Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

Being in technology and believing deeply in the power of the same to change the World, many times I encounter those not so convinced and that challenge my beliefs by assertions and lamentations that society is worse for it. Further, having the privilege of having grown up in other countries and cultures, I field many criticisms from abroad from the many friends and family that I have left behind. These people are a constant sounding board, and are not shy about expressing their view of the World and the shortcomings of the USA and its foreign policy practices. From there, by extension, of course, other related subjects emerge such as: imperialism, over-consumption, climate change, over-use of technology, etc... Basically, when one visits - as I am now doing in Chile - one is exposed to provocative discussions from relatives and friends frustrated by the state of the World that many blame on the existing political elite reigning in the USA. The refreshing thing is that they do it acknow...

Believe what you want about climate change, but the science is hard to refute. Changes are happening and while the connection between human activity and changes has not been proven, it is hard to not acknowledge that we are having an impact. Sort of like the cigarette-is-bad-for-your-health debate of decades ago…Boy, were we ever wrong about smoking. In any case, what brings me to the arduous task of transferring fuzzy thoughts into actual readable text that my scarce audience can read, has to do with individual actions and the inherent value they possess to drive collective action and from there power to effect change. You see, I believe that the sooner we can aggregate these individual actions into a cohesive whole, the sooner we will get started in achieving change. Easy, right? Well, no, very difficult indeed. Changing people’s behavior has to be up there with managing the universe in terms of difficulty. I have been thinking about this for awhile because I have taken it upon mysel...

Ok, so how more official can it get? I don’t know about you, but for me The Economist ( www.economist.com ) is as reputable a publication as they come concerning business theories and when they write a story about the benefits of psychology and the positive impacts on business, one must pay attention. Now, I know that I have written a lot about the need for “soft” skills and how we have overdone the analytical side of business management. I am not a management theorist and don’t pretend to be one, but some things just make so much sense that we really don’t need to wrap an academic study around it. I try to write on things that track with nature and soul which in turn sort of validates them- I know, kind of a tortured philosophy. This particular piece appeared in the May 3rd to 9th edition of The Economist titled: Inside a Deal. It is on page 88…Go ahead, check it out. It is further confirmation that “soft” skills are needed in order to succeed well. The key work being: well. It turns ...

Last week I had the immense privilege of attending the Milken Institute’s Global Summit in LA. The event was well attended to the tune of about 3000 attendees and 400 panelists of which I was one. I have attended and participated in many of these types of summits but never have I experienced such diversity in the attendees. Given Michael Milken’s background in finance, it was not surprising to see lots of attendees from that sector. Nevertheless, the profile of all the others was rich with diversity to include academia, NGO’s, technology, education, energy, agriculture, media, medicine to name just a few. It was disheartening to feel the pressure of the all the World’s problems as they were presented during the conference. But it was also highly enlightening to see so many people trying to make a difference. The place was crawling with Nobel laureates such as Mohamed Yunus of Grammen Bank’s fame. Or Craig Venter, an innovator that wants to solve many problems via synthetic biology, a n...

A large part of Innovation thinking is to be open to inputs from the World around us and in a sense be hyper-engaged with the same in order to derive valuable insights. Didn’t someone say, “Things happen for a reason?” Isn't the reason to teach us? This point has been brought to me many times courtesy of life experiences that for most people are just life’s passing and go unnoticed and unexamined. The other day I had such an experience that taught me a good lesson and motivated me to write this entry. As I have noted before in this blog, it has been my philosophy to look for insights wherever one can find them. In fact I have made a practice of recording these insights on the go via personal recording devices, journals, photography, etc…In no other time in history, by the way, has this been easier to accomplish. If one is open to receiving, accepting and exploring, digital technology is making it easier by the day. Case in point is the mobile phone. If you permit me a di...

