In 2023, Generative AI marked a significant milestone in AI’s evolution, with an impressive user base of around 200 million on ChatGPT alone. This year symbolizes the inception of a new era in software development, transcending the earlier transition from on-premise software to Software as a Service (SaaS). AI is not just altering the software delivery model; it’s reshaping the very foundations of software design. What began in AI consumer software is transforming business software in 2024, signaling a new software paradigm.

The Challenge with Conventional Business Software

The complexity of business software, especially in larger organizations, has reached a point of critical reflection. Many executives and board members express concerns about its evolution over the next decade. The appetite for “monster software” investments is waning. The business world, including mid-sized and small enterprises, is in dire need of simpler, faster, and less complex tools.

The Future of Business Software – a significant deviation.

Today, AI, particularly Generative AI, appears as the logical solution to remove complexity. However, it’s not about replacing one type of software with another. It’s about understanding the unique capabilities of Generative AI. Unlike conventional software, designed in a sequential linear fashion, our brains operate differently. Our Neuro-AI-Fusion model was developed to mirror the human brain’s creativity and ingenuity. This approach has enabled teams to generate disruptive innovations in weeks instead of months, potentially revolutionizing software development itself.

On January 29/30, 2024, we’re excited to introduce Neuro-AI-Fusion to Prompt Engineers at our Prompt Engineering Boot Camp. We’re transforming PROMPTS into AI Components within BlueAICONs – easily connectable, replaceable, adjustable, and maintainable structures. These represent a radical departure from conventional software design, evolving into an AI Application Network accessible to all employees, regardless of technical expertise.

Introducing GPTBlue: The Core of AI Components

At the heart of AI Components is the PROMPT – the crucial element for AI understanding and execution. Developing, testing, and deployment cycles are key to creating effective prompts. GPTBlue, our professional Prompt Management System, caters to these evolving professional requirements. Imagine having the capability to personalize responses to social media posts rapidly or to intelligently sort through hundreds of job applications – all with a single prompt in GPTBlue.

Now – Think of Professional Social Media Support functions. We are having a way to comment on 50 posts within minutes with a post-specific and very personal touch. A post Comment Creator Prompt can do that. In our system, it is a single prompt.
Or think of your Talent Development Team, needing to review hundreds of job applications. Having a way of letting the AI do a first match and a smart ranking and rating instead of just a “go or no go” is of great help. Also, this is a single prompt created on GPTBlue.

We have developed nearly 100 powerful prompts, shared as source code for customization in GPTBlue. These prompts span various departments, offering significant efficiency and productivity boosts.

To make it easy for any starter, we crafted approximately 10 Delta Prompts for every typical department we came across. We classify prompts into different groups. For instance, A DELTA PROMPT is a powerful prompt that makes a difference and specifically increases efficiency and productivity.

Developing Your Own DELTA PROMPTS with GPTBlue

GPTBlue DTD is our development, testing, and deployment engine for crafting powerful prompts. This new approach to AI application development is suitable for enterprises and small businesses alike. BlueAICON Prompts can be shared electronically, simplifying the process for end-users who receive tailored, case-specific results.

A New Era of Professional Prompt Engineering, Testing, and Deployment

Consider a business scenario where GPTBlue PFD-Stations (Prompt Framing Designer) are used internally and by external partners. These powerful prompts can be customized for different markets or business needs. With version control, history management, and other features, GPTBlue PFD is a comprehensive tool for prompt development and management.

The GPTBlue PFD (Prompt Framing Designer) is the heart of prompt development. However, larger organizations with country offices, departments, business units, and possibly external business partners need a far more organized way of generating, releasing, and deploying Prompt or AI applications.

BlueCallom’s GPTBlue Network Architecture was developed to serve large enterprises and networked sales channels. The end users in departments or partners around the world don’t need any training, A BlueAICON will deliver its own help and support info as part of the prompt to the user. A sophisticated billing system is integrated into the corporate deployment network so departments can be charged individually based on the usage of the AI system which is part of the overall cost.

The Future of BlueAICON

BlueAICONs represent a sophisticated level of prompts, functioning as AI Components Over Networks. These include supportive information, visual aids, and user rights, and can act as Edge Computing Clients. Our focus on leveraging edge computing will be a significant aspect of our future developments.

Partnering with Professional Prompt Engineers and Consultants

Through BlueCallom’s Business Partner Program, businesses of all sizes can harness the power of the GPTBlue series. This includes developing professional prompts, deploying them to customers, and offering support and maintenance services.

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Join the Future of Business Software

This is an exhilarating time at BlueCallom. With the launch of GPTBlue, we invite you to join our journey, share your ideas, and influence the future of BlueCallom. Be part of our community in the World Innovations Form and engage with the BlueCallom “Circle.”

We welcome your thoughts, preferences, and suggestions for improvement.

Thank you,

@AxelS

The post The Future of Business Software appeared first on BlueCallom.

Prompting for Newbies

If you are a savvy “prompter,” you can skip this paragraph. For those who are not that familiar with how to enter good questions into ChatGPT, this might be helpful.  ChatGPT is the most advanced way to search, and get clear answers to virtually any imaginable question that you could ask “The Internet”.  You can obviously ask a question by typing, “Who are the biggest competitors of Google? You get a decent answer. But when you are more specific, asking for competitors in the AI space, you get a different answer.  And if you go further you could ask:
“I want you to be my market research assistant.
I will tell you about my research needs and you will create a table with the following columns:
Ranking | Company name | company location | main business focus.
Sort the list by Company Name in alphabetical order
My research needs are as follows:
Find the 10 most relevant AI companies that are competing with Google.

