Category Archives: Innovation

Nominations Closed for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

Human-Centered Change and Innovation loves making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because we truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.

As a result, we are eternally grateful to all of you out there who take the time to create and share great innovation articles, presentations, white papers, and videos with Braden Kelley and the Human-Centered Change and Innovation team. As a small thank you to those of you who follow along, we like to make a list of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers available each year!

Nominations are now closed.

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
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021

Do you just have someone that you like to read that writes about innovation, or some of the important adjacencies – trends, consumer psychology, change, leadership, strategy, behavioral economics, collaboration, or design thinking?

Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022.

The deadline for submitting nominations is December 24, 2022 at midnight GMT.

Nominations are now closed, but people were able to submit a nomination in either of these two ways:

Sending us the name of the blogger and the url of their blog by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Sending the name of the blogger and the url of their blog and your e-mail address using our contact form

(Note: HUGE bonus points for being a contributing author)

So, think about who you like to read and let us know by midnight GMT on December 24, 2022.

We will then compile a voting list of all the nominations, and publish it on December 25, 2022.

Voting will then be open from December 25, 2022 – January 1, 2023 via comments and twitter @replies to @innovate.

The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions by an author to this web site will be a contributing factor.

Contact me with writing samples if you’d like to publish your articles on our platform!

The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022 will then be announced on here in early January 2023.

We’re curious to see who you think is worth reading!

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Forbidden Truth About Innovation

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Forbidden Truth About Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

If you heard it once, you heard it a thousand times:

Big companies can’t innovate
We need to innovate before we get too big and slow
Startups are innovative. Big companies are dinosaurs. They can’t innovate.

And yet you persevere because you know the truth:

Big companies CAN innovate.

They CHOOSE not to.

Using Innovation to drive growth is a choice.

Just like choosing to grow through acquisition or expansion into new markets is a choice.

All those choices are complex, uncertain, and risky. In fact:

70 – 95% of innovations fail
70 – 90% of acquisitions fail
~80% of market entry efforts fail

Hold on. The odds of failure are the same!

All three growth drivers have similar failure rates, but no one says, “Big companies can’t acquire things” or “Big companies can’t expand into new markets.”

We expect big companies to engage in acquisitions and market expansion.

Failed acquisitions and market expansions prove us (or at least our expectations) wrong. Because we don’t like being wrong, we study our failures so that we can change, improve, and increase our odds of success next time.

We expect big companies to fail at innovation.

In this case, failure proves us right. We love being right, so we shrug and say, “Big companies can’t innovate.”

We let big companies off the hook.

Why are our expectations so different?

Since the dawn of commerce, businesses engaged in innovation, acquisitions, and market expansion. But innovation is different from M&A and market expansion in three fundamental ways:

Innovation is “new” – Even though businesses have engaged in innovation, acquisitions, and market expansion since the very earliest days of commerce, innovation only recently became a topic worthy of discussion, study, and investment. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1960s that Innovation was recognized as worthy of research and deliberate investment.

Innovation starts small – Unlike acquisitions and new markets that can be easily sized and forecasted, in the early days of an innovation, it’s hard to know how big it could be.

Innovation takes time – Innovation doesn’t come with a predictable launch date. Even its possible launch date is usually 3 to 5 years away, unlike acquisition closing dates that are often within a year.

What can we do about this?

We can’t change what innovation is (new, small, and slow at the start), but we can change our expectations.

Finish the sentence – “Big companies can’t innovate” absolves companies of the responsibility to make a good-faith effort to try to innovate by making their struggles an unavoidable consequence of their size. But it’s not inevitable, and continuing the sentence proves it. Saying “Big companies can’t innovate because…” forces people to acknowledge the root causes of companies’ innovation struggles. In many ways, this was the great A-HA! of The Innovator’s Dilemma: Big companies can’t innovate because their focus on providing better (and more expensive) solutions to their best customers results in them ceding the low-end of the market and non-consumers to other companies.

Be honest – Once you’ve identified the root cause, you can choose to do something different (and get different results) or do everything the same (and get the same results). If you choose to keep doing the same things in the same ways, that’s fine. Own the decision.

Change your choice. Change your expectations – If you do choose to do things differently, address the root causes, and resolve the barriers, then walk the talk. Stop expecting innovation to fail and start expecting it to be as successful as your acquisition and market expansion efforts. Stop investing two people and $10 in innovation and start investing the same quantity and quality of resources as you invest and other growth efforts.

The first step in change is admitting that change is needed. When we accept that “big companies can’t innovate” simply because they’re big, we absolve them of their responsibility to follow through on proclamations and strategies about the importance of innovation as a strategic driver of growth.

It’s time to acknowledge that innovation (or lack thereof) is a choice and expect companies to own that choice and act and invest accordingly.

After all, would it be great to stop persevering and start innovating?

Image credit: Pixabay

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The Innovation Dashboard

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Visualizing the Impact of Your People-First Approach

The Innovation Dashboard

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the relentless pursuit of progress, businesses often fall into the trap of measuring what’s easy, not what’s important. We meticulously track KPIs for revenue, efficiency, and market share, yet when it comes to innovation, our metrics often devolve into vague notions of “idea counts” or “project pipeline.” This is a fundamental flaw, especially for leaders committed to Human-Centered Change. To truly light your Innovation Bonfire, you need a different kind of visibility: an Innovation Dashboard that vividly illustrates the impact of your people-first approach.

