Creating a Networking Culture

by Stefan Lindegaard

In my previous post, Why a Networking Culture Is Important, I argued that a strong innovation culture requires a strong networking culture. But what does a good networking culture looks like?

It is such a new concept that there are not lot of examples available to illustrate it, but here are some key components of a good networking culture:

• Top executives and innovation leaders have outlined clear strategic reasons why employees need to develop and nurture internal and external relationships. This includes making clear how your company's networking culture links with and supports your innovation strategy (which, of course, is an outgrowth of your overall corporate strategy.)


• Among the things to consider when developing your networking culture strategy is what types of networks you hope to build to support your innovation efforts. If your organization is moving toward open innovation, possibilities would include peer-to-peer networks for people working with open innovation in different companies, value - and supply - chain networks, feeder networks, and events and forums connecting problem solvers and innovators with your company.


• Leaders show a genuine and highly visible commitment to networking. Leaders must walk the walk, not just talk the talk. By making themselves available at networking events and by being visible users of virtual networking tools, they model the desired behavior and motivate others to participate. After all, who doesn't want a chance to exchange ideas with the top brass?


• Leaders should also share examples of their networking experiences whenever possible. Spread the word about your own and others' networking successes. Hearing leaders talk repeatedly about how networking is helping the organization in its innovation efforts will reinforce the message that this is important.


• Networking initiatives mesh closely with your corporate culture. This is not one-size-fits-all; each company's networking efforts will differ. You can take bits and pieces, concepts and theories, knowledge and experience from others, but you still need to make it work for your own company.


• People are given time and means to network. Frequent opportunities are provided to help individuals polish their personal networking skills. Not everyone is a natural networker. But almost everyone can become good at it with proper training and encouragement.


• Both virtual and face-to-face networking are encouraged and supported. Web 2.0 tools and facilitated networking events maximize the opportunities people have to initiative and build strong relationships.

Let me know what you think and please feel free to add more components.


Related Articles:

• Why a Networking Culture Is Important - by Stefan Lindegaard
  
• Tapping the Network to Facilitate Innovation - by Venessa Miemis

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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

A world without newspapers?

by Adam Hartung

We're rapidly becoming a quick-communication world. 140 characters is all we get on Twitter, and it's becoming the new "elevator pitch." Communication has moved from letters and phone calls to texting and Facebook. What we write, and say, is getting shorter. Book sales have declined for 4 years, and magazines are rapidly becoming an historical artifact. We rely on bloggers to read, digest, reformat and inform us quickly about what we want to know.

But, behind this, there has to be real fact gathering. Somebody has to report information as it happens, and dispense it. In many countries this was done by the government. But in the modern world we've relied on newspapers, and the wire feed services (AP, UPI, Reuters) that supply newspapers, to give us a lot of the raw news. Newspapers used ad revenue to pay for news acquisition, and they delivered the stream every morning.

But now, due to internet competition, newspapers are running out of cash. As people turn to the web for instant information advertisers have dropped newspapers. Subscriptions have fallen. And several newspaper companies, such as Tribune Corporation, have filed for bankruptcy. Many towns are at risk of losing the daily newspaper altogether. And employment has dropped to 1950's levels



So, what will be the prime source for information? Where will bloggers, and tweeters and web sites get the news if the newspapers disappear? Who is going to pay for field reporters, investigative reporters and correspondents in places far away - or dangerous like wars. The public has already bemoaned the lack of "news" in television news - which is more about pictures than news. And nowadays television news is dominated by opinion programs like "Countdown" or "The O'Reilly Factor."

It's clear that people want their information digitally - and mostly from the web. It's also clear that advertisers are drawn to the web with its far lower ad rates and specific, trackable ad placement. But what's unclear is where original news content will be created when the newspaper companies disappear. Even the most successful news web sites (Marketwatch.com and HuffingtonPost.com, as examples) depend largely upon information supplied them from wire feeds and newspaper sources for content.

A free society depends upon access to information. And nowhere is access more available than the USA. But unless there is some serious innovation in publishing, the system is at risk of collapse. Opinions will be as available as air, but if the original news sources dry up - what will everyone talk about? How will people - investors, voters, parents, politicians and others - obtain original information to become informed? Understanding what will replace the newspaper industry as a source of original news content is a difficult question to answer.

