Innovator Profiles
Id | Summary Bio | Answer 1 | Answer 2 | Answer 3 | Answer 4 | Answer 5 | Leader | Actions |
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55 | <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Helen Simpson is Head of Innovation at Ikabo an online collaboration and innovation platform based in Australia. Helen holds a joint honours degree in Business finance and economics and a postgraduate diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing and has undertaken extensive training in creativity and innovation. Helen is responsible for brand positioning and communication, customer centric strategic planning, a customer driven product development pipeline and onboarding and training new clients.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Prior to joining Ikabo, Helen worked for Squiz in a business transformation role helping organisations better leverage digital technology to achieve innovation and growth. Prior to this, she has worked in customer insights and customer driven product innovation for some of the world's leading corporates in domestic, regional and global roles. She has led global teams to develop new products, insights programmes and innovation and communication strategies.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Ikabo is an online innovation platform which crowd sources insight and ideas to help problem solve, collaborate and co-create at scale. This results in the best ideas progressing, whilst dramatically increasing engagement and sustaining a culture of innovation and transformation.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Ikabo is an important digital tool for modern organisations who want to empower teams to transform the way they work and drive a culture of creative problem solving and innovation.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Helen is passionate about helping organizations drive innovation and positive change by engaging & harnessing their people’s talent. Ikabo works with business leaders to optimise employee engagement, amplify their innovation efforts and collaborate and co create solutions at scale.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s2"><a href="http://www.ikabo.com/">Ikabo</a></span><span class="s1"> is growing through taking a collaborative approach to innovation and growth and harnessing its ecosystem of partners to help solve client problems.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p> | <p class="p1"><span class="s1">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 fully automated customisable method of evaluating concepts into a rated and ranked order in order to help leaders make objective and democratic decisions. </span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Ikabo partners its clients to create a path to innovation success by working with senior leaders to ensure the vision and strategic intent of the organisation is aligned to the challenges that are posted on the platform.</span></p> | <p class="p1"><span class="s1">The ideas management sector has developed and matured over the last 15 years or so and there are many new innovations taking place in the form of features and functions and pricing models being adopted. Artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions are also being explored to improve the customer experience in how ideas are converged and developed with limited human effort.</span> </p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">New innovations are delivered through new product releases, I think one of the biggest challenges as in most product development, is feature overload, how to balance a myriad of client needs and wants with an optimal customer experience that remains simple and easy to use. Many of our clients have come from other innovation platforms that offer all the ‘bells and whistles’, so much so they tell us they literally don't know how to get started, because there are too many options to choose from. Keeping a simple user friendly interface that is beautiful and delivers a seamless experience, is always front and centre in our minds.</span></p> | <p class="p1"><span class="s1">When Ikabo was first established the founding team was involved in the co-creation of the product, the positioning, the go to market strategy and in lead generation and sales demonstrations. The team works in a low hierarchical, fast moving and agile way, there is high psychological safety and everyone can be involved in open discussions on key strategic decisions. Ideas and openly shared and discussed about how we might grow the business and how we can continually improve what we do - the customer is at the heart of everything we do at Ikabo. We actively and continually engage our customers in feedback both formally and informally, so that our product pipeline and new product releases are delivering customer relevant improvements that surprise and delight our customers.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">One of our values is ‘better together’ (‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together’ - African proverb) and we truly believe (and know) a cognitively diverse team solves problems better and faster, and we apply this when we solve client problems, and how we approach the growth of our company. Ikabo has grown through taking a collaborative approach and harnessing our ecosystem of partners to raise awareness of our offer and collaborate on client problems together.</span></p> | <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I think we will continue to see artificial intelligence and machine learning being explored to improve the customer experience on innovation platforms, I think we will see different products being developed to meet market and price needs of different clients.</span> </p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I think we will see clients putting a stronger emphasises on outcomes of innovation not just engagement, which in turn will encourage vendors to look at the entire range of innovation programs and products that organisations are using and consider how an ideas management platform can work more effectively and integrate with current activities to deliver improved outcomes overall. Gone are the days when organisations can employ different innovation programs and products, for example design thinking programme, to skunkworks, skills training and innovation labs and hackathons as discrete activities. Organisations at the highest level need to build a shared understanding of their common innovation goals so they can all work and make meaningful progress, together.</span></p> | <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I have been inspired by public sector reforms in Australia and some of the amazing work government agencies have been achieving. Bureaucracy, hierarchy, a challenging culture, limited resources and the machinations of Government all prove to provide a compelling reason for innovation and change NOT to thrive. However despite this, we are privileged to be working with a number of small teams who against the odds, come together and drive amazing change one project at a time.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Transport for NSW is an interesting case study, they are constantly trying to disrupt themselves and are putting the customer at the centre of what they do. They are looking at what it is that the customer really needs, and releasing real time public transport data was a huge step first step for them – they took a test and learn approach. They opened the market and a raft of start-ups got involved via a hackathon, and now we have a number of apps which provide customers with real time information to make their trip a whole lot easier. The latest initiative has been establishing the Smart Innovation Centre is NSW’s which is a hub for collaborative research and development of safe and efficient emerging transport technology. One key project they are working on is to partner with industry to conduct trails on autonomous vehicles.</span></p> | Helen Simpson | View Edit Delete |
15 | <p class="p1">Innovation and creativity are at the core of Sam's practice and view of the legal profession, and he has for some time now been involved in projects which seek to use technology to change the way in which legal services are delivered and purchased. Sam is the founder of the pioneering online legal advice platforms, <a href="http:// www.virtuallawdirect.com">VirtualLawDirect</a>, and <a href="http://www.svperbar.com/"><span class="s1">SvPerbar</span></a> which use technology to make lawyers, legal advice and pricing more accessible, transparent and efficient, with an emphasis on standardizing legal advice and providing access to flat-fee legal products.</p> | <p class="p1">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 international perspective on how things are done helps to instill a desire for change, not only in seeing how different work cultures operate, but also in appreciating the broad inter-connectivity that we now all experience, the need to keep ahead of the pack to serve clients' more diverse and ever more challenging expectations, and to compete effectively. Giving employees and partners the latitude to experiment with ideas and, perhaps more importantly instilling a culture of respect for different ideas and initiatives is a key element which law firms have traditionally struggled with given their hierarchical structures. To innovate, I believe that you need to instill a framework for acceptance of differing and new ideas and the creative potential of your people. This is a fundamental cornerstone, particularly for the legal profession, for building organizations which can successfully embrace change.</p> | <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I think it is traditional hierarchical, </span>command and control type management structures. It is the ability to instill a culture of acceptance and validation which largely produces growth and vitality: giving employees a feeling that they are valued and can make a difference to the firm, the work that it produces and to its clients leads to a 'buy-in' to the companies goals and objectives, and gives people the latitude to create and to produce efficiently. Stifling employees' creative visions by instilling fear, judgement and autocratic work structures and styles does not augur well for making and retaining creative and exceptional lawyers, particularly when the potential and tools for individual expression have never been more accessible.</p> | <p class="p1">There have been a number of changes within the legal profession, but lawyers are always few among early adopters. There has been a move to a more inclusive management style, but the profession still has the aura of authority which stifles the production and contribution capacity of newer entrants to the profession. It is not uncommon for associates in a law firm to feel isolated and directionless in what they are doing, which forces them to be less engaging or productive. A number of the potentially disruptive start-ups in the online legal space have provided an outlet for young associates to express their creativity by challenging the very structures that they studied for years to join. However, the profession itself remains tied to historical ways of doing things, preserved to a large extent by protective regulation, which restricts a lot of creativity in not only the way that legal services are offered, priced or accessed, but also in the way that law firms can grow and be funded. On the technology side, particularly the legal support or back office function, there has been a considerable degree of innovation, ranging from outsourcing more mundane or repetitive tasks such as due diligence and discovery, to document production and client access.</p> | <p class="p1">I would say mobile, and cloud infrastructures and systems, artificial intelligence and standardization technology. The latter two are particularly important in my profession, as they will serve to create extensive opportunities to limit the costs of legal services and to create more certainty in legal outcomes.</p> | <p class="p1">I don't believe that any one or more organizations have more of an innovation mindset than others. I think it is the people and their beliefs that are relevant here. Living in California today, you feel the innovation buzz all around you, whether it be in Silicon Beach or Valley, regardless of the enterprise or industry. There is a thirst for innovation which is hardly replicated elsewhere (with few exceptions, for example Israel). As an immigrant to the US, this is even more so apparent to me. A culture has been instilled and technology structures laid down allowing almost anyone to be a potential innovator if they put their minds to it, and which removes the older generation hierarchical structures which were premised upon limiting inclusiveness and a fear of failure. I believe that it is the fundamental American belief in freedom of expression and respect for the rights, and equal treatment of its people, mixed with access to technology, which has eventually resulted in such a fertile ground for innovation. </p> | Sam Miller | View Edit Delete |
