Tag Archives: Investing

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

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

  1. A 90% Project Failure Rate Means You’re Doing it Wrong — by Mike Shipulski
  2. ‘Innovation’ is Killing Innovation. How Do We Save It? — by Robyn Bolton
  3. Sustaining Imagination is Hard — by Braden Kelley
  4. Unintended Consequences. The Hidden Risk of Fast-Paced Innovation — by Pete Foley
  5. 8 Strategies to Future-Proofing Your Business & Gaining Competitive Advantage — by Teresa Spangler
  6. How to Determine if Your Problem is Worth Solving — by Mike Shipulski
  7. Sprint Toward the Innovation Action — by Mike Shipulski
  8. Moneyball and the Beginning, Middle, and End of Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
  9. A Shortcut to Making Strategic Trade-Offs — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  10. 3 Innovation Types Not What You Think They Are — by Robyn Bolton

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in April 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 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:

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

Silicon Valley Has Become a Doomsday Machine

Silicon Valley Has Become a Doomsday Machine

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I was working on Wall Street in 1995 when the Netscape IPO hit like a bombshell. It was the first big Internet stock and, although originally priced at $14 per share, it opened at double that amount and quickly zoomed to $75. By the end of the day, it had settled back at $58.25 and, just like that, a tiny company with no profits was worth $2.9 billion.

It seemed crazy, but economists soon explained that certain conditions, such as negligible marginal costs and network effects, would lead to “winner take all markets” and increasing returns to investment. Venture capitalists who bet on this logic would, in many cases, become rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Yet as Charles Duhigg explained in The New Yorker, things have gone awry. Investors who preach prudence are deemed to be not “founder friendly” and cut out of deals. Evidence suggests that the billions wantonly plowed into massive failures like WeWork and Quibi are crowding out productive investments. Silicon Valley is becoming a ticking time bomb.

The Rise Of Silicon Valley

In Regional Advantage, author AnnaLee Saxenian explained how the rise of the computer can be traced to the buildup of military research after World War II. At first, most of the entrepreneurial activity centered around Boston, but the scientific and engineering talent attracted to labs based in Northern California soon began starting their own companies.

Back east, big banks were the financial gatekeepers. In the Bay Area, however, small venture capitalists, many of whom were ex-engineers themselves, invested in entrepreneurs. Stanford Provost Frederick Terman, as well as existing companies, such as Hewlett Packard, also devoted resources to broaden and strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Saxenian would later point out to me that this was largely the result of an unusual confluence of forces. Because there was a relative dearth of industry in Northern California, tech entrepreneurs tended to stick together. In a similar vein, Stanford had few large corporate partners to collaborate with, so sought out entrepreneurs. The different mixture produced a different brew and Silicon Valley developed a unique culture and approach to business.

The early success of the model led to a process that was somewhat self-perpetuating. Engineers became entrepreneurs and got rich. They, in turn, became investors in new enterprises, which attracted more engineers to the region, many of whom became entrepreneurs. By the 1980’s, Silicon Valley had surpassed Route 128 outside Boston to become the center of the technology universe.

The Productivity Paradox and the Dotcom Bust

As Silicon Valley became ascendant and information technology gained traction, economists began to notice something strange. Although businesses were increasing investment in computers at a healthy clip, there seemed to be negligible economic impact. As Robert Solow put it, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” This came to be known as the productivity paradox.

Things began to change around the time of the Netscape IPO. Productivity growth, which had been depressed since the early 1970s, began to surge and the idea of “increasing returns” began to take hold. Companies such as Webvan and Pets.com, with no viable business plan or path to profitability, attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.

By 2000, the market hit its peak and the bubble burst. While some of the fledgling Internet companies, such as Cisco and Amazon, did turn out well, thousands of others went down in flames. Other more conventional businesses, such as Enron, World Com and Arthur Anderson, got caught up in the hoopla, became mired in scandal and went bankrupt.

When it was all over there was plenty of handwringing, a small number of prosecutions, some reminiscing about the Dutch tulip mania of 1637 and then everybody went on with their business. The Federal Reserve Bank pumped money into the economy, the Bush Administration pushed big tax cuts and within a few years things were humming again.

Web 2.0. Great Recession and the Rise Of the Unicorns

Out of the ashes of the dotcom bubble arose Web 2.0, which saw the emergence of new social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube that leveraged their own users to create content and grew exponentially. The launch of the iPhone in 2007 ushered in a new mobile era and, just like that, techno-enthusiasts were once again back in vogue. Marc Andreessen, who founded Netscape, would declare that software was eating the world.

