Category Archives: Innovation

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

After a week of torrid voting and much passionate support, along with a lot of gut-wrenching consideration and jostling during the judging round, I am proud to announce your Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022:

Robyn Bolton
Robyn M. Bolton works with leaders of mid and large sized companies to use innovation to repeatably and sustainably grow their businesses.

Janet Sernack
Janet Sernack is the Founder and CEO of ImagineNation™ which provides innovation consulting services to help organizations adapt, innovate and grow through disruption by challenging businesses to be, think and act differently to co-create a world where people matter & innovation is the norm.

Greg Satell
Greg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His first book, Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age, was selected as one of the best business books in 2017. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.

Mike Shipulski
Mike Shipulski brings together people, culture, and tools to change engineering behavior. He writes daily on Twitter as @MikeShipulski and weekly on his blog Shipulski On Design.

Braden Kelley
Braden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, workshop leader, and creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Teresa Spangler
Teresa Spangler is the CEO of PlazaBridge Group has been a driving force behind innovation and growth for more than 30 years. Today, she wears multiple hats as a social entrepreneur, innovation expert, growth strategist, author and speaker (not to mention mother, wife, band-leader and so much more). She is especially passionate about helping CEOs understand and value the role human capital plays in innovation, and the impact that innovation has on humanity; in our ever-increasing artificial/cyber world.

Douglas Ferguson
Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist. He is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based change agency that helps enterprises spark, accelerate, and sustain innovation. He specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques.

John Bessant
John Bessant has been active in research, teaching, and consulting in technology and innovation management for over 25 years. Today, he is Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Research Director, at Exeter University. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship with the Advanced Institute for Management Research and was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy of Management. He has acted as advisor to various national governments and international bodies including the United Nations, The World Bank, and the OECD. John has authored many books including Managing innovation and High Involvement Innovation (Wiley). Follow @johnbessant

Shep Hyken
Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times, bestselling business author. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs, go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

Pete Foley
A twenty-five year Procter & Gamble veteran, Pete has spent the last 8+ years applying insights from psychology and behavioral science to innovation, product design, and brand communication. He spent 17 years as a serial innovator, creating novel products, perfume delivery systems, cleaning technologies, devices and many other consumer-centric innovations, resulting in well over 100 granted or published patents. Find him at pete.mindmatters@gmail.com

Geoffrey A. Moore
Geoffrey A. Moore is an author, speaker and business advisor to many of the leading companies in the high-tech sector, including Cisco, Cognizant, Compuware, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and Yahoo! Best known for Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win with the latest book being The Infinite Staircase. Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute

Soren Kaplan
Soren Kaplan is the bestselling and award-winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an affiliated professor at USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, a former corporate executive, and a co-founder of UpBOARD. He has been recognized by the Thinkers50 as one of the world’s top keynote speakers and thought leaders in business strategy and innovation.

Steve Blank
Steve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford and Senior Fellow for Innovation at Columbia University. He has been described as the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship, credited with launching the Lean Startup movement that changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate.

Arlen Meyers
Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, an instructor at the University of Colorado-Denver Business School and cofounding President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at www.sopenet.org. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameyers/

Jesse Nieminen
Jesse Nieminen is the Co-founder and Chairman at Viima, the best way to collect and develop ideas. Viima’s innovation management software is already loved by thousands of organizations all the way to the Global Fortune 500. He’s passionate about helping leaders drive innovation in their organizations and frequently writes on the topic, usually in Viima’s blog.

Alain Thys
As an experience architect, Alain helps leaders craft customer, employee and shareholder experiences for profit, reinvention and transformation. He does this through his personal consultancy Alain Thys & Co as well as the transformative venture studio Agents of A.W.E. Together with his teams, Alain has influenced the experience of over 500 million customers and 350,000 employees. Follow his blog or connect on Linkedin.

David Burkus
Dr. David Burkus is an organizational psychologist and best-selling author. Recognized as one of the world’s leading business thinkers, his forward-thinking ideas and books are helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. David is the author of five books about business and leadership and he’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and more. A former business school professor turned sought-after international speaker, he’s worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

Diana Porumboiu
Diana heads marketing at Viima, the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world, and has a passion for innovation, and for genuine, valuable content that creates long-lasting impact. Her combination of creativity, strategic thinking and curiosity has helped organisations grow their online presence through strategic campaigns, community management and engaging content.

Art Inteligencia
Art Inteligencia is the lead futurist at Inteligencia Ltd. He is passionate about content creation and thinks about it as more science than art. Art travels the world at the speed of light, over mountains and under oceans. His favorite numbers are one and zero.

Howard Tiersky
Howard Tiersky is an inspiring and passionate speaker, the Founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, innovation consultant, serial entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. IDG named him one of the “10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today”, and Enterprise Management 360 named Howard “One of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers That Will Change Your World.”

Paul Sloane
Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader and editor of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, both published by Kogan-Page.

Bruce Fairley
Bruce Fairley is the CEO and Founder of The Narrative Group, a firm dedicated to helping C-Suite executives build enterprise value. Through smart, human-powered digital transformation, Bruce optimizes the business-technology relationship. His innovative profit over pitfalls approach and customized programs are part of Bruce’s mission to build sustainable ‘best-future’ outcomes for visionary leaders. Having spearheaded large scale change initiatives across four continents, he and his skilled, diverse team elevate process, culture, and the bottom line for medium to large firms worldwide.

Patricia Salamone
Patricia Salamone is a career strategist having worked across the financial services, CPG, media and telecom sectors – seeking resonance with every problem she is hired to solve. Patricia sees innovation through the lens of human need, framing what is to be solved not through the problem at hand, but rather the mystery to be unraveled. Patricia is currently an Account Strategist at Gongos, Inc.

Dainora Jociute
Dainora (a.k.a. Dee) creates customer-centric content at Viima. Viima is the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world. Passionate about environmental issues, Dee writes about sustainable innovation hoping to save the world – one article at the time.

Dean and Linda Anderson
Dr. Dean Anderson and Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson lead BeingFirst, a consultancy focused on educating the marketplace about what’s possible in personal, organizational and community transformation and how to achieve them. Each has been advising clients and training professionals for more than 40 years.

Brian Miller
Brian Miller is the senior VP, strategic development, at BMNT Inc., an internationally recognized innovation consultancy and early-stage enterprise accelerator that is changing the future of public service innovation.

Phil McKinney
Phil McKinney is the Author of “Beyond The Obvious”, Host of the Killer Innovations Podcast and Syndicated Radio Show, a Keynote Speaker, President & CEO CableLabs and an Innovation Mentor and Coach.

Tom Stafford
Tom Stafford studies learning and decision making. His main focus is the movement system – the idea being that if we can understand the intelligence of simple actions we will have an excellent handle on intelligence more generally. His research looks at simple decision making, and simple skill learning, using measures of behaviour informed by the computational, robotics and neuroscience work done in the wider group.

Ralph Christian Ohr
Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr has extensive experience in product/innovation management for international technology-based companies. His particular interest is targeted at the intersection of organizational and human innovation capabilities. You can follow him on Twitter @Ralph_Ohr.

Jeffrey Phillips
Jeffrey Phillips has over 15 years of experience leading innovation in Fortune 500 companies, federal government agencies and non-profits. He is experienced in innovation strategy, defining and implementing front end processes, tools and teams and leading innovation projects. He is the author of Relentless Innovation and OutManeuver. Jeffrey writes the popular Innovate on Purpose blog. Follow him @ovoinnovation

Shilpi Kumar
Shilpi Kumar an inquisitive researcher, designer, strategist and an educator with over 15 years of experience, who truly believes that we can design a better world by understanding human behavior. I work with organizations to identify strategic opportunities and offer user-centric solutions.

Robert B Tucker
Robert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.

Norbert Majerus and George Taninecz
Norbert Majerus is a popular keynote speaker and consultant. His latest book, Winning Innovation – How Innovation Excellence Propels an Industry Icon Toward Sustained Prosperity, is available now. Follow him on LinkedIn or visit leandriveninnovation.com. For more than 20 years, George, as president of George Taninecz Inc., has helped executives publish award-winning books that illustrate applications of lean thinking. He also supports companies and associations with white papers, articles, and case studies on the deployment of lean in manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries.

Farnham Street
Farnham Street focuses on helping you master the best of what other people have already figured out.

Scott Anthony
Scott Anthony is a strategic advisor, writer and speaker on topics of growth and innovation. He has been based in Singapore since 2010, and currently serves at the Managing Director of Innosight’s Asia-Pacific operations.

Anthony Mills
Anthony Mills is the Founder & CEO of Legacy Innovation Group (www.legacyinnova.com), a world-leading strategic innovation consulting firm working with organizations all over the world. Anthony is also the Executive Director of GInI – Global Innovation Institute (www.gini.org), the world’s foremost certification, accreditation, and membership organization in the field of innovation. Anthony has advised leaders from around the world on how to successfully drive long-term growth and resilience through new innovation. Learn more at www.anthonymills.com. Anthony can be reached directly at anthony@anthonymills.com.

Paul Hobcraft
Paul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities. Follow @paul4innovating

Jorge Barba
Jorge Barba is a strategist and entrepreneur, who helps companies build new puzzles using human skills. He is a global Innovation Insurgent and author of the innovation blog www.Game-Changer.net

Nicholas Longrich
Nicholas Longrich is a senior lecturer in evolutionary biology and paleontology at the University of Bath. He is interested in how and why the world is the way it is and studies dinosaurs, among other things—pterosaurs, fossil birds, lizards and snakes.

Rachel Audige
Rachel Audige is an Innovation Architect who helps organisations embed inventive thinking as well as a certified Systematic Inventive Thinking Facilitator, based in Melbourne.

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

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

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2015
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2016
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2017
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2019
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021

Download PDF versions of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020, 2021 and 2022 lists here:

. . .

Happy New Year everyone!

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Pele and Vivienne Westwood – Innovators Lost

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Pele and Vivienne Westwood - Innovators Lost

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

The loss of Pele and Vivienne Westwood, two giants of innovation in their respective fields, marks a sad end to 2022. But both left legacies that can inspire us as we navigate a likely challenging New Year.

Humble Beginnings: Both rose from humble beginnings to become national and international institutions. Pele was an artist with a football, Westwood with fabric and design. Both were resilient, multifaceted, creative, and had the courage to challenge the status quo. Pele famously honed his football skills by kicking around grapefruits in desperately poor neighborhood. Westwood originated from humble British working-class origins, where her parents were factory and mill workers.

Pele was a complete footballer, talented with head, foot and mind. He was both creative and practical, and turned football into an art form. A graceful embodiment of the beautiful game, he invented moves, and developed techniques and skills that not only entertained, but that also created a new technical platform for future masters such as Cruyff, Neymar and Messi. But he was also extremely successful, winning three world cups, and scoring over 700 goals for club and country. Furthermore, he was a great ambassador for Brazil and for football. But perhaps most important of all, he was an inspiration to countless youngsters. He embodied that hard work, hard earned skill, a creative mindset and a passionate work ethic could forge a path from poverty to success. A model that inspired many in sports and beyond.

Westwood was similarly both skilled and creatively fearless. She emerged as part of the leading edge of the punk scene in the UK, closely entwined with Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols. But after splitting with McLaren, she forged her own unique and highly successful path. She blended historical materials and fashion references with post-punk individualism to create emergent, maverick designs. Designs that somewhat ironically mainstreamed and embodied British eccentricity, but that also held global appeal. Like Pele, she was a leader who saw things before anyone else in her field, and ultimately, as the first Dame of Punk, turned that vision into both financial and social success.

Nobody lives forever, and few get to reach the heights of Pele or Westwood. But we can all hopefully learn a little from them. But were leaders, unafraid to follow their own vision. Both were resilient, with the courage and belief to overcame hardship and challenges. Both blended existing norms in new ways to create new, emergent forms. They didn’t just stand on, but rose above, the shoulders of giants. Both are missed, but both live on both in the legacy and lessons they leave

Published simultaneously on LinkedIn

Image credit: Unsplash

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The Innovation Talent Stack

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Skills for the Next Decade of Change

The Innovation Talent Stack

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For decades, companies searched for the elusive “Chief Innovation Officer” — the singular genius tasked with pulling the organization into the future. That era is dead. Today’s pace of change is too rapid, and the challenges too complex, for innovation to reside in a single silo or department. The modern competitive advantage belongs to organizations that have successfully distributed innovation capabilities across their workforce, creating an Innovation Talent Stack.

The Talent Stack is not a list of job requirements; it is a layered framework of meta-skills — mindsets, methodologies, and technological fluencies — that collectively enable continuous change and disruption. When these three layers are strong and interconnected, the organization transforms from being merely adaptive to becoming inherently resilient and generative. We must shift our focus from finding the singular “T-shaped employee” to building an organization where T-shaped skills are the standard.

The Three Layers of the Innovation Talent Stack

To prepare your workforce for the next decade, training must move beyond basic technical skills and build these three integrated layers:

1. The Foundation: Mindset and Attitude

This is the cultural operating system. Without it, methodologies and tools become fragile or threatening. This layer focuses on the individual’s approach to complexity and failure.

Adaptability Quotient (AQ): The capacity to recognize and thrive in an environment of constant change. This means teaching employees to unlearn old rules and embrace ambiguity.
Cognitive Empathy: The ability to step into a user’s world and understand their pain points and motivations — not just emotionally, but analytically — to accurately frame the problem that needs solving.
Tolerance for Ambiguity: The mental fortitude to operate without a defined outcome, focusing on the quality of the process and the learning derived from failure, not just success.

2. The Mid-Layer: Methodology and Process

These are the structured tools that translate the innovative mindset into repeatable, de-risked action. They enforce human-centered principles and drive efficiency in exploration.

Human-Centered Design (HCD): Deep proficiency in observing, ideating, prototyping, and testing solutions with the user at the center. This is the antidote to internal bias and the primary tool for generating market value.
Lean Experimentation: The skill of designing minimal-cost tests (MVPs, prototypes) to prove or disprove core assumptions. This includes mastery of metrics that measure learning speed and validated assumptions, not just immediate revenue.
Systems Thinking: The ability to trace the downstream effects of any single change. Innovation leaders must see their product or service as one node in a vast, interconnected ecosystem, anticipating ripple effects on regulation, supply chain, and culture.

3. The Top Layer: Technological Fluency and Acceleration

This is not about coding; it’s about strategic literacy. It’s the ability to speak the language of the machine to accelerate speed and scale across the organization.

AI Co-Pilot Literacy (Prompt Crafting): The skill of giving generative AI tools high-quality strategic direction and constraints, transforming the interaction from a simple query into a genuine co-creation partnership that dramatically compresses time-to-insight.
Data Storytelling and Visualization: The ability to use complex data insights (from predictive analytics, for example) to craft compelling narratives that drive organizational consensus and action, making the unseen risks and opportunities visible.
Ecosystem Mapping: Utilizing digital tools to visualize market structures, competitor moves, and partner potential in real-time, allowing for rapid strategic pivots based on external shifts.

Case Study 1: The Legacy Manufacturer’s Mindset Shift

Challenge: Product Failure due to Internal Bias

A large industrial equipment manufacturer, steeped in a culture of engineering perfection, consistently failed to launch new products successfully. Their design process was entirely internal, based on what their engineers thought the customer needed, demonstrating a critical lack of Cognitive Empathy and a low Tolerance for Ambiguity (they demanded perfect V1 launches).

Talent Stack Intervention:

The firm invested heavily in the Mindset and Methodology layers. They mandated Human-Centered Design (HCD) training for all product and sales teams, forcing them into the field to observe customer workflows. They deliberately celebrated small, cheap product failures within the innovation lab as “Learned Lessons,” directly improving Tolerance for Ambiguity. This cultural shift led to their next generation of heavy machinery being co-designed with operators. The result was a 25% decrease in post-launch support costs and a 40% increase in market adoption for the new line, proving that a methodology-driven mindset change is the necessary prerequisite for market success.

The Cognitive Gap: Where Talent Stacks Collapse

The biggest threat to this model is the Cognitive Gap — the chasm that exists when a technologically fluent team delivers a brilliant solution, but the rest of the organization lacks the mindset (AQ) or the methodology (HCD) to adopt it. When a data scientist uses complex visualization (Top Layer) but the leadership team only measures short-term ROI (Foundation Layer deficiency), the innovation dies on the vine. The Talent Stack demands horizontal fluency to bridge this gap.

Bridging this gap requires the Chief HR Officer to think like the Chief Innovation Officer. They must design training pathways that are non-linear, forcing employees to develop skills across all three layers simultaneously. A successful innovator today must be an empathetic explorer (Mindset), a structured experimenter (Methodology), and a strategically-literate technologist (Fluency).

Case Study 2: The Financial Service Firm and Accelerated Fluency

Challenge: Stagnant Idea Flow and Risk Aversion

A major bank had a strong HCD practice but its experimentation cycle was painfully slow due to regulatory and technical complexity. They could generate great ideas, but struggled with execution and de-risking, creating a backlog of ideas that never reached the market.

Talent Stack Intervention:

The bank focused on strengthening the Technological Fluency layer, particularly AI Co-Pilot Literacy and Data Storytelling. They established a “Regulatory Sandbox” where teams, using generative AI co-pilots, could draft, test, and vet new product disclosures and compliance documentation at 10x speed. This allowed them to simulate regulatory outcomes and quickly de-risk new financial products. By cutting the compliance review cycle from six weeks to three days using AI tools, they accelerated their Lean Experimentation cycle (Methodology) dramatically. This immediate acceleration of speed allowed the bank to launch a new consumer loyalty product eight months ahead of their main competitor, directly proving the return on investment from strategic technological fluency.

Conclusion: Building the Portfolio of Capabilities

The Innovation Talent Stack represents the new strategic map for organizational development. It is a Portfolio of Capabilities that guarantees relevance in the face of continuous disruption. Your company is only as innovative as its least adaptive layer. If your people have the tools but lack the empathy, they will build solutions no one wants. If they have the mindset but lack the methodology, they will remain stuck in perpetual brainstorming.

The time for focusing on single-skill specialists is over. We must cultivate T-shaped innovators — deep in a core function, but broadly fluent across the entire Talent Stack.

“Innovation is not an event, but a culture. And culture is simply the cumulative effect of the skills and mindsets you choose to reward.” — Braden Kelley

Your first step toward building the stack: Identify the top five functional leaders in your organization and assess which of the nine skills listed above they are weakest in. Then, design cross-functional immersion training to plug those specific gaps.

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: Pixabay

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Voting Closed for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

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CLICK HERE TO SEE WHO HAS BEEN NOMINATED

For more than a decade I’ve devoted myself to making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because I 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!

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHO HAS BEEN NOMINATED

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

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 to recognize the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022.

It is time to vote and help us narrow things down.

The deadline for submitting votes is December 31, 2022 at midnight GMT.