You will get a nicely formatted list.
Now ask a very simple follow on question:

“Show me the same list for European competitors.”

You notice it kept the dialog between you and the AI and completes the task with all the previously defined features.

The ability to write those specific requests like the first one and know how to possibly follow up is called “prompt-Engineering’ The prompt is a well defined part that prompts the AI system into a specific persona, task and form for instance. And this is just a simple example. Unlike some other opinions, prompt engineering is not going away. It is the language in which we communicate with AI systems, and it will create results based on our input.  Understanding Prompting*, Prompt Engineering** and Pre-Prompts*** doesn’t require to learn a new language. It simply helps enormously to make it very clear what you want. And that is not only with Artificially Intelligent Beings but also with Naturally Intelligent Beings like you and me

Three areas of AI-aided Innovation

During an innovation process, Innovation Teams are working on thousands of different things. This makes innovation a bit difficult. It is very interesting to realize, we can group almost all those task into three innovation relevant action groups:
RESEARCH — VALIDATION — IDEATION

ChatGPT Prompting for Innovation Teams for RESEARCH

Before you start solving a problem and trying to develop a disruptive solution,  you will want to research the problem you are trying to solve and understand it from every aspect.
The old way of doing research is to go into a search engine, look for background information, scientific papers, research documents, user reviews, make some sentiment analysis in the social web, and so forth. Then after reading through all the documents you summarize key findings, prioritize certain findings, and craft your assessment. It takes at least several days if not weeks. In a typical innovation process we find at least 14 areas, where you need some research – not only in the beginning. All in all, it is approximately 2-3 months of uninterrupted work, to do all of your research with your team.
The new way of doing research is to ask questions to a Large Language Model like ChatGPT and get the answer immediately. You may want to consider some 30 minutes to finetune your question and still validate the outcome. But 14 research occurrences, times 1 hour is two days and not two months. You just collapsed your innovation research by 95% (2 days instead of 40 days). Even if you need to work on it for a few weeks to get savvy – the gain in efficiency is phenomenal. Also a great example for how AI is not replacing people – but hyper efficient people using AI will replace people who don’t.

To improve it further, you can optimize not only the research itself but the preparation from research reports. Tell the AI to serve the findings in nice tables, even do the priorities for you. It helps to create so called PRE-PROMPTS to save yourself time for the next research. The more time you invest in pre-prompts the better the outcome.
When you are looking for an innovation opportunity in your business which should be your first research you may use this pre-prompt:

THE COMPLETE PROMT:
Hey, act as my researcher for the automotive industry
After framing the research I will ask you a specific question.
Help me identify the biggest challenges electric vehicle manufacturer are facing.
Electric vehicle vendors seam to have trouble selling their cars.
A well known problem seams to be the still rather spotty charging station network.
My specific question is:

Now here comes your actual quetion which can obviously vary by a large degree:
“what are the unmet expectations from divers that are not met by sales, marketing and service teams of EV manufacturer?”

Now here you have a post-prompt to define the output format and maybe a follow on question:

Create a list of up to 25 of such expectations in the order of priority to fix.
Furthermore

“Create me a list of European electro vehicle companies with a specific challenges and what challenges they have.”

You see you can get as extensive and complex as you like.  Now, you may argue this is still rather manual and a maybe a bit painful to find all the right questions and variations, output forms and so forth. Correct, but as long as you do this manually for yourself, it is OK and a great learning experience.

In a system Like BlueCallom this is all done for you.  As we know the deeper meaning of each question and how we want to feed the KPI framework, we created all the Pro-Prompts and Post-Prompts for you. Meaning that your research time collapses even further down to minutes.

ChatGPT Prompting for Innovation Teams in IDEATION

Now – Ideation is a completely different beast. Ideation is your very personal creative process. But we have to say, after studying idea composition from the neuroscience angle, we can even drive am AI to be creative. Let’s say you want to invent a way to overcome the physical limits of todays geothermal energy generation. You find that you just can’t drill deeper than 12 KM. And you want to match the 500°C of a Nuclear Power Plant to drive a steam engine, and you need to get 25 km deep into the crust to reach that temperature (allmost anywhere on the planet) and you can’t pump water much higher than 100 meter – let alone 25 km. That is a serious problem because you are hitting the limit of physics. Get creative with the prompt too and frame it well.

THE COMPLETE PROMT:
Act as my universal expert and inventor in geothermal energy
Here is my challenge: I want to get to the average temperature of 500°C in the earths crust but drilling directly into the earth, the current limits are at 12 km depth.
I want to use the geothermal power and drive a steam engine in the gigawatt range.
I don’t care how the path to the 500°C is formed or found and how the steam reaches the turbine or the turbine gets to the steam.
Think of solutions that may not be drilling, may not be directly vertically, maybe longer than 25 km and so forth.
What solution can you develop?

The result is not yet optimal but it definitely stimulate the human brain beyond normal stimulation based on widening the conditions. This is by the way how we reached the conclusion to drill in a different angle and build the solution as it is shown as one of the Concept Innovations.

ChatGPT Prompting for Innovation Teams in VALIDATION

Yet another category of tasks or questions are about Opinions or Decisions during the innovation process and their respective validations. End here again, it is a good idea to start with prompt-framing. Let the AI understand your opinion or decision and find arguments for it or against it. Assuming you are in the early phase of your innovation and you want to define the audience that you like to involve in your innovation process so you get timely feedback and win some early supporter.

