Your CV is of no value to us.

1. People can write in their CVs what they want.
2. Some applicants even use a professional CV writer to do it for them.
3. Employee references can even be legally enforced to be “positive” in some countries.

When lying is not only OK but enforced by law, the value gets down to zero. It’s even worse. We no longer can help applicants why we rejected them due to  “Political correctness” or worse, lawsuits due to XYZ discrimination (replace XYZ with virtually any reason) have turned employee protection into employee disadvantage.

Your skills are not mission-critical to us.

Skills are things you can learn. And well-developed skills are all too often hard to unlearn. We are an innovative company and a thought leader in the innovation space. What we do today was unthinkable yesterday and is of less value tomorrow. At BlueCallom, you will need to be a lifelong learner. In the interest of our future development, lifelong learning of our team is essential. To make that easier, we make learning part of your job. Whatever you did in the past is clearly important and is part of your “experience collection,” which gives you the repertoire for ideas and ingenuity. But any repeat job you did in the past is of no value to us. But ONLY if you are up to par with every aspect of today’s world. Hence, your CV is of no value.

Your decade-long experience is counterproductive.

Unfortunately, if you have 10+ years of experience with anything, we cannot afford to untrain your neuro pathways. Untrain and train new things is a massive effort, and we are not yet big enough to have the resources to take care of such a process. You may call it age discrimination because you know this is a great way out of needing to change, but it won’t help you here.  And therefore, the list of all the jobs and with it your CV is of no value.

We know, in the past 200 years, all the above, very much like your educational degrees, had been essential for your career. But not for us and maybe soon for other businesses. Your education trimmed you to learn and repeat, become good at something, and then develop it to perfection. In the last 50 years, knowledge has multiplied thousands of times, and right now, global knowledge doubles every 24 hours. Learning all that “knowledge” is obviously impossible – all you can learn is where to find it.

What are we looking for if the CV is of no value?

The next two decades will bring major employee advances.

In the next 20 years, we will experience office automation progressing as much as we have seen industrial automation in the past 50 years. Today there are rarely production facilities where thousands of workers march into the plant in the morning and out in the evening. Instead, today, we see long lines of cars leaving the office in the evening and going in, in the morning. Yet this is only because organizations have been evolving that way. In fully automated offices like ours, where customers automatically get their products and pay automatically, no office workers are needed.

We are looking for creativity/ingenuity.

We train our sales force to maximize individuality in customer interaction. They need to be creative, have an amazing attitude, a broad understanding and constantly help get our offering as close as possible to our customers’ dream solution. There is nothing to automate. Our marketing teams are constantly learning about the needs and dreams in the market, new tools, and new techniques. Our marketing needs to be as unique as it can get every day. We don’t repeat campaigns. Even though our product needs to be suitable for millions of innovators worldwide, each configuration, each function, each episode in the process needs to be a perfect fit for a perfect outcome. Each of our products will be definitely unique without being custom-made, which would make it unaffordable.

Talent, attitude, openness, and passion for making it a reality are what we are looking for. Everything else, every skill, can be learned by any average human. We know you can become what you envision to become, no matter what it is. A degree, CV, or deep experience wouldn’t make a difference. Please send us an email about why you are interested in joining the company, how you will make a difference, and share your LinkedIn URL. That’s it.

If a job at BlueCallom is not your absolute dream job

More than 50% retire with a bittersweet view when looking back. Sweet because they got used to what they do and are kind of ok. Bitter because they never had a chance to fulfill their dreams. Never had a chance? You have the chance to get your dream job but most likely have never been educated on making it a reality. We had let go of people or never hired them in the first place if we recognized such a situation. And we always helped them to pursue their dreams – as we did.

Our Career Opportunities

The post Your CV is of No Value – Here is Why. appeared first on BlueCallom.

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the rules for conducting business. Now more than ever, innovative behavior is one of the essential characteristics that a company needs to develop in order to stay competitive in the changing economic landscape and new trends in consumer behavior. In order to keep your customers happy or attract new customers, the introduction of new business services, products, or processes will be the key to ensuring your organization’s future success. So, how do you foster a working environment that supports innovation within your organization?

In this post, I’ll discuss four proven strategies to enhance the innovative dimension of your company.

1) Embrace a ‘Freedom to Fail’ Culture

Let’s consider 3M, a multi-billion dollar American company, as a shining example of an enormously successful company that is known for fostering an innovative work culture by allowing employees the Freedom to Fail. As pointed out by Art Fry, the inventor of the Post-It Note at 3M, companies that wish to empower the innovative minds within the workplace need to provide freedom to employees: the freedom to fail and freedom to learn from the missteps.

The lesson that freedom can open the door to innovativeness can also be applied to the design of job roles. 

As research shows, flexible job roles can engender more participation in innovation. For example, If you are in the position to hire, instead of creating a bulleted and rigid job description, consider providing room for the next person you hire to mold their responsibilities as they grow into the role. When given the space to think outside-of-the-box of a job description, people will notice opportunities for innovation that they might not have recognized otherwise. The idea is to support everyone in your organization on the quest to identify areas of innovation and provide the space for exploration. 

2) Promote Cross-Functional Communication

When it comes to innovation, cross-functional collaboration in the workplace leads to a greater exchange of thoughts and expertise that can spark the creation of novel ideas. As Gary Hamel said, “too many companies define themselves by what they do rather than by what they know”. Bringing cross-functional teams together to solve company problems is one excellent way to tap the innovative potential of your organization. 

