Tag Archives: Seoul

A Simple Idea to Save Oil

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Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best.

Here is a great marketing campaign from S-Oil in South Korea which took the challenge of finding ways to decrease oil consumption in South Korea and turned it into a marketing campaign:

In this case the solution highlighted in the video is one potential solution of many to the challenge of decreasing oil consumption, and is focused on reducing the amount of oil consumed searching for a parking spot.

The one thing I didn’t understand was why “HERE” was in English instead of Korean characters… (NOTE: I had to replace the video and the new one is in English)

But anyways…

What simple solution is hiding under your nose?


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6-Step Blueprint to Build Innovation Momentum

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

The question I get most often from my Fortune 500 clients: “How do we create a culture of innovation?”

Although there is no simple answer, here’s a blueprint I’ve found useful to get things started and build momentum.

  1. Ask employees for ideas – Most organizations start here with the corporate suggestion box.  Let’s call it idea-driven innovation.  This step is useful for getting people engaged. It also helps capture low hanging fruit and incremental innovations.  However, after a period of time, the ideas become less practical and less valuable.  The “noise” (low quality ideas) increases.  And sadly, even the good ideas often have a difficult time finding a home (sponsor, owner, funding, resources), so they wither on the vine.
  2. Ask top execs for their most pressing challenges – We now move from idea-driven innovation to a more useful approach: challenge-driven innovation.  Find the people with money, power and resources in your organization, and ask them for the  most important challenges that they need solved.  Don’t call it innovation. Think of it as problem solving. This step gets the executives engaged as they start seeing direct value.
  3. Ask employees to solve these challenges – Once you’ve identified the top executive challenges, it is now time to get the employees working on finding solutions. This is done via internal crowdsourcing. Instead of asking everyone for their  suggestions, ask them for solutions. This keeps them engaged, reduces the noise, and provides a much higher ROI.
  4. Ask employees to identify challenges – This step is designed to get everyone to realize that the mantra, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions,” is wrong. Teach employees that if you bring bigger and better problems, there are many ways to find better solutions. Ask employees to submit good challenges. This steps requires proper education/guidance to avoid being inundated by poorly defined challenges.
  5. Go externally for solutions to challenges – Use alliances, outsourcing, and external crowdsourcing/open innovation as a means for discovering solutions to exceptionally pressing solutions. Or use “tech scouting” in order to find off-the-shelf solutions to meet needs of less strategic challenges. Some organizations do this earlier in the process, starting here before asking employees for solutions.
  6. Go externally for identifying challenges – Most organizations struggle to identify the right challenges. They are too close to the business and therefore have reduced peripheral vision. Therefore, it is useful to partner with trend monitoring organizations, universities, think tanks, and experts to help identify the challenges that might be in the organizational blind spot.

This process is not sequential. Some steps are done in parallel at times. And sometimes they are done in a different order.

If your objective is to accelerate the way you innovate, this model is extremely useful. You will find that less time is spent on innovation with better results.

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Why Change is Hard

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

I am someone who loves change. In fact I sometimes change things simply for change sake.

But I recently learned a powerful lesson on why change is difficult, even for someone like me who loves to stir things up.

I bought a MacBook Pro a few weeks ago. Friends have been prodding me to buy Apple after a number of technical issues with my Windows-based machine.

I have to admit, I really liked my PC. But for a variety of reasons, it was time for a change.

I was excited. As I said, I love change.

But what I discovered quickly was that I did not love my Mac.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with my Mac. It is just different than Windows. I am so used to my old PC that I could do things so quickly with hotkeys. From my perspective, nearly everything was intuitive on the PC while the Mac just doesn’t make sense to me.

My productivity diminished significantly since the switch. Last week I seriously considered loading Windows on my Mac via bootcamp. This would turn my Mac hardware into a PC. I was finding my new operating system and software too difficult to learn.

And then it dawned on me. I was resisting change, the way most people do.

It is not that Windows is better. It’s just different. The more I use my Mac, the more I get used to it. I am assured by most people that Mac is indeed a better solution.

And this is what happens inside of organizations. We resist change not because the old way is better. We resist change because the effort it takes to do things differently is difficult. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes breaking old habits and learning new ones.

The “culture” of an organization is much like the operating system of a computer. Maybe you have a PC culture today but want a Mac culture. There are things that everyone will need to learn. And everyone will have to believe the the switch is valuable enough to justify the effort.

If they don’t see the reason for the change, they will do what I did…revert to old habits and find ways of circumventing the system. Much like my running Windows on a Mac.

In the end I did not install Windows on my machine. I decided to really dive in and learn the new operating system. I am convinced that in the long run, this will be a better solution.

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