AI-driven Innovation Paradigm Shift II

As the era of AI unfolds, there’s an increasing discourse around job losses, with many fearing machines might render humans obsolete. However, a nuanced perspective indicates that AI is not directly replacing jobs but’s revolutionizing them. Professionals armed with AI tools are set to outpace their peers who rely on traditional methodologies. So it’s not AI that replaces jobs but people who use AI. Here’s how:

1) Marketing Plans
Imagine a world where creating a comprehensive marketing plan is as quick as making your morning coffee. AI can be fed parameters such as target demographics, budget constraints, and company goals. Within the hour, one might receive a detailed marketing strategy. This includes research-backed insights, potential outreach channels, predicted outcomes, and even content suggestions. While humans are pivotal in feeding contextual details and verifying the plan’s alignment, AI dramatically shortens the time and effort involved, turning a week’s task into merely an hour’s.
The human role: Let the AI know what YOU want in that marketing plan and what constraints YOU want to give the AI. Without intelligent input, neither a machine nor another human can perform that task.

2) White Papers
Once considered a tedious, time-consuming task, white papers can be made efficient with AI. Researchers or marketing professionals provide AI with a theme, objectives, and a few essential details. The system, equipped with access to countless databases and research journals, drafts a white paper complete with research references, infographics, and a well-structured narrative. The human role evolves from tedious drafting to primarily conceptualizing and verifying, cutting the production time from days to hours.
The human role: Let the AI know what YOU want to communicate for an audience that YOU specify. Also here: without meaningful inputs, neither a machine nor another human can perform that task.

3) Product Description
For companies with a vast array of products, writing and updating product descriptions can be daunting. With AI, a product’s raw data – size, features, benefits, price, and images – can be input. The AI then crafts compelling, SEO-optimized product descriptions in minutes. This not only standardizes the quality but exponentially speeds up the process, allowing businesses to launch products faster and adapt to market changes swiftly.
The human role: YOU give the AI the PURPOSE and it will do the work accordingly.

4) Event Landing Page
Event managers and organizers can breathe easy. When tasked with creating a landing page for an event, AI can assist in designing, scripting, and even optimizing for conversions. By simply feeding the system event details, target audience specifics, and desired outcomes, AI can craft a visually appealing, content-rich, and user-friendly landing page. Instead of laboring over design and content iterations, humans can now focus on strategy, outreach, and making the event a success.
The human role: Have the idea you want a landing page.

5) Training Class Presentation
Training modules can be made more engaging with AI. Trainers provide the core content and desired outcomes. AI can create a dynamic presentation complete with visuals, case studies, interactive elements, and even quiz sections. This ensures consistent quality, aids in better knowledge retention, and most importantly, lets trainers focus on delivering the content rather than the intricacies of presentation design.
The human role: Understand that a training class presentation is needed and YOU tell the AI how it should be done.

6) Legal Document Review
Legal professionals often spend hours reviewing contracts and legal documents. AI can analyze these in minutes, highlighting discrepancies, potential risks, and areas of concern. Lawyers can then concentrate on strategy and counsel rather than the tedious task of document analysis.
The human role: Review and validate the AI output rather than do the digging and searching yourself.

7) Personalized Learning Paths in Education
Educators can leverage AI to craft individualized learning plans for students. Based on a student’s performance, strengths, and weaknesses, AI suggests a tailored curriculum, ensuring more effective and adaptive learning experiences.
The human role: You get the idea: no matter what – Somebody needs to set it in motion

8) Real Estate Analysis
Real estate agents, with the aid of AI, can provide clients with comprehensive property analyses in record time. By entering property details, AI can predict market value, estimate renovation costs, and even suggest optimal selling periods.
The human role: Same here  – set it in motion

9) Fashion Design
Fashion designers can introduce AI into their creative process. By feeding current trends, preferred fabrics, and desired outcomes, AI can generate design sketches, patterns, and even predict market reception, allowing designers to be trendsetters at an unprecedented pace.
The human role: And here  – set it in motion

10) Film and Video Editing
Film editors can provide AI with raw footage, desired mood, and thematic elements. The system can then generate a rough edit, dramatically speeding up post-production timelines. This ensures quicker releases and lets filmmakers focus on storytelling nuances.

The consistent thread across these transformations is the paradigm shift from manual to collaborative intelligence. As AI and humans collaborate, the boundaries of what’s possible expand, ushering in a future defined by efficiency, innovation, and unprecedented achievements.
The human role: And also here  – set it in motion

I guess you can now imagine that those 10 examples can be applied to thousands of jobs. If you can’t see it give it a try or ask Chat GPT or ask me.

What does it mean for you?

If you are in any office job, you will learn to become a manager, no matter what you do today. You will become the manager of your AI system and tells it what it should do for you. This may be writing a report, summarizing today’s calls, creating a document, making a plan, telling it to process information, asking it how you can do what you are supposed to do, ask it to teach you any task, find out how things work, and draw an image even if you can’t even draw a tree. As you advance, you ask the AI to create a presentation for you or your boss, or to create a video about any topic, or analyze a project, analyze a process, suggest a process and prepare every item that needs to be done to complete it. Probably half of your daily work will be done in 10 seconds for each piece plus the 5 minutes to explain it what you want. All you need to learn is to `tell it what you want and most importantly learn to know and say what you want. This new ability will pen op new job opportunities and remove barriers like “I’m not good at writing letters” or “I’m not good at drawing images” or “I’m not good at analyzing data”…

Addressing the Global Skills Shortage through AI

Use the team you have – but much smarter than ever before !!!

AI-driven Innovation Paradigm Shift II  delivers also a highly crucial aspect on employee quality. The global skills shortage, a pressing issue in today’s rapidly evolving job market, threatens economic growth, innovation, and competitiveness across nations. As industries advance and new specialties emerge, there’s a widening chasm between the skills available in the workforce and those in demand. While retraining and upskilling initiatives are paramount, they are not the sole solution, especially considering the urgency and scale of the issue. Enter Artificial Intelligence — not as a replacement for human talent but as an amplifier and leverage for less skilled people. Somebody who never created a blog post can still ask the AI how a blogpost is written and than feed some bullets to the AI. The AI can be used as force multiplier. AI can tailor educational content for faster, more effective learning, predict which skills will be in demand in the coming years, and even assist on the job, guiding workers through complex tasks until they’re proficient. Furthermore, AI-driven platforms can match individuals’ potential and transferable skills with emerging job roles, bypassing traditional credential requirements and emphasizing capability instead. By harnessing AI, we’re not just bridging the skills gap; we’re reimagining a future where talent and technology converge, ensuring a resilient, adaptive, and skilled global workforce.

