Category Archives: Innovation

Living Life by Text Message

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Living Life by Text MessageI did my MBA at London Business School in the United Kingdom and one of the benefits of studying at a top school and being an alumni is seeing all the really cool things that the entrepreneurial alumni coming behind you are doing or that alumni in the venture capital industry might be involved with.

One of the startup ventures a fellow London Business School alumni is involved with is called ServiceWire, a company focused on the on-demand services industry. ServiceWire bills itself as the help desk for your home service needs, and unlike Amazon’s new offering Amazon Home Services which requires you to go to the Amazon web site and make a bunch of clicks, ServiceWire lets you send a text message with your request and get a response from your Personal ServiceGuru with an upfront price estimate from handpicked professionals with satisfaction guaranteed. It’s a very interesting model. Much more mobile friendly than Amazon’s offering.

Too often people get caught in the mindset of a web site or a mobile app being the only way to deliver a quality service to customers, or as being the best way to solve a customers problem.

For example, yesterday I went to the YMCA and entered the building behind another patron but I was able to enter the facility probably a minute or more before him because he was trying to find the app on his phone and load it and use it, while they scanned the plastic card I keep in my wallet in two seconds and I was on my way. Technology doesn’t always make things more efficient or effective, and it’s easy to over-engineer a solution.

This is why I like ServiceWire’s approach to helping solve life’s little problems. At this point it is a UK company only and is taking new members by email invitation only (request an invitation on their web site). If it is successful I imagine someone else will copy their approach in the United States and elsewhere.

Will the ServiceWire approach succeed at the expense of Amazon Home Services’ approach?

The ServiceWire approach should also prompt the following questions:

What solution might you be over-engineering?

What other mechanisms could you use that you are ignoring now?

Keep innovating!


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Voting Open for Thinkers50 Top Management Thinkers for 2015

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Thinkers50 - Nominations and Votes NeededThank you everyone for your nominations for the Innovation category of the Thinkers50 Distinguished 2015 Distinguished Achievement Awards. The short lists for the eight categories will be announced in early September.

September 1st is the last day to cast your votes for the Thinkers50 Top Management Thinkers for 2015.

Click here to vote for me for the Thinkers50 Top Management Thinkers for 2015 by filling in the following:

Your Name
Your Email
Person who gets your vote: Braden Kelley
That person’s title: Founder
That person’s organization: Innovation Change Leadership
That person’s email address: thinkers50@bradenkelley.com

Click here to vote for me for the Thinkers50 Top Management Thinkers for 2015

Thank you in advance!

I am deeply grateful for your continuing support.

Sincerely,

Braden

Image source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/436145545136453823/


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Is Innovation a Priority for CEOs?

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Is Innovation a Priority for CEOs?

We’d all like to be the best at everything and to make everything a priority, but that’s just not the real world.

So what did CEOs say was their priority when they were surveyed by KPMG for their Global CEO Outlook 2015.

Here are nine of the key findings from the report:

  1. 62% of CEOs are optimistic on the economy
  2. 54% are optimistic on company performance
  3. 74% believe the competitive environment is getting tougher
  4. 52% believe aggressive growth strategies prevail
  5. 30% feel they are not risking enough for growth
  6. 86% are concerned about the loyalty of their customers
  7. 42% are pursuing a mix of both organic and inorganic growth
  8. 47% of CEOs are pursuing significant geographic expansion
  9. 73% feel regulatory environment having a big impact on their business

It is also interesting that American CEOs are more pessimistic about growth prospects than their international brethren:

KPMG CEOs Confidence

Especially given that survey respondents see the greatest potential for growth in the United States:

KPMG Growth Potential

And while American, German, and Japanese CEOs definitely live in the most mature markets, part of their growth pessimism may come from more completely grasping the impact of the top four concerns of CEOs voiced in the survey:

KPMG Top 4 Concerns

“Maintaining status quo, while incredibly comfortable, is the most risky thing you can do in today’s world.” – Mark A. Goodburn, Global Head of Advisory, KPMG

Most interesting for me is the chart at the very top that shows fostering innovation as a lower priority than developing new growth strategies. Obviously innovation is just one component of any holistic growth strategy, but shouldn’t fostering innovation be a little more important if CEOs hope to create sustainable growth?