Yet trouble was lurking under the surface. Productivity growth disappeared in 2005 just as mysteriously as it appeared in 1996. All the money being pumped into the economy by the Fed and the Bush tax cuts had to go somewhere and found a home in a booming housing market. Mortgage bankers, Wall Street traders, credit raters and regulators all looked the other way while the bubble expanded and then, somewhat predictably, imploded.

But this time, there were no zany West Coast startup entrepreneurs to blame. It was, in fact, the establishment that had run us off the cliff. The worthless assets at the center didn’t involve esoteric new business models, but the brick and mortar of our homes and workplaces. The techno-enthusiasts could whistle past the graveyard, pitying the poor suckers who got caught up in a seemingly anachronistic fascination with things made with atoms.

Repeating a now-familiar pattern, the Fed pumped money into the economy to fuel the recovery, establishment industries, such as the auto companies in Detroit were discredited and a superabundance of capital needed a place to go and Silicon Valley looked attractive.

The era of the unicorns, startup companies worth more than a billion dollars, had begun.

Charting A New Path Forward

In his inaugural address, Ronald Reagan declared that, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” In his view, bureaucrats were the enemy and private enterprise the hero, so he sought to dismantle federal regulations. This led to the Savings and Loan crisis that exploded, conveniently or inconveniently, during the first Bush administration.

So small town bankers became the enemy while hotshot Wall Street traders and, after the Netscape IPO, Internet entrepreneurs and venture capitalists became heroes. Wall Street would lose its luster after the global financial meltdown, leaving Silicon Valley’s venture-backed entrepreneurship as the only model left with any genuine allure.

That brings us to now and “big tech” is increasingly under scrutiny. At this point, the government, the media, big business, small business, Silicon Valley, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have all been somewhat discredited. There is no real enemy left besides ourselves and there are no heroes coming to save us. Until we learn to embrace our own culpability we will never be able to truly move forward.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Consider the recent Covid crisis, in which unprecedented collaboration between governments, large pharmaceutical companies, innovative startups and academic scientists developed a life-saving vaccine in record time. Similar, albeit fledgling, efforts have been going on for years.

Put simply, we have seen the next big thing and it is each other. By discarding childish old notions about economic heroes and villains we can learn to collaborate across historical, organizational and institutional boundaries to solve problems and create new value. It is in our collective ability to solve problems that we will create our triumph or our peril.

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

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

Design Thinking in Financial Services

Enhancing Customer Experience in Banking

Design Thinking in Financial Services - Enhancing Customer Experience in Banking

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s highly competitive financial services industry, banks are constantly seeking innovative ways to differentiate themselves and provide exceptional customer experiences. One approach gaining popularity is design thinking. By applying this human-centered design approach, banks can better understand customer needs and create solutions that truly enhance their experience. This article explores the concept of design thinking in financial services, highlighting its benefits and presenting two case studies that showcase how this approach can revolutionize the customer experience in banking.

Case Study 1: DBS Bank – Reinventing the Branch Experience

DBS Bank, one of Asia’s leading financial institutions, undertook a comprehensive redesign of its branches to align with design thinking principles. The bank conducted extensive research to understand customer pain points and preferences. By mapping the customer journey, DBS Bank gained insights into areas where it could improve the customer experience.

Using design thinking, DBS Bank transformed its branches into vibrant and welcoming spaces, departing from the traditional cold and impersonal atmosphere. The bank incorporated technology seamlessly into the branch experience, providing customers with self-service kiosks, touch-screen displays for product information, and interactive tools for personalized financial planning. These changes not only enhanced efficiency but also encouraged customers to engage more actively with their banking needs.

As a result, DBS Bank saw a significant increase in customer satisfaction and engagement. The branch transformation project showcased how design thinking can positively impact the customer experience, making traditional banking more accessible and enjoyable.

Case Study 2: Simple – A Digital-First Banking Solution

Simple, an online banking platform in the United States, embraced design thinking to create a truly customer-centric banking experience. Simple aimed to simplify banking, addressing the frustrations customers encountered with traditional banks’ complex products and processes.

Through extensive user research and empathy mapping, Simple identified key pain points experienced by their target customers. Armed with these insights, the company created a streamlined online platform with an intuitive user interface. It focused on providing real-time financial insights, goal-oriented savings features, and transparent fee structures—all while eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy.

By leveraging design thinking in their digital-first approach, Simple ensured that its platform catered to users’ needs, resulting in high customer satisfaction and loyalty. Simple’s success demonstrated how design thinking can be applied not only to physical spaces but also to digital solutions, revolutionizing the customer experience in banking.