Multi-disciplinary collaboration and coordination are necessary for a new business idea to succeed in concept development and become an innovation. Companies with siloed business departments face an extra challenge in implementing new business concepts since the responsibility to produce innovation is split across different units. If these units experience poor communication, the odds that a new product or service is quickly (or successfully) brought to market are marginal. Both cross-functional and open communication are critical to fostering a culture of innovation in the workplace.

Next, we’ll dive deeper into the importance of differing perspectives when it comes to innovating. 

3) Spark Creativity through Diversity

Creativity includes more than innovation, but innovation inherently includes creativity. At BlueCallom, creativity is treated as the ability to compose ideas by searching the mind for correlations between various lived experiences. Being creative allows us to develop novel concepts. In order to foster an innovative workplace, individual creativity should be celebrated as an organizational resource. It is no secret that when people of different backgrounds and skill-sets are brought together, they can collectively generate great new ideas.

But, what is actually happening through this exchange that enables the creation of potentially breakthrough ideas? Creative abrasion, which is described as a process where different, sometimes clashing, perspectives are integrated (Source: HBR). In a nutshell, this means that in order to cultivate a working environment that leads to innovation, it’s absolutely critical to avoid an innovation monoculture of experts.

At BlueCallom, the Innovation Dream Team is a stage in the Innovation Journey which supports your team to assemble a diverse group of people to support your innovation vision. BlueCallom’s neuro innovation management software will help guide you through this team assembly process with a focus on diversity. 

Regardless of how innovation is handled in your organization, whether it’s a separate unit or a decentralized program, ensuring that people with diverse backgrounds and starkly different approaches are included in the innovation generation process is a productive step towards building a culture of innovation. Unleashing creativity through the diversity of thought is key.

4) Implement an Innovation Management Process

How do you get from a great idea to a tangible innovation?  The answer lies in designing a process that supports innovation within your organization, in other words: innovation management. It’s proven that having a structure and a set of common guidelines in place supports innovation. 

While most existing innovation process models are catered to producing incremental innovations, meaning modest improvements to existing products or services,  BlueCallom has developed a twelve-step innovation methodology with the goal of generating breakthrough innovation. The core of the BlueCallom innovation methodology lies in the ideation process and a technique called Neuro Ideation. Neuro ideation is a brain-stimulating ideation process that unlocks ideas by harnessing collective creativity from individual experiences. To learn more about neuro ideation, you can check out this webinar or this blog post. 

Are you interested in more actionable insight into managing innovation? We welcome you to explore our Deep Innovation Design online course. 

Thank you for reading! Is there any strategy that has worked well for your company that was not mentioned here? If so, please add your comment.

The post 4 Strategies to Foster an Innovative Work Environment appeared first on BlueCallom.

After 4 years of research, we found the answer to one of the most often asked questions: “How did you guys come up with all your innovative ideas?” One in particular, “How do you think innovatively? Tell me, step by step”. Four years ago we did not have any clear answer. Our answers were pretty much what all innovative minds would say, “Think big, think outside the box, think different, think bold….” but all these commands don’t even scratch the surface. They don’t say anything about how to think innovatively. And the only thing we found out: there are no tangible answers.

Nobody could Answer that Question

We took all our previous business ideas upside down, looking for clues. We found a few and when talking to other innovative founders we found some similarities but still no tangible answer to “how we think”. A year into it we found ways to create disruptive business models we were even beginning to teach it to startups with a surprisingly high success rate of about 50%. We realized that by looking at the behavior of the brain outcome we needed to truly understand how the brain is actually getting so amazingly creative and whether this apparently random process has at least some pattern.

Key to Extreme Creativity – There is no Creativity at all

Our first encounter with neuroscience was more depressing than anything else. Tons of arguments and discussions about brain damage, brain illnesses, and so forth. Almost giving up on that path we found Dr. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist from Stanford University talking about neural pathways, and how they connect and possible disconnect. For the next three years, we learned how the brain is not creating anything but composing new ideas based on previous experiences and previous experiences only. It became clear that homo sapiens is no creative and cannot “create” a single new idea. BUT – and that was the ultimate key to innovative thinking: All humans can compose new ideas by compiling them from past experiences. Hence our initial slogan: “Stop thinking outside the box – your innovative ideas are already inside”. Far more to learn than it would fit inside this blogpost.

Corpus Callosum (Callum)

One of the things we learned is how the Corpus Callosum operates in our brain. It sits deep below the two brain halves and connects both sides with approximately 200 Million nerve fibers (Axons). In this process, it also filters far-reaching “events” if it cannot see a meaning. While this is an important, energy-saving mechanism and in the past 300,000 years even a life saving protection, it may be an obstacle when coming to extraordinary and unique idea formation. Our 3-pound brain, by the way, is the most energy-consuming organ in our body. And if we stress it too much we notice: “Oh I’m brain dead now – or – oh my brain explodes….” In those moments we realize, it is giving up on us and wants to reduce energy consumption. But if we use it carefully and try not to overload it all at once, it provides an amazing service. It delivers groundbreaking ideas – Innovation – on the silver plate. Obviously, our understanding of the Callum is in a very early stage – but it helped us to get to a fundamentally different approach when it comes to innovation. AND – it gave our new solution its name: BlueCallom.

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