But it shouldn’t be surprising that this option scored the lowest, because my experience has been that leaders want innovation but they often aren’t willing to invest the dollars required when the rubber hits the road, and even more troublesome is that many leaders don’t understand how to foster innovation. Most CEOs see innovation as a project and not as an organizational capability they need to develop in order to help fend off disruption. Anyways, here are the top three barriers to innovation CEOs identified in the survey:

  1. Rapidly changing customer dynamics
  2. Unsure of which technologies will deliver the greatest return
  3. Budget constraints

Maybe there is no money for innovation and companies are so worried about disruption is because the survey tagged the CFO as the executive gaining the most clout in the C-suite and the CIO came in last. Just a thought.

So what’s holding you back from making sustained innovation a priority?


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Last Chance for Nominations for the 2015 Distinguished Achievement Awards

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Thinkers50 - Nominations and Votes NeededAugust 1st is the last day to nominate someone for a 2015 Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award.

I would greatly appreciate your nomination for a 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award in this category:

  • Innovation

Click here to nominate me for the 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award by filling in the following fields with whatever information you would like (I’ve included some thought starters):

Your Name
Your Email
Nominee’s Name: Braden Kelley
Nominee’s email: thinkers50@bradenkelley.com
Awards for which this Thinker is being nominated: INNOVATION
Comments:

Braden Kelley is the author of the five-star book ‘Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire’ from John Wiley & Sons, a chapter in ‘A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing’ from Kogan Page, and a new book in January 2016 for Palgrave Macmillan on the next practices of organizational change to complement his upcoming collaborative, visual change planning toolkit. Braden is a recognized thought leader on the topic of continuous innovation and change. He earned his MBA from top-rated London Business School and has published 650+ articles (Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Social Media Today, and more) and nearly a dozen white papers while living and working in England, Germany, and the United States. He is an experienced public speaker, and in 2006 started what has become the world’s most popular innovation web site, InnovationExcellence.com.

Click here to nominate me for the 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award

Thank you in advance!

There is also a short form at http://www.thinkers50.com/scanning/identify-new-thinkers/ that you can use for identifying new thinkers (and all of the above info works). 😉

I am deeply grateful for your continuing support.

Sincerely,

Braden

Image source: Thinkers50

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Innovation is Human

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Innovation is Human

In many ways organizations are like humans, and others have described organizations and organizational change in biological terms before. But this biological context applies to innovation as well, and I’d like to put it forward quickly in simple terms.

As humans we must eat to survive, but if we focus too much on eating, we get unhealthy.

If we don’t focus enough on eating or if we eat the wrong things, we get unhealthy.

If we don’t enjoy enough variety in our experiences, we get unhealthy.

If we don’t spend enough time synthesizing those new experiences to uncover insights via sleep, we get unhealthy.

If we don’t eliminate our waste, we get unhealthy.

And finally, and probably most important to our health, we must exercise to increase our strength, flexibility, agility, reduce our stress levels, to build new capabilities, and to increase our longevity.

But, you can exercise too much, and get unhealthy as well.

The key is balance.

And the same is true for organizations, and parallels for all of these human activities can be drawn to the activities of organizations as well.

And while our interactions with food can be compared to our focus on the day to day operations within the context of the organization, the pursuit of innovation is the exercise for the organization.

And in much the same way that many people resist exercise even though they know it is good for them, many organizations do as well.

But for organizations to stay fit and enjoy a long and productive life, they must strike that balance between a healthy diet and exercise.

So, is your organization going to be fit or fat?

And next time someone in your organization says that innovation isn’t important, or that they can’t focus on it right now, ask them if they think exercise is important, then remind them that innovation like exercise is how we reinvigorate our organizations and keep them vibrant and alive, and go find yourself a carrot stick.

Keep innovating!

Image credit: fitinafatworld.wordpress.com

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Death of the Chief Innovation Officer

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Death of the Chief Innovation Officer

Among my innovation peers, we have talked about how crucial executive commitment is, and some organizations have responded by hiring Innovation Managers, Innovation Directors, VP’s of Innovation, and Chief Innovation Officers (CINO’s not CIO’s so there is no confusion with Chief Information Officers).

One of the dangers of putting people in charge of innovation though, is that unless you carefully craft the positions and communicate their place and purpose across the organization, you can leave people feeling that innovation is not their job.

But, the reality is that everyone has a role to play in innovation, and in my five-star book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire (available at many local libraries) I outlined nine innovation roles that must me filled at the appropriate times for innovation to be successful. The Nine Innovation Roles include:

  1. Revolutionary
  2. Artist
  3. Conscript
  4. Connector
  5. Troubleshooter
  6. Customer Champion
  7. Judge
  8. Magic Maker
  9. Evangelist

It is because everyone has a role to play in innovation, and because everyone is innovative in their own way, that installing a Chief Innovation Officer may not be the best idea.

