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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of November 2025

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of November 2025 Drum 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 November’s ten most popular innovation posts:

Eight Types of Innovation Executives — by Stefan Lindegaard
Is There a Real Difference Between Leaders and Managers? — by David Burkus
1,000+ Free Innovation, Change and Design Quotes Slides — by Braden Kelley
The AI Agent Paradox — by Art Inteligencia
74% of Companies Will Die in 10 Years Without Business Transformation — by Robyn Bolton
The Unpredictability of Innovation is Predictable — by Mike Shipulski
How to Make Your Employees Thirsty — by Braden Kelley
Are We Suffering from AI Confirmation Bias? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
How to Survive the Next Decade — by Robyn Bolton
It’s the Customer Baby — by Braden Kelley

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

The Great American Contraction – Population, Scarcity, and the New Era of Human Value — by Art Inteligencia
Four Pillars of Innovation — by Mike Shipulski
The Voicebots are Coming — by Braden Kelley
The Future of Humanity in an Artificially Intelligent World — by Greg Satell
Measuring Human vs. AI Satisfaction — by Braden Kelley

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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Globalization and Technology Have Failed Us

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Globalization and Technology Have Failed Us

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In November 1989, there were two watershed events that would change the course of world history. The fall of the Berlin Wall would end the Cold War and open up markets across the world. That very same month, Tim Berners-Lee would create the World Wide Web and usher in a new technological era of networked computing.

It was a time of great optimism. Books like Francis Fukayama’s The End of History predicted a capitalist, democratic utopia, while pundits gushed over the seemingly neverending parade of “killer apps,” from email and e-commerce to social media and the mobile web. The onward march of history seemed unstoppable.

Today, 30 years on, it’s time to take stock and the picture is somewhat bleak. Instead of a global technological utopia, there are a number of worrying signs ranging from income inequality to the rise of popular authoritarianism. The fact is that technology and globalization have failed us. It’s time to address some very real problems.

Where’s the Productivity?

Think back, if you’re old enough, to before this all started. Life before 1989 was certainly less modern prior to 1989, we didn’t have mobile phones or the Internet, but for the most part it was fairly similar to today. We rode in cars and airplanes, watched TV and movies, and enjoyed the benefits of home appliances and air conditioners.

Now try to imagine what life was like in 1900, before electricity and internal combustion gained wide adoption. Even doing a simple task like cooking a meal or cleaning the house took hours of backbreaking labor to haul wood and water. While going back to living in the 1980s would involve some inconvenience, we would struggle to survive before 1920.

The productivity numbers bear out this simple observation. The widespread adoption of electricity and internal combustion led to a 50-year boom in productivity between 1920 and 1970. The digital revolution, on the other hand, created only an 8-year blip between 1996 and 2004. Even today, with artificial intelligence on the rise, productivity remains depressed.

At this point, we have to conclude that despite all the happy talk and grand promises of “changing the world,” the digital revolution has been a huge disappointment. While Silicon Valley has minted billionaires at record rates, digital technology has not made most of us measurably better off economically.

Winners Taking All

The increase of globalization and the rise of digital commerce was supposed to be a democratizing force, increasing competition and breaking the institutional monopoly on power. Yet just the opposite seems to have happened, with a relatively small global elite grabbing more money and more power.

Consider market consolidation. An analysis published in the Harvard Business Review showed that from airlines to hospitals to beer, market share is increasingly concentrated in just a handful of firms. As more expansive study of 900 industries conducted by The Economist found that two thirds have become more dominated by larger players.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we see the same trends in households as we do with businesses. The OECD reports that income inequality is at its highest level in over 50 years. Even in emerging markets, where millions have been lifted out of poverty, most of the benefits have gone to a small few.

The consequences of growing inequality are concrete and stark. Social mobility has been declining in America for decades, transforming the “land of opportunity” into what is increasingly a caste system. Anxiety and depression are rising to epidemic levels. Life expectancy for the white working class is actually declining, mostly due to “deaths of despair” due to drugs, alcohol and suicide. The overall picture is dim and seemingly getting worse.

