Category Archives: Open Innovation

Q: What is the most critical human-centered component of the Safe Harbor structure?

The most critical human-centered component is the **Return Ticket** policy. This guarantees that employees who dedicate themselves to high-risk ventures (which are likely to fail) are guaranteed a role of equivalent standing and prestige upon the venture's termination, thereby protecting their career and attracting the best internal talent.

Structuring a Safe Harbor for Internal Ventures

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Protecting the Pioneer

LAST UPDATED: November 24, 2025 at 9:53AM

Structuring a Safe Harbor for Internal Ventures

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

You’ve done the hard work of articulating the need for breakthrough innovation. You’ve convinced your leadership that calculated risk is necessary for survival. But now comes the critical structural challenge: where, exactly, will that risk-taking happen? If you launch a nascent venture directly into the core business, the company’s powerful Organizational Immune System – driven by optimizing for efficiency, quarterly targets, and predictable profit – will immediately attack and ultimately destroy the venture.

Innovation pioneers need protection. They need a Safe Harbor — a dedicated, ring-fenced organizational structure designed to shelter early-stage ventures from the metrics, bureaucracy, and conservative culture of the successful core business. This is not just a physical space; it’s a temporary zone of psychological and operational safety where teams can move quickly, fail cheaply, and generate the definitive learning required to validate truly disruptive business models.

The Safe Harbor is the structural counterpart to the concept of Decoupling Failure. If Decoupling Failure is the philosophical guardrail that protects the innovator’s career, the Safe Harbor is the concrete organizational infrastructure that makes that protection real and enforceable by law of the land.

The Three-Dimensional Structure of a Safe Harbor

A well-structured Safe Harbor is built on three key dimensions of separation, ensuring the venture team operates under a different rulebook:

1. Metric Separation: Funding for Learning, Not Profit

Ventures within the Safe Harbor cannot be measured by the core business’s metrics (Revenue, Quarterly P&L, Cost-Efficiency). They must be measured by Learning Velocity and Validation Milestones.

Early Stage (Phase 1: Discovery): Metrics are qualitative and focus on problem validation: Number of customer interviews completed, confidence level in problem statement, cost-per-learning-dividend.
Mid Stage (Phase 2: Incubation): Metrics shift to quantitative validation: Retention rate of early adopters, willingness-to-pay validation, cost of customer acquisition (CoCA) hypothesis.
Late Stage (Phase 3: Scaling): Only when validation is mature do metrics transition to resemble core business metrics, such as Unit Economics and Growth Rate, preparing the venture for controlled re-entry.

2. Process Separation: Immunity from Bureaucracy

The venture team must be exempt from the vast majority of standard corporate processes that are optimized for scale, not speed. This requires setting up distinct operational pathways:

Procurement: Granting fast-track, small-dollar procurement authority to buy rapid prototyping tools or access niche external consultants without a six-week RFP process.
Compliance & Legal: Assigning a single, dedicated legal counsel who understands the difference between operational risk (low) and market risk (high) for a prototype, allowing for rapid deployment of minimum viable products (MVPs) into a controlled test environment.
Hiring: Providing authority to hire niche, often expensive, external talent (freelancers, experts) quickly without passing through the central HR pipeline’s lengthy approval cycle. Speed is paramount in the exploration phase.

3. Personnel Separation: Protecting the Pioneer’s Career

This is the essential human-centered dimension. The innovator must know that dedicating themselves to a high-risk venture—which has a high probability of failure—will not destroy their career. The Safe Harbor must implement a Return Ticket policy:

Any employee moving into the Safe Harbor must be guaranteed a role of equivalent standing, compensation, and prestige upon the venture’s termination (whether successful or failed). This protection allows the best internal talent, those who are already highly valued by the core business, to engage in high-risk work without undue personal fear. You cannot build the future with second-string players.

Case Study 1: The Insurance Giant and the Digital Greenhouse

Challenge: Slow Market Response to Emerging Fintech Threats

A global insurance firm was seeing its core products commoditized by agile fintech startups, but its internal development cycle took 24 months to launch anything new due to the heavy gravity of regulatory approval, IT integration, and committee sign-off.

Safe Harbor Intervention: The Digital Greenhouse

The firm created a Digital Greenhouse, reporting directly to the CEO, not a divisional president. This Greenhouse was structured as a Safe Harbor with three key features:

Controlled Metrics: Ventures were initially funded with a “Learning Capital” grant. Success for the first nine months was measured only by the volume and quality of validated customer data, demonstrating definitive learning (Metric Separation).
Operational Carve-out: Teams were given their own small, isolated IT environment (a sandbox) and fast-track access to a dedicated external law firm for quick regulatory opinions, bypassing internal compliance queues (Process Separation).
Return Ticket Policy: A talent exchange policy was established guaranteeing Greenhouse staff a lateral or promotional move back to the core business upon project completion, provided their tenure was marked by rigorous process, regardless of outcome (Personnel Separation).

The Human-Centered Lesson:

The Greenhouse teams successfully launched three validated MVPs within one year. Critically, two ventures failed quickly, saving millions in investment. The single successful venture—a niche micro-insurance product—was quickly scaled. The company realized that the structural safety allowed high-value engineers and product managers to risk their reputations on exploration, proving that protection unlocks velocity.