THE COMPLETE PROMT:
Act as my innovation advisor for our automotive business.
Here is the scenario we work in: We are developing a disruptive automobile that can change its shape and how it is utilized with a push of a button.
We need fans, influencers and highly committed car owners for testing validation and priming the market.
We thing about selecting our largest customers, like the biggest fleet managers, the biggest taxi organizations, and the biggest rental car businesses.
We expect the initial selection will also be the first buyer and get our disruptive product instantly into the market.
Here is the help I want from you: Can you confirm that this is the best possible selection? Do you see any risks in this selection? If this is not the best selection, what would you suggest? If yes, why do you agree with my selection? What other advice would you give me?

This prompt again the importance of the prompt-framing as you will get different responses with different pre prompts. If you would add even more details the result would differ again. You will see if you add your company size and the industry of your clients, the price range of your products, the better the answers are getting.

BlueCallom ChatGPT Integration

The ChatGPT integration in BlueCallom is taking it a few steps further. As we come partly from the neuroscience part of the world, we can shape prompt-framing in a way that idea process relevant considerations can work in the background. Also we are now working on the integration into the KPI-Framework is a way that the human rating of the answer can become a relevant factor of the success predictability.

With this integration, BlueCallom is a multi-dimensional AI application where we use six different AI systems for very different jobs such as
1) AI aided neuro ideation
2) innovation research
3) success prediction
4) content visualization
5) user guidance and administration
6) decision validation support (new)
With the fusion of neuroscience and AI, BlueCallom gained an unparalleled competitive advantage. Time to Innovation has basically collapsed from years to weeks. Innovation success predictability is reaching single digit percent accuracy, and innovation team process administration almost entirely vanished away through our AI-driven guidance system.

You will soon be able to experience the full integration with BlueCallom in the new BlueCallom Lite version.
You can get on the list now as we will roll it out sequentially based on demand and support resources.

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References
* Prompting is the art of writing a request for an AI system. It maybe as simple as how “How much is an average salary for sales people in France.

* Prompt Engineering, is the ability to create detailed background information adding context relevant information.
Or it maybe highly specific like : “I want you to act as my  personnel consultant and help me establish terms for attracting exceptionally successful sales people. Help me establish attractive terms for exceptional sales people in the medical instrument business in Paris, France with 2-4 years of sales experience. Generate a list of things and a salary to offer. Additionally add a few tips that candidates may find very compelling to work for us.

*Prompt-Framing, is the technique to frame a prompt with the ideal amount of background data (not too much not to scarce), that can be provided as a pre-prompt. Followed by a rather simple prompt with the core of needs to be dealt with, and the AI can return an answer that is in context of the pre-prompt. The post-prompt may then provide further instructions in natural language, such as output format, follow on questions and more.

The post ChatGPT Prompting for Innovation Teams appeared first on BlueCallom.

I’m talking about the latest and most advanced learning in modern physics. By now, most of us have heard the term Quantum Entanglement as part of quantum physics. It is yet another dramatic shift in our understanding of the universe. But what does it really mean to us – or at least some of us?  Are your quanta already entangled?

INSTANT MESSAGING BETWEEN ANY PLANET

Assume we can get a camera onto Proxima Centauri, our next neighboring star system, about 4.2 light years away. A radio signal would take 4.2 years to reach earth. Let’s assume we even have a station there, and somebody pushes the SOS button. We would know 4.2 years later that somebody did that. Our response would take 8.4 years to arrive after the incident happened. Sorry, too late. BUT – what if – we could bring an entangled quantum system to that star and put it into a quantum computer? That quantum computer could send signals to us, and we receive them at the very moment they are sent. This little example leads to a huge question:

HOW WOULD WE COMMUNICATE WITH EXTRATERRESTRIALS

Extraterrestrial intelligent beings would die laughing when they see our yeti programs and how we listen to signals outside our solar system. If, for instance, they live just a lousy thousand light years away from us (still in our local galaxy – roughly 100,000 lightyears in diameter) and use our radio signal technology, they would listen to lizards, pythons, and the “songs” of Homo Sapiens roaming the savanna in Africa. And even today, sending powerful radio waves, hoping we get answers, it would take a thousand years to arrive and another 1,000 years to receive the response :). Now you know where I am going. With QE (quantum entanglement), we would hear and see each other as if we were next door. How would we do this? We would need a quantum detector. That’s it. Yes, they exist already. An advanced civilization would ONLY communicate with us using entangled quantum systems. If an alien civilization is not ready to leverage quantum communication, it is too primitive for them to investigate. No wonder was Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering quantum entanglement.

IF YOU WANT TO TALK TO ALIENS, QE IS THE WAY TO GO.

Now tune your quantum detector and start chatting with those guys millions of lightyears away. It is the very first reasonable way to communicate with alien civilizations. We are probably still several years away from even having the base technology straightened out, Yet, I’m sure there are hyper-agile nations that will get the first contact during our lifetime.

