership status quo isn’t up to the task of planning and executing the scope and scale of change required for existing organizations to survive the digital evolution underway. A new wave of change thinking and a new set of tools are needed to displace the old guard. In short, I’ve decided to start a change revolution to free people from the tyranny of the blank word document and poorly planned change efforts. Who’s with me?

Today I am excited to announce the availability of the Change Planning Toolkit™, a Quickstart Guide to help explain what each of the more than fifty (50+) frameworks, worksheets and other tools are for, and most importantly, my latest book Charting Change to introduce you to the concepts behind the toolkit and its proper use. What I did find in my travels and my research referenced above were some good theories on behavior change and change leadership, and those, along with a couple of great case studies from Qualcomm and Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) and guest expert pieces from nearly a dozen hand-picked contributors, you will find in Charting Change. For my part, I’ve created a lot of great new theories and frameworks that you can put into practical use with the accompanying Change Planning Toolkit™. People who purchase a copy of the book will get access to an educational license for 26 of the 50+ frameworks, worksheets and other tools contained in the toolkit, including the Change Planning Canvas™ to pull your plan all together on one page (a $500 value). Individual and site licenses for the full version of the toolkit are available.

But I can’t do it alone.

Come Join the Change Revolution

I’m seeding the clouds with Charting Change and with the Change Planning Toolkit™, but I need you to make it rain.

The first 50+ tools in the toolkit are my own, the result of thousands of hours of work and years of effort. But I know once you download the 10 Free Downloads, or buy a copy of the book and get access to the first 26 of the 50+ tools in toolkit, or upgrade to the full toolkit and unlock all 50+ tools, that some of you may want to:

Contribute a new tool to the Change Planning Toolkit™ (with full credit of course) to help accelerate change capabilities in organizations around the world
Use the Change Planning Toolkit™ in your consulting business to help your clients and increase your revenue
Become a preferred provider by translating the Change Planning Toolkit™ into additional languages, and earn a portion of any revenue from your translation at the same time
Attend a train the trainer session to become a certified Change Planning Toolkit™ professional in order to spread the knowledge across your organization, or if you’re a consultant, to offer training sessions as an additional business offering

The reason I’m not trying to hold everything dear is that I have a full-time job transforming the insurance business and can’t be running around the world doing consulting work for clients. Instead I thought it made more sense to empower as many consultants and practitioners as possible to properly use the intellectual property I’ve created (and the additional intellectual property that others are likely to contribute) to help your organizations (or your clients’ organizations) cope with the accelerating pace of change.

I know that together we can change how we plan and execute changes big and small all around the world. And for those of you who think that the toolkit and methods are designed to only help plan and execute large changes (‘Capital C’ changes like mergers, acquisitions, transformations, etc.), I would like to remind you that small changes (‘lowercase c’ changes like projects and campaigns) can use the toolkit too. The fact is that every project changes something, and so every project is a change effort. That is why in my Architecting for Change framework, project management is shown as a subset of change management, not the other way around. So, whether you are a consultant, a professor, a teacher, a project manager, a vice president or a CIO, I hope you’ll join the change revolution, get your copy of Charting Change today and check out the Change Planning Toolkit™!

¡Viva la Revolución!

Contact me about doing a Change Planning Toolkit™ translation

Get information about Change Planning Toolkit™ public training sessions

Get information about Change Planning Toolkit™ private training sessions

Image credit: freevector.com

SPECIAL BONUS:

Click here to hear Tanveer Naseer interview me about my new book Charting Change on his Leadership Biz Cafe podcast.
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What innovation hasn’t changed something?

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What innovation hasn't changed something? Can you think of a single innovation that didn’t change something?

I didn’t think so.

Innovation is change, or at least, innovation requires change.

In my role as an innovation keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, I recently led a German-based industrial company’s North American IT leadership team through an innovation workshop, during which we spent part of the time working to define their common language of innovation (as described in my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire). For companies looking to build a sustainable innovation capability this is an important first step.