Innovation isn’t a solitary act of genius; it’s a collective endeavor fueled by psychological safety, diverse perspectives, and empowered individuals. The challenge isn’t just to innovate, but to prove that investing in your people—their well-being, their ideas, their agency—is the most potent catalyst for breakthrough. This dashboard isn’t just about tracking ideas; it’s about visualizing human potential unleashed.

Beyond Output: Measuring Inputs and Outcomes

A truly effective Innovation Dashboard moves beyond simple output metrics (e.g., # of patents) to encompass both the inputs that foster innovation and the outcomes that demonstrate its impact on both people and profit:

1. Inputs: Cultivating the Innovation Environment

This section quantifies the health of your innovation ecosystem—the conditions that allow people to thrive and create. Key metrics here include:

Psychological Safety Index: Measured through anonymous surveys, pulse checks, or sentiment analysis, assessing how safe employees feel to speak up, challenge ideas, and take risks without fear of retribution. This is the bedrock of innovation.
Cross-Functional Collaboration Score: Tracking the frequency and effectiveness of interactions between different teams or departments, indicating how well ideas flow across silos.
“Purpose Alignment” Score: An internal measure of how well employees understand and connect with the organization’s overarching mission, ensuring innovation is guided by a shared “Why.”
Learning & Development Engagement: Tracking participation rates in skill-building workshops, hackathons, or knowledge-sharing sessions related to new technologies or methodologies.

2. Outputs & Outcomes: Impacting People and Performance

This section links the innovation efforts directly to tangible results, both for the business and for the people involved:

Employee-Generated Idea Conversion Rate: Tracking the percentage of employee-submitted ideas that move from concept to pilot, demonstrating a culture of action and feedback.
Time-to-Market for New Initiatives (Employee-Led): A measure of efficiency for innovations that originated from internal teams, highlighting agility.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) / Net Promoter Score (NPS) Impact from Innovations: Directly linking new products/services to improvements in customer experience metrics.
Employee Retention & Engagement for Innovators: Monitoring how well you retain and engage employees who are actively involved in innovation projects, recognizing that involvement often leads to higher satisfaction.
Revenue/Cost Savings Attributed to Innovation: Quantifying the financial impact of successful new offerings or process improvements.

Case Study 1: The “Engagement to Innovation” Link at a Tech Giant

A prominent technology company was struggling with innovation stagnation despite having a vast R&D budget. Their existing dashboards focused purely on project milestones and patent filings. Recognizing this flaw, the Chief People Officer partnered with the Head of Innovation to create a new, human-centric dashboard.

They started tracking “internal mobility” (movement between teams), “mentorship participation,” and crucially, a “Friction Score” derived from employee feedback channels, measuring systemic obstacles to creativity. They cross-referenced these with traditional innovation metrics. What they found was revelatory: teams with high psychological safety, frequent cross-functional exchanges, and low “Friction Scores” consistently produced higher-quality, market-ready innovations, even if they had fewer initial “ideas.”

The dashboard visually demonstrated that investing in employee well-being and psychological safety was a direct precursor to increased innovation output. This wasn’t just correlation; the data showed causation. It allowed leadership to justify a reallocation of resources from purely project-centric funding to culture-centric investments, proving that a robust internal ecosystem was their most powerful innovation engine. This led to a 15% increase in successful new product launches within two years, directly tied back to improved employee experience metrics.

Case Study 2: Designing for Impact in a Service Organization

I worked with a large, geographically dispersed service organization that needed to rapidly innovate its customer service model. Their initial approach was top-down, but it lacked traction. Human-Centered Design frameworks advocated for empowering front-line employees to drive solutions. To track this, we built a lean Innovation Dashboard focused on Employee-Led Solution Deployment.

Instead of just counting ideas, the dashboard visualized the journey of ideas from conception through pilot to full implementation. Key metrics included: “Time from Idea Submission to Pilot,” “Front-line Employee Participation Rate,” and “CSAT Impact of Employee-Led Solutions.” A critical visual component was a “Feedback Loop Health” indicator, showing how quickly and constructively ideas received feedback, reflecting the psychological safety to fail fast and learn.

The dashboard revealed that localized teams, given autonomy and rapid feedback, were prototyping and deploying solutions significantly faster than centralized initiatives. It highlighted specific branches and managers who were particularly effective at fostering internal innovation. This visibility allowed leadership to replicate best practices, provide targeted support, and, most importantly, celebrate the human architects of change. The result was a 10% improvement in first-call resolution and a significant jump in employee engagement for teams actively contributing to the innovation process.

“You cannot manage what you do not measure, but more importantly, you cannot inspire what you do not make visible. The Innovation Dashboard turns the intangible power of people into a strategic reality.”

Designing Your Impactful Dashboard

Creating your Innovation Dashboard is an exercise in Human-Centered Design itself. It should be:

Visually Intuitive: Easy to understand at a glance, with clear trends and actionable insights.
Balanced: Reflecting both the human inputs and the business outcomes.
Dynamic: Constantly updated and iterated based on what truly drives your organization’s innovation culture.
Empowering: Not just for executives, but for every team member to see their contribution and the collective progress.

By shifting your focus from simply tracking projects to visualizing the health of your innovation ecosystem and the impact of your empowered people, you provide not just data, but a compelling narrative. This Innovation Dashboard becomes a powerful tool for strategic decision-making, stakeholder alignment, and, most critically, for celebrating the human spirit that fuels all true progress.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Google Gemini

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How to Drive Fear Out of Innovation

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The Tic Toc Exercise

Drive Fear Out of Innovation

“To Secure Ourselves Against Defeat Lines In Our Own Hands!” — Sun Tzu

GUEST POST from Teresa Spangler

One of my favorite books to pull out in times like these is Thinkertoys, by Michael Michalko. Keeping a fresh eye on what could catch me off guard in times when anxiety and stress could take over all mental faculties if we let it. How might we defeat these feelings that paralyze us: anxieties, stresses, and FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt)?

“Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.” — Marilyn vos Savant

There is an exercise in Thinkertoys called Tic-Toc. It is somewhat fashioned after building anticipated scenarios of worst-case best case only this builds strength in creating our future realities by addressing the fears that we have head-on. Here is an example of the exercise:

Tic Side- write your fear	Toc-Side-write the opposite of the fear
Customers will never agree to these new ideas?	Customers will really like this idea if I apply myself and engage them in a deeper conversation.
My idea is so out there I will be laughed at	This is a good idea; I will share it as it doesn’t have to be accepted by everyone. If it helps just one person or if one person believes in this idea, they can help others believe in it.
Our leadership team’s plan could be so much better, but they will not listen to me.	I could help my leadership team understand there are additional ways we could approach their ideas and receive even better outcomes.

This seems like such a simple exercise, but it is in fact a very powerful exercise that can have dramatically positive outcomes if you act on the right side of the chart but recognize the left side of the chart. Here you are battling your fears head on, you are training yourself to have more conviction and take actions that may lead you out of challenges seen and unseen. Tic Toc exercises that accompany your written set of worst-case best-case scenarios could be a trigger to new and even innovative thinking.

Innovative thinking, remodeling our businesses, considering what new normal trends will be critical to every business’ survival. Innovation does not get out the door if we have our own self-doubts and no plans of what it really could be if we put our heart, minds, souls to the innovation we believe in and then comes the justifications, the financial modeling and the new potential business models.

If you tell yourself no one will listen, or my ideas are worthless then they will manifest in your gut creating even more anxiety and your greatness may be lost in fear.

Speak now and for NEVER, hold your peace.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Leading Your External Innovation Network

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Orchestrating Collaboration

Leading Your External Innovation Network

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The days when a single organization could dominate innovation solely through internal R&D labs are over. In the age of exponential change, innovation is a contact sport. As a thought leader focused on human-centered change and innovation, I see the most successful companies shifting their focus from being self-sufficient inventors to becoming expert orchestrators of external networks. They understand that the collective intelligence of an ecosystem—comprising startups, universities, competitors, and even customers—far exceeds the capability of any lone corporation.

Leading an external innovation network is fundamentally different from managing an internal team. It requires shifting from command-and-control to influence and co-creation. It’s about building a robust, diverse, and fluid network of partners who share a common purpose but bring radically different skills and perspectives. This isn’t just “open innovation”; it’s strategic, purpose-driven collaboration, designed to achieve breakthroughs that would be impossible alone. The challenge for today’s leaders is not acquiring external assets, but mastering the art of the symbiotic relationship, where mutual value and growth are guaranteed.

The Three Imperatives of Network Orchestration

To successfully lead an external innovation network, a leader must focus on three core imperatives:

1. Define the Shared Problem, Not the Solution

External partners aren’t looking for a contract; they’re looking for a mission. Your organization must clearly articulate the Wicked Problem it aims to solve (e.g., “How do we make urban logistics carbon-neutral?” rather than “We need a faster drone model”). Defining the problem invites a diversity of approaches and technologies. Defining the solution constrains creativity and filters out the radical ideas often found outside your walls. This clarity establishes the shared purpose that binds the network.

2. Design the Interface for Trust and Speed

Bureaucracy kills collaboration. The interface between your company and its external partners must be lean, fast, and built on psychological safety. This means simplifying IP agreements, offering flexible contracting models (like joint ventures or co-development agreements rather than simple vendor contracts), and establishing clear, transparent communication channels. Trust is the transactional currency of the external network, and a fast, clear process is the best way to earn it, particularly with agile startups.

3. Cultivate a Portfolio of Relationship Models

Not all external partners are created equal. A startup requires venture capital and mentorship; a university needs joint research grants and data access; a mature competitor might require a formal standards consortium. Successful orchestrators manage a portfolio of relationship models, matching the right type of engagement (e.g., challenge, investment, acquisition, co-development) to the specific partner and the innovation maturity level. This avoids treating every partner like a transactional vendor.

The Internal Barrier: Managing Cultural Change

External innovation is doomed to fail if the internal culture remains resistant. Leaders must proactively combat the pervasive “Not Invented Here” (NIH) syndrome. This requires:

Mandating “External Ambassadors”: Creating roles or rotating assignments where internal experts are rewarded for successfully sourcing and integrating external ideas.
Measuring Network Health: Shifting innovation metrics to include Relationship Velocity (how fast partners move from ideation to pilot), Diversity Index (the variety of partners used), and the Rate of External Integration.
Celebrating External Wins: Publicly celebrating the external partners and the internal teams who worked with them, positioning collaboration as a prestigious act of corporate agility.

The goal is to transform internal employees from being gatekeepers of ideas into curators and integrators of solutions.

Case Study 1: P&G’s Connect + Develop (C+D) Program

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, P&G realized its internal R&D productivity was declining, despite massive investment. They were constrained by the “Not Invented Here” syndrome and needed to source more ideas and technologies from the outside to meet ambitious growth targets.

Network Orchestration Model:

P&G fundamentally shifted its innovation strategy to Connect + Develop (C+D). This was not a passive idea submission portal; it was a global, active network orchestration effort. They created specialized internal “Technology Entrepreneurs” whose sole job was to scout, broker, and integrate external innovations. Key partnerships included:

NineSigma: Used to run open challenges and solicit solutions from a vast network of scientists and small firms worldwide.
Innovation Intermediaries: Partnering with consultants and organizations that specialize in linking technology with unmet consumer needs.

