Tag Archives: Customer Experience

Ten Reasons Every B2B Company Needs an Evangelist

Ten Reasons Every B2B Company Needs an Evangelist

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

The importance of evangelists in organizations around the world is often misunderstood or underestimated, and too few organizations have made the incredibly rewarding investment into one or more of the valuable types of evangelists – who are particularly valuable in B2B organizations for reasons I hope will be obvious by the end. Let’s set the stage.

An evangelist in a B2B company is a passionate advocate for a brand, product, service or innovation. Their role involves spreading the word about the company’s offerings, building relationships, and inspiring others to become customers or supporters. They are often seen as the face of the company, engaging with the community, attending events, and creating content to promote the brand. So, without further delay, let’s look at the top ten reasons every B2B company needs an evangelist:

  1. Increased Brand Awareness: Evangelists help spread the word about the brand, reaching new audiences and increasing visibility.
  2. Improved Reputation: Having passionate advocates can enhance the company’s reputation and build trust with potential customers.
  3. Higher Customer Loyalty: Evangelists are often the most loyal customers, and their enthusiasm can inspire others to stay loyal as well.
  4. Cost-Effective Marketing: Evangelists can provide valuable marketing support without the high costs associated with traditional advertising.
  5. Enhanced Customer Relationships: Evangelists build strong relationships with customers, providing personalized support and fostering a sense of community.
  6. Increased Sales: By promoting the brand and its products, evangelists can drive sales and generate leads.
  7. Valuable Feedback: Evangelists often provide insightful feedback on products and services, helping the company improve and innovate.
  8. Thought Leadership: Evangelists can position the company as a thought leader in the industry, sharing expertise and insights.
  9. Employee Morale: Having a dedicated evangelist can boost employee morale by showcasing the company’s strengths and successes.
  10. Competitive Advantage: A strong evangelist can differentiate the company from competitors, highlighting unique selling points and creating a loyal customer base.

Finding an Evangelist to Hire

If your B2B company doesn’t already have at least one evangelist (see the five types at the bottom), there is no better time than the present to make that first hire, or to hire additional types of evangelists to maximize your success. There is nothing wrong with hiring an evangelist from outside, especially when you don’t want to pull existing employees out of roles they’re already excelling at or when an external hire brings higher levels of skill than the internal resources you think might be best suited to such a role. Here is how to get started with that next hire:

  1. Identify Key Traits: Look for candidates who are passionate, knowledgeable, authentic, influential, and committed. These traits are essential for an effective evangelist.
  2. Leverage Networks: Utilize professional networks like LinkedIn, industry events, and conferences to find potential evangelists. Look for individuals who are already advocating for similar products or services.
  3. Engage with Communities: Participate in online communities, forums, and social media groups related to your industry. Engage with active members who demonstrate a genuine interest in your field.
  4. Job Listings: Post job listings on relevant job boards and websites, clearly outlining the role and its importance. Highlight the impact the evangelist will have on the company’s growth.
  5. Referrals: Encourage your employees and industry contacts to refer potential candidates. Referrals often lead to finding passionate and dedicated individuals.

Cultivating an Evangelist from Within

If you don’t feel comfortable hiring an evangelist from outside, either with or without some level of rotational exposure to all of the different parts of organization, or if you know you have some really skilled and passionate internal resources you think are ready to step into a new role, that’s fine too.

  1. Identify Potential Evangelists: Look for employees who are already passionate about your brand and products. These individuals often go above and beyond in their roles and are enthusiastic about sharing their experiences.
  2. Provide Training and Resources: Offer training programs to help employees develop their evangelism skills. Provide resources such as marketing materials, product information, and access to industry events.
  3. Create a Supportive Environment: Foster a culture of evangelism within your company. Encourage employees to share their ideas and experiences, and recognize their efforts publicly.
  4. Offer Incentives: Provide incentives for employees who actively promote the brand. This could include bonuses, recognition programs, or opportunities for career advancement. (Editor’s Note: Sorry CoPilot I’m not sure I agree with this one)
  5. Engage with Employees: Regularly engage with employees to understand their needs and motivations. Create opportunities for them to share their feedback and ideas.

Whether you hire your evangelists internally or externally it is important to think through how to best introduce and integrate them into every part of the organization relevant to the type of evangelism role they are filling. At this point you might be wondering how there might be more than one type of evangelist, so let’s look at briefly and if you follow the link you’ll learn more details about each.

Here are Five Types of Evangelists to Consider Hiring

In my previous article Rise of the Evangelist I defined five different types of evangelists that organizations may already have, or may want to hire, including:

  1. Chief Evangelist
  2. Brand Evangelists
  3. Product Evangelists
  4. Service Evangelists
  5. Innovation Evangelists

This specialization occurs when the evangelism an organization needs become too big for one evangelist to handle. At that point, a Chief Evangelist creates the evangelism strategy and manages the execution across the team of brand, innovation, and other evangelism focus areas.

I dive more into the role and considerations for companies on how An Innovation Evangelist Can Increase Your Reputation and Innovation Velocity.

What Are You Waiting For?

Evangelism isn’t just a marketing activity. Evangelists are incredibly important to enhancing not just the customer experience, but the employee and partner experiences as well. Not everyone may have main character energy but almost everyone still appreciates main character level credit, and this can be incredibly impactful for all three main constituencies – customers, employees and partners. Tell those stories, translate that value and make the investment into an evangelist today!


Accelerate your change and transformation success

Content Authenticity Statement: Some of the lists and paragraphs in the article were created with the help of Microsoft CoPilot, but there are also some paragraphs created by me along with content from some of my previous articles.

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2024

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2024Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are January’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023 — Curated by Braden Kelley
  2. Creating Organizational Agility — by Howard Tiersky
  3. 5 Simple Steps to Team Alignment — by David Burkus
  4. 5 Essential Customer Experience Tools to Master — by Braden Kelley
  5. Four Ways To Empower Change In Your Organization — by Greg Satell
  6. AI as an Innovation Tool – How to Work with a Deeply Flawed Genius! — by Pete Foley
  7. Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2023 — Curated by Braden Kelley
  8. 80% of Psychological Safety Has Nothing to Do With Psychology — by Robyn Bolton
  9. How will you allocate your time differently in 2024? — by Mike Shipulski
  10. Leadership Development Fundamentals – Work Products — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in December that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2023

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are December’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Five Key Digital Transformation Barriers — by Howard Tiersky
  2. Achieving a Transformation Vision for a Better Future — by Howard Tiersky
  3. Eight Innovation Executive Types — by Stefan Lindegaard
  4. Skills versus Judgement — by Mike Shipulski
  5. We Need to Stop Glorifying Failure — by Greg Satell
  6. What Will People See? — by Mike Shipulski
  7. Don’t Waste Your Time Talking to Customers — by Robyn Bolton
  8. The Amazing Efficiency of Systematic Guessing — by Dennis Stauffer
  9. Four Change Empowerment Myths — by Greg Satell
  10. Do the Right Thing — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in November that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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A New Innovation Sphere

A New Innovation Sphere

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

I’m obsessed with the newly opened Sphere in Las Vegas as an example of Innovation.   As I write this, U2 are preparing for their second show there, and Vegas is buzzing about the new innovation they are performing in.  That in of itself is quite something.  Vegas is a city that is nor short of entertainment and visual spectacle, so for an innovation to capture the collective imagination in this way it has to be genuinely Wow.  And that ‘Wow’ means there are opportunities for the innovation community to learn from it. 

For those of you who might have missed it, The Sphere is an approximately 20,000 seat auditorium with razor sharp cutting edge multisensory capabilities that include a 16K resolution wraparound interior LED screen, speakers with beamforming and wave field synthesis technology, and 4D haptic physical effects built into the seats. The exterior of the 366 foot high building features 580,000 sq ft of LED displays which have transformed the already ostentatious Las Vegas skyline. Images including a giant eye, moon, earth, smiley face, Halloween pumpkin and various underwater scenes and geometric animations light up the sky, together with advertisements that are rumored to cost almost $500,000 per day.  Together with giant drone displays and giant LED displays on adjacent casinos mean that Bladerunner has truly come to Vegas. But these descriptions simply don’t do it justice, you really, really have to see it. 

Las Vegas U2 Residency at the Sphere

Master of Attention – Leveraging Visual Science to the Full:  The outside is a brilliant example of visual marketing that leverages just about every insight possible for grabbing attention. It’s scale is simply ‘Wow!’, and you can see it from the mountains surrounding Vegas, or from the plane as you come into land.   The content it displays on its outside is brilliantly designed to capture attention. It has the fundamental visual cues of movement, color, luminescence, contrast and scale, but these are all turned up to 11, maybe even 12.  This alone pretty much compels attention, even in a city whose skyline is already replete with all of these.  When designing for visual attention, I often invoke the ‘Times Square analogy’.  When trying to grab attention in a visually crowded context, signal to noise is your friend, and a simple, ‘less is more’ design can stand out against a background context of intense, complex visual noise.  But the Sphere has instead leapt s-curves, and has instead leveraged new technology to be brighter, bigger, more colorful and create an order of magnitude more movement than its surroundings.  It visually shouts above the surrounding visual noise, and has created genuine separation, at least for now. 

But it also leverages many other elements that we know command attention.  It uses faces, eyes, and natural cues that tap into our unconscious cognitive attentional architecture.  The giant eye, giant pumpkin and giant smiley face tap these attentional mechanisms, but in a playful way.  The orange and black of the pumpkin or the yellow and black of the smiley face tap into implicit biomimetic ‘danger’ clues, but in a way that resolves instantly to turn attention from avoid to approach.  The giant jellyfish and whales floating above the strip tap into our attentional priority mechanisms for natural cues.  And of course, it all fits the surprisingly obvious cognitive structure that creates ‘Wow!’.  A giant smiley emoji floating above the Vegas skyline is initially surprising, but also pretty obvious once you realize it is the sphere! 

And this is of course a dynamic display, that once it captures your attention, then advertises the upcoming U2 show or other paid advertising.  As I mentioned before, that advertising does not come cheap, but it does come with pretty much guaranteed engagement.  You really do need to see it for yourself if you can, but I’ve also captured some video here:

The Real Innovation Magic: The outside of The Sphere is stunning, but the inside goes even further, and provides a new and disruptive technology platform that opens the door for all sorts of creativity and innovation in entertainment and beyond. The potential to leverage the super-additive power of multi-sensory combinations to command attention and emotion is staggering.

The opening act was U2, and the show has received mostly positive but also mixed reviews. Everyone raves about the staggering visual effects, the sound quality, and the spectacle. But others do point out that the band itself gets somewhat lost, and/or is overshadowed by the new technology.

But this is just the beginning.   The technology platform is truly disruptive innovation that will open the door for all sorts of innovation and creativity. It fundamentally challenges the ‘givens’ of what a concert is. The U2 show is still based on and marketed as the band being the ‘star’ of the show. But the Sphere is an unprecedented immersive multimedia experience that can and likely will change that completely, making the venue the star itself. The potential for great musicians, visual and multisensory artist to create unprecedented customer experience is enormous.  Artists from Gaga to Muse, or their successors must be salivating at the potential to bring until now impossible visions to life, and deliver multi-sensory experience to audiences on a scale not previously imagined. Disruptive innovation often emerges at the interface of previous expertise, and the potential for hybrid sensory experiences that the Sphere offer are unprecedented. Imagine visuals created and inspired by the Webb telescope accompanied by an orchestra that sonically surrounds the audience in ways they’ve never experienced or perhaps imagined. And of course, new technology will challenge new creative’s to leverage it in ways we haven’t yet imagined.  Cawsie Jijina, the engineer who designed the Sphere maybe says it best:

You have the best audio there possibly can be today. You have the best visual there can possible be today. Now you just have to wait and let some artist meet some batshit crazy engineer and techie and create something totally new.” 

This technology platform will stimulate emergent blends of creative innovation that will challenge our expectations of what a show is.  It will likely require both creative’s and audiences to give up on some pre-conceptions. But I love to see a new technology emerge in front of my eyes. We ain’t seen nothing yet. 

Las Vegas Sphere Halloween

Image credits: Pete Foley

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of April 2023

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of April 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are April’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Rethinking Customer Journeys — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  2. What Have We Learned About Digital Transformation Thus Far? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  3. Design Thinking Facilitator Guide — by Douglas Ferguson
  4. Building A Positive Team Culture — by David Burkus
  5. Questions Are More Powerful Than We Think — by Greg Satell
  6. 3 Examples of Why Innovation is a Leadership Problem — by Robyn Bolton
  7. How Has Innovation Changed Since the Pandemic? — by Robyn Bolton
  8. 5 Questions to Answer Before Spending $1 on Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
  9. Customers Care About the Destination Not the Journey — by Shep Hyken
  10. Get Ready for the Age of Acceleration — by Robert B. Tucker

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in March that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

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How Has Innovation Changed Since the Pandemic?

The Answer in Three Charts

How Has Innovation Changed Since the Pandemic?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Everything changed since the pandemic.”

At this point, my husband, a Navy veteran, is very likely to moo (yes, like a cow). It’s a habit he picked up as a submarine officer, something the crew would do whenever someone said something blindingly obvious because “moo” is not just a noise. It’s an acronym – Master Of the Obvious.

But HOW did things change?

From what, to what?

So what?

It can be hard to see the changes when you’re living and working in the midst of them. This is why I found “Benchmarking Innovation Impact, from InnoLead,” a new report from InnoLead and KPMG US, so interesting, insightful, and helpful.

There’s lots of great stuff in the report (and no, this is not a sponsored post though I am a member), so I limited myself to the three charts that answer executives’ most frequently asked innovation questions.

Innovation Leader Research 2023 Chart 1

Question #1: What type of innovation should I pursue?

2023 Answer: Companies are investing more than half of their resources in incremental innovation

So What?:  I may very well be alone in this opinion, but I think this is great news for several reasons:

  1. Some innovation is better than none – Companies shifting their innovation spending to safer, shorter-term bets is infinitely better than shutting down all innovation, which is what usually happens during economic uncertainty
  2. Play to your strengths – Established companies are, on average, better at incremental and adjacent innovation because they have the experience, expertise, resources, and culture required to do those well and other ways (e.g., corporate venture capital, joint ventures) to pursue Transformational innovation.
  3. Adjacent Innovation is increasing –This is the sweet spot for corporate innovation (I may also be biased because Swiffer is an adjacent innovation) because it stretches the business into new customers, offerings, and/or business models without breaking the company or executives’ identities.

Innovation Leader Research 2023 Chart 2

Question #2: Is innovation really a leadership problem (or do you just have issues with authority)?

2023 Answer: Yes (and it depends on the situation). “Lack of Executive Support” is the #6 biggest challenge to innovation, up from #8 in 2020.

So What?: This is a good news/bad news chart.

The good news is that fewer companies are experiencing the top 5 challenges to innovation. Of course, leadership is central to fostering/eliminating turf wars, setting culture, acting on signals, allocating budgets, and setting strategy. Hence, leadership has a role in resolving these issues, too.

The bad news is that MORE innovators are experiencing a lack of executive support (24.3% vs. 19.7% in 2020) and “Other” challenges (17.3% vs. 16.4%), including:

  • Different agendas held by certain leadership as to how to measure innovation and therefore how we go after innovation. Also, the time it takes to ‘sell’ an innovative idea or opportunity into the business; corporate bureaucracy.”
  • Lack of actual strategy. Often, goals or visions are treated as strategy, which results in frustration with the organization’s ability to advance viable work and creates an unnecessary churn, resulting in confused decision-making.”
  • “Innovations are stalling after piloting due to lack of funding and executive support in order to shift to scaling. Many are just happy with PR innovation.”

Innovation Leader Research 2023 Chart 3

Question #3: How much should I invest in innovation?

2023 Answer: Most companies are maintaining past years’ budgets and team sizes.

So What?:  This is another good news/bad news set of charts.

The good news is that investment is staying steady. Companies that cut back or kill innovation investments due to economic uncertainty often find that they are behind competitors when the economy improves. Even worse, it takes longer than expected to catch up because they are starting from scratch regarding talent, strategy, and a pipeline.

The bad news is that investment is staying steady. If you want different results, you need to take different actions. And I don’t know any company that is thrilled with the results of its innovation efforts. Indeed, companies can do different things with existing budgets and teams, but there needs to be flexibility and a willingness to grow the budget and the team as projects progress closer to launch and scale-up.

Not MOO

Yes, everything has changed since the pandemic, but not as much as we think.

Companies are still investing in incremental, adjacent, and transformational innovation. They’re just investing more in incremental innovation.

Innovation is still a leadership problem, but leadership is less of a problem (congrats!)

Investment is still happening, but it’s holding steady rather than increasing.

And that is nothing to “moo” at.

Image credits: Pixabay, InnoLead

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of March 2023

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of March 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are March’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Taking Care of Yourself is Not Impossible — by Mike Shipulski
  2. Rise of the Prompt Engineer — by Art Inteligencia
  3. A Guide to Effective Brainstorming — by Diana Porumboiu
  4. What Disruptive Innovation Really Is — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  5. The 6 Building Blocks of Great Teams — by David Burkus
  6. Take Charge of Your Mind to Reclaim Your Potential — by Janet Sernack
  7. Ten Reasons You Must Deliver Amazing Customer Experiences — by Shep Hyken
  8. Deciding You Have Enough Opens Up New Frontiers — by Mike Shipulski
  9. The AI Apocalypse is Here – 3 Reasons You Should Celebrate! — by Robyn Bolton
  10. Artificial Intelligence is Forcing Us to Answer Some Very Human Questions — by Greg Satell

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in February that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

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






Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2023

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are January’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022 — Curated by Braden Kelley
  2. Back to Basics: The Innovation Alphabet — by Robyn Bolton
  3. 99.7% of Innovation Processes Miss These 3 Essential Steps — by Robyn Bolton
  4. Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2022 — Curated by Braden Kelley
  5. Ten Ways to Make Time for Innovation — by Nick Jain
  6. Agility is the 2023 Success Factor — by Soren Kaplan
  7. Five Questions All Leaders Should Always Be Asking — by David Burkus
  8. 23 Ways in 2023 to Create Amazing Experiences — by Shep Hyken
  9. Startups Must Be Where Their Customers Are — by Steve Blank
  10. Will CHATgpt make us more or less innovative? — by Pete Foley

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in December that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

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






Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2022

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2022Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are December’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Forbidden Truth About Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
  2. A Letter to Innovation Santa — by John Bessant
  3. Preserving Ecosystems as an Innovation Superpower — by Pete Foley
  4. What is a Chief Innovation Officer? — by Art Inteligencia
  5. If You Can Be One Thing – Be Effective — by Mike Shipulski
  6. How to Drive Fear Out of Innovation — by Teresa Spangler
  7. 3 Steps to Find the Horse’s A** In Your Company (and Create Space for Innovation) — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Six Ways to Stop Gen-Z from Quiet Quitting — by Shep Hyken
  9. Overcoming the Top 3 Barriers to Customer-Centricity — by Alain Thys
  10. Designing Innovation – Accelerating Creativity via Innovation Strategy — by Douglas Ferguson

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in November that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

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






Five Steps to Digital Transformation Success

Five Steps to Digital Transformation Success

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Digital transformation is increasingly becoming an integral part of businesses in the modern age, as companies seek to leverage technology to gain a competitive edge. But, while the potential benefits of digital transformation are tantalizing, it’s not always easy to make the transition. To ensure a successful digital transformation, here are five key steps you should consider.

1. Understand Your Goals

Before you begin your digital transformation, it’s important to understand your goals. What do you want to achieve with your digital transformation? Do you want to improve customer service, create a more efficient process for managing data, or something else entirely? Being clear on your goals will help you to focus your efforts and ensure you’re making the most of your digital transformation.

2. Develop a Strategy

Once you’ve established your goals, you’ll need to develop a strategy for achieving them. What technologies and processes will you need to implement? What resources and personnel will you need to make it happen? Having a clear strategy will help to ensure success, as you’ll have a roadmap for getting from A to B.

3. Focus on the Customer Experience

Digital transformation should always be focused on the customer experience. How will the changes you’re making improve the customer experience? Will they make it easier to purchase products or services? Will they make it faster to access customer service? By focusing on the customer experience, you can ensure your digital transformation is successful.

4. Invest in Technology and Resources

Digital transformation is an investment, and you’ll need to invest in the right technologies and resources to make it successful. This could include investing in new software, hardware, personnel, and training. While these investments may be costly, they’re necessary in order to ensure the success of your digital transformation.

5. Plan for Change

Finally, it’s important to plan for change. Digital transformation can be disruptive to your business, so it’s important to plan for the changes and prepare your team for the transition. This could involve training staff on new technologies, creating a communication plan to keep everyone in the loop, and establishing processes for dealing with any issues that may arise.

Digital transformation can be a daunting process, but it can also be incredibly rewarding. By following these five key steps, you can ensure your digital transformation is successful and that your business can reap the rewards.

Image credit: Pixabay

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