It wasn’t too long ago when we were patient with the response times and overall experience when accessing and using the Web. This is absolutely no longer the case – at least not with me. As broadband speeds increase, so does the customer expectation for speed and ease of use. For technology and service providers the challenge comes from the fact that every incremental increase in customer expectation demands a marginal increase in the performance of the next iteration of a web site, product or service. In essence, one is always behind the customer perception, as it were. In my view this is the way it should be. It challenges us to Innovative- always. That said, in doing so Web designers and service providers need to be aware of the “permanency” of evolving expectations and outright intolerance for certain web-site functionalities that detract from the overall experience. This insight was brought to me courtesy of my less-than spectacular-experience utilizing the Ticketmaster web-site t...

Ok, so now you have been in Innovation Management awhile my friend blurted out over dinner and wine…So, invent the killer product of the future, he posited. You know what the trends are and you now know how to build products and develop new business models... What is holding you back? My answer to this challenge is simply this. While I may have the desire, passion and intentions to build new products that address emerging trends, not everyone in the product planning cycle are of the same idea and neither are companies organized to truly utilize innovation management theories to their fullest. Most companies still have old product development tools based on gating systems and six sigma mandates that at times can kill product innovation. Innovation management, at least my version of it, is a super fast continuum with ideation at one end and product pilot testing at the other. The idea is to try new ideas and concepts and “fail them fast”, as it were, so as not to waste inordinate amoun...

Scientists say that we humans share approximately 98% of our DNA with Monkeys. If one analyzes every human feature one would also discover that the differences between us are very small and consists of hyper small variations on the same theme. We are very much alike; a little more length here, a little broader there, bigger eyes here, smaller eye lids there, a little darker, a little whiter, and on and on. Further, the differences in facial features are characterized by even smaller variations, really. And so it is in business. Excellence in service delivery is characterized by the very small things. I am of the opinion that if one really wants to make a difference in the innovation front one needs to make sure- first and foremost- that the basics are taking care of in the delivery of products and services for the simple reason that this is where the majority of service differentiators can happen. It is not enough to have an innovative service or product without innovative service deli...

I have always asserted that for the most part companies focus too much on certain leadership traits over others. You know, the hard skills over the soft skills, the deep analytical skills over intuitive skills. This is not to say that these skills are not valuable; they really are. But - I know, the use of " but" is passe and should not be used - the fact is that all organizations needs all skills at all levels. This is one the core learnings from Innovation Management. For a succesful Innovation practice to flourish, you need to create an intersection of diverse traits and skills. So, what prompted me to write this entry? The fact that I am sensing that there is a new awareness out there about these issues as I am reading many articles in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), for example, that seem to be searching for new answers regarding leadership, collaboration and innovation. Could it be that we are reevaluating how we define leadership and how we find new leaders? If HBR ...

So much of innovation is coming up with new ideas and concepts via a change in perspective. (I have included the above picture to stimulate a change in the same before reading on). I have spoken and written in the past about perspective and the value of changing it often. Many a time I have read about artists needing to travel in order to change their perspectives and drive inspiration and passion. This entry, however, is about the value of life learning which to me is a constant change in perspective. I am one that is motivated by constant learning and in thinking about this subject it occurred to me that our social systems do not seem to instill this philosophy. If Leonrado De Vinci espoused it, who can argue against it? One very simple idea would be to create 10, 20, 30 year University degrees. Who decided that four years is enough? (of course there is Masters and PHD's). But really, why not have life learning degrees that are broader and instead of narrowing the field of studie...

This past November I participated in an Innovation conference where I had to present the results of a group brainstorming session on the subject of how to create innovative cultures in staid companies. This past December I was approached by another Innovation conference to participate as panelist on a thought leadership conference. This February I am giving a keynote address at a Frost and Sullivan conference on the subject of spotting trends and market shifts, I was approached by F&S to do so due to my work in Innovation Management. All of these events prompted me to think about the subject of trends and to write this entry. Some trends are so, so evident that there are hard to read; it is something akin to fish not seeing water because it is all around them. Who was it that said something to the effect that the hardest things to see/understand are those that are closest to us? Well, I won’t make this mistake here. One trend seems fairly evident to me now: Innovation is a ...

