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

1 minute read. Note: This is the first of a series of articles on how to be a better entrepreneur, product developer and – well – human. I base these learnings on decades of work innovating across cultures while imbedding a fascination with neuroscience findings. I am also in the process of writing a book based on the above and these are snippets of some of the content that will in it. If you are so inclined and have the time, please do let me know if you like the style and “voice” and content. Are you a futurist? Well, you can be. It turns out that developing our empathy and aesthetic sensibilities muscles leads to growing our ability to see interconnections in human systems and capturing developing trends before others.  As entrepreneurs and product developers we must develop this skill. If we can’t sense the future and adapt how you do things, our businesses will suffer. Or even die. Just think of the graveyard of brands that were bad at this: Border Books, Kodak, Blockbuster,

Many of you, I am sure, have travelled to Europe, rented cars and rejoiced in its glorious landscapes. Many, however, have not had the courage to rent a car and drive in crazy places like Italy. Many of you have shared these fears and I write these words in order to curtail those fears. It is my conviction that driving oneself is the most enthralling way to experience a country and those atypical cultural subtleties. I hope that the end result from reading this story is that the fear is minimized enough so people take the plunge.   It is just so much fun. Without the ability to be independent during our trip, we would have not had the chances to experience things the way we did. Like when we attended a weekend festival in one of Italy’s spectacular medieval towns. Hanging out with the locals and sipping the local beer and eating the local pizza was, for certain, a life experience we will cherish into our next lifetimes. Or when we drove to a secluded beach near Sie

From years of working with the internet and advising companies how to manage digital adaptation (noticed did not use the word transformation), one best practice that consistently works is the creation of a “digital swat team” designed and tasked with pursuing emerging digital trends, synthesizing their impacts on the business and recommending courses of action including new products and services. Now, before all my innovation colleagues jump on the “it does not work” bandwagon. They do, if designed, staffed and properly aligned with all stakeholders. Like everything else in life, if a process or product is not designed properly, it will suffer. (Just ask Boeing and the Super Max. Had they used design-thinking technics to consult with the pilots in a deeper basis, perhaps they would not be where they are.) It is the same with digital swat teams. As a service to the organization, it must be designed properly at the outset. These teams can themselves be disruptive

Too many leaders feel that the only way to drive new innovations is to rip up what was there before. This does not make sense. The existing debate over healthcare insurance is a case in point. It is either an entirely new healthcare scheme (government funded) or nothing. The existing employer-based scheme seems to work well but not for all. Why not then try to solve the problem by keeping what works and deriving lessons from what works to create a hybrid solution?   Keep what works and supplement it with another solution that could be government funded. First learn from what works and use it on the supplemental solution. It is in the “walking” or “what works”, where valuable lessons reside; wisdom that innovators can learn from and lessons that can be adapted and tweaked into the next new thing. We don’t throw away walking once we learn to run, now, do we… Levi jeans did not stop making jeans when faced with designer jeans (Jordache started the trend