I share my definition of innovation and the role of value in innovation in this clip from one of my many innovation speeches. This clip is from a corporate event to kick off the next phase of innovation efforts at FCS America.
I am the author of the popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons, and advise clients beginning their innovation journey or seeking to enhance the innovation efforts they’ve begun already.
I am an experienced innovation keynote speaker at conferences and private innovation events for corporations, government, and other organizations, and also deliver a two-day Masterclass around the content in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire to organizations around the world.
To book me for your conference or event, please click here.
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A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an innovation speaker at an event, I noticed a large building by the side of the freeway advertising Indoor Sky Diving. The sign peaked my curiosity to investigate what indoor sky diving could possibly mean and so I set up a visit with iFly Seattle co-founder Lysa Adams.
My visit surfaced three key innovation-related concepts I would like to discuss:
Challenging Orthodoxies
Changing Perspectives
Tunnel Vision
1. Challenging Orthodoxies
Rowan and I talk a lot here on Innovation Excellence about how challenging orthodoxies is one way to identify insights to drive innovation efforts, and it made me wonder:
Have they successfully challenged the skydiving orthodoxies that you need the following to experience the thrill of skydiving or ‘flying’?
To jump out of an airplane
To carry and deploy a parachute
To learn several parachuting skills before progressing to sky diving
What if you could experience experience sky diving without the parachute and the airplane and the training?
Well, after my visit it was clear that iFly and SkyVenture have successfully challenged these orthodoxies with the indoor flying centers they’ve built here in Seattle and 22 other locations around the world including Hollywood, Dubai, and Singapore.
The facility itself seemed to be well-designed, recycling the air through two fan-driven intersecting circles of air that are accelerated from about 30mph through the basement up to 100-160 mph through the chamber up and back around again. Integrated into the space around the necessary apparatus are meeting rooms for corporate team-building events and party rooms for private functions. Organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Boeing, and the military have used the facility. It’s a pretty a cool facility and it was even a fair amount of fun just to watch others fly from the integrated viewing area.
So what is indoor skydiving and how can you experience the thrill of skydiving and ‘flying’ without the plane or the parachute? Well here is a video that shows an amateur learning the basic skills in their first session:
In a vertical wind tunnel people are able to fly in any of the four different skydiving positions – stomach, back, sitting, and head down (after mastering the previous one) – supported by wind speeds typically of 100 miles per hour or higher (an indoor hurricane). The vertical wind tunnel at iFly Seattle is state of the art, allowing wind speeds of up to 160 miles per hour.
I had the opportunity to learn how to fly and try it out for a couple of minutes, and I looked pretty much like the novices in the video above. I was flying successfully by my second minute, floating up beyond the reach of the instructor temporarily, and never felt any of the fear I might have felt if I had done my ‘flying’ by jumping out of an airplane. It was an amazing experience, and I could see how it could be very addictive.
So other than challenging orthodoxies, what does any of this have to do with innovation?
2. Changing Perspectives
Innovation often comes from looking at things from a different perspective, or from observing something potentially valuable to your target customers in another context that you can adapt and bring to them as a new solution offering.
This change in perspective can come from using creativity tools like Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ or other tools like mind mapping, brainstorming, brainwriting, SCAMPER, SIT, or from building and tapping into a Global Sensing Network.
Or it can come from physically changing your orientation. In the case of sky diving, sometimes sky diving teams have to get down on their bellies on wheelie boards on the concrete to show each other the tricks they plan to do in the air or in the vertical wind tunnel. It’s hard for the brain to imagine in a vertical orientation what is going to take place in a horizontal orientation, and this simple physical shift makes all the difference.
If it doesn’t come natural to our brains to imagine the horizontal from the vertical, imagine the trouble our brains have imagining different business contexts without being immersed in them. We often have to go see the other context for ourselves as a result, but a Global Sensing Network can help avoid this need to some extent. But this requirement to see things for ourselves highlights something very important. Because changing perspectives presents a challenge for our human brains, it presents an opportunity for us to work to achieve competitive separation.
