4 Ways to Create Something Truly Original

4 Ways to Create Something Truly Original

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I study innovators for a living. Every year, I interview dozens of men and women who’ve achieved remarkable things. For my own part, I publish about a hundred articles a year and my second book, Cascades, has sold well since coming out five years ago. While my achievements pale in comparison to many of those I interview, many believe my work to be original.

The most destructive myth about creativity is that there are innate traits that allow some people to be creative, while others, who lack these, cannot. The truth is that in decades of research on creativity, nobody has been able to identify any such traits. In my experience, great innovators come in all shapes and sizes.

Still, despite the diversity of original innovators themselves, there are some common principles in how they approach their work and these are things that anyone can apply. That doesn’t mean everyone can be world famous, but the evidence clearly shows that anyone can be creative and, even if it’s not a major breakthrough, make some contribution to the world.

1. Explore

In 2006, Jennifer Doudna got a call from a colleague at the University of California at Berkeley, Jillian Banfield, who she knew only by reputation. Banfield’s area of research interest, obscure bacteria living in extreme conditions, was only tangentially related to Doudna’s work, studying the biochemistry of RNA and other cell structures.

The purpose of the call was to interest Doudna in studying an emerging phenomenon that was recently discovered in microbiology, a strange sequence of DNA found in bacteria. The function of the sequences were not yet clear, but some early evidence suggested that they might be involved in some kind of immune function, helping bacteria to defend themselves against viruses.

Intrigued, Doudna began to research the sequences, called CRISPR, in her own lab and, in 2012, discovered that they could be used as a powerful new tool for editing genes. Today, CRISPR is creating a revolution in genomics, completely redefining what was considered to be possible in just a few short years.

Many have observed the role of serendipity in innovation, such as in Alexander Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin. Yet in every case, once you look a little deeper, you find that even the most unexpected discoveries were the product of intense exploration. Like Fleming and penicillin, Doudna wasn’t looking for a gene editing technology, but she was investigating a wide number of phenomena that were previously unexplained.

The first step for innovation is exploration. All who wander are not lost.

2. Combine

I’m a relentless fact checker. Over the years, I’ve found that even if you’ve done significant research, reading papers and interviewing experts, it’s amazingly easy to get things wildly wrong. I’ve also found that fact checking can lead you to new information you didn’t know existed. So before I publish anything of significance, I always make sure to reach out to someone who can correct my foolishness before it becomes public.

That’s why when I was finishing up Cascades, I reached out to Duncan Watts to look over two chapters on the science of networks, a field which he helped pioneer. As usual, Duncan was gracious and helpful, and pointed me towards a paper of his that I might want to include. He did so somewhat apologetically, not wanting to push his work on me, but observed that since I had largely based both chapters on his work already, it was probably okay.

This was entirely true. Much of the first half of my book is based on Duncan’s ideas. What’s more, much of the second half of the book is based on insights from my friend Srdja Popović , who trains activists around the world to create revolutionary movements. There are a number of others as well, all of who shared their wisdom with me.

None of this, of course, was at all original, but the combination is. In fact, the key insight of the book is that Duncan’s mathematical models and the on-the-ground tactics of Srdja and others are intensely related. They can inform each other in ways that both men, who are mostly unfamiliar with each other’s work, had not addressed and, I believe, are important.

3. Refine

I first got interested in Duncan’s work in 2006. I was running a large digital business at the time and, with social networks becoming a powerful force online, I thought that learning some basic concepts of network science would be useful. Much to my surprise, I found that the ideas had a powerful resonance in an unexpected area.

Two years earlier, I had found myself in the middle of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. What struck me at the time was how nobody seemed to have the first idea what was happening or why — not the journalists I worked with everyday, or the political and business leaders I would meet with regularly, nobody.

So I was excited to find, in Duncan’s work, a mathematical explanation for many of the seemingly inexplicable things that I had seen and experienced first-hand. Yet still, I had only a faint sense of what I was on to. Sure, there were obvious connections and possibilities, but I had no real framework to make the insights actionable.

That was 12 years ago (and 15 since the Orange Revolution began) and I’ve been working to refine those initial ideas ever since. Over that period, there has been no shortage of blind allies and wrong turns. Nevertheless, I kept at it and continued to learn. It took over a decade before I was able to pull everything together into something worth publishing.

4. Validate

The connection between Duncan and Srdja’s work wasn’t completely out of the blue. In fact, Duncan had made a short reference to Otpor, the movement which Srdja had helped lead, and its overthrow of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević in his book, Six Degrees. Yet there was no guarantee that the significance went any further than that.

So I began to widen my search. I looked at social movements throughout history to see if similar patterns held or whether the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and similar events in Serbia were anomalies. I struck up a working friendship with Srdja, read his book, Blueprint for Revolution and pored through the training materials on his organization’s website.

Yet to be truly useful, I needed to see if the same concepts could be applied more broadly. So I also researched and spoke to a number of leaders in other fields, such as corporate executives and people who led movements to transform heathcare, education and other things. Anywhere I could find anyone that created transformational change, I sought them out to find how they were able to succeed where so many others failed.

What I found was that while there were vast difference among changemakers, they had all eventually arrived at similar principles that made them successful, which I could validate. It took me nearly 15 years, but the journey that began with that initial connection between two vastly different sets of ideas eventually became something that I could consider to be coherent and useful.

In that way, my experience reflects many of the innovators of vastly greater accomplishment that I research and study. Truly original work doesn’t emerge fully formed from a brainstorm or sudden epiphany. It’s long years that follow, combining, refining and validating that makes the difference between an errant idea and something useful.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pixabay

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The Top 10 Irish Innovators Who Shaped the World

The Top 10 Irish Innovators Who Shaped the World

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Ireland, a land of rolling green hills, ancient castles, and lyrical poetry, has also been home to some of the world’s most brilliant minds. From groundbreaking inventions to revolutionary discoveries, Irish innovators have left an indelible mark on history. Let’s raise a pint of Guinness and celebrate the top 10 Irish visionaries who changed the game.