One of the biggest reasons it is important to define innovation and to spend time creating a common language of innovation is that the word innovation means something different to every individual. It is very easy for companies to spin their wheels when people don’t have the same understanding of what constitutes innovation and what doesn’t.

Because of this danger, when working with companies to help build an innovation system I always make sure that we define what they want innovation to mean in their organization and what their vision, strategy and goals are going to be for innovation. This helps get everyone on the same page and causes people to start seeing some of the changes required in order to build a strong innovation capability in the organization.

Defining Innovation

As part of this most recent workshop discussion around what constitutes innovation I shared my definition of innovation and we worked together to create a definition that is going to fit their culture and their business.

My own personal definition of innovation is:

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

I’ve worked pretty hard over the years to refine this definition, and I like my definition because it highlights a couple of inherent tensions and relationships that people must consider. These include:

Invention vs. innovation
Useful vs. valuable
The requirement for an innovation to be widely adopted
The requirement for an innovation to replace the existing solution

Because innovation requires change, a potential innovation must:

Create so much value that people are willing to go through the discomfort of abandoning or migrating away from their existing solution (even if it is the oft-ignored ‘do nothing’ solution);
At the same time, you must also do an outstanding job of helping people access that value through design, packaging, education, etc. so that the product or service is a delight to use and so that you potentially simultaneously increase the overall value of the solution;
And, finally you must provide a very clear value translation for your potential customers of how this new solution will fit into their lives and is worth the disruption that comes with adopting it.

For those of you familiar with my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, or with my other writings, you may recognize my Value Innovation Framework and my views on what it takes to achieve successful innovation captured in the above three points.

Organization Size and History Matters

Inside a large organization (or one with a longer history), a potential innovation often inflicts a lot of change on the organization. Inside a large organization or an organization with a longer history, the organization will have grown up around one or two initial solutions and built an infrastructure to maximize the success of those initial solutions. As a result, any potential innovation will often require knowledge, skills, and other resources in order to build and scale it that are new to the organization. This may involve building new distribution channels, hiring people with the necessary skills and expertise, and many more changes required to build the capabilities needed to make the potential innovation a success.

Inside a startup organization this is not the case, and this is the reason why it is often easier and faster for a startup to create and implement a potential innovation than an established company. Because everything is new, there is nothing to change, other than the minds of the customers in order to get them to replace their existing solution and the minds of potential partners to convince them to work with you. This is the advantage that startups have over existing companies.

But the disadvantage startups have is that startups usually have to spend more of their time chasing the funding they need to transform their idea into a realized innovation. Whether the advantages or the disadvantages are larger depends on the startup. And, whether the startup can beat the established organization depends on how good the established organization is at managing change, and how fast it can change.

Final Thoughts

Most of us work in established organizations that have either grown large because of successful leadership, strategic vision, efficient operations, and continuous improvement and innovation, or we work for an organization that has at least established some level of longevity as a going concern. This means that for most of us we MUST get better at change. We must accept change as a constant and as a key (along with innovation) to our organization continuing to thrive in a sea of rising global competition. We must also get FASTER at change.

One way to do this is to change HOW we change by embracing a new more visual, more collaborative approach to planning our change efforts using tools like my Change Planning Toolkit™. I will be introducing this toolkit in my new book Charting Change, releasing March 9, 2016. People who buy a copy of my book Charting Change will get access to the Change Planning Canvas™ and 25 other tools from the toolkit. As a special gift for everyone else, I will be making a series of 10 free downloads available on my web site from the 50+ frameworks, worksheets and other tools contained in the toolkit (including the popular Visual Project Charter™).

I hope it is now clear that to be successful at innovation that you must become better at change, and I encourage you all to do so!

This article originally appeared on the Planview blog

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First Interview about ‘Charting Change’

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I was lucky enough to (a) get Tanveer Nasser to contribute some thought leadership to my new book Charting Change (launching March 9, 2016!) and (b) to be a guest recently on his leadership podcast.