21 | <p>Diana Stepner is the VP of Innovation Partnerships & Developer Relations at Pearson - a company which has been innovating since the Industrial Revolution. She helps business units accelerate digital innovation, drives global partnerships with startups, builds relationships with developer communities- including incubators and start ups- and runs the Pearson Catalyst for Education accelerator program. Diana's passion is to bring innovative user experiences, products, and partnerships to life by applying technologies that are not always ready for primetime. </p> | <p class="p1">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 crave rich digital experiences and believe learning can take place anywhere and at any time. </p> <p class="p1">Acknowledging that technology is helping to drive change in education to deliver on the expectations of learners and teachers. We have been able to quickly identify and connect Pearson teams with startups - particularly through connections with incubators and accelerators (<a href="http://rocket-space.com/"><span class="s1">RocketSpace</span></a>, <a href="http://www.1871.com/"><span class="s1">1871</span></a>, <a href="http://1776dc.com/"><span class="s1">1776</span></a>, <a href="http://www.marsdd.com/"><span class="s1">MaRS</span></a> and <a href="http://learnlaunch.com/"><span class="s1">LearnLaunch</span></a>). Then via <a href="http://catalyst.pearson.com/"><span class="s1">Catalyst</span></a>, Pearson’s accelerator, we’re able to build pilots collaboratively with the startups – all the while providing mentoring and insight that will help them grow and scale effectively. We’re also championing the next wave of creators and makers by being involved with maker spaces where learners of all ages gain hands-on skills, whether it be in electronics, arts, science, or beyond. </p> | <p class="p1">It’s human nature to gravitate towards the familiar - things that have already shown they are effective and work from a business perspective. But education is becoming increasingly consumerized, therefore, we need to deliver experiences that match the ones learners have outside of the classroom. This requires education companies to innovate more quickly, like other technology companies, while also ensuring that all products are delivering the expected outcomes.</p> | <p class="p1">Pearson has a history of innovation. The company’s origins were in the construction business during the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the story goes… “Pearson became one of the world's largest building contractors at a time when the industry controlled development of the transportation, trade and communication links that fuelled world economies.” Pearson had a similar forward-thinking approach when deciding to focus on education, especially the shift to digital, recognizing that technology was changing the way people learn. </p> <p class="p2">We started a Future Technologies team in 2011 to explore emerging technological developments and create prototypes that could be shared across the business. A network of 150 digital thought leaders, called Champions, was created to help promote the sharing of best practices and increase visibility into new platforms and products across the business. </p> <p class="p2">We also introduced a developer platform to enable developers both inside and outside Pearson to experiment with our content. In 2012, the Pearson Catalyst accelerator program was introduced. It is an open innovation program that enables anyone from across the company to submit a real business challenge. We then make a selection of those challenges and publish them so that startups can apply to be part of the program. The startup most capable to address each challenge is selected and works alongside a Pearson team to build a pilot solution. Each of these initiatives encourages open innovation. The focus is on collaboration and sharing; breaking down the corporate walls. </p> <p class="p2">Other innovation activities also include a new product lifecycle program to help the company adopt agile product development methodologies and a corporate-wide efficacy statement.</p> | <p class="p1">I’m actually hoping technology is going to take more of a back seat over the next two years. I don’t mean that technology will lose importance. It will remain a critical factor. But it will become invisible and serve as an enabler. We’re already seeing the emergence of this trend with the Internet of Things and the rise of data science.</p> <p class="p2">On business models, open and free is always going to be a contender – especially as quality continues to rise. Yet it’s <em>how</em> the information is presented that will be the differentiator. In education, the increasing focus is on personalized and adaptive learning - that means ensuring the right content is presented to you at the right time and being able to quickly filter through the content to find the relevant information you need. I also don’t think we’re close to the end of the sharing economy.</p> <p class="p2">More on the “fringe,” I am intrigued to see how the bitcoin blockchain is applied in new ways, including in education.</p> <p class="p2">We are seeing the rise of competency-based learning, which introduces more flexibility and a focus on learning practical skills or competencies, especially those that apply in the 21<span class="s1">st</span> century. It’s also important to have a global outlook. Mobile developments in Africa, digital experiences in China, and creative approaches to learning in Australia cannot be overlooked.</p> | <p class="p1">I’m a big fan of Rallyteam. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco back in September 2014. The focus is on employee empowerment. Most companies have valuable side projects that don’t get done simply because of lack of resources, funds, visibility or all three. With Rallyteam, a marketplace of projects is created. People in a company can submit a project or indicate they want to work on a specific type of project. Employees are able to gain and apply new skills all the while completing real, tangible projects for their employer. It’s a really exciting model - one that can help keep employees engaged and enable learning. </p> | Diana Stepner | View Edit Delete |
14 | <p class="p1">Robert David is Director of Corporate and Professional Programs at the University of California, Berkeley - UC Berkeley Extension. He has more than 20 years in key sales and business development operational roles inside several technology companies. He specializes in helping HR and Learning & Development professionals bring Berkeley-quality curricula to their companies through custom on-site training, sponsored tuition enrollments and intensive course program development.</p> | <p class="p1">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 you consciously try to do new things or do the same things in a different, more efficient or more effective way. It's very important to work at it. We tend to do 'pilot projects' to prove the concept and see what the outcomes are from both a financial and student satisfaction perspective.</p> <p class="p1">It's also very important to recognize and encourage ideas for innovation from all levels of an organization. These ideas can be simple changes to business processes to large shifts in strategy involving relationships to customers or vendors. Don't underestimate the value of simple changes--in empowering the people who come up with them and in keeping the organization agile and welcome to change. We also like to use successful models or processes in one academic program area and try to apply it to completely different academic areas to see if it will work as a controlled experiment. Our Dean likes to share examples of how we innovate, or how we focus on quality of student experience, or work more collaboratively in all-staff meetings to inspire staff to bring about change.</p> | <p class="p1">Often it's fear of the unfamiliar or values that don't really welcome and encourage change. However, in today's economy, change and the need to innovate is practically a given. Given the shifts in communication technology that we have all experienced with cell phones, apps, social media, big data...it's hard to dodge the new. It's a way of life now and in many respects, that's an advantage. In higher education, business as usual mentality, highly bureaucratic processes, antiquated systems, risk adverse culture. In many cases, too, lower level staff often do not feel empowered to suggest changes, or to work across functional departments to streamline a process, or to do things differently. </p> | <p class="p1">My role was newly created last year, so basically everything I tackle requires the organization to respond in new ways. Sometimes it requires some arm-wrestling, but we're making good headway. Also, I work in education and it's a field that's experiencing tremendous innovation as we explore the opportunities and drawbacks of online corporate learning in all its various forms. Because we are getting real-time feedback from employers about workforce development needs, our organization is prioritizing the development of innovative 'intensive workshops' to spearhead new program development efforts. </p> | <p class="p1">We are at just the beginning of a wave of new technologies that will help people learn more, faster, and better. Mobile is a technology that educators are beginning to embrace as part of an overall blended learning experience for both traditional education as well as professional development and corporate training. It's hard to project what that will look like from here, but it is exciting. Data analytics will help to provide more real-time and better information to facilitate decision-making about course development and offerings.</p> | <p class="p1">Outside the field of education, firms in the biotech and high tech areas tend to best embody the innovation mindset. For higher ed, we can see big changes coming in corporate online education. The jury is still out as far as what the right business model should be, but we are clearly pushing the envelope as far as the use of online courses and flexibility of the delivery platform. </p> | Robert David | View Edit Delete |
17 | <p>Steven Bowman is a noted author and business advisor. He has an extensive background in the nonprofit arena. He is one of the world’s leading governance and senior executive team specialists, having previously held positions as national executive director of the Australasian Institute of Banking and Finance, CEO of the Finance and Treasury Association, general manager of ExpoHire (Australia) Pty Ltd, assistant director of the Australian Society of CPAs, and director of the American College of Health Care Administrators.</p> | <p class="p1">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 come from policies, procedures or structures. It all starts with you. In the case of any organization, the culture of innovation and change starts with the CEO. If the CEO thinks they can train innovation by external advisors, workshops, incentives and rah rah talks, and the CEO does not choose this him or herself, then the culture of innovation cannot be created. And the hallmark of any really good CEO is their willingness to be strategically aware.</p> | <p class="p1">The main reason why organizations and cultures do not embrace innovation and change is because they have already decided what innovation and change is and is not. They have already defined the elements of innovation and change, even if those definitions begin with “I don’t know how to innovate and I don’t like change.” These are just definitions. There is extensive misunderstanding and misapplication about what innovation is. Most think it is about the new and the funky. Rather, it should be more about a state of being, a constant state of curiosity. It is actually about being aware and being willing to be the change that is required. It is about being the question from a sense of intense curiosity, not as a business imperative. Innovation is just a point of view. A fixed point of view about having already got it right in terms of market share, services, products and innovation leads to examples such as HMV, Kodak and Blockbuster. Any enterprise that thinks it has got something right, and is not willing to see different possibilities, is destined for the same fate.</p> | <p class="p1">We have chosen to function from no definition of what innovation is. We look for possibility in everything. We don’t just look for the now, we also look for the future. It is about sustainable future and sustainable reality. Over last few years we have started to embrace the philosophy of being Pragmatic Futurists. A Pragmatic Futurist is about creating future potential possibilities (<a href="http://nomorebusinessasusual.com/pragmatic-futurist/"><span class="s1">http://nomorebusinessasusual.com/pragmatic-futurist/</span></a>). Being a Pragmatic Futurist and expanding the power to shape your future is more important than ever in our world of accelerating transformation. We keep ourselves aware of the changes that are coming and how they will affect us and our business, as well as our clients' businesses. We develop strategies to thrive in the coming new environment. Our business now has a global reputation for being innovative and inspirational, when in fact we are being the question and being curious. Another innovation process we have been developing very recently has been the philosophy behind Benevolent Capitalism, where we put our attention on maximising possibility, not just maximizing profit. This has had a huge impact on growing our businesses and our profitability/wealth.</p> | <p class="p1">3D printing. 3D printing – also known as additive manufacturing – is part of a rapidly growing market whereby a print head deposits very thin layers of resin on top of each other in a specified fashion to create a 3D object based on a digital model. 3D printers are already in use among many businesses, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to consumers goods, and have generated a diverse set of use cases.</p> | <p class="p1">It is always tempting to use iconic global organizations such as Apple, Virgin, etc. However, we often find that some of the most innovative organizations tend to fly under the rdar. I would nominate Bill Strickland, President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation and its subsidiaries, Manchester Craftsmen's Guild (MCG), and Bidwell Training Center (BTC). Strickland is nationally recognized as a visionary leader who authentically delivers educational and cultural opportunities to students and adults within an organizational culture that fosters innovation, creativity, responsibility and integrity.</p> | Steven Bowman | View Edit Delete |