Conclusion

Design thinking is transforming the financial services industry by enabling banks to put customers at the center of the design process. By gaining deep customer insights, banks can create innovative solutions that enhance the customer experience, driving customer satisfaction and loyalty. The case studies of DBS Bank and Simple highlight how design thinking can be applied in both physical and digital environments, leading to remarkable improvements in customer engagement and overall brand reputation. As financial institutions continue to prioritize customer experience, embracing design thinking becomes pivotal for their success in an increasingly competitive landscape.

SPECIAL BONUS: Braden Kelley’s Problem Finding Canvas can be a super useful starting point for doing design thinking or human-centered design.

“The Problem Finding Canvas should help you investigate a handful of areas to explore, choose the one most important to you, extract all of the potential challenges and opportunities and choose one to prioritize.”

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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

The Advantages of Investing in Employee Retention

The Advantages of Investing in Employee Retention

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

Employee retention is a key factor in the success of any business. A company that is able to retain its employees, as well as attract new ones, is more likely to succeed in the long run. Investing in employee retention is one of the best investments a company can make, as it can lead to increased profitability, improved morale, and a more productive workforce. This article looks at some of the advantages of investing in employee retention.

1. Improved Morale: Investing in employee retention can help to improve morale, as employees feel more valued and appreciated by the company. This can lead to a more positive work environment and increased productivity.

2. Increased Profitability: Retaining employees can help to reduce the costs associated with hiring and training new staff. This can lead to increased profitability, as the company is able to focus more of its resources on other areas of the business.

3. Reduced Turnover: Employee turnover can be costly for a business, as it takes time and money to recruit and train new staff. Investing in employee retention can help to reduce turnover, as employees are more likely to stay with the company if they feel valued and appreciated.

4. Improved Productivity: Retaining employees can help to improve productivity, as they are more likely to be more familiar with the company’s processes and procedures. This can help to reduce mistakes and ensure that tasks are completed more efficiently.

5. Improved Customer Service: When employees feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to provide good customer service. This can help to improve customer satisfaction, leading to increased sales and profitability.

Investing in employee retention can be beneficial for any business, as it can help to improve morale, increase profitability, reduce turnover, and improve productivity. It is important for companies to recognize the importance of investing in their employees, as it can lead to improved overall business performance.

To illustrate the value of employee retention, consider the case of Google. The company has long been committed to investing in its employees and offering competitive wages, benefits, and perks. This commitment to its employees has paid off in the form of increased productivity, employee satisfaction, and high levels of employee retention. Google’s retention rate is currently at 95%, and the company attributes this to its commitment to employee development, career growth, and a positive work culture.

Another example of an organization that has benefited from investing in employee retention is Amazon. The company has a retention rate of over 95%, with employees staying with the company an average of four to five years. Amazon focuses on creating an environment that encourages innovation, collaboration, and learning. The company also offers competitive salaries, generous benefits, and flexible working arrangements.

In conclusion, investing in employee retention can have numerous benefits for any organization. It can reduce recruitment costs, boost morale, and save money in the long run. Organizations should focus on creating an environment that values employees and provides them with opportunities for growth. Companies such as Google and Amazon have seen the advantages of investing in employee retention and have reaped the rewards.

Image credit: Pexels

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Are You Lying to Your Customers?

Are You Lying to Your Customers?

It seems like every company these days is trying to claim that they are innovative, trying to claim that they are customer-centric, trying to claim that their employees are important to them. But are they?

Can all this be true?

Or, are all of these companies lying to their customers, lying to their employees, and lying to their shareholders?

Many companies say that they are committed to innovation, but employees know the truth. If employees’ experience around the innovation efforts of the company (and its outcomes) isn’t consistent with the innovation messages being communicated, then not only will innovation participation and outcomes be low, but ongoing trust and loyalty will be further eroded in the organization.

Employees can see the Lucky Charms on your face when you say you’re committed to innovation publicly, but behind the scenes your actions demonstrate that you really are not.

And don’t be fooled, customers will start to see the Lucky Charms show up on your face, no matter how hard you try and convince them that the marshmallow goodness is not there.

If you aren’t going to define what innovation means to your company, if you aren’t going to create a common language of innovation, if you aren’t going to teach people new innovation skills and support innovation at all levels by making limited amounts of time and capital available to push their ideas forward, then don’t say you’re committed to innovation. You’ll tear the organization down instead of building it up.

