Innovator Profiles

Id Summary Bio Answer 1 Answer 2 Answer 3 Answer 4 Answer 5 Leader Actions
49  <p>In the UK&rsquo;s world of IT, Martin Summerhayes is known as &ldquo;The Billion Dollar Man,&rdquo; 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 &ndash; or, better still, already know or anticipate the problem &ndash; and refer them to the right channels to solve it.</p> <p>Summerhayes is now Head of Delivery Strategy and Service Improvement for Fujitsu &ndash; one of the world&rsquo;s top five IT service providers, with products and services available in&nbsp;more than 100 countries. The company&rsquo;s &ldquo;human-centric&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&nbsp;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&rsquo;s needs.</p> <p>One of Fujitsu&rsquo;s most famous clients in the UK is McDonald&rsquo;s. At a recent Fujitsu Forum event, Doug Baker, head of IT for McDonald's UK, said the partnership had gone beyond the traditional &ldquo;break-fix&rdquo; 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 &ndash; and the remarkable recognition that &ldquo;the biggest focus for technology innovation in restaurants is leveraging a customer&rsquo;s own device,&rdquo; &ndash; 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 &ldquo;invisible service provision.&rdquo; Martin Smithen, head of Fujitsu&rsquo;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&nbsp;in formulating business strategy, Doug Baker, head of IT for McDonald's UK, says, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p> <p>No one knows the value of both human intelligence and technology better than&nbsp;Summerhayes, who remarks, &ldquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</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&nbsp;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&rsquo;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&nbsp;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 &ndash; 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&nbsp;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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
18  <p class="p1">Thomas White is a co-founder and CEO of the C-Suite Network, which offers services and programs to connect business leaders. From invitation-only conferences, custom-tailored content, C-Suite Radio and C-Suite Television, to the educational programs from C-Suite Academy, the network aims to cover the diverse needs of high-performing professionals. Prior to C-Suite, Thomas started 10 companies in the fields of technology, publishing, market research and corporate consulting. He also holds four patents and is co-author of a book on business process technology, executive producer of radio programming and a speaker.</p>  <p>Leadership must allow people to take risks without fear of being fired. Companies only innovate when they are willing to go outside the box. Out-of-the-box thinking allows organizations to see new opportunities and execute against those opportunities. Change happens when leaders realize they can no longer maintain their vision through status quo.</p>  <p>Status quo. People hate getting out of their comfort zones unless their organizational culture challenges them to make improvements and strive for excellence. Status quo will kill innovation.&nbsp;</p>  <p>We&rsquo;re never satisfied with the way things are. That doesn&rsquo;t mean we don&rsquo;t celebrate our successes, but we recognize that each success is a milestone &ndash; not the destination. The day after the celebration, we get back to new challenges that bring us to the next level of innovation and change.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>  <p>First, changes in digital media allow everyone to tell their story through video and online storytelling. This flattens the playing field so large companies and small companies have the same opportunities. Second is the use of digital technology used to create more authentic relationships with customers. We now know so much about them and are able to connect with our customers without pigeonholing them into these big buckets of stereotypes. Big data allows companies to reverse the trend of depersonalization, which sends customer loyalty through the roof.</p>  <p>The obvious examples are Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, but innovation doesn&rsquo;t just happen in the venue of big companies. We&rsquo;re seeing businesses like Dropbox and DocuSign really take off and provide essential services to organizations around the globe. There are also startups like Uber and Fitbit that are changing our society and inspiring both entrepreneurs and larger organizations with their innovative technologies and solutions.</p>  Thomas White 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&nbsp;introduced AI into production&nbsp;all the way back in 2017.&nbsp; Our approach is also different in that we are focused on an AI-First approach.&nbsp; This means that our team considers how AI can take the operational lead in managing and automating routine requests and work tasks&nbsp;as we design and build systems; we don&rsquo;t just add in AI where it&rsquo;s easy.&nbsp;The industry will&nbsp;still need people, but&nbsp;Serviceaide is helping to shift their&nbsp;focus to more strategic, high value&nbsp;work.&nbsp; This will result in increased productivity and efficiency.</p>  <p>Technology is evolving quicky, in some cases daily.&nbsp; Take for example, Large Language Models, we have shifted our approach to&nbsp;monthly&nbsp;in order to maximize performance from&nbsp;the best model.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;The development team is passionate about leveraging emerging technologies to maximize worker productivity.&nbsp;Our&nbsp;service and support&nbsp;vertical extends from IT to potentially&nbsp;all departments of an organization.&nbsp;&nbsp;This passion for what AI can do touches everyone in the company from development to support to marketing and sales.&nbsp;When you have those&nbsp;&ldquo;ah ha&rdquo; 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&nbsp;how a&nbsp;company adopts the newer technologies&nbsp;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. &nbsp;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. &nbsp;But&nbsp;it can be scary to add something completely different&nbsp;that is not well understood and comes with risk if not leveraged properly.&nbsp;The great news is that Serviceaide&nbsp;and others are bringing new solutions to the market that will drive digital process transformation - not AI for AI&rsquo;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&nbsp;designed an AI strategy into&nbsp;the product, have a clear vision and roadmap, and can&nbsp;show true ROI.&nbsp;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.&nbsp; Collaboration, operational and departmental and&nbsp;training systems being disconnected is a chronic problem for organizations. &nbsp;By pulling all this disparate information together, via knowledge federation, employees can find what they need from one source. &nbsp;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
29  <p>With both corporate wellness and elite staff retention increasingly critical for large enterprises, President Charles Lusk and his partners at On-Site Dental Solutions have pioneered a game-changing model that is solving multiple challenges at once.&nbsp;</p> <p>It turns out that in an economy where employee populations are best treated as treasured communities, an on-site dental suite offers far more value than an additional amenity to the gym and the company laundry.&nbsp;</p>  <p>We&rsquo;re very proud of our title as the first fully dedicated provider of turn-key dental suites. We sought to create a care delivery model for dentistry that previously did not exist in the same form, quality and packaging for campus environments.&nbsp; We wanted to bottle the magic of private dental practice and drop it into corporate settings in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, and customized to those settings. We love the way clinical settings of every kind are trending more towards aesthetically pleasing environments as opposed to sterile and impersonal settings as found in days gone by. &nbsp;</p> <p>We like to think of ourselves as pioneers in this area.&nbsp; Dentistry is perhaps the most interpersonal form of healthcare, since the services are provided &ldquo;face-to-face.&rdquo; While we are unable to eliminate every element of that experience, we strive hard to control the things within our reach to positively impact the clients senses.&nbsp;But the value-adds have been game changing too. We know that a filling today avoids a very costly crown tomorrow. But there is also a high correlation between a lack of routine dental care and large medical claims involving chronic disease later on.</p> <p>One of the most valuable commodities is time, and employers are measuring productivity in terms of not just absenteeism, but also &ldquo;presenteeism&rdquo;, which involves remarkably significant losses &ndash; the degree to which they don&rsquo;t have fully engaged employees within the workplace. If you have toothache, it's probably a major reason why you&rsquo;re not mentally engaged.</p> <p>Also, a lot of our clients are really interested in optimal recruitment and retention &ndash; and they know the millennial generation is looking closely at the work environment.</p> <p>Having a boutique dental office on-site goes a long way for clients in communicating the message that we really care about our community.&nbsp; In fact, we do frequently have prospective employees come into our offices, because the employers are very proud of these amenities.</p>  <p>The &ldquo;status-quo&rdquo; is always an impediment.&nbsp; We realize this isn&rsquo;t unique to our organization but rather a consistent theme throughout organizations looking to meet needs in new and innovative ways.&nbsp;Both end users and employees have to embrace the bundling of traditional dental services in a non-traditional setting, the corporate or university campus environment.&nbsp; Because the patient has gone out for dental services for so long; it can take some time to comprehend the dentist operating where the patient already is!</p>  <p>Our company was founded on the principle of change.&nbsp; We have learned a lot about the need to build a culture that appreciates innovation and change. In interviews we describe &ldquo;change&rdquo; scenarios and ask those candidates as to whether those circumstances evoke feelings of comfort or discomfort.&nbsp; Of course, the excitement and adventure that comes with climates of innovation are highlighted as well as the challenges.&nbsp;</p> <p>We ultimately want individuals and team members to be where they are supposed to be, whether it be with our growing organization or another that can offer more of a daily routine. We believe no single person has a monopoly on good ideas.&nbsp; We love to celebrate the individual with a unique outlook on how to maximize our potential as an organization.&nbsp; This begins with the patient experience and extends to our institutional &ldquo;host&rdquo; clients.&nbsp; We try hard to craft each relationship with care and a certain level of customization. &nbsp;</p>  <p>Already, we are able to provide client employers with new analytical HR tools&ndash; bringing population health statistics to the table, which the employer can reflect on and use to make key decisions around their populations. At our core, we are still a services organization.&nbsp; Our product is our people.&nbsp; Leaders in the dental field will be distinguished by the excellence with which they provide high quality and ethical dentistry.&nbsp; Ultimately this comes down to the talent and ethos of the individual dentist and the care team that surrounds them.&nbsp;</p>  <p>I really like Spotify. You&rsquo;d think that there were so many different ways already out there to package music, but their approach really resonated for so many people, including myself &ndash; to offer music that reflects your mood. Similarly, our company is not reinventing the wheel in our space; we&rsquo;re just taking it down a path it hasn&rsquo;t been before, which is perhaps comparable to the exceptional Spotify approach.</p>  Charles Lusk View Edit Delete
