Category Archives: Innovation

Innovate for Good – Breaking Paradoxes

GUEST POST from Teresa Spangler

At the time of my writing this, the world is in the midst of unprecedented triple crises. The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on healthcare and on the personal lives of people globally. The economic impacts of this pandemic are crippling nations, small towns, and people all over the world. And to top it off we are experiencing incredible social unrest – protests for Black Lives Matter are taking shape all around the world, with the goal of peaceful protests for change – but they’ve been hijacked by anarchists of varied profiles… individual crusaders, terrorists acting solo, antagonists of the left and the right wings… so many different factions creating chaos. All of this to say, change is happening at paces unimaginable, and ‘INNOVATION for Good’ – of all types, centered on human, economic, and environmental impacts – is a dire necessity.

The world faces many great challenges. For example, the World Economic Forum reports that “by 2050, global food systems will need to sustainably and nutritiously feed more than 9 billion people while providing economic opportunities in both rural and urban communities. Yet our food systems are falling far short of these goals. A systemic transformation is needed at an unprecedented speed and scale.”

Speed and scale, these days, are the operative words prioritized in innovation investments. When and how are the big questions that investors and stakeholders primarily ask? Of course, these are important questions. Breaking the cycle of ‘profit first’ is not an easy shift for capitalist societies. Social Entrepreneurism, Social Innovation Organizations, and Non-Governmental Organizations are charting courses toward innovating in new and socially impactful ways, but they need the support, collaborative partnership, and help from investors and from the public and private sectors. The world of business has been groomed for years to drive everything fast, faster, and fastest – fail-fast, rapid prototype, accelerated stage gates, hire-slow-fire-fast, rapid returns… and so on. Measured return on investments drives innovation decision-making from new cure-all drugs to the closet full of patents that sit in the coffers of giant industry leaders never making it out into the commercial world, even though these may be game-changing, lifesaving, humanity-improving innovations.

This chapter looks at examples of how to shift from ‘profit first’ to ‘ethics and innovation for good and safety first’. If you build it safely, ethically, and build it to serve humanity, improve the environment, and support socially good causes, the profits will come. But investors and stakeholders need to understand the WHYs – why safety, ethics, and serving are so important. How are we innovators sharing these three critical priorities in the stories we build to gain buy-in on new ideas? So often, safety and ethics are afterthoughts. Responsible Innovation: Ethics and Risks of New Technologies, Joost Groot Kormelink, TU Delft Open, 2019 note:

“If we do not critically and systematically assess our technologies in terms of the values they support and embody, people with perhaps less noble intentions may insert their views on sustainability, safety and security, health and well-being, privacy and accountability.”

Also in the textbook, Responsible Innovation: Ethics and Risks of New Technologies, it sites are case study examples of how conflicting values can open up new opportunities to innovate responsible. As a learning method, the case study opens up our minds to the point of view or moral foundations as an opportunity:“Moral dilemmas can help stimulate creativity and innovation, and innovative design may help us to overcome problems of moral overload.”

In the case study excerpt below: “Smart meters and conflicting values as an opportunity to innovate.” The case study points to an example of smart meter design.

The smart meter 3.0, which is what we are ideally looking for, is designed to accommodate both of the functional requirements in order to make energy use more efficient, while also protecting personal data. It gives us privacy and sustainability. In this respect, innovation in smart metering is exactly this: the reconciliation of a range of values, or moral requirements, in one smart design, some of which were actually in conflict before. Similarly, if we would like to benefit from RFID technology (enabling to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects) in retail, but fear situations in which we might be tracked throughout the shopping mall, it has been suggested we can have it both ways. A so-called ‘clipped chip’ in the form of a price tag with clear indentations would allow customers to tear off a piece of the label, thereby shortening the antenna in the label so as to limit the range in which the label can transmit data.

Clarity of Values-Based Purpose

In the case above, there is clear purpose-driven innovation. Study after study has shown clarity of purpose is key to engaging people in new ideas.

A Kin&Co survey conducted by Populus points out that “Not embedding purpose properly also alienates customers, because in this age of transparency employee problems leak out online, and into the press. Over a third of employees surveyed (34%) said they’d consider writing a negative review online.” One example cited is of “… the Etsy employee who started a petition against the company’s leaders for not living their purpose and values, which was signed by thousands of employees and then went viral.” From: Why purpose matters and four steps companies can take to get it right”, Rosie Warin, 14 February 2018, Ethical Corporation Magazine, Reuters Events – Sustainable Business, the conclusion was thus that …

Having a purpose and not living it will actually hurt your business more than not having one at all! Why Purpose Matters

There is a hunger for more transparency, having our work be meaningful, and knowledge that ethics and privacy are forethoughts, not afterthoughts. It’s good for business, and certainly will drive better profits in the long run.

Breaking the ‘Fast Profit’ Addiction and Adapting Innovation for Social Benefits – Seeking Purpose

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. Winston Churchill

What if we asked the BIG ‘What if?’ What if we were more focused on the benefits of our innovations to humans, the environment, and society – making these priorities over profits first? Can it be proven that if you build it, the profits will come?

The United Nations: Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The chapter Foundations of Moral Innovation (Chapter 3 – page 57) mentioned the ‘triple bottom line’ that socially conscious companies focus on serving – People / Planet / Profit… the social, environmental, and financial aspects of an organization’s impact. In 2015 the United Nations cast a vision (and put actions to their words) to build a better world for all people by 2030. Engaging a world of collaborators is key to the success of these 17 Development Goals (noted below).

“The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are one of the world’s best plan to build a better world for people and our planet by 2030. Adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, the SDGs are a call for action by all countries – poor, rich and middle-income – to promote prosperity while protecting the environment. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, equality, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and working to preserve our ocean and forests. See Transforming A World: A 2030 Agenda.

The Division for Sustainable Development Goals (DSDG) within the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) provides substantive support and capacity-building for these SDGs and their related thematic issues.

To say the least, as we read these 17 audaciously massive and impactful goals, the goals feel incredibly lofty; the actions to innovate solutions for three of the goals, much less 17 of them, feels nearly unachievable (in our fast prototyping, rapid release, ROI-focused, capitalistic mind-sets) and CFOs around the world sense that acting on these in any way may weigh heavily on profits. Yet many companies are collaborating to drive solutions to these goals. The United Nations built a values-based and purpose-driven platform to participate in solving these world challenges. They provide guidelines, research, information on other collaborators, tools, data, and so much support to help those that choose to participate. And participating they are! Noted from a press release in July 2019: “28 companies with combined market cap of $1.3 trillion step up to new level of climate ambition. Ahead of the UN Climate Action Summit, companies commit to set 1.5°C climate targets aligned with a net-zero future, challenging Governments to match their ambition”.

