The era of asking great questions. I’ll never forget meeting some people in a remote village of Laos (Southeast Asia) a few years ago. The village had no electricity. Not only was it a journey across culture and geography, but a journey back in time. Our translator helped us to ask about how they lived. They told us how they farmed, harvested, dried, and prepared rice manually.
They made fishing nets with their hands, and fished with their handmade fishing poles from their hand made boats as they rose and slept along with the sun. We finally asked if they had any questions for us and there were just blank stares. It struck me as odd. Were they shy, embarrassed, indifferent?
The era of asking great questions We’ve known for centuries that asking great questions (and finding the answers) is core component of innovation. But, we’ve never before been able to ask and answer questions as fast as we can today. What is my friend in India doing right now? New landscape. Can cells heal themselves? #CXO Chat April 29th, Noon Est: The Impact of Digital Innovation on Customer Experience.
@iluminatedance rockin the stage at #linc #innovation. The Discipline of Managing Disruption. This is the second interview we’ve published with Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen. The first appeared back in 2001. Four years before, Christensen had published The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Harvard Business School Press, 1997). When his keenly original theory of disruption first appeared, it seemed like an audacious and counterintuitive view of organizational change.
But it soon evolved into conventional business wisdom. And now he is applying it to a deeper question: What is life for? In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen argued that as companies focus their attention on their best and most reliable customers, they can all too easily overlook the threat of disruption from young upstart competitors. Christensen has always had an entrepreneurial bent, and this clearly colors his approach. S+B: How did you develop the concept of measuring your life? Big-Bang Disruption. By now any well-read executive knows the basic playbook for saving a business from disruptive innovation. Nearly two decades of management research, beginning with Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen’s 1995 HBR article, “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,” have taught businesses to be on the lookout for upstarts that offer cheap substitutes to their products, capture new, low-end customers, and then gradually move upmarket to pick off higher-end customers, too.
When these disrupters appear, we’ve learned, it’s time to act quickly—either acquiring them or incubating a competing business that embraces their new technology. But the strategic model of disruptive innovation we’ve all become comfortable with has a blind spot. It assumes that disrupters start with a lower-priced, inferior alternative that chips away at the least profitable segments, giving an incumbent business time to start a skunkworks and develop its own next-generation products. A Difference in Kind. Five innovations that will define tech in 2013. How can big data and smart analytics tools ignite growth for your company? Find out at DataBeat, May 19-20 in San Francisco, from top data scientists, analysts, investors, and entrepreneurs. Register now and save $200! Vivek Wadhwa is a vice president at Singularity University and a Washington Post columnist. Last year I predicted that social media would lose its sizzle.
Since then, the bubble has burst for companies such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. I am glad to have been wrong about LinkedIn. So, what else lies ahead for 2013? Most recently, the big rewards have gone to startups developing relatively simple social media platforms and applications. Here are the big innovation trends that I believe will gain traction in 2013. Tablet explosion to computing revolution Apple currently owns the high end of the market, of course, and I don’t expect cheap tablets to put any dent in the company’s sales this year.
The ‘quantified self’ goes mainstream and creates a new regulatory battlefield. A year in review: Top 12 Posts of 2012. The False Tradeoff in Redesigning Work - Brad Power. By Brad Power | 12:00 PM November 19, 2012 In theory, actively engaging your front line employees in improving the way work is done makes perfect sense. It allows front line workers to learn by doing. It builds capability. It gets the work done. Yet in practice, leaders seldom choose to actively engage the front line when redesigning work. Consider what happened at a major U.S. tire manufacturer, which implemented a new order fulfillment process in 2005. Leaders usually hold engagement and speed in an opposing paradigm of either/or: either they can actively engage workers or move fast. Why don’t leaders challenge this paradigm? But process change can engage the front line and be fast. Key players from various departments in the hospital, as well as office personnel and a surgeon, participated.
The wall was filled with their ideas. Question: Have you seen organizations that have made changes fast AND engaged large numbers of workers in the change? Where Models Fail: Remembering the Limits of Analytic Tools. Where Models Fail: Remembering the Limits of Analytic Tools Posted by Jay Watt on Fri, Nov 16, 2012 @ 07:00 AM Many companies inherently recognize the value of data-driven strategy and decision making, and, accordingly, many organizations and consulting firms have brought offerings to bear in this space. However, one fascinating recurrence especially with projects that fall into what OPS Rules calls innovate and transform, is the frequency with which we hear, “Consultant/software company XYZ came in and did a model for us 6-12 months ago, but that never really got us where we needed to be.” Many clients firmly state that the modeling project identified some great opportunities, but then go on to cite some operational stumbling block that prevented them from realizing the benefit; lack of organizational buy-in, lack of actionable metrics to track/control the key factors of performance, or lack of understanding of the 'tactical' steps needed to achieve the goals.