1. Arthur Guinness: The Brewmaster Extraordinaire

Arthur Guinness, the man behind the iconic stout, didn’t just create a beer; he crafted a legacy. In 1759, he signed a 9,000-year lease for the St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin. His confidence in his product paid off—Guinness is now the best-selling alcoholic drink of all time, with sales exceeding $2.6 billion. To Arthur, Sláinte!

2. John Joly: The Color Visionary

John Joly, hailing from Hollywood, County Offaly, changed the way we see the world. His invention of color photography in 1894 transformed art, science, and our everyday lives. From a single plate, he captured the vibrancy of our surroundings, proving that Ireland’s genius extended beyond its green landscapes.

3. Lord Kelvin Thomson: The Trans-Atlantic Connector

In 1865, Lord Kelvin Thomson helped lay the Atlantic Telegraph Cable, connecting Newfoundland to Valentia in County Kerry. His work revolutionized global communication, enabling trans-Atlantic calls and shaping the future of connectivity. And let’s not forget his contribution to thermodynamics—the Kelvin Scale.

4. Vincent Barry: The Accidental Leprosy Cure

Vincent Barry, while researching Ireland’s tuberculosis problem, stumbled upon a cure for leprosy. Talk about a lucky mistake! His accidental discovery changed lives and exemplified the serendipity of scientific progress.

5. Louis Brennan: Guiding Torpedoes to Victory

Louis Brennan invented the guided torpedo in 1877. His creation, a self-propelled torpedo with gyroscopic control, revolutionized naval warfare. Brennan’s legacy lives on in modern missile technology.

6. Francis Rynd: Healing with the Hypodermic Syringe

In 1844, Francis Rynd introduced the hypodermic syringe, a medical marvel that transformed pain management and drug delivery. His invention remains a cornerstone of modern medicine.

7. Rev. Nicholas Callan: Electrifying the World

Rev. Nicholas Callan invented the induction coil in 1836, paving the way for electrical innovation. His work laid the foundation for telegraphy, telephony, and countless other applications.

8. Sir James Martin: Ejector Seats for Safety

In 1946, Sir James Martin designed the first aircraft ejector seat, saving countless lives. His invention ensured that pilots could escape from damaged planes, making aviation safer for all.

9. Arthur Leared: Listening to the Heartbeat

Arthur Leared created the binaural stethoscope in 1851, allowing doctors to hear internal sounds more clearly. His invention became a vital tool for diagnosing heart conditions.

10. Leo Dean Jansen MD: Pioneering Innovations

Leo Dean Jansen MD, though not as well-known, deserves recognition. His contributions span various fields, from medicine to technology. His legacy reminds us that innovation knows no boundaries.

So, next time you raise your glass of Guinness, remember that Ireland’s spirit of invention flows as freely as its famous stout. Sláinte to these remarkable Irish innovators!

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Bing Dall-E

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Agile Innovation Management (Part Two)

How Agility Enables Innovation

Agile Innovation Management (Part Two)

GUEST POST from Diana Porumboiu

In the previous article on agile innovation we covered the main concepts around agile, business agility and its role as a driver for innovation. Now, let’s see how to actually leverage agility to innovate and how other companies have succeeded in this area.

Agility is an enabler for innovation. The pace of innovation, while not easy to achieve, has become the ultimate competitive advantage as we all need to adapt quickly to evolving environments, the digital age and increasing pressing needs.  

The reality is that agile thinking is changing the world whether we decide to adopt it or not.  

Those who succeed at this are ahead of the game. McKinsey research suggests that agility is a critical factor for organizational success. 

The Organizational Health Index (OHI) assesses various aspects of organizational health, including agility, and examines how these factors correlate with business success. An increased organizational health is linked with more resilient, adaptive, and high-performing organizations that can better navigate complexity, drive innovation, and achieve strategic goals. 

What’s more, agile organizations are best at balancing both speed and stability, and these are also the companies that rank highest in the organizational health index.  

McKinsey Ability
Source: McKinsey&Company

The research goes even deeper and identifies a series of management practices that differentiate the most from the least agile companies.  

As you can see, there’s more to business agility than meets the eye and a few sprints just won’t cut it.  

However, if we look at the agile principles, there are several ways in which they can enable innovation:

  • They bring an empirical process control approach, which emphasizes transparency, evaluation, and adaptation.  
  • They enable experimentation and learning as teams are encouraged to test hypotheses, validate assumptions, and learn from both successes and failures. This experimental mindset is essential for innovation.
  • They are about adaptive planning processes that allow teams to adjust their priorities, strategies, and product roadmaps based on emerging opportunities and threats.
  • They emphasize customer-centricity. By focusing on delivering value to customers through continuous delivery and customer feedback loops, you make sure your innovations meet real market demands and solve genuine problems.
  • They encourage cross-functional collaboration and self-organizing teams, bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise.  

To get a better idea of how this looks in practice, we’ll take the example of ING Bank.

ING Bank

ING is a global financial institution originally from the Netherlands and a good example to illustrate how agile can be introduced organization-wide, the right way.

ING wanted to become agile for the right reasons. The shift to agility wasn’t about working faster or growing more—it was about being flexible and adaptable. Even though things were going well financially in 2015, ING noticed that customer behavior was changing due to trends in other industries, not just in banking. So, they knew they had to change too.

ING Bank embraced several key principles of agility, drawing inspiration from the practices of tech companies to align with their objectives and operations: 

  • Cross-Functional Teams: ING structured its IT and commercial departments into agile squads, mirroring the approach seen at Tesla. This integration fosters cross-functionality and collaboration, with teams physically situated together within the same premises.
Agile at ING Bank - McKinsey
source: McKinsey & Company
  • Rapid Decision-Making and Experimentation: Without bottlenecks created by middle management, ING facilitates swift decision-making and continuous experimentation. This agile approach enables the organization to constantly refine and test customer offerings without bureaucratic delays.
  • Enhanced Collaboration and Transparency: Recognizing the importance of collaboration, ING implemented structural changes to break down silos. Clear delineation of roles, responsibilities, and governance structures fosters improved cooperation across teams and departments.
  • Accelerated Delivery: Instead of their usual annual product launches, ING adopted a more agile release cycle, rolling out software updates every two weeks. This agile delivery model allows the organization to respond promptly to market demands and customer feedback, ensuring rapid innovation and adaptation.  