Here are a few of the participating companies from this release: AstraZeneca, Banka BioLoo, BT, Dalmia Cement Ltd., Eco-Steel Africa Ltd., Enel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Iberdrola, KLP, Levi Strauss & Co., Royal DSM, SAP, Signify, Singtel, Telefonica, Telia, Unilever, Vodafone Group PLC, and Zurich Insurance, amongst others. The release goes on to note that this collectively represents over one million employees from 17 sectors and more than 16 countries.

It seems that the United Nations has created an intensely collaborative framework that offers a moral ground to innovate. It’s just one example, and as complex as these goals are, the framework is simple… build a mission-driven platform, engage thought-leaders around the world, set up metrics and measures for success, provide as much data as possible, offer support when and where needed, and provide as many tools as possible to encourage collaboration amongst them.

ESG – A Moral Compass

Social investors are a group growing in popularity and size. These investors focus their investments and their portfolios on corporations around the world with metric-driven processes to ensure they are building sustainable and responsible companies – a practice known as environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG.

An example of such an organization is Philips Corporation, which has made a commitment to ESG and thus to ethics over profits. In the article, “Good business: Why placing ethics over profits pays off”, they share “When companies work ethically, they will naturally outpace competition. Why? Simply because customers, as we’ve discovered, will see them as a trusted partner, not only for what they do, but how it is delivered. Commitment from management is a key factor to effectively deal with these situations.”

In Stanford Social Innovation Review, authors Chris Fabian and Robert Fabricant write, “An ethical framework – ‘a way of structuring your deliberation about ethical questions’ – can help to bridge disparate worlds and discourses and help them work well together.” Their article further notes that, “Ethical questions might include: ‘Is this platform / product actually providing a social good?’ or ‘Am I harming / including the user in the creation of this new solution?’ or even ‘Do I have a right to be taking claim of this space at all?’”11 Such a strong ethical framework can help innovators to plan for ‘value-based collaborations’. Establishing such a framework within your innovation practice also provides a process whereby collaborators can monitor the work, and consistently ensure that ethics are intact. Moreover, planning for positive outcomes and managing to an ethical framework gives customers, buyers, stakeholders, users, and investors some comfort that the ‘net new disruptive innovations’ will be safe for all, which will result in strong profits and longevity in due time.

Very importantly, this article also points out that while ethics may involve subjectivity, nevertheless “an ethical framework can bridge the worlds of startup technology companies and international development to strengthen cross-sector innovation in the social sector.”

Fabian and Fabricant outline a 4-model framework in this article:

Innovation is humanistic: solving big problems through human ingenuity, imagination, and entrepreneurialism that can come from anywhere.

Innovation is non-hierarchical: drawing ideas from many different sources and incubating small, agile teams to test and iterate on them with user feedback.

Innovation is participatory: designing with (not for) real people.

Innovation is sustainable: building skills even if most individual endeavors will ultimately fail in their societal goals.

“Critical to the world’s innovation effort is harvesting the Human Imagination!” Patrick Reasonover – writer and producer of They Say It Can’t Be Done

Incorporating any of the above four models provides the basis for forethought and planning. There may be additional considerations accompanying the above framework to drive even better outcomes yet – especially for those with big audacious visions of disruptive innovation. But often there are unexpected barriers. So how can one plan for the unexpected? There is a documentary film that explores some of these barriers, and four companies working to overcome them.

They Say It Can’t Be Done, written and produced by Patrick Reasonover, is an excellent documentary exploring how innovation can solve some of the world’s largest problems. The film tracks four companies on the cutting edge of technological solutions that could promote animal welfare, solve hunger, eliminate organ wait lists, and reduce atmospheric carbon. The film explores often unexpected challenges and barriers that are potentially keeping these companies from realizing success. They each share steps and strategies on how to break through the ‘concrete walls’.

The compelling theme from these companies is innovation for good – innovation with a moral foundation to improve humanity. One of the first questions typically asked by stakeholders is “When will these companies or their new innovations become profitable?” Here’s the BIG ‘What if’ question. What if we changed this question to, “What will it take to make this successful, and how can we help you get there faster?” These are fairly typical questions. But what about roadblocks potentially challenging even the most knowledgeable and experienced teams and proven technologies? I recently spoke with Patrick Reasonover about his mission and the documentary. Reasonover shares, “Faced with similar challenges to the companies in the documentary, I felt if more people understood barriers, the world would see more successful outcomes that could save people, improve human conditions, and the environment.” Reasonover went on to share four themes that would greatly help disruptors in their innovation practices. These four themes are summarized as follows:

One of the most important points he made in our discussion was to engage regulators and government agencies – collaborating with them very early on in the process and all along your path. Help them to understand; listen and take in their input.

Institute what Reasonover calls an ‘Ambassador of Imagination’. We need more imagination in the world and in our own world. It’s too easy to get boxed into an innovation framework and forget to take the blinders off in order to think and create big things!

Optimism is sorely needed in the world and especially for innovators. Getting new things out the door is daunting. Infuse your efforts with doses of optimism grounded in reality.

CELEBRATE… hitting milestones should be celebrated along the way. It’s a long road, and all too often we get push back from doubters, investors wanting faster outcomes, governing approval agencies, and so on. Celebrate and move forward!

These four practices create a culture that encourages and celebrates imagination, innovation, success, and all the collaborators helping you get there. And involving agencies early on in the process helps them to understand that you are taking safety and ethics seriously. Take for example 3D-printed organs for those needing transplants. There is so much at stake. Stepping through the approval process to prove it out on less risky organs – for example, 3D printed ears – helps to chart the course for other organs as the technologies and the discovery of new methods continues to develop.

The article “On The Road To 3-D Printed Organs” in TheScientist reports, “There are a number of companies who are attempting to do things like 3-D print ears, and researchers have already reported transplanting 3-D printed ears onto children who had birth defects that left their ears underdeveloped, notes Robby Bowles, a bioengineer at the University of Utah. The ear transplants are, he says, ‘kind of the first proof of concept of 3-D printing for medicine.”