The Failure Of Freedom

Probably the biggest source of optimism in the 1990s was the end of the Cold War. Capitalism was triumphant and many of the corrupt, authoritarian societies of the former Soviet Union began embracing democracy and markets. Expansion of NATO and the EU brought new hope to more than a hundred million people. China began to truly embrace markets as well.

I moved to Eastern Europe in the late 1990s and was able to observe this amazing transformation for myself. Living in Poland, it seemed like the entire country was advancing through a lens of time-lapse photography. Old, gray concrete building gave way to modern offices and apartment buildings. A prosperous middle class began to emerge.

Yet here as well things now seem to be going the other way. Anti-democratic regimes are winning elections across Europe while rising resentment against immigrant populations take hold throughout the western world. In America, we are increasingly mired in a growing constitutional crisis.

What is perhaps most surprising about the retreat of democracy is that it is happening not in the midst of some sort of global depression, but during a period of relative prosperity and low unemployment. Nevertheless, positive economic data cannot mask the basic truth that a significant portion of the population feels that the system doesn’t work for them.

It’s Time To Start Taking Responsibility For A Messy World

Looking back, it’s hard to see how an era that began with such promise turned out so badly. Yes, we’ve got cooler gadgets and streaming video. There have also been impressive gains in the developing world. Yet in so-called advanced economies, we seem to be worse off. It didn’t have to turn out this way. Our current predicament is the result of choices that we made.

Put simply, we have the problems we have today because they are the problems we have chosen not to solve. While the achievements of technology and globalization are real, they have also left far too many behind. We focused on simple metrics like GDP and shareholder value, but unfortunately the world is not so elegant. It’s a messy place and doesn’t yield so easily to reductionist measures and strategies.

There has, however, been some progress. The Business Roundtable, an influential group of almost 200 CEOs of America’s largest companies, in 2019 issued a statement that discarded the old notion that the sole purpose of a business is to provide value to shareholders. There are also a number of efforts underway to come up with broader measures of well being to replace GDP.

Yet we still need to learn an important lesson: technology alone will not save us. To solve complex challenges like inequality, climate change and the rise of authoritarianism we need to take a complex, network based approach. We need to build ecosystems of talent, technology and information. That won’t happen by itself, we have to make better choices.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Four Ways Governments Can Accelerate the Digital Transformation of Their Economies

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Four Ways Governments Can Accelerate the Digital Transformation of Their Economies

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s digital world, governments have a critical role to play in accelerating digital transformation. As technology continues to evolve, governments must find ways to embrace and apply new technologies, while also ensuring that their citizens have access to the most advanced digital services.

To ensure success, there are several key steps that the government should take.

1. Governments Should Invest in Digital Infrastructure

By investing in the infrastructure necessary to support digital transformation, the government can create a platform for innovation and adoption of new technologies. This includes things like high-speed broadband, 5G networks, and cloud computing capabilities.

2. Governments Should Provide Incentives to Spur Digital Adoption

This could come in the form of tax breaks, grants, and other incentives to organizations that are investing in digital transformation. This will help create a climate of investment and innovation, which will in turn help accelerate the transformation process.

3. Governments Should Create a Supportive Regulatory Environment

This means creating laws and regulations that are conducive to digital transformation, such as data privacy and security laws. This will help ensure that organizations can safely and securely adopt new technologies and services.

4. Governments Should Invest in Digital Literacy and Education

By investing in digital literacy and education, the government can ensure that citizens have the tools and knowledge necessary to take advantage of the digital transformation. This can include programs such as coding boot camps and digital literacy courses for adults.

Conclusion

By taking these steps, the government can create an environment that is conducive to digital transformation and help accelerate the process. In doing so, the government can ensure that its citizens have access to the most advanced digital services and technologies, and that organizations can take advantage of the opportunities that come with digital transformation.

