Tag Archives: Nine Innovation Roles

Is innovation everyone’s job?

EPISODE SEVEN – Ask the Consultant

Live from the Innovation Studio comes EPISODE SEVEN of a new ‘Ask the Consultant’ series of short form videos. EPISODE SEVEN seeks to answer a strategic question that many innovation leaders struggle with:

“Is innovation everyone’s job?”

Should it be? Can it be?

Check out the video here:

Innovation is the oxygen of business. Without continuous reinvention and renewal of the sources of value for the company and its customers, the inevitability of the Product Life Cycle will eventually defeat even the strongest company if it stands still.

The Innovation Imperative - Product Life Cycle

In the video we look at the difference a commitment to reinvention, reimagination and innovation can make to the survival of an organization by looking at the different fortunes of two companies in the same business faced back in 2010/2011.

We’ll also look at where innovation comes from, the intersection it sits at, and the power of the Infinite Innovation Infrastructure™ and the Nine Innovation Roles™ that I introduced in my first book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.

The video will show you what an innovator looks like, the importance of people to innovation and the roles that well-functioning innovation teams need filled to be successful.

Nine Innovation Roles

We’ll detail in the video what each of the Nine Innovation Roles are — and you can get lots of free gifts at http://9roles.com — but here are the names:

  1. Revolutionary
  2. Artist
  3. Troubleshooter
  4. Conscript
  5. Connector
  6. Customer Champion
  7. Judge
  8. Evangelist
  9. Magic Maker

}} Click here to watch the video {{

Help Shape the Next ‘Ask the Consultant’ Episode

  1. Grab a great deal on Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire on Amazon while they last!
  2. Get a copy of my latest book Charting Change on Amazon
  3. Contact me with your question for the next video episode of “Ask the Consultant” live from my innovation studio

Below are the previous episodes of ‘Ask the Consultant’:

  1. EPISODE ONE – What is innovation?
  2. EPISODE TWO – How do I create continuous innovation in my organization?
  3. EPISODE THREE – What is digital transformation?
  4. EPISODE FOUR – What is the best way to create successful change?
  5. EPISODE FIVE – What is design thinking?
  6. EPISODE SIX – Zoom Tutorial – Amazing New PowerPoint Background Feature
  7. All other episodes of Ask the Consultant

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Are Innovation and Empathy in the Cards?

As part of the leadership team for a new human-centered problem-solving offering for select Oracle customers, I’m always on the lookout for new tools to integrate into our flexible problem-solving process to help clients innovate, grow or transform.

Because our dynamic team of experienced professionals has a diverse range of knowledge, skills and abilities we’re able to co-create solutions to a wide range of business challenges and leverage a wide variety of tools. This means I’m always on the lookout for new tools to better serve our clients, in addition to pursuing my hobby of creating new tools and methodologies in my spare time throughout my career.

My passion for empowering others to succeed in overcoming their business challenges has led to the publishing of two business best-sellers Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire (John Wiley & Sons, 2010) and Charting Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the creation of the powerful, visual and collaborative Change Planning Toolkit™, my Nine Innovation Roles™ card deck, and the Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ (featuring tools like The Experiment Canvas™).

I create new tools, methodologies and frameworks when I see opportunities to make people more efficient and effective in their jobs and leverage the work of others when I find others have created good solutions. I leverage the Business Model Canvas for business model prototyping, I leverage The Play-to-Win Strategy Canvas v3.0 to help people work through strategic choices, along with other tools when the challenge is appropriate.

Recently I have been looking at a variety of card decks to evaluate their suitability to use alongside design thinking and other methodologies that form the basis of the Oracle FUEL approach.

Here are a few I’ve been evaluating lately:

Killer Questions Cards

1. Killer Questions – Volume 1 from Phil McKinney, author of Beyond the Obvious and CEO of CableLabs
(More info at https://innovation.tools/)

Brainstorming is a fairly useless exercise the way that most people facilitate it. There are much more effective ways to get ideas and most of the approaches that work better share at their core a more targeted and collaborative approach. The Killer Questions card deck is composed of just that, a collection of questions if left unanswered or unexplored, could lead to blind spots and disruption opportunities for new entrants (or your competition). The questions are categorized into three types:

  1. Who
  2. What
  3. How

And the questions include things like:

  • Who does not use my product because of my assumptions about their skill or ability
  • What emotional, psychological, or status benefits could people derive from using my product?
  • How could users avoid interacting with my product or service but still get the same value?