Lying to CustomersIf customers don’t see you increasing your level of value creation, improving your level of value access, and doing a better job at value translation (see Innovation is All About Value), especially when compared to the competition, then they too will become disillusioned, frustrated, and start to look for other alternative solutions that deliver more value then all of your offerings.

Meanwhile, shareholders behave like customers on steroids. If you are being rewarded with an innovation premium by the market, you can’t be “all hat and no cattle” for very long, meaning you have to deliver compelling inventions on a repeated basis with a strong potential to become the innovations that drive the future growth of the company. This is hard to do once, let alone on a repeated basis. We will likely see Apple be the latest victim in the next twelve months.

Why? Because AAPL is at an all-time high based on the likely high percentage of people that are likely to upgrade from an iPhone 4 or 5s to an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. What about after that? Well, the smartphone industry is about to enter the same place that the PC industry hit a few years ago, when replacement cycles began to lengthen, reducing revenues, and forcing prices (and margins) lower. Simultaneously carriers will seek to extract more of the margin from the overall equation, and if Google/Motorola/Lenovo, Nokia and others start to bring $99 smartphones developed for India and other places to the richer economies that will in their next generation likely be “good enough” compared to the high end $699 handsets, more people will choose to wait longer between upgrades, or trade down with their next purchase, much as they did when $400 laptops started to become the rage.

So, what are we to learn from Apple’s pending share price collapse about the middle of next year?

Well, the first thing we will learn is that continuous innovation is hard. Now I’m not saying that Apple is going to go away, HP and Dell haven’t gone away, but Apple’s share price in Q2/Q3 2015 will struggle, they will face employee defections, and it will become more like Dell, HP and Microsoft than Facebook or Google. Not because those companies are any more or less innovative than any of the others, but because the growth paradigms are different and those companies are still in a different place on their growth curves.

We can also learn that continuous innovation requires consistency, commitment, the ability to recognize and prepare for the inevitable peaking of any growth curve, the organizational agility necessary to change as fast as the wants and needs of your customers and your environment, and the ability to understand what your customers will give you permission to do (so you know where to go next when your most profitable growth curve begins to peak).

You should see by now that continuous innovation is about far more than technological innovation, but instead requires not only continuous commitment, but also a continuous willingness and ability to change, and a continuous scanning of your environment using a Global Sensing Network.

Do you have one?

What is yours telling you about your company’s future?

Please note the following licensing terms for Stikkee Situations cartoons:

1. BLOGS – Link back to http://stikkeechange.com/category/stikkees/ and you can embed them for free
2. PRESENTATIONS, please send $25 to me on PayPal by clicking the button 3. NEWSLETTERS & WEB SITES, please send me $50 on PayPal by clicking the button
License for presentations - $25
License for newsletters and web sites - $50

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

The Wonderful World of Downsizing

Stikkee Situations - Downsizing Cartoon

In Stikkee Situations we’ll try to take a humorous look at a lot of different serious business topics.

In this episode we poke fun at the wonderful world of downsizing.

Employees hate workforce reductions (aka downsizing), but some CEOs (even in profitable companies) seem to love these traumatic events as a tool to save their job and to drive short-term movements in the price of a company’s stock price, often coming on the heels of a company missing their earnings estimates.

But the positive short term stock price effects of an across the board workforce reduction come with heavy consequences, several of which greatly affect the innovation capacity of the organization, including:

  1. Destruction of trust within the organization
  2. Reduction in collaboration in the organization
  3. Loss of forward momentum on project work
  4. Loss of some of your best talent as they proactively find themselves jobs elsewhere
  5. Reduction in passion, creativity, and engagement among those who remain
  6. Elimination or reduction in the organization’s commitment to innovation

Now of course sometimes workforce reductions are necessary to avoid bankruptcy or for strategic realignment (removing human resources from business areas you are exiting), and they can be potentially healthy for the organization.

But, when downsizing is done purely to please wall street and in an untargeted way, in the long run I would assert that the organization suffers more than it benefits because any reduction in forward innovation momentum is an invitation to competitors and startups to speed past you.

So, keep innovating!

Please note the following licensing terms for Stikkee Situations cartoons:

1. BLOGS – Link back to https://bradenkelley.com/category/stikkees/ and you can embed them for free
2. PRESENTATIONS, please send $25 to me on PayPal by clicking the button 3. NEWSLETTERS & WEB SITES, please send me $50 on PayPal by clicking the button
License for presentations - $25
License for newsletters and web sites - $50

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

An Innovation Eclipse

An Innovation EclipseThe failure of Solyndra – a United States solar energy venture backed by $535 million in federal loan guarantees drew the ire of many people concerned with the state of the federal budget deficit and the growing national debt. But was the federal government wrong to offer loan guarantees to Solyndra?