Image credit: Pixabay

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What the Current Round of Layoffs Tells Us

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What the Current Round of Layoffs Tells Us

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

When layoffs hit one or two companies, you might blame it on management, but when they hit market leader after market leader, you know something structural is afoot. The important thing then is to extract the signal from all the noise. Here is my cut at it.

First of all, it is the digital consumer sector that is under fire—not all of tech. But note that when you click on the Tech Section of any major publication, all you get is consumer tech news. B2C has eclipsed B2B in the public perception of what tech is all about. The downturn may not change this for consumers, but it sure will for investors. B2B tech actually has the opportunity to thrive in a downturn if it focuses on solving urgent problems that have short time to payback.

Second, the digital consumer model has such attractive economics when it is operating at scale that it led to a massive overvaluation of the sector per se. As with prior bubbles in tech, overvaluing is primarily due to extrapolating present growth as perpetual and ignoring global economic and geopolitical downside risks. Downturns simply call this out and demand a recalibration of valuation based on a more balanced mix of positive and negative factors.

Third, when enterprises have hyper-valued market caps, management does everything it can to sustain them, eventually to the point of counterproductive actions driven more by inertia than any sensible investment strategy. Given the peer pressures of investor relations, this is almost impossible to stop, so ultimately we end up where we are, in need of a correction that everyone saw coming, but no one acted upon. And to be fair, guessing when the correction will come is not a winning play. Better to accept the dynamics you have in front of you and then adapt as fast as you can once they change.

Net net, it is time to own the correction, put our houses in order, accept the deflation in stock price, refocus on our core mission, reset our performance metrics, and get back out on the field.

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The Ways Inflection Points Define Our Future

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The Ways Inflection Points Define Our Future

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Humans tend to think in a linear fashion. If something is growing, we expect it to keep growing. If it is decreasing, we expect it to continue to decrease. We are natural trend watchers and instinctively look for patterns. Yet it is often the discontinuities, rather than the continuities, that have the biggest impact.

The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot referred to this cycle of continuity punctuated by discontinuity as “Noah effects and Joseph effects.” Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, washing away the previous order.

Throughout history, inflection points have defined the future. Business models, built on top of Joseph effects, are disrupted by Noah effects, creating new opportunities for those who are able to identify and adapt. Today, we’re in the midst of a series of inflection points in what was already a time of enormous flux. We can’t predict the future but we can prepare for it.

1920s: A Second Industrial Revolution

By 1920, electricity was already nearly a 40-year old technology. In 1882, just three years after he had almost literally shocked the world with his revolutionary electric light bulb, Thomas Edison opened his Pearl Street Station, the first commercial electrical distribution plant in the United States. By 1884 it was already servicing over 500 homes.

Yet although electricity and electric lighting were already widespread in 1919, they didn’t have a measurable effect on productivity and a paper by the economist Paul David helps explain why. It took time for manufacturers to adapt their factories to electricity and learn to design workflow to leverage the flexibility that the new technology offered. It was the improved workflow, more than the technology itself, that drove productivity forward.

Automobiles saw a similar evolution. It took time for infrastructure, such as roads and gas stations, to be built. Improved logistics reshaped supply chains and factories moved from cities in the north — close to customers — to small towns in the south, where labor and land were cheaper. That improved the economics of manufacturing further.

It was the confluence of electricity and internal combustion, along with the secondary innovations they spawned, that led to mass manufacturing and mass marketing. Enterprises scaled up into huge bureaucracies exemplified by the organization Alfred Sloan built at General Motors. Firms were designed to move large numbers of men and materiel efficiently. Information flowed up, orders went down and your rank determined your responsibility.

1990s – Globalization and Digitization

Much like in the 1920s, these forces had been building for some time. Commercial computers had been around since the 1950s and global trade as a percentage of GDP began to sharply increase in the 1970s. Yet 1989 marked an inflection point and the world would never be the same after that.

The combined forces of globalization and digitization favored the quick and agile over the large and powerful. Rather than spending months or years to develop products, startup firms could rapidly prototype and iterate their way to launching a product in months or weeks. So called “unicorns”, startup companies valued at over a billion dollars, began to emerge and disrupt incumbent industry giants.