Crucially, P&G made its own proprietary technologies available to partners, fostering a two-way intellectual property exchange built on mutual benefit. P&G offered scale and market access; partners offered speed and radical concepts.

The Innovation Impact:

Within a few years, C+D was responsible for over 50% of P&G’s product initiatives and billions in revenue growth. Iconic products like the Swiffer Duster and Olay Regenerist were either fully or substantially developed using external technology. P&G demonstrated that external innovation is not a marginal activity but the main engine of corporate growth when expertly orchestrated.

Case Study 2: BMW’s Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP)

The Challenge:

BMW, like all automotive manufacturers, faced the challenge of digitizing its vast, complex global production network. Achieving real-time data analysis, predictive maintenance, and operational efficiencies required a common data and technology standard across its supply chain and factory floor, a goal too large for one company to tackle.

Network Orchestration Model:

Instead of building a proprietary solution, BMW co-founded the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) with Microsoft. OMP is an open, community-driven initiative built on open standards and open source technologies (specifically, the Microsoft Azure cloud platform). The goal was to create a common reference architecture for industrial IoT and AI solutions. BMW actively encouraged competitors and suppliers—including Daimler, Bosch, and hundreds of smaller tech firms—to join. They relinquished proprietary control to foster a pre-competitive collaboration space for infrastructure, ensuring they could focus their internal R&D on differentiated applications.

The Innovation Impact:

By orchestrating this platform, BMW gained access to a wider pool of talent and accelerated the development of key manufacturing solutions. The OMP rapidly became an industry standard, benefiting BMW by creating a harmonized, scalable technology ecosystem that they could then build differentiated applications on top of. This case illustrates leading an external network not through ownership, but through platform stewardship, focusing on shared infrastructure to unlock superior results for all participants, dramatically reducing the cost and risk of digital transformation.

The future belongs to the innovation ecosystem architect. To succeed, leaders must cultivate a culture that views external partners not as threats or transactional vendors, but as co-investors in a shared future. It requires courage to give up some control, trust to open up the IP discussion, and clarity to define the societal or market challenge you are collectively addressing. By mastering the orchestration of this dynamic network, your organization can move from incremental improvement to exponential, sustainable breakthrough.

Image credit: Google Gemini

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Designing Innovation – Accelerating Creativity via Innovation Strategy

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Designing Innovation - Accelerating Creativity via Innovation Strategy

GUEST POST from Douglas Ferguson

To innovate is to survive.

As an overwhelming 80% of founders believe innovation to be the heart of organizational growth, employing an innovation strategy that promotes, facilitates, and feeds innovation is essential.

Developing a solid plan for facilitating innovation in your organization is a necessary step in your company’s growth. In this article, we’ll discuss the best ways to harness innovation as we explore the following topics:

The Source of Innovation
What is an Innovation Strategy?
Strategizing for Innovation
Innovating from Within
A System of Innovation

The Source of Innovation

Innovation often feels like a form of magic: it’s a powerful yet elusive force that drives the best ideas and creates the greatest breakthroughs. While some prefer to wait for inspiration to strike, happenstance is hardly the driving force behind innovation.

The true source of innovation is the organization itself. Leaders must intentionally create systems, processes, and strategies that allow for innovation at every turn.

Innovation is similar to any other corporate function as it requires careful strategizing to make the best ideas come to life. In doing this, leaders can set the stage and make the most innovative ideas and processes a regular practice in their organization. Ultimately, innovation may appear in the initial spark of a great idea, but it takes purposeful, thoughtful, and conscious planning for a great idea to exist beyond that moment of genius.

What is an Innovation Strategy?

Driving organizational innovation starts with creating an innovation strategy. An innovation strategy identifies processes that allow for the most creative and effective solutions.

The ideal innovation strategy allows an organization to zero in on its audience’s expectations by:

Identifying customers’ unmet needs
Targeting these needs for growth

A healthy innovation strategy allows an organization to create the most efficient pathways to resolving these needs and growing its company. Effective strategies for innovation follow a prioritization method to help teams understand which ideas hold the highest return. In creating a solid innovation strategy, leaders must develop a system that can be repeated time and again.

Strategizing for Innovation

From defining your goals to using tech to transform your organization into a hybrid model, the possibilities are endless when it comes to innovation. As you design your innovation strategy, it’s essential to understand the nuances of innovation. Working with an innovation consultant can help you iron out a strategy that’s best for your team. With an expert in innovation, you’ll be able to better determine effective next steps toward the business’s goals.

Consultants are equipped to explain the subtleties in innovative strategizing, such as the various types of innovation:

Routine Innovation.

Routine innovation is a building block that adds to the company’s pre-existing structure, such as its customer base or earlier versions of a product.

Disruptive Innovation.

Disruptive innovation results in a new business model that disrupts or challenges the competition’s business models.

Radical Innovation.

Radical innovation introduces new inventions, software, or technology to completely transform an existing business model. This type of innovation is best used to help organizations achieve a competitive advantage in the market.

Architectural Innovation.

Architectural innovation uses new technology to create new markets. Essentially, architectural innovation changes the entire overall design of a product by redesigning existing components.

In creating the best innovation strategy for your current needs, take into account the following guidelines:

Clarifying your goals and priorities.

The right innovation strategy outlines your organizational goals and efforts to identify the best actionable steps to achieve these goals.

Fostering alignment within your organization.

Alignment should be at the center of any innovation strategy. Everyone must be aligned in pursuing a common goal for an organization to achieve new ideas and an innovative way of working.