But the cards don’t just contain a single question. These are examples of guiding questions on the front of a few cards, but on the back of each card you will also find 3-5 supporting questions to help your team explore the guiding question more fully.

Overall, I consider the cards a useful tool for groups including: product teams wanting to continuously stretch themselves as they revaluate product direction, or for expanded innovation teams looking to broaden their search horizons.

Innovation Deck cards by Andrey Schukin

2. The Innovation Deck by Andrey Schukin, CTO at Interprefy AG
(More info at http://www.innovationfast.com/)

Where the Killer Questions deck is organized around questions, The Innovation Deck is organized around topics/tactics and triggers. For each topic/tactic there is either a set of instructions or a set of questions.

The Innovation Deck is composed of three different types of cards that will help you:

  1. Examine
  2. Explore
  3. Evaluate

Examine Card example:

EMOTION

  • People don’t buy things they need. They buy things they want.
  • How do you make sure that the product will trigger an emotional response from the customer?
  • What elements of your product will make the customer want to use it?

I would almost include the triggers cards as a fourth card type, because instead of a topic and questions the cards have a collection of words to see if any of the words inspire thought or conversations rather than giving people a guiding topic or tactic.

Overall, I consider these cards as a useful tool for product teams looking at a product to challenge or stretch the existing product direction for the future.

Nine Innovation Roles cards from Braden Kelley

3. Nine Innovation Roles – a card deck by Braden Kelley, author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire
(More info at http://9roles.com)

The following is an excerpt from my book that explains some of the thinking behind The Nine Innovation Roles™:

“Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.”

The Nine Innovation Roles™ are:

  1. Revolutionary
  2. Conscript
  3. Connector
  4. Artist
  5. Customer Champion
  6. Troubleshooter
  7. Judge
  8. Magic Maker
  9. Evangelist

To make my Nine Innovation Roles™ framework accessible to as many people as possible inside organizations all around the world to explore and improve innovation team dynamics and success, I am happy to announce that I have now made the print-ready files for the cards available here for FREE download, and you can either work with the vendor I use – adMagic – or work with a local printer in your part of the world.

LPK Roadblocks Cards

4. LPK Roadblocks by LPK, a brand and innovation consultancy
(More info at https://roadblocks.lpklab.com/)

The LPK Roadblocks deck is focused on innovation roadblocks and helping organizations whose innovation efforts might have stalled, get unstuck. There are six kinds of cards in the deck:

  1. Voting cards
  2. Question cards
  3. Create Your Own Roadblock cards
  4. Organization Roadblocks
  5. Project Roadblocks
  6. Idea Roadblocks

There are two main ways to use the cards, with selection and voting integrated into both:

  1. Root Cause Discovery
  2. Beginning, Middle and End

Organization Roadblocks include things like “Unrealistic Revenue Hurdles” and “Lip-Service Leadership,” while Project Roadblocks including things like “Untested Assumptions” and “Unclear Objectives”, while Idea Roadblocks include things like “Risk/Reward Imbalance” and “No Route to Market.”

Overall, I find these cards to be a useful tool when you run into a client that says they are struggling to innovate or that they’re not innovating as much as they’d like.

Questions & Empathy Cards

5. Questions & Empathy – a card deck by SubRosa, a brand strategy and design practice
(More info at https://www.questionsandempathy.com/)

SubRosa’s Questions & Empathy cards are composed of seven empathy archetype cards and a set of exploratory questions for each archetype. The seven archetypes are:

  1. Sage
  2. Inquirer
  3. Convener
  4. Alchemist
  5. Confidant
  6. Seeker
  7. Cultivator

Overall, I find these cards to be a useful tool for better understanding yourself and your own empathetic style and over time they could help you approach empathy from more angles than you would without them, but I struggle to see as is how they can actually help you practice applied empathy. The archetypes are useful, but I think I might create my own question cards to help my team better apply empathy within the empathize/understand phase of design thinking.