Imagine the competitive advantage your organization could build over the other organizations in your context if you could build up your perception shifting muscles to recognize the relevant challenges and opportunities in other geographies and contexts faster than the competition?
3. Tunnel Vision
Do you remember what is like the first time you learned to drive a car? Do you remember how much you had to focus on every little detail from how hard you were pushing the accelerator to how fast you were moving the steering wheel left or right? But how much attention do you pay to these things now?
It came to me as I was staring at the vertical wind tunnel and talking with Lysa Adams about the challenges that beginners have when they learn to jump out of a plane and deploy a parachute, that when it comes to the human brain we have tunnel vision while learning a new skill. This tunnel vision, caused by our lack of experience, causes us to focus on a very small subset of parameters in the environment and makes it impossible for us to notice a lot of the other things going on around us or to focus our attention more broadly.
When it comes to innovation, most organizations suffer from innovation tunnel vision because as they look to involve more employees in their innovation efforts, they don’t give their employees the opportunity to learn and practice new innovation skills. Instead in many organizations we expect employees to just be innovative.
When it comes to creativity skills that tap into our right brain capacity, it is important to remember that as we master right brain skills they move to the left brain. And, when your left brain is occupied, then the right brain can go into a more creative mode. This is why you have many of your most creative ideas in the shower, or while you are driving, etc.
When the left brain is occupied it is less likely to intervene and criticize the ideas your right brain comes up with while they are embryonic and partially formed and kill them before you develop them further. When the left brain is not jumping in and trying to determine whether the ideas are logical or not, the right brain can focus on pure creativity.
This is why it is so important to create things like a common language of innovation, a shared innovation vision/strategy/goals, and to have a structured innovation process. If these things are all very clearly understood across the organization, then your innovation tunnel vision opens up a bit wider to allow you to identify more relevant insights and come up with better ideas. But you can’t stop there. If you want to engage all employees in innovation in your organization (or even a subset), and you want to open up the innovation tunnel vision in your organization even wider, then you must provide innovation training to every employee in the organization (or your chosen subset).
The faster you can get your employees to a level of comfort with your innovation language, vision/strategy/goals, process, and tools, the sooner they will be driving innovation with their knees, eating a Big Mac, and changing your innovation soundtrack – all with the windows down letting in new stimulus and fresh air into your innovation efforts.
Every organization has innovation tunnel vision, the question is how wide or narrow your field of vision is and how much you’re doing to pry the blinders farther apart.
Conclusion
We all are innovative in our own way, which is why I created the Nine Innovation Roles. But at the same time, we all have a certain level of innovation capacity, and if we develop that capacity we can achieve much more. If you want to get better at innovation as an individual or as an organization, you must learn new skills and you must practice them. Otherwise you will be an innovation belly flier forever. Thanks to Darren (my instructor at iFly Seattle – who used to be involved with Cirque du Soleil) and to Lysa Adams I was able to fly for the first time, but if I want to progress to back flying or sit flying on the way to head down flying and doing tricks, I must practice – in the same way that you must practice innovation in your organization. To conclude, I’ll leave you with this video of one of the instructors showing off and some team flying:
If you ever get the chance to try out indoor skydiving or ‘flying’, I highly recommend it as an amazing, fun experience. The cost runs about $60 for some basic instruction and a couple of instructor monitored flights (without the whole parachute or jumping out of the plane part). Happy innovating (or flying)!
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By now, if you’re in marketing you’re probably familiar with the concept of customer lifetime value. Put simply, it’s the idea that a customer is worth to the organization not just the value of a single transaction, but the collection of all of the transactions that they might make during their relationship with you. And when speaking of customer lifetime value, we generally don’t talk about any single customer, but speak about their value in aggregate, averaging out the high value (many, many purchases) and low value customers (one or a few purchases).