Encouraging your team to keep improving.

Complacency kills innovation. Make sure your company is always ready to move on to the next great idea by making continuous growth and development a key part of your innovation strategy.

Reaching long-term success.

Focusing on reaching long-term success is an essential part of any innovation strategy.

Innovating From Within

An innovation strategy becomes the most effective when leaders can ingrain the processes and practices into their culture. Once innovation becomes an integral part of how a team works, they’ll be able to keep innovation top-of-mind.

By innovating from within, you’ll create a sustainable innovation strategy that becomes part of your company culture. Consider these pillars of innovation as you center innovation strategy at the heart of your company:

Models: Innovation strategies fall into two models:

Business model innovation
In this process, an organization completely adapts its business model to add value to its customers.
Leveraging an existing business model
This process allows an organization to use its existing business model while bringing innovation to the business itself.

Intrapreneurship
Intrapreneurship empowers employees to act as entrepreneurs while working within the company. This encourages each person to create and act on their ideas, thus fostering a culture of ongoing company-wide innovation.

Corporate Accelerator
Corporate accelerators are programs started by larger enterprises, offering aspiring entrepreneurs the opportunity to find mentors, access seed capital, and make important connections.

Innovation Labs
Innovation labs are a starting point for R&D teams and startups to facilitate new ideas.

Open Innovation Program
This model of R&D encourages existing employees to collaborate on new business ideas that add value to the company.

External Accelerators
Though external accelerators don’t meet in-house, they can add incredible value to an organization. Businesses can use external accelerators to advance startups and drive concepts that align with their goals and needs without covering the costs of running an in-house program.

Collaboration
Collaboration is an integral component in shaping a cohesive innovation strategy. Through constant discussion, interaction, and creative collaboration, all members of an organization work together to bring their ideas to life.

Ideation
Managing innovation requires organizations to manage ideation. In doing so, leaders work to identify the best plans for analyzing, gathering, and implementing the right ideas. Ultimately, companies need an effective system that will transform an idea into a process that gets results.

Measurement
Innovation strategies should include a plan to measure success by considering relevant metrics for each goal. For example, KPIs such as email subscribers, website traffic, and social shares are excellent metrics for tracking brand awareness.

A System of Innovation

Developing a comprehensive innovation strategy must go beyond general objectives such as achieving growth, creating value, and beating competitors. To truly create company-wide change through innovation, organizations should clearly articulate specific objectives that will allow for the most sustainable competitive advantage.

A thorough innovation strategy successfully embeds innovation in the very system of an organization. To implement such systemic innovation, design your innovation strategy with the following objectives:

Creating Long-Term Value for Potential Customers

An innovation strategy should always consider the most effective ways to create long-term value for customers. In developing a cohesive strategy, consider the type of value you’re aiming to create through innovation. Value can be created in many ways, including improving customer experience, making a product more affordable, or benefiting society at large.

In your efforts to identify what values to zero in on, consider those that will have the greatest impact in the long term. This way, your innovation strategy will include continuously iterating towards better designs in the future.

Capturing Value Generated From Innovations

Innovations easily attract competitors that can pose a risk to the original product or idea. In your efforts to create a thorough innovation strategy, consider how your company plans to capture the value its innovations create.

For example, a company that creates an exciting new product should be prepared for its competition to create more affordable prototypes. In the worst-case scenario, the competition may capture the value of the innovation.

Consider these risks in your innovation strategy by identifying what complementary services, products, assets, and capabilities may improve customer loyalty. This way, you’ll already have a plan in place to ensure your organization continues to profit from every innovation.

Strategizing for Business Model Innovation

Technology plays an important role in innovation but isn’t the only path to new ideas. In developing a robust innovation strategy, consider the level of technology and your preferred method of innovation to pursue.

Harnessing the magic of innovation takes careful planning. Need help driving innovation in your organization? At Voltage Control, we help leaders develop innovative strategies through change! Contact us today to discuss the best path to innovation.

Image credit: Pexels

Article first published here: voltagecontrol.com

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6 Ways to Successfully Engage Thought Leaders on Your Innovation

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6 Ways to Successfully Engage Thought Leaders on Your Innovation

GUEST POST from Teresa Spangler

The direct, early engagement with key thought leaders delivers dividends throughout the commercialization process and brings unforeseen opportunities rapidly. However, it is not for the faint of heart. Your innovation is your baby and thought leaders will inevitably tell you that your baby is ugly. But this is the moment of truth: can you defend your innovations’ value proposition? Can you demonstrate that the innovation can stand up to simpler substitution products or services? And can you easily and succinctly articulate the vision you have for changing markets? You can choose to listen and internalize the information or reject it as irrelevant to your quest. Do the latter at your peril. Here are some things to help guide you and reinforce your strength against the onslaught of challenges:

First map the key thought leaders in your market and strategize on how you will engage each one. Some are open to conversation. Some require only a response to their online presence. Some you only have to challenge at a conference. There are lots of ways to get your innovation in the discussion other than a simple email. Get into the community and become a voice.

Prep your “diffusion” strategy with a solid messaging plan. Have your elevator pitch down pat. Build several versions to match the interests and concerns of the thought leader. Know what words are impactful and which ones cause confusion. Often success is found in a single word. Most importantly, change the words if they don’t work! We see too many people staying with messages that don’t resonate, only to repeat and expect a different outcome.