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHO HAS BEEN NOMINATED

The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions to this web site by an author will be a BIG contributing factor (through the end of the voting period).

You can vote in any of these three ways (and each earns points for them, so please feel free to vote all three ways):

Sending us the name of the blogger by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Adding the name of the blogger as a comment to this article’s posting on Facebook
Adding the name of the blogger as a comment to this article’s posting on our Linkedin Page (Be sure and follow us)

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

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHO HAS BEEN NOMINATED

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3 Steps to a Truly Terrific Innovation Team

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3 Steps to a Truly Terrific Innovation Team

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“What had a bigger impact on the project? The process you introduced or the people on the team?”

As much as I wanted to give all the credit to my brilliant process, I had to tell the truth.

“People. It’s always people.”

The right people doing the right work in the right way at the right time can do incredible, even impossible, things. But replace any “right” in the previous sentence, and even the smallest things can feel impossible. A process can increase the odds of doing the right work in the right way, but it’s no guarantee. It’s powerless in the hands of the wrong people.

But how do you assemble the right group of people? Start with the 3 Ts.

Type of Innovation

We’re all guilty of using ‘innovation’ to describe anything that is even a little bit new and different. And we’ve probably all been punished for it.

Finding the right people for innovation start with defining what type of innovation they will work on:

Incremental: updating/modifying existing offerings that serve existing customers

Adjacent: creating new offerings for existing customers OR re-positioning existing offerings to serve new customers

Radical: new offerings or business models for new customers

Different innovation types require teams to grapple with different levels of ambiguity and uncertainty. Teams working on incremental innovations face low levels of ambiguity because they are modifying something that already exists, and they have relative certainty around cause and effect. However, teams working on radical innovations spend months grappling with ambiguity, certain only that they don’t know what they don’t know.

Time to launch

Regardless of the type of innovation, each innovation goes through roughly the same four steps:

Discover a problem to be solved
Design solutions
Develop and test prototypes
Launch and measure

The time allotted to work through all four steps determines the pace of the team’s work and, more importantly, how stakeholders make decisions. For example, the more time you have between the project start and the expected launch, the more time you have to explore, play, create, experiment, and gather robust data to inform decisions. But if you’re expected to go from project start to project launch in a year or less, you need to work quickly and make decisions based on available (rather than ideal) data.

Tasks to accomplish

Within each step of the innovation process are different tasks, and different people have different abilities and comfort levels with each. This is why there is growing evidence that experience in the phase of work is more important than industry or functional expertise for startups.

There are similar data for corporate innovators. In a study of over 100,000 people, researchers identified the type and prevalence of four types of innovators every organization needs:

Generators (17% of the sample): Find new problems and ideate based on their own experience.

Conceptualizers (19%): Define the problem and understand it through abstract analysis, most comfortable in early phases of innovation (e.g., Discover and Design)

Implementers (41%): Put solutions to work through experiments and adjustments, most comfortable in later stages of innovation (Develop and Launch)

Optimizers (23%): Systematically examine all alternatives to implement the best possible solution

Generators and Conceptualizers are most comfortable in the early stages of innovation (i.e., Discover and Design). Implementers and Optimizers are most comfortable in the later stages (e.g., Develop and Launch). The challenge for companies is that only 36% of employees fall into one of those two categories, and most tend to be senior managers and executives.

Taking Action

Putting high performers on innovation teams is tempting, and top talent often perceives such assignments as essential to promotion. But no one enjoys or benefits when the work they’re doing isn’t the work they’re good at. Instead, take time to work through the 3Ts, and you’ll assemble a truly terrific innovation team.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Valuing the Intangible Assets of an Innovation Culture

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Beyond ROI

Valuing the Intangible Assets of an Innovation Culture

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

Every quarter, innovation leaders are faced with the same reductive question: “What is the ROI of that experiment?” This question, while financially necessary for short-term accounting, is fundamentally flawed when applied to strategic innovation. It traps innovation in a transactional mindset, demanding a dollar value on ideas that are, by definition, intended to create entirely new markets or transform existing systems.

The true, sustainable value of an innovation program is not found in the immediate Return on Investment (ROI) of a single project. It resides in the Intangible Assets — the cultural and organizational capabilities — that the program builds. These assets, though difficult to quantify on a balance sheet today, are the ultimate determinants of long-term survival, market resilience, and future dominance. A relentless focus on short-term ROI kills the critical exploration necessary for genuine disruption.

The Four Intangible Assets of a High-Innovation Culture

When an organization invests in systematic, human-centered innovation, it accrues four non-financial assets that provide exponential returns over time:

The Adaptability Quotient (AQ): Innovation programs are essentially training grounds for AQ, the organization’s capacity to recognize, navigate, and thrive in constant change. They force teams to unlearn old methods, embrace ambiguity, and pivot quickly. A high AQ is the organization’s most valuable insurance policy against unforeseen disruption.
The Intellectual Agility Network: Innovation breaks down departmental silos by forcing cross-functional teams to solve wicked problems together. The resulting trust, shared language, and established network of communication — from engineering to marketing to legal — enables the entire organization to execute any strategic pivot faster and with less friction. This network connectivity is a massive advantage over siloed competitors.
Attraction and Retention Currency: Top talent, especially younger generations, prioritize purpose and the opportunity to create impact over stability. A demonstrated commitment to challenging the status quo and funding experimental projects acts as a powerful magnet. It transforms the company brand from a cost-center employer to a future-focused destination for change agents. The cost of replacing talent far outweighs the cost of running a few failed experiments.
De-risked Market Intelligence: Every failed innovation project provides invaluable information about what the market doesn’t want, what the technology can’t do, or what the internal structure won’t support. This failure is not a cost; it is cheap, high-fidelity market intelligence. It allows the organization to de-risk the next, larger investment by avoiding pitfalls already discovered in smaller, faster experiments.

Case Study 1: The Financial Firm’s Crisis Resilience

Challenge: Organizational Complacency and Inability to Pivot

A global financial services firm faced paralysis when FinTech startups eroded their lending division. Their internal structure had zero Adaptability Quotient (AQ), making change slow and painful.

Intangible Asset Focus:

The firm launched an internal Venture Studio program. While the immediate financial ROI of the first ten projects was poor, the program successfully created a pipeline of innovation leaders and built the Intellectual Agility Network via mandatory cross-functional teams. Two years later, when a major, unforeseen regulatory change hit, the company leveraged this new internal network to execute a massive, complex systems pivot in six months — a timeline that was previously unthinkable. The intangible asset of AQ saved the company hundreds of millions in potential fines and preserved market share, a value that exponentially exceeded the cost of the failed initial projects.