I leave the rest of the speculation about what this all means for you to muse over it during the holidays. Moreover, I GIVE YOU A TASK to learn everything you need to know about quantum physics within less than half a day. No kidding – seriously, this is learning on steroids. Start by getting these 10 questions answered from ChatGPT like no expert, no university Ph.D., and no quantum physics scientist could answer it:

1. Can a quantum particle be described as an energy field?
2. What are subatomic particles
3. Is an electron always also a quantum?
4. How to get two quanta entangled
5. When does an entangled quantum change its state?
6. Can a quantum state change be stimulated, and would an entangled quantum change its state based on that stimulation?
7. How can a quantum state be measured?
8. What is a quantum system comprised of?
9. Can two quantum get self-entangled without stimulation from the outside?

9a. How can two quanta become entangled as a result of their own internal dynamic? I had to learn about the internal dynamics as it was mentioned in the previous answer

10. What are possible behaviors of entangled particles that non-entangled particles don’t show?

Go to: https://chat.openai.com/chat. If anything in an answer is unclear, ask to explain what is unclear before you move on. Then ask the next question. There are only three general outcomes:

A) You can’t believe how fast you learn even if you have no physics degree and have never heard of quantum entanglement before (like me)

B) you feel it is too complicated because your brain resists learning, and you are 100% sure that you will not understand. Think about your ability to learn new things, think about lifelong learning, and find a way to clean up your neuropathway situation and lack of neuroplasticity. Questions, ChatGPT has brilliant answers for.

C) you even resist spending time revitalizing your learning ability, because you are too busy or too old (same problem class), still enjoy the holidays and have fun with the next TV series starting soon to entertain you. The brain is like a computer garbage in – garbage out

I found this a quantum leap in learning. I’m known for very fast learning (not by my teachers, they kicked me out of school because of my learning disabilities) – but this accelerated my ability to learn even more. Give it a shot.

SUMMARY

If we think of fast communication throughout the universe, now we have at least the technological foundation. It’s also the fabric for many innovations leveraging quantum entanglement. And this is just the beginning. If brain processes rely on quantum mechanics, it could explain why our brains are so powerful. A team of researchers possibly witnessed entanglement in the brain, perhaps indicating that some of our brain activity, and maybe even consciousness, operates on a quantum level.

And to close the loop to innovation: Of course, there will be amazing opportunities for innovation. The most critical application may lay in the understanding of QE in the process of ideation itself I will be back with more next year.

Happy holidays and a big thank you to all my subscribers. Don’t miss the January Newsletter – end of January introducing another quantum leap in innovation management – our first after two years. << INNOVATION NEVER STOPS >>

The post Are your quanta already entangled? appeared first on BlueCallom.

Innovation is a breakthrough that elevates
people and organizations in the way they do things
that were not possible before

Now, this statement can be obviously debated, as we can even debate our existence. But for our work around groundbreaking innovation, we must share with others what we are up against. The more profound question is how do we measure innovation to better differentiate between innovation and improvement of something already existing? NOTE: Improvement is essential to advancing an existing solution or service. But Innovation does not improve an existing solution.

10 Key Aspects of Innovation

The result of innovation is that it elevates the way how people or organizations do things that were not possible before. The following key aspects are vital contributors to breakthrough innovation and keep reminding us that Innovation is not just a single idea. We formed those key aspects into questions that must be answered very digitally as a Yes or No to be very clear. We gave each aspect a weighted percentage, and the sum would be 100%.

Some of those aspects may be foreign to you or make no sense to you. But Innovation is so much more than just features and functions. Data aggregation may seem impossible, but there are always ways to get there. Data is the base for every decision – even 100,000 years ago, long before we could calculate, let alone have computers.

1) Solves an unsolved problem
The new solutions solve a big problem and elevate how they do things to a degree it was impossible before.
Yes/No 50%
If NO, you can stop here – it is no innovation.

2) New essential functions
The innovative solution contains essential functions not existing in any similar product.
Yes/No 5%

3) Environmental care
The level of environmental care is recognized in initial research as superior to any comparable solution.
Yes/No 5%

4) Initial Customer Experience
The way people purchase or otherwise acquire the solution is substantially easier, safer, or otherwise more attractive compared to competing solutions.
Yes/No 5%

5) Data Aggregation
The degree of data aggregated by this new solution that is used and intelligence extracted from those data supersede any comparable solution.
Yes/No 5%

6) Advancement
The new solution significantly increases productivity, safety, savings (Time, Money, energy…), entertainment, and environmental advancement.
Yes/No 5%

7) User Experience
The way the user or consumer interacts with the solution has reached a new level compared to previous solutions.
Yes/No 5%

8) Business Model Integration
The complexity of how business models, products, and organizational innovations interact makes it almost impossible to copy such a solution.
Yes/No 10%

9) Market Shifts
With the inception of the innovation, competitors and suppliers are inspired to change how they conduct business.
Yes/No 5%

10) Ecosystem Development
The new solution inspired other businesses to introduce new and adjacent products or services to the market.
Yes/No 5%

If all questions are answered with a clear yes, you have 100% Innovation. 70% or 80% is still an innovation but has room for improvements and increases the probability of becoming your market’s preferred solution.

Who Decides the degree of Genuine Innovation?

Most companies would run the first round if reviewed internally by the innovation team and people you may ask to become a judge. But eventually, you will need to ask the market to provide feedback. You will want to interview the early adopters of new solutions. The focus is obviously on the first and defining question: Does the solution help solve the people’s problem and elevates their doing to the degree that was not possible before? An old investor proverb says: “The market always wins.” Same here, indicating that if your market does not see the innovative character of your new solution, it may need more significant adjustments.