What will be the innovation that will keep the river of original, real time news flowing? In 2020, how will we be able to obtain information we can trust for accuracy?

The "media" industry is in big trouble. Large players, like News Corp., have seen profits decline - despite acquisitions like MySpace.com. GE recently agreed to sell NBC/Universal for less than it cost to create. But so far, few have figured out how make a profit from digital media as the market transitions away from print and television. While web sites proliferate, they produce less than 1/10th the revenue of old media.

Without some serious innovation, our news could soon be long on quantity - and very short on quality.


Editors Note: Apologies all around. This article from Adam Hartung was orignally supposed to be part of January's Innovation Perspectives, but I misplaced it. I hope you still enjoy it.


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Adam Hartung, author of "Create Marketplace Disruption", is a Faculty and Board member of the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, Managing Partner of Spark Partners, and writes for "Forbes" and the "Journal for Innovation Science."

Finding Experts In Your Pursuit of Innovation

by Gil Yehuda

I attended a KM conference recently where a speaker remarked on how difficult it was to find experts in his company. He suggested that HR create a database and every employee should declare that they are an expert in something. Then when a manager needs to find an expert for an innovation project, he or she could query the database.

There's more to this story, and I'll share the details in two blog posts that I plan to publish about this conference. But I wanted to take an excursion and talk about expertise locators.

The expert database idea is doomed to fail. It will never be accurate or updated. But the problem of finding experts in your company is real. One would think that there should be a way to organize a list of experts. Databases are the wrong solution (I'll explain why). But what solution would work?

I'm excited about the approach that Aardvark is taking to solve this problem in the consumer space. I think it would translate well to the corporate space too. First let's talk about the mechanics of the solution, then why it is so interesting. When you sign on and set up your profile, you declare the topics that you consider yourself to be an expert in. They list many, and you can add any you want. So far, this seems like a database. But wait. Then you connect your network and set up how large of a network you want to engage with. You can invite people directly, via Facebook, gMail contacts or other means in order to set up your network. Then you specify how far you want your awareness to traverse - e.g. to limit interactions to your friends only, or include their friends in your trust circle. OK - you set it up like you would many other social networking sites. If this was an enterprise vendor - then you'd set it up via active directory so it would know which division you are in, who you report to, etc.

As a participant you can ask questions and answer questions. When you ask a question, you specify the topic, and Aardvark sends the question to those people in your network who said they are experts in that topic. Similarly, you can expect to get asked questions once in a while (you determine how often) about the topics that you said you are an expert in. This participation continues - every so often you get a question, and if you have the time and the answer, you help out. If not, that's OK too. After all, you are helping out your friends or their friends - something that we do all the time.

But many times you'll find that you are not so much of an expert that you think you were. You start getting questions you can't answer. Aardvark will ask you if you want to modify your topics. It does this in a very subtle way. If you decline to answer a question, it just asks - are you busy now (if so it will not bother you for a while) or is this a topic that you don't want to be asked about? Sometimes you get a question about a topic that is similar to one that you said you were an expert in, and Aardvark asks you if you want to include that topic on your list. You can set that up automatically so that it adds topics to your expertise list if you answer questions about them. Your answers get rated "helpful" if they are indeed helpful. There are other features too, it's pretty clever and easy - and I dare say, fun to use.

Most importantly - Aardvark refines your list of topics based on your ability to answer questions. It is better than a static database could ever be.

But the big "aha" about this for me is thinking about a corporate version of Aardvark. Over time your expertise would be recognized based on what you actually know and share - not based on what you once answered in an HR survey. This solves a very challenging business problem with a simple, fun solution.

At this conference I introduced myself as someone who helps companies solve problems by leveraging social software tools and behaviors. Finding experts is a problem. Creating a closed stagnant database is a poor solution to that problem. But creating a dynamic system is a much smarter approach. First of all you get people answering questions - which saves time and money. And secondly, by leveraging social computing tools (and staying away from emails that hide conversations) it becomes clear who the experts really are. Employees might want to answer questions to demonstrate what they are capable of. And administrators can manage the system so that no one person gets too many questions. Let's say you get no more than two questions a week - that's not such a burden. Let's say the answer is "go to the corporate librarian" - OK, that's a good answer too sometimes. But having this kind of system solves a set of business problems that the old database would never solve.