Measuring the Intangible: Shifting the Innovation KPI

To move beyond ROI, leaders must adopt Innovation Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that directly measure the accrual of these intangible assets. These should be tracked alongside traditional financial metrics:

Network Score: Percentage of innovation project members who come from non-traditional departments (e.g., Legal, HR).
Unlearning Rate: Number of old, inefficient processes officially decommissioned due to learnings from an innovation project.
Talent Flow: Promotion rate or retention rate of employees who participate in high-exposure, cross-functional innovation projects.
Failure Value: Clear documentation of the “most valuable lesson learned” from projects that failed to launch.

Case Study 2: The Energy Company and the Talent Magnet

Challenge: Stagnant Image and Failure to Recruit Digital Talent

A traditional energy company struggled to attract top software engineers and data scientists, who saw the firm as technologically backward and environmentally unfriendly. The firm needed to visibly signal its commitment to a sustainable future.

Intangible Asset Focus:

The company invested in highly visible “moonshot” innovation labs focused on renewable energy grid optimization and carbon capture (projects with very high financial risk and long ROI timelines). They openly publicized the failures and learnings. The immediate ROI was negative, but the intangible return was immense: Attraction and Retention Currency. Potential recruits saw the firm was actively funding high-risk research into societal problems. By positioning the firm as a place where engineers could solve societally relevant wicked problems, the recruitment metrics soared, allowing them to fill their critical digital talent gap and secure the specialized knowledge required for future core business transformation.

Conclusion: The Portfolio of Capabilities

Innovation is not a vending machine where you insert budget and expect immediate profit. It is an insurance premium and a strategic investment in organizational capabilities. When you only focus on short-term ROI, you are essentially demanding that a corporate training program must immediately produce a best-selling product. It’s an illogical mandate.

True visionary leadership understands that the investment in a strong innovation culture builds a Portfolio of Intangible Capabilities — a resilient organization that can adapt, attract talent, and learn faster than the competition. These are the assets that don’t appear in quarterly reports, but they are the only ones that guarantee relevance a decade from now.

“If you can’t measure the return on a healthy culture, you haven’t yet calculated the staggering cost of a fearful, rigid one.” — Braden Kelley

Your first step toward valuing the intangible: Change the primary success metric for your next three innovation experiments from ‘Revenue Generated’ to ‘Most Valuable Lesson Learned and Applied.’

Image credit: Pixabay

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Why is it important to innovate in 2023?

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Why is it important to innovate in 2023?

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

At ImagineNation™ we have just celebrated 10 years as a global innovation consultancy, learning, and coaching company. During this time, we’ve identified some of the common patterns that people demonstrate as a result of feeling uncomfortable, frozen, inert, stubborn, and confused and as a result, are resistant to innovation. Where many organizations, teams, and leaders appear to walk backward as if they are sleepwalking through this time in their lives.

At the same time, we know that innovation is transformational, and why, at this moment in time, it is more important than ever to create, invent and innovate. We also know that is crucial to be better balanced, resilient, and adaptive to grow and flow, survive and thrive, in today’s chaotic BANI environment. We also know exactly what transformative innovation involves, and how to enable and equip people to connect and collaborate in new ways to effect constructive and sustainable change in a world of unknowns.

Innovation is, in fact, the water of life!

Shaping the next normal

According to a recent article by McKinsey and Co “The future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal” the coronavirus crisis is a “world-changing event” which is forcing both the pace and scale of workplace innovation.

Stating that businesses are forced to do more with less and that many are finding better, simpler, less expensive, and faster ways to operate. Describing how innovative health systems, through necessity, constraints, and adversity have exploited this moment in time, to innovate:

“The urgency of addressing COVID-19 has also led to innovations in biotech, vaccine development, and the regulatory regimes that govern drug development so that treatments can be approved and tried faster. In many countries, health systems have been hard to reform; this crisis has made the difficulty much easier to achieve. The result should be a more resilient, responsive, and effective health system”.

We all know that it is impossible to know what will happen in the future and yet, that it is possible to consider and learn from the lessons of the past, both distant and recent. On that basis, it’s crucial to take time out, be hopeful, and positive, and think optimistically about the future. To be proactive and innovate to shape the kind of future we all wish to have, through making constructive and sustainable changes, that ultimately contribute to the common good.

Strategically deciding to innovate

Strategically deciding to innovate, is the first, mandatory, powerful, and impactful lever organizations, teams, leaders, and individuals can pull to effect constructive and sustainable change that enables people to execute and deliver real benefits:

Deal with, and find solutions to a world full of complex and competing social, civic, and political problems that are hard to solve and aren’t going away.
Better adapt, respond to, and be agile in fast-changing circumstances, uncertainty, instability, and to random and unexpected Black Swan events, like the global Covid-19 Pandemic and the Russian-Ukraine war.
Become human-centric to help people recover and manage their transition through the challenges of the global pandemic and enable them to exploit the range of accelerating technological advances in the digital age.
Develop corporate responsibility, sustainability, diversity, and inclusion strategies that are practical and can work and really deliver on their promises.
Compete by applying and experimenting with lean and agile start-up methodologies and take advantage of the opportunities and possibilities of the global entrepreneurship movement’s new models for leadership, collaboration, and experimentation.
Align to the range of changing workplace dynamics and trends, resulting from the pandemic, including WFH, the “soft resignation” and the demands of a hybrid workplace.
Shift individual, group, and collective consciousness towards collaboration and experimentation in ways that rebuild the trust that has been lost through incompetence, corruption, greed, and dishonesty.
Respond creatively to meet the increasingly diverse range of customer expectations and choices being made around value.

Important to innovate – three elements

To take advantage of living in a globalized world, where we are interconnected through technologies and values and where we have an interrelated structure of reality, we can:

Accept that innovation-led adaptation and growth are absolutely critical and develop targets and a willingness to invest in new scalable business models, achieve fast and effective developments, and launch processes to reflect these.
Invest in a coherent, time-risk balanced portfolio of initiatives and provide the resources to deliver them, at scale, strategically, to innovate to the right market, at the right price, at the right time, and through the most effective channels.
Adopt an ecosystem approach to adapt and grow by creating and capitalizing on both internal and external networks, and stakeholder management through developing workforce ecosystems – a structure that consists of interdependent actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals.