To hear more about this topic, ask questions or enter the discussion,
Join us on Nov 9, to our innovation thought leader webinar Genuine and Pseudo Innovation.
https://dev.bluecallom.com/genuine-versus-pseudo-innovation/ 

In any case, I would love to hear your opinion about the characteristics of innovative solutions or companies.

The post How to measure Genuine Innovation? appeared first on BlueCallom.

Enterprises around the world have been challenged with becoming genuinely innovative, trying to elevate their effort from improvement to innovation. With over 90% of groundbreaking innovation coming from startups, enterprises are trying to understand what startups do differently. Turning an enterprise into a truly innovative business has been globally one of the biggest challenges across all industries. It is time to completely rethink the act of innovation from the ground up – starting at the very top. Innovation is a CEO mandate because only CEOs together with their board can make the important decisions about TIME, CAPITAL, and STRUCTURE.

Time

The time it takes to get to new innovation. This is a paradigm shift we all need to be aware of. With the new data and processes, we know that in five years from now, you will need to completely start from scratch again, referred to as the innovation continuum. Think of discovering the next innovation opportunity, and find again new ways to satisfy customers. It is a continuum for building one innovation after the other and becoming a Generation Project that is set forward for the next leadership generation. Each time it takes five years to achieve broad market acceptance. That means you have a maximum of five years to innovate and compete or be out. The new mantra: innovate fast or get out. Once that innovation hits the market, there is a five to ten-year timespan, from idea to recognized market leadership. Important long-term decisions to continue investing in those innovations and the innovation continuum require the CEO and their board.

Capital

The capital market has radically changed in the past ten years. Companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and Uber were considered overhyped but then achieved global market domination. Competitors could not compete because they did not know why those companies took over their market share. It is becoming more and more difficult to catch up with the market. Conventional companies are trying to fight their competitors with legal attacks, just because they don’t know how to compete with their innovation. The old game was competing with new improvements, which no longer works. Capital markets, its savvy investors, analysts, and fund managers have long understood that fighting innovation, when not even knowing how innovation works and how much is required to invest, is a very bad position to be in. Hundreds of millions of investments are necessary to get an innovation from early concepts to success in a global market. Successful innovations consumed more than $100 Million in funding. Unicorns, per definition, consumed roughly a billion dollars, some reached into two-digit billion-dollar investments. Only the CEO together with the CFO and the board can make financial commitments of that magnitude.

Structure

The pressure to innovate has risen dramatically in the past 10 years. Managers look at startups and think they can learn how innovation works. Innovation centers ended up becoming kindergarten-like playgrounds, an esoteric group of “thinkers and tinkers’’, hunting for the inspiration they hoped would come their way. Random experimentation and hoping to find a great idea never leads to groundbreaking innovation. Innovation is an outcome – not a desire. Without exception, the most innovative solutions were created to solve a specific and very present problem. Innovation success is not about an idea creation team and taking it to market by the existing organization. It is about creating an innovation center independent of the corporate organization that is responsible for identifying a viable innovation opportunity and bringing it successfully to market. This independent innovation center requires a highly diverse team of exceptional innovation talents that will get the job done. The team and a decision to create a separate innovation center independent of the corporate organization can only be made by the C-Level.

In conclusion, the innovation mandate is the strategic decision from the CEO to become innovative with certain guidelines regarding the long-term goals and designated audience for the innovation. The mandate is typically addressing innovation management and other corporate management functions with time, capital, and structure all taken into consideration.

For more information and how to set innovation in motion, download the latest whitepaper, “Innovation is a CEO Mandate.”

Enterprises around the world are struggling to create groundbreaking innovations, watch the latest Innovative Minds Event from Thurs. Oct. 21 “Innovation is a CEO Mandate” and hear from leading organizations about their struggles and why they feel it requires a top-down approach to be successful. Available to watch here.

The post Innovation is a CEO Mandate appeared first on BlueCallom.

The Innovation Master Plan, a blueprint for innovation success. 

After building four innovative businesses, two growing into the billion Dollar revenue range and later helping several hundred startups to become innovative; we decided to create this Innovation Master Plan as a blueprint for innovation success.

The foundation of this Innovation Master Plan is the Deep Innovation Design method. The method is highly influenced by neuroscience, how our brain composes ideas. Creativity and innovation are done laterally in our brains. Lateral thinking and lateral processes are becoming of strategic importance in empowering teams to create the disruptive concepts, businesses need to stay competitive.

The full details and additional insights can be downloaded as a Whitepaper.

(1) Pillars of Innovation

When having a chance to learn from neuroscience how ideas get created in our brain and extrapolate the impact of that learning, we also see several aspects of innovation like purpose to innovate, the time and finance to innovate as well as the overall outcome in a very different light. Also, the entire innovation process can be seen in a very different light and the necessity for a stringent process is rising. The least used but biggest power of our brain is lateral thinking. When putting the key learnings together, the pillars of innovation become an important part of innovative thinking.

(2) Preparation for Innovation

When preparing for innovation there are several key components to take into consideration, starting with an Innovation Readiness Check. By completing a simple checklist you can determine if your top executives are on board, understand your current access to customers, and grasp your readiness to create groundbreaking innovations.

Leadership buy-in is key to your success. Genuine Innovation is a long-term engagement. It usually takes less than six months to create an innovative solution, but on average 5 to 10 years to be recognized as an innovation in the market. Innovation is a CEO mandate. Without a dedicated innovation strategy that comes from the very top of an organization, no innovation is realistically possible.