The first step in achieving this agile transformation was to develop a clear strategy and vision. They started small and rolled out the new structures and way of working across the entire headquarters in eight to nine months.  

Last, but not least, they invested significant energy and leadership time in fostering a culture of ownership, empowerment, and customer-centricity, which are foundational elements of an agile culture.

As Bart Schlatmann from ING points out, agility is a means to an end, not the end goal itself; it is the pathway to achieving innovation.

Drawing from these examples and research from other organizations, we can summarize the five tenets of agile organizations:

  1. Purpose-Driven Mindset: Shift from a focus on capturing value to co-creating value with stakeholders, embodying a shared vision across the organization.
  2. Empowered Network of Teams: Transition from top-down direction to self-organizing teams with clear responsibility and authority, fostering engagement, innovative thinking, and collaboration.
  3. Rapid Learning Cycles: Embrace uncertainty and continuous improvement through iterative decision-making and experimentation, prioritizing quick adaptation over rigid planning.
  4. Innovation Culture: Cultivate ownership, empowerment, and customer-centricity, enabling employees to drive organizational success.
  5. Integrated Technology Enablement: View technology as integral to unlocking value and enabling responsiveness to business and stakeholder needs, leveraging advanced tools for seamless integration and rapid innovation.

Actionable Steps to Drive Innovation through  Business Agility

We can’t wrap things up without going through some of the key steps that should not be missed in an agile transformation journey.  

Constancy of purpose  

You might have heard of Edwards Deming and even used his PDCA cycle in your continuous improvement work. He is well known for his legacy in the field of quality management, particularly for his contributions to the improvement of production processes in Japan after World War II. To some degree, his work is also seen as one of the main inspirations for the agile movement.

Among his work, we can also find the “14 Points for Management,” where Deming outlines how essential it is to have a clear and unwavering commitment to a long-term vision or mission. 

He called it constancy of purpose. You can also call it your North Star. Regardless of the words you choose, it’s important to set your goals and align all activities, processes, and resources towards achieving them. How to do this?

  • Communicate the Purpose: Regularly communicate the organization’s purpose, mission and goals as well as how agility contributes to achieving them.
  • Define Goals: Clearly define objectives and goals that align with the organization’s purpose. These goals should support the overall mission and vision.
  • Empower Teams: Trust by default and enable teams to make decisions, take ownership of their ideas and work. Provide them with the autonomy and resources they need to innovate and deliver value.
  • Measure Progress: Measure progress towards your goals, but also establish metrics that can measure your ability to be responsive. Regularly review and assess how agile practices are contributing to the overall mission.
  • Adapt and Iterate: Embrace continuous improvement processes that align with your internal structures and needs. Encourage teams to experiment, learn, and iterate on their approaches.

Agile leadership

Adopt the ABC of leadership which drives innovation and makes the shift from “vertical ideology of control” to “horizontal ideology of enablement”.

Linda Hill, renowned professor at Harvard Business School, specializing in leadership and innovation makes a great point about the roles a leader should take if they want to drive innovation and agility.  

Over time leadership evolved from a purely strategic role, to providing a vision that guides people in the same direction. More recently, research showed that a visionary leader is not enough. You need leaders that can also shape the culture and capabilities needed for people to co-create the future. This requires a different approach to leadership.

Research has identified that in order to lead an organization that innovates at scale with speed, you need leaders that fill in three different functions:  

  • the Architect – to build the culture and capabilities necessary to collaborate, experiment and work.
  • the Bridger – to create the bridge between the outside and the inside of the organization by bringing together skills and tools to innovate at speed.
  • the Catalyst – to accelerate co-creation through the entire ecosystem.  

Here is Hill’s short summary on the ABC of leadership:

Another top voice is Steve Denning who has been an advocate of agile and agile management for years. He makes some great points about the agile mindset which requires a new way of running organizations.

For an organization to be truly agile, the so called industrial-era management needs to be replaced with digital-age management which is strongly driven by an agile mindset.  

The traditional management style makes it hard for agile to work because the old command-and-control approach goes against the agile principles. The top-down approach is riddled with bureaucracy which obstructs visibility to the customer and the realities at the lower levels of the organization.  

Some of the most successful and innovative organizations, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft understood this early on and shifted their focus to delivering customer value first, one of the agile principles. This required a change in mindset but also in the corporate culture, which is no easy undertaking.

To make this transition, Denning talks about five major shifts that companies need to make:

  • From profit-focused to customer-focused goals.
  • From direct reporting to self-organizing teams where management’s role is not to check on employees, but to enable them to do their work by removing obstacles.
  • From bureaucracy, rules, and reports to work coordinated by Agile methods and customer feedback.
  • Prioritize transparency and continuous improvement over predictability.
  • Encourage horizontal communication rather than top-down directives.  

While they are straightforward and make sense for most of us, these changes are maybe the hardest to make, especially for established organizations that are not used to challenging the status quo.  

These big undertakings are what make agile possible at scale. But even if you’re not there yet, you can still apply the agile principles at a smaller scale to enable innovation.  

Minimize complexity  

Complexity is the enemy of agility. People in companies both large and small try to come up with the perfect solution, that often doesn’t exist in the first place, and only end up having solved the wrong problem.

On the other hand, if you were to simply move ahead quickly with something that creates real value and solves at least some of the problems, you’ll see which of your assumptions and concerns are real, and which aren’t. You’ll also see which problems you can work around, and which ones you simply must address directly.

This obviously eliminates a lot of uncertainty and reduces the complexity associated with solving the problem, which again helps you focus your innovation efforts on what matters – creating real value.

The bigger and more complex the problem, the more important it is to take an agile and modular approach. 

Thus, the bigger and more complex the problem, the more important it is to take this agile and modular approach that focuses on the speed of making tangible progress. 

Conclusion

As we explained in our complete guide to innovation management, there is no single perfect way of managing innovation. Different companies have different approaches for innovation management.  

However, the common thread of successful organizations are structures and processes that mitigate the somehow chaotic nature of innovation management.  

In these two articles we explored agile as a method to enable innovation and improve its management for sustained success. We don’t believe in quick fixes or miracle solutions. That’s why we made the case of agile as a mindset that should permeate every aspect of the organization.