_____________________________

An important note at this point

You may have guessed it already, This post was written by AI, we use, GPT-4, and leveraging our Prompt Framing technology. All I had to do is compile a list of things I wanted to talk about and a minute later I had the results. To do the post it required still me (a human) to say I want a post. It required me to give the AI the structure I wanted and the bullet points in order to get this output. And finally the review and some personal touch like this paragraph. All done in about 20 minutes.

The learning for Business Leaders

AI is not just another piece of Software the IT team should get familiar with, but also the most revolutionary organizational innovation instrument since the industrial revolution with its production automation. I use the term instrument very purposefully. Like the conveyor belt changed mass production from the ground up, it needed to be implemented. it needed to be part of the organization and it needed to be part of he company culture. All this was possible with a few drawings, lists, new rules and organization descriptions. Today’s enterprises are so complex and optimized that it needs tools to make it work.

Leading by innovation

It takes leadership to transform a company through a paradigm shift. And this one is far bigger than most expect it to be. Leading by innovation requires the understanding about how AI really works. Neither the “Dooms Day Prophecy” nor the “Click and be done” mentality is helpful in any way.  The future of work lays not in the hands of politicians, scientist or educators. It is in the hands of CEOs. They are the ones that let a company crash or flourish. They need to look into what AI is doing like the farm boys looked at industrialization 200 years ago.

Like the CEO of a car manufacturer knows what cars are, he or she also know what SALES means and how it works, or how FINANCE  ticks and what it means, or how MARKETING does the job. Now there is a quantum leap in organizational management, time management, and results amplification. That requires skilled people we just don’t have – and we don’t need to.

PART III

AI-driven Innovation Paradigm Shift Part III — Organizational Innovation
I noticed that it may be helpful to describe how companies can initiate that paradigm shift, set new goals and empower people to complete far more jobs in the same time by leveraging AI. Also what task can be performed by less educated people and how all that will drive down cost and increase profitability.

The post AI-driven Innovation Paradigm Shift II – Future of Work appeared first on BlueCallom.

It was about the year 1435. countless monks were copying books. They did so by writing a new book by hand from scratch. Hundreds of pages. Monitored by supervisors, ensuring there is no single mistake on page 563, for instance. Otherwise, the monk had to rewrite it. This entire business of educating the world has suddenly changed. Around 1440 Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press. It was the first major shockwave that hit monks like a stroke.

One of the first modern innovations

Many thought that this machine needed to be destroyed. But it turned out the other way around. Within a few years, what was considered a curse became a blessing. All of a sudden, not only a few monasteries with a rare number of educated writers could distribute knowledge. Monasteries from all over Europe could quickly replicate knowledge and distribute it in their community. This was the very early start of the knowledge explosion.

More and more monks were needed to create new and unique content; others were busy with printing, yet others with producing more paper, packaging, packing, and shipping. It was no longer a business for just a few educated writers but for monks and, later on, normal people in the villages participating in that business.

The printing press led to the need for more people – not less. It led to more business opportunities, sales channels, and better education, which allowed more businesses to flourish. It is one of the best descriptions of disruptive innovation. AI is precisely of the same fabric. It will help us do things in any industry and any aspect of our lives that were impossible before. I don’t want to overshadow the risks. Analyzing those risks and, for the first time in history, preventing those risks while innovating is part of the paradigm shift. Innovating and automatically conducting various risk analyses at every major step in the process creates sustainable innovations with transparent risk profiles.

Why is the above analogy so relevant in today’s innovation and artificial intelligence world?

The old innovation paradigm versus the new

1. Try and error vs. strategic and tactical innovation.
2. Innovation is done by the same “experts” who would need to question their own expertise vs. by a diverse team of differently wired backgrounds and specific cognitive abilities.
3. Today, all repeat jobs like administration, KPI monitoring, Reporting, and Guidance are done by humans, versus an AI system that can augment human capability.
4. Ideation is reduced to a person’s experience (see neuroscience) instead of augmented by an AI that cannot really generate ideas but stimulate the ideation process.
5. Research is done manually today by researching relevant content, revising and abstracting the critical pieces, and summarizing the result, which may take weeks or even months, instead of by an AI that can do all that in seconds.
6. Today, disruptive ideas are created by hoping and wondering, dreaming and thinking in random exercises and models like design thinking versus neuroscience-driven ideation that stimulates the brain’s natural process and is supported by AI for internal and external idea confluence that unfolds breakthrough innovation and in the same process disruptive business models.
7. Ensuring that the disruptive solution is a market fit, stopping market research like idea validation, and instead using neuroscience-driven methods to have an undisputable result.
8. Today, 80+% of disruptive products or services fail in the market for many reasons that may have their roots anywhere from original idea to final product or go-to-market strategy. Instead of moving it back into the existing organization, let the innovation team bring it to market, leveraging AI to its fullest extent, which would be impossible in an existing organization.
9. Instead of buying a startup with 100 people or even less and hoping they can bring innovation to 20,000+ employee enterprises, create a detailed ‘Innovation Meta Strategy’ for the corporation and then decide what you really want and how to make it happen.
10. Instead of pretending you have an internal startup, think big and build an internal Unicorn. And instead of looking for improvements that will never be mentioned in an analyst report, create a ‘Large-Scale Innovation’ that changes how people do things that were never possible before.

From the first innovation opportunity discovery to scaling in a global market – the new Innovation Paradigm dictates an end-to-end solution that is thought through in all aspects of what it takes to make an innovation successful like any of the far over 1,000 unicorns already do. NEVER try small steps or walk before you run. There is no trying with pregnancy, and you cannot try a circumnavigation with a sailboat unless you already did the first.

Leading by innovation

It takes leadership to transform a company through a paradigm shift. And this one is far bigger than most expect it to be. NVIDEA was a startup in 1993 that was shining through the innovative graphics accelerators for gaming systems it offered. Twenty years later, it was one of the top tech giants in Silicon Valley. Ten years after that, it joined the Club of Valuation Trillionaires. With one exclusive feature: Continuous innovation.

Examples of the AI-driven Innovation Paradigm Shift

All images in this post were created with an AI from #MidJourney. It was done in 20 minutes, including several tries to get the desired output. So I took away business from our ad agency or graphic design freelancers. Well, here is MY POINT: did I really?

NO – I did not take jobs away from graphic designers. I only took the job away from graphic designers stuck in the old paradigm of taking hours and hours, rounds and rounds of reviews and arguments, whether it should be this or that.

MODERN GRAPHIC DESIGNERS use tools like MidJourney, Dall-E, Jasper, Canva, and many others. They can produce an image within 10 minutes, including reading the order. If they charge $20 each, that is $120 an hour. Way more than they earn right now. The only difference: 20 times more productive.