Next, craft an innovation mandate and an innovation strategy. An Innovation Mandate is similar to a declaration, mission statement, or manifesto. It is therefore not just the wish to be more innovative but building an entirely new operation within the company that may be able to compete and disrupt an existing business for the benefit of the market and the benefit of staying highly competitive. Once the executive team agrees on becoming an innovative business an innovation strategy needs to be crafted. Such a strategy is not focused on a certain innovation target, product, audience, or technology but the strategic position of the company, the fact that innovation is not a single event but a continuum, and what value the company sees in innovating.

Finally, assemble an innovation dream team and establish an innovation culture. Every business starts with a team. Our research and our own experience have shown that a highly diverse team will always beat a team of specialists. Make very clear what the goal and objectives are. The team must know the magnitude of that venture and make sure there are unique rewards for the team. Intelligent people argue with logic and facts, not ego and self-interest. The smartest people don’t work for money but for self-fulfillment. Have a base innovation culture statement ready before you attract talents. Then shape it together with the team you hire.

Innovation is the duality of brilliant ideation and relentless execution.

(3) Innovation Life Cycle

An innovation effort is a long-term engagement that deserves thorough planning. None of the highly innovative disruptors has hit the billion-dollar mark within just a year or two. The complete innovation life cycle is best described with an innovation journey map. That map shows the very origin or starting point of an innovation effort and all the major episodes of the innovation life cycle, all the way to global market acceptance. Even the greatest idea ever is no innovation unless it is recognized as such in the designated market. Like every journey, innovation has a destination. However, in our case, the destination is “Innovation Continuum”.

To help navigate the journey, BlueCallom created a methodical approach that starts at a point where a team may have no idea where to start, includes getting market feedback, from that point creates an innovative concept. From there the concept gets verified in the market and with positive feedback, it is much easier to finance. Then we are building prototypes that we call MVPs (Minimum viable Products) and bring those to market. After the market introduction, we spend a lot of effort in scaling the innovative business and go global. We purposefully do not go step-by-step through that journey but work in episodes and may jump back to an episode as needed. It’s part of the lateral thinking process. This is why the Innovation Journey map is not a linear path from one activity to the next but allows the freedom to go back and forth.

Putting the Innovation Master Plan to work

To implement a successful innovation master plan be PREPARED:

1. Complete an Innovation Readiness Assessment
2. Get the buy-in from the CEO
3. Develop an innovation strategy
4. Assemble your Innovation Dream

Finally, EXECUTE the entire Innovation Life Cycle. Start with the Innovation Opportunity Discovery all the way to bringing the innovation to market. There are many good reasons why the conventional sales and marketing teams cannot successfully bring disruptive innovation to market while working on the conventional and main solution offering.

Time is money – literally, execute relentlessly and focus on a 1% growth rate per day, creating exponential growth.

To download the complete whitepaper, please visit here.

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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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100 Million Innovation Managers

Of course, at first sight, it sounds ridiculous. Yet if you take the number of registered businesses around the world plus the enormous growth rate of new businesses it is relatively easy to imagine that 25% of those companies, no matter how small they are, will want at least one person that works on innovation concepts. The fortune 20,000 however, is more like hiring Millions on their own. Of course, there is room to debate the number in both directions. If we consider a 3% investment in innovation, the numbers could also move further up. Who would have thought just 10 years ago that in 2020 we will have 1.5 Billion websites live? And an estimated 100 Million webmasters are handling them.

Gameover for romantic ideation dreams

Now, since we know how the brain is actually composing, processing, and fine-tuning ideas, we can begin strategic innovation management. We know that no idea ever composed was by accident. We know that brainstorming can’t create a single disruptive business model. We know that disruptive innovation takes on average 6 weeks to create. It will not happen in a week nor will it take longer than 12 weeks. With amazing predictability comes manageability but most importantly readiness to invest. Constructing an innovative idea is no longer much different from architecting a new skyscraper. Both have a predictable outcome. All that is opening up new investments. 100 Million Innovation managers become more and more a realistic number.

Now is a good time to build up your experience.

BlueCallom launches its Innovations Management Academy with an orientation webinar on Jan 7 and Jan 18. https://dev.bluecallom.com/certified-innovation-manager-orientation/ We will help innovators, managers, and executives to get their arms around the many counter-intuitive aspects of an innovation lifecycle. It’s already hard enough to find top talents. And that will get even harder in the next few years. Having experience will remain to be a top value in an innovation career. “How many innovation projects did you complete?” “What methods did you use?”. To compete with 100 Million others for a job is equally challenging as trying to get top talents competing with 100 Million other businesses. We interviewed shrimp farm owners in Vietnam, street dealers in Cambodia, car repair shops in Nigeria, and 50+ more businesses. The owners are on average 25, graduated from their local University, and are smart enough to understand that our world is changing very fast. The shrimp farmer considers an AI system to manage the population, the car repair shop an e-commerce system for parts sale, and the street dealer a mobile app to push their daily harvest of ultra-fresh food to sell it the same day. Each one of the innovative concepts is simple at first glance, yet powerful enough to force all their competitors to follow.