It also solves one other problem - improving knowledge. Let's say I give an answer to a question that is not complete or correct. Then another friend/coworker (who is in the network and is also an expert in the topic) steps in and contributes more to the answer. The person who asked has the benefit of a better answer, and I get the benefit of learning something I didn't know. Next time someone asks I'll know more, or I'll refer the question to my friend who knows this topic better than I do. That's a win all around.

The next question is how to get experts to share their expertise? I'll post the response I gave at the conference - look for it next week on this blog.

Disclosure: I have no relationship with Aardvark and do not know if they plan a corporate edition. I'm just mentioning them because I'm impressed with what I see in their approach.

Editor's Note: Google recently acquired Aardark for $50 million. What will they do with it? I guess we will have to wait and see.


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Gil Yehuda is web strategy consultant at GilYehuda.com who helps organizations leverage Enterprise 2.0 tools and behaviors to meet their business goals. He is a former Forrester analyst and Enterprise Architect.

Fantastically, Brilliantly, Insanely Amazing

by Kevin Roberts

One thing about the January 27th launch of the Apple iPad clashing with President Obama's first State of the Union address was that they both focused on Jobs.

And check out the awesome enthusiasm Steve Jobs and his team have for their new baby in this video!





A lot of hype and hyped-up criticism have accompanied the launch of the iPad. Nothing new there. Apple attracted lots of criticism with the launch of the iPod in 2001 (total sales: 220 million) and the iPhone in 2007 (total sales: 34 million). They centered on a perceived lack of functionality. So it's not surprising to hear gripes that iPad doesn't support HDMI or Flash graphics, or have a built-in camera.

The critics have missed the point. The iPad is not a netbook or scaled-down laptop. In fact, it is only a distant relative to the traditional PC or Mac. Instead, its lineage is the DVD player, the VCR, the television set, the radio, the newspaper, the telephone, the telegraph. It is not a workhorse loaded up with functions and hardware. It is a platform for story-telling, interactive, personal and immediate.

The story of human technology is the relentless advance in the direction of greater utility, connectivity, immediacy, affordability and flexibility. The iPad represents a quantum leap in that direction.

We want to communicate with each other, cheaply and easily. We want information where and when we need it. We want to be entertained and to entertain ourselves. We want to get closer to the people and the things we love. The iPad promises to do that. Technology that fails to serve that purpose is just a gadget, suitable for little more than collecting dust.

There's an interesting blog post in the NY Times predicting that the iPad will become an irresistible toy for children because kids will love the tactile nature of the device (they love to jab at things!), 'painting' software allows for mess-free splatter, it's an ideal distraction for car trips, and the screen offers endless story opportunities. I couldn't agree more, but the author could go even further: They are pretty compelling reasons for adults to get their hands on an iPad, too.

Related Articles:

• Radical Innovation of Meaning


• Apple's Hidden Disruptive Innovation


• Insights to Drive Apple iPad Success


• Will Apple Introduce the Innovation Expected From Google?

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Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Internet Future Driven by User Reputation Scores

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent interview with EMC's Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we'll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact.

Three different trends come together at some point in the future to make this happen. These trends have been underway for a while, but come together at some tipping point in the years ahead. Here's a visualization of the trends:


It's helpful to discuss each one, in the context of online reputations.


Rate performance of businesses

eBay, which went public back in 1998, played an important role in socializing the concept of people providing online ratings for online sellers. After we receive our purchase, we rate the seller. The collective wisdom identifies top sellers. Got your eye in that Donkey Kong game? Who are you most likely to trust...?


Amazon picked up on this, once it introduced third party sellers into the mix. You can see the percentage of positive ratings for the different sellers. Personally, I have paid premiums (i.e. higher prices) for the assurance that comes from a higher rated seller.

Yelp has taken this concept of rating a seller, and applied to offline consumer experiences. Want to get a burrito in San Francisco? You're likely to go with the highest rated restaurants.

These ratings make up for our lack of information about various providers of services. One could do a lot of online research, and asking friends, before buying. But these ratings do quite well as shorthand ways of assessing quality. They've made it easy to transact, without knowing someone ahead of time.

The rating ethos is expanding. On Facebook, you can 'like' people's entries. We 'love' music on Last.fm. We 'favorite' tweets. We 'digg' and 'buzz up' stories. Implicitly, we provide ratings when we share content via different social networks. Online engagement allows for this.