Problem-solving, cultural change, and improving people’s lives

It is more important than ever to make innovation transformational, so that it delivers constructive, ethical, and sustainable change, by building on three critical successful abilities:

Seeing and sensing the real systemic problem or breakthrough opportunity:

What problem are we solving? And is there a customer who wants to pay to have that problem solved?
What problem are we solving for the customer? Who needs this?
What are the possibilities and opportunities available to us? And is there a customer who wants to pay to have this opportunity realized?
What are some of our strengths? What are some of the things we are doing well that we can build upon or exploit?

Shifting the culture:

Where are we today? Where do we want to be in the future?
What are our prevailing mindsets? How can we measure and contextualize their impact? What mindsets might we embrace to adapt and grow in an uncertain world?
How ready and receptive are we to really embrace change?
What do we need to unlearn and relearn to ensure our people are open-minded, hearted, and willed to embody and enact the desired change?
How engaged and passionate are our people in problem-solving?
How might we harness our people’s collective intelligence to solve problems and realize opportunities?

Aligning technologies, processes, artifacts, and behaviors as a holistic system:

What is our appetite for risk? How do we define risk in our context?
What type of innovation do we strategically want to plan for and engage in?
What old legacy technologies no longer serve your needs? What new technologies might you be willing to invest in for the future?
What disciplines are in place to ensure that people have a common understanding of the key processes and comply with managing them?
How are we ensuring that everyone is motivated and skilled to innovate?
How are we ensuring that people are acknowledged, rewarded, and organized to repeatedly innovate?
What are the key mindsets and behaviours that enable and equip people to embody and embrace repeatedly innovate and design solutions with the end customer in mind?

Become an adaptive and resilient difference maker

As many of us are aware, Toys R Us and Blockbuster were huge companies, that enjoyed massive success; however, this was all brought to an end due to their failure to innovate.

We can all avoid this fate by choosing to innovate and create constructive and sustainable change through:

Accepting and acknowledging that to survive and thrive in a BANI world, where necessity is still the mother of all invention, and the urgency to do this is more important than ever.
Identifying, understanding, and dealing with our own resistance to innovation, safely and proactively, and transforming resistance into resilience, to be adaptive and safely innovate.
Understanding where we are today and then assessing the gap to what we want to be in the future, and mitigating the risks of both closing the gap and leaving the gap wide open.
Enabling leaders, teams, and individuals to connect, explore, discover and navigate new ways of approaching and delivering commercially viable, value-adding, constructive and sustainable change, and outcomes.
Leveraging innovation to transform an organization, a business, the way people lead and team, to improve the quality of people’s lives in ways they appreciate and cherish.

“In order to transcend mere adequacy and make a mark of creative transcendence on the world, organizations need to stop walking backward, following a trail that has already been blazed. The motto of the British Special Air Service is, “Who dares, wins.” It is time for businesses to be bold, inspired, and look to the horizon. The next great innovation is out there. Will you have the guts to create it?”

Will you make a fundamental choice to innovate?

According to McKinsey and Co “The point is that where the world lands is a matter of choice – of countless decisions to be made by individuals, companies, governments, and institutions”.

Will you make a fundamental choice to use the current crisis to lead to a burst of innovation, productivity, resilience, and exploration in 2023, to take advantage of our connected world to create the constructive and sustainable changes we all want to have?

Or will you continue walking backward and sleepwalking through life, and fail to take advantage of this moment in time, to innovate, and continue life with the same thinking that is causing the current range of results, that many of us don’t want to have?

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, starting Tuesday, February 7, 2023.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Find out more about our products and tools

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Finding Innovation Gold in a Single Customer Story

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The Power of One

Finding Innovation Gold in a Single Customer Story

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

We live in the Age of Big Data, where innovation decisions are often filtered through algorithms, heatmaps, and massive statistical models. Leaders demand large-scale surveys and multi-million dollar data warehouses to validate a new direction. Yet, history consistently shows that truly breakthrough ideas rarely emerge from the average — they emerge from the outlier, the extreme user, or the single, compelling narrative that exposes a deep, unmet human need.

This is the Power of One: the profound, catalytic value contained in a single, deeply understood customer story. While Big Data tells us what is happening (correlation), Small Data — the qualitative, ethnographic insight — tells us why it is happening (causation and motivation). For human-centered change and innovation, the Single Customer Story is the most efficient and emotionally resonant path to finding innovation gold.

The Problem with the Average and the Gift of the Outlier

When you design for the average customer, you create an average product. Statistical models, by their nature, normalize outliers. They smooth over the strange, inconvenient behavior that is often a leading indicator of market disruption. If a single customer is using your product in a way it was never intended — that is not a bug; it is a Signal of Innovation. That single story contains a kernel of truth that 10,000 data points will obscure. It reveals the critical gap between what you think your product does and what the human needs it to do.

Innovation thrives in the gap between the status quo and the ideal human experience. The Single Customer Story serves as the emotional bridge that allows a team to move from abstract data points to genuine empathy, driving radical redesign and bypassing organizational inertia.

Three Strategies for Mining the “Power of One”

Leaders must institutionalize practices that deliberately seek out and amplify these singular narratives, transforming anecdotal evidence into strategic insight.

Embrace Observational Research (Ethnography): Instead of relying solely on surveys (which capture conscious opinions), go into the user’s natural environment to observe their unconscious behavior. Watch how they struggle, how they improvise, and where they introduce unnecessary steps. The innovation is often found in the user’s duct tape solution — the hack they use to get around your product’s limitations.
Design for the Extremes, Not the Center: Actively seek out the extreme user. This could be the power user who pushes your limits, the non-user who actively avoids your product, or the person using your product in an unexpected cultural context. Designing a robust solution for a highly complex or unusual need will often simplify and improve the experience for the mainstream user. The extreme user’s story sets the highest bar for innovation.
Institutionalize the Narrative Transfer: A single story is only powerful if it becomes a shared vision. When a team finds a powerful customer narrative, it must be captured as Persona, a Day-in-the-Life Journey Map, or a visceral video and put directly in front of engineers, marketers, and executives. This human input cuts through data silos and provides a shared, emotional imperative for change that abstract data cannot match.

