Game Changer Insights

Life-saving innovation for children has always been part of UNICEF’s DNA. We’ve been changing the game in the international development and humanitarian sectors by innovating at scale for decades, introducing solutions like oral rehydration salts in 1975, considered one of the most significant lifesaving innovations of the 20th century, saving hundreds of mill... Read more »

It’s a great question, because it really goes to perhaps the most important aspect. I just have one word to address that question: belief. You have to find something that you buy into, believe in, and then make. So what does that belief comprise? It’s a belief that must be acceptable for the business, in terms of market innovation and acceptance, and something... Read more »

We started the bar code initiative because the CEO of IBM at the time, Frank Cary, wanted to expand the company beyond mainframe computers. At first, Frank wanted to find the best companies in Silicon Valley and buy them. But it was decided that no, if you buy small startup companies, the most important people would quit because they don’t want IBM culture. They don... Read more »

I believe strongly that to successfully transform an organization to embrace and lead on digital innovation and change… you must ensure innovation is both everywhere… and somewhere. What I mean by this is that you must instill an innovation mindset within every nook and cranny of the organization... while a... Read more »

Innovation was actually part of our DNA from the very beginning. And change is also an integral part of our company history. We have reinvented ourselves again and again.

CHERRY was founded in 1953 in the basement of a restaurant in Highland Park, Illinois, to produce electronic switches. The company quickly gained a reputation for the quality of its microswitches... Read more »

I would say one of the keys to building an innovation culture is having people within your organization and on your teams that continuously challenge the status quo and have the ability to think about the biggest problems and challenges customers and markets are trying to solve and how your company can evolve to address them. Typically, that is going to require you to loo... Read more »

Prior to coming to Moda Health, I worked for one of the world’s most renowned customer experience, innovation and brand consulting agencies for over a decade. I was fortunate to partner with a lot of different companies around the world, from global Fortune 500 businesses to startups and across a very broad range of industries. My observation in working with those c... Read more »

It starts with the fundamental belief that we all have responsibilities to our customers, partners, shareholders and fellow employees. We have to believe that what we do is valuable to our customers and to the market as a whole.  This is the foundation of why we have to keep innovating, changing and doing better.

I have found that some people that are incr... Read more »

BT has established an operational model for some of our key, complex, globally-managed services customers, where we have separated the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) functions that are primarily proactive, such as capacity planning, RCA/problem management and inventory management from the more traditional day-to-day functions like maintenance and inc... Read more »

Life Insurance is a complicated product. It’s typically a grudge purchase made mostly because an agent convinced you that you needed it and assisted you over the purchase line. This in itself can be a complicated and drawn out process which could take a few weeks to complete, with underwriting and medical tests that need to be conducted. Life insurers also typically... Read more »

Ikabo is an online collaboration and innovation platform based in Australia. Ikabo’s unique point of difference is that we don't just on board and train a new customer on to our platform, but we fully support clients on their first project, from framing the challenge to final selection of concepts to implement. Ikabo has also developed a ... Read more »

ALW Properties is a small yet dynamic and innovative property management and development company with its head office based in Norwood, Johannesburg, South Africa. We are a team driven by a passion for environmental conscientiousness in the design and development of commercial office properties.

Our latest flagship development, Atholl Towers, in Sandton Johannesbu... Read more »

Just last week, I had a healthcare company from Tennessee wanting to know how to do intrapreneurship pitches in-house; how to pitch things like app ideas that might be approved by upper management.

There are the important basics for the intrapreneur process, like knowing who you’re pitching to, and what their needs and criteria are; what they say &n... Read more »

There are two significant trends driving the growth of the lighting industry and new innovations in lighting technology.

The first is increasing demand for more energy-efficient light. According to the US Energy Information Association, lighting accounts for 10% of total electricity consu... Read more »

The idea of the lab presence itself is about giving people a space to come and think differently and engage with us. We run demand sessions with our business teams to get to the root cause of their challenges and then find solutions to meet those needs. It is the applied adoption of new technologies with a return on investment by decreasing risk, simplifying the environme... Read more »

My team operates in Silicon Valley with three goals: bring Silicon Valley perspective and knowledge into our company; find and incubate new partners (especially start-ups) to demonstrate the power of new technology and approaches, and build a West Coast presence that leverages technology as well as life science leadership.

My team sits in IT, so we serve all thera... Read more »

Fujitsu is an organization that manufactures everything from telephony systems to PCs, mobile phones, enterprise servers, mainframes - and much more. It operates in a software development space and provides solutions for customers.

In Fujitsu, we hope to bring intelligence, big data, analytics, predictability, and predictive tools together to answer big quest... Read more »

I started Crave Metrics to focus on customer journey analytics. We are trying to solve misleading data with Crave Metrics by giving people a broader view of their campaign’s effectiveness across all their channels, because many marketers do not realize every campaign drives brand awareness and the end value that it creates.