54 | <p>“Innovation has become the fundamental aspect of all development; without it there can be no progress in the Property Industry,” says Leslie Fivaz, CFO for ALW Properties in Johannesburg, South Africa. Johannesburg is South Africa’s economic powerhouse and one of the fastest growing emerging market cities in the world.</p> | <p>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.</p> <p>Our latest flagship development, Atholl Towers, in Sandton Johannesburg is an environmentally innovative office building, offering world-class AAA-rated, 5 Star green office space for commercial property letting. Up to 50 percent savings are offered on energy and water costs, which is accomplished through:</p> <ul> <li>Recycled heating</li> <li>Energy efficient lighting and motion sensors</li> <li>Water saving fixtures and rain and ground water harvesting systems</li> <li>Waste recycling facilities</li> <li>Low volatile organic compound paints, adhesives and carpets</li> <li>Recycled and locally sourced building materials</li> <li>Energy efficient “REGEN” elevator facilities</li> <li>Cyclist facilities</li> </ul> <p>We are determined to be and to remain responsive to a rapidly changing industry dynamic.</p> | <p>South Africa’s commercial property market is facing many challenges. A number of factors are causing both local and international buyers to put off purchases until they have a clearer picture of where the country is headed. Factors include: Rand weakness, high inflation, weakening metal prices, ongoing violent strike action, a rising trade deficit, continuing uncertainty regarding property rights and land reform, high levels of crime, weak service delivery, and political in-fighting. Increasing input costs such as labour, electricity, water, property rates and taxes and raw materials, as well as skills shortages, and credit downgrades are further undermining South Africa’s social fabric and spooking investors.</p> Yet it is not all doom and gloom. Confidence in the real estate sector has improved; there are suburbs across South Africa which are performing well, and property values are improving. The Property Industry is an extremely innovative industry full of people with innovative ideas and entrepreneurial spirit who continually find ways to counter the challenges. Encouragingly, industry observers continue to state that there are good reasons to remain confident in South African properties as an asset class. | <p>There is no doubt that within the next few years the Real Estate Industry is likely to look very different from the way it does today. There is recognition that patterns of demand are changing and the most forward-thinking companies and people in the industry are creating products that cater to the changes. Companies like WeWork and Regus are taking service offices to the next level by building sophisticated collaborative workspaces for entrepreneurs and professionals. They understand that the shift toward online business has not downgraded the importance of social interaction, but that there is massive demand among companies and individuals for environments in which they can talk to each other, generate ideas, and innovate.</p> <p>Innovation is enabling the property industry to make the most of one of its most important characteristics: that it is a people industry. New technology and disruption are not leading to a depersonalisation of Real Estate; quite the opposite.</p> <p>Steve Jobs says that “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”</p> <p>In Property, change and innovation are a given. In fact, they are key imperatives for any successful Real Estate company seeking to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving and consumer-driven marketplace.</p> | <p>New technologies are having a surprising amount of impact on the property industry.</p> <p>For commercial property owners, sustainability is more than a trend – it’s a glimpse into the future. Sustainability is one of the biggest drivers of innovation in today’s economy – and the commercial property sector is no exception. As the demand for green-friendly office spaces increases daily, particularly with millennials, building owners are embracing sustainable designs that lower monthly costs and reduce the building’s carbon footprint.</p> <p>With cities around the world growing fast as development spreads to almost every corner of the globe, resources are scarcer than ever. Building materials, water and electricity will need to be produced, consumed and recycled efficiently to support the planet’s growing population. The recent drought in South Africa, which brought water rationing in its wake, as well as the decade-long Eskom crisis with its annual electricity tariff increases, have inspired property owners and tenants to take action.</p> <p>Commercial buildings that feature independent power generation (through solar energy systems) and smart water recycling, are becoming increasingly popular with tenants – especially the younger generation of startup owners. Lower monthly utility bills are good for every company’s bottom line. At the same time, environmental stewardship is an essential part of prominent brands, from SMEs to large corporates.</p> <p>While Green Star ratings are typically given to new developments, it’s still possible for older buildings to shed their large carbon footprints and remain desirable. Many developers, including ourselves, are actively engaged with this process:</p> <ul> <li>Solar power systems and geysers can be retrofitted to some older buildings, as long as the building’s structure can accommodate them safely.</li> <li>Energy-efficient lighting, air conditioning and office equipment can be fitted to almost all older buildings, reducing monthly consumption and utility bills.</li> <li>Some older buildings in up-and-coming areas can be renovated and re-purposed using green designs, giving them a new lease on life.</li> </ul> <p>With years of load-shedding, double-digit increases in electricity prices and now a catastrophic drought, South Africans have come to appreciate green features the hard way. The demand for green features will continue to increase as the high cost of utilities, along with electricity and water supply issues, force this to become a key factor in buying decisions.</p> <p>Technology is definitely disrupting Real Estate economics as the demand for eco-efficient buildings rises. Technology is forcing developers to relook at the way they construct buildings. Today, buildings must be low-energy, sustainable, and able to respond to future changes in the climate, technology and regulation. Buildings of the future will all be “green.” The Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark, an industry-driven organisation, is committed to assessing the sustainability performance of Real Estate portfolios worldwide; and Europe’s Energy Directive is driving for near-to-zero energy buildings by 2020.</p> | <p>In addition to the call for green office innovation, collaborative workplace organizations such as WeWork and Regus are also knocking down the literal and figurative “walls” and changing commercial real estate dynamics. These flexible, shared office spaces provide various options for companies that either lack the capital or want to divest themselves of the real estate, furniture and services that were previously non-negotiable. These shared spaces are ideal for hosting meetings, and can also act as both on-demand and long-term space for satellite employees, mobile workers, and independent professionals.</p> <p>Many large corporates are realizing that they can dramatically reduce the office space required, not because of a fall-off in business, but rather as a result of technology innovation and changing human behavior, which have reduced the amount of required office space. Companies and employees are able to do more with less space – the very heart of innovation. Spurring this dynamic is the rapid growth in mobility technology, smartphones, tablets, laptops, Wi-Fi and exceptionally fast Internet connections, and cloud-based resources. These technologies have obliterated the need for file cabinets and server rooms – further reducing the need for dedicated IT space. The speed at which technology has evolved means that not only are business people able to take their work around the city as they hop from meeting to meeting, or home in the evening, but they are also able to carry out these tasks and remain cost-effectively and efficiently connected to their team and management.</p> | Leslie Fivaz | View Edit Delete |
57 | <p>Robert Novo is a director in the global services division of BT (British Telecom) where he leads a department responsible for various proactive ITIL functions that are an integral part of a managed services contract for a multi-national, Fortune 200 insurance company. He and his team are responsible for a network with tens of thousands of devices, serving hundreds of sites worldwide. The team provides management and planning of various functions including capacity, inventory, change, problem, release, and knowledge as well as managing and supporting the tools used in the day to day monitoring and operations of the network.</p> <p>Robert has 30+ years of experience in the industry, having worked with customers all over the world, published papers/articles, and presented at conferences on leading-edge technologies in both Spanish and English. Prior to joining BT, Robert has held a variety of senior leadership positions in the telecommunications networking industry, in areas including business strategy consulting, research and development, product/service management, complex data analysis and forecasting, and software tool support. Robert holds a Master of Engineering degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.</p> <p>He has spent almost his entire career in customer facing roles because of the satisfaction he gets of seeing innovations being put into practice, particularly when making strategic decisions. “Every day, we face complex problems that we are challenged to boil down to the right black and white, dollars and cents, decision point. Not enough depth in the analysis increases the risk of a sub-optimal decision. Too much can result in wasted effort and time or ‘paralysis by analysis.’ Understanding the problem statement and determining that sweet spot is essential.” He advocates innovation as early as possible in the problem definition process to maximize the potential benefit.</p> <p>Robert has developed telecommunications traffic projections for many customers worldwide, with forecasts ranging anywhere from 6 months to 15 years. “The level of detail in the analysis has to be tailored to the forecast window. Near term projections are more driven by trends in existing customers and applications. Longer term, we need to look more into industry disruptors and social, business, and technology trends. Fifteen years ago, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat weren’t around and Facebook was nascent. Fifteen years from now, the Internet may be dominated by a new generation of apps, but a constant will always be the people, companies, and machines behind them creating the traffic.”</p> <p>In his current position, Robert leads a team of experts located throughout Hungary, India, The United Kingdom, and The United States. Two areas he considers essential to keep his team thinking ahead of the curve are collaboration in the decision making process and customer centricity. “Innovation should not only be a personal objective. We should always look at ways to encourage and nurture it in others.”</p> | <p>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 incident management. The latter functions are supported by the network operations (NOC) team, while the team that supports the proactive functions as well as the network management tools is referred to as TCAP (Tools, Capacity, Availability, Performance, Problem). Under this model, I lead the global TCAP team that is part of a managed services contract for a multi-national, Fortune 200 insurance company with hundreds of sites and tens of thousands of network elements.</p> <p>Because of this distributed operational model, BT is in a better position to engage in strategic planning discussions with our managed services customers; understanding their business plans and forecasts and their impact on the network. The team is better positioned to translate these business plans and forecasts into new requirements for analysis, reporting updates, and network monitoring and management tool features/capabilities.</p> | <p>One of the biggest impediments to innovation is inertia. While the objective of any innovation in the long run is a positive impact to the business, whether in savings or revenue, most innovations will require an upfront effort and investment to define a problem statement, hypothesize, test the hypothesis, measure the benefit and implement the solution. In particular, if it is an operational innovation, those who will use it will need to be trained and alter their daily working model to embrace it.</p> <p>It is an easy trap to focus solely on meeting day-to-day deliverables and obligations, thereby losing sight of the “big picture” and not dedicating enough time for problem analysis and planning of innovations. The challenge is in establishing a balance, and investing enough time in the short term for defining and analyzing key problems and subsequently planning and developing innovations to address them.</p> <p>The risk of organizational inertia emphasizes the need for effective and cascaded goal setting, both at the personal and organizational level; i.e., establishing, tracking and validating completion of relevant and SMART objectives yearly, monthly, weekly and in certain cases even daily, and ensuring appropriate targets for innovation are included in those goals.</p> | <p>The first part of the question is an interesting one. I would say that innovation has not become engrained in our organization’s culture, because it has been there all along. We have been thought leaders since 1846 when the Electric Telegraph Company was first formed in The United Kingdom. The founders were excited by the business applications of innovation, excited by the commercial potential of electricity and magnetism could offer for communications. And since 1984, we have become truly global, extending our presence with locations and customers all over the world.</p> <p>As a company, BT has a portfolio of approximately 5000 patents, and files over 100 new applications every year. Over the last five years, we have invested over £2.5B in R&D. We leverage substantial academic engagements with more than 30 elite universities around the world, including MIT, Cambridge University and Tshinghua University.</p> <p>Locally and more specifically to everyone on my team, innovation is essential to our day-to-day jobs. We optimize innovations through the goal and objective-setting process (see above) both on a team as well as on an individual basis, and we measure the impact of any potential innovations against the overall benefits to the business.</p> | <p>From a networking technology perspective, security is an ongoing concern where growth and change continue to happen. Unfortunately, it’s not just the “good guys” who are innovating. The threat landscape is rapidly changing. Every day we are hearing about new and creative ways people and companies are being put at risk, such as DDoS attacks, data theft and breaches and viruses, malware and ransomware. Hackers, with the backing of deep-pocketed organizations that provide endless resources are getting more and more sophisticated in their attacks. The industry has to constantly innovate by adapting its technologies and approach to stay ahead of the game in light of all these new cyber threats, designing services that are highly available and robust, and networks that are more resilient and making data more secure.</p> <p>From the point of view of process engineering, I expect automation to be the key game changer. As enterprises digitally transform further, automation will enable them to be more efficient, increasing agility and reducing costs. IoT, M2M and machine learning will be further catalysts for this automation.</p> | <p>I think that the best innovations occur in collaborative environments; when you are part of a wider ecosystem. Our research and innovation center in Adastral Park, near Ipswich, used to be a BT-only facility. However, it is now a collaborative, open community of close to 100 leading edge technology companies and 4000 employees between BT and its partners. Our strong track record of collaborating with many institutions, including our customers and partners, has led to many examples of mutual business benefits derived from the innovations that were jointly created.</p> | Robert Novo | View Edit Delete |
