Innovation is Rubbish!

Leave a reply

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

And if you’d like to learn with me take a look at my online course here

Image credits: Dall-E via Bing, John Bessant

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

One Day Sale – Charting Change – Second Edition

Leave a reply

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

Daniel H Pink “There’s no denying it: Change is scary. But it’s also inevitable. In Charting Change, Braden Kelley gives you a toolkit and a blueprint for initiating and managing change in your organization, no matter what form it takes.”
– Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and To Sell is Human
Phil McKinney “Braden Kelley and his merry band of guest experts have done a nice job of visualizing in Charting Change how to make future change efforts more collaborative. Kelley shows how to draw out the hidden assumptions and land mines early in the change planning process, and presents some great techniques for keeping people aligned as a change effort or project moves forward.”
– 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

You must go to SpringerLink for this Cyber Sale:

  • The offer is valid until March 10, 2024 only using code IWD24

Click here to get this deal using code IWD24

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.






How to Tell if You Are Trusted

2 Replies

How to Tell if You Are Trusted

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you have trust, people tell you the truth.
— When you don’t have trust, people tell you what you want to hear.

When you have trust, people tell you when others tell you what you want to hear.
— When you don’t have trust, people watch others tell you what you want to hear.

When you have trust, you can talk about the inconvenient truth.
— When you don’t have trust, you can’t.

When you have trust, you can ask for something unreasonable and people try to do it.
— When you don’t have trust, they don’t.

When you have trust, you don’t need organizational power.
— When you have organizational power, you better have trust.

When you have trust, you can violate the rules of success.
— When you don’t have trust, you must toe the line.

When you have trust, you can go deep into the organization to get things done.
— When you don’t have trust, you go to the managers and cross your fingers.

When you have trust, cross-organization alignment emerges mysteriously from the mist.
— When you don’t have trust, you create a steering team.

When you do have trust, the Trust Network does whatever it takes.
— When you don’t have trust, people work the rule.

When you have trust, you do what’s right.
— When you don’t have trust, you do what you’re told.

When you have trust, you don’t need a corporate initiative because people do what you ask.
— When you don’t have trust, you need a dedicated team to run your corporate initiatives.

When you have trust, you don’t need control.
— When you don’t have trust, control works until you get tired.

When you have trust, productivity soars because people decide what to do and do it.
— When you don’t have trust, your bandwidth limits productivity because you make all the decisions.

When you have trust, you send a team member to the meeting and empower them to speak for you.
— When you don’t have trust, you call the meeting, you do the talking, and everyone else listens.

When you have trust, it’s because you’ve earned it.
— When you don’t have trust, it’s because you haven’t.

If I had to choose between trust and control, I’d choose trust.
— Trust is more powerful than control.

Image credit: Unsplash

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






Celebrating the Trailblazing Women Pioneers of Innovation

Leave a reply

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

On this International Women’s Day, we honor the remarkable women who have shaped our world through their groundbreaking inventions, discoveries, and unwavering determination. These female innovators defied societal norms, shattered glass ceilings, and left an indelible mark on history. Let’s delve into the stories of some of the greatest female minds:

1. Caroline Herschel – The Comet Hunter

Caroline Lucretia Herschel, born in 1750 in Hanover, Germany, was a trailblazer in astronomy. Despite her parents’ discouragement, she pursued education and mathematics. Caroline’s brother, William Herschel, took her to England, where she became his housekeeper. In 1782, she discovered her first comet, earning her place in history as the first woman to achieve this feat. Her meticulous observations and dedication to science paved the way for future astronomers.

2. Marie Curie – Radiant Genius

Marie Curie, a Polish-born physicist and chemist, revolutionized science. She discovered radium and polonium, coined the term “radioactivity,” and became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (and later, two more!). Her tireless work in radiation research laid the foundation for modern medicine and cancer treatment. Marie Curie’s legacy continues to inspire generations of scientists.

3. Ada Lovelace – The First Computer Programmer

Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer, collaborated with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. She envisioned its potential beyond mere calculations and wrote the first algorithm, making her the world’s first computer programmer. Her foresight laid the groundwork for modern computing, and we celebrate her every time we write code.

4. Katherine Johnson – Hidden Figures, Revealed Genius

Katherine Johnson, an African American mathematician, played a pivotal role at NASA during the Space Race. Her calculations were crucial for John Glenn’s successful orbit around Earth. Despite facing racial and gender discrimination, Katherine’s brilliance helped humanity reach the stars. Her story was immortalized in the film “Hidden Figures” and serves as a beacon of resilience and excellence.