MODERN TEXTER, leverage ChatGPT or similar Large Language Models. They let the task through GPT-4 and get an excellent text, press release, and announcement… That costs 60 seconds + 2 human reviews, and you are done in 10 minutes instead of 3 hours. You charge $25 per press release and make $150 per hour. Again more than most copywriters. Also, you do more with less and earn more than you did in the past. Leveraging modern tools are increasing your productivity 18 times.

MODERN CFOs leverage ChatGPT or their own GPT-4 models to analyze financials, predict cash flow, predict ROIs, and much more. In this case, the CFO Is not in danger but can do more things in less time. But – that leads to a situation that old-world CFOs may need help staying in business.

MODERN INNOVATION TEAMS, ok, this is my favorite. Modern innovation managers use AI and neuroscience discoveries to get to top-notch innovation opportunities in the first place within days. In a few more days, they get all the research done and then take two weeks to craft a breakthrough innovation, and develop the corresponding disruptive business model. A few days later, they get their market validation and go for an innovation financing meeting with the CFO. And again, what took easily 6 to 12 months for complicated processes, unbearable administration, KPI collections, and reporting is now done in about three months. The same goes for prototype building, go-to-market, and scaling. Most breakthrough innovations require 10+ years to see an ROI. Today it is no more than three years. The newly won productivity gives you a 10-fold increased productivity in innovation and a three-fold ROI acceleration. Adding the Innovation failure rate of about 90% into the mix, your Innovation output increases by 100x.

IS IT ALL MARKETING BS? I know – those numbers look too good, and most arguments we hear include, we are an enterprise and tick differently, legal requirements, compliance, regulations, etc. But when you look under the hood, some arguments are based on distrust that your solution may not work, that nobody knows if your idea is really disruptive, uncertainty that the market will not accept the product, that customers won’t pay the price you anticipate, and roughly 70+ more challenges. Correct, but did you ever consider changing ALL those “circumstances”? No? But you can. This is why we use the term “Innovation is a Paradigm Shift.” The CEO and the board can make a significant difference in making innovation much easier, yet you must ensure it will work.

Other arguments are process and technology related and include: “We need too much time for reporting and KPI collection,” “We spend too much time for research,” old technology, old processes, old methods, old management… And those arguments can be alleviated even faster.

Neuroscience provided a game-changing inspiration. How can you THINK if you don’t know how your brain does it? How is the brain stimulated best? Where are its limits? And Artificial Intelligence is the other big game changer. Now we are leveraging AI for a productivity level that is by an order of magnitude higher than ever imaginable. Fusing neuroscience and AI made the Innovation Paradigm Shift and empowered us and our innovation teams to perform a quantum leap in Innovation productivity. Moving from guessing and hoping to repeatability, manageability, and predictability.

This is no future thinking but a reality today. BlueCallom’s AI system help you research, create exceptional ideas, and make intelligent decisions. And yet another AI system that automatically manages and monitors KPIs and prepares reports and performance feedback. Now the innovation teams can focus on one thing only: Their nature-given ingenuity. Here and now.

The AI-DRIVEN INNOVATION PARADIGM SHIFT is like the Gutenberg printing press. Instead of manually crafting one innovation in sequential stage gate steps and doing every single step on your own, now create a Meta Strategy for the entire enterprise, and use an AI-driven innovation that guides you through that process. Instead of shrinking innovation teams, the teams can make far more innovations, and they don’t need to be all top experts but now can be a mix of diverse backgrounds. Large-Scale Innovation like Peta-Watt Power Plants, High Volume Intelligent Logistics, New Monetary Systems, Disruptive Insurance Models, Modular Mobility Technology, Collaborative Moon Base Infrastructure, Harvesting Asteroids and other Planets, and developing new and individual organization models is no longer Sci-Fi. Sustainable AI with the ability to make its own risk assessment or assess the risks of other AI Models will turn the fear into a new perspective. Businesses not only get more productive but can build and do things that have been impossible so far.

In PART 2 I will talk about how all this may shape the future of work and our education systems.

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From randomness to strategic innovation

One of the biggest frustration for CEOs is the random experimentation with no results. The fact that all enterprises have the same challenge doesn’t set anybody apart. But that is the goal for several enterprises for 2022. Most innovation centers today end 2021 with several improvements but no genuine innovation. While almost all of today’s innovation methods help manage ideas to get to the prototype stage, non have reached the market. In a few cases, it did but died within a few months. It’s time to get strategic. There are 800 unicorns, bolstered with a billion $ or more, ready to disrupt whatever market they are looking at. One CEO asked, “Why did I never see a unicorn in the making? I saw hundreds of startups, but most didn’t make it.” An excellent question. We answered: “Because you saw only those who ran around from startup event to startup event, trying to raise capital.” A unicorn is far more strategic than most people think. They are relentless executors, have brilliant talents, and run faster than any other business. Many enterprise leaders have yet to learn what it takes to bring innovation successfully to the market. But there are several who just now do that – with a dedicated innovation development strategy.

From improvement to genuine innovation

Another early shift we saw for 2021 is that enterprises realize that improvement is not innovation. Improvement has been made for 200 years in every R&D center. Some enterprises have already learned the hard way: an R&D center is not an innovation space and cannot be just “tasked” to be done. Using improvement as a step-by-step path to innovation is like a sailor using a lake to prepare for circumnavigation. One major force to make a clear decision to engage in innovation is the CEO. Without a clear direction from the CEO, innovation cannot happen in any enterprise. That shift to genuine innovation bares the question, “Should that innovation center remains a department, be a business unit, or even a separate company?” The trend is already seen by companies like Kärcher who separated the innovation activities into a legally separate unit which is still owned by the mothership. There is a slew of advantages included above and beyond the risk mitigation. Those separate units don’t have to be integrated into the massive bureaucracy of the main enterprise, they may have different legal contract frameworks and more.

From Students to top-level teams with exceptional cognitive abilities

Another interesting trend comes actually from the innovation consultant space. Very often, students had been hired to innovate for a company. The task was simple, “find a great idea”. It has been that way for quite some time because innovation was associated with a brilliant idea. Only now do we understand that a brilliant idea is always coming from solving an existing or in the future envisioned problem. Today we know that a human is producing thousands of ideas every year. We are even drowning in ideas. Ideas are of no value. Solving a problem is a hard and complex task and the solution may be considered a brilliant idea. When Elon Mask hires people, he still focuses on people with exceptional abilities. When Amazon employs people, they spend more time on soft skills than hard skills. The search for people with exceptional cognitive abilities for the innovation job is on the run. Several software companies emerged from this trend, like Pymetrics, which exclusively focuses on a hiring process for those soft skills.