Lately (well, over three years now) I have become a long distance bicycling addict which unfortunately places me out on the streets together with inattentive drivers driving giganticus SUV’s while on cell phones. If this is not scary enough, now I understand from the latest research, that GPS receivers are the latest distraction toy to complement cell phones. As I deeply believe in the powers of evolution to enlighten us into healthier ways, I hope that we hurriedly are evolving ourselves to accommodate our new, always-on, connected lifestyles. I, and I am sure all my fellow bicyclists out there feel the same way, am praying for this to happen sooner rather than later because the close calls have become too close and in many unfortunate cases, deadly. What brings me to this latest stream of thinking is not the trials and tribulations of sharing the road with inattentive and arrogant drivers and their vehicles, what has surfaced instead, thanks to this new found love, is an insight...

If a company wants to establish themselves as innovative and if they truly want to institute an innovative and creative culture, then they must re-think the hiring and promotional policies and think diversity, not only in the racial sense but in a much broader sense. Innovation is a complex eco-system with many variables and requirements, one of them being, in my experience, the need for people from different walks of life with different experiences and psychological profiles. Remember those crazy Myers Briggs tests? Those tests are fantastic, as they provide valuable insights into the different profiles that an innovation group requires. From the highly sensing types to the highly left brain types, they can all contribute to an innovation practice with their skills in the proper job. I see it again and again. Too often we promote the wrong profile into the wrong positions. A feet-in-the-street sales person does not make a good sales manager. Period. Yet, I have seen this being done ov...

As I was driving to work the other day, I was listening to NPR and the show Marketplace which was doing a special on Innovations. The piece was about the business of Foundations and how they grant money to non-profits. One of the experts being interviewed come upon the idea that non-profits need a little more than a “mission” statement to drive them and that they should be more “objective oriented” (read for profit management practices). Duh! of course. I am a huge proponent of “best practices” and to that end why not use some of the management lessons learned from the for-profit World and apply them to the non-profit World? Is this really Innovation? Now, the bigger and more important insight for me upon listening to this story and others similar stories is that we have created these “artificial detachments” that at the end of the day have done a disservice to the advancement of human progress. Non-profit - For-Profit; Religious-Humanists; Consumption/Living-Environment; Businesses- r...

One simply cannot be in Innovation management without having a pulse on what is happening internationally. In the case of my industry, being at the intersection of media, telecom and technology is a must and finding those leading-edge markets and regions where innovation is accelerating ahead of the USA is critical to my practice. For my industry these regions and countries are Europe, Korea and Japan. One simple example is broadband penetration in Japan. While in the USA we get excited about 5Mg download speeds for $40 a month, in Japan the going deal is 100Mbps for $19.99. Now, that is what I call broadband. And, oh yes, I forgot to mention, it is fiber and not cable. Two weeks ago I had the chance to feel the international pulse via a conference in Europe; Berlin, Germany to be exact. The event was wonderful and what struck me the most about the event was the seriousness of the proceedings and the dedication and attention given by the attendees to the topics and discussions. There s...

The attachment of meaning to synchronicity is highly dependent on where one is in his/her search for significance. As one that is innovation, I seek inputs and nuggets from everywhere. I have made the deliberate decision to open my mind to all occurrences that cross my path and analyse them; not in detail, but as potential pieces of puzzles in my search for new ideas, products, issues, etc... Just yesterday during my morning commute, I saw this car with a set of highly creative bumper stickers with very distinct messages. I found it fascinating and very creative and in at the end of the encounter with the car, I found myself stimulated and though about new ways to convey messages via SMS and other digital technologies. SMS is still in its infancy and it has become a great medium that people are comfortable with, that is easy to use. The same day I spoke to a company that is adapting the use of search and directory services to deliver information via SMS gateways. This is what I cal...