Article originally published in full format on viima.com/blog

Image credit: Unsplash, McKinsey

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Truth Can Set You Free – If You Tell It

Truth Can Set You Free - If You Tell It

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Your truth is what you see. Your truth is what you think. Your truth is what feel. Your truth is what you say. Your truth is what you do.

If you see something, say something.

If no one wants to hear it, that’s on them.

If your truth differs from common believe, I want to hear it.

If your truth differs from common believe and no one wants to hear it, that’s troubling.

If you don’t speak your truth, that’s on you.

If you speak it and they dismiss it, that’s on them.

Your truth is your truth, and no one can take that away from you.

When someone tries to take your truth from you, shame on them.

Your truth is your truth. Full stop.

And even if it turns out to be misaligned with how things are, it’s still your responsibility to tell it.

If your company makes it difficult for you to speak your truth, you’re still obliged to speak it.

If your company makes it difficult for you to speak your truth, they don’t value you.

When your truth turns out to be misaligned with how things are, thank you for telling it.

You’ve provided a valuable perspective that helped us see things more clearly.

If you’re striving for your next promotion, it can be difficult to speak your dissenting truth.

If it’s difficult to speak your dissenting truth, instead of promotion, think relocation.

If you feel you must yell your dissenting truth, you’re not confident in it.

If you’re confident in your truth and you still feel you must yell it, you have a bigger problem.

When you know your truth is standing on bedrock, there’s no need to argue.

When someone argues with your bedrock truth, that’s a problem for them.

If you can put your hand over mouth and point to your truth, you have bedrock truth.

When you write a report grounded in bedrock truth, it’s the same as putting your hand over your mouth and pointing to the truth.

If you speak your truth and it doesn’t bring about the change you want, sometimes that happens.

And sometimes it brings about its opposite.

Your truth doesn’t have to be right to be useful.

But for your truth to be useful, you must be uncompromising with it.

You don’t have to know why you believe your truth; you just have to believe it.

It’s not your responsibility to make others believe your truth; it’s your responsibility to tell it.

When your truth contradicts success, expect dismissal and disbelief.

When your truth meets with dismissal and disbelief, you may be onto something.

Tomorrow’s truth will likely be different than today’s.

But you don’t have a responsibility to be consistent; you have a responsibility to the truth.

Image credit: Dall-E via Bing

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10 CX and Customer Service Predictions for 2024 (Part 2)

10 CX and Customer Service Predictions for 2024 (Part 2)

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

As promised, I’m back with the second part of my top predictions and trends for 2024 in the world of customer service and customer experience (CX). You can read the first five here. So, let’s get started with number six.

6. Social Cause Increases Customer Satisfaction — Earlier this year, my customer experience research found that 43% of consumers believe it’s important that a company supports a social cause that’s important to them. Only 24% said it wasn’t important. Furthermore, those who claim it’s important are the younger customers: Gen-Z and Millennials. Companies are recognizing this, and you’re seeing more advertisements about how brands are focused on important causes like climate change, diversity, poverty and more. Sustainability is one of the top social causes. The Human8 annual Global What Matters Report found that 78% of U.S. respondents believe brands bear a significant responsibility for the planet’s future. Consumers are factoring in a company’s cause and impact on the community—and the world—as they choose where to do business. Forty-one percent will even pay more if the company has a cause that’s important to them. In short, a social cause is now part of the customer experience!

7. Fewer Chances To Get It Right — In our customer service and CX research, we asked, “How many chances would you give a company you were loyal to before switching?” In 2021, the typical American consumer gave a company 3.4 chances if it made mistakes. In 2022, that number decreased to 3.3, and in 2023, it dropped to 3.1. I predict customers will only be loyal to the companies and brands that are loyal to them, which means delivering a service experience they can count on. And I have to emphasize the word loyal in this prediction. That number is even lower for customers without loyalty or love for the company. When it comes to customer service, the bar is higher than ever. Looking back at the first prediction (from last week’s article), our customers are smarter and compare their experiences to the best they’ve had from any brand, not just your competitors. So, get it right the first time. You won’t have many chances, if any, to win back a customer if you don’t meet their expectations.

8. Customers Want It Now — Customers will appear to be less patient than in the past because of what some refer to as the Amazonation of the consumer. Amazon has set the bar high for fast delivery, and now customers get frustrated when another company can’t meet their delivery expectations. But it is more than just delivery. It’s about time. My friend and customer experience expert Jay Baer did a consumer patience study and wrote a book about it, The Time to Win. He discovered that 64% of people say speed is as important as price. Speed, as in delivery and response times, is an essential part of customer experience, and it will only increase as the companies and brands that get it right put pressure on all the others.

9. Convenience Rules — Before the pandemic, convenience was a “nice-to-have” offering. During the pandemic, customers needed convenience, primarily in the form of delivery. And it’s no surprise that it was so well received that delivery became the norm. Convenience in all forms, not just delivery, is appreciated by the customer, and the demand has increased in all areas of business (B2C and B2B). Just as many people will pay more for speed (see No. 8), they will also pay more for convenience—even more than for a good customer experience. (Imagine if you combined service, speed and convenience!) More companies are recognizing what their customers want and adopting a convenience strategy, making it easier to do business with them. This trend will accelerate as convenience—just like a good customer experience—is demanded by the customer and becomes the expectation.

10. AI Will Not Eliminate Jobs — Yes, some jobs may be eliminated and changed, but for the near future, as in 2024, there will be minor disruption. I spend much time studying the contact center/customer support department. This is one place that AI could be used to eliminate jobs, as ChatGPT and other technologies create human-like experiences. Just six months ago, I wrote a Forbes article about my collaboration with Capterra on their 2023 CX Investments Survey to learn how customer service and CX leaders were investing in technology. We specifically asked about AI’s impact on increasing or decreasing CX staff. It was good to learn that only 9% are reducing staff because of AI, while 63% are increasing staff. Fears of layoffs will continue, thanks to hyperbole and overreactions to new AI capabilities, but for the most part, those fears are unfounded. There will be some layoffs, but there will also be opportunities for employees to learn new skills and find new places to work as a result of AI.