Starting January 25, the new BlueCallom Innovations Management Academy will offer four major programs:

Deep Innovation Design Champion – learning all about the methodology
Deep Innovation Design Specialist – applying the acquired knowledge in a project
Innovation Manager – learning to run a full-size innovation project
Innovation Executive – knowing what you can expect from your team

You will find all details here: https://dev.bluecallom.com/imacad/

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Uncovering why truly groundbreaking innovation was so hard and so rare:
1) Not really knowing how innovative ideas can be created.
2) Then, being forced to random experimentation, pivoting, and failing.
3) Not realizing that the relationship with users holds one of the most important keys to innovation.
4) Therefore, not really knowing what the ideal innovation team composition should look like.
5) Failing to create a robust, market-based concept validation.
6) Lacking the skills to present groundbreaking concepts for c-level approval.
7) The first 6 items makes it nearly impossible to create KPIs that allow creating a genuinely manageable process.
8) Mistakes are resulting in a large portion of projects being dismissed
9) And if not, disaster strikes when the go-to-market strategy started with the usual top customers due to lacking the understanding of early adopter dynamics.
10) As a result, corporations are failing to create disruptive innovation in 99% of the cases and settle with improvements or copying the new leaders.

Immense knowledge explosion in neuroscience has led to a new understanding of how ideas get created. This advancement resulted in innovation management processes, KPIs, and IMS systems. You can learn it all in the upcoming Deep Innovation Design Training.

Education leaders from the University for crafts and arts in Lucerne helped design the Deep Innovation Design Champion Training.

Here are the core elements of the one-week online training with live instructors.

1) Innovation Opportunity Discovery

Instead of random idea development, countless experimentations, and other activities, we developed a targeted innovation opportunity discovery method that involves customers and the market in general to the degree that has never been done except by highly innovative startups. It involves counterintuitive yet logical steps to observe the market and analyze the highest potentials and risks to get disrupted.

2) Innovation Strategy

With the results of a targeted Innovation Opportunity Discovery, a team can craft an Innovation Strategy for the first time. You will describe the innovation strategy goal, who you will innovate for, budgets and resources, and the anticipated outcome.

3) Innovation Dream Team Assembly

Once a direction for the innovation is discovered, and a strategy is created, we can assemble an innovation dream team that looks different than 99% of all corporate innovation labs, centers, and teams.

4) Needs and Dreams Analysis

The first step of such a team is to identify the needs and, most importantly, the DREAMS of their customers’ users. Getting to the customers’ dreams is not exactly an intuitive process, but Neuroscience is also here was extremely helpful.

5) Neuro Ideation

Conventional brainstorming, stickers, and whiteboards have been the most sophisticated tools we had to let our brain spit out ideas. After understanding how ideas get processed, it was a shocking realization that those ideas were always exciting but never even nearly innovative – rarely if a major improvement. The human mind is the most complex object in the known universe but also the most effective. Knowing how ideas get composed from past experiences, how they get started, and composing new ideas changed everything. No drugs, no special training. It’s all about experiences, the right team, the right inputs, and the right details. Neuro ideation leads to a super logical process that we never need to understand in all details but in its behavior.

6) Disruptive Business Model Development

Disruptive technology, products, devices are the classics and rather fast to emulate. Disruptive Business Models a difficult to copy and, in connection with disruptive technologies and experiences, almost impossible to catch up. See Amazon, Apple, Google, IKEA, Microsoft (never invented anything), Tesla, and others. It’s clearly part of the innovation development process.

7) Market-Based Idea Validation

Instead of testing the product and showing it to a small group of insiders, fearing the competition could copy it before it is out, make massive in-market validation. Never use an agency for that. The innovation team needs to get out and ask roughly 20 – 30 clients in a personal interview. A team of ten can easily get feedback from 250 people. Part of the trick is the selection of the interviewee. Ask highly visual and vocal people, who you find on the web, in your support department’s records, and so forth. A methodical process and carefully crafted the questions – no more will do the magic.

8) Staged Innovation Financing

Probably one of the most strategic acts of the entire innovation process. While startups may sack in a hundred million or more, how will you get the funding from your CFO? How can you convince an executive who perfected cash management, profitability, capital expenditures, and market cap – to make substantial investments into a future they cannot see. The “Staged Innovation Financing” model helps far beyond the monetary aspects but took a deep dive lesson from neuroscience. It explains why somebody not actively involved in a genuine innovation process will under no circumstances approve a substantial investment in groundbreaking innovation unless you use a methodical path, making them part of the process despite their busy days. An estimated 95% of corporate innovation projects fail because of that.

9) Prototyping Market Born Products

Due to brain wiring as experts and their training, top-of-the-line engineers cannot release premature products. This is an extremely costly problem that needs to be solved. Most successful products are born and improved in the market and completed during approximately six months of market testing. Market side advocates can provide priceless support and invaluable insights.

10) Innovation-To-Market

Usually are new product generations, or even new products are presented to the biggest customers first. The more disruptive a product is, the harder it is to get large businesses to accept those innovations. Is it an indication that the innovation is not good? Wrong. The audience is not good for groundbreaking innovation. Any groundbreaking innovation ever brought to market took at least 3 years to gain adoption and 5 to 10 years to become mainstream.

11) Global Scaling

After the first two or so years in the go-to-market process need to scale. Audience expansion, geographic expansion, production scaling, sales and marketing scaling and diversifying to different audiences, financial scaling, growth financing, and so forth. THIS 11th EPISODE determines if INNOVATION is happening. It is the ultimate milestone of the innovation dream team, most likely in its 5th year of the project.

12) Innovation Continuum

Even the most innovative companies fail to continue their innovation journey. Cisco is still making most of their money with communication devices, Intel with their silicon-based chips, Mercedes with their combustion engine based automobiles, Google with search, Facebook with their social network, Uber with taxi service operation fees, and so forth. There is no “we wait until we get there” innovation culture, operational guidance, financial structure, team spirit, take years to enter into an “Innovation Continuum

.”