Perhaps the biggest shift of the globalized, digital world was from hierarchies to networks. While in the industrial era strategy was focused on linear value chains and the sum of all efficiencies, in the networked world strategy increasingly focused on the sum of all connections. A leader’s role was no longer simply to plan and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief.

Yet much like technologies that came of age in the 1920s, the second and third order effects of globalization and digitization were very different than anyone had predicted. Instead of the triumph of democracy we got a rise in authoritarian populism. Instead of a new era of prosperity, we got stagnant wages, reduced productivity growth and weaker competitive markets.

2020s – A New Era of Innovation

Today, as Moore’s law nears its theoretical limits, the digital revolution is coming to a close and we’re about to embark on a new era of innovation. Much like in the 1920s and the 1990s, the future is likely to surprise us, but the rough outlines of new inflection points are already beginning to take shape.

The first is in energy. The World Economic Forum reports that wind and solar now produce energy cheaper than coal and gas in North America. In fact, in some sunny parts of the world, solar costs less than half as much as coal. Costs for energy storage are still too high, but here too there is significant progress and we’re likely to see a scaled solution within a decade.

Another is the rise of synthetic biology. Driven by new technologies such as CRISPR, we’re beginning to go beyond merely reading genomes and starting to write them. Andrew Hessel, CEO of Humane Genomics, told me that we’re nearing the point that the value of a genome exceeds the cost to produce one. That will unleash a new wave of biologically driven business models. A similar revolution is underway in materials science.

Over the next decade we will also see the emergence of post-digital computing architectures such as quantum and neuromorphic computing, which are potentially thousands, if not millions of times more powerful than today’s technology. Although we don’t expect much of an impact from either of these for at least a decade, they will accelerate advancements in biology, materials and artificial intelligence.

Clearly these new technologies will open up new possibilities, but right now it’s impossible to see beyond first order effects. Nobody looked at a light bulb and saw household appliances empowering women to enter the workplace, or looked at a Model T and saw suburbs and the transformation of retail, or came across an IBM mainframe and said, “Gee, this thing will put journalists out of work one day.”

Preparing For the Future

Six years ago, I wrote how 2020 was shaping up to be a pivotal year. Boy, I had no idea! In addition. In addition to the convergence of longstanding trends in technology, energy and transportation, Covid-19 and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement burst onto the global consciousness.

Two things stick out about these new inflection points. First, they were not only predictable, but were, in fact, predicted by a number of people. Second, both will accelerate already existing trends. Covid-19 has shifted digital transformation and synthetic biology into high gear. Black Lives Matter will likely expedite the shift in political power from Boomers to Millennials.

We can think of various scenarios that can play out. Covid may catalyze nascent trends, such as telemedicine and genomic medicine to greatly improve healthcare in the US. Black Lives Matter may cause a shift in hiring patterns that may help to accelerate productivity. On the other hand, the tensions both inflection points create may exacerbate underlying divisions and make things worse.

Those are just two possible scenarios. There are many more, each of which will create their sets of Noah and Joseph effects and then combine secondary and tertiary changes in ways that are unknowable today. What we can do, however, is explore new possibilities and prepare for them. The most important inflection points are often the ones that we create ourselves through the choices we make. No future is inevitable.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Six Driving Forces of Change Shaping 2018 and Beyond

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Six Driving Forces of Change Shaping 2018 and Beyond

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

As we enter the New Year, there are no lack of issues to be concerned about. But if you take a step back and look at the big picture today, there are developments happening that are cause for tremendous optimism as well.

As a futurist and innovation speaker, my work involves studying the driving forces of change: technological, demographic, social, and economic — and helping people translate change into opportunity. In ruminating over the important trends that will shape 2018, I see that more than ever before, businesses and their leaders will rise or fall based on their ability to anticipate and creatively respond to rapid change.