Case Study 2: The Energy Company and the Decentralized Skunkworks

Challenge: Internal Resistance to Renewables and Decarbonization

A traditional oil and gas company needed to diversify into renewable energy and decarbonization, but the core engineering and budgeting divisions were structurally resistant, viewing renewables as too low-margin and risky. The organizational immune system was rejecting the future.

Safe Harbor Intervention: The Decentralized Skunkworks

The company established a decentralized Skunkworks model, placing small venture teams outside the main campus and requiring them to utilize third-party vendors for almost all IT and HR services. This forced maximum separation:

Funding Separation: The Skunkworks was funded by a dedicated Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) arm, which had its own P&L and investment criteria. Ventures were treated as external investments, thus exempt from core budget approval cycles (Metric Separation).
Physical and Cultural Isolation: Placing the team in a separate city created immediate cultural distance, allowing them to establish their own agile workflow, collaboration tools, and cultural norms without being constantly judged by core employees (Process Separation).
Pioneer Protection: The CVC arm offered equity stakes and defined vesting schedules, compensating for the high financial risk, while the parent company offered career sponsorship for successful integration back into a senior sustainability role (Personnel Separation).

The Human-Centered Lesson:

The Skunkworks successfully developed a modular battery storage solution for industrial use. By forcing both physical and structural separation, the company allowed a completely different culture—one of speed, open collaboration, and high-risk tolerance—to flourish. The core business didn’t judge the pioneers; it watched and learned, eventually acquiring the most successful ventures and the talent back into the main fold at the point of scale, fundamentally shifting the company’s long-term strategy.

The Safe Harbor Imperative: The Temporary Bridge

The purpose of the Safe Harbor is not to permanently isolate innovation; it is to give ventures the time to achieve escape velocity before they are forced to integrate with the core. The success of the Safe Harbor is measured by how effectively it manages the transfer of the validated business model and the pioneer talent back into the core when they are strong enough to withstand organizational gravity.

Human-centered change leaders must view the Safe Harbor as a Strategic Incubation Unit. It is the necessary bridge between the world of optimization (now) and the world of exploration (the future). Structure precedes culture; protect the pioneer, and the innovation will follow.

“The greatest risk is not in funding a pioneer; the greatest risk is letting your existing success unintentionally sabotage your future success.”

Frequently Asked Questions About the Internal Safe Harbor

1. What is the primary function of an Internal Safe Harbor?

The primary function is to provide a ring-fenced organizational structure that shelters early-stage, high-risk ventures from the metrics, bureaucracy, and cultural immune system of the successful core business. It is a temporary zone of psychological and operational safety.

2. How is a Safe Harbor different from a standard R&D department?

A standard R&D department often works on incremental or adjacent innovation and is typically measured by output (patents, papers). A Safe Harbor focuses solely on disruptive business models, is measured by Learning Velocity and Market Validation, and is granted specific exemptions from core corporate processes (e.g., procurement, HR, compliance) that traditional R&D teams still follow.

3. What is the most critical human-centered component of the Safe Harbor structure?

The most critical human-centered component is the Return Ticket policy. This guarantees that employees who dedicate themselves to high-risk ventures (which are likely to fail) are guaranteed a role of equivalent standing and prestige upon the venture’s termination, thereby protecting their career and attracting the best internal talent.

Your first step toward creating a Safe Harbor: Identify one strategic, high-potential idea that is currently stalled in a core business unit. Structure a minimal viability team (2-3 people). Write a formal memo granting them a 6-month exemption from two specific corporate processes (e.g., procurement approval and standard time-tracking) and publicly state that their success will be measured by the quality of their customer interviews, not their P&L. This small, official act of separation is the beginning of the Safe Harbor.

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

Image credit: 1 of 1,000+ FREE quote slides for your meetings and presentations at http://misterinnovation.com

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Building a Gig-Innovation Model

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Leveraging the External Talent Cloud

LAST UPDATED: November 21, 2025 at 9:32AM

Building a Gig-Innovation Model

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The traditional model of innovation — locked within the four walls of the corporate R&D lab or internal project team — is no longer sufficient for navigating today’s complex, rapidly evolving landscape. In an era defined by accelerating technological shifts, diverse customer demands, and intense global competition, organizations cannot afford to limit their intellectual firepower to their fixed headcount. Instead, they must strategically tap into the vast, specialized skills, fresh perspectives, and scalable capacity residing in the External Talent Cloud. This is the essence of building a robust Gig-Innovation Model.

For the human-centered change leader, this isn’t about simply outsourcing tasks or replacing core employees; it’s about intelligently augmenting internal teams with precision-targeted external expertise, on-demand. The smartest organizations are those that can fluidly and ethically assemble the absolute best talent for any given innovation challenge, regardless of whether that talent is on the payroll or part of the global freelance ecosystem. This model unlocks unprecedented agility, cost-efficiency, and a breadth of expertise that no single enterprise could ever hope to maintain internally.