So, there you have it, my top predictions and trends for 2024. I’m always optimistic as I look to the future. That doesn’t mean I’ll put my “head in the sand” and ignore negative trends. When appropriate, I’ll share those as well. For now, let’s embrace the opportunities that are in front of us. May 2024 be your best year yet — and each year thereafter be even better than the last!

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Image Credits: Shep Hyken

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The Remarkable Power of Negative Feedback

The Remarkable Power of Negative Feedback

GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

The most effective innovators—entrepreneurs, scientists, new product developers, and advocates of social change—are adept at seeking feedback. But not just any feedback. They look for a particular type of feedback that may surprise you. They actively seek negative feedback, feedback that tells them when they’re wrong.

That probably sounds counterintuitive. Who goes around wanting to fail? The whole field of positive psychology has convinced many of us that to be successful, we need confidence and plenty of positive reinforcement. There’s some truth to that. Entrepreneurs understandably want their businesses to be successful. Scientists don’t win many awards for failed theories.

But deficits matter. One crucial flaw can torpedo the best of ideas. In the real world there are always many things that can go wrong. Figuring out what those shortcomings are can save you a lot of time and wasted effort. Negative feedback tells you when the strategy you’ve chosen isn’t working, so you can adjust, either by overcoming some obstacle, or adopting a different strategy.

Seeking only positive feedback predisposes you to confirmation bias, when you tend to see what you expect, or hope will happen. It feels good, but it may not be telling you what you most need to know, to be at your best. Savvy investors—and my own research—have found that those innovators and entrepreneurs who most actively seek negative feedback, create by far the greatest value.

Almost any feedback is better than none. You need feedback to get a clear take on the realities you face, so you can respond effectively. But only seeking positive feedback ultimately fosters false-confidence and insecurities. It’s always looking for validation and simply wanting to be right.

Negative feedback can be humbling, but you can build confidence in your ability to respond to setbacks and failures, rather than pretending they aren’t there. Accomplished innovators can handle the bad news because they’ve done it many times before. When you’re trying to bring change, it comes with the territory—and it’s always an opportunity to practice being creative and resourceful.

The next time you face some challenge, hoping for success is understandable, but the best way to make sure that success is real is to look for indications that what you’re doing isn’t working. 

That’s the fastest way to make sure it is working.

View this post as a video here:

Image Credit: Pixabay

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5 Innovation Leadership Lessons That Go Beyond “Yes, And”

5 Innovation Leadership Lessons That Go Beyond Yes And

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Yes, and….”

You know it.  You love it.  You may even use it.

The phrase is a core principle of improv that has become the “magic” brainstorming phrase.  On stage, it encourages acceptance and collaboration, and in innovation, it quiets the critics (“No, because”), one-uppers (“No, but”), and passive-aggressive show-offs (“Yes, but”).

And there are other core Improv principles that will help you lead your team to innovation success.

You probably know them.  You may or may not love them.  And you definitely need to use them.

1. Be human

As Alla Weinberg pointed out in our conversation about Psychological Safety, “People are messy.”  YOU are a person (I assume), meaning YOU are messy.  And that’s ok because guess what?  Your boss, team, and even that super annoying person in (fill in the function) are people, meaning they’re messy. 

Improv embraces the mess.  When someone says the wrong thing, something unexpected happens, or everything goes wrong, the actors don’t stand around, point fingers, and complain.  They embrace the opportunity to step into the scene, support their fellow actor, and move things forward. Plus, as Coach Beard says, “Perfection sucks.  Perfect is boring.”

2. Connect

Building genuine and authentic relationships is central to building Psychological Safety.  It’s also central to great Improv.  Consider this example:

If two performers come on stage and only talk about the muffins they are baking, it’s going to be a boring scene. The audience doesn’t care about the muffins! What they really want to know is how these characters feel, especially about each other. Is one character sad because her daughter is about to go off to college, and she will miss spending time with her? Or is the other character fearful because she will have to navigate adulthood without her mom nearby? If the scene doesn’t focus on the relationship, it isn’t going very far. In order to connect well in the scene, improvisers must be attuned to one another.

If all you do as a leader is talk about your calendar, your To-do list, and deadlines, people aren’t going to care about the work.  They’ll do the work because that’s what you pay them to do.  But they won’t care enough to problem-solve (they’ll ask you for the solution), suggest improvements (they’ll do what you ask), or develop new ideas (they’ll wait for your orders).  As a leader, you need to connect to create. That applies to creating solutions, new businesses, and the next generation of leaders.

3. Actively Listen

Active listening isn’t just about nodding your head while someone else speaks. Active listening requires giving full attention to the speaker, letting go of judgment, and understanding their point of view.  You don’t have to agree with what they’re saying, but you do have to understand and respond to it.

Actively listening, understanding, and responding are essential to Improv.  When an actor does something completely unexpected, their fellow actors can’t ignore it because that will destroy the show.  They respond to it and build on it.  After all, you shouldn’t say “Yes and” if you don’t know what you’re saying yes to.

4. Pivot

Pivoting is hard.  It’s hard to admit something isn’t working, and often harder to figure out what will work while you’re in the middle of doing the thing that doesn’t work.  And that’s what Improv actors have to do all the time.  You may not notice because it looks easy.  But it only looks easy because they practice all the time.

Flexibility, adaptability, and the ability to change quickly are all skills that can be developed.  But you must practice.  Some people are naturally more comfortable making changes, but everyone can learn skills and tools to recognize when a change in direction is required and quickly sort through the options to find the next best option.

5. Have fun

Improv is hard work, and it’s fun.  Innovation is hard work and (it should be) fun.  We spend too much time at work and with our colleagues to not have fun, laugh, or enjoy ourselves.  Work will never be all rainbows and unicorns, just like not every Improv sketch will be hilarious.  But there must be moments of fun, laughter, and joy because you can’t create or innovate when you’re overwhelmed, downtrodden, or burned out.

As Jeff Ash, Director of Westside Improv, explains:

“Play unlocks the creative spirit that we all have. When people lose a creative spirit and get engulfed in whatever they’re doing in their day-to-day lives, I believe it impacts our ability to connect, build relationships, and be in community.”