Management, KPIs, and Goals

With a detailed and methodical process, innovation turns from random experimentation to a measurable and manageable process. A strategic effort calls for a goal and milestones. All that is now possible, and you can experience it in the Deep Innovation Design Training.

1) Goals: 

Most likely, one objective is a competitive advantage. But the hard goal needs to be the return on investment and profit contribution. Obviously, there may be a whole series of other strategic goals and objectives.

2) Key Performance Indicators include:

Time Management:

Obviously, trying to manage anything the factor time is one of the most critical factors. Time to complete certain project episodes, execution time compared with others and so forth. The factor time is part of a series of KPIs.

Time to innovate:

The Time To Innovate TTI is one of the strategic KPIs. It’s important to know how fast can a team get to innovation. The start and the endpoint are critical to be defined so we can measure that time span. We calculate the TTI in days from the initial “Needs & Dreams Analysis” to the market-based “Idea Validation”. It’s also important to define innovation as a disruptive or groundbreaking innovation. Everything else would be an improvement.
Benchmark for a good TTI: 6 weeks

Time To Market:

The Time To Market is the time between “Idea Validation” and first revenue during the “Innovation-to-Market” episode.
Benchmark for a good TTM: 6 months

Budget Management:

The way a given budget is used over time between Innovation Opportunity Discovery and first revenue in the market. Then from first revenue to scaling, being in at least 20 countries and 5 continents.

Financing stages:

Staged Innovation Financing is a process that manages financing from Innovation Episode to Episode until the team presents to the CFO. In the meantime, the team will present each stage in a 3-minute online meeting.
Benchmark for a good initial budget is $50,000  plus the salary for a team of 8 to 12

Innovation contribution:

Measuring the number if innovation relevant ideas, research facts, and work inputs
Benchmark for a good TIC value: 1,200 (contributions)

Degree of innovation confluence:

Measuring idea composition based on team inspiration from other members. They share who inspired them. Data show the Idea Confluence Factor ICF learning how well a team builds on each other or works in isolation. The Individual Ingenuity Driver IID shows the key driver and possible dominance.

Innovation Progress States:

Measuring the progress from episode to episode as an IPS (Innovation Positioning System) over the typical 12 episodes. Average Mean Time Between Episodes MTBE
Benchmark for a good MTBE: 2 weeks

Innovation process data consolidation:

Average corporations run between 50 to 2,000 innovation projects, distributed across the world. It’s important to consolidate and compare all the data to help teams improve and share their experiences to advance their innovation processes.
Consolidation is important to see the overall effort, overall budgets, overall cost, overall team sizes, overall ROI. For comparison purposes KPIs including TTI, TTM, Budgets, TIC, ICF, IID, and MTBE.

With a Deep Innovation Design Training,
Innovation is no longer serendipity
but a highly strategic and intelligent process!

You may want to explore the BlueCallom Innovation Management Academy.

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Find out what suits you best:

The pressure to be more innovative is big. This pressure comes from various sources at the same time. Customers want better, easier, more useful solutions. Investors want to see the company they invested in more agile and more innovative. The board simply amplifies the pressure from the market onto the executive bench. Top talents want to work in innovative companies and the competition from fast-growing and scaling young companies on top of all that. A CEO of a global enterprise cannot be the same innovator as the CEO of a startup. But the enterprises can look for innovative talents who may perform that role without taking the entrepreneurial risk of starting and driving their own business.

The Innovator

The title says it all, the person innovates. However, in our today’s complex business organizations, we need to not only think of innovative solutions for customers but also innovative solutions internally. Many marketing departments conduct their business in more or less the same way, with the same KPIs and the same methods as 25 years ago. Marketing innovation can have extremely positive effects on a companies market presence. Innovation itself is another even more dramatic challenge. How can a perfectly organized company with a top-level employee utilization craft out time for innovation? Whether for internally or externally faced innovations, the innovator is a top talent that has a wide-open mind, is a stellar listener, and amazing observer. That person has lots of experiences with which they can compose new ideas and are trained to “play” with their brain and produce groundbreaking ideas. The innovator is the person who literally produces innovation without being the expert that actually builds the product or service that will rock the market. The developing and building process remains in the engineering or other specialists’ hands. The innovator typically would report to a Deep Innovation Design Manager.

The Deep Innovation Design Manager

We all learned that the value of an idea is zero. The value of innovation grows with its distribution throughout global markets. The Deep Innovation Design Process needs managers with a 360° view of all aspects, steps, processes, stakeholders, and activities who can navigate and moderate the process with whole teams, partners, contributors, and other stakeholders. He or she is the Innovation Success Manager and would typically report to an Innovations Paradigm Executive or directly to the CEO in smaller organizations.

The Innovation Paradigm Executive

In large enterprises with different business units, countless departments and many products need an executive-level person to craft a corporate-wide innovation strategy, work with the C-Level of the company, coordinate the innovation engagements across all business units and ensure the financial engagements and capital distribution throughout the various projects, run by the Deep innovation Design Managers.

In the new world of Innovation Paradigm Models and Deep Innovation Design methods, innovation is demystified and turned into predictable and manageable activities that can be planned, budgeted, and managed. And to do so, businesses need talents to perform these new jobs.

If this should become your career path, join one of our free online events.

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