Go quick and go hard. Gain an early review of innovation value proposition no matter what it takes. Get it out there in the open. We see so many early innovation diffusion efforts tip-toe around their innovations’ value in the hopes that confusion will ward off negative feedback. Charge indirectly. Here is where many engineers use techno-babble to project a larger picture than is warranted. Don’t let this happen. The more complicated your technology explanation the more confusion you create and the longer it takes to get to the real value of what you are trying to do.

Always follow-up on suggestions, objections or new ideas learned from your engagement with a thought leader. The gold is in the adaptation of your innovations’ value to the perceptions of the thought leaders. Adapt and be agile in how you work with these people. It takes effort to place your innovation within context of the existing market noise and it takes time to internalize any new information.

Work with thought leaders to expand on boundary information; this is the information that influences perceptions but may not directly relate to your innovation. Keep your radar aperture wide open to take in this influencing information. Often this is where the value reinforcement messaging is found. Keep your discussions open to tangents that relate to your innovation.

Know the downstream impact of your thought leader association. Create a stakeholder relationship map. Who will the thought leader influence? Who will listen to their opinions that you can then go to later and investigate the propagation of your messaging?

One final note: Seek thought leaders from a diverse set of industry, public policy, academia and social media. This diversity will ensure a comprehensive picture of the changes and challenges your innovation will produce.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Practical Applications of AI for Human-Centered Innovation

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Beyond the Hype

Practical Applications of AI for Human-Centered Innovation

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The air is thick with the buzz of Artificial Intelligence. From Davos to daily headlines, the conversation often oscillates between utopian dreams and dystopian fears. As a thought leader focused on human-centered change and innovation, my perspective cuts through this noise: AI is not just a technology; it is a powerful amplifier of human capability, especially when applied with empathy and a deep understanding of human needs. The true innovation isn’t in what AI can do, but in how it enables humans to do more, better, and more humanely.

Too many organizations are chasing AI for the sake of AI, hoping to find a magic bullet for efficiency. This misses the point entirely. The most transformative applications of AI in innovation are those that don’t replace humans, but rather augment their unique strengths — creativity, empathy, critical thinking, and ethical judgment. This article explores practical, human-centered applications of AI that move beyond the hype to deliver tangible value by putting people at the core of the AI-driven innovation process. It’s about designing a future where humanity remains in the loop, guiding and benefiting from intelligent systems.

AI as an Empathy Amplifier: Deepening Understanding

Human-centered innovation begins with deep empathy for users, customers, and employees. Traditionally, gathering and synthesizing this understanding has been a labor-intensive, often qualitative, process. AI is revolutionizing this by giving innovators superpowers in understanding human context:

Sentiment Analysis for Voice of Customer (VoC): AI can process vast quantities of unstructured feedback — customer reviews, social media comments, call center transcripts — to identify emerging pain points, unspoken desires, and critical satisfaction drivers, often in real-time. This provides a granular, data-driven understanding of user sentiment that human analysts alone could never achieve at scale, leading to faster, more targeted product improvements.
Personalized Journeys & Predictive Needs: By analyzing behavioral data, AI can predict individual user needs and preferences, allowing for hyper-personalized product recommendations, customized learning paths, or proactive support. This moves from reactive service to anticipatory human care, boosting customer loyalty and reducing friction.
Contextualizing Employee Experience (EX): AI can analyze internal communications, HR feedback, and engagement surveys to identify patterns of burnout, identify skill gaps, or flag cultural friction points, allowing leaders to intervene with targeted, human-centric solutions that improve employee well-being and productivity. This directly impacts talent retention and operational efficiency.

“The best AI applications don’t automate human intuition; they liberate it, freeing us to focus on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of human experience. This is AI as a partner, not a replacement.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: AI-Powered User Research at Adobe

The Challenge:

Adobe, with its vast suite of creative tools, faces the constant challenge of understanding the diverse, evolving needs of millions of users — from professional designers to casual creators. Traditional user research (surveys, interviews, focus groups) is time-consuming and expensive, making it difficult to keep pace with rapid product development cycles and emerging user behaviors.

The AI-Powered Human-Centered Solution:

Adobe developed internal AI tools that leverage natural language processing (NLP) to analyze immense volumes of unstructured user feedback from forums, support tickets, app store reviews, and in-app telemetry. These AI systems identify recurring themes, emerging feature requests, and points of friction with remarkable speed and accuracy. Instead of replacing human researchers, the AI acts as an an ‘insight engine,’ highlighting critical areas for human qualitative investigation. Researchers then use these AI-generated insights to conduct more focused, empathetic interviews and design targeted usability tests, ensuring human intelligence remains in the loop for crucial interpretation and validation.

The Innovation Impact:

This approach drastically accelerates the ideation and validation phases of Adobe’s product development, translating directly into faster time-to-market for new features. It allows human designers to spend less time sifting through data and more time synthesizing insights, collaborating on creative solutions, and directly interacting with users on the most impactful issues. Products are developed with a deeper, faster, and more scalable understanding of user pain points and desires, leading to higher adoption, stronger user loyalty, and ultimately, increased revenue.

AI as a Creativity & Productivity Partner: Amplifying Output

Beyond empathy, AI is fundamentally transforming how human innovators generate ideas, prototype solutions, and execute complex projects, not by replacing creative thought, but by amplifying it while maintaining human oversight.