What are other lessons we can learn from Improv?

Image credit: Dall-E via Bing

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Why Materials Science is the Most Important Technology of This Decade

Why Materials Science is the Most Important Technology of This Decade

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Think of just about any major challenge we will face over the next decade and materials are at the center of it. To build a new clean energy future, we need more efficient solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Manufacturers need new materials to create more advanced products. We also need to replace materials subject to supply disruptions, like rare earth elements.

Traditionally, developing new materials has been a slow, painstaking process. To find the properties they’re looking for, researchers would often have to test hundreds — or even thousands — of materials one by one. That made materials research prohibitively expensive for most industries.

Yet today, we’re in the midst of a materials revolution. Scientists are using powerful simulation techniques, as well as machine learning algorithms, to propel innovation forward at blazing speed and even point them toward possibilities they had never considered. Over the next decade, the rapid advancement in materials science will have a massive impact.

The Seeds Of The Materials Revolution

In 2005, Gerd Ceder was a Professor of Materials Science at MIT working on computational methods to predict new materials. Traditionally, materials scientists worked mostly through trial and error, working to identify materials that had properties which would be commercially valuable. Gerd was working to automate that process using sophisticated computer models that simulate the physics of materials.

Things took a turn when an executive at Duracell, then a division of Procter & Gamble, asked if Ceder could use the methods he was developing to explore possibilities on a large scale to discover and design new materials for alkaline batteries. So he put together a team of a half dozen “young guns” and formed a company to execute the vision.

The first project went well and the team was able to patent a number of new materials that hadn’t existed before. Then another company came calling, which led to another project and more after that. Yet despite the initial success, Ceder began to realize that there was a problem. Although the team’s projects were successful, the overall impact was limited.

“We began to realize we’re generating all this valuable data and it’s being locked away in corporate vaults. We wanted to do something in a more public way,” Ceder told me. As luck would have it, it was just then that one of the team members was leaving MIT for family reasons and that chance event would propel the project to new heights.

The Birth Of The Materials Project

In 2008, Kristin Persson’s husband took a job in California, so she left Ceder’s group at MIT and joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) as a research scientist. Yet rather than mourn the loss of a key colleague, the team saw the move as an opportunity to shift their work into high gear.

“At MIT, we pretty much hacked everything together,” Ceder explains. “It all worked, but it was a bit buggy and would have never scaled beyond our small team. At a National Lab, however, they had the resources to build it out properly and create a platform that could really drive things forward.” So Persson hit the ground running, got a small grant and stitched together a team to combine the materials work with the high performance supercomputing done at the lab.

“At LBL there were world class computing people,” Persson told me. “So we began an active collaboration with people that were on the cutting edge of computer science, but didn’t know anything about materials and our little band of ‘materials hackers’. It was that interdisciplinary collaboration that was really the secret sauce and helped us gain ground quickly.”

Traditional, materials science could take a class of alloys for use in, say, the auto industry and calculate things like weight vs. tensile strength. There might be a few hundred of those materials in the literature. But with the system they built at LBL, they could calculate thousands. That meant engineers could identify candidate materials exponentially faster, test them in the real world and create better products.

Yet again, they felt that the impact of their work was limited. After all, not many engineers from private industry spend time at National Laboratories. “Our earlier work convinced us that we were on the cusp of something much bigger,” Persson remembers. That’s what led them to create The Materials Project, a massive online database that anyone in the world can access.

A Massive Materials Initiative

The Materials Project went online early in 2011 and drew a few thousand people. From there it grew like a virus and today has more than 50,000 users, a number that grows by about 50-100 per day. Yet its impact has become even greater than that. The success of the project caught the attention of Tom Kalil, then Deputy Director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who saw the potential to create a much wider initiative.

In the summer of 2011, the Obama administration announced the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) to coordinate work across agencies such as the Department of Energy, NASA, the Department of Energy and others to expand and complement the work being done at LBL. These efforts, taken together, are creating a revolution in materials science and the impacts are just beginning to be felt by private industry.

The MGI is based on three basic pillars. The first is computational approaches that can accurately predict materials properties, like the ones Gerd Ceder’s team pioneered. The second is high throughput experimentation to expand materials libraries and the third are programs that mine existing materials in the scientific literature and promote the sharing of materials data.

For example, one project applied machine learning algorithms to experimental materials data to identify forms of a super strong alloy called metallic glass. While scientists have long recognized its value as an alternative to steel and as a protective coating, it is so rare that relatively few forms of it were known. Using the new methods, however, researchers were able to perform the work 200 times faster and identify 20,000 in a single year!

Creating A True Materials Revolution

Thomas Edison famously remarked that if he tried 10,000 experiments that failed, he didn’t actually consider it a failure, but found 10,000 things that didn’t work. That’s true, but it’s also incredibly tedious, time consuming and expensive. The new methods, however, have the potential to automate those 10,000 failures, which is creating a revolution in materials science.

For example, at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), a US government initiative to create the next generation of advanced batteries, the major challenge now is not so much to identify potential battery chemistries, but that the materials to make those chemistries work don’t exist yet. Historically, that would have been an insurmountable problem, but not anymore.

“Using high performance computing simulations, materials genomes and other techniques that have been developed over the last decade or so, we can often eliminate as much as 99% of the possibilities that won’t work,” George Crabtree, Director at JCESR told me. “That means we can focus our efforts on the remaining 1% that may have serious potential, and we can advance much farther, much faster for far less money.”

The work is also quickly making an impact on Industry. Greg Mulholland, President of Citrine Informatics, a firm that applies machine learning to materials development, told me, “We’ve seen a huge broadening of companies and industries that are contacting us and a new sense of urgency. For companies that historically invested in materials research, they want everything yesterday. For others that haven’t, they are racing to get up to speed.”

Jim Warren, a Director at the Materials Genome Initiative, thinks that is just the start. “When you can discover new materials for hundreds of thousands or millions dollars rather than tens or hundreds of millions you are going to see a vast expansion of use cases and industries that benefit,” he told me.