52  <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Hicham Sabir is the Open Innovation Leader for North America at Philips Lighting. He holds an Engineering Degree from French Engineering School&nbsp;<em>Arts et M&eacute;tiers</em>&nbsp;and a Master of Science in Applied Physics from&nbsp;<em>Chalmers University of Technology</em>&nbsp;in Sweden. Prior to his current position, Sabir worked in Philips Lighting&rsquo;s R&amp;D and venture teams to build up Philips&rsquo; LED Lamps portfolio, professional systems and connectivity solutions. Sabir says the iconic global brand is responding to a profound disruption &ndash; connectivity &ndash; not only with leading connected solutions and optimized illumination but also with transformative new business models.</span></p> <p>In addition to its market-leading suite of lighting products for both B2B and B2C environments, Philips Lighting offers data-enabled solutions in an extraordinary diversity of applications &ndash; from helping building managers optimize their office spaces, to guiding retail shoppers to sale items with game-changing accuracy, to improving safety and livability for smart cities.</p> <p>&ldquo;Lighting is ubiquitous,&rdquo; says Sabir. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s everywhere people are. Imagine connecting even a small percentage of this lighting, you will end up with the largest connected IoT network in the physical space. Our ambition for Philips Lighting is to be the lighting company for the Internet of Things, turning light sources into data points to connect more devices, places and people through light.&rdquo;</p> <p>Sabir says the company is achieving transformation through a collaborative approach to innovation that includes partnerships with expert vendors in new technologies and use case applications to achieve their maximum potential through lighting infrastructure.</p> <p>He told BPI that the applications and value emerging from its data-enabled services are such that it is no longer optimal for traditional procurement or lighting executive teams to explore partnerships on their own &ndash; because other departments&rsquo; stakeholders, from IT and finance to sustainability and marketing, stand to benefit directly from the data-enabled solutions.&nbsp;</p> <p>&ldquo;From our <a href="http://www.lighting.philips.com/main/systems/connected-lighting/citytouch">Philips CityTouch</a> connected street lighting solution to the category leader for connected home lighting, <a href="http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/">Philips Hue</a>,&ndash; connectivity is driving innovation use cases throughout the entire Philips Lighting portfolio,&rdquo; he says.</p>  <p>There are two significant trends driving the growth of the lighting industry and new innovations in lighting technology.</p> <p>The first is increasing demand for more energy-efficient light. According to the US Energy Information Association, <a href="https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity_use">lighting accounts for 10% of total electricity consumption in the US</a>. Switching to LED enables light-related energy savings up to 50% - and that number jumps to 80% when paired with smart controls. There is a tremendous retrofit opportunity as a significant portion of light points in the US still need to be converted to LED.</p> <p>The second is the increasing potential of lighting systems and services that harness the power of digital light. Lighting infrastructure already exists everywhere that people live, work, travel, shop, dine and interact. From cities and stores to offices and homes, lighting systems are being transformed into information pathways with the capacity to collect and share data, and offer new insights that enable, and really drive, the Internet of Things. These lighting systems become a conduit to exciting new services, enabled by data, that make people&rsquo;s lives more safe, inspired, and comfortable, make businesses more productive and profitable, make cities more efficient and livable, and make the world more sustainable and prosperous.</p> <p>Connectivity will continue to proliferate as technology evolves and volumes drive costs down. The smart city is a great example of growth potential for connectivity. Globally, just 2 percent of installed street lighting systems are connected today, but this number is set to reach 35 percent by 2025, according to a recent market analysis from Philips Lighting. This represents a huge opportunity to help enable smart cities in order to improve public safety and services.</p> <p>In retail, our visible light communication technology enables customers to have precise positioning of devices to help them navigate the retails stores and find sales, while at the same time providing the store with detailed analytics on what the shoppers are doing. In commercial buildings, connected lighting systems can collect, share and analyze data that uncover insights into new capabilities such as space optimization and employee experience. With technology that exists today, we can equip every light with a sensor that can collect all kinds of data points about the office environment and its uses. With these insights, there is so much more value that a building can afford its tenants, or companies offer to its employees, beyond illumination.</p> <p>The Open Innovation team is responsible for the identification of disrupting trends and the selection of the startups and partners that will help us respond to those disruptions. My approach with the open innovation team is to be vocal about what we are trying to do and find the right partners within the greater innovation ecosystem who specialize in areas of technology that are complementary. Our overall innovation strategy is to grow the company in data-enabled services and build partnerships with organizations who we may not otherwise have dealt with &ndash; those with higher risk profiles, or larger companies within verticals we would not normally engage.</p>  <p>The benefits of our connected systems go far beyond the lighting itself. When we talk to a city, we talk to the lighting and infrastructure and utility guys. They know all about lighting and energy savings, but when you start talking about acoustic sensing, or lighting that can help improve traffic safety, you need a discussion with additional departments. Those applications will trigger further innovation for both parties. We are starting to see cities hiring Chief Innovation Officers and CTOs, precisely to bridge the gap between technology , city operations and public services.</p>  <p>We have a long history of innovation, and we are well positioned on awareness on the need for innovation. Our 125-year legacy of innovation is core to our business and to meeting our customers&rsquo; needs.</p> <p>We are pioneering breakthrough innovations in products, system architectures and services &ndash; making bold investments in sensors, cloud-based controls platforms, connected lighting, indoor positioning technology and consumer-based personal wirelessly controlled home lighting systems.</p> <p>We invest approximately 5% of sales revenue in R&amp;D to ensure we remain at the forefront of lighting technological developments.</p> <p>Our culture was formerly structured around large internal R&amp;D teams. Over the past five or six years, we became more structured toward partnerships for external innovation. We recognize that there are partners that have complementary areas of expertise and experience. By sharing, learning and working with one another, we can explore new ideas and open new opportunities.</p> <p>There is no comparison with the current speed of innovation compared to ten years ago. There is a sense of urgency where a typical innovation project today will take three to six months, while that might have lasted two years prior to the LED revolution.</p> <p>Internally, we have a number of innovation challenges within and between our R&amp;D teams. For example, every few months, there will be a challenge for sourcing ideas from engineers on how new approaches can be applied elsewhere in the portfolio. We try to bridge this gap by involving additional stakeholders in the organization. One of the things that has been most instrumental is connecting with marketing. Meetings with our marketing teams on what they are seeing outside help us to make more informed decisions about how to improve our products or create new solutions.&nbsp;</p>  <p>We want to become a data-enabled services company. Technologies like AI and IoT are all critical to delivering services based on data insights, so they are vital for our continued success and innovation.</p> <p>We need to have connected systems and sensors to extract information from the physical space. We also need to make sense of unstructured data, which is where artificial intelligence comes in. And we need to be able to commercialize and offer services, including exciting new business models.</p> <p>In the professional space, in some of the smart cities and smart building projects we do, the customers are paying for lighting services, not for the light system itself. This is what we call light-as-a-service. Our revenue depends on the performance of the system, so it is vital to ensure the system is operating as efficiently and effectively as possible.</p> <p>With IoT, you can optimize maintenance contracts. If I send people to repair three street lights, they will have the right diagnosis and the right parts. If I see there are ten nearby lights that will fail in a month or two, I can make the decision to replace them all now to reduce my overall maintenance costs. The ideal scenario will send someone to fix the problem before the customer notices there is something wrong.</p>  <p>I am a big fan of innovative products like our Philips Hue connected home lighting system. When paired with smart home platforms, particularly voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit and Google Assistant, Philips Hue is transforming the way consumers experience and interact with light at home. Finally, I am intrigued by the autonomous driving revolution and the scaling-up of electric vehicles.</p>  Hicham Sabir View Edit Delete
35  <p>With more than 15 years in R&amp;D, Francois Ragnet specializes in successful transfer of innovation into Business. More recently, he focuses on pre-sales and is a technology evangelist, as well as managing an R&amp;D group within Xerox Global Services in charge of transferring breakthrough innovation. Francois has spent almost his entire career at Xerox, and understands Xerox's innovation strategy from many angles. For the past 8 years, he has focused his innovation experience at Xerox Services, and received the Netherlands National Contact Centre Association (NCCS) Innovation Award for the technology developed &amp; deployed by Raganets&rsquo; team in call centers in the Netherlands.&nbsp;He also currently holds 21 patents in the United States for various technologies he has developed since 2008 with various team members within Xerox. Francois holds a Masters in Telecommunications from the <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/edu/school?id=12465&amp;trk=prof-edu-school-name">Institut national des T&eacute;l&eacute;communications</a> in France.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Xerox has a long, well-known innovation tradition; it&rsquo;s widely known for producing game changing inventions in particularly the 70s and 80s, with light lens copiers for instance, and the mouse. But, historically, we were not always so effective in capitalizing on those innovations. But while the culture has been maintained, and deepened to all levels, Xerox has transformed dramatically in recent years. We are now the leading enterprise globally in BPO services in areas like healthcare, financial services, education and even transportation.</p> <p>In terms of traditional innovation and also blue sky research, we have 5000 scientists and engineers generating truly amazing things. The Xerox Innovation Group is a dynamic network of centers worldwide, including in the US, Canada, and France. We also have our major partnership in Japan with Fuji Xerox, and a center in India to capitalize on emerging markets.</p> <p>We have a strong innovation culture company-wide, making sure the blue sky research we have going in Xerox Innovation Group is repeated and amplified across our services business. Some of this work does not relate directly to our core business today, but we want to keep that flexibility of researchers to come up with totally new ideas.</p> <p>Innovation has been incremental in the BPO area, with profound results &ndash; you don&rsquo;t have millions to spend on R&amp;D in the service world, but the nice thing is that it is much more disruptive; you can innovate without multi-year projects. On the downside you have to be much quicker &ndash; you don&rsquo;t have multiple years to develop those inventions.</p> <p>Recently I&rsquo;ve been involved more in customer care &ndash; an area we&rsquo;ve invested quite a lot in, and where we place a lot of our innovation focus. Evidence of this is the Call Centre Association Innovation Award that went to our Xerox Virtual Performance Indicator product in 2013 &ndash; which is now deploying across the corporation, and which we plan to sell to external customers.</p> <p>The indicator is really a small innovation, technically &ndash; but it does make a huge difference, once you make it right, you make 50,000 agents deployed more motivated, more productive, and more into their job. We have invested a lot in gamification &ndash; we&rsquo;re motivating those agents by bringing an element of games and fun into their day-to-day work. They have key performance indicators, but we don&rsquo;t want it to be a case of &lsquo;Big Brother watching you&rsquo; &ndash; we want to use gamification in a positive way, and get people into their jobs. We are finding that agents are enjoying the spirit so much that they virtually belong to the customer company.</p> <p>Turnover rates can be 100% for traditional call centers, with people too stressed or bored. With these technologies, you ensure they stay longer; they are more competent; I suspect there is even less sick leave taken. We have created a real sense of community and engagement in the call centers.