Conclusion

Whether you’re trying to innovate or just to build up your empathy muscles, I hope you see that there are some great, extremely portable resources to help with either. Of course, there are other card decks out there, but these will give you a few to explore and see whether there is a fit for your design thinking or innovation undertakings. If you’re pursuing a digital transformation or business transformation you can:

If you missed the links to the cards decks above, here they are again:

  1. Killer Questions – Volume 1
  2. The Innovation Deck
  3. Nine Innovation Roles (English/Spanish/Swedish)
  4. LPK Roadblocks
  5. Questions & Empathy


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Get Social with Your Innovation

Get Social with Your InnovationIf your organization is struggling to sustain its innovation efforts, then I hope you will do the following things.

  • Find the purpose and passion that everyone can rally around.
  • Create the flexibility necessary to deal with the constant change that a focus on innovation requires for both customers and the organization.
  • Make innovation the social activity it truly must be for you to become successful.

If your organization has lost the courage to move innovation to its center and has gotten stuck in a project – focused, reactive innovation approach, then now is your chance to regain the higher ground and to refocus, not on having an innovation success but on building an innovation capability. Are you up to the challenge?

There is a great article “ Passion versus Obsession ” by John Hagel that explores the differences between passion and obsession. This is an important distinction to understand in order to make sure you are hiring people to power your innovation efforts who are passionate and not obsessive. Here are a few key quotes from the article:

“The first significant difference between passion and obsession is the role free will plays in each disposition: passionate people fight their way willingly to the edge to find places where they can pursue their passions more freely, while obsessive people (at best) passively drift there or (at worst) are exiled there.”

“It’s not an accident that we speak of an “object of obsession,” but the “subject of passion.” That’s because obsession tends towards highly specific focal points or goals, whereas passion is oriented toward networked, diversified spaces.”

More quotes from the John Hagel article:

“The subjects of passion invite and even demand connections with others who share the passion.”

“Because passionate people are driven to create as a way to grow and achieve their potential, they are constantly seeking out others who share their passion in a quest for collaboration, friction and inspiration . . . . The key difference between passion and obsession is fundamentally social: passion helps build relationships and obsession inhibits them.”

“It has been a long journey and it is far from over, but it has taught me that obsession confines while passion liberates.”

These quotes from John Hagel’s article are important because they reinforce the notion that innovation is a social activity. While many people give Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the modern-day equivalent, Dean Kamen, credit for being lone inventors, the fact is that the lone inventor myth is just that — a myth, one which caused me to create The Nine Innovation Roles.

The fact is that all of these gentlemen had labs full of people who shared their passion for creative pursuits. Innovation requires collaboration, either publicly or privately, and is realized as an outcome of three social activities.

1. Social Inputs

From the very beginning when an organization is seeking to identify key insights to base an innovation strategy or project on, organizations often use ethnographic research, focus groups, or other very social methods to get at the insights. Great innovators also make connections to other industries and other disciplines to help create the great in sights that inspire great solutions.

2. Social Evolution

We usually have innovation teams in organizations, not sole inventors, and so the activity of transforming the seeds of useful invention into a solution valued above every existing alternative is very social. It takes a village of passionate villagers to transform an idea into an innovation in the marketplace. Great innovators make connections inside the organization to the people who can ask the right questions, uncover the most important weaknesses, help solve the most difficult challenges, and help break down internal barriers within the organization — all in support of creating a better solution.

3. Social Execution

The same customer group that you may have spent time with, seeking to understand, now requires education to show them that they really need the solution that all of their actions and behaviors indicated they needed at the beginning of the process. This social execution includes social outputs like trials, beta programs, trade show booths, and more. Great innovators have the patience to allow a new market space to mature, and they know how to grow the demand while also identifying the key shortcomings with customers who are holding the solution back from mass acceptance.