9 | <p>Pieter de Villiers is responsible for establishing Clickatell as the world’s leading mobile messaging provider, enabling tens of thousands of enterprises and millions of consumers to interact, communicate and benefit greatly via their mobile phone. De Villiers has led the organization through a decade of robust growth and innovation by providing high value, application-to-person (A2P) SMS services to banks and other financial services providers, governments, social communities, and a myriad of mobile developers in several additional vertical markets.</p> | <p>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 smart organizations. You can then get those same smart people to innovate in areas outside of what you do today as long as you provide a clear “Vision” and “Why” to your people.</p> | <p>Not having a clear “Why” or “Vision” for the business that translates into relevance is a large impediment to enterprise innovation today. It is important for a company to know who and what it is and what is brings to the industry (example Kodak: Thinking of themselves as a paper or camera company instead of a company people associate with their most precious memories).</p> <p>Not having the courage to manage stakeholder expectations as you invest for change is another innovation impediment. Executive teams are measured on how well they meet quarterly earnings expectations, so it is understandable that many would prefer to just “deliver the numbers” than take risks. However, this does not produce an environment conducive to change and innovation. It is better to manage expectations and know that as your technology or company changes, the measurement and expectations need to change too. </p> <p>Organizational agility and management ability to “re-tool” for change is a must have. Managing people is difficult enough, adding in the complexity of “re-tooling” the organization with training and hiring creates an additional burden to an already complex role as a manager. A manager without the skills to handle these issues impedes effective change and innovation.</p> | <p>At Clickatell, we are thinking a lot about our “Why” and our relevance in order to update our thinking and match it with our customer’s perspective. We have also allocated funding to new initiatives and products even though they only contribute to the bottom line in the “out years.” We have embraced new methodologies (agile/scrum) and tools/platforms as we design new solutions and optimize existing offers (Hadoop, Amazon- Cloud, etc.).</p> | <p>Two years is a short time frame, so it will have to be those technologies that have some level of “mainstream” acceptance already. This would include mobile technologies with their super-size reach, Cloud Computing which improves speed to market and reduces start-up costs and lastly Big Data & Analytics which allows us to better understand our customer behavior and monetize in new ways.</p> | <p>People (typically product folks) that are very close to customers, engage them often and understand how they are using the product embody the innovation mindset. These are the same individuals who measure results frequently and are willing and/or able to iterate and invest in expanding/improving the organizations value proposition. I don’t feel there is a specific company to name because for me, there is no singular company that gets this right all the time.</p> | Pieter de Villiers | View Edit Delete |
66 | <p>Bill brings over 30 years of experience in the communications and enterprise IT industries. He was CTO at SUMMUS Software. He served at Amdocs as a CTO of the Product Business Unit where he was responsible for the development of real-time customer experience platforms. Before joining Amdocs, Bill served as SVP of product planning and architecture at DST Innovis, where he was responsible for strategic technology platforms, product management and pre-sales for the cable, broadband and satellite industries. Bill is also known for designing and hand crafting custom furniture, as well as for his skills on the shooting range.</p> | <p>Everyone is talking about AI. The difference for Serviceaide is that we introduced AI into production all the way back in 2017. Our approach is also different in that we are focused on an AI-First approach. This means that our team considers how AI can take the operational lead in managing and automating routine requests and work tasks as we design and build systems; we don’t just add in AI where it’s easy. The industry will still need people, but Serviceaide is helping to shift their focus to more strategic, high value work. This will result in increased productivity and efficiency.</p> | <p>Technology is evolving quicky, in some cases daily. Take for example, Large Language Models, we have shifted our approach to monthly in order to maximize performance from the best model. For many customers, it's hard to keep up with the pace of innovation which makes having both the knowledge and maturity to consider the benefits of new technology in their DevOps and overall planning incredibly important. One example is examining how to make Ai driven automation work with legacy systems, and implement the changes required. To this end, Serviceaide is often introducing innovation and becoming an advisor on Digital Transformations to many of our clients.</p> | <p>Bringing innovation to Service Management is our company and departmental mission. The development team is passionate about leveraging emerging technologies to maximize worker productivity. Our service and support vertical extends from IT to potentially all departments of an organization. This passion for what AI can do touches everyone in the company from development to support to marketing and sales. When you have those “ah ha” moments and see all the ways the technology can be applied, it really motivates the team to drive even harder and naturally fosters creativity.</p> | <p>I see the issue as how a company adopts the newer technologies that either automates routine labor-intensive tasks or provides a boost to employees that must spend a lot of time searching for and working with information. Generative AI is certainly the biggest news at the moment, and everyone is rightly looking to capitalize on it, or be a victim of their competitors that do. But it can be scary to add something completely different that is not well understood and comes with risk if not leveraged properly. The great news is that Serviceaide and others are bringing new solutions to the market that will drive digital process transformation - not AI for AI’s sake but AI that solves real problems and makes quantifiable improvements that go straight to the bottom line. My advice is to look for solutions that have designed an AI strategy into the product, have a clear vision and roadmap, and can show true ROI. Too many vendors are looking for quick wins with AI, and they are very likely to create unsustainable architectures and have a lot of churn in their product as a result.</p> | <p>Knowledge federation is really making a difference for a lot of bigger enterprises that suffer from having information scattered all over the place. Many organizations have one place to store personal information such as One drive or One Note, another tool to collaborate with your team, another system to get IT help, another to ask HR questions, yet another for internal business procedures and operations, and then a whole different set of systems that provide online training. Collaboration, operational and departmental and training systems being disconnected is a chronic problem for organizations. By pulling all this disparate information together, via knowledge federation, employees can find what they need from one source. Employing a good AI-based interface that can make inquires in natural language rather than using keywords or navigating to where the information is a productivity game changer.</p> | Bill Guinn | View Edit Delete |
16 | <p>Lilach Felner is a marketing consultant and lecturer specializing in building customer trust. She helps companies and brands become trustworthy by injecting trust into their businesses. As a marketer of multinational consumer brands for over 15 years, Lilach has experienced first-hand the tsunami of consumer militancy towards companies and brands, social media escalation and the dramatic transition of power to consumers. Her Trustworthy Marketing Approach helps organizations and brands become more worthy of their customers’ trust in the age of open social communication. </p> | <p>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 change, and is willing to be committed to the change and its implications. Third, rolling out the change depends on management's ability to lead and inspire its employees, to empower those who come up with ideas, nurture them and activate them as advocates. In order to execute change, the employees must be involved. This is why the management should have an "open door policy," encouraging an open flow of communication and demonstrating high levels of accessibility. Fourth, another critical parameter for rolling out innovation and change is trust. In an atmosphere of trust, innovation and speed reach their full potential. </p> | <p>Based on my experience, the biggest obstacles to change and innovation are as follows:</p> <p>Short term-ism: A short-term managerial attitude includes management that is focused on short-term gain rather than long-term growth, management that finds it difficult to balance the need for long-term strategy with short-term results demanded by the market, and management that doesn't communicate a long-term vision for the business.</p> <p>A continuously decreasing Chief Executive Officer tenure: CEOs and senior executives with short tenure seem to have few incentives to embrace long-term oriented behavior. They find themselves facing an intriguing ethical dilemma between optimizing their financial pay-off within their own tenure and securing the longer-term well-being of the organization. According to a 2014 report released by The Conference Board, the average tenure of a departing S&P 500 company CEO has decreased in recent years, from roughly 10 years in 2000 to 8.1 years in 2012.</p> | <p>The innovation process should start from the CEO and the management team in order to give it the focus and the priority it deserves. A special committee for innovative change should be appointed with representatives from all relevant departments. Employees should feel they are involved as well. In order to examine the effectiveness and the results of the process, a 'before and after' survey should be conducted. It is recommended to plan a kick-off session with all relevant employees in order to create involvement and engagement and build their commitment. </p> | <p>Given the erosion in customer trust towards organizations and brands due to a history of over-promising and under-delivering, not only do we find more and more customers who arm themselves with as much unbiased information as possible but also more and more consumers who trust what their peers say. In this reality, I believe new technologies should focus on the 'social customers', those customers that are constantly engaging with one another in order to seek out advice and opinions from their peers. Engaging these powerful, trusted voices has become even more important considering that 92 percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family (Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Report). Another area that challenges new technologies lies in the proliferation of communications channels. The challenge is to create a seamless, omni-channel solution that will provide a single, <em>seamless experience </em>for the customer across all channels. The customer views the company as being one company no matter how many channels it has. Each platform needs to have awareness of the other. This means a lot of coordination between IT and marketing. </p> | <p>I have two examples of trustworthy leaders who embody the innovation mindset in the way they lead.</p> <p>Tony Hsieh, the inspiring widely-admired founder and CEO of Zappos.How often do we see a company where most of its efforts towards customers happen after they’ve made the sale? How often do we see a company that has reps who are trained so that when a customer is looking for a specific pair of shoes, if they’re out of stock (for example, they don’t have their size), they will look on at least three competitor web sites and refer the customer to that competitor if they find the shoe the customer is looking for? Hsieh has innovated the way Zappos treats its employees, its customers, and its suppliers. Hsieh is an inspiring example of a leader who believes that being true to your own values is fundamental to how others will perceive you.</p> <p>Peter Aceto, the President and CEO of Tangerine—formerly ING Direct Canada. How often do we see a CEO who measures his employees’ views about his leadership after his first year as CEO? After his first year as CEO, Peter Aceto decided to send a company-wide email, inviting everyone to vote on whether they wanted him to remain in charge. He was prepared to leave the position if the employees weren’t inspired by his leadership. The response rate was 95% and of those who responded 97% said he should stay. </p> | Lilach Felner | View Edit Delete |