2022 Summary

In the past two corona years, businesses of all sizes learned to be far more agile or suffer enormously, if not pushed out of business. Innovation has shown its positive effect on some companies where it resulted in innovation efforts that brought even significant improvements to the market capitalization on the stock exchange. We see even a trend of amplification in innovation efforts as the past growth also encouraged investors and the capital market.

In 2022, we will see

• More enterprises investing in intelligent and strategic innovation, away from random experimentation.
• More explicit use of the term innovation by refraining from using “gradual innovation” as an excuse.
• A big challenge is finding talents with innovation-related soft skills.
• A surge in upskilling teams to gain innovative thinking and become more entrepreneurial.
• Finally, by the end of 2022, we may see some significant innovations created by enterprises.

We, the BlueCallom team, wish you all a happy, healthy, and innovative 2022.

The post Innovation Outlook 2022 appeared first on BlueCallom.

Axel Schultze opened the roundtable with a topic that has been current for some time among the BlueCallom community: Innovation is a CEO Mandate. What do CEOs need to do to empower their teams to become truly innovative? 

In the first place is clear communication between the C-level managers and innovation teams i.e. define the innovation goals, directions, and methods. We have already mentioned several times the importance of identifying team members with unique abilities to move the team and project forward. 

How to identify innovative minds? 

When we talk about successful innovation, execution is a part of it. As Christian Weh, Senior Director Innovation & Global Projects at Johnson & Johnson, said: “all successful innovators are playing an important role in the execution process.” The Maverick traits of a person are always visible through their independence, creativity, and experimentation. Truly talented individuals exist and they are the ones who always tend to be the best performers in the organization. Christian also mentioned capability building training as a part of human resources management, where organizations provide talent programs, incorporate continuous learning and improvement which is focused on specific capabilities. This tool is used to identify innovative talents. Ambition is another powerful trait and its impetus for success and achievement since ambitious people are goal-oriented and always strive for the next achievement.

Luuk Houtepen, Director of Strategic Partnerships and Innovation at SThree, sees exponential thinking as one of the important factors when it comes to recognizing talent. Individuals who possess this trait can envision the future and reveal new opportunities. We need to start visualizing the future to harness the potential of technology and positively impact our lives, not just in five or ten years, but also in a few generations.

“If you are really driven to make a change, to prove yourself, you won’t just settle down. You will be ambitious enough to push forward, to identify problems, and opportunities,” said Christian. He gave us an example, “Amazon did disrupt the book industry with audiobooks and Jeff Bezos can be described as an ambitious leader who set his targets and went beyond the next business plan.” 

Innovation is not only the CEO Mandate, it is also a CEO Task

Instead of having more and more innovations, most of the organizations are just followers with no concrete business plans. And this is the reason Luk said that “Innovation is not only the CEO Mandate, it is also a CEO task to open people’s minds up to where the world is going.”

Axel Schultze agreed that innovation is a CEO task, but when we look at their daily life, which includes political ambitions, involvement in the investor industry plus running a company, there is very limited time left for an extra assignment. But if innovation becomes the core of a business, the CEO has to give his/her best to encourage the innovation team and support the innovation project. 

As Luuk already said, exponential thinking is important, I would like to point out the following: 

Exponential thinking brings us to innovation and the BlueCallom Equation, G = I * E² (Groundbreaking Innovation (G)  = Ideation (I) * Execution(E)²), where the brilliant ideation plus exponential execution describes the foundation of any innovation process. 

Culture of Failure

A culture of failure is something that should be present in most organizations. Failure also means learning and if we want to make a change and personal progress, we need to be willing to identify our weaknesses and maximize our strengths. Luuk explained that we, unfortunately, don’t have the “Culture of Failure” and therefore most people are afraid to make decisions – it is less risky not to make decisions at all. 

What Axel has noticed is when it comes to large organizations where the CEO makes decisions, there is a risk that some decisions are not good which can result in job loss. On the other hand, making no decision because of the risk is a good idea.  It turns out that making no decisions is the best thing a CEO can do. Unfortunately, this is a common practice in the western world. 

Even when we look into the eastern societies, Asian countries, the decision-making process is also a long process. They might be faster in the decision-making than Europeans and the reason for that is that the whole team is included in the decision-making. Also if it turns out the decision was right and the first results are visible, employees are getting the rewards. 

The biggest advantage of startups over enterprises is that the decisions are made by people who have invested their own money. As soon as you hire a CEO, very rarely that person will become a decision-maker. 

When a company is determined to make groundbreaking innovations, that division has to be extracted as a separate legal identity. In this way, the innovation team has, so to say, “free hands” to do things and make decisions without being controlled. 

Summary

When it comes to the innovation process the most important is to have the right team on board. Innovative minds can be found in any organization and the CEO’s task is:

a.) recognize innovative minds 

b.) nurture innovative minds

c.) encourage innovative minds 

People with an innovative mindset think ahead, are creative, are likely to experiment, and are visionaries. These professionals involved in the day-to-day running of an organization can overcome obstacles, idealize, and generate truly disruptive processes, products, and services.

If you are interested in joining our next roundtable by-invitation-only event, please send us an email: tanja@bluecallom.com

The post Key Thoughts: Innovation Thought Leader Roundtable | November 2021 appeared first on BlueCallom.

Talents or Soft Skills matters – in some cases, even more than hard skills. One of those cases is with Innovation Development. Creating a groundbreaking innovation needs a new perspective, open-mindedness, creativity, courage, and other cognitive abilities deeply ingrained in a person’s mind. We prefer ‘Talent’ over ‘Soft Skill’. A skill is something people can get by training on. Talent is something that has evolved early in a person’s life, beginning as a newborn. For the sake of this post, let’s use talent as something we are looking for when attracting innovation team members.

Cognitive abilities as a Critical Success Factors of Innovation Teams

About ten years ago, we asked ourselves, what critical skills an innovative mind should have? After many long discussions, we realized: No skills at all. We learned that 20-year-old innovators with no developed skills could quickly create unique ideas and form a company. An early reaction was that age is a crucial factor for innovators. Startups should be run by young people that are unbiased and can change the world. Later on, we all learned that 50-year-old Elon Musk unfolded his full potential in the mid-30s. Regardless, all highly successful innovators have a few things in common, independent of age, skills, or educational background – TALENTS.