Embracing the Gig-Innovation Model is not just a trend; it’s a strategic imperative for organizations aiming to stay relevant, accelerate their pace of innovation, embed continuous change capabilities, and ultimately, thrive in the future.

The Limitations of Internal-Only Innovation

Relying solely on internal teams for innovation, while valuable for core competencies, presents several critical limitations that can hinder growth and agility:

Persistent Skill Gaps: Rapidly evolving fields (e.g., advanced AI ethics, quantum computing, specialized biotech applications) often require highly niche skills that are too expensive, too difficult, or too transient to hire and retain full-time.
Inherent Cognitive Bias: Internal teams, however brilliant and well-intentioned, can suffer from organizational groupthink, entrenched paradigms, and a lack of truly fresh, outside perspective, often leading to incremental rather than disruptive ideas.
Scalability Challenges: Spiky or short-term innovation demands (e.g., a rapid proof-of-concept sprint for a new product, a deep dive into an emerging market segment) are difficult to staff efficiently with fixed internal resources without overworking teams or sacrificing other strategic priorities.
Cost Inflexibility: Maintaining a large, diverse internal innovation team comes with significant fixed overhead (salaries, benefits, infrastructure), regardless of current project load or strategic focus, limiting dynamic resource allocation.

The Gig-Innovation Model directly addresses these by providing flexible, on-demand access to a diverse, global talent pool.

Key Characteristics of a Robust Gig-Innovation Model

Successfully integrating external talent into your innovation pipeline requires intentional design, clear processes, and a human-centered cultural shift:

Clear Project Scoping & Modularity: Precisely defining innovation challenges into discrete, modular projects or work packages with clear deliverables, measurable outcomes, and acceptance criteria suitable for external contribution.
Curated Talent Cloud & Platform Strategy: Proactively building relationships with reputable freelance platforms, specialized agencies, and individual experts, thereby creating a trusted, accessible network for specific, high-demand skill sets (e.g., UI/UX design, data science, specific market research, advanced engineering).
Seamless On-boarding & Integration: Establishing efficient, digitally-enabled processes for on-boarding external talent, including secure system access, clear cultural integration into project teams, and robust communication channels from day one.
Hybrid Team Leadership & Enablement: Training internal leaders to effectively manage and integrate hybrid teams, fostering psychological safety, promoting equitable collaboration between full-time employees and external contributors, and recognizing diverse contributions.
Robust Intellectual Property (IP) Management: Implementing clear, legally sound frameworks and explicit agreements to protect company IP, ensure confidentiality, and fairly compensate external innovators for their contributions.
Performance & Relationship Management: Developing systems for tracking external talent performance, providing constructive feedback, and proactively nurturing long-term relationships with high-performing individuals for future engagements, creating a loyal extended network.

Key Benefits of the Gig-Innovation Model

Embracing the external talent cloud delivers tangible benefits that significantly accelerate innovation and strengthen overall organizational resilience and adaptability:

Enhanced Agility & Speed: Rapidly assemble expert teams for time-sensitive projects or urgent strategic pivots, dramatically accelerating time-to-market for new products, services, or internal solutions.
Access to Niche & Frontier Expertise: Tap into highly specialized, cutting-edge skills (e.g., specific regulatory knowledge for emerging markets, advanced quantum computing algorithms) that are often unavailable or cost-prohibitive to hire internally on a permanent basis.
Diverse Perspectives & De-biased Thinking: Introduce fresh, unbiased thinking, cross-industry insights, and global perspectives that challenge internal assumptions and foster truly disruptive, rather than merely incremental, innovation.
Cost Optimization & Flexibility: Convert fixed labor costs into flexible, variable project-based expenses, allowing for more dynamic budget allocation and resource deployment across innovation initiatives.
Risk Mitigation & Experimentation: Test new market ideas, technological concepts, or business models with lower initial investment by leveraging external talent for discrete proofs-of-concept or pilot projects.
Internal Up-skilling & Knowledge Transfer: Internal teams gain new skills, knowledge, and best practices by collaborating directly with external experts, fostering continuous learning and capability building across the organization.

Case Study 1: The Automotive OEM and the Autonomous Future

Challenge: Accelerating Autonomous Driving Software Development

A major automotive OEM was falling behind competitors in autonomous driving software development. Their internal R&D team possessed deep automotive engineering expertise but lacked the cutting-edge AI and machine learning specialists needed to accelerate their vision for self-driving vehicles. Hiring these specialists full-time proved difficult due to high demand and fierce competition from tech giants.

Gig-Innovation Intervention:

The OEM strategically established a dedicated “Innovation Guild” comprising both internal engineers and a carefully curated network of external freelance AI/ML experts sourced through specialized platforms. They meticulously broke down their complex autonomous driving software into modular components (e.g., perception algorithms, sensor fusion, predictive modeling) that could be worked on by hybrid teams. Internal project managers were rigorously trained in Hybrid Team Leadership, focusing on agile methodologies, transparent communication, and ensuring psychological safety and equitable contribution from both internal and external members. Robust IP Management protocols were established from the outset.