49 | <p>In the UK’s world of IT, Martin Summerhayes is known as “The Billion Dollar Man,” having once innovated a billion dollar business for HP while also working as a field engineer.</p> <p>His expertise in customer experience and service needs derive from innumerable physical visits from his field engineer days, which have enabled him to create enhanced service models with a customer-friendly but up-front extended warranty. This innovation became a huge new revenue stream for Fujitsu, and a model emulated by many companies since its inception. His service ideas stem from customer-centric realizations like this: Why should a customer have to deal with the complexity of choosing between hardware, software or warranty departments in seeking solutions from their provider? Surely the provider should be able to take their problem – or, better still, already know or anticipate the problem – and refer them to the right channels to solve it.</p> <p>Summerhayes is now Head of Delivery Strategy and Service Improvement for Fujitsu – one of the world’s top five IT service providers, with products and services available in more than 100 countries. The company’s “human-centric” tech innovation is far-reaching, ranging from farming sensors for better harvests to software for the hearing impaired, and augmented reality systems to reduce truck rolls for field engineers. Its slew of recent awards includes the Citrix Award for Partners, in which Fujitsu managed to get a key agency of the New Zealand government back online within days of the country’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake, with a cloud-based desktop-as-a-service solution.</p> <p>Rather than seeing their tech portfolios managed in a series of add-ons and piecemeal updates in response to changing needs and improved software, enterprise customers routinely hail the fact that Fujitsu IT services are continuously up-to-date thereby enhancing personalization for the client’s needs.</p> <p>One of Fujitsu’s most famous clients in the UK is McDonald’s. At a recent Fujitsu Forum event, Doug Baker, head of IT for McDonald's UK, said the partnership had gone beyond the traditional “break-fix” contracts of the past, and toward a flexible service which enabled a personalized, optimized customer experience for its 1260 restaurants.</p> <p>The partnership, including the new CARE program, is enabling kiosk-driven table service – and the remarkable recognition that “the biggest focus for technology innovation in restaurants is leveraging a customer’s own device,” – as well as a very human kind of load-balancing, where drive-thrus take simultaneous orders in two lanes and deliver efficiently in one.</p> <p>Having learned some high traffic retail customers do not like the disruption of even rapid response site visits by predictive IT engineers, Fujitsu responded with “invisible service provision.” Martin Smithen, head of Fujitsu’s TMS Offering Development, notes to ensure the success of the remote, invisible support, the service requires customers are kept fully informed. Despite the benefits of optimized engineering support, the role of human intelligence remained on a par with technology in formulating business strategy, Doug Baker, head of IT for McDonald's UK, says, “The most powerful data we have had comes from CARE engineers who go to sites, talk to the stores, and brief us on how the systems are being used.”</p> <p>No one knows the value of both human intelligence and technology better than Summerhayes, who remarks, “The consumer is driving changes like the opportunity for prediction, the cost of IT, and the spread of the Internet of Things. Thirty years ago, we could monitor container ship’s location. Twenty years ago, we could monitor the containers. Ten years ago, we could monitor the pallets in the containers. Now, we are talking about tracking products throughout their entire journey, through lower cost RFID tags on value-based consumer items. Lower levels of granularity present huge opportunities for customers.”</p> | <p>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.</p> <p>In Fujitsu, we hope to bring intelligence, big data, analytics, predictability, and predictive tools together to answer big questions: How can we better track trends and anomalies? How can we predict failure before failure occurs? How can we drive preventative programs? How can we use our engineering workforce, our partner workforce, and our repair workforce to ensure our customers do not experience downtime? My team is leveraging software tools and partners, plus the knowledge we have developed to be able to look at that space.</p> <p>A new type of service model called CARE uses intelligent engineering to drive and support the customer’s changing requirements. One of our prominent customers, McDonald's, is leveraging our CARE service to allow customers to pre-order and select a time for pick up before the customer gets to the store via an app on their phone; the customer can use a connected kiosk; customers have a choice.</p> <p>Fujitsu ensures uptime and availability to those stores, which often operate 24/7.</p> <p>As a part of the outsourcing space within my team, I look in how Fujitsu provides managed services to customers who have either IT products or It services provided by another partner we can take over.</p> <p>From a game-changing perspective, ten years ago, there was IT outsourcing version 1.0 – where the company decided to move it to a partner who managed its IT provision on a holistic basis. Outsourcing moved through a tower model called IT managed services or outsourcing version 2.0, in which the IT provision breaks up into various towers. It is like an orchestra of independent companies playing together, or the company orchestrating it themselves.</p> <p>My team is looking at how we provision engineering-type services, provided either remotely or on customer sites. It is <em>how</em> we provision and make available those engineering services to customers that is a key game changer. We hope to provide a service before the customer realizes they have a problem.</p> <p>Fujitsu tries and pilots programs like an intelligent error engineering deployment for one of their customers in the UK. Their goal is to take it from white screen concepts to a working prototype within two weeks.</p> <p>We are looking at augmented reality from our engineering workforce perspective. The ability to use a smartphone, and point at another device for both visual and providing verbal instructions to the engineer in the terms of how best to resolve the problem.</p> <p>Fujitsu hopes to use virtual reality tools to train our engineers like "just in time training" - broadly scaling our engineering workforce in terms of a core set of skills.</p> | <p>Speed is the biggest hurdle to overcome when it comes to IT services, as our customers expect rapid deployment and zero downtime. The complications of adopting speed of change with the challenge of demonstrating return on investment limit innovation. It becomes difficult to clearly articulate the value of innovation without taking the C-suite on a customer experience journey, where they can clearly articulate those savings.</p> | <p>Fujitsu’s innovation depends on the speed of adoption versus the speed of change. Most companies, whether banks, retail institutions, or manufacturers, have a legacy environment plus a small element of new code, and its service models vary dependent on those factors.</p> <p>Amazon is a disruptor in retailing and supermarkets. In the UK, Amazon states they are the online supermarket. Consumers can even order fresh produce from Amazon. Many companies are seeing disruption within their industry by new competitors.</p> <p>There is little to consider as first generation, innovative. Small pocket organizations create an innovative idea, it develops, and then it is realized as a blue ocean market opportunity or a disruptive market opportunity. That is how innovation happens, and how innovation gets inculcated in an organization.</p> <p>I see innovation in Fujitsu and in many of its competitors. Fujitsu implements an encouraging culture for innovation. The challenge is in demonstrating the business case and the return on investment.</p> | <p>Within IT services, the Internet of Things, the connectivity of many devices, and the integration of big data through analytics will be the major industry disruptors.</p> <p>Augmented reality and virtual reality will have an impact, although AR will be more prevalent. It is how companies bring those various elements together around industry vertical solutions. How vertical solutions are brought together to offer a solution to the customer is key.</p> | <p>Google’s innovations are highly compelling. When traveling, Google gives online recommendations through Google Maps in terms of products and services nearby the user. A consumer can submit photographs and narratives of places they have visited via social media channels, and contribute to shared information.</p> | Martin Summerhayes | View Edit Delete |
38 | <p>Serving as Arla’s Head of Open Innovation, Barraza is a chemical engineer by training who is passionate about collaborations between enterprises, academia and entrepreneurs. He studied intellectual property law to arm himself with a tool that has since proved critical in his work on open innovation, both at Unilever and now at Arla.</p> | <p>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 companies in Denmark today: Danish Crown and Arla</p> <p>I see the DNA of the company as not just being a co-op, but innovative in terms of product quality. That continues today – to be able to maintain our dominant position in markets like the UK, and bolster our ability to enter new markets in China and the Middle East and U.S. as well. Particularly in China and the Middle East, the credentials of being high quality about products really helps our exports – stemming from the famously stringent laws we have (in Scandinavia and Europe).</p> <p>In addition to having strong dairy products, we are also manufacturers for other companies, so we also need to be competitive in technologies and efficiencies for production.</p> <p>What I do is often researching about research – how can we find new ways to interact with other types of research partners, such as academic partners and smaller companies, to unlock ecosystems of innovation. A big game changer for us has been the ability to translate the Scandinavian traditions of dairy products and foods to deepen appeal within diverse global markets. One of these products is Skyr, which is based on an old Nordic tradition: translating Skyr according to the taste of other parts of world, like the UK and Holland – that’s been a game changer. Another has been the change in formulation in some of our high protein products, which have allowed very successful recent launches in China.</p> <p>We are also moving toward more strategic partnerships with universities. Last year, we partnered with Copenhagen University and Aarhus University to launch the Arla Dairy Health and Nutrition Excellence Center. I believe dairy can unlock major global problems in terms of nutrition, and we have only begun to tap the potential applications of natural milk proteins. We actively seek out disruptive ideas from both internal and external sources; connecting with small companies and entrepreneurs. Our approach is based around ‘technology push; consumer pull” – so that potential new products must see a deep collaboration between from both scientists and marketers before launch.</p> <p>Last year, we put together the Arla Food Innovation Challenge, in partnership with the Creative Business Cup. This challenged entrepreneurial ideas in competition, and brought winners to Copenhagen – and we were able to see fantastic ideas from preexisting businesses as well as from early-stage entrepreneurs. Stimulating entrepreneurs in this way gives us a new way of thinking about our products – providing new insights from external sources. I am very passionate about working with small and medium enterprises, which is what we will be pushing going forward.</p> | <p>Innovating in the dairy products space may seem less sexy than creating the next digital app, so it is a challenge to attract top entrepreneurial talent to the industry. And yet we are doing so at Arla. Our goal – to create the future of dairy – offers the kind of ambition that interests young innovators. And our potential for positive impact on societies around the globe is immense, in terms of health and nutrition in particular. We are trying to raise the level of expectation of what we need from small companies in the food industry, and showing that we can create opportunities for innovation. We also challenge entrepreneurs directly through competitions like the Innovation Challenge.</p> <p>Another potential impediment to innovation in the industry is the traction of ideas between seniority levels. In some companies, just the fact that, say, a junior scientist comes up with an idea may mean that idea does not go forward. But while that is a barrier present in other companies, I see it as a big positive contrast for us. At Arla, everybody has a say, and the weighting is the same for good ideas, no matter where it comes from.</p> <p>I also think that having gurus on innovation does not suit our industry – it is more about what works. The ability for anyone to put forward a proposal leads to a broader source of internal ideas. On the flip side, there is a greater challenge to reach a consensus – you may think that breaking consensus would be a barrier to innovation in a conservative environment, but the way we try to address that is to harness external sources.