Those top innovators are without exception highly curious, very courageous, continuous, or relentless in their execution and exceptional collaborators. While looking deeper into the fabric of the innovator’s talent, we discovered eight key aspects: Curious, Courageous, Continuous, Collaborative, Creative, Communicative, Confident, and Connected. You may wonder what about PASSIONATE? We put it consciously out. Passion is not necessarily a specific talent or wiring in one’s brain – it is a result of a particular neurological trigger. Any person can be extremely passionate about something. Passion is undoubtedly a success factor for innovators but not a talent.

The 8 Cs of innovation talent

Curious, Courageous, Continuous, Collaborative, Creative, Communicative, Confident, and Connected

(1) Curious

We learned that new ideas are composed of past experiences. Unrelated experiences to solve a problem or create a new solution are especially valuable. People who are curious above average have more and broader spread experiences than others. Curiosity is also an essential talent when learning how customers work today and what it may take to make a significant improvement. In some cultures, curiosity has a slightly negative connotation as it is used for people snuffing around other people’s private life. However, curiosity is a key driver in knowledge acquisition driven by an interest and not so much by an external force to learn something. That mind-driven curiosity makes a person find out things to satisfy the overall interest or the interest in the context of a purpose.  Why want people to get faster with their car? What distances do they go? How important is it to be on time? What do they do while driving for 5 hours? What are the alternatives? What would be the most convenient way? Even if we don’t have fast trains, would they use it if ……? In the innovation space, innovation teams need to ask questions that may have never been asked. They need to construct their own paths to acquire knowledge that may not be available in that form. What is the max width of a train trace to make narrow curves at 300 miles an hour? This is not about having ideas – but all about asking related or connected but unrelated questions.

(2) Courageous

When radically new thoughts get created, it takes a lot of courage to share them with others. It takes courage to stand your ground, despite others laughing at you. In an enterprise, it takes courage to push for a change and, at the same time, take the risk to get fired. Courageousness is the basis for bold thoughts. It allows to break any rule except the law. And if the law is hindering innovation it takes courage to make all efforts to change the law.  Innovation is not just inventing new products but also building new business models. Should it be necessary to question the current business model, then it needs to be discussed. If the company’s structure is in the way to bring radically new processes forward, it takes courage to say so and not only mention it but make every possible attempt to make it happen. Genuine innovation is touching many people; employees, customers, partners, vendors, alliances, unions, and possibly many more. It takes courage to not stop at this overwhelming undertaking but to work through all the groups, interests, and aspects that may need attention. Enterprise employees are typically best when they follow the rules, don’t question the set structure, and get great results fast. Courage is not part of the recipe to success – but it exists in many people without using it in business but in sports or hobbies.

(3) Continuous

Brilliant ideas are just an episode in the entire innovation effort. Relentless execution makes innovative ideas and concepts a genuine innovation. Missing that duality between ideation and execution is why so many innovation projects failed. Successful innovation is the entire work from pre- ideation market observation to a multi-year engagement to scale the new solution globally. Innovation teams, therefore, need to be continuous in their work. Never give up and never surrender. Once an idea is found the innovation team will want to validate the idea, make sure to finance the project and then bring it successfully to market. There is no known case where the existing organization was able to bring an innovation to market. The only exception may be if the company is virtually dead and has nothing to sell anymore and the innovation is their last hope. The innovation process is a 5 to 10 years marathon. Look at any significant innovation created in the past 50 years; you won’t find a single one that became globally successful in less than five years. It simply takes time to make a dream a reality. It isn’t because all the teams so far were slow – it is the adoption time of conservative buyers, which represents the most significant part of almost any market.

(4) Collaborative

Sharing ideas, not owning them, is part of a strategic ideation process component called Idea Confluence. Working with others to extend the brainpower and accumulate more ideas is critical in the ideation process. Also, when ideas are realized or brought to market, the innovation team needs to be highly diverse but also collaborative in every aspect of their work. When in exchange mode, ten brains produce more than ten times as much value than just one time ten. The time of solopreneurs or isolated researchers or engineers is over. Not that they cannot come up with good ideas, but they won’t outperform a diverse team of ten amazing brains. And a well-assembled team is usually 5 times faster in the market than a single expert – no matter how smart he or she is.

Moreover, collaboration is far more than a team sport. Innovation terms need to know their limits and quickly pull external experts, science, research into the operation. If an innovation team member is not collaborative, their knowledge and experience would not be shared, discussed, extended, and so forth, and therefor that team member is far less valuable in an innovation team.

(5) Creative

Creativity has very many faces. In the innovation space, creativity is not only creative ideas but also creative business models, creative ways to produce things, creative ways to finance development, get to the market, and more. Creativity in the innovation space means going ways nobody else went. Creativity is the talent to connect many unrelated things, thoughts, or experiences, construct them in their head, and come up with a structure, shape, process or anything of that order that has just not been done but at the same times provides a significant advantage over what exists today. Creativity to be different is of no help in the innovation space; however, when created in a collaborative effort, it may trigger new ideas and new structures in somebody else’s brain. Creativity, in a collaborative process, is what makes innovation work. An innovation team member lacking creativity will very quickly feel uneasy, not contributing, and not successful.

(6) Communicative

Compared to other biological life forms, one of the most significant advantages of being human is communicating thoughts and visions for the future. That talent is needed in every phase of innovation, every collaborative event or meeting, every ideation session, and every other collaborative engagement. The more communicative a person is the more content of their thinking gets across. A big innovation dilemma is that the human brain can think extremely fast and has a large number of thoughts and ideas within milliseconds but can’t communicate them at the same speed. Communication talent is key for every innovation team member. The best thoughts, ideas or brain constructs are rather limited of value when they cannot be communicated. Communication talent is not only important during the ideation processes. Communication becomes extremely important when it comes to involving others. Those “others” include early customers when it comes to idea validation, the management team when it comes to approval financing of the concept, business partners when it comes to the early building and production validation, the market when this radical innovation needs to attract its early adopters.  

(7) Confident

Confidence is needed in communication, motivation, investment phases, and in the interaction with the market. Confidence is derived from very well-thought-out solutions and concepts that have been explored from hundreds of different aspects. Confidence is not about convincing others but transforming a vision into a realistic model that others can adapt as well. Confidence is needed by every innovation team member as the new “thing” needs to be explained with confidence to attract others. Confidence is an essential connection in the brain between a variety of aspects of a brand new solution. In particular, knowing it will help many people, realizing it is possible to build what is shown, and knowing that even if not everything works today, it will be possible to make it work in the coming years. Confidence is a form of being visionary by translating all that is known about that envisioned future today will be possible through certain actions that are yet to happen. At the same time confidence is not being afraid to say that there is no guarantee about the anticipated outcome.

