Category Archives: Innovation

Trends in Medical School Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

Biomedical and health entrepreneurship continues to expand around the world. Driven by global pressures to optimize the allocation of scarce resources, life science bioentrepreneurs are creating innovative products, platforms, service and systems that deliver more value. As a result, the demand for biomedical and health professional entrepreneurial talent has increased and biomedical and health innovation and entrepreneurship education and training (BEET) programs are growing to fill the gap.

Authors of a 2019 analysis of 171 allopathic medical schools conducted an exhaustive search of the published literature and websites of existing medical school innovation and entrepreneurship (MS I&E) programs, with an emphasis on answering the following three questions:

1. How are I&E programs organized and integrated with the medical school curriculum?
2. What are the core competencies of the I&E program?
3. How are the core competencies measured/evaluated?

Twenty-eight I&E-oriented medical education programs were identified from 26 schools; all of the programs integrated faculty leadership with backgrounds in medicine, engineering, and/or business/entrepreneurship. Of the programs, 57% (16/28) had been launched within the past four years and 75% (21/28) based program enrollment on a selective application process. Nearly all (27/28) incorporated lecture series and/or hands-on modules as a teaching technique. The most prevalent metric was completion of a capstone project (22/28; 79%). At least 15.2% (26/171) of American and Canadian allopathic medical schools include the option for students to participate in an I&E curriculum-based program.

In a few short years, educational offerings in MS I&E have accelerated, in part due to the impact of the COVID pandemic. Trends include:

Sharing lessons learned teaching medical students innovation and entrepreneurship
Experimenting with various program business models
Creating medical student entrepreneurs
Rethinking MS I&E
Designing a curriculum map and defining learning objectives, entrustable professional activities and knowledge,skills, abilities and competencies
Mentoring and guiding medical students
Offering non-clinical-career options
Providing exit ramps
Rethinking how we select medical students
Resetting the future of academic medical center work
Using principles of medical education reform and what we should be teaching in MedEd 2030
Training MS I&E faculty
Encouraging interprofessional and transdisciplinary entrepreneurship programs
Integrating premed, medical student and postgraduate programs
Encouraging life-long learning

We should teach innovation, entrepreneurship and the business of medicine in medical schools, not MD/MBA programs. MBE programs are a better option for those interested in getting an idea to a patient.

Here are the many reasons why physician entrepreneurship is important and why we are likely to see more of the international design, development and deployment of MS I&E programs in both allopathic and osteopathic schools as well as other health professional schools, including nursing, pharmacy and public health schools. Ultimately, as a result, patients and sickcare systems will be the beneficiaries and doctors will be better and happier.

Image credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Voting Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

1 Reply

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!

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 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.

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.

Here are the people who received nominations this year along with some carryover recommendations (in alphabetical order):

Adi Gaskell – @adigaskell
Alain Thys
Alex Goryachev
Andy Heikkila – @AndyO_TheHammer
Annette Franz
Arlen Meyers – @sopeofficial
Art Inteligencia
Braden Kelley – @innovate
Brian Miller
Bruce Fairley
Chad McAllister – @ChadMcAllister
Chris Beswick
Chris Rollins
Dr. Detlef Reis
Dainora Jociute
Dan Blacharski – @Dan_Blacharski
Daniel Burrus – @DanielBurrus
Daniel Lock
David Burkus
Dean and Linda Anderson
Diana Porumboiu
Douglas Ferguson
Drew Boyd – @DrewBoyd
Farnham Street
Frank Mattes – @FrankMattes
Geoffrey A Moore
Gregg Fraley – @greggfraley
Greg Satell – @Digitaltonto
Helen Yu
Howard Tiersky
Janet Sernack – @JanetSernack
Jeffrey Baumgartner – @creativejeffrey
Jeff Freedman – @SmallArmyAgency
Jeffrey Phillips – @ovoinnovation
Jesse Nieminen – @nieminenjesse
John Bessant
Jorge Barba – @JorgeBarba
Julian Birkinshaw – @JBirkinshaw
Julie Anixter – @julieanixter
Kate Hammer – @Kate_Hammer
Kevin McFarthing – @InnovationFixer
Lou Killeffer – @LKilleffer
Manuel Berdoy

Mari Anixter- @MariAnixter
Maria Paula Oliveira – @mpaulaoliveira
Matthew E May – @MatthewEMay
Michael Graber – @SouthernGrowth
Mike Brown – @Brainzooming
Mike Shipulski – @MikeShipulski
Mukesh Gupta
Nick Partridge – @KnewNewNeu
Nicolas Bry – @NicoBry
Nicholas Longrich
Norbert Majerus and George Taninecz
Pamela Soin
Patricia Salamone
Paul Hobcraft – @Paul4innovating
Paul Sloane – @paulsloane
Pete Foley – @foley_pete
Ralph Christian Ohr – @ralph_ohr
Randy Pennington
Richard Haasnoot – @Innovate2Grow
Robert B Tucker – @RobertBTucker
Robyn Bolton – @rm_bolton
Saul Kaplan – @skap5
Shep Hyken – @hyken
Shilpi Kumar
Scott Anthony – @ScottDAnthony
Scott Bowden – @scottbowden51
Shelly Greenway – @ChiefDistiller
Soren Kaplan – @SorenKaplan
Stefan Lindegaard – @Lindegaard
Stephen Shapiro – @stephenshapiro
Steve Blank
Steven Forth – @StevenForth
Tamara Kleinberg – @LaunchStreet
Teresa Spangler – @composerspang
Tim Stroh
Tom Koulopoulos – @TKspeaks
Tom Stafford
Yoram Solomon – @yoram

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

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

The Anticipatory Leader

Leave a reply

Shifting from Reacting to Predicting Disruption

The Anticipatory Leader

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The vast majority of organizational leadership today operates in a state of perpetual reaction. We manage by dashboard, optimize by quarterly report, and respond to crises only after they hit the headlines. This is the Victim Mindset of Leadership — believing that external disruption is an unavoidable, random event that must be absorbed. While this reactive approach might ensure short-term stability, it guarantees long-term decline.

In a world defined by exponential technology and complex global systems, the future belongs to the Anticipatory Leader. This is not about crystal balls or psychic predictions; it is a systematic, Human-Centered approach to sensing and preparing for future shifts before they become crises. It is the core capability that allows an organization to become the disruptor, rather than the disrupted. This shift requires trading the comfortable illusion of stability for the strategic discomfort of informed foresight.

The Three Domains of Anticipatory Leadership

Anticipation is built on a structured commitment to looking beyond the immediate horizon. It moves the leader from the transactional (managing today) to the transformational (designing tomorrow) across three key domains:

Sensing and Signal Detection (The ‘Where’):
This involves actively seeking weak signals — small, early indicators of massive change that are often dismissed as fringe ideas or anomalies. Reactive leaders only see trends; anticipatory leaders see inflection points. This means looking beyond industry trade journals into adjacent industries, geopolitical shifts, and emerging scientific research. It requires building diverse networks outside the company walls.
Scenario Mapping and Future Prototyping (The ‘What If’):
Anticipatory leaders refuse to plan for just one future. They create three to five plausible future scenarios based on their detected signals. These scenarios aren’t forecasts; they are mental models used to stress-test current strategies. Crucially, they use these scenarios to engage in Future Prototyping — building Minimum Viable Solutions (MVS) for future needs today, before the market demands them.
Building Organizational Adaptability (The ‘How’):
The best prediction is useless if the organization cannot pivot quickly. Anticipatory leadership requires embedding Agility and Resilience across the entire enterprise. This means flattening hierarchies, democratizing decision-making (empowering the edge), and constantly practicing unlearning — discarding outdated assumptions about the market, the customer, and the business model. This organizational fluidity is the ultimate defense against disruption.

Case Study 1: The Retail Giant and the E-Commerce Threat (The Cost of Reaction)

Challenge: The Slow Decline of Brick-and-Mortar Revenue

A massive, decades-old general merchandise retailer saw the emergence of e-commerce in the late 1990s not as a threat, but as a niche for booksellers. Their leadership was reactive, focused only on optimizing the square footage of their existing stores.

Anticipatory Leadership Intervention (Failure):

The retailer failed to detect the crucial weak signal: the shift in consumer expectations toward convenience and limitless choice. They ran a single, optimistic scenario: “Online sales will remain under 5% of total retail.” This reductionist view meant they did not prototype alternative logistics models (e.g., last-mile delivery, in-store pickup) until their market share began a terminal decline. Their leadership waited until the disruption was a crisis before reacting, resulting in an expensive, years-long struggle to catch up and a permanent loss of market leadership. The cost of reaction is always exponentially higher than the investment in anticipation.

The Human-Centered Imperative of Foresight

Anticipatory Leadership is inherently Human-Centered. It recognizes that the future is not found in spreadsheets alone; it’s found in the unmet, often un-articulated, needs of humans. By systematically looking for signals in human behavior — how younger generations are spending their time, how environmental awareness is shaping purchasing, or how trust is being fractured by digital life — the leader can predict the behavioral inflection points that drive market change.

Furthermore, leading through foresight mitigates the employee fear of change. When change is announced as a reaction to a competitor’s move, employees feel panicked and betrayed. When change is presented as the execution of a strategy anticipated two years ago, it breeds confidence and a sense of strategic purpose.

Case Study 2: The Software Company and the Open-Source Wave (The Power of Anticipation)

Challenge: The Commoditization of Proprietary Technology

A successful enterprise software company, whose entire business model was based on expensive, proprietary licensing, faced the rising tide of open-source software (OSS) in the early 2000s. The traditional leadership instinct was to view OSS as “low quality” or “non-commercial.”

Anticipatory Leadership Intervention (Success):

A small, empowered foresight team within the company detected a weak signal: the cultural shift among top developers who increasingly valued collaboration and transparency over vendor lock-in. Instead of dismissing OSS, the leadership team mapped two extreme scenarios — one where OSS failed, and one where it became the global standard. They quickly realized the latter was plausible and highly destructive to their core business.

Their action was anticipatory: they made a strategic pivot by quietly investing in and contributing heavily to several key OSS projects, and then repositioned their proprietary product not as a stand-alone license, but as a Premium Service Layer built on top of the open-source infrastructure. This shift transformed them from an expensive vendor into a trusted ecosystem partner, securing a new recurring revenue stream and attracting the very talent their competitors were losing. They predicted the disruption and changed their business model before their revenue plateaued.

Conclusion: Making Anticipation Your Operating System

The time lag between a disruption beginning and it hitting your P&L is shrinking every year. You cannot wait for the data to confirm what common sense and human insight already suggest. The Anticipatory Leader does not fear the future; they design for it.

“Reactive leaders spend their time climbing out of holes. Anticipatory Leaders focus on where to dig the next one. That gap is the difference between survival and sustained market dominance.” — Braden Kelley

Make sensing the future a daily habit, not an annual planning exercise. Your essential first step: Empower your best people to spend 10% of their time focused entirely on weak signals outside your current strategic boundary. This small investment in foresight is the greatest insurance policy you can buy against being disrupted.

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: Pexels

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Intrapreneurship 2.0

1 Reply

Empowering Employees to Be Startup Founders

Intrapreneurship 2.0

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The single biggest threat to a successful, established company is rarely an external competitor; it is the Internal Antibody. This is the organizational immune system that attacks new ideas, citing rigid budget cycles, resource constraints, and ‘the way we’ve always done things.’ This institutionalized resistance is why so many large organizations fail to capitalize on the single greatest source of innovative ideas: their own employees.

Intrapreneurship 1.0 was about suggestion boxes, pitch competitions, and “20% time” — nice initiatives, but often disconnected from the strategic core, quickly defunded, and politically vulnerable. Today, in the age of rapid, complex disruption, we need Intrapreneurship 2.0: a systemic approach that treats internal innovators not as suggestion-givers, but as legitimate Startup Founders with the mandate, resources, and protection needed to scale. This is how you unlock a continuous capability for internal disruption.

The Three Pillars of the Intrapreneurial Operating System

To transition from a siloed corporate structure to a decentralized innovation engine, an organization must build three pillars, transforming its internal operating system to mimic a venture capital firm.

The Seed Funding and Protection Pillar:
The greatest barrier for an intrapreneur is not generating the idea, but navigating bureaucracy. Intrapreneurship 2.0 requires a dedicated, independently governed Internal Venture Fund separate from the traditional P&L and capital expenditure budget. Most importantly, it requires a “safe harbor” — a leadership commitment to shield these projects from the corporate antibodies, protecting the innovator’s career, even if the project fails after a disciplined experiment.
The Governance and Autonomy Pillar:
Intrapreneurs must have high autonomy over their team, budget, and execution methodology. Their reporting structure should be to an impartial “Innovation Review Board” (IRB), modeled after a VC board of directors, not to their traditional department head. This allows them to move with startup speed, pivoting based on market data rather than political consensus or departmental inertia.
The Talent and Rewarding Pillar:
Innovation is a retention strategy. The rewards for successful intrapreneurial ventures must be commensurate with the risk taken. This goes beyond a one-time bonus; it must include genuine equity-like incentives (e.g., profit-sharing on the new business line), career advancement into a new business unit established around the innovation, or formal recognition as a Chief Intrapreneur. This elevates internal innovation from a side project to a viable, exciting career path.

Case Study 1: Transforming Legacy Hardware into a Service Model

Challenge: Stagnant Revenue in a Global Industrial Manufacturer

A multi-billion-dollar industrial equipment company faced declining revenue as its traditional hardware sales became commoditized. The future was in “Equipment-as-a-Service” (EaaS), but the legacy sales force and technology platforms lacked the agility to transition.

Intrapreneurship 2.0 Intervention:

The leadership team sponsored a small, cross-functional team to form a fully-funded internal startup, deliberately naming it to sound external: Synergy Tech Solutions. The team was explicitly tasked with building the EaaS platform and customer experience outside of the main P&L. They were given a two-year budget and full autonomy to choose their cloud infrastructure and agile pricing model. Crucially, a formal Executive Steering Committee acted as their impartial VC board, providing guidance but never vetoing their market experiments. When the new service generated its first $10M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), the core intrapreneurial team was given the option to merge their unit back into the core with significant promotion and profit sharing, effectively transitioning from founders to general managers.

The Anti-Bureaucracy Toolkit

The single greatest tool for the intrapreneur is the ability to say no to corporate overhead. Intrapreneurship 2.0 recognizes that speed is the only currency that matters. Leaders must provide a practical “Anti-Bureaucracy Toolkit” that includes:

Pre-Approved Legal Templates: Quick contracts for small vendors or pilot customers, bypassing the standard six-week legal review.
Shadow IT Access: Permission to use modern, rapid prototyping software (often blocked by corporate IT and security policies) with agreed-upon guardrails.
Fast-Track Procurement: A simplified purchasing card with a higher limit for immediate needs, eliminating cumbersome Purchase Order (PO) processes.

Case Study 2: Solving Internal Talent Drain with an Innovation Marketplace

Challenge: Losing Top Talent to Startups and Internal Siloing

A large technology company suffered from talent drain as its best engineers left to join external startups. Simultaneously, internal talent was siloed and locked into non-strategic maintenance work.

Intrapreneurship 2.0 Intervention:

The company created an Internal Innovation Marketplace, essentially an internal job board for mission-driven, intrapreneurial projects. Any employee with an approved idea could post a “Team Request” for talent. The powerful shift was institutionalizing a formal Talent Mobility Policy that allowed employees to dedicate 100% of their time to an internal startup for a defined period (6-12 months) with a dedicated manager bypass for high-priority projects. This marketplace acted as a decentralized innovation incubator. It gave existing employees the startup experience they craved — ownership, speed, and mission — without having to leave the company. Within 18 months, the company successfully launched four new business lines, and top talent attrition was cut in half, proving that the best retention strategy is often internal disruption.

Conclusion: Scaling the Founder’s Mindset

Intrapreneurship 2.0 is the evolution of innovation culture. It’s not a program; it’s an organizational design decision. It is the recognition that the person closest to the customer pain or the technical opportunity is often a mid-level employee, not an executive.

“If you want to create a culture of continuous innovation, you must stop treating your best ideas as suggestions and start treating your best people as founders. Give them the key to the innovation vault and the mandate to drive change.” — Braden Kelley

The time for hesitant, half-measures is over. Embrace the principles of Intrapreneurship 2.0 to transform your workforce into a legion of nimble, motivated internal entrepreneurs, securing your future through your own capacity for disruption. Your first step: Audit your current innovation budget and separate 10% into a true, autonomous Internal Venture Fund.

For more on this topic I encourage to explore the writings of my friend Braden Kelley, a two-time best-selling author, including Charting Change and Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, and the creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He helps organizations drive innovation, overcome resistance, and embed continuous change capabilities.

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: Pixabay

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Nominations Closed for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

Leave a reply

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.

Nominations are now closed.

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.

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!

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Forbidden Truth About Innovation

2 Replies

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

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

The Innovation Dashboard

Leave a reply

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.

Image credit: Google Gemini

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

How to Drive Fear Out of Innovation

Leave a reply

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

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Leading Your External Innovation Network

Leave a reply

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

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Designing Innovation – Accelerating Creativity via Innovation Strategy

Leave a reply

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

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.