The Human-Centered Lesson:

This Gig-Innovation Model allowed the OEM to access top-tier AI talent globally, without the significant overhead and hiring challenges of full-time recruitment. The external experts brought fresh methodologies and accelerated development timelines. Crucially, the internal engineers gained invaluable hands-on experience and facilitated knowledge transfer, significantly up-skilling them for the future. The OEM significantly accelerated its software development roadmap, reducing its projected time-to-market for advanced autonomous features by 18 months, demonstrating how targeted external talent can fill critical gaps and drive innovation faster and more effectively.

Case Study 2: The Consumer Goods Giant and Sustainable Packaging

Challenge: Disruptive Sustainable Packaging Solutions

A global consumer goods giant was committed to ambitious sustainability goals, particularly in eliminating single-use plastics from its product lines. Their internal packaging R&D team, while competent in traditional materials, lacked deep expertise in niche areas like bioplastics from algae, advanced composite materials, or circular economy design principles at scale. They urgently needed truly disruptive, rather than merely incremental, solutions.

Gig-Innovation Intervention:

The company launched an open innovation challenge, leveraging a global crowdsourcing platform to tap into a diverse ecosystem of material scientists, industrial designers, and sustainability strategists worldwide. This involved meticulous Clear Project Scoping, breaking down the overarching challenge into specific, solvable problems. They offered competitive bounties and long-term retainer contracts for the best solutions and talent. Internal core teams worked collaboratively alongside external experts in focused sprints, with clear Seamless On-boarding & Integration processes for winning contributors to join short-term projects. They eventually formed a permanent “Sustainable Solutions Hub” led by an internal core team but primarily staffed by external experts on a flexible, project-by-project basis, constantly curating the talent cloud.

The Human-Centered Lesson:

This model provided unprecedented access to diverse, cutting-edge knowledge and a global network of innovators. It allowed the company to rapidly prototype and test materials and designs that their internal team alone could not have conceived. The external perspective challenged internal biases about manufacturability and cost, pushing for truly radical solutions. Within a year, they identified three promising bioplastic innovations and two circular design concepts, significantly accelerating their sustainability roadmap and establishing themselves as a leader in eco-friendly packaging, all by embracing external ingenuity on demand as a core part of their innovation strategy.

Building Your Gig-Innovation Future: A Human-Centered Approach

The Gig-Innovation Model is not just a tactical staffing solution; it’s a strategic framework for future-proofing your organization. It requires a fundamental shift in mindset: from simply owning all resources to intelligently accessing and integrating the best global resources. It demands a culture of trust, transparency, and a genuine valuing of diverse contributions, regardless of employment status.

Start by identifying your organization’s most critical innovation bottlenecks or strategic areas where fresh, external perspective is desperately needed. Pilot a small, clearly scoped project with external talent, focusing intently on fostering trust, ensuring clear communication, and achieving seamless integration between internal and external contributors. By doing so, you’ll transform your organization from a closed system to an open, dynamic, and resilient innovation ecosystem, poised to adapt and thrive in any future.

“The walls of your innovation lab are only as high as your imagination. Break them down with the External Talent Cloud to truly unleash human-centered innovation.”

Your first step towards building a Gig-Innovation Model: Identify a specific, non-core innovation challenge or a complex research question that your internal team has been struggling with or has limited time to address. Instead of immediately assigning it internally, clearly define the precise deliverable and the specific expertise required. Then, research and identify two different external talent platforms or individual freelancers specializing in that exact niche. Compare their capabilities and propose a small, well-defined pilot project to leverage this external expertise, focusing on how it will bring a truly new perspective or a specialized skill set that your internal team currently lacks. Document the expected learning for your internal team.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Gig-Innovation Model

1. What is the Gig-Innovation Model?

The Gig-Innovation Model is a strategic framework where an organization augments its internal teams by fluidly and ethically accessing specialized, on-demand external talent (freelancers, consultants, experts) from the global gig ecosystem to drive innovation. It focuses on filling niche skill gaps and bringing fresh, unbiased perspectives to complex challenges.

2. How does using external talent improve the quality of innovation?

External talent introduces diverse, cross-industry expertise and challenges the organization’s inherent cognitive biases (groupthink). This leads to the formulation of truly disruptive ideas, wider opportunity mapping, and solutions that are more resilient because they are pressure-tested by outside perspectives.

3. What is the biggest challenge in adopting this model?

The biggest challenge is cultural and operational: training internal leaders in **Hybrid Team Leadership** and establishing robust, clear processes for **Seamless Onboarding & Integration**. Successful adoption requires prioritizing trust and psychological safety to ensure fair and effective collaboration between full-time employees and external contributors.

Image credit: Pexels

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Six Ways Crowdsourcing Can Enhance Innovation Performance

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Six Ways Crowdsourcing Can Enhance Innovation Performance

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Disruption and digitization are changing the game for more and more industries, and more and more companies. As a result, traditional ways of approaching innovation are coming up short. What I’m beginning to see is that there’s a new way of practicing innovation being embraced by a growing number of companies, not just in tech. An important component of this new all enterprise approach is the use of crowdsourcing, the process of inviting ideas from groups – usually online — to solve a common problem.