Migration of transparent work and information online

I found this recent Kaiser Family Foundation study fascinating. The amount of time kids spend online - smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device - is now at an all-time high. There's no denying this: future workers are going to be more accustomed to online engagement and information-seeking than any generation before. It's their lifestyle:


More generally, an important distinction from the web of the 1990s and early 2000s is that we aren't just reading and transacting. Individuals are providing the content. More every day, in fact. We have transferred some of the engagement and contributions from the offline world online. Actually, we're probably creating more content than we ever have,

For workers, the growth of Enterprise 2.0 continues. A key outcome of that? More and more work is making its way online. When it's available there, and not just in a Word document on the hard drive or email in an inbox, it's findable and usable by everyone. Your colleagues know quite well what the quality of your work and contributions are.

Do you think all of this stops, and we go back to message-relaying marathoners, smoke signals and carrier pigeons? No. Enterprise 2.0 and social media will continue their growth apace. And increasingly, this time spent online is through social media.

More and more people will be publishing their work, their ideas, their knowledge, their conversational bits, their creativity... online. It's just going to keep increasing.


Rely on social media for information

An emerging trend is the transition of where we seek information. Remember libraries, magazines and microfiche? Then the 1.0 websites where we got information? Then the portals that aggregated information from major media sites? Then search augmented all this information consumption?

Well, the next wave is to rely on our social connections to deliver interesting, relevant information to us. As was famously said by a college student in 2008:


"If the news is important, it will find me."


A recent Nielsen study confirms this growing tendency to use social media as a first stop to find information:


Admittedly, the leading social sites of today - blogs, Facebook, Twitter - have a ways to go before they become a large percentage of the population's first choice. And it'd help if Twitter could get their search working further back than a week or two.

But this survey and anecdotal evidence points toward an increased reliance on others to provide information to us.


Putting this all together

It's that last trend, still early in its cycle, that really points toward the development of formal, online reputations. When we started transacting online with complete strangers or small businesses we never knew, we needed a basis for understanding their credibility. It turns out, crowdsourced ratings are excellent indicators of quality. It also causes small businesses to be aware of the quality of their products and services.

In the years ahead, expect increased usage of social media for getting information and sourcing people, products and services. As an example, research firm IDC just released these survey results:


"57% of U.S. workers use social media for business purposes at least once per week. The number one reason cited by U.S. workers for using social tools for business purposes was to acquire knowledge and ask questions from a community."


As reliance on people for information increases, expect an increased need for knowing which strangers provide the top quality information. Note I said "strangers" there. One thing we will continue to do is to rely on our "friends" (social media sense of the word) for ongoing daily information. The people we connect with on the various social sites.

But that's the only way we will get information. Or make decisions. Great case in point? Google's real-time search results:


If innovation is the focus of your work, wouldn't you want to be included in those Google results? Here's the thing. Google doesn't just put any old tweet or other form of real-time content in there. As Google's Amit Singhal stated:


"You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone - then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers, his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely," Singhal says. "It is definitely, definitely more than a popularity contest," he adds.


Note his words: "You earn reputation."

PR agency Edelman created a ranking algorithm called Tweetlevel, which analyzes people on the basis of influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Tweetlevel was recently used to create a list of the top analysts on Twitter. As the author of that post noted, one purpose for the list was to answer the question: "Should they spend their limited time interacting with analysts via twitter?" Presumably if you're an analyst in the Top 50, 'yes'.

Again, reputation being used for a defined purpose.

Ross Dawson wrote a good piece about the changes coming due to the increasing visibility of "people's actions and character." He notes the impact of reputation on seeking professionals for work:


"Many professionals will be greatly impacted by these shifts. The search for professional advice is often still highly unstructured, based on anecdotal recommendations or simple searches. As importantly, clients of large professional firms may start to be more selective on who they wish to work with at the firm, creating a more streamlined meritocracy.

The mechanisms for measuring professional reputation are still very crude, yet over the coming decade we can expect to see substantial changes in how professionals are found. This will impact many facets of the industry."


And Bertrand Dupperin sees a similar dynamic playing out internally:


"Use internal social networks to build a kind of marketplace that would put work capacity and competence on a given subject in relation with needs and allow those who can apply for an assignment instead of blind assignments to those who can't."