</p> <p>I learned so much during my time at Unilever, which was one of the initial drivers worldwide of open innovation, together with Procter & Gamble. Unilever was creating new models of innovation before they appeared in textbooks. But the pace was such that there was time to experiment and develop iterations of prototypes. At Arla, open innovation is also a major feature, but the culture is a little different, partly because the speed at which things need to happen is greater. We try different things and must make almost instantaneous decisions on what works and what does not work, which, at times, may be a challenge.</p> | <p>Arla, of course, has a long history of innovation, but I think our roots in the Nordic countries really promotes this culture, and that culture itself also presents Arla with a big advantage in foreign markets.</p> <p>To be successful in the future, dairy companies will need to have strong credentials on sustainability. Consumers and customers in foreign markets know that the emphasis on sustainability in the Nordics is way ahead of other parts of the world. Already, Arla is the biggest organic milk producer in Europe, and those efforts in sustainability are being recognized abroad.</p> <p>Within the company, there is already a deeply collaborative culture, and part of my role is to try to bring Arla to working closer with SMEs and entrepreneurs, and finding new ways of approaching products and business models outside our own. We invite our large customers to come and innovate with us at the lab. We want to duplicate this more and more, and also to be involved in the incubation of start-ups.</p> | <p>I think the main driver for our business in the future will be people’s concern in living longer and healthier lives – health will be the big driver throughout the food industry. There are increasingly effective technologies being developed to measure your health and fitness, which will impact the type of products we introduce in the market.</p> <p>There will soon be constant monitoring of all of your vital signs – technology which may tell you: “this week, your calcium levels are lower and you may need x grams of cheese.” There is going to be a big connection between products with strong health credentials and the maintenance and self-reporting of heath. Arla is in the right place in terms of understanding consumption and health-monitoring technologies.</p> <p>3-D printing offers some interesting opportunities, linked to new digital challenges. One possibility which is interesting for me, for instance, is whether new technologies can bring back old traditions – such as the popular tradition in the UK, in particular, of having your dairy product and bottle of milk delivered by the milkman to your front step. These are things that might come back in the digital world, and we have some people researching in that space – but aerial drones delivery are not part of that research just yet!</p> | <p>Well, we saw a series of outstanding innovations at the Arla Food Innovation Challenge. The Challenge winner – Miss Can, from Portugal – was a great example of the importance of creative consumer-focused innovation in an industry that may not seem sexy for entrepreneurs; in this case, canned fish.</p> <p>I am also really inspired by the innovations Arla is creating in terms of producing products which are not only ‘nutrient dense’, as our scientists call it, but are also about enjoying your life. It is not just about counting calories – so butter for instance, can be enjoyed as part of the rich life experience, with the right formulation and balance.</p> <p>But top of my list might be Arla’s successful translation of Nordic products into markets and cultures from the U.S. to China.</p> | Harry Barraza | View Edit Delete |
63 | <p>Bryony Winn is the Chief Strategy Officer for Anthem, Inc., a U.S. provider of health insurance. Anthem is the largest for-profit managed health care company in the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. She is responsible for developing Anthem’s Enterprise strategy and growth plans, as well as continuing to expand Anthem’s focus on delivering innovative solutions to all stakeholders. Prior to Anthem, she was Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. Before that, she was a partner in the Chicago office of McKinsey & Company.</p> | <p>I believe strongly that to successfully transform an organization to embrace and lead on digital innovation and change… you must ensure innovation is both <strong><em>everywhere</em></strong>… and <strong><em>somewhere</em></strong>. What I mean by this is that you must instill an innovation mindset within every nook and cranny of the organization... while also dedicating a full-time team to the ambition. If you only do the former, you risk the effort stalling due to weak ownership. If you only do the latter, you risk creating a silo, innovating in a vacuum and in a way that doesn’t make sense or isn’t embraced across your business.</p> <p>In sum, digital transformation requires a “yes, and…”not an “either/or” approach. You must drive cultural changes across the entire organization <strong><em>and </em></strong>set goals / launch dedicated initiatives within and owned by every single part of the business <strong><em>and </em></strong>build a team dedicated solely to driving innovation.</p> | <p>Innovation in healthcare... is hard. It is a highly regulated industry; has incredibly varied delivery systems across the world, limiting the spread of best practices and innovation; is dominated by large industry incumbents and significant barriers to entry for new players; and is unparalleled and high stakes – with lives potentially on the line when innovations don’t work.</p> <p>This has all contributed to digital innovation (and even adoption!) significantly lagging behind other industries. Compared to the digital transformations in other industries (think: the electric car, app-based food and grocery delivery, music streaming, etc.) the disjointed and often analog consumer experience within the healthcare system can feel archaic to consumers.</p> <p>I see my sector’s history of innovation paralysis, however, as a fantastic opportunity to leapfrog. And, this leapfrogging is well underway – new healthcare technologies (virtual care solutions, remote monitoring, AI algorithms to read chest X-rays, personalized medicine therapies… the list goes on) and advancements in data and analytics are transforming my industry at an unparalleled rate. This transformation has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which placed intense and immediate pressure on my industry to respond. We rushed to develop vaccines, create virtual care options, and adapt our products and services to the “new normal.” COVID-19 has fundamentally changed my industry, and we will continue to invest in innovation to meet the demands of our time.</p> | <p>At my company, we are intensely focused on fostering an innovation culture and mindset in all of our employees. Equally important, however, are the organizational changes we are making to enable these culture changes and mindset shifts. We recognize that it is not enough to tell people to think creatively with an eye towards the future… you must also provide an environment that will enable and empower these changes. This means re-imagining the often long-ingrained processes and structures that can hold back innovation to create a more agile organization. At my company, this means re-designing everything from the way we measure and track our performance to the way we run our day-to day meetings, to the format of our materials and agendas.</p> | <p>I believe the acceleration of consumerism will be the defining force of the healthcare industry in the post-COVID-19 era. By this I mean so much more than consumers demandingmore user-friendly products. Rather, the “consumer voice” in healthcare, already influential, will grow and consumers will expect more of our industry than to simply provide healthcare services – they will demand <em>health</em>.</p> <p>They will demand <em>health</em> that is affordable – to meet the ever-increasing affordability challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 epidemic (44% of US consumers reported not being able to pay a $1K medical bill).</p> <p>They will demand <em>health</em> that delivers chronic condition management, not just urgent care. (American consumers are aging rapidly, and this growing population has significant health needs, with over 2/3 of seniors living with more than 2 chronic conditions.)</p> <p>And finally, they will demand <em>health </em>inclusive of mental, not just physical care (as COVID-19 increases the prevalence and severity of already under-treated behavioral health conditions).</p> | <p>One of the pitfalls I’ve seen when an organization launches an innovation strategy is the “endless pilots” trap – meaning, they constantly incubate and test ideas, partnerships, and new technologies… but never bring anything to scale. The best innovation teams tackle this risk head on, continuously assessing their pipeline for promise of success and scalability, defining stage gates at which to evaluate their initiatives, and deploying strict criteria to evaluate impact. The result? The portfolio of initiatives become incredibly curated and purposeful; pilots without impact are sunsetted rather than stalled; and successful initiatives are implemented quickly and more broadly. These team are seen as a true incubators of the company’s future – rather than a lone-ranger team running wild with flashy, crazy, impractical ideas. </p> | Bryony Winn | View Edit Delete |
45 | <p>Ayad sees a trend in the retail landscape where the front end registers disappear, and where check-out lines are eliminated through predictive data analytics, sensors, and artificial intelligence – and, eventually, where self-driving shopping carts meet you at the entrance of the store with your shopping list already uploaded into the cart screen, and even direct you to the items you need. </p> | <p>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.</p> <p>If you really think about the retail industry, so many innovations have compelled companies to start to think different, to act different, and to plan for potentially different outcomes. Within workforce management, for example, the industry is going through tremendous shifts due to the expansion in internet selling coupled with rapidly changing demographics and regulations. Thus, brick and mortar stores are under a different type of pressure. And it is said that necessity is the mother of all inventions, so many organizations find the dynamics of the environment and the accelerated speed by which innovation is happening a threat and an opportunity leading to new strategies and innovations.</p> <p>I’m of the opinion that societies change slowly, and despite so many years in e-commerce rapid growth, e-commerce is still a fraction of the total retail and service industries. So, it is going to continue to be a combination of digital and physical for the retail industry. Many organizations are utilizing data - predictive modeling, advanced algorithms - to better forecast work in the stores. And once work is forecasted and measured, then it becomes easier to schedule people to be at the right places and times - either when the truck is coming to the store to deliver products, or when customers are coming to the stores to receive a service.</p> <p>You need optimizing software to help deliver efficiency. But no one platform is going to be the only and the ultimate solution. I think what's so clear, at least in my mind, is that the future is a blend of the digital and physical capabilities.</p> <p>Based on my academic and my industry knowledge, I can tell you that customers want to shop anytime and anywhere. Leading retailers, including Bed-Bath, want to serve customers wherever, whenever, and however they wish to be served. Leading retailers want to be there for customers when they want to shop, the way they want to shop, and the way they want to complete the transaction, whether it is “ship it to my home” or “let me pick it from the store”, or a combination of both.</p> <p>What's exciting about the current technology is how friendly it is to everyone involved. For example, 10 years ago you had to go to the store to see your schedule as an employee. And the manager of the store ultimately decided who worked when. There was little freedom or flexibility. Today, technology allows you to see your schedule on your phone, and even to opt for available shifts. Employees can swap shifts with their coworkers if they need to, without disrupting operations. This is a significant win-win change.</p> <p>The technology is not only allowing organizations to respond better to customer needs, but also to employee's needs and situations. It's becoming more participatory versus top-down. And it is proven in research and in practice that happy employees create an environment of happiness for the customers. Efficient workforce management is beneficial to customers, and to the business. That's why companies invest in them.</p> <p>In terms of benefiting from customer insights, today, you can measure and map customers’ movement in the stores from the entry point to the exit point through sensors. Based on data, you would know exactly, or on average, know how long the customers will be shopping in your store. Eventually, you would know when they're going to get to the register. Ultimately, you will be able to know the number of employees that need to be at the front end to help the customers exit the building and pay for the merchandise. So, it is not just long-term predictive modeling, but on-time, live, as you go, so that there will be totally no long lines up front for customers who choose to interact with an employee, and managers would be able to respond faster to customers’ needs. </p> | <p>I’m very familiar with two industries: the retail industry and the academic industry. Luckily, both industries have adopted and encouraged innovation, perhaps because of the competitive nature of the retail industry, and the critical thinking nature of academia.</p> <p>Fear of failure and siloes are often common challenges. Financial obstacles and opportunities are both drivers and blockers of embracing innovation. You might go after an innovation because it's financially rewarding, but then you may not embrace it fully because it's financially burdening on the short term.