The concept is usually linked to discussions of how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer and whether a particular advertising or marketing effort is worth undertaking.The concept has been even applied to non-profits (lifetime donor value) and even to social media ROI.
But what’s a good outside innovation partner worth?
As I was speaking with several of the innovation leaders at Intuit on their campus in Mountain View last year, it came to me that organizations should be seeking to build and strengthen relationships with their customers, suppliers, and other potential innovation partners in ways similar to their approach to traditional relationship marketing.
Having helped several clients with their relationship marketing strategies, it seems to me that there is no reason why the same principles can’t or shouldn’t be applied to your potential innovation partner community.
After all, as more and more companies begin to understand and engage in the practice of open innovation, then there will be an advantage accumulated by the organizations that do a good job of building strong and profitable relationships with the most passionate and prolific suppliers, customers, academics, etc. over those organizations that don’t.
What organization out there wouldn’t want to accumulate an innovation advantage, a growth advantage, a relationship advantage over their competitors?
But the real questions are of course:
Do you have the required internal innovation capability built already to support open innovation?
Are you engaging in open innovation already? Or are your competitors?
What are you doing to build strong relationships with you potential innovation partners?
Are you tasking skilled relationship marketers with creating and maintaining these conversations and building these relationships?
So, do you? Are you?
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I’ve been talking for a while now as an innovation speaker how crucial value is to innovation. It is no consequence as a result that value sits at the center of my definition of innovation:
Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into solutions valued above every existing alternative – and widely adopted.
In this definition you will also see that I draw a distinction between useful and valuable, and I develop it further in my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – the following is an excerpt on the topic from the book:
“Often usefulness comes from what a product or service does for you, and value comes from how it does it. If you’re looking to truly deliver innovative products and services into the marketplace, then once you succeed at the designing and developing the ‘what’, don’t forget to also focus on achieving excellence in the ‘how’.”
One of my favorite example of the useful versus valuable distinction is the mousetrap. Despite the hundreds or thousands of patent applications submitted every year for new mousetrap designs, most people still purchase the same simple snapping mousetrap that you see in cartoons and that has been around for a hundred years. The mousetrap is a great example of how easy it is to generate innovation investment opportunities and how difficult it is to create something that is truly valuable.
This distinction between useful and valuable is one that you must seek to understand and by turning this into a lens through which you can look at the potential of your innovation investment opportunities, the higher the return you will have from your innovation portfolio.
Speaking of which, maybe we should stop talking about idea generation, idea management and idea evaluation and instead begin thinking about ideas as innovation investment opportunities. Just changing the language we use in talking about innovation can change the way we think about things and the outcomes that we are able to generate. The images we choose and the language we use is incredibly important and we’ll discuss this in more detail here in a moment. But first I would like to share my innovation equation to counter the popular (innovation = idea + execution) equation. I like to say that:
Innovation = Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation
Now you will notice that the components are multiplicative not additive. Do one or two well and one poorly and it doesn’t necessarily add up to a positive result. Doing one poorly and two well can still doom your innovation investment to failure. Let’s look at the three equation components in brief:
Value Creation is pretty self-explanatory. Your innovation investment must create incremental or completely new value large enough to overcome the switching costs of moving to your new solution from the old solution (including the ‘Do Nothing Solution’). New value can be created by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or create new psychological or emotional benefits.
Value Access could also be thought of as friction reduction. How easy do you make it for customers and consumers to access the value you’ve created. How well has the product or service been designed to allow people to access the value easily? How easy is it for the solution to be created? How easy is it for people to do business with you?
Value Translation is all about helping people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Value translation is also about understanding where on a continuum between the need for explanation and education that your solution falls. Incremental innovations can usually just be explained to people because they anchor to something they already understand, but radical or disruptive innovations inevitably require some level of education (often far in advance of the launch).