In a world where individuals emerge as important sources of information, products and services, people will need a way to break through the limited knowledge they'll have on any one person. Look for online reputations to emerge as a way to fill that gap.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Innovation Training & Coaching - Overlooked?

by Robert F. Brands

Smart companies often pride themselves on training programs that introduce or enhance employees' knowledge of corporate business practices. They promote mentoring initiatives that pair seasoned execs with rising talent. They create booklets or PDFs on corporate policy - and implore staff to read them.

But introduce a business innovation initiative, and those involved are expected to just know how things are done. They're supposed to possess some innate awareness of the concepts, the best practices, the goals, milestones and targeted end-game.

It doesn't work that way.

Innovation is a learned concept. Training and coaching is the forgotten imperative in the process of innovation. For best practices in the pursuit of innovation have to be shared to be learned - and mastered.

From the Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) to the innovation team to rank-and-file employees who will implement, follow through or carry forth on the fruits of innovation, people don't just know. They're taught.

Organizations whose teams are not trained and coached in its unique approach to the imperatives of innovation are destined to amass a litany of failed projects.

For example, a major multinational launched a new Innovation initiative with the hopes of turn-around renewed profitability and growth. After much initial excitement and visibility, expected results did not materialize - and in the turn-around world, false starts are more costly for an organization than starts or restarts.

What happened? The team involved basic project management training. After a course of such training and coaching, associates had gained a common language and understanding. Progress was realized, and the company today remains on a growth path.

Training and coaching is vital to transmitting the organization's unique approach to innovation - and ensuring people adhere to its practices. Proper hiring, training and coaching is the way to create, reinforce and enhance company culture and mindset. At its root, training and coaching introduces people to the organization's vision, mission, strategy and objectives, and points everyone's compass toward True North.

Training and coaching should cover the lot - from the unique way ideation is treated, to the unique way ideas are cataloged and approached; teams are inspired, formed and managed; risk is assessed; new product development is explored; ownership is encouraged; value is created; accountability is attached; metrics are observed and measured; net results are rewarded; and yes, how teams are trained and coached.

Training and coaching is developed and delivered on a continuum. No sooner are existing policies and best practices discussed, then new procedures are introduced to further the organization's pursuit of innovation.

Continuity is the key. Training helps your team constantly improve its skill set, through new techniques in ideation, process experience and intra-organizational communication of best practices. Ongoing reinforcement helps employees understand their place and aspire to greatness on the New Product Development team (whether that "product" is a product, a service or an internal practice).

This goes beyond the team. Trainers and coaches need continuous training and coaching, as well. Even the CIO at times requires training and coaching on evolving corporate innovation practices.

Alas, training and coaching often is lost or last as companies often believe they have little time and money to fund these efforts. Best of breed companies have earmarked a dedicated budget to training and coaching.

Why? Because they realize the downside of not training - and retraining - their people in the process of innovation is to be mired in mediocrity.

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Robert F. Brands is President and founder of Brands & Company, LLC. Innovation Coach Robert Brands has launched a new site - www.RobertsRulesOfInnovation.com - to complement his upcoming book.

Are You Thinking Ahead of the Curve?

by Robert B. Tucker

The other day in Cincinnati I met Filippo Passerini, Procter & Gamble's Chief Information Officer. Fascinating guy. Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Rome. Father of three. Technical mountain climber. And the toast of his organization right now for what he and his troops have been able to accomplish.

Passerini was the driving force behind Procter's radical revamping of its entire back office operations. The move obliterated $1.2 billion in costs from P&G. It enabled the consumer products giant to respond quickly to the Global Economic Crisis, and bring new products to market faster than ever.

So how does Filippo unwind after routinely putting in 60 hour weeks? He plays chess. "Thinking what your opponent will do three moves out is good discipline for business," he told me in a thick Italian accent.

Filippo is the perfect illustration of an important innovation skill -- thinking ahead of the curve.

"It was our reading of trends that led us to make this move," he explained. In frequent open-ended brainstorming sessions, he and his core team of five saw that the world was shifting. It was moving from 'big is good' to 'flexible is good' to 'network is good'.


"Fifteen years ago, if you were a big company, that was a competitive advantage. Then flexibility was the way to achieve it. But we saw that over the next five years the network would become more and more important."


What to do?

Passerini's vision was that the entire company should operate from one consolidated, integrated global services network. He and his team assaulted the assumption that the way P&G handled back office functions like finance and accounting, HR, facilities management, and IT was good enough. They knew it was riddled with duplication and waste. So they set forth to build a new unit -- Global Business Services - to take over and consolidate all such operations.