Marketers look at a campaign and m... Read more »

The CA Technologies Business Analytics team is a global corporate team that provides business insights to stakeholders across the company, including sales, marketing, customer support, customer success, product engineering, HR, finance – you know: everybody.

The charter of my team is to help improve the top line of the company by changing our culture so that... Read more »

I really don't know whether we are changing the game or the game is changing us. Success in business, today, is all about the optimal intersection of the physical and digitals worlds, and the interaction between humans and intelligent machines.

If you really think about the retail industry, so many innovations have compelled companies to start to think different, ... Read more »

We have created an online platform for online dispute resolution (ODR) that can resolve disputes of all kinds from eCommerce to relational disputes, and we are available to companies, government agencies, and ADR organizations, to deliver fast and fair resolutions across these categories. We have done a couple of things that I think are unique. One is that we built a conf... Read more »

We deliver to our customers low and medium voltage products and automation systems that are all integrated in several end markets: buildings, data centers, asset intensive industries, and utilities. We have a host of innovations throughout those areas, and we invest 1.3 billion euros on R&D. It is about faster, cheaper, better, so why do we need that deep level of inn... Read more »

Three main differentiating factors between the Lufthansa Innovation Hub and other corporate innovation activities are:

1. Talent: Instead of “just relocating” existing line-managers to a fancy tech-location – we managed the challenge to get significant amount of entrepreneurial talent on board. Currently 80% of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub consis... Read more »

Value Creation is a distinctive mind-set. It is a mentality driven by enhanced self-esteem, awareness, and pro-activeness. It goes beyond just doing your job, it is doing something extra. Value Creation is executing proactive, imaginative, or inspired actions that increase the net worth of products, services, or an entire business. This creates better gains or value for c... Read more »

Others try to be on the political side; some try to be advisors, but what we really offer is the practice. What we can deliver on is the knowledge and experience of 3000 company members – both large and also midsized.

We ask – are you prepared for 24/7? Are you prepared for changing from products to services? Are you really cyber-ready? I am talking a ... Read more »

This technological and business model transformation we are living through actually requires companies to innovate differently. The set of innovation practices companies could rely on to stay in the game – even recently – are no longer sufficient. In the past, and even the most recent past, the main philosophy was that innovation is a science – that you ... Read more »

Historically, an export mindset, the focus on quality and the embrace of innovation have been competitive advantages for Arla.  In general, a strong export focus in Sweden and Denmark was a big difference from co-operative movements in other countries. In Denmark, for example, one driver was exports to the UK of butter and bacon, which originated two of the biggest c... Read more »

We are a deeply entrepreneurial company, founded by a family of entrepreneurs and we are still family-owned today. It’s no accident that we are ranked number one in our category. Ideas are not the hard part; rather, the challenge arises from actually delivering on those ideas.

Everything can be made better, and I do mean everything. Differentiation is critic... Read more »

One of the areas I am most active in is the application of machine learning to health care, specifically interpreting individual’s social media feeds and determining their health status. This sounds odd but social media provides a unique environment where people openly discuss their personal lives: how they feel, what they eat, their activities, etc. Social solves a... Read more »

Xerox has a long, well-known innovation tradition; it’s widely known for producing game changing inventions in particularly the 70s and 80s, with light lens copiers for instance, and the mouse. But, historically, we were not always so effective in capitalizing on those innovations. But while the culture has been maintained, and deepened to all levels, Xerox has tran... Read more »

Open communication and easy interaction between people of different backgrounds always have a net positive impact on society. We saw this at Mxit where we allowed millions of users to interact and communicate at a mere fraction of the cost of an SMS. Once again at YouNow, we are using the video medium to allow users from all over the world to socialize, meet friends and e... Read more »

The Vodafone Innovation team is fortunate to be positioned at the intersection of the world’s leading total telecommunications company, innovation and relationships with the largest global enterprises. Mobility is the heartbeat of today’s innovation. While not every innovation is built on mobile, mobility is transforming the way the world operates. This gives ... Read more »

The US retirement space has changed significantly over the last few decades. People of a previous generation were more likely to receive a guaranteed pension either from their employer or the government. Today, Social Security is not enough to provide a stable retirement, and guaranteed pensions have largely disappeared. So Americans have to fend for themselves and are le... Read more »

We’re very proud of our title as the first fully dedicated provider of turn-key dental suites. We sought to create a care delivery model for dentistry that previously did not exist in the same form, quality and packaging for campus environments.  We wanted to bottle the magic of private dental practice and drop it into corporate settings in a way that is aesthe... Read more »

We've been innovating on the incubator/accelerator model.  Instead of just adopting the standard 'Y-Combinator' model, which is meeting start-ups once a week for 3 months followed by a “Demo Day,” we spent 18 months interviewing start-up founders and asking them what they'd like us to do differently.  Here's what we learned: 

a) Three mo... Read more »