Done really well, value translation also helps to communicate how easy it will be for customers and consumers to exchange their old solution for the new solution. My favorite example of poor value translation and brilliant value translation come from the same company and the same product launch – The Apple iPad. It’s hard to believe, but Apple actually announced the iPad with the following statement:
“Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”
This set off a firestorm of criticism and put the launch at risk of failure. But amazingly Apple managed to come up with the Out of Home (OOH) advertisements with a person with their feet up on a couch and the iPad on their lap (see above) by the time the product shipping. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this particular picture will probably end up being worth billions of dollars to Apple.
Never Forget!
Value creation is important, but you can’t succeed without equal attention being paid to both value access and value translation…
Because innovation is all about value…
Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation = Success!
Picking up where my hugely popular article ‘Rise of the Social Business Architect‘ (PDF) leaves off, I thought I would examine the world of web design in a world where the tools of social media are becoming increasingly important and integrated into how business gets done (and even how searching and search results are done).
When it comes to putting up a web site, most entrepreneurs and marketers unfortunately look at it from their perspective (what do I want to say?) instead of from their potential customers’ perspective (what do they want or need to know?). This causes most entrepreneurs and marketers to start building web sites for their new product or service in the same basic way (a push marketing approach).
First, they go out and hire a web designer to build them a web site, only to have the web designer ask them three main questions:
1. What kind of visual design are you looking for? (…and what are your favorite web sites and why?)
2. Do you need the web site to run on any particular technology platform?
3. What kinds of content do you have? (…and what is your menu structure going to be?)
The third question often provokes a deer in the headlights kind of response – “Oh shoot, we have to write something” – and then after the entrepreneur or marketer recovers from the shock they think about what they want to say.
The entrepreneur or marketer hastily runs off and sketches out a set of pages that they want to have (or they use another site as a template) and then they write (or hire someone to write) copy for each page, and when the copy is written and the design is complete they have someone build the web site using the design and content as a guide.
The end result is a web site that stands alone as a new domain in the digital wilderness, disconnected from the rest of the digital world. This may be great for putting on business cards and email signatures, but the chances are low of someone finding the new web site and actually caring about the product or service.
Frustrated that nobody is coming to the new web site, maybe the marketer or entrepreneur creates a Facebook page or a Twitter account, but then those likely sit there – lacking a clear purpose or a point of conversation.
Still trying to provoke activity on their web site, maybe the marketer/entrepreneur starts to create deeper level content that their potential customers might actually care about, with the potential of moving them along the customer purchasing journey, and put it on the site. When few people find the new content that the marketer/entrepreneur created at great time and/or expense, maybe they buy some pay-per-click advertising (PPC) to drive people to it, wondering when the financial bleeding will stop.
Finally, maybe they place the content off-site in places where potential customers actually gather and might find it (and find the new web site as a result).
What would happen if you flipped the traditional push marketing web design paradigm around and used a pull marketing approach instead?
I would contend that is exactly what you should do if you want to build a social business, and to prove it, over the next couple of months I will flip the traditional web site design model on its and head and use an upside down social web design model for my new domain in the wilderness – http://b2bpull.com – which will be the home of a new digital agency focused on b2b pull marketing strategy and execution services.
So what does an upside down social web design approach look like?
Well, the first key is to keep the customer at the center of your plans, not the product or service you plan to offer. My current web site – https://bradenkelley.com – is all about me – my thinking, my services, my creations, etc. I am the product, and I sit at the center. The web site in this evolving case study – http://b2bpull.com – will be built with b2b marketing managers at the center, and now I’ll lay out what the steps in a pull marketing approach to social web site design should be.
Blackjack!
Here are the 21 steps to building an Upside Down Social Web Design:
While you are exploring what product or service to offer to potential customers, also explore how they shop for the kind of product or service you are going to offer. Seek to understand where their areas of confusion are, and what kinds of information they seek out to help them make the decisions about which companies to consider and which products or services they are interested in learning more about.