</p> <p>I believe we are able to make innovation work in a very difficult domain &ndash; Business Process Services - but are also able to deliver economies of scale, and even create potential new business for our customer.</p>  <p>The challenge the Business and Document Process Services sector is that it is a fast paced domain, which is constantly evolving with &ldquo;mini&rdquo; fixes &ndash; large, breakthrough innovation, although well needed, is not possible. Large corporations outsource largely to cut costs, and so &ldquo;cost-down&rdquo; is the primary driver for innovation. Reducing costs is a difficult driver for innovation &ndash; you start a project, put small fixes here and there; test and build successful innovations, and quickly drop those that aren&rsquo;t working.</p> <p>There is also a danger of deploying technology for its own sake. So we have ethnographers and scientists who study how work is being done; to tell us where technology can help, and be effective; and not just be technology for its own sake.</p> <p>We increasingly have a mix of ethnography, user-centric design, research, and &ldquo;Agile Innovation&rdquo; -&nbsp;part of this was to learn to fail quickly. Furthermore, innovation models were quite rigid &ndash; planned, multi-year innovations which are focused on industrial design; not adapted to services.</p>  <p>Innovation has been part of Xerox&rsquo;s DNA forever. Indeed, although Xerox has a long-standing tradition being focused on industrial products, the ACS acquisition in 2009 took us into a totally new world. We had to rethink processes - including innovation - totally.</p> <p>When we moved into Services and acquired Affiliated Computer Services we had to adapt drastically our vision for innovation &ndash; in ACS it was happening at a grass roots level, in small pockets. We have homogenized and built processes that touch just about everyone across the organization.</p> <p>Within our services business, it is important to have the right structures, so we have the office of the CIO for Services; we have executives in charge of bringing innovations to maturity. Each line of business has its own CIO, and each group proposes new innovation projects that make the whole company more agile, and the creative energy cascades down to everyone.</p> <p>We also like to be very customer-focused &ndash; so we have different ways of reaching out to and collaborating with our customers. For some of our top customers, we have Innovation Councils; we also have what we call &ldquo;Dreaming Sessions&rdquo;, where we bring customers out to our home in Grenoble (France), and show them some of our cutting edge research, and they talk to us about potential applications.</p> <p>Internally, we&rsquo;ve got processes for IP generation and for ideation, which encourages just about anyone, from call center agents to executive, to provide inputs.</p>  <p>A lot of technologies / models are potential game changers &ndash; cloud, mobility, SOA, BPM - the buzzword list is long! But at the end of the day, in our business, work is performed by humans and agents. I personally think technology alone will not be sufficient &ndash; we need to find other biggest leverage for motivation is gamification.</p> <p>Another key technology area is automation &ndash; to understand business processes and automate as much as possible with technologies such as Robotic Process Automation.</p>  <p>We want to revolutionize the call center arena, and making machines ever more intelligent in satisfying a customers&rsquo; request is a worthwhile goal. We haven&rsquo;t yet passed the &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo; &ndash; where, if you make a customer service call, you would not realize that you were talking to a machine. But we will be getting there someday hopefully -&nbsp; and there might be times where you actually will prefer talking to a machine, in terms of the speed and accuracy of the solution. The key will be that Machines could detect when frustration is growing in the voice of the caller, and hand it over smoothly to a human.</p>  Francois Ragnet View Edit Delete
34  <p>Barry Money insists that the Japanese innovation concepts of kaizen and kaikaku represent the twin competitive engines for a cramped automotive market. With Toyota already hailed as a classic model of both disruptive and incremental innovation, Money says the most urgent challenge is to direct disruptive strategies toward creating lifelong customers, and to transforming the used vehicle market.</p> <p>Scores of dealerships in Australia are already reaping the rewards of offering personalized benefits to repeat customers, driven by integrated big data tools, and a laser-focus on loyalty. While some brands are offering car sales directly online, Toyota is using digital resources to enrich person-to-person relationships throughout the dealer network, including an innovative sales and service collaboration.</p> <p>Money tells BPI that other connectivity technologies are also being piloted. However &ndash; having worked everywhere from the production line to the logistics desk at Toyota &ndash; Money believes that trust remains the one truly indispensable asset.</p>  <p>Toyota has the largest number of units in operation in the Australian automotive market. We have more owners on the road than any other brand. Our strong dealer network services many of these customers. With innovative service, finance and repurchase products, we have the ability to move customers from their existing vehicle into a newer vehicle &ndash; which provides the customers with that Oh What A Feeling emotion as well as great value.</p> <p>The specific innovation that my team has delivered is combining the best of our service and sales departments and assisting our customers to move from their current vehicle to a new vehicle. We call this sales and service collaboration. It&rsquo;s been tried before in the market, but this time we have strong system support, combined with training, on site consulting, KPI management and follow up and most importantly segmentation and one-to-one marketing that tailors the offering to the needs of the customers.</p>  <p>The dealer network and the automotive franchises have a strong culture and process that has worked well for a long time. But with an increase in the competition in the market from new entrants such as newer manufacturers as well as newer technologies that facilitate the automotive buying process, plus the threat of policy changes by government, it is important that the industry continues to adapt and change in a dynamically changing economy and market.&nbsp;Therefore, the biggest issue is creating an innovative and dynamic culture that looks to new ideas, new ways, new opportunities and challenges the status quo head on. Risk is part of business and understanding and managing that risk is important. But progress in the face of risk is mandatory. Standing still is not an option.</p>  <p>Toyota is synonymous with kaizen &ndash; continuous improvement. After ten years in Japan, I saw with my own eyes the lengths to which Toyota goes in order to create even better products and services. I was captured as a young executive by the passion and intelligence of my kaizen mentors and I have tried to bring that to the Australian market. <br /><br />Toyota practices kaizen in every thing it does. However, sometimes, incremental improvements are not enough &ndash; that is when &ldquo;kaikaku&rdquo; or revolutionary innovation is required. As part of the Retail Development team at Toyota, we are trying new technologies and processes in order to transform the way we do business with our dealers and more importantly how we engage with and satisfy our customers.</p>  <p>Consumers shop across brands and industries. They expect to be able to experience the same levels of excellence in any category &ndash; they carry their expectations horizontally across different industries. This expectation has been facilitated through the internet.</p> <p>As the new vehicle market has plateau&rsquo;d, the franchises will be looking to capitalize on their existing owners, the loyalty from these owners and products and services that optimize the customer experience for this segment of the franchise&rsquo;s market.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Recently we have undertaken a study of various technology-based products in the market that would be useful for our dealer network. WIFI based customer tracking and profiling, sales process support technologies, MAC address tracking on handheld devices among others.</p> <p>While each technology has great merit in the right context, the key is not in the technology. It is in the connection to the consumer on a one-to-one basis. Technology that can support and facilitate that type of tailored connection with our customers is the next step for automotive franchises, in my opinion.</p>  Barry Money View Edit Delete
37  <p>Andria Long - VP of Innovation at Johnsonville Sausage - believes that effective innovation is, most centrally, about delivering on the ideas which actually solve consumer needs in a differentiated way. When it comes to innovation, her first question is: "what differentiators are consumers actually willing to pay for?"</p>  <p>We are a deeply entrepreneurial company, founded by a family of entrepreneurs and we are still family-owned today. It&rsquo;s no accident that we are ranked number one in our category. Ideas are not the hard part; rather, the challenge arises from actually delivering on those ideas.</p> <p>Everything can be made better, and I do mean everything. Differentiation is critical, but we&rsquo;ve found that you can skip some traditional steps in innovation: weeding through ideas and holding ideation sessions, and waiting for &ldquo;perfect information&rdquo; can hold up the process needlessly. We are focused on the front end &ndash; delivering on real insights of what consumers need.&nbsp;</p> <p>In the CPG industry, driving competitive advantage from innovation techniques is all about figuring out and meeting a consumer's unmet need in some new or different way. It is learning how to balance the risk and reward of how much you know with the amount and depth of information and research you need in order to make a decision. You're never going to have perfect information. You need to achieve that precarious balance of using good business judgment combined with enough consumer research to confidently approach the market.&nbsp;</p> <p>The success we&rsquo;ve had with the Fully Cooked Breakfast Sausage is a great example of delivering against a trifecta of insights. We found that convenience really is key for time-pressed consumers. We also thought about how consumers actually use products. It turns out that not everyone eats 12 sausages at a time, so we used re-sealable packs. And consumers want to see their foods, so we use clear packs. In essence, we lean in on where and what we need to know versus what is nice to know. Companies that do this well will have competitive advantage over others in their industry and will have greater speed to market.&nbsp;</p>  <p>The fear of failure impedes innovation because it is always easier on an existing business to know what lever to pull versus leaning in on a completely new initiative. Innovation is fundamentally contrary to human nature in that it requires willingness to change, willingness to fail, and a willingness to accept the unknown. Add to those challenges the natural inclination to form attachments to one's own projects. Innovators have to be able to kill initiatives, be agile, and shift when necessary. Failure is not failure if you learn from it. But if you fail and don't know why, then that is a concern.&nbsp;</p> <p>Another impediment to innovation is cross-functional collaboration. Innovation needs to be a top priority cross-functionally, but cross-functional teams often have multiple projects and initiatives across different business units, so ensuring that all of the leaders across those business units are working together towards similar goals with similar priorities can be a major challenge.&nbsp;</p>  <p>In recent years we have seen a dramatic increase in innovation-centric roles. This is due to the recognition that companies need dedicated resources, both people and financial, and dedicated leadership to accomplish innovation. In the past, innovation was a part of someone's job, and it is really hard to manage a base business with short-term goals and also try to deliver longer-term innovation goals. Also, not every person who manages a base business is also the right person to do innovation. So it wasn't that innovation didn't exist before, but the shift is in the discovery that it is essential to have those dedicated roles for innovation. The growth in the importance of designated roles has also led to higher visibility of those roles and as such we are seeing higher involvement from the C-Suite - which helps innovation to become better integrated in the overall company structure. Now, there are dedicated resources - both people and financial - dedicated roles, dedicated cross-functional teams, and a designated executive leader.