(8) Connected

And finally, a strong networking ability connects a person with relevant people from all backgrounds and levels. Connection skills are critical when unique expertise is needed to augment an innovation team. Ideaconfluence sometimes requires very rare experiences or skills that are not present in the innovation team. Making those connections in timely order – typically on the same day is a talent that every innovation team member should have.  Well-connected people are inherently open and open-minded, involving others in whatever needs to get done.

Isn’t Passion a Cognitive ability?

So what about passion? Being passionate is not a soft skill to qualify for an innovation team member in general. People can be passionate about anything – they can even be obsessed about anything. We learned that passion or obsession kicks in if a specific action or environment, religion, or people captivates one so much that they can’t stop being engaged. Suppose everybody can develop passion about what they care about most. In that case, it is not a soft skill to probe for – but – it is utterly essential to find out in an interview process if innovation in your space would be a passion for the candidate.

Open-minded and other traits

In our research, we found that people with the above eight Cs are inherently open-minded. Openness is a relatively fast identifiable characteristic of a human but doesn’t necessarily include our talents. But to the contrary, people with the 8 Cs are always open-minded. Otherwise, those specific abilities would not show. This is true for many other soft skills that seem to be important in innovation but indicate some of the other talents we mention here. However, we want to clarify that we are just at the beginning of understanding the brain’s ability to compose ideas and what it takes to get there. We continuously research behaviors during innovation processes and learning as fast as possible, including using tools like AI to improve our work and results.

Testing Talents /Cognitive Abilities

Unlike well-trained and adopted hard skills, it seems that testing soft skills or cognitive abilities is not so easy. Exploring the soft skills of a job candidate is far more difficult today as there is only little experience. Hard skills are trained and the person will need to repeat what they learned or applied and then get tested on the results. Those repeat/linear jobs are rather easy to test while lateral activities like being curious, communicating, being creative, and so forth have no exact outcome as they have no exact input.

Here are a few tips for testing a candidate for specific soft skills. Instead of having multiple-choice questions or questions that you expect either a right or a wrong answer, try to understand how they behaved in certain situations by asking questions about their experience in various situations.

• Ask them to remember a situation or time where they had to solve a problem that they never had or don’t know anybody who solved it.
• Ask them to remember a scene where they had to help another college while they were under stress themselves.

We will publish a separate blog post just on soft skill testing and probing.

Where to find the best talents?

Most business managers tend to hire their innovation dream team from the outside. Reasons may include that they don’t trust their own culture, don’t know anybody who has the right profile, or fears that the organization already blinds them. However, our research indicates that most enterprises that desire to innovate have the top talents already in-house. We have seen amazing creative and ingenious people in all kinds of departments within enterprises. Attracting talents from within the organization has various advantages. It would help if you did not fear that they may already be blinded by the way things work in the company. If they have the 8 C’s as soft skills they will make a better organization and culture faster and with more intensity than newcomers.

Summary

• Make yourself familiar with the value of the 8 C’s
• Look inside your own organization first
• Make sure you have a very compelling offering
• Be aware that you will deal with exceptional talents that other companies will try to hire away.
• Don’t protect your talents, give them a dream environment
• It takes teamwork to make a dream work

Looking for a career in the fast-growing innovation space. Take the Innovation Talent Test to see if you have the 8C’s to start your innovation career opportunity.

The post Cognitive abilities to groundbreaking innovation appeared first on BlueCallom.

When we talk about innovation culture, the first thing that comes to mind is a work environment where people can develop their ideas. To hear more about this topic, I would like to share amazing insights from Erik Wirsing, Vice President of Global Innovation at DB Schenker, the latest guest on the Navigation of Ingenuity podcast. 

What is Innovation Culture? 

Innovation culture is all about bringing new knowledge into the organization. As Erik pointed out knowledge has to be shared among the people, let them learn something new, and encourage them to create new ideas and solutions. 

One thing DB Schenker is proud of is their innovation department – a place where they bring experience to the right people, train them, empower them and let them be creative. When you create an environment of constant change, networking, agility, and collaboration, employees’ motivation brings increased productivity and higher levels of output that will help organizations reach their important goals.

The biggest obstacle to innovation is having too much guidance and instructions that have to be followed. Put all this aside and give employees the freedom to work independently. This is the recipe that makes DB Schenker successful in their industry – logistics. When empowering team members it is important to provide them with resources, funds, time, and place but keep in mind that this might fail. 

How do you encourage your team to be innovative?

Team members and employees need to feel confident and comfortable to express their thoughts. Therefore the right communication style is the answer to this question. 

We also have to mention the importance of team diversity since their varied backgrounds and experiences allow them to bring broader ideas and new perspectives. Curiosity, openness, and emotional intelligence are crucial when it comes to empowering. It’s not all about monetary incentives and the best way for empowering your employees is to enable them to reach their full potential. Just like Erik said: “Help them to shine”. Erik tells us the story of how DB Schenker’s sparked innovation within their organization:

When Eric joined the company, he was responsible for global innovation and all the innovative activities. Since he had no idea how to run this globally, one of his team members came up with the idea of an innovation magazine that collects stories from colleagues and their experiences. Since everyone wanted to be a part of this magazine, the idea was very well accepted and the storytelling approach got more popular over the years. With time, the sales team recognized the value of the innovation magazine for their customers, which resulted in the new format – an external magazine. With the approach of bringing people together and promoting their success through the “Innovation Champion of the month” column, DB Schenker continues to be a leader in supply chain management and logistics solutions.

What was your last innovation?

As Erik stressed, it is not about establishing something completely new but adopting from different industries. 

His last innovation was not planned, it just happened accidentally at one event he participated in. Talking to one of the attendees who work in the roofing industry he found out about a special paint which keeps the roofing firm. Erik realized a potential use for the paint and adopted it in the logistics industry. As a result, we have a transport vehicle whose floor is coated with this paint to prevent the movement of cargo while driving. Now customers are using it for the forklifts. Such an easy and spontaneous idea provided benefits for different industries.

Creating the next groundbreaking innovation

We also asked Erik if there is one thing he wants to invent or see invented, what would it be? This is what he said: having one device (ie smartphone) with the possibility of the screen adjustments just like we do with Windows on the PC. He wants to stop traveling with his phone, tablet, and computer, one device that can expand or contract based on the use. Other great things he would like to see in the future are self-driving vehicles and space tourism available for everyone. 

Bringing different innovative minds together and being able to manage a big global innovation culture it is important for all the team members to know that within organizations there are people who are going to support their “crazy ideas”. Structured organization, developing a business model, and taking into consideration customer feedback is the foundation for tackling a main corporate “Innovation Blocker”. 

We thank Erik Wirsing for being a special guest on the Navigation of Ingenuity podcast. With certainty, I can say we all learned a lot from his experience in the innovation world. To listen to the episode please visit: https://dev.bluecallom.com/podcast/

Authored by: Tanja Sopcic

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During the past 6 months, we were able to chat and interview influential innovation leaders from companies such as ROCHE, DB Schenker, Sony, LG Electronics, Siemens, Coca Cola, and many more. Obviously, every innovation team has different subjects and issues they are facing, but comparing the general conflict, each company has similar problems in the innovation space.

By being able to speak to these different innovation team members we concluded that the overall main “innovation blocker” is the so-called innovation culture, better said, the missing innovation culture.

Innovation Culture

When talking about innovation culture, we are talking about norms, values, ​​and attitudes, shaping the behavior of all employees, especially those who are involved in the innovation process. Since the innovation process is not limited to the core innovation team and this process is cross-sectional, the innovation culture as such can be described as a cross-dimensional culture.

Describing the key points of the culture is easier than establishing this value system. So,  when talking about innovation culture – what are the main challenges why innovation gets stuck? We defined four challenges:

(1) Top-down approach

Successful, groundbreaking innovation is determined by the ability of the team and their culture. To bring out the best you have to push and give room for these norms, values, and attitudes to grow and to become the standard. Therefore, Innovation is a CEO mandate. Only the CEO and their board can take the much-needed decision in time, capital, and structure.

“Innovation success is not about an idea creation team and taking it to market by the existing organization. Creating an innovation center independent of the corporate organization that is responsible for identifying a viable innovation opportunity and bringing it successfully to market can only be made by the C-Level.”

– Axel Schultze

(2) There is no time to innovate

In many cases, the cross-dimensional innovation team, from the CEO to the working student, is fully stuffed with finding new ways of improving current products or services. They are too busy to think of innovation in a way where opportunities are discovered, reviewed, developed, and validated. Unfortunately, innovation has even been outsourced quite a lot to universities or startups.

(3) Fail and fail fast

Obviously, the pressure to innovate and stay relevant in the market has risen in the past years. Managers tried different techniques, took closer looks at the startup world and how their management is innovative. This led to experimenting with playgrounds, where innovation team members are hunting for inspirations and the next big thing; pivoting, brainstorming, and massive prototyping. These newfound Innovation Hubs, which tend to go back and forth with ideas – prototyping, idea – prototyping, and so forth with every little long-term success. By changing the process into a more structured way, combining research and customer feedback before prototyping, the team is able to save a lot of time, money and is not limited to just “experiment”.

(4) The initial value of an idea is zero

Your idea or my idea?  We are living in a world where recognition for something is key. With this value in the back of your mind, people tend to keep ideas secret because they are scared that somebody is stealing their intellectual property. BUT in a successful and inspiring innovation culture, it should not matter who had the idea first.

“The innovation team must know that all ideas come from past experiences and are composed of millions of impressions, often co-produced by other people. […] Teammates should be rewarded for ideas but also equally rewarded for building new ideas based on previous ideas from other teammates or anybody else for that matter.”

– Axel Schultze

Groundbreaking innovation is not only about the original idea, it’s about what you and your team do with this idea. The value of the idea is created through relentless execution and open innovation by taking into consideration what your customer wants.

Despite these main challenges, genuine innovation can still be created with the right innovation culture and innovation mandate. Rethink innovation from the ground up and discover why innovation is a CEO mandate in our latest whitepaper, “Innovation is a CEO Mandate.”

Authored by: Anna Ranke

The post Main Innovation Challenges appeared first on BlueCallom.

The initial value of an idea is zero

The entire value is created through relentless execution

Stop worrying start doing

Cowards will never bring an idea to life because they are more fearful their idea will be stolen than they fear to fail. If you feel you are too weak to execute – go back to square one and rationalize that it is all about execution, and look for a partner who can execute while you craft the concept for your idea. If you have nobody you can trust, work on your network. If you have no network, build it.

Every outstanding idea is usually created multiple times at the same time. Did you ever wonder why most breakthrough concepts happen around the same time in different places? Some may be a blunt copy, but most just happen because the time is right, the base to build a new step in the evolution of something is perfectly prepared and a need from a market is pushing it to reality. It doesn’t matter whether it was copied or the same idea was created multiple times by chance – getting it done is the real value – not having a brain fart

Why Espionage?

Putting it all together

Please share your thoughts and ideas with other innovative people on BlueCallom’s Deep Innovation Design, Innovation Management System, and Neuroideation LinkedIn Group.

The post The Initial Value of an Idea is Zero appeared first on BlueCallom.

A growing number of enterprises feel the headwind from capital markets. Up and coming businesses get valuations far above conventional businesses that may be more than ten times as big. Those warning signals all too often are simply ignored. But that could become a fatal mistake.

Innovation takes 7 to 10 years

Theoretically, enough time for any established market player to respond and fight back. But it isn’t quite that easy. If you look at the early years of the then, new automaker, Tesla, you notice that the established players sold more cars in some metropolitan cities in a month than Tesla sold globally in an entire year. Airbnb sold so few vacation rentals a year that established hotel chains didn’t even notice. Early freelancer platforms connect some inexpensive workers with businesses who had a short-term need in a way that the established recruiting firms didn’t even take the time to understand their business. Now, some people may say this is ignorance. But taking the sheer number of companies and enterprises that have tried something and failed into consideration, an enterprise cannot respond to any brain spark that may happen in this world. However, one group does take that time and effort for a very different reason.

Financial Market Analysts get Extremely Smart

In the past years, top investment firms completely disrupted the financial market. Yet it went almost unnoticed. With far more detailed insights, more intelligent tools, and evolving algorithms, they are able to predict the success probabilities of new market entrants/enterprises to a degree that was unimaginable just a few years ago. CEOs, Board Members, Unions, Investor representatives, and enterprises as a whole will need to shift gear when it comes to innovation. Future-oriented investment decisions drive market caps (value of a company) into new directions. It’s no longer only in the tech space but now also in all other industries like the auto industry, the tourist and hospitality industry, in the business services where a substantial shift is happening: The capital market favors innovation over profitability and size. One newcomer in that market is investment management company ARK-Invest who states on their website “We Invest Solely In Disruptive Innovation”. And the reason is obvious; in the next 10 years, it is more likely that those new and innovative businesses will win, than the established and slowly evolving companies.

Innovation is Entering all Industries

We randomly choose Hospitality, Automotive, and Business Services in our research. You can see how companies with rapid growth into a large industry segment, while there is no or no adequate response from the current market leaders are seen by the capital market today.
AIRBNB
2007 first 3 guests – the company was founded
2009 21,000 guests
2018 300 Million guests
2021 market cap $93 Billion *
2021 Hilton market cap $36 Billion *
TESLA
2012 2,000 or so cars
2015 35,000 cars
2020 1,000,000 cars
2021 market cap $570 Billion *
2021 Daimler market cap  $84 Billion *
FIVERR
2010 Some 1,000 jobs at $5 each
2012 estimated $6 Million
2018 estimated $100 Million in revenue
2021 market cap $7 Billion *
2021 Kern Ferry market cap $3.1 Billion *
at $2 Billion in revenue
* = June 15, 2021

Is the world insane? Then, what was with the market caps of Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Google Facebook, and so forth. What happened to their competitors like DEC, Amdahl, Zilog, Alta Vista, AOL, or MySpace? Today the disrupters are identified much earlier and get evaluated much earlier to higher levels. Not to help them and not to kill others. The new behavior is only a logical consequence of the desire to be in a rising giant early. The advantage for established enterprises: They get a brand new early warning system. But even then, there is a potential for huge mistakes as you can see in our mini case study below.

Innovate or Get Disrupted

Trying to counter-attack a market intruder that has a disruptive business model or disruptive product, by trying to build something better is not leading to any success. A weak attempt to focus on “Gradual Innovation”, which is nothing but improvement, is definitely not an adequate response either. The only way to counter an innovation from a competitor, no matter what size or age, is by another groundbreaking innovation. Improvement is important – but it isn’t withstanding an innovation. Trying to be better than the new innovator is only an improvement and makes the former leader a follower of the new innovator.

MERCEDES BENZ CASE STUDY
The Daimler AG was an investor in Tesla. But eventually lost interest and sold the shares. Tesla was built on 5 unique aspects: 1) A very fast electric motor 2) New high capacity batteries 3) A big display giving space to all kinds of information 4) A digital experience that went far beyond the proprietary “Board Computer” and 5) A customer experience not seen from the conventional carmakers.
The competition only saw the electric motor and battery. They also did not see the timeline that it took 5 years from introducing the first Tesla to getting it at least a bit off the ground. Chevrolet killed its EV short after launch because they thought the market does not exist. Mercedes ignored it completely, then began to invest and built the EQ series. But it was only the replacement of the motor and tank for an electric motor and batteries.
Only with the EQS, Mercedes finally pushed the innovation button in many ways – BUT – chose not to really talk about it. Still, a market leader by the volume of cars they produce, Mercedes became a follower and did not push their innovation but what Tesla has since 10 years: Motor, Battery, and a “hyper display”. The digital experience and also the customer experience fell behind. And the innovation they made was not even mentioned. When the tough gets going the going gets tough.

Instead of standing their ground and continuing rejecting a large display in or on the dashboard and introducing their innovative head-up display – they competed in a space that has no future for both cars. Instead of drumming up their real innovation, they ignored it because they did not understand what customers want. The innovative MBUX system with a large display mirrored on the windshield, supported by a perfect and unique augmented reality system was not part of the competition. The leader turned into a follower and the capital market recognized it. How is this possible?

Things you can do to correct the current direction

Innovation is everything but a small club of thinking and researching innovators playing in their innovation labs.
1) It needs an innovation mandate from the CEO.
2) It needs a robust innovation strategy that is blessed by the board
3) It requires innovation managers with exceptional talents and abilities – not skills.
4) An innovation process that empowers the team to develop brilliant ideas and then conducts relentless execution.

THE FIRST STEP however is an innovation readiness assessment that makes sure enterprises have the foundation for what is coming.
BlueCallom offers free Innovation Readiness Checks with no obligation at all.

WHY DO WE CARE EVEN BEYOND OUR OWN BUSINESS
Part of that first step is the understanding that by 2050 we will want to change our energy supply, the energy grid, or whatever we can create, we need renewable energies and tap into energy sources we don’t even think of today. We will want to create transport infrastructure for people, goods, and service infrastructure that is far beyond our today’s abilities. We need to have digitized commerce, business transactions, return services, and handling that is far more intelligent than today. We want to make sure that our health systems, health understanding, and sources for health failure are much better structured, organized, affordable, and available. While we could theoretically feed all people on earth even with a 20 billion population it works only if we can integrate those 20 billion people as contributors to our global society, economy, and humanity. Today only a handful of people seriously try to engage in terraforming mars or build a lunar station. That is far too less to be effective and far too less to prevent new monopolies.

The post How Failing to Innovate Affects the Market Cap of Enterprises appeared first on BlueCallom.

No – it has nothing to do with size or capital, And yes both are driven by human beings.

Over the past four years, we learned so much about the difference between innovation in corporations and in startups that we today realize: Enterprises had not even a chance to be innovative even when acquiring a startup.  The full details can be downloaded as a Whitepaper. 

HOW ARE INNOVATIVE IDEAS CREATED
When thinking of innovation it is most helpful to understand how homo sapiens is performing the creation of innovative ideas. Without knowing how innovation is done, it is hard to manage the process and innovation remains to be a process. The key learning is that ideas are composed by our neurons from past experiences. There is no mechanism that just “creates” ideas.

INNOVATION PURPOSE
Without exception, the most innovative solutions were created in an attempt to solve a problem. Random experimentation and hoping to find a great idea never led to groundbreaking innovation. Innovation is an outcome – it cannot be a desire.

RETHINKING INNOVATION
When we know how innovation is created, we can request certain results, request to provide insights, and measure and manage the effort. Most importantly executives know what they are asking, even where and what to innovate.

INNOVATION READINESS
When you know the “what and how”, you can make sure that your business is ready to innovate in the first place and prevent unnecessary costs and delays.

INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
After all – innovation management can be performed like most other mission-critical activities, teams can be selected in accordance with the requirements and tasks and results become predictable and timely.

INNOVATION FINANCING
Successful innovations consumed more than $100 Million in funding, some reached into two-digit billion-dollar investments. Obviously, this is done in stages and in line with progress, KPIs, and timelines. Comparing it with a $500,000 startup would be a huge mistake because that was only their starting point.

FOLLOWING IS NO INNOVATION
Obviously, you can catch up with the market to survive. But the financial market will recognize it accordingly. A follower will not beat the innovator – not on the market cap.

RELENTLESS EXECUTION
Innovation is one of the intellectually most demanding jobs. Not only does it take 100% focus, it also requires relentless execution and the motive to do so. The Innovation Culture, team selection, and motivations are the ultimate driver of successful innovation.

The BlueCallom Deep Innovation Design method was modeled and shaped based on all the findings from our research and our own experiences, building 4 innovative businesses and helping hundreds of startups to get there too.

Whitepaper Download here.

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