Here is a quick snippet from Tanveer’s site about the content of our interview:

“In today’s faster paced, interconnected world, there’s little doubt that change is the new reality; the new standard by which we now have to operate. But if leaders recognize change as being a new constant in our organization’s field of view, why then are so many leaders struggling to effectively drive change in their organization? It’s the question that serves as the basis of my talk with innovation expert and author, Braden Kelley.”

Click here for more information and to listen to the interview

Tanveer Naseer is an award-winning and internationally-acclaimed leadership writer and keynote speaker. He is also the Principal and Founder of Tanveer Naseer Leadership, a leadership coaching firm that works with executives and managers to help them develop practical leadership and team-building competencies to guide organizational growth and development.

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Digital Transformation Matters

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Digital Transformation Matters

The pace of change is accelerating.

Much has changed since we all started to dial in with our modems and connect to online services like America Online or Compuserve and eventually directly onto the Internet and the World Wide Web. Elements of our digital world continue to invade our language and our consciousness.

“Text me later.”
“Skype me tomorrow.”
“Google it.”
“#hashtag”
“rtofl”

Whether we like it or not the physical world and the digital world, and people are more likely to freak out about leaving their mobile phone at home than their wallet. Soon you won’t even need to carry a wallet (unless you want to). Canada stopped making pennies. In Sweden many businesses no longer take cash. Have you tried buying a drink on an airplane lately? (no cash accepted there either)

We now live in a digital age.

Not because technology is new, but because the way we react to technology and interact with it is different.

We’ve had technology for a while, but we used it primarily for performing calculations, and then for information storage and retrieval. But now, because the computer has moved from being a machine in a lab programmed with punch cards, to something nearly every one of us carries in our pocket or wears on our wrist, we’re beginning to form relationships with machines and more importantly, to use our machines to form, maintain, and even deepen, our human relationships.

So what does this mean for you as a business person?

It means that people like me have to drag you kicking and screaming away from the way you’ve always done business, away from the way you’ve always structured your enterprise, away from the ways you’ve facilitated communication among employees and between you and your customers, partners, and suppliers and towards a fundamentally different way of organizing and operating your business.

Are you ready to do business in a digital way for the digital age?

No?

Well, your market is large and attractive to me and my digital native friends. While you struggle under the weight of your legacy systems and the denial that you must change how you think, change how you interact with customers, change how your business works inside, maybe we will re-imagine your business and your entire industry from the ground up with a collection of digital strategies that utilize the power of the digital mindset to more efficiently and effectively utilize people, process and technology with some venture capital backing to challenge the incumbents and put them out of business. People are fascinated with startups like Uber and with good reason, but they should also be looking at what established technology companies like Amazon are doing because you’re either have to think like a technology company or go out of business.

In my next article on digital transformation we will circle back to discuss Uber in a bit more detail as we explore the difference between a digital strategy and a digital transformation. Because they are not the same and are vastly different in what they require to be successful. The one thing they both have in common is that they will inflict change (in varying amounts) upon the organization, and with a more visual, collaborative approach to planning that change – like that enabled by the Change Planning Toolkit™ that I introduce in my new book Charting Change – you will increase your odds of beating the 70% change failure rate and successfully achieving your digital change goals.

Stay tuned!

This article originally appeared on Linkedin

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Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation – Revisited

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Eight I's of Infinite Innovation

Some authors talk about successful innovation being the sum of idea plus execution, others talk about the importance of insight and its role in driving the creation of ideas that will be meaningful to customers, and even fewer about the role of inspiration in uncovering potential insight. But innovation is all about value and each of the definitions, frameworks, and models out there only tell part of the story of successful innovation.

I’ve been talking for a while now in my innovation keynotes how crucial value is to innovation. It is no consequence as a result that value sits at the center of my definition of innovation:

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

In this definition you will see that I draw a distinction between useful and valuable, and I develop it further in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.

“Often usefulness comes from what a product or service does for you, and value comes from how it does it. If you’re looking to truly deliver innovative products and services into the marketplace, then once you succeed at the designing and developing the ‘what’, don’t forget to also focus on achieving excellence in the ‘how’.”

One of my favorite examples of the useful versus valuable distinction is the mousetrap. Despite the hundreds or thousands of patent applications submitted every year for new mousetrap designs, most people still purchase the same simple snapping mousetrap that you see in cartoons and that has been around for a hundred years. The mousetrap is a great example of how easy it is to generate innovation investment opportunities and how difficult it is to create something that is truly valuable.

This distinction between useful and valuable is one that you must seek to understand and by turning this into a lens through which you can look at the potential of your innovation investment opportunities, the higher the return you will have from your innovation portfolio.

Innovation is All About Value

Speaking of which, maybe we should stop talking about idea generation, idea management and idea evaluation and instead begin thinking about ideas as innovation investment opportunities. Just changing the language we use in talking about innovation can change the way we think about things and the outcomes that we are able to generate. The images we choose and the language we use is incredibly important and we’ll discuss this in more detail here in a moment. But first I would like to share my innovation equation to counter the popular (innovation = idea + execution) equation. I like to say that:

Innovation = Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation

Now you will notice that the components are multiplicative not additive. Do one or two well and one poorly and it doesn’t necessarily add up to a positive result. Doing one poorly and two well can still doom your innovation investment to failure. Let’s look at the three equation components in brief:

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.

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?

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).

Done really well, value translation also helps to communicate how easy it will be for customers and consumers to exchange their old solution for the new solution. My favorite example of poor value translation and brilliant value translation come from the same company and the same product launch – The Apple iPad. It’s hard to believe, but Apple actually announced the iPad with the following statement:

“Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

iPad Billboard This set off a firestorm of criticism and put the launch at risk of failure. But amazingly Apple managed to come up with the Out of Home (OOH) advertisements with a person with their feet up on a couch and the iPad on their lap (see above) by the time the product shipping. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this particular picture will probably end up being worth billions of dollars to Apple.

Never Forget!

Value creation is important, but you can’t succeed without equal attention being paid to both value access and value translation…

Because innovation is all about value…

Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation = Success!

Creating a Continuous Innovation Capability

To achieve sustainable success at innovation, you must work to embed a repeatable process and way of thinking within your organization, and this is why it is important to have a simple common language and guiding framework of infinite innovation that all employees can easily grasp. If innovation becomes too complex, or seems too difficult then people will stop pursuing it, or supporting it.

Some organizations try to achieve this simplicity, or to make the pursuit of innovation seem more attainable, by viewing innovation as a project-driven activity. But, a project approach to innovation will prevent it from ever becoming a way of life in your organization. Instead you must work to position innovation as something infinite, a pillar of the organization, something with its own quest for excellence – a professional practice to be committed to.

So, if we take a lot of the best practices of innovation excellence and mix them together with a few new ingredients, the result is a simple framework organizations can use to guide their sustainable pursuit of innovation – the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation. This new framework anchors what is a very collaborative process. Here is the framework and some of the many points organizations must consider during each stage of the continuous process:

1. Inspiration

Employees are constantly navigating an ever changing world both in their home context, and as they travel the world for business or pleasure, or even across various web pages in the browser of their PC, tablet, or smartphone.
What do they see as they move through the world that inspires them and possibly the innovation efforts of the company?
What do they see technology making possible soon that wasn’t possible before?
The first time through we are looking for inspiration around what to do, the second time through we are looking to be inspired around how to do it.
What inspiration do we find in the ideas that are selected for their implementation, illumination and/or installation?

2. Investigation

What can we learn from the various pieces of inspiration that employees come across?
How do the isolated elements of inspiration collect and connect? Or do they?
What customer insights are hidden in these pieces of inspiration?
What jobs-to-be-done are most underserved and are worth digging deeper on?
Which unmet customer needs that we see are worth trying to address?
Which are the most promising opportunities, and which might be the most profitable?