</p> <p>At Johnsonville Sausage, we have found that the fundamental requirement is giving employees the freedom to fail. We've talked about the fact that fear of failure impedes progress. With the plethora of information out there, it is easy to iterate something to death in order to decrease risk, but not only can that iterative process dilute down what was once a great idea, we've also seen that in a rapidly-changing environment, those iterative processes can impede agility and speed to market, thereby contributing to a loss of competitive advantage. We've found that our organization itself and the people within it need to be comfortable with a rapid pace of change, and a lot of change, and as innovation leaders we have to be the champions of that change.&nbsp;</p>  <p>The pace and rate of change in our industry is dramatic. Three of the companies I worked for in the past 10 years no longer exist. The churn rate is phenomenal. The average lifespan of an S&amp;P 500 company used to be 61 years; now it is 16 to 18 years. Fortunately, Johnsonville is already over 70 years old, and more relevant to consumers than ever.</p> <p>I like the comment by Peter Senge, from &ldquo;The Fifth Discipline,&rdquo; which may help account for the success we&rsquo;ve had: &ldquo;The ability to learn faster than your competition may be the only sustainable competitive advantage than you can ever achieve.&rdquo; CPG companies who are able to shift and respond to the rapidly changing environment, use relevant consumer insights without getting bogged down in process, and get to market quickly will succeed.&nbsp; The ones that don't have a very good chance of being replaced by more agile competitors.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Well, as a commuter in Chicago, I can tell you that one innovation I particularly like is Passport Mobile Pay. Its revealing for me that, on top of a $3 parking fee, consumers are also willing to pay at extra 50 cents &ldquo;convenience fee,&rdquo; to pay their parking from their device, and not have to bother locating the parking pay station. And as a beer drinker, I like Yeti colster. I&rsquo;m always on the lookout for something to keep beverages cold, and I bought a Yeti colster, and it is phenomenal. Again, it tells you something that consumers like me are willing to spend $35 to keep their drink cold &ndash; that&rsquo;s amazing. I&rsquo;m also a fan of what Hello Products are doing in the oral care space &ndash; breaking category molds with design and consumer-centric thinking.</p>  Andria Long View Edit Delete
30  <p>In 2012, Greg Smith became an overnight game-changer in the debate for Wall Street reform, with his sensational public resignation in the New York Times: &ldquo;Why I am leaving Goldman Sachs.&rdquo; The former Goldman equities vice president is again tackling systemic inefficiencies and predatory practices in the financial world, but this time it&rsquo;s in the retirement savings sector. Smith recently accepted the role as President of Blooom, a Midwest startup which was named a Word Top 10 Innovative Company (2015) in the personal finance space by <em>Fast Company.</em></p> <p>The South African expatriate was motivated to move due to the realization that technology innovation had yet to be harnessed to bring down costs for consumers in the financial services sector &ndash; and his conviction that, in a gridlocked legislative environment, only innovation could trigger rapid reform.The company was created in response to these astonishing research findings: that four out of every five 401K plans are incorrectly invested, and that the average American unknowingly pays $150,000 in investment fees over their lifetime &ndash; the bulk of which are entirely needless. Also, its products were innovated on the basis of these twin conclusions: that 401K plans simply cannot be efficiently managed on a DIY basis, and that only the wealthy can afford financial advisers who can customize and maximize the investments while minimizing their costs.</p> <p>Just a year after its official launch, Blooom has already taken over management of 401K plans for clients in 48 states, using smart software which automatically rebalances investments, while lowering fees. Blooom manages close to $100 million of retirement assets, and employees at half of the Fortune 50 have already signed up as clients of Blooom.</p> <p>Blooom is also disrupting the competition with its flat fee business model charging individuals as little as $1 per month to manage and update their portfolios. Additionally, an essay was published in Time magazine this month exposing the astonishing inefficiencies in the 401k system. Smith is again giving a public jolt to conventional thinking. And his mission is nothing less than to see an entire generation of Americans harness smart technologies to secure their retirement future.</p>  <p>The US retirement space has changed significantly over the last few decades. People of a previous generation were more likely to receive a guaranteed pension either from their employer or the government. Today, Social Security is not enough to provide a stable retirement, and guaranteed pensions have largely disappeared. So Americans have to fend for themselves and are left with a legacy 401k system that was never designed for the middle class.</p> <p>It has an overwhelming amount of choice, often high fees, and often poor selections of index funds. Many people are bewildered and overwhelmed by this complexity, and make no choice, often missing out on a decade of compounding returns. Others can make bad choices and pay away up to a third of their nest egg in fees, often without knowing it.&nbsp;</p> <p>Blooom is the first company that has a completely fresh approach to the 401k space. We are an online service that analyzes any 401k, no matter where someone works. We then recommend the necessary changes. Finally, if the client hires us, we completely take over the management of their 401k &ndash; we make the changes for them, we keep an eye on the accounts, and we rebalance it over time. We are not a 'Do-It-Yourself' Solution. We are a 'Do-It-For-You' Solution. All for a Netflix-like subscription fee of $15/month or less.</p> <p>We use the image of a flower (hence blooom!) to represent the health of the 401k, instead of complicated jargon or charts or graphs that no one understands. Clients love the simplicity and we have grown quicker than anyone else in the automated advisory space in the first year since formal launch. We manage 401k&rsquo;s for people in 48 states, from age 22 to 67. Our mission is to fix broken 401k&rsquo;s for millions of Americans.</p>  <p>There are a few impediments that have really kept 401k&rsquo;s in the 1980&rsquo;s, despite the advancement of technology. Firstly, 401k&rsquo;s and retirement are seen as an HR function in the benefits department. Therefore the executives making the decisions on 401k&rsquo;s have ten other benefits to worry about and are not finance people. So the 401k&rsquo;s have often been littered with poor fund selections that end up being egregiously expensive for their own employees. There was even a time when the corporation would get kick-backs or part of the very mutual fund fees that their own employees were paying for their retirement.</p> <p>Paradoxically, retirement became a profit center for the very corporation that was supposed to be providing you with benefits. The second major issue is that government largely thinks of the savings problem as a tax issue instead of a complexity issue. I.e. Government thinks if they can just offer you more attractive tax deferrals in your Roth IRA, that tens of millions more Americans will save more money. But behavioral economist after behavioral economist has told the Senate that it is not about taxes. The overwhelming majority of Americans don&rsquo;t understand the complex tax system. What they need is a very simple system, without jargon, that makes making the &ldquo;right&rdquo; choice an easy proposition. There is no innovation, use of technology, or simplicity in the 401k system. This needs to change.</p>  <p>Well I am quite new to Blooom, but am not new to its mission. I think we try to think of every decision we make through a human lens. Finance is complicated &ndash; often purposefully &ndash; so no one can understand it and so that lots of people can continue to make lots of money off an unsuspecting general public. Our view is that anything we do needs to be understandable to someone who knows nothing about finance.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s why we charge people a transparent, monthly subscription fee instead of the industry standard of &ldquo;basis points&rdquo; or &ldquo;expense ratios&rdquo; that get deducted out of people&rsquo;s accounts without them knowing it. That&rsquo;s why we use simple imagery to explain one&rsquo;s 401k instead of a complicated chart. Because of this drive to make everything human, we are forced to keep things really simple. And in finance, keeping things extremely simple turns out to very innovative, and something that people love.</p>  <p>The biggest change will come within 5 years, when the millennial generation will constitute half the global workforce. People underestimate how differently millennials think about money versus baby boomers. Millennials like simplicity, transparency, the predictability of software, the ability to tap the wisdom of their peers and crowdsource an answer instead of paying an expensive advisor for the answer. And that advisor had to deal with lots of paperwork that also runs up the costs. All of this is going away in the investment management business. I think costs will come down and transparency will hopefully go up.</p>  <p>I think much of what is going on in the mobile banking space in developing countries around the world has been truly extraordinary. Examples like M-Pesa that started in Africa, which allows those who don&rsquo;t have access to a bank to perform much of the basics of banking &ndash; sending money, paying people, saving small amounts of money. Why doesn&rsquo;t the developed world follow this example and make it easier for everyone to be banked?&nbsp;</p> <p>I also think some of the &ldquo;Nudge" practices going on around the world in national savings systems is good. For example, we know that the only proven way to make people save money is to make it easy for them. I think the 401k system for example should move in an opt-out/nudge direction. For example, when a new person joins a company, start taking some small amount out of their salary and putting it away for them in a low cost, appropriate investment. This will then escalate this percentage over time or when the person gets a raise. And the employee can absolutely opt-out. But what economists find, is that few people do opt out, and ultimately are happy that this inertia set in.<br /><br />Companies<em>&nbsp;are&nbsp;</em>allowed to automatically enroll their employees to 401k plans, yet only about half of corporate CEO&rsquo;s choose to do so. This is very sad, since many people could be contributing to a nest egg, and often getting free matching from their company, yet they don&rsquo;t do so because they never get over the hurdle of signing up for their 401k in the first place.</p>  Greg Smith View Edit Delete
42  <p>Sebastian Herzog constantly moves between corporate culture and startup spirit. Herzog has more than 10 years of work experience within Lufthansa, including being the former executive assistant to the CEO of Lufthansa Group, while also founding his own fashion ecommerce startup OfficePunk.</p> <p>In 2014, Herzog finally bridged both worlds by becoming a true corporate entrepreneur, initiating and founding the Lufthansa Innovation Hub jointly with internal and external top talents as a separate legal entity. Asked about the focus fields of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub, Herzog explains that he is not a believer in focusing on specific trends or technologies. &ldquo;If you really want to change things, you have to focus on a specific customer,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Innovation starts with empathy and only with understanding the needs of a customer, one will be able to derive real improvements and innovations. In that sense, our only focus is the traveler and his or her needs. In an exaggerated way, I would say, 'customer interest beats company interest.'&rdquo;</p> <p>One very concrete example is the pain of travelers having to check-in for their flights manually. Instead of supporting the Lufthansa core business with state of the art self-check in solutions, the Lufthansa Innovation Hub built www.airlinecheckins.com-- an industry-wide solution that allows travelers to be checked automatically for more than 100 airlines based on their preferences. Herzog says, &ldquo;While it might sound contra-intuitive in the beginning, we are now learning a lot about the traveler behavior when they use other airlines than Lufthansa. And of course, this knowledge helps Lufthansa as well.&rdquo;</p> <p>Herzog is also advising and consulting other corporates on the topics of digital transformation and corporate entrepreneurship. He adds, &ldquo;Regardless of the industry I am working for, they all struggle on how to cope with the incredible speed and rate of change out there. That is why corporations such as Lufthansa can fully exploit the full potential of an Innovation Hub by setting it up as a second operating system of the corporate that runs with a different speed, based on different talents and framed with a different set of budgeting rules. If you then develop the right links to the mothership &ndash; Innovation Hubs can become a major driver of commercial and strategic impact.