This is the question many people asked back when the failure happened, and I would be interested to hear what you think.

In a previous article I stated some of my thoughts on the role the federal government should play in the overall innovation ecosystem in the United States, and I stand by what I said in that article – An Open Letter on Innovation to President Obama.

To quote the relevant part for the discussion:

We need to take a step back and define what the role of government is in our overall innovation efforts as a country:

  1. What are the big research challenges that companies are unwilling to spend on that if pursued and conquered, would unleash a wave of innovation?
  2. How can companies and the government work together to fund and share technology that doesn’t define competition, but does accelerate productivity and global competitiveness of U.S. firms against foreign competitors?
  3. How can we restructure our tax system to reward successful American firms for taking the bigger risks that will help them continue to lead their industries in the future?
  4. How can we incent American exporters trailing foreign competitors to try and leapfrog and disrupt foreign competitors, take market share, and create jobs in this country?
  5. Should we build a deep innovation coaching capability into the Small Business Administration so that small companies can get access to innovation education?
  6. If the last wave of innovation in this country was built on the passion and ideas of foreign born entrepreneurs, should we not be doing more (not less) to encourage the world’s best to come here and study and start businesses?
  7. If we are in a war for innovation, should we not be building innovation alliances with countries in the same way we have built military alliances for centuries? More and more companies are doing this, why not countries?

You’ll notice that nowhere on this list was funding companies. This is a special skill and one that most people wouldn’t think about the government as having, especially when you take into account that identifying a potentially successful startup is not about the idea, but about identifying strong management teams that have the capability to lead a team of people to find and overcome the critical flaws in the founding idea and get the final solution to market. Funding companies isn’t something that the government should be focusing on – even when they pursue it in a portfolio approach (Solyndra represents only 2% of the Department of Energy’s committed loan guarantees).

From an outsider’s perspective the $535 million would have been better spent in discovering and transferring a platform technology to multiple companies that could then work towards getting the basic platform technology to market (funded by the private sector). Then other American entrepreneurs could have generated even more jobs by building upon it. Think about the growth in the US Economy that the platform technology of the Internet generated. It is too soon to see whether the failure of Solyndra will be a big blow or a small blow to the Obama administration’s innovation efforts, but it probably also didn’t help that last week Alan Greenspan was quoted as saying:

“Can innovation create jobs? The answer is that is not its focus,”

“Jobs are created in that process and what happens in private industry as technology decreases unit costs and especially labor costs, profits go up, companies expand and then they hire people,”

“Innovation reduces jobs, and there is no way getting around that syllogism,”

Alan Greenspan may be simplifying things here and ignoring that there are more types of innovation than cost innovation, but hey, let’s give the guy a break as innovation is not really his focus.

Also this week it emerged that Thomas Friedman has a new book coming out with Michael Mandelbaum called That Used to be Us that essentially says the United States must innovate or else. After all, we’re never going to be cheaper, so we have to better and more innovative. That leaves a huge challenge for the government of the United States.

To replace all of the debt-fueled, consumption-related jobs that will likely never come back, the United States must come together as a collection of public, private, and charitable institutions to re-train our workforce and change our mindset as a country to focus not on consumption but creation in order to generate the new jobs necessary to reduce a 9.2% unemployment rate.

But for all of the focus in the media and academia on improving the quality of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education in America, we must also introduce an equally strong focus on creating young people that are equally capable of becoming the flexible and adaptable workforce that organizations will need to continue to succeed at innovation. This includes helping reinforce the value of unplugging in our always-on society that suffers from expectations of immediate response.

All of this taken together still shows that the United States still needs a cohesive, long-term, committed innovation strategy if we are to prevent the country’s continued loss of ground to other rising economies over time. Because any innovation strategy requires long-term focus and commitment, I remain doubtful that the United States politicians will be up to the task, and very doubtful that in an era of collapsing education budgets that we will be able to train our children to be more flexible and adaptable with the requisite skills in language to translate the value of their ideas, the technical skills to create the value, and the logic to create the systems necessary to make it easier to access the value of their ideas. But we will see.

It is my belief as I have said before in my article Stop Praying for Education Reform that we must come together outside the normal school day to educate our children in the skills necessary to create the innovation capacity they will need to take our country forward through the rest of this century, and help to maintain its place near the top of the economic pyramid.

Ultimately the question is not whether the United States CAN still lead the world in innovation, but whether we have the WILL.

What do you think?

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