3. Ideation

We don’t want to just get lots of ideas, we want to get lots of good ideas
Insights and inspiration from first two stages increase relevance and depth of the ideas
We must give people a way of sharing their ideas in a way that feels safe for them
How can we best integrate online and offline ideation methods?
How well have we communicated the kinds of innovation we seek?
Have we trained our employees in a variety of creativity methods?

4. Iteration

No idea emerges fully formed, so we must give people a tool that allows them to contribute ideas in a way that others can build on them and help uncover the potential fatal flaws of ideas so that they can be overcome
We must prototype ideas and conduct experiments to validate assumptions and test potential stumbling blocks or unknowns to get learnings that we can use to make the idea and its prototype stronger
Are we instrumenting for learning as we conduct each experiment?

5. Identification

In what ways do we make it difficult for customers to unlock the potential value from this potentially innovative solution?
What are the biggest potential barriers to adoption?
What changes do we need to make from a financing, marketing, design, or sales perspective to make it easier for customers to access the value of this new solution?
Which ideas are we best positioned to develop and bring to market?
What resources do we lack to realize the promise of each idea?
Based on all of the experiments, data, and markets, which ideas should we select?

You’ll see in the framework that things loop back through inspiration again before proceeding to implementation. There are two main reasons why. First, if employees aren’t inspired by the ideas that you’ve selected to commercialize and some of the potential implementation issues you’ve identified, then you either have selected the wrong ideas or you’ve got the wrong employees. Second, at this intersection you might want to loop back through the first five stages though an implementation lens before actually starting to implement your ideas OR you may unlock a lot of inspiration and input from a wider internal audience to bring into the implementation stage.

6. Implementation

What are the most effective and efficient ways to make, market, and sell this new solution?
How long will it take us to develop the solution?
Do we have access to the resources we will need to produce the solution?
Are we strong in the channels of distribution that are most suitable for delivering this solution?

7. Illumination

Is the need for the solution obvious to potential customers?
Are we launching a new solution into an existing product or service category or are we creating a new category?
Does this new solution fit under our existing brand umbrella and represent something that potential customers will trust us to sell to them?
How much value translation do we need to do for potential customers to help them understand how this new solution fits into their lives and is a must-have?
Do we need to merely explain this potential innovation to customers because it anchors to something that they already understand, or do we need to educate them on the value that it will add to their lives?

8. Installation

How do we best make this new solution an accepted part of everyday life for a large number of people?
How do we remove access barriers to make it easy as possible for people to adopt this new solution, and even tell their friends about it?
How do we instrument for learning during the installation process to feedback new customer learnings back into the process for potential updates to the solution?

Conclusion

The 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.

So, as you move from the project approach that is preventing innovation from ever becoming a way of life in your organization, consider using the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation to influence your organization’s mindset and to anchor your common language of innovation. The framework is great for guiding conversations, making your innovation outputs that much stronger, and will contribute to your quest for innovation excellence – it is even more powerful when you combine it with my Value Innovation Framework (which I’ve done here in this article). The two are like chocolate and peanut butter. They’re powerful tools when used separately, but even more powerful when used together.

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

Click to download the PDF version of this article

People who upgrade to the Bronze Version of the Change Planning Toolkit™ will get access to my Innovation Planning Canvas™ which combines the Value Innovation Framework together with the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation, allowing you to track the progress of each potential innovation on the three value innovation measures as you evolve any individual idea through this eight step process.

Now you can buy the Change Planning Toolkit™ – Individual Bronze License – Advance Purchase Edition here on this web site before the book launches.

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Give the Gifts of Innovation and Change

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2015 is quickly coming to a close and perhaps you have a little bit of money left in your budget. What better way to spend it than to get everyone on your team a copy of the popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire?

Getting everyone on your team (or in your organization) a copy of this five-star book from John Wiley & Sons will not only help build a common language for innovation in your team or organization, but will also help you identify and remove barriers to innovation and begin building a continuous innovation capability.

Download the sample chapter if you’re not already convinced the book will make a great gift. 😉

Another great way to close out 2015 and prepare your team or organization for an innovative 2016 is to have everyone on your team or key people in your organization complete my innovation audit (free download).