Create a simple landing page that tells people what is coming soon, and that contains a simple form asking people what they’d like to know more about. If you go to http://b2bpull.com now you will find not a web site, but a landing page asking people what they’d like to know about b2b pull marketing. So, please let me know what you’d like to know about using content to drive an increase in inbound sales leads, and I’ll work to build answers to share with the world.
Create a simple logo (you can change this later) that is a square image (this is for use as a profile photo in any profiles you create – i.e. Twitter/Facebook)
If your prospective customers are on Twitter, then create an account on Twitter – if they are not, then skip this step. At a minimum, populate your profile with a description of your product or service, a profile image, the URL of your landing page, and a background image to make your profile more visually engaging and distinctive. Send a tweet or two letting people know what you’re planning to do and inquiring what people would like to know more about (as it relates to your specialty area). Do research to find out who else tweets interesting things about your specialty and start following them. Retweet one or two interesting things that they share (every day) – be sure and use appropriate #hashtags in your re-tweets to help people find them.
If your prospective customers are on Facebook, then create a Facebook page and at a minimum populate it with a profile photo, a cover image, and an about us. If your prospective customers do not spend time on Facebook, then skip this step. Add links to the one or two interesting things that you find on Twitter each day that relate to your specialty area. That will start giving you some interesting content on your Facebook page (instead of it staying blank), feed it into your fans’ Facebook content streams, and give people an idea of what to expect in the future.
Look for interesting groups on Linkedin that focus on your specialty area and join them. Consider starting your own Linkedin group. See what people are sharing in the groups you join. Consider sharing some of what you find on Twitter in the discussions area of the groups that you join (or create) to add value.
Scour the web for sites and blogs in your specialty area that are ideally independent of any one company, publish interesting content, and have multiple contributing authors. Ask your friends and network connections in your specialty area for recommendations too. Use Alexa, Compete, and other tools to identify which of the sites get the most traffic.
Refer to your research in step #1 to identify which topics in your specialty area that customers look for information on the most to help them further their progress along their purchasing journey. Hopefully one or more of these topics you will have deep knowledge and expertise on. Commit to writing a white paper on one of these topics.
See if one or more of the sites in step #7 will allow you publish an article announcing your research effort for this white paper on their web site in order to build interest and hopefully participation in this effort.
Write the white paper (ideally with contributions from current or prospective customers), and when complete, create one or more articles for digital publication from each white paper.
Add another simple form to your landing page for people to fill out with name/company/title/email/phone in order to download the white paper (make phone optional) and ask their permission (with a check box) to send them information about an upcoming webinar to discuss its findings.
Create an electronic presentation to share the findings of the white paper you’ve created. Be sure to embed contact details in it and a link to your landing page (which will become your web site later).
Create accounts on presentation sharing sites like Slideshare and Scribd and share the presentation you’ve created. Be sure that you fill out your profile on these sites and include a link to your landing page as part of your profile if possible.
Inquire with the most promising sites identified in step #7 to find out if they accept article submissions and submit one or more of the articles you created from your white paper.
Identify short snippets from the white paper and articles that work well as quotes or insights and will fit into status updates on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, or other communities where it makes sense to share them. Be sure and include a shortened url (bit.ly, su.pr, ow.ly, etc.) to the article, presentation, or white paper.
Look for professional associations and complimentary vendors in your specialty area that conduct regular webinars and ask if they would be interested in doing a webinar with you to share the findings of your white paper with their members or current/prospective customers. If you do a webinar, be sure that they record the webinar and share the link with you to the recording (and hopefully the email list of attendees). Check to see if they can provide a recording of the webinar in a video format that you can share. If you can’t find someone to do a webinar with to share your findings, consider doing one yourself. While having a large number of people attend live is helpful, what is more important here is the recording (you can help potential customers find this 24/7/365).