Generative AI for Ideation & Concepting: Large Language Models (LLMs) can act as powerful brainstorming partners, generating hundreds of diverse ideas, marketing slogans, or design concepts from a simple prompt. This allows human creatives to explore a broader solution space faster, finding novel angles they might have missed, thereby reducing ideation cycle time and boosting innovation output.
Automated Prototyping & Simulation: AI can rapidly generate low-fidelity prototypes from design specifications, simulate user interactions, or even predict the performance of a physical product before it’s built. This drastically reduces the time and cost of the early innovation cycle, making experimentation more accessible and leading to significant R&D savings.
Intelligent Task Automation (Beyond RPA): While Robotic Process Automation (RPA) handles repetitive tasks, AI goes further. It can intelligently automate the contextual parts of a job, managing schedules, prioritizing communications, or summarizing complex documents, freeing human workers for higher-value, creative problem-solving. This leads to increased employee satisfaction and higher strategic output.

Case Study 2: Spotify’s AI-Driven Music Discovery & Creator Tools

The Challenge:

Spotify’s core challenge is matching millions of users with tens of millions of songs, constantly evolving tastes, and emerging artists. Simultaneously, they need to empower artists to find their audience and create efficiently in a crowded market. Traditional human curation alone couldn’t scale to this complexity.

The AI-Powered Human-Centered Solution:

Spotify uses a sophisticated AI engine to power its personalized recommendation algorithms (Discover Weekly, Daily Mixes). This AI doesn’t just match songs; it understands context — mood, activity, time of day, and even the subtle social signals of listening. This frees human curators to focus on high-level thematic curation, editorial playlists, and breaking new artists, rather than sifting through endless catalogs. More recently, Spotify is also exploring AI tools for artists, assisting with everything from mastering tracks to suggesting optimal release times based on audience analytics, always with human creators retaining final creative control.

The Innovation Impact:

The AI system allows Spotify to deliver a highly personalized and human-feeling music discovery experience at an unimaginable scale, directly driving user engagement and subscriber retention. For artists, AI acts as a creative assistant and market intelligence tool, allowing them to focus on making music while gaining insights into audience behavior and optimizing their reach. This symbiotic relationship between human creativity and AI efficiency is a hallmark of human-centered innovation, resulting in a stronger platform ecosystem for both consumers and creators.

The future of innovation isn’t about AI replacing humans; it’s about AI elevating humanity. By focusing on how AI can amplify empathy, foster creativity, and liberate us from mundane tasks, we can build a future where technology truly serves people. This requires a commitment to responsible AI development — ensuring fairness, transparency, and human oversight. The challenge for leaders is not just to adopt AI, but to design its integration with a human-centered lens, ensuring it empowers, rather than diminishes, the human spirit of innovation, and delivers measurable value across the organization.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Unsplash

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A Letter to Innovation Santa

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Ten Essentials for an Innovator’s Christmas List

A Letter to Innovation Santa

GUEST POST from John Bessant

Christmas, as my 6-year old never tires of reminding me, is coming. Never mind that technically it’s a month away and forget the efforts I make, Scrooge-like, not to allow any trace of the season to cross our threshold until at least 1st December. She excitedly points out that everywhere — the TV and online adverts, the shop decorations, even some of our early bird neighbors with their flashing light displays — everywhere the signals are unmistakable. ‘It’s nearly here!’

Which prompts her to write lists, long and getting longer, of gift ideas in case Santa is short of the relevant information about this year’s must-have items without which a six-year old’s world can never be complete. I feel like King Canute, water lapping around my ankles as I desperately try to stem the tide, inevitability fast approaching on my horizon.

In a desperate attempt to distract myself from these seasonal waves I began thinking about the kind of list I might put together for a would-be innovating organization. Assuming there was an innovation equivalent of the old gentleman at the North Pole what might he be working on with his elves right now? What are his stock-pickers pulling off the warehouse shelves and loading up on the sleigh? What might be on the must-have list for an innovation Christmas?

Turns out to be a useful exercise in choice editing. Just like my daughter, my early lists grew and grew like Topsy, sprawling over several pages. And containing lots of items in the ‘Motherhood and apple pie’ class — things which were unarguably ‘good’ for innovation but a bit vague in how they might actually be implemented. ‘Make innovation happen every day in every way’ or ‘Put innovation at the heart of everything you do’, or ‘Keep reinventing the organization’ kind of thing — nice sentiments but not exactly helpful.

Back to the drawing board, trying to focus on things which not only represent important elements but also have some specific tools to help put them into practice. So here’s the result. If you’re looking for inspiration for your seasonal innovation shopping here’s a few ideas that might help. (And if you believe in an Innovation Santa they might be useful items to add to the ‘what I’d really like’ list you’re about to send up the chimney)

First the wrapping paper.

Innovation matters. If we don’t change what we offer the world (our products and services) and the ways we create and deliver them (our processes) then there’s a good chance that we won’t survive long in today’s turbulent market-place. The issue isn’t about whether or not to innovate but how?

The good news is that we’ve learned a lot about this challenge; whilst innovation still remains a risky business there are some key insights which can help stack the deck in our favour. Over a hundred years of research consistently shows that successful innovators …

1. Manage innovation as a process.

Innovation isn’t like the cartoon moment with a light bulb flashing on above someone’s head. It’s a journey, involving key steps (search, select, implement) to create value from ideas. Anyone might get lucky once but in order to repeat the innovation trick we need a process for managing this; it doesn’t have to be bureaucratic, but it does have to be systematic. So, to help you work with this one there are plenty of frameworks which you can adapt, checklists to make sure you’ve got a system for innovation — you could do a lot worse than start with the framework which the ISO launched this year for an Innovation Management Standard …

2. Explore all the innovation space available.

There are many different ways to innovate, from changing our offering, updating our processes, exploring new market contexts and even switching our underlying business model. It’s a little like an innovation compass and the challenge is to make sure we explore the full 360 degrees of opportunity. Once again there are plenty of tools to help with this — try looking at Doblin’s ten types of innovation, play with the 4Ps innovation compass or explore Blue Ocean thinking

3. Have an innovation strategy

A clear roadmap of where and how innovation will take the business forward. It’s easy to wave the flag and shout about how important innovation is; serious players think through their strategy for dealing with it, share the roadmap and make sure that people buy into it. And there are plenty of stocking fillers here to help with strategic positioning and analysis, from good old PEST and SWOT through to more thorough future scanning, scenarios and road mapping and discovery-driven planning.