And if you’re thinking that change is more what you need than innovation in 2016, then be sure and pre-order my next book Charting Change for your team and help beat the 70% change effort failure rate by spreading a more visual, collaborative way to plan change effort (or even projects) across your organization. Charting Change will start shipping in February and I have just released an advance purchase edition of the Change Planning Toolkit™.

Now you can buy the Change Planning Toolkit™ – Individual Bronze License – Advance Purchase Edition here on this web site before the book launches.

I’ve already made four of ten (4 of 10) free downloads available from the Change Planning Toolkit™ as my special gift to you. Be sure and download them here.

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Building a Global Sensing Network – Revisited

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When I first wrote about Building a Global Sensing Network I wrote in the specific context of the war for innovation and the need to make sure you’re fighting it outside your organization — not inside.

We looked at how most organizations hire the most clever, educated, experienced and motivated people you could afford and then direct them to come up with the best customer solutions possible, organize and execute their production and marketing predictably and efficiently, and do their best to outmaneuver the competition.

In short, most organizations pursue success by building a fortress from which the organization can defend its intellectual property and its market position utilizing the human resources it can assemble within the castle walls. At the same time most organizations focus on achieving organizational success by achieving the greatest overlap possible between the skills, abilities and talents of each job applicant and the job description for each role.

But most organizations (referred to as Typical Organizations in the graphic below) fail to harness ALL of the skills, abilities and talents of the individuals they have in their organization to achieve greater performance as a collective. In my mind this is painful, wasted human capital – painful for the organization (lost potential revenue and profitability) and painful for the individual (boredom, stress, and disappointment).

But, a handful of more progressive, innovative organizations are trying to do better to harness the passions AND the skills, abilities, and talents of their individuals to better achieve the collective’s ability to generate revenue and profits (or other appropriate benefits) by engaging their employees in the innovation efforts of the organization, and allowing their employees to take some of their skills, abilities and talents and apply them to help fulfill other job descriptions. This looks something more like this:

But in the most progressive organizations, they not only provide a way to better harness a more complete set of their employees’ skills, abilities and talents to more than one job description, but they also find a way to harness more of the skills, abilities, and talents that employees are currently realizing outside the organization in their hobbies, volunteer work, or other places.

And the successful organizations of the future will not stop there. They will also harness the connections their employees have outside the organization to increase the innovation capacity of the organization, and better engage not only partners in helping to fulfill the needs of different job descriptions, but they will also even engage their customers in achieving the work of the organization.

Where customer or partner skills, abilities and talents intersect with the job requirements, work can get done, and where customer or partner skills, abilities or talents intersect with employee skills, abilities or talents intersect, communities and connections have the chance to form and be nurtured. This is what organizations of the future will look like:

In this scenario, where innovative organizations begin to move beyond better harnessing the internal innovation capacity of their employees, to also harnessing the external capacity to work (and to innovate) of individuals outside of the organization (and to expand the scope of the collective), and to attract partners and customers to participate, organizations that allow and even encourage employees to develop a personal brand and greater external connections, will claim an outsized share of the potential benefits to both the mission of the organization and to its innovation efforts.

If your employees lack the external exposure, the external connections, and the external personal brand equity and awareness, how much harder will it be for your organization to:

Attract the best partners to your innovation efforts
Recruit the best customers to co-create with you
Build a strong pipeline of potential future internal talent

Through this lens you can see that in the future, successful innovation and change will be determined not just by how strong the brand of your organization is (or the collective), but also will be shaped by the strength of the personal brands of the collective’s component individuals.

As the commercial battlefield continues to change, future business success will be built upon more fluid boundaries and the ability to leverage skills, abilities and talents of people and other organizations outside the company and also the ability to:

Utilize expert communities.

Identify and gather technology trend information, customer insights and local social mutations from around the globe.

Mobilize the organization in organic ways to utilize resources and information often beyond its control.

Still organize and execute production and marketing predictably and efficiently in the middle of all this complexity.

Market leaders in our evolving reality will be increasingly determined not by an organization’s ability to outmaneuver the competition in a known market, but by their ability to identify and solve for the key unknowns in markets that will continue to become more global and less defined. Future market leaders will be those organizations that build superior global sensing networks and do a better job at making sense of the inputs from these networks to select the optimal actionable insights to drive innovation and change.

By this point, hopefully you are asking yourself three questions:

1. How do I create more fluid boundaries in my organization?

2. What does a global sensing network look like?

3. How do I build one?

One View of a Global Sensing Network

The 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:

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

1. Customer Insights

Ethnography
Private Communities
Focus Groups
Surveys
Lead User Observation

2. Core Technology Trends

3. Adjacent Technology Trends

4. Distant technology trends

5. Local social mutations

Demographic trends
Sociological trends
Economic trends
Political trends (including regulation)
Behavioral trends

6. Expert Communities

University Research
Government Research
Corporate Research
Charitable Research
Hobbyists

To actually build a global sensing network you need to start from the inside out. You have to take a look around inside your organization and see what employees you have, what natural connections they have, and where they are currently located on the globe. At the same time you need to understand how employees in your organization naturally connect with each other and define what core, adjacent and distant technologies mean in the context of your organization. You must also look and see what tools you have inside the organization for managing insights, expertise and information within the organization, and what expert communities you may already have connections into.

I would recommend beginning to establish your global sensing network inside your organization before venturing to build it out completely with the resources and connections that you will naturally need outside your organization. This will enable you to get some really great feedback from employees on the connections that will be necessary to foster and manage outside of your organization and to prepare your information sharing systems and internal communications to enable increased sharing and improved innovation inputs and outputs.

It is likely that many organizations will already be gathering some level of customer insight information from ethnography, private communities, focus groups, surveys, lead user observation, etc. but not have a good infrastructure, policies or procedures in place for sharing this information. If you’re truly serious about creating a deep innovation capability and working to achieve innovation excellence in the same way that you pursue operational excellence, you should experiment with your systems by making customer information more available.

Next, you should leverage your employees and existing partnerships to reach outside the organization to organize and establish stronger communication channels with the relevant expert communities, including those focused on university research, government research, charitable research, corporate research (industry associations and competitors), and even to inventors or hobbyists.

And then finally from the connections you’ve built to this point, you should have identified where you have good people internally to provide information on local social mutations (local developments of interest spawned by local demographic, sociological, economic, political and behavioral trends), and where you have gaps. Hopefully by this point you may have also identified people outside your organization in countries around the world that you already have formal or informal connections to that can be leveraged to fill the gaps in your global sensing network footprint.

Conclusion

If you’re already involved in innovation and change, or have read a lot on the topic, it should be obvious to you why your organization needs a global sensing network.

Building a global sensing network helps organizations:

Accelerate their innovation efforts
Create more fluid organizational boundaries
Embrace a more open approach to innovation
Monitor emerging and evolving technologies
Track changes in customer behavior in the unending search for new insight-driven ideas

But the main that should jump out as you look at the download titled Building a Global Sensing Network is that innovation can come from anywhere, so you need to be listening everywhere.

The purpose for building a global sensing network is much like the purpose for having a SETI program. We know that there must be intelligent life outside the four walls of our organization, but to find it, we must be listening. And we must be listening so that we can amplify, combine and triangulate the weak signals that we might pick up so that we can find the next innovation and change that our organization is capable of delivering – before the competition. After all, there is a war for innovation and change out there. The only true unknown is who’s going to win.

I hope you’ll come join me on this journey to improve the pace and execution of innovation and change efforts in our organizations!

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

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Thought Leadership Builds Firm Value

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by Braden Kelley

Consulting firms sell expertise, and their currency is trust. Large consultancies like Boston Consulting Group, Bain, McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture and others make their money from being a trusted advisor to companies around the world. Why do companies trust them?

One reason is that companies always value an external perspective, and there is a large army of alumni from these firms in organizations around the world guiding their leadership to choose their former employer as that external perspective or that extra pair of hands needed in tackling a large strategic challenge.

But there are also several other considerations that factor into an organizations choice of a trusted advisor, including:

Previous experience
Industry expertise
Area of practice specialty (Strategy, HR, Innovation, Finance, M&A, Technology, etc.)
Personal relationships
Thought leadership

The resulting client work creates staffing plans within consultancies to provide billable hours for project execution. And, while most consulting firms spring to life and find early success because of the strength of their thought leadership, in general, over time most consulting firms tend to under-invest in thought leadership and as a consequence they find themselves vulnerable to new entrants nibbling around the edges of their core business and see their growth slow and eventually turn negative. Thought leadership generates the initial creation and success of the firm and leads to millions of dollars, or potentially even billions of dollars, of revenue for the consulting firm, but despite this fact, most consultancies under-invest in thought leadership.

Part of the reason for the inevitable decline in the firm’s thought leadership investments occurs because thought leadership is rarely anyone’s primary focus inside most consulting firms. Thought leadership is usually seen as the responsibility of the partners and principals of the firm AFTER they meet their revenue goals. How frequently are these people likely to have the time or energy to create the kind of quality and revolutionary thought leadership that leads to the sustaining or expansionary growth that every firm desires?

What we end up with is a level of thought leadership inside most firms that in the best case leads to a maintenance of the firm’s existing business, and in the worst case either no new thought leadership is created, or that which is created, is insufficient to maintain the firm’s current level of business.

A successful partner in most firms keeps their people busy and possibly creates some growth in billable hours for the firm, but rarely will you find that partners are able to create thought leadership capable of creating whole new lines of business. Not through any fault of their own, but because they simply don’t have the time to do it all.

To make things worse, the world is changing…

It used to be that information was scarce and external knowledge was valued by the client.

Now information is freely available and knowledge can thus be created within the client.

An increasing number of companies are therefore relying on their employees to educate themselves, while also creating their own internal consultancies, and relying less on external consultancies as a result.

At the same time, companies are becoming less open to being sold consulting services and instead more focused on becoming buyers of consulting services. And where do companies turn when they seek to be educated buyers of consulting services?

To the thought leadership they can find online from the different consulting firms in their consideration set. This is part of the reason for the rising importance of inbound marketing and content marketing as part of the marketing mix in all industries, but consulting firms are struggling to identify and provide the content necessary to help them maintain (and possibly extend) their success in this new environment.

And, even with all of these changes, most traditional consulting firms still hire traditional consultants and fail to hire people with established social media visibility, great content creation skills, the ability to get published, and the ability to help traditional consultants create both sustaining and revolutionary thought leadership. Firms are still hiring round pegs for their round holes to generate thousands of dollars a year in revenue and ignoring the square pegs with these skills that could generate millions of dollars in new revenue per year for the firm.

Marketing and advertising agencies operate in a similar client-firm ecosystem, but their value proposition is more tilted towards selling creativity and execution. In these industries we’ve seen huge consolidation driven by the need to acquire the new thought leadership, creativity and execution necessary to keep their existing clients, and we’re starting to see the same dynamics in the business consulting market.

The value of thought leadership and employees capable of creating and facilitating the execution of a great content marketing strategy driven by thought leadership, cannot be underestimated.

If anyone doubts the value boost of a thought leader to a firm, even outside the consulting market, ask yourself:

How much did Steve Jobs add to the value of Apple?

How much value did Jack Welch add to the value of GE?

How much value does Elon Musk bring to Tesla Motors?

Great thought leaders and thought leadership add a tremendous amount of value to the brand equity and the value of the firm, so why don’t consulting firms pay more attention to attracting or cultivating great internal thought leaders and thought leadership facilitators within their firms?

How much is a thought leader worth to you?

Do you need one?

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Innovation, change and transformation thought leadership, lovingly curated by Braden Kelley

Category Archives: Innovation

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Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation – Revisited

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Give the Gifts of Innovation and Change