5. Shirley Jackson – Breaking Barriers in Physics

Shirley Ann Jackson, the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. from MIT, made significant contributions to theoretical physics. Her work in condensed matter physics and particle theory advanced our understanding of materials and fundamental particles. Dr. Jackson also served as the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, advocating for safety and innovation.

These women, among many others, have shaped the course of human progress. Their brilliance, resilience, and unwavering pursuit of knowledge inspire us to celebrate their achievements not just today but every day. Let us continue to uplift and recognize the remarkable contributions of women in science, technology, and innovation.

Happy International Women’s Day!

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

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






10 CX and Customer Service Predictions for 2024 (Part 1)

1 Reply

10 CX and Customer Service Predictions for 2024 (Part 1)

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Here we are at the beginning of 2024. The big trends in customer service and customer experience (CX) revolve around technology. Generative AI has been around for a while. Then along came technologies like ChatGPT, which was introduced at the end of 2022. Hardly any consumers understood what it was—or how powerful. Six months into 2023 a large percentage of consumers still didn’t know, but that has changed, and I’ll share my prediction about ChatGPT-type technologies in the list. In addition, our customer experience research has benchmark questions we’ve used for three or more years to track trends, some of which influenced what is included below. So, here are the first five of ten customer service and experience trends and predictions for 2024:

1. Smarter Customers — I have started my annual predictions with this same one for many years. Our customers are smarter and more demanding than ever (again). Customer service and CX continue to be a focus for most companies. The ones that get it right have taught all customers what good customer service looks like. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling B2C or B2B. All customers are consumers and have experienced brands that deliver an exceptional experience. And those rock star brands are the ones you are now compared to. So don’t just look at your competitors and think you need to be as good as them. Look at the best companies—in any industry—and let them help set your benchmarks. Once again, customers are smarter than last year!

2. Digital Customer Support Improves — The technology that everyone loved five years ago is so outdated compared to what is available today. Not only is today’s technology better, but it is also less expensive to implement. With an investment that’s easier on the bank account and generative AI and ChatGPT-type solutions improving, companies and brands will deliver self-service support that will make customers happy.

3. A Big Mistake — As a follow-up to No. 2, some companies will make the mistake of thinking the latest technologies can replace human-to-human customer support. These companies will become so enamored with the latest and greatest technology that they will make the mistake of thinking they can shut down phone support. Making the switch to 100% digital will not work 100% of the time. More competent companies will recognize the opportunity for a balance between digital and the human-to-human experience. That said, the balance isn’t the same as in the past. Digital will be more important because customers will learn that it’s easier to use and can provide answers faster, but companies must back this up with human support. Finding the right balance is crucial and will vary between companies and industries.

4. Employee Experience (EX) is as Important as CX — This trend has been going on for several years. I included a version of this last year amid what everyone called The Great Resignation. Companies and brands continue to recognize that employee retention is as important, if not more so, than customer retention. Organizations will make more significant moves to keep their best employees. They will create competitive wage and compensation packages (including insurance, PTO and more). The fulfilled employee is more engaged with customers. It is what will drive a better CX. As I’ve said many times before, what’s happening inside an organization is felt on the outside by customers.

5. Fewer Phone Calls, More AI — I could be wrong about this prediction, but I will put myself out there. Our CX research found that year-over-year, more customers preferred making a phone call for customer support than using digital self-service options. In 2021, 59% of customers preferred the phone. In 2022, that increased to 65%. And in 2023, 69% of customers chose the phone over self-service options. Looking at this trend, one might believe that in 2024, the phone will be even more prevalent, but as previously mentioned, today’s AI and ChatGPT-type technologies are not only better, but they are also less expensive. The result is that more companies will be providing better digital service experiences, which means more customers will be happier using them. Our 2024 survey will go out the first week of January, and I can’t wait to see if I’m right or wrong. (Either way, I’ll let you know in a future article.)

Well, that’s the first five of my ten predictions and trends for 2024. Next week, I’ll be back with five more.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Image Credits: Shep Hyken

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






How to Re-engineer the Incubation Zone

Leave a reply

How to Re-engineer the Incubation Zone

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Having spent the last several years working with public companies in the tech sector who want to apply zone management principles to catching their next wave, I finally had an epiphany.