The challenge is one we all face. Busy fighting fires, we often fail to take stock, or take the time to separate trends from mere fads. And we fail to devise plans to translate change into opportunity. Here are six driving forces of change that demand your attention going into 2018:

1. America’s economic recovery is real. Don’t let the current boom pass you by.

Positive economic indicators are popping up everywhere. Consumer confidence is up. GDP growth is up. Tax cuts will soon put more money in consumers’ pockets. Stock markets here and abroad are setting records. Granted, there could be a correction coming, or even a recession at some point, but now is the time to take advantage of favorable conditions — or miss losing out.

Action steps: Challenge yourself and your team with a series of questions. Are you bringing “this is the way we’ve always done it” assumptions to bear on future opportunities? How can you and your team take advantage of rising consumer confidence and a buoyant market to drive growth and enter new markets? What career changes (a pay raise, graduate degree, lateral move, etc.) should you make this year to take advantage of this seller’s market in human talent? How can you turbocharge your personal value proposition in 2018?

2. In 2018, Millennials will reach a demographic tipping point.

Already the majority in the workplace, Millennials are poised in 2018 to become the dominant demographic cohort in the marketplace, eclipsing Generation X and Boomers in buying power, economic influence, and political clout. Today’s Millennials are no longer in a delaying mode. The oldest Millennials are in their mid-30s, getting married, starting families, starting businesses, buying houses, investing savings, and moving up the career ladder. Millennials are ethnically and racially diverse, open-minded, and tech-savvy. They are not just cutting the cord to cable television, but to businesses, brands, and institutions that are unresponsive to their needs. This is a generation of ultra time-starved shoppers that have more information at their fingertips than any generation in history. Where and how they spend will determine winners and losers in the marketplace going forward.

Action steps: Regardless of what you make or sell, seek to align with Millennials in both the marketplace and the workplace. Update outdated perceptions about this rising generation. Talk with members of this generation and ask them questions about their lifestyles, buying behavior, aspirations. Aim marketing, workplace environment, and recruiting efforts on being relevant to this 80 million-member cohort. Anticipate their burgeoning needs and help them resolve contradictions. For example: while they yearn for the convenience of online shopping, they are now acutely aware that where they spend their hard-earned dollars will depend on whether local shops (especially surviving bookstores and independent retailers) continue to wither away, or whether that experience will be available to them and their offspring in years to come.

3. Big brands, incumbents, and entire industries will continue to face the forces of disruption. But in 2018, small businesses and new entrants have unique advantages as well.

Digital disruption will continue to radically destabilize industries ranging from textbook publishing to cable television to advertising. Big global brands and incumbents in every category are facing an additional threat as well. Brands such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestle, Kraft Heinz, and others are all facing what amounts to consumer revolt. Their once-loyal consumers are deserting them for store brands, and smaller, niche, and locally sourced products, services, and business models.

Startups ranging from Shave Club for Men (sold recently to Unilever) to Warby Parker to The Honest Company are making inroads into incumbents’ territory at every turn. How? By introducing new choices, offering better pricing, and appealing to social responsibility. The Honest Company, founded by actress Jessica Alba, sells an array of household products from diapers to vitamins, to consumers concerned about “ethical consumerism.” Manufacturing costs and barriers to entry are falling, enabling startups to capitalize on consumers’ desire to support the local brand, help the independent producer. Social media and e-commerce enable startups to establish direct relationships with customers and avoid middlemen.

Action steps: Count on further disruptions ahead, both digital and societal. Ask: how can you and your company capitalize on local or regional differences to offer unique choices? How can you pounce on consumer disappointment with incumbent poor service, prices, or terms to offer unique value? How can new technology – artificial intelligence, wearables, big data, etc. — give you advantages?

4. Real time responsiveness and convenience will become key competitive differentiators to firms that exploit them.

In 2018, businesses that eliminate customer waiting will win, whether online, in-store or over a period of days. Financial institutions will provide instant approval of every service, and mobile banking will soon be derigueur. The quest for speed and convenience is insatiable. An ATM machine gives you cash faster than a bank teller, but even better is not having to use cash in the first place. What about making a simple motion with your smartphone to pay the babysitter instead? Brick and mortar stores will upgrade their “convenience quotient” or continue to lose customers to e-commerce. Even mighty Amazon cannot rest, innovations such as same-day delivery, “anticipatory shipping” and (possibly) drone delivery attest to Amazon’s weakness in this arena.