Here are six ways organizations are using crowdsourcing to drive results:

1. Engage people across the enterprise.

Gallup surveys show that 50.8% of American workers are not engaged, while One in four are actively disengaged – and they want to disrupt meetings, cause chaos, and sabotage results.

Eighty six percent of crowdsourcing companies report that increasing employee engagement is one of their primary motivators, according to surveys by Spigit, an idea management software purveyor to industry. “Inviting ideas from employees at every level, about issues that affect everybody is a proven way of engaging the disengaged and kicking off a crowdsourcing program,” says Amy Millard, Spigit’s vice president of marketing.

Instead of passive “we want your feedback” electronic suggestion boxes, crowdsourcing experts now favor “campaigns” — limited duration contests that invite the crowd to submit ideas on a particular problem or question. Such engagement in turn creates opportunities to collaborate across departmental lines. It empowers people with a new means to effect change within the organization. Crowdsourcing campaigns often bring talented associates to the attention of management. They become a gateway to spreading innovation across the enterprise.

2. Cultivate a culture of innovation.

Hong Kong based Li & Fung is the world’s largest sourcing agent for Wal-Mart and hundreds of other retailers. With the rise of the Internet and e-commerce, the firm is facing market shifts that threaten to destabilize it. To focus on new ways of working, the company formed a five-person innovation unit with new mantra is “creating the supply chain of the future.”

“We challenged everybody everywhere with the question: what innovative product can you create to delight a customer,” says Lale Kesebi, chief communications officer and head of strategic engagement, for the company. “We did four week idea jams, both online and offline. We held one innovation week for our Grand Challenge winner and we did 14 one-hour brainstorm sessions on separate topics and we got over 600 ideas in four weeks. One submission was a simple redesign of a body brush for back cleaning. Another was a system for building sensors and digital maps that enable emergency response after natural disasters. That idea came from our team out of Turkey that was looking at how they might be able to find people after earthquakes, which was an issue that had impacted them. And we got so many more ideas it was incredible.”

3. Combat disruption with employee brainpower.

KPMG predicts that, within 25 years, the $200 billion auto industry could shrink to less than 40% of its current size. An Accenture report titled Banking 2020 notes that “disruptive fin-tech business models threaten up to 32% of banks revenue by 2020.” And so it goes in the age of disruption.

When we first started hearing about disruption 20 years ago, it was confined to a few industries, like disk drives. Today virtually every industry is susceptible. Brick and mortar retail is said to be at a tipping point as retailer after retailer closes stores, or slink into bankruptcy.

Often, when I’m on a speaking engagement, I put up a slide with logos of disrupted companies, such as Blockbuster or Blackberry or Nokia. No CEO wants to see their logo on this list. So if you’ve got a way to tap the brainpower of thousands of employees, there’s no reason it has to. There’s so much crowdsourcing has to offer those who are challenged with fighting back against disruptors. But you do need all hands on deck and this new tool is vital.

4. Invite customers to contribute ideas.

Denmark-based Lego Group uses crowdsourcing to solicit ideas from fans all over the world. While the company employs 180 designers, they know that among their many fans (some of whom are well beyond childhood) may lurk the company’s next blockbuster — if only they are receptive to customer ideas. Lego personnel review all idea submissions that garner 10,000 “likes” from site visitors. Lego customer contributors whose ideas get chosen to go into production receive 1% of their idea’s revenue.

Other organizations are crowd-sourcing for solutions to vexing technical problems or to discover winning algorithms (Netflix), while snack giant Lay’s, a division of Frito Lay, asks the crowd to suggest new chip flavors or even whole snack categories via its website. Visit Clorox Connects and you’ll see dozens of ideas submitted by Clorox consumers. Fact is, we’ve been crowdsourcing since the time of the Romans. What’s different today is the scale and scope of this new method of interacting with the wider world, and this dynamic will only grow in the years ahead.

5. Revamp new product development.

Polaris Industries, a Roseau, Minnesota-based manufacturer of ATVs, uses its crowdsourcing platform to discover and deliver breakthrough products that help it compete with Harley-Davidson. Before they began rethinking new product development, the company’s innovation approach was very much 2.0 and top-down.

Under the old approach, new product development was difficult for Polaris to discover unconventional ideas. And even when they did, the path to development was tortuous. Polaris had no way to predict the risk, value, or viability of an idea, which made it hard to secure executive sponsorship and budget for innovation projects. But when it turned to the crowd, Polaris achieved an 80% reduction in the time it takes to discover, assess, and execute new ideas, according to a Spigit white paper.

One byproduct of Polaris’ new approach has been the its three-wheel motorcycle called the Slingshot, and three other bestselling vehicles. Tapping the internal crowd has energized Polaris’ R&D process. It’s also reduced time-to-market dramatically – a distinct advantage in a highly competitive market.

6. Embrace new methods of driving growth through innovation.

My research study of the best practices of the world’s leading companies suggests they do five things amazingly well: 1) They make innovation a strategic leadership imperative, 2) they manage ideas as critical assets to future growth, 3) they collaborate with customers using a variety of customer insight tools, 4) they cultivate cultures of risk-taking and experimentation, and 5) they involve everyone in the enterprise.