<br /><br />Some are short-sighted; they might think about the quarterly results, and not necessarily look at the long term. The other fascinating aspect is the speed of innovations. Some companies are hesitant to embrace innovation because today's innovative solutions may become obsolete quickly, which add burdens on the organization; especially from a change management perspective. However, perhaps the biggest impediment lies is the culture of the organization; organizational culture is the make or break for innovation. </p> | <p>The retail industry was among the first industries to benefit from (disruptive) innovation. Take Walmart for example, it started with Sam Walton’s innovative ideas about the nature of the retail store - the role of transportation and logistics, and the mindset of trying new things. Walmart optimized innovation by supporting its people to become owners of the business and by techniques such as profit sharing and career planning. You see, employees are called associates, and associates call Walmart stores “my store”. A culture that's built on the idea that the employee is the owner of the business unit, not the keeper of the business unit, is positioned to benefit from the unlimited creativity of people.</p> <p>Another example from Walmart: They have a practice called VPI, or Value Producing Items, where employees compete and have fun adopting and promoting specific items. Employees get recognized on results. All this infuse tremendous amounts of energy, engagement, pride, and innovation into organizational culture.</p> | <p>The Internet of things, robots, artificial intelligence, brick and mortar store closure, regulations, and the entry of new organizations to the marketplace. For example, the entry of Lidl from Europe to USA.</p> <p>Lidl already has 10,000 stores in Europe, and they’re coming to the United States like Aldi did, and Aldi already has 1,600 stores in the US, and by some reports, in the 2018, they may have another 400 stores, reaching 2,000 stores. That's almost half the size of Walmart! Granted, the stores are smaller, but they are everyday low-price, because of their competitive pricing and their business model Walmart has to respond, and they are. Walmart recently announced drops in the price, and Target - a couple of days ago - announced a significant investment in price. So that entry of new organizations, and new regulations will significantly impact the retail industry.</p> | <p>From my perspective, one of the innovative strategies that I find very compelling is the idea of underground delivery of freight, supported by drones and self-driven cars and robots. The idea of moving freight underground by a magnetic field that's created by electrified coils, when complemented by drones and self-driven cars seems fascinating and disruptive. Research is happening, especially in the UK, around the concept of underground fright delivery. Why not, water and electricity are delivered to homes underground; why not packages! Imagine that! </p> | Amine Ayad | View Edit Delete |
48 | <p>Digital marketing entrepreneur and strategy innovator Sean Shoffstall is pioneering a more relevant and measurable approach to messaging in today’s multi-channel world of engagement. Shoffstall formerly delivered data-driven marketing strategies for Fortune 500 brands at Teradata. Now, he is a prominent speaker and thought leader who is widely credited for successfully leveraging the “Quantifiable Creativity” marketing approach.</p> <p>Despite the emergence of numerous new marketing technologies, Shoffstall told BPI he sees the state of innovation in digital marketing as stagnant, with training that lags the landscape, and marketers who spend too much time mastering complex technologies and too little time on messaging and strategy. </p> <p>Sean founded his own company, Crave Metrics, which will serve as the host for a software product with game changing potential. Having decoded both B2B and B2C customer brand engagement within growing channels, data and devices, Shoffstall is writing the code that he believes will automatically cut to the relevant numbers.</p> <p>Sean tells BPI: “My ultimate goal is to benefit the marketer and the end consumer. The marketer wanting to create an awareness campaign should be able to log into our platform Crave Metrics, and find the top five awareness campaigns that have run in the last six months. The marketer can then find the right marketing mix that is perfect for a given audience and truly considers how to help the end consumer. If we start messaging customers with the right marketing message mix, then we can send fewer messages to consumers." He adds “Our goal is to have an alpha out at the end of June, and we have already identified a few key customers to be working on that pilot with. We will hopefully have an open beta in mid-September.”</p> <p>Shoffstall says the past seven years has seen a significant consolidation of platforms. Marketers are spending more time on technology than on messaging. He believes we need to bring the power of the marketing message back, leveraged by the power of platforms.</p> | <p>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.</p> <p>Marketers look at a campaign and might see the click-through rate and the open rate, but they are not instantly able to see how it compares against other similar campaigns, or against their company's benchmarks.</p> <p>Our platform will allow customers that review a campaign to not only see what their score is against the Crave Metrics key marketing measures, but also to see how it performs against the company benchmarks, and against similar campaign benchmarks. This answers the marketer’s question that many platforms miss today, I’ve got a metric but what does it mean?</p> | <p>There is an influx of so much new technology. Companies must constantly go from Paid Search, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Email, to Instagram, and be prepared to adapt and market to any and all other digital marketing technologies that develop popular user platforms. Current digital marketing technologies are complicated and ever changing: this leads to siloed information and messaging, and can lead to paralysis for marketing teams who get stuck with basic batch and blast marketing.</p> <p>In spite of all this, universities and colleges are still primarily teaching traditional marketing strategies. Companies then hire young people simply because they know how to use certain media platforms or marketing tools, which can be problematic on its own. New educational and training systems will be vital to success in coming years to help bridge the talent gap. </p> | <p>The leadership of a given team drives its innovation. One thing I have always done with my teams whenever someone new joins us, is bring up the top three to five trends I am seeing succeed with our customers or elsewhere, and ask them questions about its success, which opens the door for them to bring their own ideas to the conversation. </p> <p>At the same time, I am willing to pilot certain ideas. I am willing to invest 8 percent, 10 percent, 12 percent of my team’s time to pilot one of these ideas. We cannot always go after the newest platforms, but we can test new platforms on campaigns. If a campaign fails, at least we learn something. </p> <p>I have also seen mid to large size companies create a sandbox marketing environment that allows a safe atmosphere to test the latest social platform or API integration, just to see if it breaks. If it works in the sandbox, we bring it in. You need a partnership between leadership, the IT group, and the marketing department to try something new.</p> | <p>VR and augmented reality will change marketing. In-game marketing is another platform that is similar, these immersive environments is where we are going to see the most growth and change. Marketers will need to again focus on the message and make sure it fits in these environments without being obtrusive or obnoxious.</p> <p>I believe another key business trend will be, I hope, a focus more on consumer data privacy. We protect financial and healthcare data and have seen the repercussions when it isn’t secured. Consumers give marketers their trust by accepting cookies, by signing up for our newsletters, by purchasing and registering their products. They entrust marketers with their data, so marketers have a responsibility to use the data for marketing without releasing potentially sensitive information. I think customers will start to demand more protections like other sensitive data. </p> | <p>Amazon's Alexa. The simplicity of voice activation to access music at any time, to interact with different lists and calendars, to listen to podcasts or news sources, and to use fewer screens, is a game changer for the consumer marketplace. </p> | Sean Shoffstall | View Edit Delete |
61 | <p>Dhrupad Trivedi, president and chief executive officer of A10 Networks, brings global leadership experience across multiple businesses and is passionate about driving leading technology businesses to win by creating value for customers.</p> | <p>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 look at things from multiple points of view. You have to think about it from a technology point of view; you have to think about it from a user point of view; and you have to think about it from a structural and macro trend point of view. So, when I think about this, I think about organizations and cultures that are continuously connecting what they do with how they can help their customers and markets achieve value. This may include breakthrough technology, doing something no one else can do, but it is always about connecting what you do with your customers and markets. It may be your customers don’t really know the solutions they need, but still you need a culture that is always focused on solving the customer’s problem.</p> | <p>One of the biggest impediments is being anchored to what has worked in the past. Too many technology companies begin by doing something great, but they fail to understand what the next great thing should be. Where can I continued to innovate? The second factor, which is related to that, is inside-out thinking rather than outside-in. Companies can spend too much time thinking about what they do without bridging that to what their customers really need. Companies may have important technology and expertise that their customers don’t have, but they still need to make that relatable to the customer and ultimately deliver solutions that improve the customer experience and deliver better business outcomes. Now there are some innovations that you may build that never translate into customer success, and that’s okay. However, it’s critical that you keep thinking about where your customers and markets are going and how you can help them get there.</p> | <p>One of the things that drives innovation is creating a problem-solving culture. You need to create a culture of examining the biggest problems your market faces and figuring out how you can help solve them. The problem might not be the product itself. It might be that you need to make the product easier to use and consume. Maybe it’s a technology problem. Maybe it’s a usability problem, or maybe it’s a customer interface problem. But being clear on the problem you’re trying to solve is essential. It takes an analytical mindset in which you are always being driven by the problem you’re trying to solve. You are trying to solve a problem in a new and different way, and there is always the chance that that won’t be the right way. There is always an executional risk. But an analytical mindset will help you understand that risk, along with the invention side of the equation. It guides you in a more structured way and helps you understand why you are trying to do something and what success will look like.</p> | <p>There are many. One of the really big trends in our industry has to do with the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0. More sensors and objects are being connected and are collecting and generating more data. And all of that runs through networks and into applications. All of it needs to be efficiently and flexibly managed and that represents a major opportunity and challenge for our industry. The second thing that affects our business is that, as all of this gets connected, it creates a naturally attractive target for cyber criminals and attacks. A10 Networks brings a deep understanding of networks, but also an understanding of the nature and structure of those attacks with the technical expertise to detect them and remediate them. I don’t expect cybersecurity to become less of a problem over the coming years, especially as connectivity becomes more and more important. A third big trend is the continued adoption of the cloud for storage and compute. This is a huge trend for the industry and also for us. How do we support our customers as they continue to move into the hybrid environment of public and private clouds and on-premises systems? All of these trends are also creating a major skills gap, so it’s incumbent on us to continually create greater customer ease of use.</p> | <p>Achieving alignment across the organization and all of your teams—commercial teams, engineering teams, product teams, marketing teams—on why you are doing things is really a strategic imperative. And then you need to connect all of that to the customer. As I’ve said before, not everything you try is going to work. But if you can create a much more inclusive conversation on why you are doing something, it really helps you get there. Now I think it’s true that if you do everything the customer tells you to do, you will not be very successful because the customer doesn’t know what he or she doesn’t know. But if you understand their underlying problems, you can be far more effective as an innovator. What we are trying to do at A10 Networks is to create a shorter closed loop between sales, engineering and product management, so that we can function as one team focused on solving problems for our customers, whether that is a new product or a new consumption model, for example. Another strategic requirement for A10 is always focusing part of our development efforts on breakthrough ideas and solutions. They may have a low probability of success, but if we are successful, we will solve major challenges for our customers.</p> | Dhrupad Trivedi | View Edit Delete |