Every one of my clients had an Incubation Zone of one sort or another, and all of them had put concerted efforts into running it in an efficient and orderly way. This included crowd-sourcing a large funnel of potential ideas from the workforce, taking those ideas through a well-structured qualification process with clear benchmarks for progressing to the next stage, and funding a handful of the best ideas to get through to an MVP and market validation.

My epiphany was, this is a Production Zone operating model, not an Incubation Zone model. That is, these enterprises are treating the Incubation Zone as if it were another cost center. No venture capitalist operates in this manner. They are not process oriented—they are coin operated. But they do have a method, one that has proven itself countless times, and that’s what I want to describe here.

Anchor Tenets

In my view, there are five key principles that successful VCs keep close to their hearts. They are:

  1. Trapped value. If you are going to be coin operated, the first thing to do is find the coins. In B2B markets, this typically equates to identifying where there is trapped value in the current way of doing business. The value may be trapped in the infrastructure model (think cloud computing over data centers), the operating model (think self-organizing ride dispatching from Uber over the standard call center dispatcher), or the business model (think software subscription over license and maintenance). The point is, if you can release the trapped value, customers will enjoy dramatic returns, enough to warrant taking on the challenge of a Technology Adoption Life Cycle.
  2. 10X technology. VCs are fully aware that there are very good reasons why trapped value stays trapped. Normally, it is because the current paradigm has substantial inertial momentum, meaning it delivers value reliably, even though not optimally. To break through this barrier requires what Andy Grove used to call a 10X effect. Something has to be an order of magnitude better than the status quo to kick off a new Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Incremental improvements are great for reinforcing the status quo, as well as for defending it against the threat of disruption, but they do not have the horsepower to change the game.
  3. Technology genius. 10X innovations do not fall out of trees. Nor are they normally achieved through sheer persistence. Brilliance is what we are looking for here, and here public enterprises face a recruiting challenge. They simply cannot offer the clean slate, venture funding, and equity reward possibilities that private capital can. What they can do, however, is pick up talent on the rebound and integrate them into their own playbook (see more on this below). The point is, top technology talent is a must have. This puts pressure both on the general manager of any Incubation Zone operating unit and on the Incubation Zone board to do whatever it takes to put an A Team together.
  4. New design rules. The path for breakthrough technology to release trapped value involves capitalizing on next-generation design rules. The key principle here is that something that used to be expensive, complex, and scarce, has by virtue of the ever-shifting technology landscape, now become cheap, simple, and plentiful. Think of DRAM in the 1990s, Wi-Fi in the first decade of this century, compute cycles in the current decade, with data storage perhaps the next in line. Prior to these inflection points, solution designers had to work around these factors as constraints, be that in constricting code to run in 64KB, limiting streaming to run over dial-up modems, or operating their own data center when all they wanted to do was to run a program. Inertia holds these constraints in place because they are embedded in so many interoperating systems, they are hard to change. Technology Adoption Life Cycles blow them apart—but only when led by entrepreneurs who have the insight to reconceive these assets as essentially free.
  5. Entrepreneurial general manager. And that brings us to the fifth and final key ingredient in the VC formula: entrepreneurial GMs. They are the ones with a nose for trapped value, able to sell the next new thing on its potential to create massive returns. They are the ones who can evangelize the new technology, celebrate its game-changing possibilities, and close their first visionary customers. They must recruit and stay close to their top technology genius. They must intuit the new design rules and use them as a competitive wedge to break into a market that is stacked against them. Finally, they must stay focused on their mission, vision, and values while course-correcting repeatedly, and occasionally pivoting, along the way. It is not a job description for the faint of heart.

Now, these are what I claim to be the anchor tenets of the VC playbook. For the purposes of the rest of this blog, let’s take them as a given. Now the question becomes, how could a public enterprise, which does not have the freedom or flexibility of a venture capital firm, construct an Incubation Zone operating model that incorporates these principles in a way that plays to its strengths and protects itself against its weaknesses?

An Enterprise Playbook for the Incubation Zone

We should acknowledge at the outset that every enterprise has its own culture, its own crown jewels, its own claim to fame. So, any generic playbook has to adapt to local circumstances. That said, it is always good to start with a framework, and here in outline form is the action plan I propose:

  • Create an Incubation Board first, and charter it appropriately. Its number one responsibility is not to become the next disrupter—the enterprise already has a franchise, it doesn’t need to create one. Instead, it needs to protect the existing franchise against the next technology disruption by getting in position to ride the next wave as opposed to getting swamped by it.
  • In this role, the board’s mission is to identify any intersections between trapped value and disruptive technologies that would impact, positively or negatively, the enterprise’s current book of business. We are in the realm of SWOT threats and opportunities, where the threats take precedence because addressing them is not optional.
  • The first piece of business is to identify potential use cases that could emerge at the intersection of trapped value and breakthrough technology, to prioritize the list in terms of import and impact, and to recruit a small team to build a BEFORE/AFTER demo that highlights the game-changing possibilities of the highest priority case. This team is built around a technology leader and an entrepreneur. The technology leader ideally would come from the outside, thereby being less prone to fall back on obsolete design rules. The entrepreneur should come from the inside, perhaps an executive from a prior acquisition who has been down this path before, thereby better able to negotiate the dynamics of the culture.
  • The next step is to socialize the demo, first with technology experts to pressure test the assumptions and make improvements to the design, and then with domain experts in the target use case, whether from the customer base or the enterprise’s own go-to-market team, who have a clear view of the trapped value and a good sense of what it would take to release it.
  • The next step is to pitch the Incubation Zone board for funding.

> This is not an exercise in TAM or SAM or anything else of the sort. Those are tools for determining ROI in established sectors, where category boundaries are more or less in place. Disruptive innovation creates whole new boundaries, or fails altogether in the process, neither of which outcomes are properly modeled in the normal market opportunity analysis frameworks.

> Instead, focus on beachhead market potential. Could this use case gain sufficient market adoption within a single target segment to become a viable franchise? If so, it will give the enterprise a real option on a possible future. That is the primary goal of the Incubation Zone.

Whether the effort succeeds or fails, the enterprise can gain something of real value. That is, success gives it a viable path forward, and failure suggests that it need not spend a lot of resources protecting against this flank. The job of the board is to determine if the proposal being pitched is worth prioritizing on this basis.

  • Once funded, the focus should be on building a Minimum Viable Product and using it as the basis for selling a bespoke project to a visionary executive working at a marquee brand. The intent is to build a whole product for this customer on a project basis, doing whatever it takes to release the trapped value, thereby showing the world what good could look like. This project will require a ton of custom engineering, so it is key to price this on a time and materials basis, giving away the license while protecting the IP rights. Success consists of creating a marquee reference that garners the attention of the tech sector analysts and media.
  • The next funding milestone focuses on productizing the MVP for initial distribution. Ideally, this would be done internally with the enterprise IT department serving as Customer Zero. That allows for deeper dives into what’s working and what’s not as well as data collection to verify that trapped value is not only being released but recovered. It also positions the CIO as a highly credible reference to support New Product Introduction.
  • With productized offering in hand, the final step is to introduce the new product into restricted distribution, not general availability. Your goal is to target a beachhead market with a single use case—just the opposite of what general distribution is designed to accomplish. Thus, the entire go-to-market effort, from product launch, to pipeline generation, to sales, post-sales implementation, and customer success needs to be under the direct management of the GM of the Incubation Zone operating unit. Success here is measured by classic chasm-crossing metrics, focused on winning a dominant share of the top 30 accounts in the target market segment.

Crossing the chasm represents the fulfillment of the Incubation Zone’s real option mandate. This sets up a second set of funding milestones depending on what exit path is to be targeted. We can dig into those dynamics at another time.

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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






It’s Not Clear What Innovation Success Is

Leave a reply

It's Not Clear What Innovation Success Is

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“I would argue that it was an innovation success!”

At that moment, I started to deeply empathize with Alice because I felt like I was tumbling down the rabbit hole.

For the previous several minutes, I had been on one of my usual soapboxes – Innovation needs to generate quantifiable, and specifically financial, results; otherwise, it’s theater at best and performative lie at worst. As Alexander Osterwalder says, “ROI is the only thing that matters in innovation.”

That’s when my conversation partner brought up Kickbox. 

Way back in 2012, Adobe’s Chief Strategist and VP of Creativity, Mark Randall, packed “everything an employee needs to generate, prototype, and test a new idea” into a little red box to encourage employees to unleash their inner innovator. One thousand Kickboxes were distributed to interested employees in that first year. 

In the decade since, Kickbox has been used at thousands of organizations from multi-nationals (3M, Cisco, Caterpillar, MasterCard, Swisscom, P&G, Roche, Implenia, Zurich Insurance) to educational institutions (ETH, UNSW, USC), government agencies (DARPA, United Nations) and non-profits (Peace Corp, Gates Foundation, Kickstart-Innovation, Careum).  It is widely regarded as the world’s most “successful” Intrapreneurship program.

But what does “successful” mean?

Widely adopted?

Highly regarded?

The source of:

  • New projects (using Kickbox, Swisscom validated 400+ innovation projects in just two years)?
  • New revenue?
  • Cost savings?
  • Higher profit?

Effective at:

  • Increasing employee morale?
  • Reducing employee turnover?
  • Building a culture of innovation?

Something else?

For Kickbox, “success” means increasing employee engagement, creativity, and collaboration.

Let me be clear: this is an AWESOME outcome.  Very few programs have even a temporary impact on employee engagement and the organization’s culture of innovation.  So, to have a program that makes a measurable and lasting impact is incredible.  To have a program that is so effective that other organizations around the world adopt it AND experience similar benefits is almost unbelievable,

But is that enough?

If Kickbox was the ONLY thing Adobe did to encourage innovation, would Kickbox be considered a success? 

I don’t think so.

Kickbox was successful because it was part of a holistic approach to innovation.  It was part of a portfolio of efforts to encourage employees to be more creative and collaborative and to build and acquire new sources of revenue. 

If Kickbox was the only innovation effort Adobe invested in, it would not have lasted even the two years between its 2012 test and 2014 Adobe-wide launch.  It would have been like all other hackathons, shark tanks, events, and gimmicks companies use to encourage innovation without thinking about how to carry on after the event.

Speaking of the two years from test to internal launch…

For Kickbox, “success” also means surviving internal scrutiny.

Each Kickbox contained instructions, a pen, two Post-It notepads, two notebooks, a Starbucks gift card, a bar of chocolate, and a $1,000 prepaid gift card that could be spent on anything the employee needed with NO need for approval, justification, or even an expense report.

Think about that for a moment.

The 1,000-box test cost $1M in gift cards PLUS the costs of all the other materials, and that’s before you factor in the costs of design, assembly, and distribution.

If Kickbox was a grassroots effort instead of one championed by the company’s Chief Strategist and VP of Creativity, a highly respected executive who joined Adobe when it acquired the company he led as CEO, would the company have spent $1M+ on the test and an additional two years refining the concept before launching to the rest of the organization?

I don’t think so.

Kickbox was successful because it survived financial scrutiny and organizational skepticism, protected by a senior executive motivated to deliver on a request to teach his skills and approach to innovation to the rest of a giant organization.

“Success” ultimately means money.

After a week of tumbling, I think that I may have reached the bottom of the rabbit hole and a way to reconcile my money-grubbing capitalist view of innovation with my colleague’s extremely true and data-based assertion that success can be something much softer and more intangible.

Yes, and.

Yes, a successful innovation can be something with qualitative benefits, AND those benefits need to translate into quantifiable (financial) benefits, AND it needs a senior executive to shepherd it through the years of scrutiny and skepticism that kill most efforts.

After all, employee engagement, lower turnover, and more ideas have quantifiable and meaningful financial benefits. So, ultimately, it is all about the money.

Or maybe I’m still in Wonderland.

What do you think?

Image credit: Unsplash

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

Change the World One Shared Purpose at a Time

1 Reply

Change the World One Shared Purpose at a Time

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1847, a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis had a major breakthrough. Working in a maternity ward, he discovered that a regime of hand washing could dramatically lower the incidence of childbed fever. Unfortunately, the medical establishment rejected his ideas and the germ theory of disease didn’t take hold until decades later.

The phenomenon is now known as the Semmelweis effect, the tendency for people to reject new knowledge that contradicts established beliefs. Whether you are a CEO trying to launch a new initiative, a political leader pushing for an important reform or a social activist advocating for a cause, you need more than a big idea to change the world.

The problem is that a new idea has to replace an old one and the status quo has inertia on its side. Even those who are easily convinced have to convince those around them and those, in turn, need to convince others still until the long chain of influence results in a change of the zeitgeist. That’s why to truly make an impact, you need small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose.

1. Small Groups And Local Majorities

To understand how new ideas take hold it’s helpful to look at a series of conformity experiments conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. The design of the study was simple, but ingenious. Asch merely showed a group of people pairs of cards like these:

Each person in the group was asked to match the line on the left with the line of the same length on the right. However, there was a catch: almost everyone in the room was a confederate who gave the wrong answer. When it came to the real subjects’ turn to answer, most conformed to the majority opinion even when it was obviously incorrect.

The idea that people have a tendency toward conformity is nothing new, but that they would give obviously wrong answers to simple and unambiguous questions was indeed shocking. Now think about how hard it is for a more complex idea to take hold across a broad spectrum of people, each with their own biases and opinions.