This final factor may be the most significant. Creative, original, and impactful ideas can come from anywhere, notes Spigit’s 2017 Business Innovation Report. “When asked how often ideas selected for implementation are submitted by someone outside the group or business unit sponsoring the challenge, 24% of our customers say this happens more than half the time.”

Crowdsourcing’s most significant contribution may be that it breaks up monopolies in an organization, and readies it for fundamentally new approaches to coming up with ideas and bringing them to life. No department has a lock on ideas pertaining to its work product. The research and development group is no longer the only place where new technologies can originate. The human resources department is no longer the only place where morale and engagement can be nurtured. The marketing department is not the only place where customer experience improvements can originate. And the innovation department no longer has a monopoly on innovation.

Crowdsourcing is not a silver bullet. Organizations must focus the approach on real business challenges. Otherwise, ideas languish for lack of sponsorship. But its rise seems inevitable, given the inadequacy of traditional approaches and given the promise of applying the collective intelligence of the larger community to the opportunities at hand.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Freepik

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The Challenge of Autonomous Teaching Methods

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An estimated 250 million children around the world cannot read, write, or demonstrate basic arithmetic skills. Many of these children are in developing countries without regular access to quality schools or teachers. While programs exist to build schools and train teachers, traditional models of education are not able to scale fast enough to meet demand. We simply cannot build enough schools or train enough teachers to meet the need. We are at a pivotal moment where an innovative approach is necessary to eliminate existing barriers to learning, enabling the seeds of innovation to be imparted to every child, regardless of geographic location or economic status.

XPRIZE Chairman and CEO, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis announced the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE today to help solve these challenges. The Global Learning XPRIZE is a five-year competition challenging teams to develop an open source solution that can be iterated upon, scaled and deployed around the world, bringing quality learning experiences to children no matter where they live. Enabling children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

At the same time, XPRIZE will launch an online crowdfunding campaign to mobilize a global street team of supporters to get involved with the Global Learning XPRIZE. Every dollar pledged will go towards optimizing the success of the prize, specifically focusing on supporting team recruitment globally and expanding field testing.

The Global Learning XPRIZE will launch with a six-month team registration period followed by 18 months of solution development. A panel of third-party expert judges will then evaluate and select the top five teams to proceed in the competition, and award each of them a $1M award. Solutions will be tested in the field with thousands of children in the developing world, over an 18-month period. The $10M top prize will ultimately be awarded to the team that develops a technology solution demonstrating the greatest levels of proficiency gains in reading, writing and arithmetic.

The learning solutions developed by this prize will enable a child to learn autonomously. And, those created by the finalists will be open-sourced for all to access, iterate and share. This technology could be deployed around the world, bringing learning experiences to children otherwise thought unreachable, who do not have access to quality education, and supplementing the learning experiences of children who do.

The impact will be exponential. Children with basic literacy skills have the potential to lift themselves out of poverty. And that’s not all. By enabling a child to learn how to learn, that child has opportunity – to live a healthy and productive life, to provide for their family and their community, as well as to contribute toward a peaceful, prosperous and abundant world.

XPRIZE believes that innovation can come from anywhere and that many of the greatest minds remain untapped.

What might the future look like with hundreds of millions of additional young minds unleashed to tackle the world’s Grand Challenges?

The Global Learning XPRIZE is funded by a group of donors, including the Dick & Betsy DeVos Foundation, the Anthony Robbins Foundation, the Econet Foundation, the Merkin Family Foundation, Scott Hassan, John Raymonds and Suzanne West.

For more information, visit http://learning.xprize.org.

COMMENTARY

I am very excited about this new effort, as I am a big believer that we should live in a world where the next Einstein could come from anywhere, but I have a few of concerns:

It seems to be focused on the use of technology
Five years is a long time (will they get a five-year-old solution?)
It doesn’t engage the target users in co-creation throughout the whole process (it’s outside in)
It seems to ignore the infrastructure in place in areas of the greatest need (where students don’t even have desks)
The most capable solutions may be too expensive to implement in the target areas
The goal should be to build an autonomous learning system that can be used for reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also extended to do much more
Teaching students skills autonomously is fine as long as there is social practice as part of the curriculum
An over-reliance on autonomous teaching will lead to less innovation not more
We are already seeing negative effects in first-world society from too much reliance on technology
If we want more innovation, we need to be teaching our kids ICE skills not just STEM, ICE being Invention, Collaboration, and Entrepreneurship – these are all social skills that don’t need technology (but can use it)

For more on my views on improving education (which doesn’t require education reform or new technology), please see my article Stop Praying for Education Reform.

For those of you who are going to enter a team, I look forward to seeing what you come up with and I hope that you’ll keep some of the above in mind!

Build a common language of innovation on your team

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Your Chance to Help Overworked Entrepreneurs

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Life for a busy entrepreneur regular working 60 hours a week can lead to a struggle with maintaining a healthy weight. You may find that you are eating out for convenience and getting to the gym very infrequently (if at all). This lifestyle may have been fine through your twenties and early thirties, but after 35, it gets difficult to keep active and you might find those few extra pounds you’ve put on every year are really starting to add up.