Rapid digital innovation fueling vast complexity and opportunity for customer experience executives. I was recently invited to keynote a series of executive events hosted by NICE Systems. For those unaware, NICE serves over 25,000 organizations in the enterprise and security sectors, representing a variety of sizes and industries in more than 150 countries, and including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies. At the start of each session, I encouraged contact center and customer experience executives from American Express, Disney, Coca-Cola, Staples, eBay, JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Discover, and several other organizations to commit with me to ask great questions together for the balance of the afternoon. We are in an era where asking great questions, and collectively pursuing answers together is a necessity. The accelerating pace of technological innovation is disrupting every industry, every best practice, and democratizing opportunity across the globe.
I asked the respective audience(s) in Orlando, Austin, and Salt Lake City to consider the following: 1. According to Peter Diamandis 2. 1. Rapid digital innovation fueling vast complexity and opportunity for customer experience executives. I was recently invited to keynote a series of executive events hosted by NICE Systems. For those unaware, NICE serves over 25,000 organizations in the enterprise and security sectors, representing a variety of sizes and industries in more than 150 countries, and including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies. At the start of each session, I encouraged contact center and customer experience executives from American Express, Disney, Coca-Cola, Staples, eBay, JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Discover, and several other organizations to commit with me to ask great questions together for the balance of the afternoon.
We are in an era where asking great questions, and collectively pursuing answers together is a necessity. The accelerating pace of technological innovation is disrupting every industry, every best practice, and democratizing opportunity across the globe. I asked the respective audience(s) in Orlando, Austin, and Salt Lake City to consider the following: 1. According to Peter Diamandis 2. 1. Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What's Next? The decade of Design Thinking is ending and I, for one, am moving on to another conceptual framework: Creative Intelligence, or CQ.
I am writing a book about Creative Intelligence, due out from HarperCollins in fall 2012, and I hope to have a conversation with the Fast Company audience on this blog about how we should teach, measure, and use CQ. Why am I, who at Business Week was one of Design Thinking's major advocates, moving on to a new conceptual framework? Simple. Design Thinking has given the design profession and society at large all the benefits it has to offer and is beginning to ossify and actually do harm.
Helen Walters, my wonderful colleague at Business Week, lays out many of the pros and cons of Design Thinking in her post on her blog. Design consultancies hoped that a process trick would produce change. I would add that the construction and framing of Design Thinking itself has become a key issue. There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. How To Disrupt Yourself. For years now, everybody has been talking about disruptive innovation. It’s not enough just to play the game anymore, the aim is alter it completely.
That’s a lot easier said than done. If you are a thriving business, you will have to change a lot of what made you that way. There will be no guarantee of success and the road forward will be uncertain, with no previous model to emulate. It’s not just products of process that will have to change, but the entire business model. Where do you start? The Problem of Change Management Many think that disruptive innovation has something to do with change management. , Clay Christensen points out that most often, change management efforts fail with respect to disruptive innovation (he gives one example of a success, but in that instance it almost killed the CEO who tried it). Change management can be effective when you understand the problem and have devised a viable solution. That’s what makes disruptive innovation so dangerous and so interesting. The truly networked world we still can’t quite grasp. This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya As the world races to connect, share, interact, and learn, new pathways are opening up for value to be created along the way.
Parallel to these connections happening, the lines between information, people, and things are blurring. I am increasingly hearing real world stories about man-machine, and machine-machine interactions happening on social networks. Machines are communicating with us, and vice versa. In addition to machines, sensors are being embedded in animals and humans for monitoring and tracking.
They provide valuable feedback and analysis on health conditions and location. Google glass likely becomes a midway or introductory step towards the rapid growth of more tightly coupled human and technology integration. I believe the era ahead of us contains more surprises than we are expecting. Digital Social Capital: Building, Maintaining and Leveraging Digital Networks for Innovation and Creativity. By Anabel Quan-Haase The digital landscape makes it clear that individuals are employing multiple sources of information, are members of diverse, sparsely-knit and specialized interest groups, and access both online and mobile applications via a wide range of media. We no longer function in small, local, interest-based groups, but rather society has moved toward a new social order, which Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman term networked individualism. This creates a need for each individual, social group, and corporation to make large investments of time, effort, and creativity into building, creating, and maintaining their unique social network.
But, to what extent are digital networks relevant to the business world? The Spread of Digital Social Networks Recent data from the PEW Internet and American Life Project shows that over half of adults belong to Facebook or Twitter, and as much as 80 percent of young Americans are connected via a social networking site. Just press the easy button. “To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown – the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none…” – Friedrich Nietzsche Economist and best selling author John Mauldin expands on Nietzsche’s thought in a recent article: “Ah,” we tell ourselves, “I know why that happened.”
With an explanation firmly in mind, we now feel we know something. Please help me make sense of this. Reflecting back over hundreds of conversations I’ve had in different contexts with different people, in varying landscapes, and with a variety of props, the narrative is largely the same. Things could be or should be much better around here. In reality, we see this mindset permeate all facets of our lives. We collectively seek the magic pill. What then, shall we do? I don’t have the easy answers. If You Were the Next Steve Jobs... - Umair Haque. …what problems would you try to solve? Let me answer that by telling you a story. Every writer will tell you: first, find a good café. And while I was hunched over my laptop in one my favorite tiny cafes in London — the estimable Kaffeine, purveyors of some of the best coffee I’ve had the privilege to have — something tiny, yet remarkable, happened.