The truth is that majorities don’t just rule, they also influence, even local majorities. So if you want an idea to gain traction, the best strategy is not to try to immediately spread it far and wide, but to start with groups small enough to convince a majority. Once you do that, you can begin to work to achieve wider acceptance.

2. Loose Connections

One important aspect of Asch’s conformity studies was that the results were far from uniform. A quarter of the subjects never conformed, some always did, and others were somewhere in the middle. We all have different thresholds for conformity that vary widely, depending on a variety of factors, such as our confidence in our knowledge of a subject.

The sociologist Mark Granovetter addressed this aspect with his threshold model of collective behavior. As a thought experiment, he asks us to imagine a diverse group of people milling around in a square. Some are natural deviants, always ready to start trouble, most are susceptible to provocation in varying degrees and the remainder is made up of unusually solid citizens, almost never engaging in antisocial behavior.

You can see a graphic representation of how the model plays out above. In the example on the left, a miscreant throws a rock and breaks a window. That’s all it takes for his friend next to him to start and then others with slightly higher thresholds join in as well. Before you know it, a full scale riot ensues.

The example on the right is slightly different. After the first few troublemakers start, there is no one around with a low enough threshold to join in. Rather than the contagion spreading, it fizzles out, the three miscreants are isolated and little note is made of the incident. Although the groups are outwardly similar, a slight change in conformity thresholds makes a big difference.

It’s a relatively simplistic example, but through another concept Granovetter developed called the strength of weak ties, we can see how it can lead to large scale change in the final graphic below as an idea moves from group to group.

The top cluster is identical to the one in the first example and a local majority forms. However, no cluster is an island because people tend to belong to multiple groups. For example, we form relationships with people in our neighborhood, from work, religious communities and so on. So an idea that saturates one group soon spreads to others.

Notice how the exposure to multiple groups can help overcome higher thresholds of resistance, because of the influence emanating from additional groups through weak links. Physicists have a name for this type of phenomenon — percolation — and configurations like the ones in the diagram are called a percolating cluster.

As I explain in my book, Cascades, there is significant evidence that this is how ideas actually do spread in the real world. So if you want an idea to gain traction, the best strategy is not to try to convince everybody all at once, but to start with small groups with low resistance thresholds. They, in turn, can help you convince others and build momentum.

3. Forging A Shared Purpose

As many have observed in recent years, you don’t really need leaders to spread ideas. Some, like LOLcats, go viral all on their own. Yet if it’s an idea that you consider to be important, you don’t want to leave things to chance. In many cases, such as the Occupy Movement, even an initially popular idea can spin out of control and lose credibility.

That’s where the importance of leadership comes in. The role of a leader is not so much to guide and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief and a sense of shared purpose. You can’t expect people to do what you want, they first have to want what you want, which is why you can’t change fundamental behaviors without changing fundamental beliefs.

Now we can see where Ignaz Semmelweis went wrong. Rather than working to gain allies among likeminded people, he castigated the medical establishment—those who had high resistance thresholds to a challenge of established beliefs. Instead of being hailed as an innovator, he died in an insane asylum, ironically from an infection he contracted there.

So we need to redefine how we think about leadership. In his book, Leaders: Myth And Reality, General Stanley McChrystal defines leadership as “a complex system of relationships between leaders and followers, in a particular context, that provides meaning to its members.” Control, as attractive as it may seem, is always an illusion.

You Can’t Overpower, You Must Attract

All too often, we think creating change is about charismatic leaders and catchy slogans. People see Martin Luther King Jr. and “I have a dream” or Obama and “Yes, we can,” and think that you need a heroic leader to make change happen. In a similar way, they see CEOs like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk thrill audiences on stage and think that’s what entrepreneurship is all about.

This is a trap. Movements like Occupy didn’t fail because they lacked a Mandela or Gandhi, any more than countless startups fail because they lack a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Successful movements like Otpor in Serbia and Pora in Ukraine prevailed against incredible odds, in much more difficult environments, without visible leaders. Bill Gates isn’t really such a charmer and neither are Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google.

Most often, change efforts fail because they seek to overpower rather than attract. Semmelweis sent angry letters to his critics, rather than address their concerns. Many of the Occupy activists were shrill and vulgar. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are often known for their arrogance as much as for their technical prowess.

The problem is that fantasies about overpowering your foes are much more romantic than doing the hard work of building traction in small groups and then painstakingly linking them together through forging a sense of shared purpose. Yet if you want to truly change the world, or even just your little corner of it, that’s what you need to do.