7 | <p>Chris Hummel has a 20+-year career in enterprise sales and marketing and is a globally-recognized thought leader and widely-respected senior executive in the technology industry. Chris Hummel is a true international executive, having lived, worked, and successfully led organizations around the globe, including the US, Germany, Eastern Europe and Asia.</p> | <p>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 encourage a strong preference for thinking ‘outside the box’ and a willingness to take risk to foster a change/innovation culture. </p> | <p>Innovation is stifled in companies that operate in silos, where leaders are inwardly focused, and where stakeholders have allowed business challenges, market dynamics or competitive pressures to dominate decision making and investment decisions. There is ample evidence of brands who have seen market leading positions deteriorate due to over-confidence and too much “we know best” mentality. Finally, companies whose research and development agendas are dominated by engineering or product focus rather than a market focus often fall behind peers from an innovation perspective.</p> | <p>A determined shift to a market-focused R&D agenda is helping to drive an accelerated pace of innovation at my company. We have shifted away from investment decisions driven by the product portfolio or so-called “long tail” development projects toward a decision schema driven on careful analysis of industry trends and changing customer requirements. Those companies whose investment priorities are the result of market-facing analysis will have a faster time to value from innovation projects.</p> | <p>The emergence of improved collaboration and communications technologies will enable innovation workers to better come together as virtual teams and amplify the collective effort of today’s “anywhere workers.” Such technologies will seamlessly combine voice, video, text, structured and unstructured content while also enabling a much improved collaborative environment that will drive not only higher levels of business performance but also accelerate the pace of innovation.</p> | <p>I admire Apple for what they have done for product design. Frog showed us the power of bringing customers into the conversation around innovation. In the end, I admire any company who has the courage to seek a better alternative when the “good enough” option won’t do.</p> | Chris Hummel | View Edit Delete |
62 | Rolf Unterberger, CEO of Cherry Group and founder/CEO of RMU CAPITAL, is an internationally accomplished executive Manager with over 25 years’ experience in different industries, countries and leadership positions. | <p>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.</p> <p>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 in particular, which became commonly referred to as “CHERRY switches.”</p> <p>In the early 1960s, CHERRY expanded to Germany, creating a global brand known for key switches and high-quality computer input devices. In 1973, we began manufacturing computer keyboards. Today we are the oldest manufacturer of computer keyboards and a pioneer in the computer hardware industry.</p> <p>In 1984, we filed a patent for the CHERRY MX switch. In 2008, CHERRY was sold off to a German firm called ZF Friedrichshafen, a company that specializes in parts for automobiles. In 2016, CHERRY was acquired by the private investment firm GENUI, and our focus shifted from automotive parts to computer input devices.</p> <p>These are just a few milestones to show that innovation and change have always been an integral part of CHERRY.</p> <p>To make sure this spirit doesn’t get lost nowadays, we are working and building innovation hubs internally as well as together with external people. Furthermore, we are running small innovation teams and projects outside the box or the so called comfort zone.</p> | <p>As a German company, we are subject to a whole host of legal regulations and provisions - at both national and European level. This goes so far that we have to comply with different governmental and environmental regulations for products in different European countries and have to prove a large number of certifications.</p> <p>Another problem is the fact that our products can easily be copied. These pirate copies then naturally fall far short of our high standards in terms of quality, environmental compatibility and safety. They damage our good reputation with all the unpleasant consequences.</p> | <p>To think around the corner, to always be one step ahead - that was already the motto of our founder, Walter Cherry. So it is not surprising, that the CHERRY brand stands for top quality, innovation, high-end design, technological expertise. This is what we still live every day.</p> <p>We are constantly working with innovation consultants. One of their tasks is to constantly challenge us in the development of new products and features. The basis for this is a clearly defined product development process that also includes milestones.</p> <p>To always be better than the competition is a tradition, a basic constant and our daily motivation! After all, we have a good name to defend. One way of achieving this is by setting up a review and approval meeting.</p> | <p>We, too, will continue to be strongly influenced by the major trends that have been emerging not just since today. First of all, there is the digital revolution, which is far from over and affects us in many ways.</p> <p>This starts quite trivially with the fact that many aspects of social life are digital and we therefore spend much more time in front of the computer - whether we shop online, deal with official business virtually, chat over the internet, play games, stream. All this requires high-quality input devices that are resilient and also meet expectations in terms of form and ergonomics.</p> <p>The world of work is also becoming increasingly digital, the forms of work more arbitrary if you like. More than ever before, people are working from where they want and when they want. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear to even the last home office refusenik that things actually work wonderfully. So in future, work will be much more hybrid and the home office will become a permanent feature. This, too, will undoubtedly have an impact on our business development.</p> | <p>Being innovative is virtually part of our DNA. This means that we actually see ourselves as early adopters. However, we are also self-critical and are very aware when we need to catch up in certain areas. Only recently we announced the acquisition Theobroma Systems Design and Consulting GmbH, an Austrian-based developer and trusted manufacturer of embedded systems. These support various industrial applications in the field of IoT and Industry 4.0. With this acquisition, CHERRY is specifically expanding its development and production capacities in the security sector.</p> <p>Furthermore, we partnered with Argand Partners to support Cherry’s next phase of growth. Our business has gone from strength to strength, and we look forward to continued investment in our people, research & development and manufacturing technology. The positive trends currently accelerating the adoption of PC gaming and the digitalization of healthcare make it an exciting time to be Cherry.</p> | Rolf Unterberger | View Edit Delete |
22 | <p>Mark Manney is the Founder and CEO of Infobeing.com - a website disrupting the forefront of human interaction and trade practices. Mark left his corporate life and Seattle roots to travel the world and study new ways of commerce. While practicing international customs and eCommerce abroad, Mark was able to identify a major issue in networking practices of the present. This led to his creation of an ideal People’s Economy via Infobeing. Mark believes that through innovative networking and modern trade, the People’s Economy will help lead the world to a more productive and healthier lifestyle.</p> | <p>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.</p> <p>Social media contributes to information overload by providing a massive amount of irrelevant information. This makes us feel physically ill. Information overload is becoming a real problem. Infobeing.com is different because it is designed so that users spend minimum time on the site and maximum time living, doing, and becoming.</p> <p>Another problem with today’s social media is that there is no real mechanism to meet new people in order to easily form mutually-beneficial relationships. These sites are designed primarily for staying in touch with existing friends or, occasionally, meeting someone new in a random way. Infobeing is designed for the purpose of helping you meet the new people you need to know in order to move your life forward.</p> <p>Social media leads to stagnation and inaction. It is passive. Infobeing uses the potential of the network world to create a People economy where everyone is doing what they want, what they are good at, just as they live in freedom and maximize their earning potential. This isn’t happening on Facebook.</p> | <p>Today people remain stuck in a “corporate economy” paradigm. Our most important economic relationships are with brands, corporations, and companies. The vast majority of our purchase of goods and services are with organizations.</p> <p>My view is radically different. I’ve spent the past 10 years traveling the world and living mostly in Eastern Europe. Things are done a bit differently here. Relationships between people are valued most. If you need something fixed, need to hire someone for an odd job, or need some help…people look to other people. There is a massive person-to-person economy that is based on cash transactions or even “favors for favors”.</p> <p>The Infobeing People Economy replicates this in the online world. We provide a new option for people to form relationships and conduct transactions for goods and services with each other. This is a radically different paradigm where we begin to trust each other and work together based on mutual wants, needs, and skills.</p> | <p>As Founder and CEO of Infobeing, Innovation isn’t a conscious focus of mine. I don’t set out to innovate. I simply do what I think makes most sense, with essentially no regard for what anybody else is doing. This is one of the benefits of living abroad, away from conventional wisdom, for so many years.</p> <p>Beyond this, I think innovation is allowed to thrive, and will continue to thrive at Infobeing, because our goal is not only to maximize profit. We are founding Infobeing as Public Benefit Corporation. We will be auditing our performance against a charter that includes 5 requirements for serving the public good. We’ll remain completely ad-free, we will improve the overall happiness of our users, we will help our users achieve greater freedom, we will strengthen the local community through direct-democracy, and we will aim to do no harm to the planet.</p> | <p>I don’t care about changing an industry. I care about changing lives. People have access to amazing technology, but they don’t know how to use it to live in a better way. Infobeing is concerned with improving your quality of life in both the online and off-line world by making it easy for you to meet all of the people you need to know.</p> | <p>Follow your intuition. Meditate. Listen to your inner-voice first and let it drown-out any voices of conventional wisdom. The purpose of your life is to bring your unique perspective to the world. Failure to innovate is failure to believe in yourself and act on those beliefs.</p> | Mark Manney | View Edit Delete |
20 | <p>Nicole Alexander is a marketer and lecturer; the quintessential unconventional marketer who has an extensive background working in digital media with an enviable list of blue-chip brands. She leads the Innovation Practice for Nielsen China and in this role she advises clients on the importance of evolving consumer journeys to deliver stronger returns on investment while eliminating fragmentation of brand communication across channels. </p> | <p>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.</p> | <p>Expertise. Even the best organizations believe they have the skills and expertise in-house or know how to access it in order to plan and make pivotal decisions. With today’s digital landscape there is an access to a global network of creative minds with depth of knowledge across sectors. By utilizing Open Innovation to understand how to develop new solutions, evolve existing frameworks and plan for human capital they will need to change their mindsets in a changing environment.</p> | <p>Unilever has been successful in adopting innovation from the bottom up and top down and supporting it within their communications; their day-to-day planning and how their employees are measured. Their new Global SVP of Consumer & Market Insights, Stan Sthanunathan, has been the mastermind behind this transformation supporting and provoking the organization to think differently from developing Innovation Centers to leveraging integrated data and insight globally. They are looking at consumerization today and in the future – particularly in D&E markets – and leveraging those insights to not only innovate on existing products but develop new ones with an eye on their sustainable footprint.</p> | <p>Machine Learning (i.e. Big Data and AI) will be the largest drivers of technological changes in the coming years, particularly when those solutions can pair complex processing decision making with human-like judgment. In the short-term, the rise of Machine capabilities could increase productivity and economic growth, causing a shift in human capital and growth patterns particularly within D&E markets. We currently see signs of this across medical, research, agriculture and transportation areas. In the longer-term, if Machines exceed human capabilities we will see a devaluation of labor, increase in income disparities paired with increasing GDP. The great challenge will be how we ensure that this rapid technological shift doesn’t leave people behind and blend that with policy change, education, and a fundamental shift in how we view capitalism.</p> | <p>Firstly, I admire any company that challenges the good enough or “this is how things have always been done”, mindset. Uber – who brings drivers together with customers – has innovated the way we experience on-demand transportation while also allowing individuals with a vehicle to be entrepreneurs. </p> | Nicole Alexander | View Edit Delete |
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