Any time you put someone in charge of something at that level of the organization, you end up with someone who thinks they are in charge of the area, in control of innovation. And innovation is not something that you should seek to control, but instead to facilitate.

The idea that people are either innovative or not, and either possess the Innovator’s DNA or they don’t, is complete poppycock (feel free to insert a stronger or more colorful word if you’d like, but I’ll try and keep it PG – for now).

Is there is any type of work more in need of a servant leader than the innovation efforts of the company?

So, if you fire your Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) how are you going to make your organization more innovative?

The answer is to hire an Innovation Enablement Leader.

The implication is that this person’s job will be to lead not to manage, and to enable instead of control. The job of an Innovation Enablement Leader is to facilitate the Seven C’s of a Successful Innovation Culture (working title):

  1. Cultivating a Culture of Curiosity
  2. Collection of inspiration and insight
  3. Connections
  4. Creation
  5. Collaboration
  6. Commercialization
  7. Communications

More on the details of the Seven C’s of a Successful Innovation Culture in a future article.

Responsibility for innovation should remain with the business, under an innovation vision, strategy and goals set by the CEO and senior leadership. The job of an Innovation Enablement Leader (or Innovation Facilitator) meanwhile is to serve the rest of the organization and to work across the organization to help remove barriers to innovation and to focus on the Seven C’s of a Successful Innovation Culture. This could also providing a set of tools and methodologies for creative problem solving and other aspects of innovation work, organizing events, and other activities that support deepening capabilities across the Seven C’s of Successful Innovation Culture.

Most organizations have innovated at least once in their existence, and in many organizations people are still innovating. A true Innovation Enablement Leader is more of a coach, supporting emergent innovation, and helping people test and learn, prototype and find the right channel to scale the most promising insight-driven ideas (or work with the organization to create new channels).

So, are you seeking to control innovation with a Chief Innovation Officer or to facilitate it with an Innovation Enablement Leader?

Keep innovating!

P.S. If you’re looking to hire an Innovation Enablement Leader, drop me an email.

Image credit: E Sotera (via interaction-design.org)

This article originally appeared on Linkedin


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5 Keys to Developing an Innovation Culture

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5 Keys to Developing an Innovation CultureThe Interview

Listen to the interview on The Everyday Innovator Podcast

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Chad McAllister recently for the Everyday Innovator Podcast on the topic of how an organization can become more innovative. Below you will find Chad’s summary of the Five Keys to Developing an Innovation Culture that I shared with him:

  1. Learn the basics of culture change, such as the 8-step Kotter change model or the Leading Change Formula. Braden is developing a Change Planning Toolkit™ based on his experience and research helping organizations change their culture to support innovation. We’ll discuss this in detail in a future interview when the Toolkit is available.

  2. Build a common language of innovation. Define what innovation means for the organization. Braden’s definition is that innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative. Then build vision, strategy, and goals for innovation. Finally, consider what infrastructure is needed to support innovation.

  3. Create a connected organization. Design the organization to apply the additional talents and skills employees have but are not used in their primary role. This “overhang” of capabilities can be applied for innovation by connecting people with the work that needs to be done. One model, used at Cisco, is to create internal internships to contribute to other projects. Another is Intuit’s innovation vacations (my term) that allows employees to take a scheduled break from the regular work to work on a short-term basis for another project.

  4. Identify those who care about innovation. Recognize that some employees are most comfortable in day-to-day operational roles and maintaining the status quo while others are constantly looking to change things for the better. Those that are seeking to make improvements, especially from the customer’s perspective, should be identified to contribute to product development. This also involves unlocking employees’ initiative, creativity, and passion.

  5. Make innovation a team sport. There is no such thing as a lone innovator. All innovators have a team around them. Braden created The Nine Innovation Roles™ for effective innovation teams: revolutionary, conscript, connector, artist, customer champion, troubleshooter, judge, magic maker, and evangelist. See details in the blog post he wrote for Innovation Excellence.

Listen to the interview on The Everyday Innovator Podcast

Image credit: EverythingZoomer.com


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Most Companies Fail at Innovation Because…

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Most Companies Fail at Innovation Because...Most companies fail at innovation because they fail at change.

There you go, there is the entire article in a single sentence. Please click the like button or leave a comment on your way out, and I’ll turn out the lights.

I’m actually serious, but I didn’t come to this single sentence overnight, but through decades of research and experience. It coalesced however this morning in an interview with Chad McAllister that will air next month.

This sentence also highlights the reason why after writing the popular Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire (a book about innovation) and traveling the world delivering innovation keynotes and workshops, that my next book for Palgrave Macmillan (@PalgraveBiz) will be about change, not innovation.