Add the link to the webinar recording to your landing page.
Create an account on YouTube and possibly also on Vimeo and populate your profile in a similar manner to Twitter (not neglecting to link to relevant assets). Upload the video file from the webinar (if you were able to get one), plus add it to your Facebook page if you’ve created one. If you are comfortable in front of the camera, consider recording a separate video segment highlighting the key findings from your white paper to upload to your video channels.
Be sure and share links to the white paper, the webinar, the webinar recording, and any articles you created from the white paper through your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and any other communities linked to your subject matter.
Repeat as many times as necessary until you have enough content to build your web site.
Last but not least, design and build your web site, incorporating all of the content elements that you created. Not only will it be easier to build the web site because you have already built a lot of the content required to populate any design your web designer might come up with, but the quality of your web design may improve and be more social because the designer will have a clearer idea of what you are selling and the goals you are trying to achieve with your new web site.
The importance of social media in the internet ecosystem is only continuing to grow, and so it is time to design web sites in a different, more social way. The way that people buy things, especially more complicated products and services with longer cycles (particularly B2B products) is changing as well. This will make marketing organizations focus more on pull marketing and less on push marketing. This will force marketers and entrepreneurs to focus less on building beautiful, flash-driven web designs and more on building valuable, socially-driven, content-rich ecosystems (of which the web site is only a part).
In short, the future of marketing belongs to marketers who are good at creating social pull.
So, how strong is your social pull?
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If the innovation war is just beginning, then you need to make sure you’re fighting it outside your organization — not inside.
The old way of succeeding in business was to hire the most clever, educated, experienced and motivated people you could afford and then direct them to come up with the best customer solutions possible, organize and execute their production and marketing predictably and efficiently, and do their best to outmaneuver the competition.
But the battlefield of business success is changing. Future business success will be built upon the ability to:
Utilize expert communities.
Identify and gather technology trend information, customer insights and local social mutations from around the globe.
Mobilize the organization in organic ways to utilize resources and information often beyond its control.
Still organize and execute production and marketing predictably and efficiently in the middle of all this complexity.
At the same time, market leaders will be increasingly determined not by their ability to outmaneuver the competition in a known market, but by their ability to identify and solve for the key unknowns in markets that will continue to become more global and less defined. Future market leaders will be those organizations that build superior global sensing networks and do a better job at making sense of the inputs from these networks to select the optimal actionable insights to drive innovation.
By this point, hopefully you are asking yourself two questions:
Have you ever wondered why with all of the people trying to innovate, more innovation isn’t created?
I’ll give you a hint…
Often, something gets lost in the translation between what people think their customers want and what their real desires are.
Part of the reason so many people fail to innovate is that they fail to recognize that ideas and innovation are not the same thing. Ideas are easy, innovation is hard. For ideas to translate into innovation they must be based on unique insights that unlock new customer value.
In their book The Other Side of Innovation, Chris Trimble and Vijay Govindarajan assert that:
Innovation = Idea + Execution
Successful innovation is based on how effective firms are at execution, and that ideas aren’t as important as execution. But the equation could be better because many companies are good at generating ideas and at executing their ideas, but are still bad at innovation. The problem is not that companies don’t know how to execute, but that they often fail to identify a unique insight that unlocks sufficient new customer value to displace existing solutions.
So let’s modify the equation to be:
Innovation = Insight x Execution
The equation improves by multiplying the two elements instead of adding them because if the insight is not unique or does not unlock new customer value, then even the best execution doesn’t equal innovation.
But even this modified equation doesn’t go far enough. Instead it should be something more like this:
In 2011, I was a regular contributor to the American Express OPEN Forum on the topic of innovation. Here is the first one of that year:
Have you ever woken up in a cold sweat in the middle night from a nightmare focused on you throwing a big party that nobody comes to? Or, in real life, have you ever thrown a big launch party for a new product or service, made a lot of noise with advertising, marketing and public relations – only to have the sales returns be anemic at best?