Case Study 1: The Design Fix that Transformed a Financial Software Product

Challenge: Stagnant Adoption of a Financial Software Tool

A B2B software company saw high initial sign-ups for a new financial analysis tool but very low sustained usage. The drop-off rates were massive, but the data offered no explanation for why users abandoned the product after the first week.

The Power of One Intervention:

The Head of Product focused on a single, frustrated junior analyst. By spending a day shadowing this one user, the team discovered that her workflow required her to export data from their tool, import it into Excel, manually clean the data using six specific formulas, and then run the final analysis. The software was saving 20% of her time, but the 20-minute manual data cleaning ritual was the breaking point. The single story revealed the key unmet need: integrated, automated data cleansing. They integrated the analyst’s six formulas directly into the software. This small fix, driven by the qualitative insight of one user, led to a 300% spike in sustained usage and became the flagship feature of a whole new product line.

Case Study 2: Uncovering a Global Market Opportunity in a Remote Village

Challenge: Designing for Remote Infrastructure in Emerging Markets

A global manufacturer was developing a decentralized power source for off-grid communities. Prototypes were too complex and failed in field testing. Market data lacked the crucial context of how people prioritized power usage.

The Power of One Intervention:

An ethnographic team focused on a single family and their local economy in a remote African village. They noticed that the family’s biggest pain point wasn’t general lighting or charging phones; it was the single battery they relied on for a crucial, single use: running a small milling machine to grind grain for the entire community. This task was vital to the village economy, and the battery’s failure was a social crisis. The innovation was not in designing a complex micro-grid, but in designing a simple, hyper-robust, easily repairable “Power Hub” optimized solely for the continuous reliability of that single, high-value, high-impact task. This focus on one critical application, revealed by one village story, unlocked the blueprint for a highly scalable, successful product line across dozens of similar low-infrastructure markets globally.

Conclusion: From Correlation to Causation

Big Data is essential for scale and validation. But Big Ideas are almost always born from the intimacy of Small Data. When you bypass the spreadsheet and spend genuine time with the human experience, you achieve a level of empathy that moves your team from guessing at correlation to knowing the root cause. This is the difference between incremental improvement and market disruption.

“The Power of One is the ultimate antidote to organizational inertia. A single, painful, well-told customer story can override months of contradictory data, mobilize an entire company, and define the next decade of innovation.” — Braden Kelley

Embrace the qualitative journey. Your essential first step: Find the most frustrated, extreme, or resourceful user of your product, sit with them for an hour, and simply watch them work. Then, build the solution to their one painful, repeated problem.

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: Dall-E

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3 Things Politicians Can Do to Create Innovation

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3 Things Politicians Can Do to Create Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the 1960s, the federal government accounted for more than 60% of all research funding, yet by 2016 that had fallen to just over 20%. During the same time, businesses’ share of R&D investment more than doubled from about 30% to almost 70%. Government’s role in US innovation, it seems, has greatly diminished.

Yet new research suggests that the opposite is actually true. Analyzing all patents since 1926, researchers found that the number of patents that relied on government support has risen from 12% in the 1980s to almost 30% today. Interestingly, the same research found that startups benefitted the most from government research.

As we struggle to improve productivity from historical lows, we need the public sector to play a part. The truth is that the government has a unique role to play in driving innovation and research is only part of it. In addition to funding labs and scientists, it can help bring new ideas to market, act as a convening force and offer crucial expertise to private businesses.

1. Treat Knowledge As A Public Good

By 1941, it had become clear that the war raging in Europe would soon envelop the US. With this in mind, Vannevar Bush went to President Roosevelt with a visionary idea — to mobilize the nation’s growing scientific prowess for the war effort. Roosevelt agreed and signed an executive order that would create the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).

With little time to build labs, the OSRD focused on awarding grants to private organizations such as universities. It was, by all accounts, an enormous success and lead to important breakthroughs such as the atomic bomb, proximity fuze and radar. As the war was winding down, Roosevelt asked Bush to write a report to continue OSRD’s success peacetime.

That report, titled Science, The Endless Frontier, was delivered to President Truman and would set the stage for America’s lasting technological dominance. It set forth a new vision in which scientific advancement would be treated as a public good, financed by the government, but made available for private industry. As Bush explained:

Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science.

The influence of Bush’s idea cannot be overstated. It led to the creation of new government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, later, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). These helped to create a scientific infrastructure that has no equal anywhere in the world.

2. Help to Overcome the Valley of Death

Government has a unique role to play in basic research. Because fundamental discoveries are, almost by definition, widely applicable, they are much more valuable if they are published openly. At the same time, because private firms have relatively narrow interests, they are less able to fully leverage basic discoveries.

However, many assume that because basic research is a primary role for public investment that it is its only relevant function. Clearly, that’s not the case. Another important role government has to play is helping to overcome the gap between the discovery of a new technology and its commercialization, which is so fraught with peril that it’s often called the “Valley of Death.”

The oldest and best known of initiative is SBIR/STTR program, which is designed to help startups commercialize cutting-edge research. Grants are given in two phases. In the first, a proof-of-concept phase, grants are capped at $150,000. If that’s successful, up to $1 million more can be awarded. Some SBIR/STTR companies, such as Qualcomm, iRobot and Symantec, have become industry leaders.

Other more focused programs have also been established. ARPA-e focuses exclusively on advanced energy technologies. Lab Embedded Entrepreneurship Programs (LEEP) give entrepreneurs access to the facilities and expertise of the National Labs in addition to a small grant. The Manufacturing Extension Program (MEP) helps smaller companies build the skills they need to be globally competitive.

3. Act As a Convening Force

A third role government can play is that of a convening force. For example, in 1987 a non-profit consortium made up of government labs, research universities and private sector companies, called SEMATECH, was created to regain competitiveness in the semiconductor industry. America soon regained its lead, which continues even today.

The reason that SEMATECH was so successful was that it combined the scientific expertise of the country’s top labs with the private sector’s experience in solving real world problems. It also sent a strong signal that the federal government saw the technology as important, which encouraged private companies to step up their investment as well.

Today, a number of new initiatives have been launched that follow a similar model. The most wide-ranging is the Manufacturing USA Institutes, which are helping drive advancement in everything from robotics and photonics to biofabrication and composite materials. Others, such as JCESR and the Critical Materials Institute, are more narrowly focused.

Much like its role in supporting basic science and helping new technologies get through the “Valley of Death,” acting as a convening force is something that, for the most part, only the federal government can do.