Have you had similar struggles?

If you have a way to help motivate overworked entrepreneurs to lay off the takeout and introduce more physical activity into their busy lives, we at Premera would love to hear about it.

Simply post your idea to Premera’s Facebook or Twitter page using the hashtag #IGNITEchange, or as a comment to their stories. You are then automatically entered into a drawing to win a $200 Amazon gift card. Best of all, you have the chance to impact a real person’s life. There will be four chances to win, once every week from now until September 8, 2014 (terms and conditions link expired).

Have a true game-changing idea that will spark families to make lasting, realistic improvements to their health?

Premera is rewarding that type of innovation as well through Premera’s Innovate to Motivate challenge (link expired), which offers a grand prize of $5,000!

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Your Chance to Help Working Professionals

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Today life in our college years feels somehow more manageable than the hectic pace of the working professional. Somehow it feels like it was easier then to eat reasonably well and to stay in good shape. Recent college graduates feel the pressure to build a strong foundation for a career and a social life, then add in responsibilities like car payments, pets, rent, and student loan debt, and it’s no wonder many working professionals find a focus on a healthy lifestyle often comes last.

With time short, stress high, and energy running low after work, it is often easier to grab a burger or pizza than to make a kale salad, and skip the gym in favor of the siren’s song of Netflix and the couch.

Are you struggling with a similar issue or is this sounding like the problems of a younger you?

Then here is your chance to help working professionals everywhere!
(and possibly win some cash at the same time)

Have a true game-changing idea that will spark families to make lasting, realistic improvements to their health?

Premera is rewarding that type of innovation as well through Premera’s Innovate to Motivate challenge (link expired), which offers a grand prize of $5,000!

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Your Chance to Help Middle-Age Guys (and Gals) Get Fit

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Here is your chance to help every middle-aged guy (or gal) who’s struggling with the inevitable progression of age. What used to be easy isn’t anymore!

Maybe you (or a friend) used to be a big runner and counted on running to keep weight down and stay active, but lately the motivation to run has waned, and as as a one-trick pony who’s never developed other ways to get regular exercise, with persistent plantar fasciitis that makes anything longer than a one mile walk moderately painful, the weight is starting to accumulate.

How do you re-energize what formerly were healthy eating and workout routines to accommodate the realities of middle age?

Any ideas for new forms of exercise, for establishing new routines that are realistic for an 8 to 6 office worker?

Premera would love to hear your ideas on a middle age makeover.

Have a true game-changing idea that will spark families to make lasting, realistic improvements to their health?

Premera is rewarding that type of innovation as well through Premera’s Innovate to Motivate challenge (link expired), which offers a grand prize of $5,000!

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

Your Chance to Help Working Moms (and Dads)

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Working Moms (and Dads) struggle to get a healthy meal on the table for their family every night during the week without resorting to fast food (or any other fast, but unhealthy alternatives).

If you have an idea to help working mothers (and fathers) bring healthy creativity to their weeknight meals we at Premera would love to hear it.

Have a true game-changing idea that will spark families to make lasting, realistic improvements to their health?

Premera is rewarding that type of innovation as well through Premera’s Innovate to Motivate challenge (link expired), which offers a grand prize of $5,000!

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

What is the Role of Personal Branding in Achieving Innovation Success?

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal branding, in part because I’m about to begin a new commissioned white paper and so I’ve been re-visiting my popular white paper for Innocentive – Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation, and what I wrote about personal branding there:

“… the world continues to move away from being a place where employees expect to have jobs for life, and fight against any change to this paradigm, to a world where portfolios, personal branding, and project-based work will become more common in an increasing number of industries. The evolving world of work is becoming a world in which individuals will need to be really good at collaborating and playing well with others, while also honing their skills at standing out from the crowd. At the same time, the external perception of your network value will expand from a focus on internal connections to also include the talented minds you might know outside the organization that can be brought in on different projects or challenges.”

So, let’s dig in…

The power of the individual versus the power of the collective. This is a tension that has been around longer than the practice of human resources and talent management as an occupation. While the organization is concerned with achieving success for the collective, too often we forget that the collective is made up of a collection of unique individuals, and that each of these individuals have a collection of unique skills, talents, and abilities that may or not directly fulfill the needs of their role and the organization’s goals and brand promise:

“To build a brand, you must start a conversation with your customers. Your customers have to know that you stand for something and that they can count on you to deliver upon your brand promise.” (April 20, 2012)

While the role of the individual in helping to fulfill the organization’s brand promise is often not considered, it should be, at the same time that the organization considers whether its chosen individuals adequately fill the defined job requirements that the organization believes are necessary to fulfill the collective’s mission to achieve revenue and profits for its shareholders, value for its clients and donors, or benefits for its constituents (depending on whether you’re talking about a for-profit, non-profit or governmental organization).

If we look at each role in an organization as an attempt by management and human resources to find a perfect match for the job requirements that live within a certain circle, the fact is that for every role, the circle of the individual’s skills, talents, and abilities will never perfectly overlay the circle of the job requirements, it will always look like a Venn Diagram with a good candidate possessing a large amount of overlap, but with always some of their skills, abilities, and talents lying outside of their job requirements’ circle.