Conclusion

When it comes to insights, these three activities are not completely discrete. Insights do not expose themselves only in the social inputs phase, but can also expose themselves in other phases — if you’re paying attention.

Flickr famously started out as a company producing a video game in the social inputs phase, but was astute enough during the social execution phase to recognize that the most used feature was one that allowed people to share photos. Recognizing that there was an unmet market need amongst customers for easy sharing of photos, Flickr reoriented its market solution from video game to photo sharing site and reaped millions of dollars in the process when they ultimately sold their site to Yahoo!.

Ultimately, action is more important than intent, and so as an innovator you must always be listening and watching to see what people do and not just what they say. Build your solution on the wrong insight and nobody will be beating a path to your door.

NOTE: This article is an adaptation of some of the great content in my five-star book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire (available in many local libraries and fine booksellers everywhere).

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Latest Radio Interview with The Health Maven

LeAnna J Carey - The Health MavenI’m proud to share with you the link to my latest radio interview. This time I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with LeAnna J. Carey (@LeannaJCarey), host of the popular radio program The Health Maven – Innovation Talk.

We spend the 30 minutes talking about The Nine Innovation Roles and how organizations around the world are increasingly utilizing The Nine Innovation Roles to help them build more effective innovation teams. Curious which ones I think LeAnna fills or that I see myself typically filling?

Tune into the broadcast to find out! 🙂

Click here to listen to a recording of the interview


Build a common language of innovation on your team

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Announcing FREE Nine Innovation Roles Resources

Nine Innovation Roles Cards

I have big news that I’m extremely excited to share with you today.

I’m proud to announce today that I’m setting The Nine Innovation Roles free.

What does that mean exactly?

It means that for the greater good, I am now providing all of the tools that you need to conduct a Nine Innovation Roles workshop or team meeting inside your organization to enhance the success of your innovation teams – for FREE.

Some people think I’m crazy to help people not hire me, but because of my collaborative and people-centric approach to innovation I would like to give everyone five free gifts:

  1. The Nine Innovation Roles themselves
  2. Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles presentation for team meetings or workshops
  3. Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles Worksheet for gathering data on team makeup
  4. Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles card deck design that I use with Fortune 500 clients
  5. Nine Innovation Roles video for use in team meetings or workshops

The Nine Innovation Roles is one of the most requested workshop topics in the keynotes and masterclasses that I conduct for companies all around the world, and comes directly from my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, that is being used by universities like Creighton and companies like Microsoft and AB Inbev to help establish a common language of innovation.

Here is an excerpt from my book that talks about The Nine Innovation Roles:

“Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.”

I hope you take the time to download and learn and utilize these FREE Nine Innovation Roles resources to improve the success of your innovation efforts and of the innovation teams in your organizations.

Keep innovating!

Get the Free Nine Innovation Roles Resources Now


Build a common language of innovation on your team

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Become a Certified Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Facilitator

In support of my crowdfunding project over on IndieGoGo I am offering an incredible deal to the first TEN (10) individuals to grab this perk:

Grab the Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Facilitator Certification Perk

In exchange for each $500 investment, the first TEN (10) people anywhere in the world will get:

  1. One of only TEN (10) spots in an online seminar where I will personally train you on how to facilitate a Nine Innovation Roles workshop or public seminar
  2. A share of any Nine Innovation Roles Workshop leads that I can’t fulfill myself
  3. A Nine Innovation Roles Seminar Pack – which includes TEN (10) Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tools to use with your first set of workshop participants (a $199.99 value)

This is a great opportunity to add the Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop to your roster of innovation services that you offer to clients. You should be able to charge between $2,000-$5,000 + expenses for each of the sessions you facilitate depending on the length and amount of custom content, so you should recoup your $500 investment after running your first workshop or public seminar.

You can click to read more about The Nine Innovation Roles.

Grab the Certified Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Facilitator Perk

The Nine Innovation Roles diagnostic workshop will create a fun, interactive experience for innovation teams or organizations to use to help people better understand what roles they fill on innovation projects, why the team’s or organization’s innovation efforts are failing, and how they can together improve the innovation performance of their teams or organization.