Ethics First

All in all, there is much evidence pointing to success, longevity, scale, and profits when building a framework that places ethics, safety, values, and purpose as planned practices in any innovation effort.

These practices do not have to slow the process of innovation in the least. On the contrary… they will often speed up the effort, as in the example of engaging regulators as collaborators early on in your efforts. Engaging imagination and optimism are sorely needed, and keeps teams engaged and enthused. And.. leveraging one of Stanford’s four models could save a great deal of pain by monitoring outcomes all along your development stage gates. It all just makes good and safe business sense!

*Article is an excerpt contribution (chapter 6): The Other Side of Growth: Innovator’s Responsibilities in an Emerging World

Image credit: Pixabay

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Innovation or Not? – Catios

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Innovation or Not - Catios

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Catios are quickly becoming the new trend for cat owners. They’re a great way to give your cats the chance to explore the outdoors without having to worry about them running away or getting into trouble. Catios provide cats with a safe, secure space to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine, while also keeping them safe from predators or other dangers.

Catios come in all shapes and sizes, so you’re sure to find one that fits your home and your cat’s needs. Some are small and enclosed spaces, while others are larger and offer cats more room to explore. You can also choose catios with multiple levels, so your cats can climb and explore different heights.

When considering a catio, the most important factor is safety. Make sure your catio is made of sturdy materials and is properly secured. Check for any gaps or holes that your cat could easily escape through. Make sure you also choose a catio that is large enough for your cats to move around comfortably.

In addition, catios are great for providing cats with mental stimulation. Place toys, scratching posts, and other items inside the catio to keep your cats entertained. You can also add plants and bird feeders to the catio to create a more natural environment and attract wildlife.

Finally, it’s important to keep your catio clean. Make sure you regularly sweep and vacuum the area to keep it free of debris and bugs. Keep the catio free of dirt and debris, as these can harbor bacteria and other germs that can be harmful to your cats.

But are they an innovation?

Sound off in the comments.

p.s. It will be interesting to see how this furry family member and home improvement trend evolves. Will we start to see new homes built with incorporated catios? Will your catio positively or negatively impact the value of your home when it comes time to sell? Wish I had one – if I was a cat.

Image credit: Wikipedia

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Shark Tanks are the Pumpkin Spice of Innovation

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Shark Tanks are the Pumpkin Spice of Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

On August 27, Pumpkin Spice season began. It was the earliest ever launch of Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte and it kicked off a season in which everything from Cheerios to protein powder to dog shampoo promises the nostalgia of Grandma’s pumpkin pie.

Since its introduction in 2003, the Pumpkin Spice Latte has attracted its share of lovers and haters but, because it’s a seasonal offering, the hype fades almost as soon as it appears.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for its counterpart in corporate innovation — The Shark Tank/Hackathon/Lab Week.

It may seem unfair to declare Shark Tanks the Pumpkin Spice of corporate innovation, but consider the following:

They are events. There’s nothing wrong with seasonal flavors and events. After all, they create a sense of scarcity that spurs people to action and drives companies’ revenues. However, there IS a great deal wrong with believing that innovation is an event. Real innovation is not an event. It is a way of thinking and problem-solving, a habit of asking questions and seeking to do things better, and of doing the hard and unglamorous work of creating, learning, iterating, and testing required to bring innovation — something different that creates value — to life.
They appeal to our sense of nostalgia and connection. The smell and taste of Pumpkin Spice bring us back to simpler times, holidays with family, pie fresh and hot from the oven. Shark Tanks do the same. They remind us of the days when we believed that we could change the world (or at least fix our employers) and when we collaborated instead of competed. We feel warm fuzzies as we consume (or participate in) them, but the feelings are fleeting, and we return quickly to the real world.
They pretend to be something they’re not. Starbucks’ original Pumpkin Spice Latte was flavored by cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. There was no pumpkin in the Pumpkin Spice. Similarly, Shark Tanks are innovation theater — events that give people an outlet for their ideas and an opportunity to feel innovation-y for a period of time before returning to their day-to-day work. The value that is created is a temporary blip, not lasting change that delivers real business value.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If you’re serious about walking the innovation talk, Shark Tanks can be a great way to initiate and accelerate building a culture and practice of innovation. But they must be developed and deployed in a thoughtful way that is consistent with your organization’s strategy and priorities.

Make Shark Tanks the START of an innovation effort, not a standalone event. Clearly establish the problems or organizational priorities you want participants to solve and the on-going investment (including dedicated time) that the company will make in the winners. Allocate an Executive Sponsor who meets with the team monthly and distribute quarterly updates to the company to share winners’ progress and learnings
Act with courage and commitment. Go beyond the innovation warm fuzzies and encourage people to push the boundaries of “what we usually do.” Reward and highlight participants that make courageous (i.e. risky) recommendations. Pursue ideas that feel a little uncomfortable because the best way to do something new that creates value (i.e. innovate) is to actually DO something NEW.
Develop a portfolio of innovation structures: Just as most companies use a portfolio of tools to grow their core businesses, they need a portfolio of tools to create new businesses. Use Shark Tanks to the surface and develop core or adjacent innovation AND establish incubators and accelerators to create and test radical innovations and business models AND fund a corporate VC to scout for new technologies and start-ups that can provide instant access to new markets.

Conclusion

Whether you love or hate Pumpkin Spice Lattes you can’t deny their impact. They are, after all, Starbucks’ highest-selling seasonal offering. But it’s hard to deny that they are increasingly the subject of mocking memes and eye rolls, a sign that their days, and value, maybe limited.

(Most) innovation events, like Pumpkin Spice, have a temporary effect. But not on the bottom-line. During these events, morale, and team energy spike. But, as the excitement fades and people realize that nothing happened once the event was over, innovation becomes a meaningless buzzword, evoking eye rolls and Dilbert cartoons.

Avoid this fate by making Shark Tanks a lasting part of your innovation menu — a portfolio of tools and structures that build and sustain a culture and practice of innovation, one that creates real financial and organizational value.

Image credit: Unsplash

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When Humans and AI Innovate Together

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The Symbiotic Relationship

When Humans and AI Innovate Together

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The narrative surrounding Artificial Intelligence often veers into two extremes: utopian savior or dystopian overlord. Both miss the profound truth of our current inflection point. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the most impactful future of AI is not one where machines replace humans, nor one where humans merely manage machines. Instead, it is a symbiotic relationship — a partnership where the unique strengths of human creativity, empathy, and intuition merge with AI’s unparalleled speed, scale, and analytical power. This “Human-AI Teaming” is not just an operational advantage; it is the definitive engine for exponential, human-centered innovation.

The true genius of AI lies not in its ability to replicate human thought, but to augment it. Humans excel at divergent thinking, ethical reasoning, abstract problem framing, and connecting seemingly unrelated concepts. AI excels at convergent thinking, pattern recognition in vast datasets, rapid prototyping, and optimizing complex systems. When these distinct capabilities are deliberately integrated, the result is a cognitive leap forward—a powerful fusion, much like a mythical centaur, that delivers solutions previously unimaginable. This shift demands a radical rethink of organizational structures, skill development, and how we define “innovation” itself, acknowledging potential pitfalls like algorithmic bias and explainability challenges not as roadblocks, but as design challenges for stronger symbiosis.

The Pillars of Human-AI Symbiosis in Innovation

Building a truly symbiotic innovation capability requires focus on three strategic pillars:

1. AI as a Cognitive Multiplier: Treat AI not as an autonomous decision-maker, but as an extension of human intellect. This means AI excels at hypothesis generation, data synthesis, anomaly detection, and providing diverse perspectives based on vast amounts of information, all to supercharge human problem-solving, allowing us to explore far more options than before.
2. Humans as Ethical & Creative Architects: The human role is elevated to architect and guide. We define the problem, set the ethical boundaries, provide the contextual nuance, and apply the “human filter” to AI’s outputs. Our unique capacity for empathy, understanding unspoken needs, and managing the inherent biases of AI remains irreplaceable in truly human-centered design.
3. Iterative Feedback Loops: The symbiotic relationship thrives on constant learning. Humans train AI with nuanced feedback, helping it understand complex, subjective scenarios and correct for biases. AI, in turn, provides data-driven insights and rapid experimentation capabilities that help humans refine their hypotheses and accelerate the innovation cycle. This continuous exchange refines both human understanding and AI performance.

“The future of innovation isn’t about AI or humans. It’s about how elegantly we can weave the unparalleled strengths of both into a singular, accelerated creative force.” — Satya Nadella

Case Study 1: Moderna and AI-Driven Vaccine Development

The Challenge:

Developing a vaccine for a novel pathogen like SARS-CoV-2 traditionally takes years, an impossibly long timeline during a pandemic. The complexity of mRNA sequencing, protein folding, and clinical trial design overwhelmed human capacity alone.

The Symbiotic Innovation:

Moderna leveraged an AI-first approach where human scientists defined the immunological targets and ethical parameters, but AI algorithms rapidly designed, optimized, and tested millions of potential mRNA sequences. AI analyzed vast genomic databases to predict optimal antigen structures and identify potential immune responses. Human scientists then performed the critical biological testing and validation, refined these AI-generated candidates, and managed the ethical and logistical complexities of clinical trials and regulatory approval. The explainability of AI’s outputs was crucial for human trust and regulatory acceptance.

The Exponential Impact:

This human-AI partnership dramatically accelerated the vaccine development timeline, bringing a highly effective mRNA vaccine from concept to clinical trials in a matter of weeks, not years. AI handled the computational heavy lifting of molecular design, freeing human experts to focus on the high-level strategy, rigorous validation, and the profound human impact of global health. It exemplifies AI as a cognitive multiplier in a crisis, under human-led ethical governance.

Case Study 2: Generative Design in Engineering (e.g., Autodesk Fusion 360)

The Challenge:

Traditional engineering design is constrained by human experience and iterative trial-and-error, leading to designs that are often sub-optimal in terms of weight, material usage, or performance. Designing for radical efficiency requires exploring millions of permutations—a task beyond human capacity.

The Symbiotic Innovation:

Platforms like Autodesk Fusion 360 integrate Generative Design AI. Human engineers define the essential design parameters: materials, manufacturing methods, load-bearing requirements, weight constraints, and optimization goals (e.g., minimum weight, maximum stiffness). The AI then autonomously explores hundreds or thousands of design options, often generating organic, complex structures that no human designer would conceive. The human engineer then acts as a discerning curator and refiner, selecting the most promising AI-generated designs, applying aesthetic and practical considerations, and testing them for real-world viability and manufacturability.

The Exponential Impact:

This collaboration has led to breakthroughs in lightweighting and material efficiency across industries, from aerospace to automotive. AI explores an immense solution space, while humans inject creativity, contextual understanding, and final aesthetic and ethical judgment. The result is parts that are significantly lighter, stronger, and more sustainable—innovations that would have been impossible for either human or AI to achieve alone. It’s AI expanding the realm of possibility for human architects, leading to more sustainable and cost-effective products.

The Leadership Mandate: Cultivating the Centaur Organization

Building a truly symbiotic human-AI innovation engine is not merely a technical problem; it is a profound leadership challenge. It demands investing in new skills (prompt engineering, AI ethics, data literacy, and critical thinking to evaluate AI outputs), redesigning workflows to integrate AI at key decision points, and—most crucially—cultivating a culture of psychological safety where employees are encouraged to experiment with AI, understand its limitations, and provide frank feedback without fear.

Leaders must define AI not as a replacement, but as an unparalleled partner, actively addressing challenges like algorithmic bias and the need for explainability through robust human oversight. By strategically integrating AI as a cognitive multiplier, empowering humans as ethical and creative architects, and establishing robust iterative feedback loops, organizations can unlock an era of innovation previously confined to science fiction. The future of human-centered innovation is not human-only, nor AI-only. It is a powerful, elegant dance between both, continuously learning and adapting.

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.

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Innovating in a Downturn

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Innovating in a Downturn

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Downturns are wake-up calls. They ask us to sharpen our focus and be more disciplined in our allocation of resources. It’s a tough-love regimen that can make our enterprises more healthy as long as we commit to the program.

There are three ways to get a return on innovation, each fit for a different purpose, as follows:

1. Differentiation

Differentiation is key for acquiring new customers. Your goal is to overcome the inertia of the status quo, and to do so, you must make an offer that is sufficiently disruptive that a prospect will come over to your side. Slightly better doesn’t cut it. You need to focus on one vector of innovation that is lights-out superior and delivers a value proposition others cannot match. Then you need to marry your offering to a customer challenge that is sufficiently urgent and important to require immediate attention, downturn or not, creating a whole product that fulfills a compelling reason to buy. That in hand, you need to rotate your marketing and sales coverage to play most of your games on this chosen turf. None of this requires heroics, but all of it goes against whatever inertial momentum inside your own enterprise remains from a decade or more of leveraging economic tailwinds.

2. Neutralization

Neutralization is key to both defending, or even expanding, your customer base when a challenger throws their hat in the ring. They are making the disruptive offer, and your goal is to get to good enough, fast enough. This allows your customer base to reject the challenger offer, good as it may be, because in the greater scheme of things, with your other value add, plus your good-enough response, it is safer and more sensible to stick with you. The key here is speed. Innovation teams want to have the best offer in the market, but there is no time for that. It is a hard ask for them to prioritize good enough, but any delay leaves your core business exposed. On the other hand, if your offer really is good enough, your account teams can pitch a consolidation offering to the customer base which can replace one or more of their current point-product vendors via a suite offering from you. Done well, you can grow share of wallet share in a downturn, which is by far the most profitable path to take.

3. Optimization

Optimization is key to maintaining viability in a downturn. Revenues are likely down, which means operating expenses must follow suit. This is particularly important in a period of rising interest rates where taking on additional debt is truly dangerous. Done well, optimization not only saves money and frees up resources to invest in differentiation or neutralization, but it also improves the customer experience by streamlining the processes that underpin the core of your business. The key is to combine the value disciplines of operational excellence and customer intimacy, focusing them on the processes that are unnecessarily slow, complex, or onerous. Again, the challenge is to overcome the lulling force of inertia. Change is never welcome, as there is a J-curve in every learning curve, and in a downturn, people are fearful of losing any ground even temporarily.

One Final Point

These three paths of innovation do not blend. Combining any two will dilute the impact of both. This leads to waste at a time when return on investment is crucial. You can run the playbooks in parallel, but you must not let them merge.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Prototyping the Future

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Experimenting with Emerging Possibilities

Prototyping the Future

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In the high-stakes game of organizational change, inertia is the silent killer. Leaders often talk about innovation, but they are terrified of the risk associated with committing millions to an unproven concept. This fear traps organizations in a cycle of incrementalism. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the most powerful antidote to this paralysis is prototyping. Prototyping is not merely a step in a design process; it is a mindset — a strategic, disciplined commitment to experimenting with the future in the present. It is the art of making the unknown tangible, allowing us to fail safely, learn quickly, and dramatically increase our Return on Learning (ROL).

We must shift from an obsession with traditional ROI (Return on Investment), which punishes failure, to prioritizing ROL (Return on Learning), which rewards clarity and speed. Prototyping the future requires moving from a culture obsessed with detailed planning to one that values informed iteration. It means creating low-fidelity, high-impact simulations of emerging possibilities — be it a new product, a process, or an entirely new business model. This commitment to creating fast, disposable versions of the future dramatically lowers the psychological cost of failure, fostering the psychological safety necessary for true breakthrough innovation. Whether it’s a cardboard model, a basic wireframe, or an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) simulation, the goal is to maximize the learning extracted per dollar spent.

The Three Imperatives of Strategic Prototyping

To successfully prototype the future, organizations must focus on three core strategic imperatives that accelerate learning and reduce risk:

1. De-Risking the Unknown with Speed: The primary function of a prototype is to identify and test the riskiest assumption in an emerging idea. It must be fast, cheap, and disposable. We aim to fail quickly and often at the conceptual stage, saving significant time and capital that would otherwise be wasted on building a perfect solution for the wrong problem.
2. Generating Empathy Through Tangibility: Abstract ideas are difficult for stakeholders and customers to critique meaningfully. A prototype — whether physical or digital (e.g., an Augmented Reality model) —forces interaction. This human interaction generates deep empathy and reveals hidden needs, emotional reactions, and critical user friction points that no spreadsheet or survey can capture.
3. Creating a Shared Vision: The future is difficult to discuss because everyone imagines it differently. A prototype serves as a Shared Artifact — a concrete, singular point of reference around which a team, and the entire organization, can align their vision, critique constructively, and unify their efforts. This speeds up decision-making and aligns cross-functional silos.

“Don’t fall in love with your first idea. Fall in love with the clarity your first prototype creates.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: The IDEO Shopping Cart – Prototyping the Experience

The Challenge:

The design firm IDEO was challenged by a major grocery chain to redesign the common supermarket shopping cart. The initial, narrow focus was on engineering and durability, which would have resulted in only incremental changes.

The Prototyping Solution:

IDEO’s human-centered approach started not with engineering, but with experiential prototypes. The team quickly built several low-fidelity models using rudimentary materials (duct tape, bins, children’s seats) to test radically different concepts — like a cart with a built-in calculator or one with better maneuverability. They took these rough models into the grocery store for real-time testing, observing customer and employee interaction and failure points.

The Innovation Impact:

By prototyping the user experience rather than the final product, IDEO discovered critical, unarticulated needs—like improved maneuverability and safer child seating—that led to fundamental design shifts. The process proved that fast, visual, and highly interactive prototyping is the most efficient way to unlock breakthrough innovation by placing the human at the center of the learning loop.

Case Study 2: Amazon’s “Working Backwards” – Prototyping the Document

The Challenge:

Amazon, known for its high-velocity innovation, needed a mechanism to ensure that product teams were building things customers actually wanted and that ideas were vetted quickly without expensive software development.

The Prototyping Solution:

Amazon formalized a process called “Working Backwards,” which uses a document-based prototype. Before a single line of code is written, a team must write a Press Release (PR) announcing the finished product to the world. The PR is a one-page, customer-centric narrative explaining the product’s benefit, the problem it solves, and its release date. Accompanying the PR is a detailed FAQ and mock Customer Reviews.

The Innovation Impact:

This simple, text-based prototype forces immediate clarity and user focus. Writing the press release first ensures the team can articulate the customer value proposition before spending any engineering time. If the PR isn’t compelling, the idea is instantly shelved or iterated upon. This low-fidelity, high-discipline prototyping method de-risks multi-million-dollar projects by ensuring the idea is sound and clearly focused on the human need before the execution even begins. It is the ultimate example of prototyping the communication and the value proposition.

Conclusion: Leading with Iteration and ROL

Prototyping the future is the most responsible way to lead change. It replaces the paralyzing certainty of the five-year plan with the agile confidence of constant, low-cost learning. Leaders must create the cultural conditions for this to thrive: namely, by celebrating fast learning and treating failed prototypes as valuable data points, thereby building an organization defined by high Psychological Safety and high ROL.

The innovation landscape moves too fast for slow, secretive, and large-scale commitments. By adopting the three imperatives—speed, empathy generation, and shared vision creation—through prototyping, you ensure that your organization remains perpetually adaptive.

“Stop trying to predict the future. Start building disposable versions of it.” — Braden Kelley

That is the definitive strategy for unlocking continuous, human-centered innovation.

Image credit: 1 of 950+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

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Things I Occasionally Forget

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Things I Occasionally Forget

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Clean-sheet designs are fun, right up until they don’t launch.

When you feel the urge to do a clean-sheet design, go home early.

When you don’t know how to make it better, make it worse and do the opposite.

Without trying, there is no way to know if it will work.

Trying sometimes feels like dying.

But without trying, nothing changes.

Agreement is important, but only after the critical decision has been made.

When there’s 100% agreement, you waited too long to make the decision.

When it’s unclear who the customer is, ask “Whose problem will be solved?”

When the value proposition is unclear, ask ‘What problem will be solved?”

When your technology becomes mature, no one wants to believe it.

When everyone believes the technology is mature, you should have started working on the new technology four years ago.

If your projects are slow, blame your decision-making processes.

Two of the most important decisions: which projects to start and which to stop.

All the action happens at the interfaces, but that’s also where two spans of control come together and chafe.

If you want to understand your silos and why they don’t play nicely together, look at the organizational chart.

When a company starts up, the product sets the organizational structure.

Then, once a company is mature, the organizational structure constrains the product.

At the early stages of a project, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

And once the project is complete, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Bringing Your Innovation to Life

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The Power of Visual Storytelling

Bringing Your Innovation to Life

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

We live in an age defined by complexity and clutter. Revolutionary ideas, transformative products, and critical organizational changes often fail—not because the innovation itself is flawed, but because the story of the innovation is invisible. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I contend that in a world saturated with information, the ability to communicate impact is as vital as the ability to create it. The future of influence belongs to those who master Visual Storytelling: the strategic use of imagery, data visualization, and narrative to connect abstract concepts to human emotion and tangible benefit. This is how you bring your innovation to life, making it understandable, memorable, and — most importantly — adoptable.

Visual storytelling is far more than marketing; it’s a human-centered design principle applied to communication. Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, and we are wired to remember stories and images over lists of features or bullet points. For innovators, this means moving beyond verbose white papers and dense slide decks. It means finding the single, compelling image, the three-second animation, or the simple diagram that instantly conveys the user’s journey, the ‘before and after,’ or the strategic shift. This capability is the essential bridge between the R&D lab and the customer’s mind, transforming complex ideas into intuitive understanding.

The Three Pillars of Innovation Storytelling

Effective visual storytelling in innovation rests on three psychological pillars designed to drive adoption and overcome the innate human resistance to change:

1. The Empathy Shot (The ‘Before’): Start by vividly illustrating the pain point or the broken process that the innovation solves. This establishes relevance by showing the current, difficult human reality. A picture of a frustrated user or a diagram of an inefficient, tangled process creates immediate emotional connection and validation.
2. The Clarity Bridge (The ‘How’): Use simple visualizations—such as journey maps, flowcharts, or metaphors—to demystify the complexity. This reduces the cognitive load required to understand the innovation. If your innovation is AI, show a graphic of data flow, not a list of algorithms. If it’s a process change, show the old spaghetti diagram next to the clean, new highway.
3. The Vision Anchor (The ‘After’): Conclude with a powerful visual depiction of the positive, human-centered outcome. This isn’t just a picture of the product; it’s a visual of the impact — the delighted customer, the streamlined workplace, or the saved time. This anchor provides the emotional payoff and fuels motivation for change.

“An innovation explained in 100 words is often forgotten. An innovation shown in one powerful visual is instantly understood.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: Google’s Self-Driving Cars – Visualizing Safety and Trust

The Challenge:

Introducing autonomous vehicle technology requires overcoming profound human fear: handing over control to an unseen computer. The complexity of the software and the catastrophic risk associated with failure made verbal assurances insufficient.

The Visual Storytelling Solution:

Waymo (Google’s self-driving division) tackled this by prioritizing radical visual transparency. Their early communications focused heavily on videos and internal dashboard screens showing the vehicle’s real-time perception. Viewers saw a digital overlay of lines, colors, and boxes representing every cyclist, pedestrian, speed limit sign, and potential hazard. This provided a compelling visual metaphor for the AI’s hyper-awareness, essentially letting the viewer ‘look through the car’s digital eyes.’

The Innovation Impact:

This simple visual strategy demystified the technology and built algorithmic trust. By demonstrating, frame-by-frame, that the car ‘sees’ far more reliably than a human, they used visual storytelling to translate complex machine learning data into an understandable human concept: safety. This allowed regulators, partners, and the public to emotionally process and begin accepting the innovation much faster than if they had only read engineering statistics.

Case Study 2: Airbnb’s Storyboarding – Aligning Product and Service

The Challenge:

Early on, Airbnb’s service was inconsistent. They realized they weren’t just selling a transaction (a place to sleep); they were selling a high-quality human experience. The challenge was aligning their distributed workforce and millions of hosts on what that ideal experience looked and felt like.

The Visual Storytelling Solution:

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia famously used storyboarding — a simple, analog, sequential visual narrative—to map the entire customer journey, from search to checkout. One famous early storyboard was the “A-Team” story, which visually detailed a host preparing for a guest and the guest’s delightful arrival. These simple, hand-drawn visuals didn’t just document the current process; they illustrated the aspirational emotional journey the company wanted to deliver.

The Innovation Impact:

These storyboards became the central communication tool for every team—product designers, customer service, and marketing. They provided an unambiguous, visual definition of quality and purpose. By aligning the organization around a shared visual narrative of the ideal host and guest experience, they focused all innovation efforts on removing friction points in those specific moments. This clarity was instrumental in scaling their quality standards and transforming their platform from a novelty into a trusted, experience-driven brand.

Conclusion: The Visual Imperative

In the end, innovation is a human endeavor. If your revolutionary idea cannot be instantly grasped and emotionally processed, it will be delayed, diluted, or dismissed. Leaders must invest heavily in Visual Fluency within their organizations—not just hiring graphic designers, but teaching every employee, from the CEO to the engineer, to think and communicate in visuals.

The future of effective change relies on your ability to make the intangible tangible. By mastering the art of the empathy shot, the clarity bridge, and the vision anchor, you move your innovation out of the laboratory and into the lives of your customers. Stop describing your innovation. Start showing its impact. That is the definitive strategy for bringing your best ideas to life and ensuring they achieve the scale they deserve.

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Effective Facilitation for All

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How Leadership Fundamentals Benefit Everyone

Effective Facilitation for All

GUEST POST from Douglas Ferguson

Effective facilitation isn’t limited to the inner workings of staff meetings. True facilitation goes beyond simply setting an agenda: it’s a mindset, framework, and way of being.

Excellent facilitators know how to get the best out of their teams and design conversations that are innovative, exciting, and productive.

In this article, we explore how the fundamentals of facilitation affect an organization in the following topics:

Leading with Great Expectations
Effective Facilitation for Everyone
Facilitation with a Purpose

Leading with Great Expectations

At its core, great facilitation is an engaging conversation. In practicing effective facilitation, leaders make sure all communication is as clear and thoughtful as possible. Facilitators can begin this conversation by intentionally setting their expectations with all stakeholders in every conversation, meeting, and project.

Often, meetings end with attendees unaware of their colleagues’ and leaders’ expectations. By focusing on effective facilitation, leaders can identify and communicate their expectations as well as the expectations of everyone else in the room.

Consider the following facilitation fundamentals when identifying others’ expectations and needs ahead of a meeting:

Personal Preparation

Preparation is essential for any form of facilitation. Whether you’re leading a meeting or heading up a project, participants expect you to come prepared. Demonstrate proper facilitation techniques by preparing to be physically, emotionally, and mentally ready for your presentation.

Practice

Practice is the next step in proper facilitation. In practicing, you’ll be able to review your process and identify any areas needed for adjustment. Moreover, practicing will help you visualize your upcoming session, anticipate problems, and prepare alternative plans should something go wrong.

Process

Effortless facilitation follows a seamless process designed specifically for your audience. Facilitators have a variety of processes to choose from, including strategic planning, problem-solving, decision-making, and more.

Place

Your physical or virtual environment plays an important role in your facilitation ventures. It’s essential to be as intentional as possible in selecting the space for your next session. Consider the requirements for a space, such as the size of the room, what equipment is needed, and any other elements that may affect the flow of your meeting.

Purpose

The purpose may be the single most important component of effective facilitation. Your purpose will outline the end goal of a meeting and will communicate why the session is taking place.

Perspective

Perspective is as essential to effective facilitation as the purpose. Your perspective allows you to contextualize the goals, mission, vision, and purpose of your meeting.

Product

As effective facilitation hinges on meeting with a purpose, understanding what that purpose will produce is just as important. Consider what deliverables should be created by the end of a project, meeting, or conversation. Additionally, be sure to define the most important goals and actionable steps required to achieve them.

People

Facilitate with intention by identifying who should be in attendance. Learn more about each participant by researching the bias, potential barriers, and preconceived ideas that they may bring to each meeting. Likewise, be sure to highlight their strengths to further assess how they can be an asset in your conversation.

Effective Facilitation for Everyone

Integrating effective facilitation skills and techniques goes far beyond the walls of a meeting. A facilitative approach to leadership zeroes in on the positives of leading an active and engaged group. Facilitation techniques such as active listening and encouragement work to stimulate participative group conversation and collaboration.

Every member of an organization can benefit from the power of facilitative leadership. Leaders that demonstrate and embody proper facilitation skills can impart these practices to their employees.

Facilitation techniques benefit employees in the following ways:

1. Fostering Collaboration and Learning

Facilitation skills are essential in encouraging an environment of collaboration and learning. Encouraging team members to look at a situation from a different perspective, consider new solutions, and understand how to bring the best out of each other will result in the most productive experiences.

In creating a culture of learning, leaders should take the time to learn from their teams as well. Giving your employees a platform to offer their own insights is the best way to invite them into this collaborative process of co-creating learning.

2. Getting More From Meeting Attendees

As employees adopt the elements of effective facilitation, they’ll bring more of their skills, focus, and energy to each meeting. Equipped with the skills to act as influencers amongst their peers, each employee will become an active participant in the meeting, encouraging each other to make the most out of their time together.

3. Improving Productivity

As team members work together on various projects, effective facilitation skills allow them to move forward in the most productive, cost-effective, and timely manner. When employees incorporate their finely-honed facilitation skills, they work together efficiently, converse productively, and solve problems effectively. Ultimately, facilitation fundamentals allow everyone from team members to management to make the most of their time at work.

4. Boosting Group Dynamics

Incorporating effective facilitation skills helps improve group dynamics as well. All team members benefit from improved communication strategies, both in and out of the structured setting of meetings. These strategies allow all participants to better express their thoughts, opinions, and concerns as they work together to achieve a common goal.

Teams that invest in developing their communication skills are likely to retain the best employees. Statistics show that organizations that practice strong communication skills experience 50% less attrition overall.

5. Encouraging Active Participation

While effective facilitation is often considered from a leadership perspective, it is also an excellent catalyst in driving employee participation. Oftentimes, team members don’t feel comfortable enough to share their true opinions in a meeting. Moreover, they tend to bring the bare minimum to the workplace if they don’t feel as though their participation, efforts, and insights are valued.

Organizations that champion effective facilitation as part of their company culture are actively shaping an environment that makes employees feel as though they are truly part of their team. Feeling this sense of psychological safety allows all stakeholders to feel comfortable enough to put their all into their work.

6. Encouraging Team Competency

Leaders that excel in facilitation techniques are able to engender a sense of self-efficacy in their team. Oftentimes, leaders fail to go beyond methods of coaching to help their team members understand and internalize pertinent information. Effective facilitation helps to bridge the gap of competency in an organization.

Leaders must encourage team members on the path toward true competency. This approach to facilitation is essential to incorporate a culture where facilitation skills are easily transferable.

Lauren Green, Executive Director of Dancing with Markers, shares that the path to competency starts with meeting employees where they are:

“First, you’re unconsciously incompetent. You’re unconscious. And then you become aware [of] your incompetence, and then you’re consciously competent. And then you start to grow your skills. So then you’re consciously competent. And then when you don’t have to think about it anymore, then you’re unconsciously competent.”

Facilitation with a Purpose

Just as the purpose is a powerful tool in leading a meeting, it’s also essential in building effective facilitation skills in others. Intentionally investing in facilitation training allows organizations the opportunity to teach, practice, and embody the structured techniques of effective facilitation.

The nature of effective facilitation is that nothing can take place without purpose. From managing meetings to running projects, leading with the fundamentals of facilitation helps every facet of an organization run smoothly.

Lead with purpose by focusing on the following effective facilitation practices:

Listening first and speaking second
Leading with effective communication
Managing time and tracking deadlines
Asking intentional questions
Inviting others to engage
Creating a focused and psychologically safe environment
Providing unbiased objectivity
Acting as a decider in group discussions

Effective facilitation benefits everyone, whether you’re leading a meeting or encouraging employees to take their leadership skills to the next level. At Voltage Control, we help leaders and teams harness the power of facilitation. Contact us to learn how to apply these fundamentals to your organization.

Article originally published on VoltageControl.com

Image credit: Pexels

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Transparency in Innovation

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Why Openness Builds Trust

Transparency in Innovation

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

For too long, the default stance of innovation has been one of secrecy. Organizations have operated under the assumption that competitive advantage is best preserved by erecting walls of intellectual property and treating consumers as passive recipients of finished products. This closed model, built on proprietary control, is fundamentally incompatible with the demands of the modern, interconnected world. The fear is palpable: If we show our hand, a competitor will steal our core idea. But as a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that this fear is misplaced. The single most critical, non-technical factor separating resilient market leaders from fragile incumbents is Transparency. Innovation thrives in the open, and in today’s economy, strategic openness is the foundation of trust.

Transparency in innovation means proactively sharing the why, the how, and the results of your creative endeavors. It involves exposing your development process, admitting to failures, disclosing the data you use, and inviting external scrutiny. This requires a courageous shift in mindset, transforming the consumer from a passive buyer into an engaged partner. This shift creates a powerful, self-correcting feedback loop of trust that accelerates quality, anticipates ethical pitfalls, and builds a powerful, resilient community around your brand, making the entire organization more anti-fragile.

The Three Dividends of Transparent Innovation

Adopting transparency is not a moral obligation; it is a superior business strategy — a Hybrid Competitive Advantage — that delivers three quantifiable dividends:

1. Enhanced Integrity and Algorithmic Resilience: By exposing your processes, you invite ethical audit. This is paramount in the age of AI. Algorithmic Transparency — explaining how a machine learning model arrived at a decision — is vital for regulatory compliance and public acceptance. Openness forces integrity, catching unintended biases or data misuse before they become a public crisis. This proactive ethical diligence shields the brand from future reputational damage.
2. Accelerated Improvement via Feedback: When you share prototypes or development roadmaps early, you don’t just get passive validation; you gain immediate, diverse, and high-quality feedback. The community effectively becomes an unpaid, global testing and quality assurance team, vastly accelerating the iterative cycle and ensuring the final product is truly human-centered. This speed is IP protection in itself.
3. Deepened Stakeholder Trust: In an era of rampant skepticism, consumers, investors, and employees value authenticity above all. Transparency serves as a powerful signal of confidence and honesty. It communicates: “We believe in what we are doing enough to show you the messy middle.” This conviction translates directly into loyalty and a willingness to forgive inevitable missteps, leading to higher customer lifetime value (CLV).

“Secrecy guards your vulnerability; Transparency guards your resilience. The choice is between short-term control and long-term trust.”

Case Study 1: Buffer – Radical Transparency in Operational Innovation

The Challenge:

Buffer, a social media management company, operated in a crowded, competitive market where secrecy around funding and operational decisions was the norm. The challenge was finding a non-technical way to stand out and build extraordinary trust with employees and customers.

The Transparent Solution:

Buffer embraced Radical Transparency as its core operating principle. They went far beyond standard innovation disclosure, sharing sensitive company data like their public salary formula, financial health (revenue, expenses, funding), and detailed decision-making frameworks. For product innovation, this meant openly discussing the trade-offs and constraints that shaped their roadmap, explaining why one feature was prioritized over another and how resources were allocated.

The Trust-Driven Impact:

This openness fostered deep trust, leading to extremely high employee engagement and low attrition. Externally, it positioned Buffer as an ethical, reliable partner. Customers became deeply committed not just to the tool, but to the company’s values, proving that sharing sensitive operational data—the ultimate act of transparency—can be a powerful, non-replicable competitive advantage that builds profound organizational resilience.

Case Study 2: Patagonia – Transparency in the Value Chain and Impact

The Challenge:

As a global apparel company, Patagonia faces immense complexity in its supply chain, making it difficult to guarantee that every fiber and factory meets its stringent environmental and labor standards. The pressure for perfect, unquestionable sustainability is practically unattainable.

The Transparent Solution:

Patagonia chooses not to hide its complexity but to expose it through Impact Transparency, most notably with its Footprint Chronicles. This online resource publicly details the environmental and social impact of every product, from raw material extraction to final delivery. This includes disclosing manufacturing locations and, crucially, admitting to shortcomings where materials or processes do not yet meet ideal standards. They use transparency not as a claim of perfection, but as a commitment to innovation and improvement, often inviting customers to join the journey.

The Trust-Driven Impact:

By being honest about the “messy middle” of their value chain, Patagonia has earned exceptional trust and loyalty. Consumers trust the brand not because it claims perfection, but because it is willing to disclose its imperfections and actively work to fix them. This transparency drives purchasing decisions, allows Patagonia to command a price premium, and ensures that their innovation efforts—such as switching to regenerative materials—are seen as genuine commitments, not just superficial marketing.

The New Mandate: Leading with Proactive Openness

The age of opaque innovation is over. Today, secrecy is interpreted not as strategic prudence, but as a lack of confidence or, worse, something to hide. Trust, the most valuable currency in business, is earned through exposure and vulnerability.

Leaders must therefore champion a culture of Proactive Transparency. This means designing innovation processes where ethical disclosure, early feedback loops, and open communication about both success and failure are default settings. By opening your innovation process—sharing the data, revealing the constraints, and celebrating the collective effort — you not only build a better product faster, but you forge an unbreakable bond of trust with your employees, partners, and customers. Transparency is not just good for people; it’s essential for modern, resilient innovation.

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: Flickr

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