As we have learned from the digital revolution, any time you get a 10x improvement in efficiency, you end up with a transformative commercial impact. Just about everybody I’ve talked to working in materials thinks that pace of advancement is easily achievable over the next decade. Welcome to the materials revolution.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Dall-E on Bing

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Innovation is Rubbish!

Why waste recycling and reuse may represent a valuable entrepreneurial opportunity…

Innovation is Rubbish!

GUEST POST from John Bessant

One of our family traditions at this time of year is the big clear-up. There’s a time limit on our tolerance for the accumulated junk, the temporary displacement of furniture to make space for Christmas trees, decorations, cards and mountains of discarded wrapping paper, piles of new toys and other festive fripperies. At a certain point (Twelfth Night, good of them to mark it on the calendar) some kind of alarm switch trips and it’s a case of loading up the car to transport the rubbish to the refuse tip. Where, we quickly discover, we are not alone — everyone else has had the same idea. Cue long wait in queue.

When I teach about searching for innovation opportunities one of the great tools to introduce is ‘find a queue’. It builds on a well-established principle of lean thinking — most times the presence of a queue means that value isn’t being added somewhere. Something or someone is being forced to wait for something to happen and that’s a waste of time, space, energy, etc. . So there’s an opportunity to think about how to change the process — to innovate to smooth out the bottleneck. Find a queue do a process map and begin the improvement journey.

So sitting in a queue for the refuse tip started me thinking on the innovation opportunities so much accumulated waste might have to offer. And whilst it might be possible to improve the ways and speed with which families can be separated from their rubbish the real benefits are buried a little deeper.

Queuing

In fact it’s worth referring back to a well-known piece of Yorkshire wisdom, ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’. Waste needn’t be a problem to be hidden away — buried or burnt to get rid of it. Instead there are real opportunities in waste — as plenty of innovators have already found out. Think for example of Earl Tupper whose efforts to turn the black sludge emerging from 1940s oil refineries paid off when he created the bright shiny plastic kitchenware which bears his name.

Or Charles Goodyear who managed to improve the unpromising raw material of rubber with its tendency to become sticky and brittle into something elastic and flexible through the vulcanization process he literally cooked up in his kitchen sink.

Or Henry Ford who developed a plastic made from soybeans and used it to make car parts, demonstrating an early example of using agricultural waste to create valuable products.

It’s still happening — take the case of Terracycle, founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky as a business specialized in recycling and up-cycling various waste materials. Envar is a UK company which recycles coffee grounds into bio-fuel. An approach which has been deployed elsewhere; Virgin Atlantic picked up some helpful publicity and valuable learning when it flew an airliner from London to New York on November 28th last year on a diet of 100% bio-fuel, essentially derived from waste cooking oil.

In doing so they scored a notable PR bonus, being the first of many airlines seen to be doing something to help reduce their climate impact. Adidas has done something similar for the fashion industry; their partnership with Parley for the Oceans creates shoes and apparel from ocean plastic waste. And Nike, not to be left out, has been running its Grind program since the 1990s turning waste from shoe manufacturing into surfaces for sports facilities, turning manufacturing waste into valuable products.

In fact there’s growing interest in using waste as a feedstock for further use — through recycling or re-using in different forms. Waste tips are increasingly seen not as dumps but as mines, full of valuable resources which can be dug out. It’s a useful analogy.

Think of gold mining and the traditional picture is something like a hot and cramped shaft a mile below Johannesburg’s city streets. The results of long sweated hours are brought to the surface and end up mostly as huge piles of rock which are painstakingly separated to yield a few grams of gold. That’s not so far from what is now becoming commercially interesting — digging deep into waste heaps to extract and concentrate small flecks of gold (or many other valuable minerals) from the piles of discarded electrical goods.

When I took a tour of my local waste processing facility recently (I have so much fun in my holidays) I had a growing sense of déjà vu — where had I seen something like this before? Separating out an unpromising feedstock of unpleasant smelling raw material into different parts which could be further refined to produce something of value? Then it struck me — an oil refinery. The processes might be different — think physical separation instead of fractional distillation — but the underlying story is the same. Identify the value in different streams, find clients who will pay for it and manage the business accordingly.

It’s a profitable business — so much so that councils and local authorities are increasingly selling the licenses to process waste. Recent reports suggest profit margins at between 30 and 60% which suggest that it’s worth taking a close look. The global recycling industry is worth about $410 billion and is forecast to grow at over 5% per year, at least for the next 7–10 years. A 2023 McKinsey report offers an optimistic scenario for plastics recycling, for example, suggesting a future in which 50 percent of plastics worldwide could be reused or recycled by 2030. Following that path, plastics reuse and recycling could generate profit-pool growth of as much as $60 billion for the petrochemicals and plastics sector, representing nearly two-thirds of its possible profit-pool growth over the period.

It may not be so easy as waving a magic wand, though. There is widespread concern that plastics recycling is much more difficult to achieve because of the challenge of separation — most plastic waste is mixed and contaminated. But whilst manual separation may be cheap it is rapidly being supplanted by a new generation of smart sensors and actuators. CES 2024 might have some glamorous consumer products and plenty of AI on the front stage but behind the scenes there’s huge improvements in the sensor and actuator field which could drive the cost of separation down whilst improving its efficiency.

Robot Recycling

And it’s not just economic pressure in the marketplace. Increasingly regulation is pushing for higher rates of recycling and for manufacturers to take responsibility for their products over the whole life cycle. Which is promoting some ambitious innovation in recycling. Henry Ford’s ghost might enjoy a trip to the southwest of England where the Charles Trent scrapyard in the town of Poole has quietly reinvented itself as one of Europe’s most advanced ‘de-production’ facilities.

It has cost over £10m and looks at first sight like a car assembly plant — except that this one is focused on disassembly. Whole cars go in at one end and their skeletal remnants emerge at the other. Around 96.3% is reused or recycled by weight — above the 95% legal target and the UK average of 93% or less. Part of what makes the model work is the emphasis on separating out the valuable but harder to get at elements rather than simply recycling the steel for scrap.

On a typical day 120 cars arrive on trucks from all around the area and engineers crawl over them attaching bar codes which identify key valuable items. It’s a high-tech operation. Robot arms lift items clear so that humans can get in with cutting torches, bar codes label and track everything.The wheels, batteries and tyres are the first to be removed — many can be refurbished and resold, others can go to a specialist recycling facility. Fluids are drained off- fuel, oil even water — and are used in the company’s own vehicles. And then the carcass is hoisted on to a disassembly line where it visits four stations; at each one the bar codes are scanned to identify what has to be done and instructions for how to deal with different parts. It’s got a lot in common with Ford’s old lines — the same race to complete tasks against the clock, for example, 15 minutes being allocated for each set of instructions. The stations are specialized; number 1 deals with doors, panels and interiors, 2 handles lights and dashboards, 3 is moving parts like engines, gearboxes, axles and cat converters ad the last stage is electricals. Engine blocks are washed, labelled and assessed for re-usability — or stripped down for parts. What’s left after all this is to crush the rest into a metal bale and send to scrap recycler. The whole process takes about 60 minutes and handles 75 cars/day

A key element in the process is the downstream platform where parts can be sold online; eBay has become the UK’s largest retailer of car parts and preferred not least because it offers guarantees of provenance and quality. It has grown as a marketplace partly because since the Brexit split from the EU spare parts are scarce. Prices have risen and consumers and repairers are prepared to pay and use recycled ones, especially with a guarantee. The approach is not only greener but also up to 70% cheaper!

Innovation is continuing to help develop the process further; as the CEO comments ‘within the next couple of years our target will be to close that recycling loop to nearly 100%…this is the future of car recycling’.

So innovation in processes is a key — but so too is innovation in the underlying ways in which we frame business opportunity. Business model innovation. Current concerns around the availability and complex geopolitics of key raw materials is promoting a rethink and a re-evaluation of opportunities. Key minerals like lithium and cobalt are going to be critical and the search for alternative sources of supply comes into the equation. How about re-mining as one route forward?

In another recent article in New Scientist Graham Lawton reports on thinking — and the technology development behind it — around revisiting coal waste as a source of key valuable materials. A recent webinar hosted by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine explored some fascinating options which revalue the thousands of sites of old coal mines which are littered with unsightly waste heaps. There’s a lot of collateral waste associated with coal mines — slag heaps, ash ponds and so on do not make for green and pleasant landscapes. These are mostly the consequence of burning coal — but they may represent a rich source of opportunity. Burning coal concentrates residual chemicals in the rock and those residuals include some of the most sought after minerals in today’s world. Lithium is close to the top of the list, essential for our current electromobility revolution and the batteries which will drive it. But there are other members of the so-called ‘dynamic dozen’ of key strategic materials present on slag heaps. Estimates suggest US coal waste alone contains around 288,000 tonnes of the stuff, enough to supply the US market for 130 years. Plus it also contains other high value minerals like cobalt (think mobile phones), platinum, iridium, gallium and germanium (semiconductors anyone?)

Rethinking waste in this way takes not only money but the classic entrepreneurial skill of reframing — of seeing what others don’t see. At its core, the Trash-to-Cash business model is all about re-imagining waste as a valuable resource. It requires an open mindset but also a long-term vision; the changes which might make such a business model viable may take time to materialize. But somewhere in that future of uncertainty about resource availability, concern for pollution and an increasingly strong regulatory framework lie the seeds of significant opportunity.

There’s also a need to think big and recognize that this kind of change may require a rethink at systems level. Much of the circular economy argument hinges around this theme of bringing together different players to create something viable which has emergent properties — the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Sustainability led innovation is easy and obvious — up to a point. Only a very short-sighted organization would fail to try to do what it does better — saving energy, reducing carbon footprint, etc. — it’s a no brainer. And there’s scope for the visionaries who see that this might be a route to new products and services, a way of creating a company or of renewing and transforming an existing one. The role model of Ray Anderson who took Interface Flooring from a small carpets company to being a major player in the industry through committing wholeheartedly to the sustainability vision is a powerful one.

The big challenge in sustainability-led innovation is working at the system level, assembling and aligning multiple players into a coherent ecosystem. And that takes a lot of entrepreneurial vision, re-framing and dogged perseverance! But the prize may be worth it; in earlier centuries alchemists were seen as the somewhat lunatic fringe with their attempts to transmute base material into gold. With today’s technological, political and economic environment we may be closer to reaching that goal. To paraphrase a classic one-liner from the Hollywood depictions of the Gold Rush — ‘there’s gold in them thar hills….!’ could become ‘there’s gold in them thar landfills….!’

Golden Rubbish

You can find my podcast here and my videos here

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Image credits: Dall-E via Bing, John Bessant

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One Day Sale – Charting Change – Second Edition

Wow! Exciting news!

In honor of International Women’s Day my publisher is having a 24 hour flash sale that will allow you to get the hardcover or the digital version (eBook) of my latest best-selling book Charting Change for 50% off!

What People Are Saying

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– Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and To Sell is Human
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– Phil McKinney, retired CTO for Hewlett-Packard and author of Beyond the Obvious
Marshall Goldsmith “Higher employee retention? Increased revenue? Process enhancements? Whatever your change goal, Charting Change is full of bright ideas and invaluable visual guides to walk you through change in any area where your organization needs it.”
– Marshall Goldsmith is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Triggers, MOJO and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

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Quick reminder: Everyone can download ten free tools from the Human-Centered Change methodology by going to its page on this site via the link in this sentence, and book buyers can get 26 of the 70+ tools from the Change Planning Toolkit (including the Change Planning Canvas™) by contacting me with proof of purchase.

*This offer is valid for selected English-language Springer, Apress & Palgrave books & eBooks and is redeemable on link.springer.com only. Titles affected by fixed book price laws, forthcoming titles and titles temporarily not available on springer.com are excluded from this promotion, as are reference works, handbooks, encyclopedias, subscriptions, or bulk purchases. The currency in which your order will be invoiced depends on the billing address associated with the payment method used, not necessarily your preferred currency. Regional VAT/tax may apply. Promotional prices may change due to exchange rates. This offer is valid for individual customers only. Booksellers, book distributors, and institutions such as libraries and corporations please visit springernature.com/contact-us. This promotion does not work in combination with other discounts or gift cards. Promotional prices may change due to exchange rates.