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

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






Agile Innovation Management

2 Replies

Agile Beyond Software Development

Agile Innovation Management

GUEST POST from Diana Porumboiu

Research reveals that 90% of executives recognize the critical importance of agility for their company’s future success, with 96% emphasizing the need to increase agility in the future. What’s more, agile companies grow revenue 37% faster and generate 30% higher profits than their non-agile counterparts.  

Incumbents are shaken by the highly dynamic environment they operate in, and they are too slow to respond to disruptive changes. 52% of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, were acquired, or ceased to exist.

An AEIU survey, 27% of respondents cited their organization’s lack of agility as a competitive disadvantage in anticipating marketplace shifts. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to be better and stronger, you also need to be faster to swiftly adapt to the market race.

Based on our experience in working with top innovators, and on market insights and trends, we can see that the future of innovation management is agile. What does this mean, and how does it concern you, the ambitious innovator?

The following two articles dedicated to agile innovation aim to answer these big questions and act as a guide to agile innovation management. Let’s start by framing the major concepts and explain the thinking behind them and later continue with practical and actionable tips.

Let’s start by untangling the intricate connection between business agility and innovation management by shedding some light on all these terms: innovation, innovation management, agile and business agility. 

Innovation is a highly debated topic. You might be sick of hearing this buzzword everywhere, but whether you choose to use it or not, the concept behind it is here to stay.

The short definition of innovation comes from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: innovation is “the introduction of something new.”  

This is an oversimplification, so we have to take it one step further to explain the nuances.  

Innovation is not just about generating and implementing new ideas. While these ideas can refer to products, services or processes, adding innovation to the mix means that you bring about positive change and create value.

Through innovation you should identify new opportunities that can be transformed into tangible outcomes that address unmet needs, solve problems, or improve existing conditions. 

To achieve these results, you need to manage a series of activities that are involved in the process of introducing those new ideas. These activities can range from ideation, development prioritization, evaluation, to implementation and launching of new products or introducing new processes. This is what we call “innovation management”.   

The challenge is not only in managing all these activities to pursue innovation, but also in doing it fast.  

Here, we refer to the pace of innovation, which plays a crucial role in sustained business growth.

In a nutshell, the pace of innovation is the speed at which an organization can improve their existing products and services and their ability to develop them while capturing the needs of the constantly evolving markets. 

Your rate of improvement (so the pace of innovation), has compounding, exponential returns and thus gives a clear competitive advantage.  

Why are we talking about the pace of innovation? Because it goes hand in hand with the agile mindset, which in the past decade has developed into the more holistic approach, business agility.  

A short introduction to “agile”

Agile as a business concept emerged in 2001 with the “Agile Manifesto”.  

At its core, agile refers to a set of twelve principles and four values intended for teams that work on software development. It started as a manifesto, but the brains behind it never imagined that their vision on how to better develop software would play such a pivotal role in management at an organizational level. 

This is, in a nutshell, the 2001 version of agile:

  • The four values of the Agile Manifesto. The idea is that what is on the left should be valued more than what is on the right.  
  1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
  3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  4. Responding to change over following a plan 
  • The twelve principles behind the Agile Manifest that the signatories followed.

Today, “agile” left the dark chambers of software development to capture the attention of leaders across many industries.  

These days there are countless frameworks and practices that ride the agile wave, but to be truly agile it’s more important to understand the thinking behind the agile concept, before deciding what methodologies are fit for purpose.

Agile 2.0

Agile 2.0 is the next iteration which comes from different authors who want “agile to pivot”. Given today’s use of agile and how it has been growing outside of its initial purpose, the initiative is understandable and laudable.   

Agile 2.0 is more anchored in today’s digital world and puts greater emphasis on some areas that were missing or misunderstood in the first version.

It’s also more balanced and encourages a more holistic approach. For example, even though the first manifesto does not incite chaos by making the case of self-organizing teams, it fails to address the importance of leadership, which agile 2.0 wants to rectify. To get a better understanding of agile 2.0, you can read the principles on the dedicated page.  

To summarize, “the agile way” refers to the ability to respond to change, adapt, build things in smaller cycles, get feedback, and unveil new opportunities. 

Why Business Agility is More Relevant than Isolated Agile Practices 

Agility promotes flexibility, collaboration and continuous improvement. It’s about adapting and responding quickly to changes. This is why it also helps increase the pace of innovation. Of course, easier said than done.