After a few days, James, the barista, noticed that I’d come in, order a flat white, write like a man possessed for an hour or so — but never finish my coffee. Now, this might sound entirely trivial. Imagine, for a moment, that you (yes, you) were the next Steve Jobs: what would your (real) challenges be? Whether you’re an assiduous manager, a chin-stroking economist, a superstar footballer, or a rumpled artist, here’s the unshakeable fact: you don’t get to tomorrow by solving yesterday’s problems.
To solve today’s set of burning problems, you just might have to build new institutions, capable of handling stuff a little something like this… NB. 40 Examples of Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing. We can call it open innovation, crowdsourcing or co-creation – or something else. In short, it is about bringing external input to an innovation process and this is no longer a buzzword. Companies are learning that they must embrace this paradigm shift of innovation in order to keep up with the competition and those that are lagging behind, well, they will find themselves to be in big trouble in the coming years.
This list of corporate initiatives is worth looking into if you want to get an idea of what is happening with the open innovation, crowdsourcing and co-creation today. NOTE: The process of bringing external input into an innovation process requires lots of work that is often not visible to the public. So when you go through this list of examples, please remember that these companies have other initiatives related to open innovation. Audi Production Award In this competition, Audi asks questions such as: How will people work in production? Akzo Nobel Open Space BASF Future Business.
What Data Can't Tell You About Customers - Lara Lee and Daniel Sobol. And then there was One. Which is your top priority in #CRM in the next 1.5 years? #Innovation #scrm #IT #CXO. Turning Customer Intelligence into Innovation - Scott Anthony. Mom and Pop Start-Ups Rev Up in Silicon Valley. Seizing Opportunity in a Hyper-Dynamic Environment. Improving the known, exploring the unknown, and innovating to be well-known. The Most Innovative Tech Companies in Orange County. Business - Derek Thompson - Forget Edison: This is How History's Greatest Inventions Really Happened.
You’re Invited to Attend HTA19! Google's Project Glass: Inside The Problem Solving And Prototyping. Mary Meeker 2012: Mobile’s Hypertrajectory and the Re-imagining of Everything. In Search of the Hybrid Ideal. Techamerica. The Digitization of Human Interactions: From Long Tail to Mass Disruption. Harvard Business School For The Facebook Age. The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon. Yacht Combinator? Step aboard this ship full of startups bound for international waters.
It's Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement - Ron Ashkenas. Crush the "I'm Not Creative" Barrier - Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen. Brian Vellmure - Google+ - Curious how many of you have used the Cynefin framework to… Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development. The Innovativeness of Nations. P&G Innovates on Razor-Thin Margins - Vijay Govindarajan. Jeff Bezos's Top 10 Leadership Lessons. When all of us have “Terminator Like” powers. Why Innovators Don't Always Win. Your organization 8 years from now. Your organization 8 years from now. Brian Vellmure - Google+ - This is a fascinating article that measures communication… Economist: Customers will replace R&D as the main source of new ideas. Shoppers see innovation in mobile device use.
Sign in. It is the Jobs-to-Be-Done, Stupid. The Rewiring of Institutions. Big Data + Machine Learning = Scared banks. 3 Ways To Predict What Consumers Want Before They Know It. The Innovator's Challenge: Moving From Idea Networks to Action Networks. FULL LIST. Announcing the Winners of the HCI Human Capital M-Prize on Leadership. Products Come and Go – Customers Will Always Have Needs. Shift Index 2011: The Most Important Business Study -- Ever? Why brainstorming doesn’t work–and what does. Monitor: More than just digital quilting. Future of TV: The Quick Version. The Global Innovation 1000: Why Culture Is Key. Five Reasons Companies Fail at Business Model Innovation - Saul Kaplan. Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit. Mapping Innovation with the Customer Experience moderated by @StacyLeidwinger. Infographic Of The Day: Does Innovation Flow From Cities? | Co. Design. Accenture Launches Global Social Media Innovation Center in Silicon Valley.
Five Discovery Skills that Distinguish Great Innovators. What's Old is New Again: O'Reilly Publishes Time-Release eBook Experiment. Quirky: The Solution to the Innovator's Dilemma. Marc Benioff, Mister Disrupter - Victoria Barret - Upside Potential. Can Innovation Really Be Reduced To A Process? | Co. Design. Not what we thought? What's your platform for value co-creation?
Introducing S-D Logic and its 10 foundational premises | co-creation in hospitality - tobiaskoehler.com. The Collapse of Complex Business Models. Announcing The Constellation SuperNova Awards | Constellation Research. 2011 LaunchPad Award Winners and More Highlights of VC in the OC!