Action steps: Continue to challenge your company’s hassle factor, and make doing business with you easier and easier. Chip away at the time gap that exists between the customer saying “I want” and “I am satisfied.” Ask: in what ways might we reduce the elapsed time at every step of our operation in order to make speed our competitive advantage?

5. Small and mid-sized businesses will begin to adopt artificial intelligence (A.I.) in 2018, changing the nature of work and life.

Real estate broker Coldwell Banker is experimenting with A.I. to target classes of likely buyers for a specific property. Fidelity is trying to find ways to apply artificial intelligence, computer algorithms, and voice recognition software to the hidebound world of money management and investing. Your company could be next.

A.I. encompasses computer systems that are able to perform tasks that heretofore required human intelligence to perform. Things like speech recognition, visual perception, enhanced decision-making, and language translation all come under this tech-category. And while Netflix, Amazon, Google and other tech giants have been pioneering artificial intelligence for well over a decade, look at growing numbers of non-tech companies in 2018 to begin using this tool.

Action steps: Identify places where artificial intelligence could differentiate your company, both internally and with external customers. Start by becoming better informed about A.I. and its potential. How might it help you add tangible value to your customer’s overall experience? An edge in customer acquisition? Look at what needs to be done or could be done better, cheaper and faster using A.I., and look to vendors willing to partner with you to make it happen.

6. Social Trust is on the decline. Businesses and leaders that offer trust will gain.

Wells Fargo employees, under pressure to meet sales goals, created two million phony accounts, charged improper and unauthorized fees, and withdrew money from customers’ accounts. A data breach at Equifax caused the release of sensitive personal information on 143 million Americans. Volkswagen was fined $30 billion for cheating on emissions requirements. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see that trust will be a huge issue in 2018 and beyond.

“Social trust,” according to researchers, has been declining gradually since the early ‘70s, but has dropped noticeably in recent years. The social impacts of rampant technology are occurring faster than anyone can digest them, and there’s a great reckoning afoot. Social media was supposed to connect us (and it does), but it also divides us. Personal technology was supposed to liberate us, but recent research shows that it debilitates us as well, if overused.

Take action: Seek to prove trust-worthiness both with internal employees and external customers and suppliers. Make the demonstration of trust-worthiness a strategic priority.

In summary: While explosive technological change is the driver today, other changes must not be ignored. If not duly observed, taken into account and acted on, they can spell doom for an organization. Or boom, if they are. This “spot a change, create a response” mindset will become the touchstone of innovation for the vast majority of businesses going forward. Not always breakthroughs, but constant adjustments and constant improvements that add value to customers, and make your company an exciting place to work. Leaders with imagination and foresight, who can keep a positive attitude about the unrelenting pace of change will have unprecedented opportunities in the years ahead.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: ChatGPT

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Whither Innovation in Indiana?

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Whither Innovation in Indiana? Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk about homosexuality and whether it has any impact on innovation. There probably are two no more polarizing topics in the United States than homosexuality and abortion. But the truth is that if both sides of the political and religious spectrum focused on the golden rule, there would be less corruption, we’d all be a lot happier, probably have more innovation, and our politics would be more productive.

Today we have another great case study for how short people’s attention spans have gotten, how the government can help or hinder innovation, how little investigative journalism still remains in the United States, and how easily people are swayed by a soundbite that runs contrary to (or in support of) their own personal religious or political beliefs.

But this article isn’t going to be some diatribe in support or opposition to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) legislation (referred to by the media as an anti-gay law) because I freely admit I don’t fully understand all of the implications of a similar federal law and whether federal protections for gays apply to the state law.

Instead I’d like to focus briefly on what this controversy brings to mind for me in regards to the efforts of hard-working folks attempting to stimulate innovation in Indiana (and elsewhere).