According to a Linton, Matysiak & Wilkes study from 1997 titled Marketing, Witchcraft or Science, the success rate for new product introductions in the food industry is only between 20 and 30 percent. But, there is a key insight inside that data not to be ignored. The results highlight the power of market research and strategic marketing:
The bottom 20,000 U.S. food companies in the study combined for an 11.6 percent success rate.
The top 20 U.S. companies in the study enjoy a 76 percent success rate for new product introductions.
Sure, the 1997 data is coming from a single industry that many of you may not be in, but other data I’ve seen from the Product Development Management Association (PDMA) and other sources are similar and reinforce the importance of market research and strategic marketing. Worded another way, success in the market is often:
In support of my crowdfunding project over on IndieGoGo I am offering an incredible deal to the first TEN (10) individuals to grab this perk:
In exchange for each $500 investment, the first TEN (10) people anywhere in the world will get:
One of only TEN (10) spots in an online seminar where I will personally train you on how to facilitate a Nine Innovation Roles workshop or public seminar
A share of any Nine Innovation Roles Workshop leads that I can’t fulfill myself
A Nine Innovation Roles Seminar Pack – which includes TEN (10) Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tools to use with your first set of workshop participants (a $199.99 value)
This is a great opportunity to add the Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop to your roster of innovation services that you offer to clients. You should be able to charge between $2,000-$5,000 + expenses for each of the sessions you facilitate depending on the length and amount of custom content, so you should recoup your $500 investment after running your first workshop or public seminar.
The Nine Innovation Roles diagnostic workshop will create a fun, interactive experience for innovation teams or organizations to use to help people better understand what roles they fill on innovation projects, why the team’s or organization’s innovation efforts are failing, and how they can together improve the innovation performance of their teams or organization.
So, grab this Amazing Innovation Keynote and Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Deal and help your innovation teams be more successful in the future. Don’t wait. Be one of only TEN (10) people worldwide to get this perk, or pre-order the seminar kit and run run workshops or seminars on your own.
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It’s a wedding proposal from an actor in my hometown to his now bride to be, and is a great example of re-imagining a traditional activity in our society – the marriage proposal.
The things I love about it are not the actual creative execution but the principles exemplified by the experience:
If you have a great product or service, people will be willing to help you sell it
If it’s really good, they may go out of their way to help you sell it – or even do so without asking your permission
Oregon fosters creativity 😉
Focus on more than the transaction – Make magic!
Skills can from other contexts can be valuable to the current challenge
Have fun with everything you do and you’ll have better results 🙂
Don’t just ask people to help, make it fun to help
Give people something to talk about and feel the love spread 🙂
Even if your customers or community do the sales pitch – YOU’VE GOT TO CLOSE
What magic are you making?
Are there boring transactional parts of your business that could use a little love and magic?
Don’t be afraid to invest in reducing the friction in your adoption process. You’ll improve the value access performance in your innovation equation:
Innovation Success (or even business success)
= Value Creation
+ Value Access
+ Value Translation
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A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an 
It came to me as I was staring at the vertical wind tunnel and talking with Lysa Adams about the challenges that beginners have when they learn to jump out of a plane and deploy a parachute, that when it comes to the human brain we have tunnel vision while learning a new skill. This tunnel vision, caused by our lack of experience, causes us to focus on a very small subset of parameters in the environment and makes it impossible for us to notice a lot of the other things going on around us or to focus our attention more broadly.
By now, if you’re in marketing you’re probably familiar with the concept of 
I’ve been talking for a while now as an 
Picking up where my hugely popular article ‘
If the innovation war is just beginning, then you need to make sure you’re fighting it outside your organization — not inside.
Have you ever wondered why with all of the people trying to innovate, more innovation isn’t created?
In 2011, I was a regular contributor to the 