&rdquo;</p>  <p>Three main differentiating factors between the Lufthansa Innovation Hub and other corporate innovation activities are:</p> <p>1. Talent: Instead of &ldquo;just relocating&rdquo; existing line-managers to a fancy tech-location &ndash; we managed the challenge to get significant amount of entrepreneurial talent on board. Currently 80% of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub consists of people that have not worked for Lufthansa before.</p> <p>2. Tool set: Instead of being a pure incubator, accelerator, technology lab, or corporate VC, we are deeply linked with the Lufthansa Corporate Strategy and pursue whatever innovation setup that is suited to a specific challenge.</p> <p>3. Test-driven culture: Instead of writing five-year plans on whiteboards, we try to get instant market feedback, regardless if we are building prototypes and products or developing broader strategies.</p> <p>This unique combination really allows us to support and drive the digital transformation within Lufthansa by supporting the existing business with startup partnerships and new products, (&ldquo;better business&rdquo;) as well as pursuing topics out of current business boundaries (&ldquo;new business&rdquo;).</p>  <p>There are three levels one has to consider:</p> <p>First &ndash;&nbsp;The Innovation Team. In general, you often see innovation teams pursuing something they are passionate about but that customers do not really care about, or teams unwilling to kill off ideas that aren&rsquo;t working. Within the Lufthansa Innovation Hub we try to rapidly kill our projects if they do not meet our initial hypotheses.</p> <p>Second &ndash; The Industry. You always have to consider the industry you are working in. The aviation industry for example highly relies on safety&mdash;we build systems to be backed up by systems to be backed up by systems. You don&rsquo;t want us to do fail-fast. Fail early, when it comes to building or running aircraft or engines. Even within development, safety is drilled down with the manufacturers and airlines at a level only otherwise seen in nuclear energy. This is understandable, but it has implications for innovation potential.&nbsp;</p> <p>Third &ndash; The Corporate. Corporates in general have a lot of things to lose &ndash; for them it is so hard to innovate. Start-ups can fail fast, because you have no customers to lose, no brand to lose, no package to lose. At big corporates, you have everything to lose, and that keeps you from pushing the boundaries. That is where corporates have to find their own platforms where they can be explorative, and that is where we come in.</p>  <p>The history of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub is quite a unique one. In May 2014, a small group of internal Lufthansa colleagues convinced the Lufthansa Board about the relevance of travel tech startups as driver of innovation in our industry. That time, we were looking for the commitment to acknowledge those startups as a very relevant stakeholder for Lufthansa. Based on these very early and initial findings, I personally had the chance to set up a team of three internal and three external colleagues to move to Berlin for three months and try to figure out what is needed and what is suitable for Lufthansa.</p> <p>The six of us spent the time in a shared apartment in Berlin: meeting various startups, corporate entrepreneurs, building the first prototypes, and finally convincing Lufthansa to move this initiative to its next level with founding the Lufthansa Innovation Hub as a separate legal entity in January 2015. While we were equipped with an initial budget for one year, Lufthansa just recently increased their commitment with a three and a half-year funding and more resources focusing on commercial and strategic impact. To summarize, these intense 30 months since the days within the joint apartment one can say that the Lufthansa Innovation Hub moved from an internal experiment towards a fully integrated part of the digital transformation of Lufthansa.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Speaking of technologies, we live in a world with some very interesting technologies all with the ability to change major parts of our daily lives. For example, there is voice recognition, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, blockchain. One could name every fancy buzzword here, but the question I am really asking is, what&acute;s the impact on business models and customer interaction?</p> <p>Take travel booking as an example. As the consumer, you are confronted with numerous choices from airline websites, meta-searches and online travel agencies. Whether you are on a leisure or business trip, you could spend endless hours comparing offers and trying to find the best deal. Even if you found what you are looking for, it is not convenient to book. You are forced to type in passport credentials and personal data over and over again. This high degree of inconvenience is a perfect open door when it comes to disruption.</p> <p>We see a change in the interface: travelers are very eager to use their existing communication channels such Email, Whatsapp, or Facebook, and rather deal with one travel-focused concierge service than with a broad set of various travel providers, each with his own communication. That observation and anticipation of customer behavior then led to the launch of www.hellomissioncontrol.com &ndash; a travel concierge built by the Lufthansa Innovation Hub.</p> <p>Talking about the future, will we still have airline booking websites around in five years? I don&rsquo;t know. I literally cannot imagine people who still enter an airline website domain and manually type in where they want to go. I just don&rsquo;t see it because there are so many trends towards much more convenient frontends with massive data-driven backend that actually can perform the task you want them to do.</p>  <p>I am impressed by innovation strategies that are able to adapt according to what is happening out there. Just as if you would be building a prototype: you build, you learn, you measure, you build again. Considering the uncertainty and speed we are living in, I am convinced that five year plans are not worth the paper they are written on. Strategy has to be as agile as product development.</p>  Sebastian Herzog 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Quantifiable Creativity&rdquo; 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.&nbsp;</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: &ldquo;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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&nbsp;performs against the company benchmarks, and against&nbsp;similar campaign benchmarks. This answers the marketer&rsquo;s question that many platforms miss today, I&rsquo;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.&nbsp;</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,&nbsp;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.&nbsp;</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&rsquo;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. &nbsp;</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&nbsp;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&rsquo;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.&nbsp;</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.&nbsp;</p>  Sean Shoffstall 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&rsquo;s Economy via Infobeing. Mark believes that&nbsp;through innovative networking and modern trade,&nbsp;the People&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t happening on Facebook.</p>  <p>Today people remain stuck in a &ldquo;corporate economy&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&hellip;people look to other people. There is a massive person-to-person economy that is based on cash transactions or even &ldquo;favors for favors&rdquo;.</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&rsquo;t a conscious focus of mine. I don&rsquo;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.&nbsp; We will be auditing our performance against a charter that includes 5 requirements for serving the public good. We&rsquo;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&rsquo;t care about changing an industry. I care about changing lives. People have access to amazing technology, but they don&rsquo;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
43  <p>Prith Banerjee is Group CTO of Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management and automation, with operations in more than 100 countries. With an EcoStruxure platform that defines its &ldquo;Innovation at Every Level&rdquo; business philosophy, Schneider leverages the most advanced data technologies&mdash;and an open, standards-based innovation strategy&mdash;for next-generation solutions and efficiencies. Its commitment to innovation is illustrated in an R&amp;D budget of 5 percent of revenue and a dedicated architecture for incremental, new-market, and disruptive innovation, defined as Horizon 1 (core or short-term), Horizon 2 (adjacent or medium-term), and Horizon 3 (disruptive or long-term). Historically, its disruptive initiatives include pioneering aspects of IoT itself in 1996, and with recent technologies like arc-fault detection and its new IoT-enabled M580 automation controller. Today, its connected circuit breakers, protection relays and variable speed drives are already reducing machine downtime for customers with remote reporting of actionable data, while pilot projects are underway to slash downtime even further, with asset performance management IoT systems predicting faults before they happen.</p> <p>Meanwhile, Schneider is now looking at business model transformations, in which guarantees of production outcomes can be sold as services. Seeing access to energy as a basic human right, the company&rsquo;s &ldquo;Life is On&rdquo; vision is to ensure that energy is available to everyone in a safe, reliable, and sustainable manner. Anticipating global megatrends like rapid urbanization and digitization as the defining parameters for this vision, Schneider recruited Banerjee as Group CTO specifically to drive digital innovation and the transformation to IoT. Banerjee was previously MD for Global Technology R&amp;D at Accenture, after serving as CTO for ABB and Senior VP for Research and Director of HP Labs at Hewlett Packard. In driving innovation and technology differentiation for these leading companies, he also leveraged significant academic experience. Banerjee has served as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Walter Murphy Professor and Chairman of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. He is also the author of 350 research papers.</p> <p>In an interview with BPI, Banerjee says that despite the massive strides already made with IoT-enabled solutions, the truly game-changing innovations will come from next-generation analytics on big data. And he says those leaps in efficiency are not only required for competitive advantage, but also for the macro challenges of demand and sustainability facing the industry. Banerjee also mentions a 300 percent increase in efficiency is required to deal with a 50 percent increase in global energy consumption in 40 years without significantly increasing carbon emissions. Fortunately, the company&rsquo;s portfolio of innovative products has vast consumption efficiency gaps to eat into, including 50 percent energy inefficiencies in asset-intensive industries and a stunning rate of 80 percent inefficiencies in the world&rsquo;s buildings.</p> <p>Banerjee says the bringing together of smart energy management, automation, and software could not only achieve the required efficiencies, but also lead to exciting new business models.</p>  <p>We deliver to our customers low and medium voltage products and automation systems that are all integrated in several end markets: buildings, data centers, asset intensive industries, and utilities. We have a host of innovations throughout those areas, and we invest 1.3 billion euros on R&amp;D. It is about faster, cheaper, better, so why do we need that deep level of innovation?</p> <p>Over the next 10 years, the energy consumption in the world will increase by about 40 percent, and electricity consumption will increase 80 percent thanks to things like urbanization, industrialization, and digitalization; you must be three times more efficient to keep carbon emissions near neutral. We found that in the domain of buildings, only 18 percent are energy efficient, so there is an opportunity for 82 percent of untapped energy efficiency in buildings. Data centers are 30 percent energy efficient. Asset intensive industries such as oil and gas, mining, and metals are about 50 percent efficient. The grand problem we are trying to solve is making sure your energy efficiency is running close to 100 percent.</p> <p>I work with the five business CTOs to harness the innovations springing from that $1.3 billion investment. Connectivity is a major part of the solution. We are on the IoT journey, and our innovation chain is tied to IoT and digital transformation. Connectivity is about bringing value to our customers, and it can be cost reduction, efficiencies, performance, or all of the above. It also promotes safety, and safety has always been a core value in our customer proposition.</p> <p>We look at innovation in the portfolio approach. A large percentage of investment&mdash;about 70 percent&mdash;is on Horizon 1: short term innovations on our core products. With Horizon 2, we have products like Masterpact MTZ, which has an IoT and power monitoring capability. This is Horizon 2 or adjacent and medium-term innovations: bringing new technologies to the same product. H-2 also includes bringing the same product to a new geography, meaning bringing these circuit breakers to China or India with modifications. H-2 is about 20 percent of our innovation investment. Horizon 3 is truly disruptive and long-term innovations, and represents a lot of the stuff we are driving today, and is about 10 percent of our R&amp;D spend. Some of them are seemingly crazy, but with huge potential to completely disrupt our industry.</p> <p>I am responsible for all innovation, not just the digital parts. We are on the journey of IoT and digital transformation, and almost all our products&mdash;from automation systems to circuit breakers&mdash;are integrated with digital technologies. We are absolutely the market leader.</p> <p>Our new products are taking the industry by storm, and I am completely proud.</p>  <p>We are moving toward IT/OT convergence, so all of a sudden engineers who had been very focused on the physics of arc breaking and switching in circuit breakers find themselves in the world of cyber security and cyber trends, of analytics, and machine learning. How do you bridge the gap from the old physics-based engineering to new world technologies or social media, machine learning and data analytics? That&rsquo;s a challenge, and it needs a multi-disciplinary approach. Finding people who have knowledge in all areas is tough. Obviously, you do not need individuals fluent in all areas, but you do need individuals who can collaborate in large teams to solve customers&rsquo; problems effectively. The competency of people in our area is in the IT/OT convergence. We are an operational technology company, so we take care of the actual operations of the company&mdash;whether it is operating wells for Shell or what have you, whereas the IT companies like Oracle or SAP or Microsoft do the company back office.</p> <p>Siloes also present a problem, because in many organizations, each line of business is so focused on their own vertical that they don&rsquo;t think about the broader ecosystem. Companies that don&rsquo;t invest enough in innovation have an even greater challenge. If I had only the industry average of 2 percent of sales for R&amp;D, I would not be able to compete with the Schneinders of this world!</p> <p>Also, with a risk-intolerant culture, you get only incremental innovation. The only way to get disruptive innovation is to create a culture of risk tolerance, where it is okay to try crazy things. We have a culture where it is okay to fail, and even encouraged to celebrate early failures&mdash;but only early failures, not just putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a stubborn mule project. We try to spend on lots of wacky things, knowing that most will fail, and when they do I give the team a pat on the back and say thanks for trying that, and what have we learned? Knowing something does not work also adds to our knowledge. Organizations who do not tolerate failure become very incremental.</p> <p>For IoT, there are three main challenges: cyber security; inter-operability, or standardization; and legacy systems. There are systems you build on that could be 30 years old (brownfield systems) or one day old (greenfield systems). I think data security is a very big problem. The perimeter for attack is increasing daily with the 50 billion connected devices in the world of IOT. Cyber terrorists can create more havoc with cyber attacks than with bombs. We are giving a lot of attention to cyber security.</p>  <p>One of the things we pride ourselves on is the concept of open innovation, and that is something I have been practicing and preaching for years. Open innovation is a very big part of what we do, and we try build solutions for our customers with partners. Before we open an R&amp;D project, we always ask if there is any start-up in the world that is doing something related to what we are trying to do? If there is, lets investigate and possibly collaborate with or bring that start-up into our fold. We can innovate much faster with this approach. It took three years and 10 million dollars to bring a solution to customers before; now we can spend, say, one extra million and bring it to market in six months. That&rsquo;s the value of open innovation.</p> <p>We have partnerships with the top 50 companies in Silicon Valley and relationships with top venture capital firms, and we ask all of them: &ldquo;what are the top start-ups you are working with in the IoT space? In the sensor space? In the cyber space or in the drive space?&rdquo; We ask them for their technology strategy&mdash;what is it they are trying to do? From this, we typically identify three or four start-ups, and we try to identify the technology that best matches with our system. Conferences are also helpful. A week ago, I gave a keynote in Barcelona at the IoT world congress. We tell the world, &ldquo;this is where we are headed,&rdquo; and then 15 start-up founders came to me and talked about possible synergies.</p>  <p>As Group CTO, I am driving IoT, and there are four pillars that are part of my organization. One is working with the five divisional CTOs on driving about 1.3 billion euros in R&amp;D spend. The second is programs like open innovation. The third pillar is our corporate research center, where we look at Horizon-3&mdash;disruptive innovation. The fourth pillar is IoT. I was recruited at Schneider fundamentally to drive our IoT development, along three levels. One is connected products, which is fundamental, but not where the real value is.The next level is edge control, where in our application, our customers do not expect these IoT products to be connected and controlled from the cloud. We want to have local control. The third level is apps, analytics, and services, which we are building on top of the cloud.</p> <p>The first value is in services. In the past, if a transformer failed, you as the customer would have to alert Schneider and ask if we can fix it. Today, we will tell you your transformer has failed, and ask if you would like me to fix it. Remote services are the low hanging fruit we are going after. But the next level is having the transformer give signals before it fails so we can inform the customer that the transformer will fail Thursday, and replace it Wednesday. Now there is no downtime. It is called asset performance management with predictive analytics, and we are doing it with a whole range of products. The cost of 15 minutes of downtime for an Amazon data center can be a hundred million, so the value is enormous. The third value is outcome-based services&mdash;if you can guarantee the outcome. If you&rsquo;re making widgets in your factory, we can guarantee you will make 20,000 widgets per minute, no matter what. So rather than selling the 1,000-dollar transformer, we can sell the guarantee of 20,000 widgets per minute. You lease our products which we install for free, and you pay for the service of productivity. We are currently running pilots on this model. The IoT area will journey from products to connected products to services to guaranteed outcomes. We are increasingly moving toward a world where people will not own products, and instead will get services on demand where and when they need it.</p> <p>IoT also offers enormous benefits for continuous customer engagements. In the past, when we sold you a circuit breaker or panel that lasts seven years, the next time we would talk would be in seven years. With IoT, you have a 24/7 connection with the customer. We know exactly what is going on. Continuous engagement with customers is an amazing new opportunity for marketers, and the best thing you can do for your CMO. IoT is just the plumbing. The technology that will be truly disruptive will be the analytics on that big data you are collecting. How to use data is the most important question we discuss every day. Initially, you are collecting small data, but with data coming in 24/7 from 50 billion connected devices. How do you do artificial intelligence and machine learning on all that data? This is going to be the most exciting thing. Connectivity is the easier part; analytics on the big data is going to be the game changer.</p>  <p>I am very excited with some of the latest innovations in areas such as augmented reality/virtual reality, cognitive computing and machine learning, 3D printing, robotics and drone technology.</p>  Prith Banerjee View Edit Delete
67  <p>Antony (Tony) White is Executive Chairman, enChoice. He has extensive experience in launching, developing, and managing technology-based start-up companies. He was instrumental in founding both of the predecessor companies to enChoice, namely ICI Solutions, Inc. and en technologies corporation. Tony is a pioneer in the ECM industry, having been active in the segment since 1989. His prior career included 15 years with IBM, where he advanced to a senior position before leaving to launch a start-up.</p> <p>Hidden in plain sight as unstructured content, a treasure trove of information lies in corporate repositories just waiting to be unleashed. If AI can discover, search and interrogate this content, then it will be able to deliver key business insights &mdash; and, ultimately, a powerful competitive advantage.</p> <p>But companies still need convincing.</p> <p>&ldquo;Every organization has a natural resistance to change, especially when it comes to investing in something that&rsquo;s not yet proven,&rdquo; says Tony White, executive chairman at enChoice. &ldquo;But today, you need to be technically innovative to be competitive.&rdquo;</p>  <p>It&rsquo;s a great question, because it really goes to perhaps the most important aspect. I just have one word to address that question: belief. You have to find something that you buy into, believe in, and then make. So what does that belief comprise? It&rsquo;s a belief that must be acceptable for the business, in terms of market innovation and acceptance, and something that your people can really buy into.</p> <p>In our case &mdash; we&rsquo;re a 30-year-old organization &mdash; our strong belief was that there was just too much paper in the world. The key to the future was to digitize paper and employ it in business processes. While we weren&rsquo;t the first to believe in that, we were one of the very early companies that commercialized this area in the mid-market. It was a critical component of how we started.</p> <p>Although it took an awfully long time, this belief turned out to be very accurate in that it developed into unstructured content. All the various kinds of content in an email, e-business, social media videos comprise unstructured content, which is 80% to 90% of all the key information in any organization. In those days we just called it imaging, which was converting paper documents to electronic content.</p> <p>With AI emerging, unstructured content emerged as a key resource for AI. We sort of got into a sweet spot.&nbsp;So that's how I believe we validated&nbsp; our belief and culture.</p>  <p>We have to convince our customers to believe that unstructured content is definitely a component for AI and business processes, which changes the way organizations do business. It&rsquo;s easy to establish the principle, but the the how has to be convincing.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s impossible for any organization to have the skill sets across all the components needed to make any company technologically self-sufficient. This is a real challenge for our customers but also where enChoice can provide the solution..</p> <p>One of the things that every organization faces is a natural resistance to change. No one likes it when something new comes out. Yet we&rsquo;re asking people to completely uproot traditional ways of doing business and invest in something new that, in their eyes, is not proven.</p> <p>To me the biggest impediment is, how do you convince people to spend a lot of money &mdash; to do it properly doesn't come cheaply &mdash; and make that change. It&rsquo;s a challenge because there have been past failures of key technology projects and often someone gets fired. Everybody wants to hang on to their job.</p> <p>But you still need to innovate if you want the benefit.</p>  <p>Innovation has always been part of our life, part of our culture, because we&rsquo;re in a rapidly developing industry. Our people want to be on the forefront and constantly bring us new ideas, especially the new generation who are extremely digitally aware.</p> <p>In our case, we got into the right area but it was very painful for a long time. Very slow adoption. Then recognition emerged that digital automation is a necessity for the future of every organization to be competitive.</p> <p>Imagine a cake where AI is the frosting on top. Your cake is your massive, unstructured content. It is not easy to manage and leverage it. So there&rsquo;s a huge pool of unrealized resource &mdash; unstructured content &mdash; that we've been fortunate enough to get into. We still have the problem of convincing organizationsthat the risk can be managed and the payoff is huge.</p> <p>Now we can honestly say it's key. Our expertise in unstructured content fuels the AI journey, and we hang our hat on it.</p>  <p>We deal with large companies that know AI is critical to be competitive but don&rsquo;t know what to do about it. We have the capability to get the unstructured data needed for AI, and big companies partner with us because of&nbsp;this.</p> <p>Anybody can use Chat GPT to write an essay, but how do you apply AI to your business? It&rsquo;s a much more complex question. The reality is there's a lot of work and a lot of preparation and understanding needed.</p> <p>But process innovation, like I said earlier, runs into resistance to change. Companies cancel projects because they can&rsquo;t get users to accept the new technology and new way of working. Successful projects happen when top management buys in and insists on the change. While this may be a little painful, it almost always pays off in the long run with improved competitiveness and efficiency, higher profitability and employee morale.</p> <p>One of the ways companies can ease cultural change is to tie the new technology, new way of doing things, new innovation to something that benefits society or, if you like, the planet.</p> <p>For instance, we&rsquo;re involved in helping threatened species. We provide technical support for a project called SPARK, or Sentinel Protection Against Rhino Killing, aimed at keeping rhinos from extinction. The project leverages the Internet of Things and AI. It&rsquo;s a good, positive thing. Our employees love it, and our customers love seeing us doing something outside of selling.</p>  <p>Strategy is changing the cost benefit equation. How do you show what is worth doing? That's the challenge for all of us. The good news is that the current availability of tools and technologies, from the cloud, containerization and subscription pricing, has changed the equation for so many companies and projects. Everything is more feasible and effective, and so we can do things that we couldn&rsquo;t do before.</p> <p>We know technology has made things more efficient. Just take a look at workflow in insurance. Paper documents used to float around, and it would take two weeks to process a claim. With digitized content, it takes only two days. Now we have pictures showing how many filing cabinets we&rsquo;ve saved just among our current customers. You couldn&rsquo;t fit them in a room.</p> <p>We still scan paper documents and manually enter them in the right place, but now we can start using AI to pull a lot of the information off a document.</p> <p>These are the things that take away the drudgery, drive innovation, and help you become more competitive in a challenging marketplace. It&rsquo;s absolutely worth doing. Now you have to take the leap and do it.</p>  Tony White View Edit Delete
28  Steve Hoffman is a virtual midwife to the future of humankind at Founders Space. &ldquo;Captain Hoff&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t just predict a world in which computers replace accountants and IOT chairs automatically adjust to your personal dimensions, but he actively selects and empowers the tech innovators who are shaping these kinds of revolutions.&nbsp; Named a Top 10 incubator in its first year of active mentorship, the Silicon Valley-based and globally focused accelerator is helping to mature hyper-innovative tech companies which could change our lives.   <p>We've been innovating on the incubator/accelerator model.&nbsp; Instead of just adopting the standard 'Y-Combinator' model, which is meeting start-ups once a week for 3 months followed by a &ldquo;Demo Day,&rdquo; we spent 18 months interviewing start-up founders and asking them what they'd like us to do differently.&nbsp; Here's what we learned:&nbsp;</p> <p>a) Three months is a long time to wait for a Demo Day.&nbsp; Most start-ups apply to their accelerator several months in advance, and then if they get accepted, it&rsquo;s another 3 months until they actually get to pitch investors on Demo Day. That means that many start-ups must wait 6 months or so from the time they first apply until they are in front of investors. In half a year, everything changes: competitors, market conditions, funding trends, etc.&nbsp; A start-up can miss their window by waiting.&nbsp; Founders Space solves this problem by having Demo Day at the end of the first month.&nbsp;</p> <p>b) &nbsp;The second issue founders have with the traditional model is being committed to stay in Silicon Valley for 3 months during a program. This is a big issue, especially if the start-up is coming from overseas and has employees, family and customers back home.&nbsp; Founders Space solves this problem by having a more condensed, intensive program.&nbsp; Instead of having mentoring and training sessions one or two days a week for three months, Founders Space has them every single weekday for four weeks, followed by Demo Day.&nbsp; This way startup founders can move quicker and get the same benefits.</p> <p>c) Lastly, the Y-Combinator model ends after three months, leaving start-ups on their own.&nbsp; It turns out start-up founders have more questions after Demo Day than they do before.&nbsp; But most programs end after Demo Day.&nbsp; Founders Space solves this issue by allowing startups to continue to attend all mentoring sessions and workshops for an entire year after Demo Day.&nbsp; This way startups can receive&nbsp;on-going support when they need it most. &nbsp;</p> <p>We work with a lot of corporations who say they are innovating, but when we ask them to sacrifice revenue, they recoil.&nbsp; The one strategy that we propose to our partners is to reward innovation with virtual dollars.&nbsp; These dollars count as real dollars, but they aren't actual revenue.&nbsp; This way managers can justify spending time on innovative projects.&nbsp;</p>  <p>We often find that founders who have a good idea &ndash; but not a great one &ndash; will get too stuck on it and keep hammering on it, as rivals pass them by. Acceleration needs to be that, and we push them hard to identify the best ideas they have &ndash; and if they&rsquo;re pushing a boulder up a hill, they should stop, and switch to something else. Also: Most people see a model or idea that works and then they copy it, making some incremental changes along the way.&nbsp; True innovation means rethinking everything and challenging all the assumptions you have.&nbsp;</p> <p>You need to question every aspect of your business.&nbsp; Why do we do it this way? &nbsp;Why is this the model?&nbsp; What if we tried this? &nbsp;And then you have to take risks.&nbsp; You have to be prepared to fail over and over until you discover a new way of doing it.&nbsp; Most managers in large corporations are risk averse.&nbsp; That's how they got to the position they are in.&nbsp; They don't want a series of failures attached to their names, so naturally they go for the safe bets.&nbsp; But safe bets don't transform a business.&nbsp;Risk does.</p>  <p>When we started Founders Space, we felt that we had to develop something new.&nbsp; There are thousands of accelerators out there, and we didn't want to just follow the herd.&nbsp; So we've been constantly experimenting and pushing ourselves to come up with new ideas that get better results for ourselves and our start-ups.&nbsp; It's a continual learning process, as we change and improve our model and program every quarter.</p>  <p>The startup ecosystem is constantly changing.&nbsp; Large corporations are now jumping into the startup game in a much bigger way with open innovation, intraprenuership, incubators and funding. &nbsp;We are launching new services to partner with global corporations and help them collaborate with startups.&nbsp; This is the biggest change we see on the horizon, and it's the biggest opportunity.&nbsp; We just launched a new service called Founders Edge, which does exactly this: <a href="http://www.FoundersEdge.com">http://www.FoundersEdge.com</a>.</p>  <p>It&rsquo;s simply inevitable that machines will replace the jobs we do &ndash; blue collar; white collar; every collar. Surgeons are going to be replaced by robots, which will do the procedure precisely the right way every time. The tax code is a system of laws to follow and optimize &ndash; so there is no reason an algorithm can&rsquo;t do it far better than an accountant.&nbsp; Legal contracts can all be written by computers. We will get to a very interesting point in society where people will have to ask themselves &ndash; what unique value can we provide? One wonderful impact will be in longevity. They are building nano-bots which we can put into our body to repair organs; and smart pills that can measure all the bacteria in your digestive tract, and tell you precisely what drugs or foods you need to take to be healthy and live longer. Ultimately, we will be upgrading our bodies; even our genetics.</p>  Steve Hoffman View Edit Delete
64  Anne Schl&ouml;sser is founder and CEO of <a title="http://www.studiomem.com/" href="http://www.studiomem.com/">studiomem</a>, an innovation company and <a href="http://www.memoratio.com/">Memoratio</a>, a data driven venture builder. She has spent her career in solving innovation and design challenges for start-ups, mid-sized businesses and large corporations in Europe, the US and China. As a business designer and entrepreneur she discovers customer or market need, builds innovative offers and defines innovation strategy along the value chain of an organization. A lot of her work has been in transitioning product manufacturers into becoming service providers, and specifying the right digital product or business offer in a given environment. She studied Product Design at Art Center College of Design in California, and worked in consultancies in the US and Europe, before becoming a founder. She is at home close to Munich in the south of Germany, from where she collaborates with clients worldwide.  The ability to change is fundamental to the survival of any organism.&nbsp; Organizations, like organisms, are subject to the same type of darwinistic rules to evolve under. Finding a fit to the environment is key to survival. Successful organisms strive, unsuccessful ones wither. Beyond the ability to change and adapt, organizations need to innovate to anticipate the next critical adaptation. Digital Innovation, oftentimes is a disruption if not a successful evolution of an existing analog system. Digitalization is penetrating all areas of life. As much as the ability to change, successful companies have to find their right fit in the digital environment. For manufacturers of physical products it means to become digital service providers, just as much as service providers can&nbsp; &ldquo;product-ize&rdquo; their offer to remain relevant.  I personally believe &ldquo;unlucky opportunism&rdquo; is a big impediment to innovation, no matter what sector or organization. Things done opportunistically, not following overall culture or strategy will hinder change and adaptation. Managing opportunism across an organization can only be done with a strong evolving and guiding culture. Sometimes, however, opportunistic events, will turn into an adaptation, or even an innovation strategy, that&rsquo;s &ldquo;lucky opportunism.&rdquo; Both, agility and foresight are needed to navigate opportunism.  studiomem is a strategic innovation and design company, with a 12 year history of delivering innovation services from strategy to implementation to start-ups, mid sized businesses and global fortune 500 clients. We constantly ask ourselves: what is the future of our business, dedicate time to gain foresight and innovate our offer. The paradox is, that selling innovation services, does not make you innovative yourself. You&rsquo;ll have to eat your own medicine and dedicate as much time to innovate for your own business, as you expect from your clients. Earlier I mentioned that service providers will have to productize to be successful in a globally digitalized world. That&rsquo;s what we are driving forward now. Two years ago we co-founded the data driven venture builder, Memoratio. A logical consequence of our experience as an innovation company, ultimate proof of expertise in innovation means venturing into entrepreneurialism. Besides venture building, Memoratio and studiomem are productizing our services by offering our clients<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://studiomem.com/data-driven-innovation">Data Driven Innovation formats</a><span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>or our<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.studiomem.com/visioneering">foresight format &lsquo;Visioneering&rsquo;</a>. In these formats, we are combining design thinking methodology with Big Data and AI - our clients benefit by gaining never-before-seen precision in finding opportunity and in understanding their audience in the future.  It is March 2021, we are in the midst of the third wave of the pandemic in Germany. Countries are getting ready to start-up again. The post-pandemic world feels within reach. Right now, everybody is asking themselves, how will it be different? What will change, what will stay or come back, what will be gone forever? Technologies driving the next two years will be anything, which is enabling rapid advancement and the evolution of digitalisation. During the Covid Crisis the world has became smaller as we collaborate and compete across organizations, societies, continents digitally. The given circumstances delivered the need to adapt to new environments. Within these new environments customers demand and businesses will deliver a new fit. The post-pandemic world however will by no means be less troubled. The climate crisis is here and now, more than ever, radical transparency, boosted by global digitalization will drive forward environmental, social and governance criteria. Change and adaptation will be crucial, not only for the survival of the individual organism but this time for the survival of the species.  Our current transition is driven by the pandemic, digitalization and climate change. Organizations are trying to understand how the post pandemic world will be different, how climate change will impact their business model, and how they can use technology to drive forward these changes to create positive impact. We utilize our <a href="http://www.studiomem.com/visioneering">foresight format Visioneering</a> to support organizations in finding ways to deal with these changes and uncertainties. Visioneering is based on forecasting plausible future scenarios, based on technology, social, environmental and business trends. We help our clients to think forward 20-30 years into the future and imagine their organization&rsquo;s brand, products and services. We then sketch a roadmap backwards, giving them a long term innovation strategy and future purpose to work with. Our clients tell us, that besides the strategic outcome, their organizational cultures are deeply impacted by becoming more future-focussed and more aware of thinking long term.  Anne Schlösser View Edit Delete
47  <p>Nic Vu, GM and SVP for Direct-to-Consumer for Adidas North America, discusses how building relationships is today's number one sales strategy. Through this game changer interview, he discusses what customer-centricity really means in today&rsquo;s data-enabled, hyper-competitive brand environment, from the perspective of one of the premier performers in the global retail landscape.</p>  It's global change: our entire company worldwide, as well as the North American team. We specifically set out three major strategies, which include speed, cities, and open sourcing, and it really has changed the behavior and frankly the entire game in which we play. Before, we would create products and push them out and try to sell to customers, in the traditional model. But as we started to&nbsp;open source and invite our consumers to help us within our journey in a new innovative way, which has created a shift in the ecosystem that has been applied throughout the entire organization.<br /><br />We're obviously very well known for Kanye West, and co-creating products with his fashion, style and expertise. By leveraging our globally recognized brand and expertise with his product and personal brand, we are going to market with a tailored product that leverages the best of both sides. &nbsp;We strategically&nbsp;made a choice that we would co-create with our key partners to deliver the best products to their consumers, and we are now leveraging that open source strategy with a variety of different key partners.<br /><br />We have opened up a product creation design house in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Farm. We put our best designers there, and we are allowing customers &ndash; anybody who has a creative thought, anybody who wants to work with our brand &ndash; to walk in off the street and help us design products, give us new ideas; fresh thinking. We created an ecosystem internally with internal websites that allowed people to generate ideas, and their peers can vote it on their ideas. And that ultimately has driven thousands of ideas, including the very successful Avenue A initiative.<br /><br />With Avenue A, I have to give credit to Mark King, my boss, who's the CEO of North America. He is well known as a major innovator in the golf industry, and he has subsequently initiated and built this relentless innovation culture for Adidas North America in the past three years. In year one, we were all raising awareness, educating people on the process around innovation. In year two, we started to&nbsp;cultivate this ecosystem of openness. And now that we're in year three, you're seeing the net results organizationally, both within the North American marketplace but also on a global organizational level. At the same time, we launched the Innovation Academy, wherein we created an environment in which people can learn, get an education; effectively get an MBA in innovation.<br /><br />As the GM of Direct-to-Consumer for North America, I spend half of my time understanding consumer sentiment and listening to the ideas they have, and the other half of my time around merchandising and product.<br /><br />What's unique about Adidas Group is that we were born in sport, and we're sporting goods athletic apparel and footwear company. We can basically be an athlete&rsquo;s entire wardrobe, on-court and on-pitch, or as soon as they get off: we're there to support them through their own style and fashion as well. And we're a brand that wants to co-create.  People need to be educated and aware that they have the ability to contribute within their own organization, and to try new things. You can't create an ecosystem organizationally that shuts that down. You need to allow votes on people&rsquo;s ideas by their peers, not by their supervisors &ndash; so, their confidantes, if you will. And employees need to know that it is safe to fail,&nbsp;and they need to fail fast and frequently. Unfortunately, I would say the majority of organizations still penalize mistakes, despite the knowledge that innovation requires an ability to fail. <br /><br />Really, the impediment that I see within the industry is that, too often, people feel they have to have a 100% plan, ready-to-go, and that it has to be successful. Today, we have an innovation board within every single one of our brick-and-mortar stores and we invite not only our consumers to put ideas on there but we invite our own team members, our internal consumers, to give us ideas, and those ideas then are surfaced all the way up the "chain of command." Then, ultimately we create games that feature competition and collaborations, and then all of a sudden people feel like, "Wow. I'm a one-week-old employee internal to Adidas, and I submitted my idea and two months later, the top guy in the organization is reviewing my ideas! How cool is that?"  What I would say is we have to create a incentivized change-management process to induce innovation. I think you can't introduce innovation as a top-down mandate or even execute it in that form. I &nbsp;think you have to win hearts and minds within the organization, and you have to start by developing a budget or resources that are dedicated to it.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<br /><br /> So our newsletter four or five years ago was driven by functional heads and&nbsp;it was kind of like this laborious mandate from the top &ndash; me, in this case &ndash; where every function gave and updated them, and we&rsquo;d we post a static document and that would go out to the organization. We thought that was communication. Today, in contrast, the employees within each function, regardless of level, drive what content they want to express to the organization. And it's this living, breathing document that goes out every week now.  <p>Mobile technology will remain key &ndash; almost every consumer today has some level of smartphone in their hand, and the information that they can get via Google or other search engines is so quick and so fast that brands like us, Adidas Group, will need to make sure that we are there to help cultivate that experience for the consumer and answer those questions, or even anticipate those questions. So I would say mobile technology and all the apps that can be developed to connect the consumer's experience, is really the key in the future.</p> <p>We already have virtual reality in our stores today, which help educate and create a great experience for our consumers. So when we opened up our world flagship on Fifth Avenue, we had virtual reality in there wherein NBA superstar James Harden in a VR space was giving them &ndash; the consumers &ndash; the experience of a lifetime, because it felt like you were actually speaking with James Harden.</p> <p>Meanwhile, we&rsquo;re leveraging technologies from 3D printing to AI, and I think the key is to make sure that our digital and social ecosystem remains connected for the end-user experience. We're starting to implement local market manufacturing wherein we can bring speed of product-to-market faster. And we're talking months and weeks, we're not talking years and months.</p>  <p>My personal favorites include Tesla and also Faraday Future, that just came out with an innovation where you can basically sit in the car, and it will self-drive, self-park, and you can talk on your social platforms. And ultimately what I learned from the car industry &ndash; in this case, electric car companies &ndash; is that they're chasing the very same thing we are: a connected experience for the consumer in which they can interact with your brand, any which way they like, and for us to be prepared to be able to interact with them any which way they like: digital communities, hubs, and apps.</p>  Nicholas Vu View Edit Delete
58  <p>Wai is Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Serviceaide. A serial entrepreneur, he has been in the high-tech industry for 36 years. Wai held executive leadership roles at BEA where he was the EVP and Global Chief Product Officer and at CA Technologies where he was the SVP and GM of the Unicenter brand, SVP and GM of WW Services, and SVP and GM of interBiz.<br /><br />Wai received his Master&rsquo;s and Bachelor&rsquo;s degrees in computer science focusing on AI and Systems Architecture from Columbia University in NY.</p>  <p>It starts with the fundamental belief that we all have responsibilities to our customers, partners, shareholders and fellow employees. We have to believe that what we do is valuable to our customers and to the market as a whole.&nbsp; This is the foundation of why we have to keep innovating, changing and doing better.<br /><br />I have found that some people that are incredibly innovative in one area (ex: technology, operational processes, business model, etc.) can be very resistant to change in other dimensions.&nbsp; Individual and collective mental inertia and the organizational mandates that reinforce the inertia are what makes change hard.&nbsp; However, if an organization takes things to the extreme on the other end of the spectrum, people often revert to becoming cautious and hesitant in fear of doing the wrong thing because there is no clear set path.&nbsp; Finding the middle ground by creating an environment with a foundation that is multiple faceted enough to stand even when major pieces are being modified is key to innovation. This allows people to support change to get to a better place with the understanding that the pain of change is a prelude to something better.</p>  Standards and processes can be great, but when organizations go overboard it can lead to a checkbox mentality that isn&rsquo;t well suited for innovation. At the same time, if solutions are not thought out fully, and they predictably fail &ndash; this can greatly impact the trust in innovation and change.&nbsp; The key is to focus on the value of results, keeping innovations practical, when implementing new ideas.&nbsp; Of course, research is also important in determining which ideas are worth major efforts and which are not.  I believe that we should never say NO, immediately.&nbsp; Accept ideas as worthy of some mental investment and at least one discussion to tease out how it can create value for your constituents (customers, partners, shareholders and fellow employees). Of course, if it comes from any of the constituents, the likelihood of it being impactful is even better.&nbsp; The cycle of idealization to feedback to implementation back to idealization is an implicit optimization loop.  The AI model, based around insights and encoded knowledge, will be extremely impactful in the coming years.  There are many areas where an organization can innovate: technologically, operational processes and business models, etc. I see compelling innovation put to use constantly - the highly diversified technology threads of Google, the use of SaaS as a business model by ServiceNow, the full iphone consumer all-in-one experience by Apple, or IBM&rsquo;s Watson AI initiative.&nbsp; They are all industry changing from the value they have created.&nbsp; In many cases (like in AI), innovation in pure technology also makes possible innovation using the technology in operational processes and business models. That is where we at Serviceaide are making our own small contribution for Service and Support use cases.  Wai Wong View Edit Delete

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