Design for Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool

So, grab this Amazing Innovation Keynote and Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Deal and help your innovation teams be more successful in the future. Don’t wait. Be one of only TEN (10) people worldwide to get this perk, or pre-order the seminar kit and run run workshops or seminars on your own.

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Amazing Innovation Keynote and Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Deal

In support of my crowdfunding project over on IndieGoGo I am offering an incredible deal to the first FIVE (5) organizations to grab this perk:

Grab the Nine Innovation Roles Workshop and Innovation Keynote Perk

For $2,000 + expenses I will:

  1. Deliver a SIXTY (60) minute innovation keynote and Q&A session
  2. Deliver a SIXTY (60) minute Nine Innovation Roles diagnostic workshop for up to 60 participants
  3. Bring TEN (10) Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tools to use with the workshop participants

Normally I charge anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 + expenses for innovation workshops and keynotes depending on the length and amount of custom content, so this is a crazy deal.

You can click to read more about The Nine Innovation Roles.

Or, click to find out more about me as an innovation speaker.

Grab the Nine Innovation Roles Workshop and Innovation Keynote Perk

The Nine Innovation Roles diagnostic workshop will create a fun, interactive experience for innovation teams or organizations to use to help people better understand what roles they fill on innovation projects, why the team’s or organization’s innovation efforts are failing, and how they can together improve the innovation performance of their teams or organization.

Design for Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool

So, grab this Amazing Innovation Keynote and Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Deal and help your innovation teams be more successful in the future. Don’t wait. Be one of only FIVE (5) organizations to get this perk, or pre-order the group diagnostic tool or seminar kit and run a team building exercise of your own.

Grab the Nine Innovation Roles Workshop and Innovation Keynote Perk

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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UPDATE – Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool

I am proud to announce that my crowdfunding project over on IndieGoGo for the Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool has already received support from EIGHT people to get the project off to a strong start. There are still lots of great perks available including discounts on the Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool and seminar kits, and even FIVE (5) two-hour innovation keynote and workshop combos at an incredibly discounted price.

The Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool will come with a series of simple exercises and a deck of roles cards to help create a fun, interactive experience for innovation teams or organizations to use to help people better understand what roles they fill on innovation projects, why the team’s or organization’s innovation efforts are failing, and how they can together improve the innovation performance of their teams or organization.

Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool Coming Soon

Design for Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool

You can click to read more about The Nine Innovation Roles, but here is the ethos behind it:

“Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.”

Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool Coming Soon

The Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool and Workshop can help you identify why your innovation efforts are failing or how your innovation teams could be more successful in the future. Don’t wait. Book a workshop, or pre-order the group diagnostic tool and run a team building exercise of your own.

Book a Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 28, 2012


“The more successful an organization becomes the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets the more it focuses on optimizing its resources. The more it optimizes it resources the more it eliminates variation. Innovation requires variation. We have seen the enemy and he is us.”

– Jeff DeGraff


“It is in identifying which of The Nine Innovation Roles are vacant (or sub-optimally filled) that you will be able to see some of the areas where your efforts are likely to come up short, and then can take actions to improve your chances of innovation success.”

– Braden Kelley


“It is not enough to simply go through the motions. In order to build our abilities, cognitive or otherwise, we must think about what we’re doing, concentrate while we’re doing it and then review what we have done. Further, we need to seek out mentors and peers who will critique our efforts.”

– Greg Satell


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 27, 2012


“So healthy paranoia is the friend of innovation. Complacency is the enemy – be ruthless in driving it out of your business.”

– Kevin McFarthing


“There are Nine Innovation Roles that need to be filled on every innovation project team, and filled well, for each individual innovation effort to be successful – and the skills necessary to be successful in each role should be cultivated in the organization.”

– Braden Kelley


“Variation, or hedging as it’s called in the venture capital community, is essential because it accelerates the failure cycle and quickens the discovery of the valuable solution. Innovation requires deviation; deviation requires deviants.”

– Jeff DeGraff


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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