When we launched, there were several research sources which showed that the health of employees depends far more on what you eat than on how often you work out - yet there were very few solutions, if any, based on nutrition. You could attend seminars on how to cook healthier; you could get recipe books; you could be coached by dieticians. But you’d generally need to... Read more »

Medical knowledge is doubling every two years and most people are receiving poor, conflicted medical information. 2nd.MD's first goal is to make the ability to reach medical specialists more easily accessible. For example, our member​s can now ​enjoy a video consultation with a top specialist from ho​me ​within three days, getting remarkable clarity an... Read more »

The University of Tennessee has been studying the nature of highly successful business relationships since 2003. Our research was originally funded by the United States Air Force with a goal to provide a pathway to long-term, collaborative success among business partners. We codified our findings into a methodology and business model that researchers coined as “Vest... Read more »

News Corp is actually where the customers are, and that’s the change. Its about innovating around the proposition that content is about “and,” not “or.” In the past, customers either bought a newspaper or consumed content on mobile, or on PC, or Tele, or listened to it on the radio. Now, they are consuming content in newspapers and on Twitter... Read more »

It is tempting to say that there is no industry sector for what we’re doing, but in fairness we might compare Infobeing.com to social media like Facebook, Ello, Tumblr, and LinkedIn. These sites offer a Web 2.0 experience that is becoming obsolete for a few reasons.

Social media contributes to information overload by providing a massive amount of irrelevant ... Read more »

We help teams across Pearson gain insight into emerging trends - what we call developments “on the fringe.”  For example, over the last few years we have witnessed the consumerization of education. Students, teachers, and learners, for example, have similar expectations and behaviors in the classroom as they do outside.  As a result, they ... Read more »

We guide clients toward viewing their organization, in all facets, with a mindful innovation (MI) approach. MI is a tuned in, creative-thinking leadership engagement process — coupled with a five-step systematic approach including assessment, culture, strategy, implementation and measurement — empowering CEOs to improve the health of the enterprise and its wor... Read more »

It should start from both the top and the bottom of an organization. Where leadership enables a culture of inspiring teams to develop ideas around change, provoke them to act on that change and then develop a framework that supports test/pilots to scale innovations that can be successful.

Leaders that want to build an organization that innovates consistently must provide three things to employees: freedom, support and challenge. Those are the key ingredients needed to accelerate innovation in any environment. In other words, you can put it like this: Have bold goals, get out of the way and reward people for trying. The last point is very important bec... Read more »

Leadership must allow people to take risks without fear of being fired. Companies only innovate when they are willing to go outside the box. Out-of-the-box thinking allows organizations to see new opportunities and execute against those opportunities. Change happens when leaders realize they can no longer maintain their vision through status quo.

Your own personal leadership is essential. From our point of view, leadership is about strategic awareness, where you are willing to be aware of the future possibilities, are nimble enough to turn to advantage any of these possibilities, and wise enough to know that your personal points of view are what creates your reality. Leadership and innovation do not com... Read more »

First, the organization must be managed by strong leaders that know where the organization is heading, and have a clear purpose and clear goals. Second, in order to make the changes happen, the organization needs a management that "walks the walk", adheres to its values and lives by them. Essentially, an organization needs management that believes in the necessity of chan... Read more »

This is not an easy prospect by any means, particularly when working within an established and age-old profession. Change is seen as a threat to existing stakeholders in many cases, but law firms are beginning to realize that through pure market forces alone they will eventually be required to innovate in order to compete. I have found that having an internatio... Read more »

Within UC Berkeley Extension, education innovation is highly valued. We tend to look for examples outside the organization and compare those with opportunities inside the organization, and then try to create an innovative approach to solving our objectives.  Then communicate the value internally and embrace the change. But that's all very theoretical until... Read more »

Let people pursue their natural curiosity and good intensions.  Nudge a person's curiosity, intensions, and pursuit toward outcomes that benefit the organization, its customers and other external constituencies, as well as the person's colleagues and self.  Help people overcome shyness about trying to make a difference.

You have to have that enthusiasm and drive from the kind of grassroots level of the organization, but then they have to be supported and feel as if they have the ability to take action on those ideas from above. And so it's the combination of those two that really enables, I think, productive activity across an organization.

Building an organization or culture that embraces change is no easy task since both are a reflection of its people and most people do not like change -- we are, after all, ‘creatures of habit’. However, I’ve found if the change or innovation is focused on efforts that improve, enhance, or simplify things you are already doing, it is generally accepted by... Read more »

Innovation is something you don’t easily teach or even force on an organization.  It requires fresh and unique perspectives gained from either pulling people out of their traditional roles and comfort zones or by bringing in outside perspectives through new talent acquisition or external expertise.  At the same time, executive leaders must display and enco... Read more »