We have seen in the past twenty years how agile has outgrown its software development box. The problem is that most organizations that want to be agile are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. This leads to frustrations especially on the receiving end, when employees are forced into these “agile ways” even though leadership did not set the stage for agile in the first place.

Instead of fixating on agile methods, the focus should be on how to scale the approach at a higher level through business, organizational and enterprise agility. They might seem one and the same thing, but there are nuances that differentiate the three.   

While business agility focuses on operational responsiveness, organizational agility emphasizes cultural and structural adaptability, and enterprise agility encompasses a broader perspective, incorporating external relationships and ecosystem dynamics in addition to internal capabilities.  

In all three scenarios, achieving an extensive agile transformation is a highly complex journey and requires a top-down approach. However, it doesn’t mean that agility can’t also be achieved bottom-up, outside the IT department. In our work with customers, we see many innovation champions who put the wheels in motion through their determination and commitment to embrace agility.  

Even though the agile concept is used as a badge of honor by many organizations, it’s still highly misunderstood.  

That’s why it’s also important to understand not just what agile is, but also what is not.  

What is NOT Agile  

Scaling agile thinking organisation-wide it’s very difficult and hard to achieve. One reason is the lack of direction. Leaders and managers rush into methodologies and frameworks that sound good because others seem to be successful in implementing those. But more often than not, they forget to ask themselves why they want to be agile in the first place. Is it for the right reasons? Is there a good understanding of agile before bringing on board an agile coach?

Using Kanban, organizing Sprints, and hiring Scrum Masters will not automatically make you more agile. It’s important to understand agile holistically and put it into context before getting to the actual tactics and tools.

Start by asking yourself, what do you want to achieve, and what problems you want to solve with agile?

If your goal is to increase efficiency, deliver more or faster, increase productivity, or quality, there are plenty of other methods that can help you achieve this. Agile can contribute to these, but it’s not a prerequisite.  

Agility is primarily about adaptability and changing conditions. So, the main reason for considering the agile approach should be market responsiveness: your organization’s ability to adapt rapidly to changes that are happening in the market. 

Without clearly understanding the above, it’s easy to see how, for many organizations, agile became synonymous with processes like scrum.

Just to give a bit of context, Scrum is the most popular method (even though it precedes the Agile manifesto) used now by agile practitioners. It’s an iterative framework that brings small teams together to find adaptive solutions for complex problems.  

source: unsplash.com

A scrum process is built around product innovation and works best when there is a lot of uncertainty, and you don’t know which way your product should go.

In Scrum, work is organized into short iterations called sprints, usually lasting 2-4 weeks, during which a cross-functional team works to complete a set of tasks or goals. Sprints have been adopted by other departments too, not just those working on product development.  

But whether these can be successfully implemented outside of software development and scaled to other departments, is still a matter of debate. We’ll explore the reasons behind this in the next section where we dissect the challenges and pitfalls of agile.    

Bottom line, scrum is most suited for exploration and validation of assumptions. Scrum is not about speed, efficiency, and predictability. If you’re in a highly exploratory environment Scrum is a valuable practice.

Then there are those teams that proclaim their agility through Kanban. We explained the tool in greater detail here, where we show how it’s used to improve flow efficiency and optimize operations.

While it can be a highly valuable tool within the agile transformation, Kanban on its own is not enough to increase agility.  

So, while these are very popular agile practices, useful in their own right, they don’t have the power of embedding agility at the core of the business.

What does this all have to do with innovation management and how can you actually drive agility to innovate?  Something to explore in the next article.

Article originally published on viima.com/blog

Image credit: Unsplash.com, viima.com

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

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of February 2024

Leave a reply

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of February 2024Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are February’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Will Innovation Management Leverage AI in the Future? — by Jesse Nieminen
  2. 4 Simple Steps to Becoming Your Own Futurist — by Braden Kelley
  3. Master the Customer Hierarchy of Needs – Embrace Customer Expectations — by Shep Hyken
  4. Science Fiction Becomes Innovation Reality This Way — by Greg Satell
  5. Are You Engaging in Innovation Theater? — by Mike Shipulski
  6. Innovation the Star of the 2024 NBA All-Star Game — by Braden Kelley
  7. This One Word Will Transform Your Approach to Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Announcing the Second Edition of Charting Change — by Braden Kelley
  9. Resistance to Innovation – What if electric cars came first? — by Dennis Stauffer
  10. Goals Are Not the Goal — by Mike Shipulski

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

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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