Today, 'shared-services centers' in Costa Rica, Manila and Newcastle, England, provide networked support around the clock to P&G operations everywhere. All non-strategic activities have been outsourced to outside vendors. And Passerini and his group have 'decommoditized' themselves (his word) from being internal service providers to become strategic partners to the organization.

In researching a forthcoming book, I've been interviewing dozens of high output managers like Filippo Passerini. They don't try to predict the future, which is impossible. But they do make it a priority to spend time thinking ahead of the curve.


"One of our pillars is thinking out in the future and anticipating what is coming and then making your move. It's so much better than reacting."


Innovation-adept leaders like Filippo Passerini don't just gather better intelligence. They creatively crunch this data, argue about it, debate its implications, and try to connect the dots in some meaningful fashion. They seek to arrive at a point of view, both individually and collectively, about how to turn today's rapid changes into tomorrow's opportunities. And then they take action.

How are you "sussing out" (as the British say) the trends in your market and in the wider world? What's new in your information diet that's stimulating your thinking? What trends, emerging technologies and developments are you doing deep dives on to gain a knowledge edge?

"I manage my life like a chess game," Passerini told me as I was leaving. "I still continue to study the trends every day."

Not bad advice for all of us.

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Robert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.

Future Is Not More Gadgets

by Idris Mootee

Future gadgets will do things such as enhanced cognitive assistance and collaborative filtering. And that gadget is probably your phone.


Japan is always the best place for new inspirations. My rental phone also acts as a translator and all I need is to point the built-in camera to any Japanese characters. It exchanges personal information that works like business cards. It also reads 3D barcode and gets me all the information that I need as long as they provide them. It is so popular here, from real estate agents to consumer package goods - even the Louis Vuitton store has them for their special collections. But what works here usually won't work elsewhere and vice versa in most cases. But one universal truth holds for the Japanese market as well as Europe or North Americas, people are simply not buying new gadgets, but actually trying to do things with them or getting jobs done. As technology advances as if there are no limits of they can do, there are tremendous gap exist between the potential of these gadgets (whether they are converging into cell phones of diverging into separate devices) versus the limited ways we use them today. We have yet to see how these gadgets will change the way we live, work and socialize.


Marketers are jumping into the bandwagon. MasterCard just launched their first corporate iPhone app. Using the theme of its well-known "Priceless" campaign Priceless Picks pairs GPS and 3D maps to show you local deals, dining, and other points of interest in your immediate vicinity. It allows you to soar around the map in quasi-street view or bird's-eye view, identifying locations as the color-coordinated bubble pops up. Red for dining, blue for shopping, orange for "Priceless" items, and so on. It is supposed to point you to interesting sources for wine sampling via vending machine or a local jazz club, etc. It is a cool app.


Best Buy understands the power of gadgets beyond gadgets. Shari Ballard EVP/Retail channel believes individual gadgets don't mean as much as marketers think they do. Instead, "we see tremendous opportunity around how those devices work with each other, and with content people already own," says Ballard, "People are trying to do things with their technology products, not just acquire them." Best Buy is looking at many ways it can bring those connections to the center of the store, in formats that are easy for consumers to see and touch. "There is major work to do in helping customers see what today is mostly invisible. Now, we describe these products with a lot of hand motions and 'imagine this.' We need a physical way for people to interact with invisible solutions."


The question is how we untangle the future of consumer (and social) technologies to uncover unarticulated, unmet or yet-to-exist customer needs? And in the process of untangling the future we will become more tangled up with more technologies driving new behavior that we cannot even imagine? What are the next practices to imagine these new behaviors? And how do we know if some of these behaviors will be ending up mainstream?



The future is not more gadgets, but more integrated and modular designs. We will see a wide variety of innovative tools and apps that will emerge to help us leverage the information glut to our benefit. These new devices, systems, and services will enable us to alleviate the symptoms of cognitive overload and compensate errors and weaknesses in everyday life human decision-making. Much like a pilot relies more and more on computers to fly planes, technologies will allow us all to become smarter.



They will come in all forms and functions including enhanced cognitive assistance and collaborative filtering, surface-based three dimensional data visualization and display, reputation-based recommendation systems, personal productivity improvement software, affordable context-aware devices, social software tools, and systems that leverage social intelligence.