4. Pay attention to the small stuff.

Although radical changes are the ones which hit the headlines the underlying economic evidence is clear; most innovation, most of the time, is about doing what we do a little better. Incremental innovation of this kind adds up and has the additional advantage that it is much lower in risk, advancing slowly along well-known frontiers. This is where the lean toolkit becomes a must-have — whether it’s tools like fishbones and process maps for continuous improvement of processes or value analysis and product feature maps for our offerings.

5. Mobilize the mainstream.

Many organizations have specialists who are given the responsibility for innovation — a bit like James Bond, they have the ‘license to innovate’. But every human being comes fitted with the standard equipment to enable us to be creative, finding solutions to problems and coming up with new ideas. Smart innovators mobilize this creativity across the entire organization. And there’s a rich toolbox to help with this one, from simple variants on the humble suggestion scheme to powerful collaboration platforms to ensure voices get heard, ideas get shared and collective intelligence puts its weight behind the big strategic challenges facing the organization.

6. Make connections.

Innovation has always been a multi-player game rather than a solo act and these days the talk is all about ‘open innovation’. Simply put, in a world rich in knowledge even the largest organization has to recognize that ‘not all the smart people work for us’. The game has shifted from one where knowledge creation and ownership is key to one where managing knowledge flow is the critical ingredient. The good news for smaller firms is that this levels the playing field; you don’t have to have all the resources for innovation as long as you know where they are and how to connect to them. By now some version of ‘open innovation’ should be at the heart of your strategy and there are plenty of tools and frameworks to help you work out what connections you need and how to build them. It might also be worth looking at your absorptive capacity — how well placed are you to take advantage of all the rich knowledge that’s out there, making sure you don’t get a kind of ‘knowledge indigestion’ as a result of gorging yourself on everything that’s on offer!

7. Build an innovative organization.

Companies like 3M and Google are famous for giving their staff time and space to explore and experiment, not just because they are generous employers trying to attract and retain talented employees. What they’re really doing is actively trying to recreate the entrepreneurial spirit which began their businesses. They believe that embedding that spirit in ‘the way we do things round here’ gives them a real long-term edge — everyone is an entrepreneur. But they also know that creating that kind of climate needs work — on the physical layout (to make sure people have the chance to creatively collide) on time (to allow ideas to emerge and incubate), on support and space (to provide fertile environments for creativity) and on their approach to ‘failure’ (not punishing people when things don’t work but encouraging an experimental learning approach). Maybe take a look at some of the tools available to help you assess how much of a creative climate you have — and focus on what you might usefully work on to develop it further.

8. Co-create with users.

Learning from markets has always been important but customers aren’t passive, they can also be a rich source of ideas for innovation. Finding ways to tap into user innovation not only generates more diverse ideas, it also helps create a partnership with the marketplace which improves adoption of innovation. People will use things, work with processes, feel a sense of ‘ownership’ if they’ve been involved in the innovation process. And the good news here is that we have plenty of tools and frameworks to help — starting with design thinking and embracing approaches like lead user methods …

9. Accept failure

Innovation is omelet territory and the odd broken egg is an important part. The key is to learn from failures and use the information to build and strengthen capability for the future. That’s been the big lesson coming out of the whole lean -start-up’ model for developing new ventures and it sits just as well inside established organizations who make use of agile approaches. Once again there are plenty of tools which capture this ‘build-measure-learn — pivot’ approach which builds on ‘intelligent failure’ …

10. Build dynamic capability.

Innovation involves a moving target — constant changes in technologies, markets, competition, regulation and a host of other variables. Successful innovators build on the above principles, but they also keep checking and updating their innovation management capabilities, learning new tricks and discarding old ones which no longer work. Innovation model innovation. Having a commitment to structured and constructively critical reflection is a key to this ‘metacognition’ approach — and there are plenty of helpful frameworks to enable and support that process. Check out the Innovation Fitness Test as an example …

One last seasonal thought. Innovation, like a puppy, is for life, not just for Christmas. It’s something we need to think about all year round. So, it might be worth recycling your Christmas innovation list into something you could use as a set of New Year resolutions …

You can find a podcast version of this here

If you’d like more songs, stories and other resources on the innovation theme, check out my website here, or listen to my podcast here, and if you’d like to learn with me take a look at my online course here

Image credit: Pixabay

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Nominations Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

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

Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022.

The deadline for submitting nominations is December 24, 2022 at midnight GMT.

You can submit a nomination either of these two ways:

Sending us the name of the blogger and the url of their blog by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Sending the name of the blogger and the url of their blog and your e-mail address using our contact form

(Note: HUGE bonus points for being a contributing author)

So, think about who you like to read and let us know by midnight GMT on December 24, 2022.

We will then compile a voting list of all the nominations, and publish it on December 25, 2022.

Voting will then be open from December 25, 2022 – January 1, 2023 via comments and twitter @replies to @innovate.

The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions by an author to this web site will be a contributing factor.

Contact me with writing samples if you’d like to publish your articles on our platform!

The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022 will then be announced on here in early January 2023.

We’re curious to see who you think is worth reading!

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