Point #1: People Must Feel Safe to Innovate

If we take Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs as gospel (okay, maybe that’s dangerous word choice), then safety is one of the most important needs for people, and in order to innovate people must feel safe. True innovation usually requires taking risks and doing things in a new way, and if people feel that trying something new or even just being different has a high price, then people won’t step out of their comfort zone and push the boundaries of conventional wisdom. So if we are truly trying to do everything we can to inspire innovation in our region, shouldn’t we also try to do everything we can to make it feel like a place where it is safe to be different and where that difference is potentially even celebrated?

Point #2: Diversity is Important (to a point)

We all look at the same situation through different eyes and a different history of experiences, values and beliefs. This diversity can help create different idea fragments that can be connected together to create revolutionary new ideas with the potential to become innovations. But at the same time, having some shared experiences helps to make it easier to communicate and to have a higher level of trust (assuming those experiences were good ones). So if we are truly trying to do everything we can to inspire innovation in our region, shouldn’t we also do everything we can to make different groups of people look to our region as a good place to move to so we have a diverse talent pool?

Conclusion: If Culture Trumps Strategy, Environment Trumps Startups

The world is changing. It used to be that companies started and grew in the community where they were founded, hiring increasing numbers of people from the surrounding areas and attracting others from elsewhere. Now, an increasing number of companies (especially digital ones) are moving to more distributed models where they create satellite offices where the talent is rather than trying to attract all of the talent to a single location.

Economically this is meaning that it is becoming less important that the next Facebook starts in your town than it is for the next Facebook to want to have an office in your town. This means that for cities, counties, states and countries, the greater economic impact is likely to be made not from trying to encourage lots of startups, but instead from trying to create an environment that young, talented people choose to live in.

And when you create a place that is attractive for smart, creative people to move to, you know what, you’re likely to end up not just with more growing digital companies seeking a presence, but also a larger number of startups than if you started with the goal of specifically trying to encourage startups.

Does your region focus on creating startups as the primary goal or on making itself an attractive place for a young, diverse and talented population to live?

Does this uproar help Indiana establish its as an attractive place to be, or work against that perception?

I’ll let you decide!

P.S. If you’re curious, here are The Metro Areas With the Largest, and Smallest, Gay Populations (for what it’s worth, Indianapolis isn’t on either list)

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The New Reinvigoration of American Manufacturing

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The New Reinvigoration of American Manufacturing

As wages and shipping costs rise abroad, unemployment stays high at home, and strategic discontent with offshoring grows, U.S. Manufacturing finds itself facing its best chance at staging a comeback.

American companies are considering a reversal of offshoring and outsourcing to reduce risk, improve agility, shorten product development cycle, and improve their ability to simplify increasingly complex supply chain management.

Missing from this list is innovation, but US companies that commit to engaging American workers in their innovation efforts may also increase their ability to justify manufacturing their products at home.

As wages and shipping costs rise abroad, unemployment stays high at home, and strategic discontent with offshoring grows, U.S. Manufacturing finds itself facing its best chance at staging a comeback.

Moreover, Chinese workers are now three-to-five times more expensive than some other Asian workers, leading American firms to reconsider their sites of production.

One such firm is Nike, whose innovative Flyknit technology could allow it to make shoes easily anywhere in the world by having a machine make the most labor-intensive parts of the shoe. To bring production back to the United States allows Nike to react faster to competitors or to increase the speed of scheduled product launches. In the fashion industry, speed is crucial, and onshore production could create a competitive advantage.

Other firms are taking a second look at their reliance on contract manufacturers in China and elsewhere. Companies that once saw contract manufacturing as a strategic or economic necessity are questioning the wisdom of the arrangement as they watch original design manufacturers like HTC move up-market and strengthen their brands to compete with Apple, Motorola and others.

Adding fuel to the fire are rumors of workers at plants like Foxconn smuggling out plans and components to sell to pirates to make a little cash on the side.

But more importantly, an almost religious focus on cost and increased use of standard components across whole industries has made it more difficult for one brand to differentiate their products from another in the industry – increasing price competition and squeezing margins for all.

As a result, companies like Apple are now looking to reverse some elements of their standardization and outsourcing strategy and instead become more vertically integrated. Apple has acquired a chip design firm — and even their own chip fabrication plant (fab) — in its quest to differentiate itself and control some of its basic inputs and it may still acquire another fab to continue this strategic direction. Not to be outdone, Google is acquiring Motorola, and Nokia and Microsoft are working together closer than before.

It is possible for companies to manufacture their products in the United States and make a profit. When you invest in your workers, engage their hearts and minds and involve them in the innovation process, you can not only optimize your manufacturing processes but also uncover new growth opportunities that no contract manufacturer will ever bring to you.

Companies like New Balance, Snapper Mowers, American Apparel, Caterpillar, Syntax-Brillian (Olevia TV’s), Case IH, American Bicycle Group and many others have been working hard to keep making their products in the United States.

Now is the time for the Obama administration and state and local governments to step up their encouragement of US manufacturing. In these difficult economic times, Americans would love nothing more than to stroll down the aisles of their local Walmart, Target, or independent retailer and find more products on the shelves that say Made in the USA.

This article originally appeared on The Atlantic

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Keep Your Innovation Nerve

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Keep Your Innovation Nerve It is much easier to lose your nerve than it is to regain it, so better not to lose it in the first place. I have lost my nerve before and made decisions I regretted for a long time after they were made. Acting out of fear leads to poor decision making and a lack of leverage that, in turn, leads to unfavorable outcomes. That is why you must maintain your nerve and focus on the actions you need to take to create positive change, rather than allowing yourself to be overtaken by fear. Fear is one of those emotions that grows to fill the space.

When this downturn began, I had a client that wanted to extend our contract at half the previous rate in order to cut costs. Without any other projects in hand it would have been very easy to take their offer and hope that something better would come along. It’s much harder to walk away from guaranteed income and focus on winning new clients during the biggest downturn in a generation, but I did. The outcome?

Not losing my nerve, refusing this offer, and fully dedicating myself to revitalizing my business led to:

Signing my first two clients outside the United States

Signing a top literary agent to represent my book project and John Wiley & Sons to publish it (the five-star Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire)

Building upon my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire by creating the Nine Innovation Roles Diagnostic Tool to help companies improve their innovation team success

Becoming a popular innovation keynote speaker and thought leader

My personal innovation blog expanding to become the leading innovation blog on the web – Blogging Innovation – with more than 15 contributing authors and upwards of 200,000 monthly page views

Blogging Innovation becoming the foundation for Innovation Excellence, the world’s most popular innovation web site – a Top 1% site that now regularly generates 800,000+ monthly page views (before it was sold in early 2020)

Launching a new business focused on helping b2b companies increase their inbound sales leads and revenue through execution of customer journey research and creation of an effective b2b pull marketing strategy that includes the use of my proprietary single content input, multiple content output methodology

So before you lose your nerve and start asking yourself all those questions about what could go wrong, focus instead on asking yourself about the actions you could take now to make sure that things go right.

Are you going to be nervous in the downturn, or nervy? If you act fearful, your clients will be afraid to do business with you, but if you’re confident that you will do great things, then your clients will want to do great things with you.

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Keynote Speaker & Futurist – Braden Kelley

Tag Archives: economy

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1. Governments Should Invest in Digital Infrastructure

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1. America’s economic recovery is real. Don’t let the current boom pass you by.

2. In 2018, Millennials will reach a demographic tipping point.

3. Big brands, incumbents, and entire industries will continue to face the forces of disruption. But in 2018, small businesses and new entrants have unique advantages as well.

4. Real time responsiveness and convenience will become key competitive differentiators to firms that exploit them.

5. Small and mid-sized businesses will begin to adopt artificial intelligence (A.I.) in 2018, changing the nature of work and life.

6. Social Trust is on the decline. Businesses and leaders that offer trust will gain.

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Keep Your Innovation Nerve