But most organizations (referred to as Typical Organizations in the graphic below) fail to harness the skills, abilities and talents of the individuals they have in their organization to achieve greater performance as a collective. In my mind this is painful, wasted human capital – painful for the organization (lost potential revenue and profitability) and painful for the individual (boredom, stress, and disappointment).

But, a handful of more progressive, innovative organizations are trying to do better to harness the passions AND the skills, abilities, and talents of their individuals to better achieve the collective’s ability to generate revenue and profits (or other appropriate benefits) by engaging their employees in the innovation efforts of the organization, and allowing their employees to take some of their skills, abilities and talents and apply them to help fulfill other job descriptions. This looks something more like this:

But in the most progressive organizations, they not only provide a way to better harness a more complete set of their employees’ skills, abilities and talents to more than one job description, but they also find a way to harness more of the skills, abilities, and talents that employees are currently realizing outside the organization in their hobbies, volunteer work, or other places.

And the successful organizations of the future will not stop there. They will also harness the connections their employees have outside the organization to increase the innovation capacity of the organization, and better engage not only partners in helping to fulfill the needs of different job descriptions, but they will also even engage their customers in achieving the work of the organization.

Where customer or partner skills, abilities and talents intersect with the job requirements, work can get done, and where customer or partner skills, abilities or talents intersect with employee skills, abilities or talents intersect, communities and connections have the chance to form and be nurtured. This is what organizations of the future will look like:

In this scenario, where innovative organizations begin to move beyond better harnessing the internal innovation capacity of their employees, to also harnessing the external capacity to work (and to innovate) of individuals outside of the organization (and to expand the scope of the collective), and to attract partners and customers to participate, organizations that allow and even encourage employees to develop a personal brand and greater external connections, will claim an outsized share of the potential benefits to both the mission of the organization and to its innovation efforts.

If your employees lack the external exposure, the external connections, and the external personal brand equity and awareness, how much harder will it be for your organization to:

Attract the best partners to your innovation efforts
Recruit the best customers to co-create with you
Build a strong pipeline of potential future internal talent

Through this lens you can see that in the future, innovation success will be determined not just by how strong the brand of your organization is (or the collective), but also will be shaped by the strength of the personal brands of the collective’s component individuals.

Does your organization recognize the value of your personal brand to the innovation success of the collective, and foster it, or attempt to prevent you from growing your personal brand equity?

What is your personal brand, how strong is it, and how are you going to leverage this to power innovation in your organization?

Keep innovating!

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Innovation in Motion

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Every once in a while someone comes along and takes what most people believe is a mature category and finds a way to inject new life, new innovation into it.

What’s even more impressive in the case that I’m about to talk about is that a new entrant has found a way to innovate in a category where the dominant player is often held up by innovation consultants and innovation keynote speakers (like myself) as a company that has an innovative culture and working environment, plus an open innovation program worth looking at.

What established player am I speaking of?

Lego

And if you’re not aware of their open innovation program, it is called Lego Cuusoo.

So how could someone come in and realistically challenge Lego?

By coming in with a building toy approach that is both Lego compatible but while simultaneously introducing new design and building capabilities.

The main thing that this new competitor is bringing to bear to compete with the dominant Lego, is motion.

Think about what would happen if you smashed together the basic tenets of Lego with the basic tenets of Hasbro’s Transformers (more than meets the eye), and you’ll start to get an idea of what this new competitor is bringing to their crashing of the Lego party.

Who is this Lego competitor?

They are called Ionix Bricks.

Ionix Bricks - Innovation in Motion

They launched into the marketplace with a Saturday morning cartoon called Tenkai Knights on the Cartoon network.

Here is a video review of some of the initial robot characters, showing how they transform and can be configured and played with:

At first glance they look pretty fun!

Will they catch on and take some of the building toy market away from Lego?

What do you think?

Personally, I think that they have a chance of doing so, and if nothing else I think that Ionix Bricks and the Tenkai Knights are a good reminder that even in categories that people might think are pretty mature and the dominant player is unlikely to be disrupted, that isn’t necessarily the case.

And if you get bored with the pieces that come in any of the Tenkai Knights building sets?

Well, because they are compatible with Lego and other leading building sets, you can attach all kinds of crazy, random Lego pieces that you might already have from castle, space, or other kinds of sets.

Ionix Bricks are a good example of the “C” from SCAMPER – Combine – as they are exactly the kind of outcome you would expect if you combined Legos with Transformers. I wonder what kind of other crazy toys some young toy designer out there could come up with by combining Legos with something else.

In the meantime, I challenge you to keep challenging your own orthodoxies about what your product or service should look like, and how your industry should operate. You never know what kind of crazy new potential innovation you might come up with if you never take your product or service as perfected and keep challenging things at the edges.

What things about your product or service could you challenge? How could SCAMPER or other ideation tools help you?

I will be at the Back End of Innovation conference (November 18-20, 2013) in Silicon Valley. I hope you’ll join me!

(Save 25% with code BEI13IX)

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