Because after all, my life’s work is to help others change the world for the better by creating and sharing valuable tools and insights that hopefully serve to accelerate innovation and change in communities around the world.

I will continue on to say though that if you want to be successful at innovation you need to get better at planning, leading, managing, and maintaining change.

If you doubt the linkage, please check out my other article Managing Innovation is About Managing Change. This will give you a great example of how innovation inflicts change on the organization.

And if you’d like to learn more about making your organization more change capable, then I encourage you to check out my article Change the World – Step One, which is the first in a series of articles I will be publishing here in the run up to the launch of my book in January 2016 to help organizations build a stronger, more sustainable approach to change. This first article outlines the Four Keys to Successful Change, with much more content and a whole Change Planning Toolkit™ being released over the next few months.


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Your Chance to Help Change Change

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Your Chance to Help Change ChangeMy first book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire was designed to help organizations identify and remove barriers to innovation, but readers also found it to be a great primer on how to take a structured, sustainable approach to innovation, and as a result the book has found its way into university courses and libraries around the world.

I’ve been thinking over the last few years about where I could provide the most value in a follow-up book, and it came to me that innovation is really all about change and that where most organizations fail to achieve innovation is in successfully making all of the changes necessary to transform their inventions into innovations. At the same time, the world has changed, the pace of change is accelerating and organizations are struggling to cope with the speed of changes required of them, including the digital transformation they need to make.

So, my next book, this time for Palgrave Macmillan, will focus on highlighting the best practices and next practices of organizational change. And where does any successful change effort begin?

With good planning. But it is really hard for most people to successfully plan a change effort, because it is hard to visualize everything that needs to be considered and everything that needs to be done to affect the changes necessary to support an innovation, a digital transformation effort, a merger integration, or any other kind of needed organizational change.

But my Change Planning Toolkit™ and my new book (January 2016) are being designed to help you get everyone literally all on the same page for change. Both the book and my collaborative, visual Change Planning Toolkit™ are nearly complete. But before they are, I’d like to engage you, the intelligent, insightful Innovation Change Management community to help contribute your wisdom and experience to the book.

I’m looking for a few change management tips and quotes attributable to you (not someone else) to include in the book along with the other best practices and next practices of organizational change that I’ve collected and the introduction to my Change Planning Toolkit™ that I’m preparing.

It’s super simple to contribute. Just fill out the form, and the best contributions will make it into the book or into a series of articles that I’ll publish here and on a new site focused on organizational change that I’m about ready to launch.

I look forward to seeing your great organizational change quotes and tips!

UPDATE: The book is now out! Grab a copy here:


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A Lifetime of Innovations

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A Lifetime of InnovationThis week I was in Michigan for a family wedding and I had a great conversation with a family member about the history of Lifetime Products and how probably more than twenty years ago he saw the founder of Lifetime Products at a trade show demonstrating their first product, a basketball hoop that could be raised and lowered in seconds with the help of a pole or broom handle.

The founder was standing there and repeatedly saying “The basketball hoop goes up, the basketball hoop goes down.”

My family member was recounting how when he saw the guy at the tradeshow repeating this mantra over and over that he laughed at him, and how more than twenty years later how silly he feels because the guy has created a multimillion dollar company from these simple beginnings and his belief in the company’s first product.

Basketball hoops were the company’s only product for the first nine years until they started manufacturing a picnic table designed to fold flat.

According to my family member the company’s fortunes changed one day when a buyer at Walmart asked a simple question:

“Do you think you make a folding table?”

It obviously would have been easy at this point for the company to respond, “No, we make basketball hoops.” but given that business owners should always be watching to see what customers are struggling with and listening to hear what they might give you permission to sell them, it was smart for Lifetime Products in this situation to say “Of course.”

It also makes sense when you remember that two of the main questions you are always looking to answer for any new product are:

1. Can we make it profitably at scale at a price point where the value delivered is greater than the price?
2. Is there a market for it?

If the answer to question #2 has already been determined to be yes (like in this situation), then it simply becomes a matter of figuring out how to make question #1 true.

Lifetime Products found a way and so it is no longer about just “The basketball hoop goes up, the basketball hoop goes down.”

Basketball hoops may still be an important part of their product line, but their blow molded folding tables have nearly completely replaced much of their heavier wooden competition and they’ve moved on to make folding chairs, sheds, playgrounds, tent trailers, composters, and kayaks.

Now with 2,200 employees and revenue likely north of $250 million, the company is definitely no laughing matter.


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