Make No Mistake: This Is Our New Sputnik Moment

In the 20th century three key technologies, electricity, internal combustion and computing drove economic advancement and the United States led each one. That is why it is often called the “American Century.” No country, perhaps since the Roman Empire, has ever so thoroughly dominated the known world.

Yet the 21st century will be different. The most important technologies will be things like synthetic biology, materials science and artificial intelligence. These are largely nascent and it’s still not clear who, if anybody, will emerge as a clear leader. It is very possible that we will compete economically and technologically with China, much like we used to compete politically and militarily with the Soviet Union.

Yet back in the Cold War, it was obvious that the public sector had an important role to play. When Kennedy vowed to go to the moon, nobody argued that the effort should be privatized. It was clear that such an enormous undertaking needed government leadership at the highest levels. We pulled together and we won.

Today, by all indications, we are at a new Sputnik moment in which our global scientific and technological leadership is being seriously challenged. We can respond with imagination, creating novel ways to, as Bush put it, “turn the wheels of private and public enterprise,” or we can let the moment pass us by and let the next generation face the consequences.

One thing is clear. We will be remembered for what we chose to do.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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The Phygital Future

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Designing Seamless Experiences Across Worlds

The Phygital Future

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For too long, organizations have treated their physical and digital channels as separate silos, managed by different teams, budgets, and metrics. This disconnect is the root cause of friction, frustration, and failure in the modern customer journey. Customers do not think in channels; they think in experiences.

The future of customer engagement, employee empowerment, and service delivery is Phygital: the seamless, human-centered integration of the digital (technology, data, online) and the physical (locations, people, products). Phygital design is not about adding a screen to a store; it’s about using technology to dissolve the boundaries, focusing entirely on a single, continuous, and highly contextual journey. The goal is to maximize the utility and speed of the digital world while preserving the authenticity and human connection of the physical world.

The Failure of the Digital-First Mandate

The pendulum swung hard toward “Digital-First,” driven by efficiency and the push toward automation. While automation is vital, the pure digital-first mandate often fails at the last mile — the human interaction. Imagine a customer who spends 45 minutes online researching a product, only to have to repeat their entire story to an employee when they walk into a physical store. This is the Phygital Friction Gap — a moment where the digital intelligence is lost, forcing the human to restart the process. This failure occurs because the organization hasn’t designed the two worlds to share context, forcing the customer to carry the burden of the organization’s internal silos.

Phygital design solves this by recognizing that the highest value comes from the intersection, where the speed and intelligence of the digital world elevate the sensory and relational depth of the physical world.

Three Pillars of Seamless Phygital Design

Designing for the Phygital future requires a shift in mindset and strategy, moving from parallel channels to a single, interconnected Experience Architecture.

Contextual Continuity:
The fundamental rule of Phygital design is Never Ask the Customer to Repeat Themselves. The digital system must carry the customer’s intent, history, and context forward, regardless of the channel they jump to. This requires integrating the CRM, data analytics, and inventory systems so that an in-store associate can see the customer’s browsing history and cart status instantly via a mobile device.
Human-Augmentation, Not Replacement:
Technology should not be used to replace human interaction, but to augment the human professional. Use AI for mundane, high-volume tasks (data entry, scheduling) to free up employees to focus on high-value, high-empathy interactions (problem-solving, creative consultation). A Phygital environment uses digital intelligence to make the human associate smarter, faster, and more efficient.
Experiential Utility and Delight:
The physical space must be designed to maximize what the digital cannot offer — sensory experience, immediate gratification, and social connection. If a customer can buy the product cheaper and faster online, the store must offer a compelling reason to visit, such as interactive prototyping, localized expert advice, or a community event. Technology is used to add delight to the physical world, not just efficiency.

Case Study 1: Transforming the Bank Branch into a Consultation Hub

Challenge: Dying Relevance of the Physical Bank Branch

A major retail bank faced the imminent closure of many branches as customers shifted to mobile banking. The few customers who still visited branches were usually facing complex financial problems that demanded significant human expertise and time, clogging up service lines.

Phygital Intervention:

The bank didn’t just add tablets; they re-architected the entire journey. Customers were required to pre-book complex appointments through the mobile app (Digital). This allowed the digital system to collect context and queue the request to the correct specialist before the customer arrived. When the customer walked in, geo-fencing technology alerted the specialist (Physical) to the customer’s arrival. The specialist greeted the customer by name, already possessing their case history, eliminating the need to repeat their issue. This fusion of digital scheduling and physical, informed human contact cut wait times for complex issues by 70% and successfully repositioned the branch as a high-value Consultation Hub rather than a mere transaction counter.

The Ethical Imperative: Transparency and Trust

As we design Phygital experiences, we must address the ethical imperative. The constant collection of data (from location tracking to browsing history) to enable seamlessness can be perceived as invasive. Phygital Trust is built on transparency: customers must understand what data is being used and why, and feel they have genuine control. The seamlessness of the experience should always feel helpful, never creepy.

Case Study 2: Supply Chain Visibility in Manufacturing

Challenge: Lack of Visibility and Trust Between Partners

A global industrial manufacturer struggled with complex, long-lead-time orders, leading to constant back-and-forth communication and mistrust with clients regarding production status. Clients wanted the assurance of seeing the physical process but couldn’t visit the plant.

Phygital Intervention:

The manufacturer implemented a real-time Digital Twin strategy. They placed IoT sensors on key machines and production stations (Physical) and aggregated this data onto a secure, cloud-based platform (Digital). This allowed the client, via a secure web portal, to see the exact stage and location of their custom component in the plant, complete with real-time video feed snapshots and verifiable production data. The physical asset became the source of truth, but the digital interface provided the constant, transparent access the client needed. This Phygital visibility didn’t just improve efficiency; it transformed the client relationship from transactional to one of deep, shared trust, proving the ROI of transparency.

Conclusion: Experience Architecture is the New Battleground

The Phygital Future is here, and it demands that we stop designing for channels and start designing for the human journey. Leaders must champion Experience Architecture — a holistic view of the customer’s path. The organizations that win will be the ones that use the invisible power of data to create visible, human-first magic in the physical world.

“Phygital design is not about technology; it’s about context. It’s the art of giving the human everything they need, exactly where they need it, whether they are holding a smartphone or standing in a store.”

Your first step into the Phygital future: Map one critical customer journey and identify every point where Contextual Continuity is lost when the customer jumps from digital to physical. Eliminate that friction.

Image credit: Pixabay

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