This is a future that is happening fast. It is not something that will only happen in Japan, but around the world. Tens of billions of economic value will be created, are you in for it?

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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

Keeping Innovation Ideas Flowing

It happened a few months ago, when I was meeting with some people from one of the world's leading consumer goods manufacturers. This is a company where you would expect innovation to have been honed down to a fine art because it has launched a slew of successful innovations over the course of its long, proud history.

But these executives candidly admitted they had a problem. They had started an initiative to solicit ideas from across their organisation. It started well in the first year, slowed down in the second and was almost at a standstill by the third. Like the parents of a delinquent child, they asked "Where did we go wrong?" and it didn't take me long to find the answer.

It's quite typical these days for companies to set up an online suggestion box and ask their employees - perhaps also their customers - to send in ideas. The reason these initiatives tend to start with a bang and then dwindle down to nothing is that most people already have one or two ideas in their pockets.

They may even have been kicking them around in their heads for some time. So the minute somebody asks for suggestions and offers an incentive for submitting them, all those would-be innovators come out and post their ideas.

But soon after this low hanging fruit has been picked and processed, a company usually finds that less and less suggestions are coming in despite the fact that the same incentives are being offered and management continues to beat the innovation drum with the same intensity.

Here's why: people find it far easier to submit ideas they already have than to go through the intellectual work of coming up with new ones.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against electronic suggestion boxes or idea management software per se. Indeed, one of my key messages is that companies should involve as many minds as possible - inside and outside the organisation - in their innovation efforts. So, essentially, these platforms are a good thing.

The reason they so often fail is that they are way too passive. They simply sit there waiting for lightning to strike. They don't do very much to create the conditions that produce the lightning in the first place.

They don't trigger innovation by inspiring people with new insights and perspectives. They don't train people how to stretch their thinking along new lines. They don't create a thick matrix of connection and conversation between many different voices. And they don't guide would-be innovators on how to turn a wild idea into a concrete business plan.

If you cling to the notion that innovation is something enigmatic and ethereal and that an electronic suggestion box will somehow just pluck ideas out of the ether like a radio antenna, your innovation efforts will not get very far. Instead, you need to build your idea collection system on a deep understanding about how the innovation process actually works.

To put it simply: big ideas are born from breakthrough insights. Go back and look at any case of successful business innovation over the last few decades and you will invariably find that it was about challenging conventional wisdom about how things are done or recognising the power of some nascent trend to upend an industry or leveraging some competence or asset in an exciting new way or discovering some deep, unarticulated customer need.

These kinds of insights are the raw material out of which radical innovations are built. So it follows that, if we want people to continually come up with powerful new ideas and growth opportunities, we have to continually inspire them with a constant stream of fresh, strategic insights.

Indeed, we have to teach them to discover such insights themselves by giving them the right thinking tools and training them to use them. We have to show people how to use eye opening insights to generate eye popping innovations.

One company that has done this highly successfully is Whirlpool, the global appliance manufacturer. Instead of just setting up a passive electronic suggestion box, the company established a sophisticated IT infrastructure several years ago called 'Innovation E-Space' which is open to anyone at Whirlpool who has intranet access.

With just a few clicks, Whirlpool employees can look for inspiration by perusing insights captured on the system, they can use these insights to spark new thinking, they can submit their own ideas and insights, they can build on existing ideas, they can follow an online tutorial on how to turn ideas into business concepts and they can find innovation coaches and mentors in their region who can help them organise seed funding for their ideas.

Whirlpool also instituted a leader led training process (like GE's Work-Out) aimed at enabling their people to continually apply the system to their own jobs.

Over the last five years, Innovation E-Space has had hundreds of thousands of hits from Whirlpool's employees worldwide and has become indispensable to the way people share ideas, learn together and collaborate on innovation projects in the company.

Rather than starting out with a torrent of ideas and ending up with a trickle, the system has gone from strength to strength and has been instrumental in making innovation a daily reality at Whirlpool. Most importantly, it has also helped the company add billions of dollars in innovation generated revenue to its top line.

As for the organisation I mentioned at the beginning, I told them they would have to do much more than just ask for ideas and then sit back and wait for them to come. In fact, I recommended that they take a good look at Whirlpool. And if your company is facing a similar struggle to maintain the momentum on innovation, you might want to do the same.

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Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation.