Innovator Profiles

Id Summary Bio Answer 1 Answer 2 Answer 3 Answer 4 Answer 5 Leader Actions
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
19  <p class="p1">Jorge is a global Innovation Insurgent and author of the innovation blog&nbsp;<a href="http://www.game-changer.net/"><span class="s1">Game-Changer</span></a>.&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">Jorge is known as the Puzzle Builder and Pain Reliever by companies such as FedEx Ground, TelVista, The Jumpitz, Tuni&amp;G, IOS Offices and Chivas USA. This is because whether it's planning and executing strategies to improve processes, helping companies "wow" their customers, or creating new capabilities, products and services and launching them in the market; he's done it.</p> <p class="p1">He is the Co-founder and Chief Strategist of Blu Maya. Connect with Jorge on Twitter&nbsp;<a href="http://www.twitter.com/jorgebarba"><span class="s1">@jorgebarba</span></a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgebarba/"><span class="s1">LinkedIn</span></a>.</p>  <p>Leaders that want to build an organization that innovates consistently must provide three things to employees: freedom, support and challenge.&nbsp;Those are the key ingredients needed to accelerate innovation in any environment. In other words, you can put it like this: Have bold goals, get out of the way and reward people for trying. The last point is very important because when people see that getting rewarded for trying, not getting punished, is like a badge of honor; they will start giving a damn.&nbsp;Try it, you'll see.</p>  <p>Innovation is as much about attitude and perspective as it is about process. So, the impediment to innovation for large organizations, today and forever, is human nature. The fear of losing what one already has is probably the most pervasive bias of all, and it reflects itself in how enterprises behave in the marketplace.&nbsp;There are some forward-thinking organizations that deliberately keep biases at bay by doing specific activities that force people to expand their perspectives, experiment and try new things, and collaborate with people outside their domain.&nbsp;The activities themselves are not hard to do, what's hard is accepting that you have to make time for "assumption busting" activities and that they are priceless for the long-term existence of the enterprise.&nbsp;</p>  <p>I'm a proponent of organic over systematic innovation. Embracing organic change is when the mindset is being developed in a slow but deliberate process; rather than being dictated. &nbsp;Systematic innovation takes a more MBA approach, where the assumption is that you can manage and measure innovation. This is the approach that is sold by consultants to large organizations. I don't believe you see a lot of breakthrough comes from systematic innovation. Heck, look at any list of the most innovative companies and most are innovators because they live the ethos of the innovator rather than dictate it.</p> <p>I am also a proponent of speed, so experimenting to quickly eliminate assumptions we are making is key for me. Rapid prototyping can take many forms such as physical products, mock ups, storyboards, role playing, etc.. The point of rapid prototyping is speeding through your list of assumptions, changing and getting to "better" faster.&nbsp;</p>  <p>There are many that in combination will drive massive change across enterprises and all size of business. Specifically, I'm looking at artificial intelligence, big data, augmented reality, virtual reality, natural language processing, and speech recognition.&nbsp;Why these? Because in aggregate we will see them both in the consumer and enterprise domain; specifically in how we get stuff done, how we hire and how we collaborate.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Nike, Porsche, McLaren Automotive, Darpa, Google, Amazon, Apple, Pixar; to name a few. The reason? Simple: they have bold goals, they don't compromise on their values, and they constantly push boundaries to make things radically better.&nbsp;</p>  Jorge Barba View Edit Delete
12  <p>Wendy Mayer is Vice President of Worldwide Innovation for Pfizer, responsible for driving ideas and fresh thinking across the organization through the identification of transformative and disruptive innovation platforms, and through the development of capabilities and a culture that will support continued innovation.</p>  <p>You have to have that enthusiasm and drive from the kind of grassroots level of the organization, but then they have to be supported and feel as if they have the ability to take action on those ideas from above. And so it's the combination of those two that really enables, I think, productive activity across an organization.</p>  <p>I think a big one that people very often talk about is the fear of failure. The best innovations have really iterated and require actually a lot of failure and learning from that failure in order to deliver successful innovation. And so, if people feel as if there is no tolerance for failure, or that that is a mark on their reputation or on their career path, that will kill innovation right in its tracks.</p> <p>The other thing I think is the funding aspect. If funding is only available for projects that have a demonstrated ROI, then that will also kill the ideas. If you're comparing new ideas to established proven tactics or strategies, the innovation and the new idea is going to lose every time. So depending on what sort of metrics or bar you're holding up as a success measure, that could very often, if you don't have the right one, be a barrier to innovation.</p>  <p>I think [CIO] titles vary across organizations. To me, the point is that there is an element of getting out from under the business and influencing strategy, even organization, at a senior level. And so, there's been a lot written about the importance of having [the] innovation function reporting high into the organization. I think you also need to be strategic around where you innovate. Organizations need to be thinking at a high level strategy standpoint, as to what's the innovation ambition. Do I think you need to be a chief innovation officer? No, not necessarily. Obviously that's not my title, but I think it's more to the point that it needs to be a high level role, and one that can influence and be comfortable amongst senior leaders within an organization.</p>  <p>[Big data] changes the game in a few ways. Internally as an organization, it presents a lot of information you have accessible to you, as well as new channels and new opportunities and ways in which you could use that data. So, it can become fodder for innovative ideas. The second thing is just the evolution of computing power and technology, and accessibility to data. This is the democratization of innovation where beyond the walls of expert organizations, this information is available, and people have the ability to use it to develop new products, to come up with insights and offer that up to some of the more traditional organizations.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Our CEO has been very active in the program that we're working on now, and has been extremely vocal in sharing across many forums across the organization to tell people: this is a priority capability for our organization, and this is going to be required for our future success.&nbsp;</p>  Wendy Mayer View Edit Delete
41  <p>Look at almost any plastic soda bottle, and you will find that it stands on five ribs that are integral to the walls. The invention of the &ldquo;petaloid base&rdquo; in the 1970s offers crucial insight into an innovation process that is highly relevant to business today, and to the growing movement away from functional roles and toward value creation. Because pressurized plastic expands like a balloon under pressure, bottles at the time were two-piece products that stood on a rigid cup &ndash; and efforts to create a one-piece bottle had cost tens of millions, without success.</p> <p>Gautam Mahajan&mdash;the co-inventor of the petaloid base, then head of research and engineering at Continental Can&mdash; told BPI that his team solved the problem by reframing it in this way: where does the bottle <em>want</em> to go when under pressure, and using the concept of entropy, where everyone including the bottle resists being forced into an ordered state? It had been assumed in the industry that the bottle would need an incremental innovation, and that the machines that make them would require an expensive disruptive innovation&mdash;since they would have to create far more pressure to force out those five bulges. Mahajan proved the opposite: the disruptive petaloid solution changed the entire industry, while the machines needed only affordable shock-absorbing improvements, and timing changes.</p> <p>Now a leading author and thought leader, Mahajan moves executives and academics globally to his belief that the purpose of companies is not to generate profit, but to create value&mdash;where profit and competitiveness are by-products. &ldquo;We all know the purpose of attending college is education, not grades. Grades are a measure of how well you have studied,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Why then do business leaders still insist that the purpose of a business is profits? Indeed, why do we study for a Masters of Business Administration when it should be a Masters in Value Creation? Everything is process-driven at present, but we want the mind-set to be changed.&rdquo;</p> <p>Mahajan&rsquo;s new book, &ldquo;Value Creation: The Definitive Guide for Business Leaders&rdquo;, was introduced this month by the Director of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, and received high praise at a recent business literary festival. Gautam is setting up Value Creation Forums around the world and catalyzing colleges to conduct research on Value Creation. He believes values create value, and that efforts beyond formal job descriptions&mdash;efforts as small as a smile&mdash; generate brand equity for both the employee and the company.</p> <p>Mahajan is now the Founding Editor of the Journal of Creating Value, which enables academic research become more responsive and relevant to business practitioners, while promoting value creation as the new &ldquo;true north&rdquo; compass heading for executives. This approach echoes recent findings at Harvard Business School, in which Michael W. Toffel noted that, &ldquo;The lack of practical relevance of much of our research might suggest that few of us also have the ambition to improve the decisions of the managers and policymakers whose actions we study.&rdquo; The business leader who Harvard quoted on the issue&mdash;Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council&mdash;also noted that, &ldquo;There is often a disconnect between practitioners and academics, who tend to be far removed from operational complexities and market dynamics&rdquo;.</p> <p>&ldquo;I see myself as a generalist, as someone who has created and who thinks differently, who doesn&rsquo;t get stuck with the run of the mill thinking,&rdquo; says Mahajan. Previously, he was President of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, which is the only bilateral chamber between the US and India, and includes 14 offices between the two countries. He is also President of Inter-Link India and Customer Value Foundation and went on to become a leading consultant to top Indian companies, as well as the author of three seminal books on value. Mahajan told BPI that his consistent advice to innovators is to ban any concerns about cost when at the early, explorative end of the innovation process. Conversely, he also advises executives to free themselves from the fear of making incremental increases on the prices of their products, since customers will pay for value.</p> <p>Mahajan poses a fundamental thought challenge to companies innovating in areas like customer experience and &ldquo;customer journey&rdquo;&mdash;where customers are provided ever-better experiences when returning defecting products. &ldquo;They forget that customers do not want that journey in the first place,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Why not rather innovate toward zero complaints, and zero product returns?&rdquo;</p>  <p>Value Creation is a distinctive mind-set. It is a mentality driven by enhanced self-esteem, awareness, and pro-activeness. It goes beyond just doing your job, it is doing something extra. Value Creation is executing proactive, imaginative, or inspired actions that increase the net worth of products, services, or an entire business. This creates better gains or value for customers, stakeholders, and shareholders. Value Creation stimulates executives and business leaders to generate improved value for customers, driving success for the organization; it creates customer-conscious companies.</p> <p>Value Creation Forums have been started in the US, Europe and Asia, along with Value Creation research. Programs are underway to modify MBA teaching to become less functional and more value creation oriented. The role of an executive is not just to be a good manager, administrator, or a good efficiency expert; his or her role is to create value. Ahead of my most recent book, I realized that value is completely misunderstood. Everyone has a meaning for it&mdash;some think value means price, benefits, or importance&mdash; you can think of it in any way. In business jargon, value is creating financial benefits, and for people around you, which will eventually create greater financial benefit for you. You cannot set out and say you&rsquo;re going to create value for yourself; you have to create value for others, such that they recognize you are a person of greater value.</p> <p>You hear words like CRM, customer satisfaction, customer experience, customer journey, customer this and that, yet all are only one part of what the customer is looking for. When you start investing heavily in things like customer experience and customer journey, you are essentially saying that they are very important&mdash;and they are&mdash;but you forget the context of their importance.</p> <p>Once I have bought a cellphone, what is the experience I really want? I want it to work; I don&rsquo;t want to waste a lot of time on maintenance. The moment I have to go back to the company&mdash;and that&rsquo;s the experience companies are investing on improving but not the experience I as a customer want in the first place&mdash;I am making an extra journey. I just want to be left alone. Companies tend to glorify a journey that customers don&rsquo;t want in the first place instead of making sure I do not have a problem. The real thing they should be working on is how to prevent that journey. Companies should be innovating toward zero complaints, toward zero defects.</p> <p>It is easier to give examples of value destruction because they are so obvious. Value creation in a very simplistic sense is everything that goes beyond your job. You could be an accountant who does efficient work, you can&rsquo;t fault his numbers, but the guy comes up to you and says, you know the tax laws are going to change and maybe we should do something with our investments and our accounting practice so we get an advantage. He&rsquo;s done something extra. Everyone whose career progresses is creating value, but often he does not know that because he is doing it unconsciously. If you were conscious about it, you might create a little more value, and might destroy a little less.</p> <p>Stephen Vargo is on the board of our journal, and he coined the phrase, &lsquo;service-dominant logic&rsquo;. Before that, there were other concepts, but he said no, it is not about products. Everyone is serving everyone and the product is just part of the service. This year, there might be thousands of papers written on service dominant logic, talking about value co-creation, but few people seem to know what value co-creation is. Many see it as some kind of a vague thing that is nice to think about.</p> <p>We first started a journal that addresses both academics and practitioners: that&rsquo;s a difficult mix because academics like to write in journals, and practitioners generally don&rsquo;t like to write. They like to read. What we want is for academics to write in the way that business people can really understand, that is relevant. Then we encourage the practitioners to use this. On the other hand, we want practitioners to write about things that make academics pay notice. So if I write about zero complaints, they may wish to do research and find the best way to get to zero complaints. The second thing we have done is start Value Creation Forums around the world, and we have leaders in their fields come together and discuss value creation.</p> <p>We set up one in the Benelux with academics and practitioners, and many universities in the Netherlands came together and discussed three things: one, how can you create value for the student in the present courses. The second was to look at courses like HR and IT and see if you can just add one lecture on value creation for those courses. The third was to have a general management elective which is based on value creation. If you look at HR, it is probably one of the most important functions in the company since people--employees, partners and customers&mdash; are really important. The question I always ask is, &lsquo;Why don&rsquo;t HR guys become CEOs? Why are they called a staff function?&rsquo; That is because they do their functional work; they really do not do their value creation work. Once they start to do it, they begin to create immense value for the company.</p> <p>We have asked a college in India to look at values and value&mdash;what you stand for, such as ethics, morals, and integrity). The idea is that if you are a college that talks about values, do your students who become teachers do better than teachers for whom values were never inculcated? There is a professor at Wharton that does customer lifetime value; we want to work together so that he can correlate customer value-added with customer lifetime value.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Let&rsquo;s look at small things that prevent people from being innovators. One is self-esteem. If you do not believe in yourself, you cannot create value. Two, you really have to become aware; if you don&rsquo;t notice things around you, it becomes difficult to innovate. Most people who truly create value do not need a financial incentive to innovate; they are natural innovators because they have awareness and believe in themselves. Fear of failure comes in when you are concerned only about keeping your job.</p> <p>Another thing I find really slows down innovation is bringing the financial thought process onto the innovation table. You sit at the table, and someone comes up with an idea, and the guy next to him says, &lsquo;That can never work because it is going to be too expensive.&rsquo; You then discard it because you have forgotten that things become cheaper and cheaper. So, my advice to innovators is to forget the cost part of it and say, &lsquo;What is the best way of doing this?&rsquo; Then ask how to make it practical from a cost point of view. Too many good ideas just go away because some joker says it will hurt cash flow or will be too expensive.</p> <p>I am not sure that disruptive innovation is the only way to go. A few years ago, I went with students in an innovation course and suggested they work with the long distance taxi service to prevent one way hiring, and ensure the taxi guy got a return ride. It would save costs for the passenger and increase profits for the taxi person. This was like a pre-Uber move, but no one looked at it. Would this be called disruptive or an add on? Today, Uber would call it disruptive.</p> <p>With the development of the petaloid bottle base, we had machines that were taking a pounding, because the pressures required to blow the petaloid bottle were much higher than the simpler bottle. The design group came up with a way that would cost $75,000 per machine&mdash;in the late 70&rsquo;s&mdash;and we had about 45 machines. They were redoing the machine. That&rsquo;s disruptive. I said that is the wrong approach. We ended up doing everything at a cost of only about $8,000. We studied the machine and asked, &lsquo;What is the machine actually doing?&rsquo; Why not just reduce the shock impact on the machines with cheap shock absorbers, and proper timing and then they will stop braking?</p>  <p>I suppose we could have called value creation, value innovation. To me, creation is a little more basic, more intrinsic. Innovation is something that takes something and goes to the next step. The goal is to take something that exists and try modify it a little. If the core of an MBA course should completely change, from one of teaching people to be good managers or efficient administrators, to becoming value creators that could be disruptive.</p> <p>Because many of the functional courses would start to disappear, and people would really start to learn how to create real value in HRD&mdash;instead of measuring whether the guy comes to work on time, or try to measure his performance&mdash; you are really doing something that increases the value to customers and society. Many functions could get outsourced into administration departments, and true HR Value Creation would remain in HR. If your brand equity increases, the brand equity of the company increases. People notice when value is created. In the Netherlands, we are currently doing a program with Microsoft with finance managers. Oracle is going to do something in this area on the West coast in the US.</p>  <p>I think it is about mind-set. One is business schools moving toward value creation, and away from doing functional teaching. Instead of a masters of business administration, you have a masters of value creation, or value management. A second thing is that companies start to drive their businesses from the point of view of long term value creation. One example was the CEO of Unilever, Paul Polman, who was able to convince his board that they should look at long term results&mdash;one to five years&mdash;rather than quarterly. What they got was a higher rate of growth overall, and fewer perturbations in share prices.</p> <p>One of the things I fear is the impact of automation. Too many of the younger generation are so smart at using tools that they forget the fundamentals. Data analytics is a great tool as long as you understand what lies behind. It is great if you analyze and measure the customer journey to a fine science, except you might miss the fact that customers might not want that journey, and you are actually making the journey more important. The focus goes away from zero complaints. Everything is process driven; we want the mind-set to be changed. We emphasize the better mind-set through our value creation councils.</p> <p>In India, the Tata companies are moving from business excellence to value creation thought processes. Unilever is doing good thinking. When they decided not to buy palm oil from a group of growers in Malaysia and Thailand because of the ecological impact, the fear was that prices would go up and customers would not buy. However, customers continued to buy because they favored sustainability. We found at Tata Power that values create value.&nbsp;</p>  <p>This morning, I got a call from a wrong number, and I then received six calls from the same number. I thought: how do I block this guy? I would pay for an app that allowed me to do that! All jokes aside, the real disruptive thing will be when we start to build things the way the human body is built. Today, the structures we build are external, and our body is internal.</p> <p>There is complex innovation and complicated innovation. With complex, we are talking about moving targets. In a complicated one, we know it is only a matter of putting all the known pieces together, like a jigsaw puzzle. A complicated problem might be building a big building, but all the steps are known. On the other hand, if you are trying to make a building that is a living building&mdash;perhaps a self-healing building&mdash;that is complex. Again, if you look at great innovations, you&rsquo;ll tend to find a value creation mindset behind them.</p>  Gautam Mahajan View Edit Delete
56  <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Andre</span><span class="s2">&nbsp;Fredericks is a get-things-done strategist exploiting design and technology to solve complex business problems. Learn how his organization is changing the game in life insurance by taking a complicated, uncomfortable product and making it appealing.</span></p>  <p>Life Insurance is a complicated product. It&rsquo;s typically a grudge purchase made mostly because an agent convinced you that you needed it and assisted you over the purchase line. This in itself can be a complicated and drawn out process which could take a few weeks to complete, with underwriting and medical tests that need to be conducted. Life insurers also typically struggle in attracting younger clients which places pressure on long term business sustainability.</p> <p>Indie has rewritten the narrative of purchasing Life Insurance away from &ldquo;Protecting your loved ones when you pass on,&rdquo; to &ldquo;Not just insuring your life, but Creating Wealth." We do this by matching up to 100% of your monthly premium and placing it into an investment that generates wealth over time. It's all tax-free and costs our clients nothing.</p> <p>We&rsquo;ve been successful in attracting a younger audience with our fresh messaging and honest content. We don&rsquo;t just want clients to buy our product, we want them to be financially savvy and make the right financial choices. That is why we keep on producing content to educate - not only for our clients but for everyone.</p> <p>We view the entire customer experience and engagement as &lsquo;The Product,&rsquo; which is contrary to the traditional view that only the Financial Product is &lsquo;The Product.&rsquo; We actively leverage design and technology to deliver it in a seamless and cost-effective manner. With us, you can purchase underwritten Life Cover in as little as 10 minutes, or if you prefer, save and resume later, or chat with a live customer success agent for assistance.</p> <p>We truly place our clients in the center of everything that we do. We view them as the true heroes of the story, which is their financial journey. We are only their guide. Our aim is to equip them with the knowledge and tools that will assist them in making the right financial choices and pave their way to financial freedom.</p>  <p>Large incumbents have been around for many years. As an example, our Parent Group has been a going concern for 100 years. During that time, you develop a significant portfolio of legacy technology systems which inhibits your ability to change. This effect is compounded as the financial products those systems support have a very long lifespan and continued platform renewal is not always viable.</p> <p>Mature businesses are also geared for continuous optimisation in order to remain profitable. Halting or impeding operations to experiment with a new business model introduces risk and creates tension between short and long term goals.</p> <p>Our industry is also still largely intermediated where agents have relationships with the clients and insurance companies provide products. This separation makes it difficult for companies to get closer to clients and build real empathy required to deliver on their needs.</p> <p>We have been set up as a new business with the freedom to experiment with new business models and technology whilst leveraging the scale that comes from our parent company. This scale comes in the form of intellectual property, financial licenses and access to capital. So really, the best of both worlds.</p>  <p>Having the luxury of building an organisation from the ground up ensured we made it a foundational principle and baked it into our DNA. We try and keep our structure as flat as possible and communication as transparent as possible.</p> <p>No one person has a monopoly on ideas or innovation. Everyone is encouraged to contribute and participate in identifying opportunities or brainstorming ideas to problems. Work in progress solutions are shared and everyone has the opportunity to engage, ask questions and make suggestions.</p> <p>We also hired people who did not have experience in our industry and we valued the diverse opinions they brought to the table. Many times their &ldquo;naivety&rdquo; unlocked some insight where we were stuck in our old paradigm of &ldquo;this is how that is supposed to work&rdquo;.</p> <p>We also have a bias towards action, as we truly believe that doing, and shopping our product is the only way you really learn. We are client driven and embrace feedback. It is the only way you refine your value proposition and assist your clients in achieving their desired outcomes.</p>  <p>As the core financial products become more commoditised, companies will adopt a more personalised approach focusing on client engagement. Companies will have to deal with two major issues here, 1) typical Life Insurance services and products don&rsquo;t lend themselves to frequent engagement and 2) as the industry is mostly intermediated, the client relationship typically resides with the agent.</p> <p>We can expect to see regulation, affecting how agents are remunerated, create an advice-gap where agents opt to serve higher-income clients, leaving lower-income clients unserved. This is where Robo-Advice is able to play a role by automating financial advice processes. Agents could also leverage the type of tools we see remote teams use for collaboration, to attend to more clients, thus removing geographic barriers and saving time.</p> <p>Effective distribution will remain key and I expect to see the continued experimentation with alternative distribution and partnership models.</p> <p>Technologies like Cloud can assist in driving down operational costs and unlock new capabilities, while investments in AI and Analytics can offer better client and market insight, and also help optimise front- and back-end processes such as underwriting, improved pricing, risk- and capital management.</p> The key is not which technologies or trends are the latest, but how the intersection of these technologies and trends can be utilised to unlock more utility value for their clients. Companies who really understand and engage their clients will reap benefits.  <p>I am a big proponent of Design Thinking as it provides a mechanism to really understand clients, identify their pain points and latent needs. Spending time with clients and building empathy really allows you to build solutions that matter. Beyond the Design Thinking process, having the right mindset is important such as reframing, asking questions, keeping an open mind, deferring judgement, and continued learning.</p> <p>I also love innovations that bring to life that which seems to be futuristic in a way that hides all the technical complexity, whilst delivering a seamless client experience.</p> <p>Amazon Go is a great example of this. Using computer vision, machine learning and IoT together to redefine the shopping and checkout experience. You simply scan your app&rsquo;s code on the way in, select what you want from the shelves and just walk out. The technology detects what you&rsquo;ve selected to buy and charges your card on the way out.</p> <p>Each piece of technology already existed in its own right, but Amazon Go used the intersection of those technologies to develop a customer experience with enhanced utility value i.e. instant checkout.</p>  Andre Fredericks View Edit Delete
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
39  <p>Alex Blanter is a partner and leader of A.T. Kearney's innovation practice. Armed with over 20 years&rsquo; experience in driving high-tech business growth in Silicon Valley and beyond, Blanter is a global thought leader on new technology deployment for enterprise-scale businesses, and on novel solutions for complex problems.</p>  <p>This technological and business model transformation we are living through actually requires companies to innovate differently. The set of innovation practices companies could rely on to stay in the game &ndash; even recently &ndash; are no longer sufficient. In the past, and even the most recent past, the main philosophy was that innovation is a science &ndash; that you can go through a number of predictable steps: create new ideas; decide which ones to invest in; have an efficient development engine that gets those ideas to market; and manage your portfolio in the marketplace.</p> <p>What&rsquo;s happening now is that the level of disruption is such &ndash; and the level of fluidity is such &ndash; that this is no longer enough: you now need to plug into the ecosystem of these new technologies, and monitor your broader role in the marketplace. I explain it to companies this way, especially for larger enterprises: you need to play the long game fast.</p> <p>As we know, the capabilities deployed from new technologies allow you to do amazing things. But out of those 50 amazing things you can do, we assess which of those will actually deliver the most value within your timeframe, and what you need to do within that timeframe to take maximum advantage. Some of these technologies, and corresponding opportunities, are mature enough that you actually need to jump on the bandwagon and start developing a product right away, or start implementing a feature. Some technologies (and business models) are farther out, and therefore you shouldn&rsquo;t do that &ndash; but you do need to engage with the ecosystem and monitor the development of those technologies so you are in the flow, and are not left behind.</p> <p>Whether you look at IoT, or AI, or Big Data, or any one of those fundamental tech shifts &ndash; and even the business model shifts &ndash; we see that they are affecting the majority of the industries in a way those industries are not used to. Companies are either seeing real benefits or are suffering.</p> <p>Take IoT, for example. If you think about being able to source granular data in real time, process it and effect change back in the physical environment, you can think about all kinds of examples of solutions. Look at LA, where drivers lose millions of hours a year just looking for a parking space.</p> <p>If I can instrument my parking garages so that they can show the absence and presence of cars in specific parking spaces, and if I can couple it with positioning sensors in the cars so I can understand where they are going, I can actually create predictive models where I can direct drivers to the places which <em>most likely</em> have open spaces at the time of their arrival. I can even predict when a space will likely <em>become</em> available, or at least predict turnover on average stays. I&rsquo;ll know that 15 cars are leaving every 5 minutes. If I install sensors in various places in this whole use case &ndash; then think of it as a use case with multiple players &ndash; parking garage; traffic controls; individual drivers. I can actually collect and connect that information to optimize the whole use case and deliver value to multiple players at the same time.</p> <p>At a strategic level, we&rsquo;re helping companies figure out how technologies like IoT present a potential for disruption: in some cases, fairly minor, which can be dealt with in the normal course of business, but in other cases, the disruption will be fundamental. And the challenge is not just that they will be fundamental, the challenge is that they will sneak up on you. These start as an interesting curiosity, but before you know it, you are behind the curve.</p> <p>Industries with significant capital assets like oil &amp; gas are not going to be displaced by the next Internet company, but they can be materially affected from a competitiveness point of view. If some competitors start instrumenting their assets and increasing their asset utilizations &ndash; e.g., predictive maintenance based on predicted wear &ndash; that will be a competitive game changer that will demand a response.</p> <p>Let me give you another example. Let&rsquo;s say you have a logistics company with warehouses, which you might think is not a very cutting edge business. You will find that as simple a thing as a garage door can be the focus point for a significant opportunity. Residential garage doors in the U.S. have some level of automation at around 80%, but only about 30% of commercial doors are instrumented in any way. By 'simply' installing automation and the sensors on the garage door, you can significantly reduce energy consumption, because you&rsquo;re otherwise losing all that heat or AC to the environment &ndash; and who thinks about keeping the door closed? There is nobody in charge of closing the door within 10 seconds of a truck coming in. Then you go a step beyond that &ndash; with algorithms that allow me optimize goods and truck flow through those doors, and that creates additional opportunities from the same technological solution.</p> <p>At A.T. Kearney, when it comes to innovation and disruption our differentiators are three-fold.</p> <p>First, we have a very deep understanding and knowledge of the industries in which we operate. So, for a project we did recently for an insurance company, we brought our financial services group and our high-tech group together, both to the pitch and the project.</p> <p>Also, because many of us here are engineers or technologists by training, we come into all of that with a very pragmatic lens. Its very easy to get completely absorbed into the hype: &ldquo;Okay, robots and Big Data are taking over the world; AI is the next best thing since sliced bread; IoT is nirvana.&ldquo; And to present big messages and great forecasts.&nbsp; But where it becomes valuable for our clients is our ability to actually translate that into what it means for their business, now and in the medium and long term, and how they need to respond to it in very pragmatic terms. Very few companies have unlimited money &ndash; therefore, while you can have the best strategy, you still need to be able to make the right choices.</p> <p>A third differentiator is that we are truly a single global partnership; there is no friction in bringing together our capabilities in the Silicon Valley and in Korea or Germany. Many of our competitors are regionally or even locally structured, so they have a more difficult time in bringing a global perspective to bear. What we can help companies in a very collaborative, open way, is to really drive to a better set of choices that will allow them to do what they need to be successful in this ever-changing landscape.</p> <p>Beyond the right choices, companies are faced with the need to incubate things that have a much longer gestation period. If you are an automotive insurance company, for instance, instrumenting all the cars in order to take all their information will change your business model, from a statistical, actuarial model to an individual use model. But you&rsquo;re not going to instrument old cars en masse, only new cars, and you&rsquo;ll need to achieve fleet thresholds &nbsp;&ndash; so its a 5 or 7-year horizon. Look at what&rsquo;s happening at Intel &ndash; the pre-eminent chip company is laying off 12,000 people, and its because they were not fast enough; not agile within the ecosystem when it came to mobile. With the new technologies, that agility will be even more important.</p> <p>I have looked at how innovation has evolved, going way back. In the Middle Ages innovation was mostly considered magic, and the winner became a tribal chief and the loser possibly was burned at the stake. In later centuries it was then driven as art, and it evolved to a more or less a science by the end of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. We are in transition right now, and it is now fundamentally culture driven &ndash; a culture that requires rapid experimentation and constant involvement in the ecosystem.</p> <p>Even the recent past, when you were innovative, your prize was your position of dominance in the market.&nbsp; What you have now as a prize is simply an opportunity to innovate again; that&rsquo;s all you actually get. Just science isn&rsquo;t enough; you actually have to change the DNA of the company to innovate differently.</p> <p>Different industries will move at different speeds. The number of technologies that are now available for a broader set of industries and how those technologies interplay with each other is fundamentally changing the business environment.</p> <p>Before, you had communications and computing at certain speeds, and sensors at a certain cost &ndash; when you put them together, each of those things was useful, but they were not reinforcing each other. Now they are all at the level of cost/performance where you can put them together in a way that creates completely novel outcomes. They are no longer additive; they are multiplicative.</p>  <p><em>In a major presentation to executives in Silicon Valley last year, entitled &ldquo;Rethinking the 'How' of enterprise innovation,&rdquo; Blanter listed some key obstacles to innovation within large organizations, including:</em></p> <ul> <li><em>Stable &ndash; and somewhat frozen &ndash; business models;</em></li> <li><em>A complex regulatory environment, and resulting risk aversion;</em></li> <li><em>Culture of large organizations &ndash; with its premium on current performance and business stability;</em></li> <li><em>Legacy infrastructure &ndash; and significant costs to re--platform.</em></li> </ul> <p><em>He added: &ldquo;Addressing these challenges one-by-one is a losing proposition. A change in DNA is required.&rdquo;</em></p> <p>Blanter told BPI:</p> <p>&ldquo;The incumbency curse is real. And old innovation methods will deliver old innovation results." Organizational inertia is a real challenge; every large enterprise is struggling with the notion of delivering value today, with adapting and adjusting to delivering value tomorrow. And the metrics are built for the very short term.</p> <p>Playing the long game fast. The majority of innovations, when they are just starting out, are not material enough to a big company to matter. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges to innovation is to figure out how to stay the course with these small but very new projects, while at the same time executing on the business plan for revenue. You simply don&rsquo;t know which of the twenty small projects are going to be the next great thing.</p> <p>Look at Amazon &ndash; one reason they are so successful is that, for many years, they told a story to the street that they were not expecting to be profitable in near future. That allowed them to plough money back into the business &ndash; like echo device or cloud services. Most regular companies would never have had the foresight to do that.</p> How many companies are actually able pull off not just the story, but the execution? It comes down to DNA of the company.  <p>Culture isn&rsquo;t an objective; it's a means to something bigger &ndash; growth or profitability or competitive advantage. We don&rsquo;t want to destroy value &ndash; there are countless examples of new CEOs turning companies upside down just for the sake of change, and destroying value.</p> <p>But many large enterprises are clearly not evolving fast enough, with average tenure of companies in the S&amp;P500 dropping by 80%. So we look at the culture through the lens of the journey the company has taken; where the CEO and the executive team wants to take the firm, and what things need to change, and for what purpose.</p> <p>To measure innovation the right way, you are actually introducing a level of discomfort into the organization, because that&rsquo;s a mechanism to change culture. You can&rsquo;t just delegate innovation to people in the corner, you actually need to change the culture &ndash; and that is probably the most difficult thing to do; certainly, more difficult than changing strategy. You want to amplify the right messages and behaviors, and to create barriers for the wrong ones. One interesting metric for innovation is revenue from new products. But what is a new product? &ndash; that&rsquo;s actually not a trivial determination.</p> <p>Removing organizational barriers and silos, and all the normal problems enterprises grow up to have &ndash; difficulty in collaborating across regions; difficulties in taking risk; difficulty in connecting engineering with manufacturing; difficulty in driving revenue from new products; it is all a challenge for changing culture.</p> <p>On metrics: We worked with a semiconductor equipment company, whose main business is equipment, but they also have a significant services and spares businesses. We found that the innovation measure for their equipment business needed to be very different from their innovation measure for their services business.</p> <p>Conversations with our clients start at the business problem level &ndash; some of those are actually big enough to require culture change.&nbsp; Within Kearney itself, we try very hard to practice what we preach in terms of an innovative culture. We have put in place mechanisms for collecting ideas; we have a global innovator competition, where winners get real resources to implement those ideas. We look across our client portfolio, and look at which project was most innovative, and what lessons can be learned from that.</p> <p>But we found that the infectious impetus of personal passion can also drive culture change. We do a lot of work in the digital space, but we started with a number of partners and staff who were simply passionate about innovations in that space, personally, and that had its own momentum.&nbsp;</p>  <p>The transition we are in is being triggered by a collection of new technologies, not a single one. But, okay, take 3-D printing.&nbsp; Some people believe that this will disrupt manufacturing overall in the near term. Yes, it will materially impact how manufacturing is done, and, yes, it will allow people to make things locally, versus globally. But I don&rsquo;t think it will change manufacturing in the near term; the installed base is just too great.</p> <p>That said, I would argue that the impact of 3-D printing will be much greater on design: it will allow design engineers to design parts that could not be made now, and especially in designing simpler, more reliable products with fewer parts. Its value is disruptive in nature in the short term, rather than a huge monetary impact. Cars are not going to be 3-D printed in 3 or 5 years, but the design of cars will start changing because of it.</p> <p>Big data and analytics will bring a level of insight that was never possible before, for a broad range of industries, and in ways those companies can start taking advantage of it in more explicit ways. I think the number and variety if business models companies will be able to deploy will increase significantly. Insurance is a good example &ndash; when companies start to charge on actual use, rather than on statistical models, that&rsquo;s a very different business model, leading to a very different relationship with the customer.</p> <p>If I look at large industrial equipment: at the moment I make it, I sell it; you pay me to use it. What if, now, I can instrument that equipment to better manage it, so that I can guarantee things to you that I could not guarantee before?</p> <p>The Nest Thermostat started as a replacement for individual consumers to regulate their private heating and cooling. Yet it is emerging as a remarkable tool for power utilities &ndash; because it has information from individual homes, the company can go to the power utility and say: &ldquo;in this part of the grid, by making very minor automatic adjustment to the temperature, we can reduce your peak load requirements, so you don&rsquo;t have to bring additional power plants online, or build them.&rdquo;</p> <p>Business models based on a combination of integrated technologies &ndash; that&rsquo;s the game of the future. Its not jumping on the bandwagon of a single technology, partly because none will deploy fast enough, especially in the industrial space. A lot of companies underestimate this potential.</p>  <p>The whole proliferation of sharing business models, enabled by technology, is something no one saw coming at this level.&nbsp; You have a set of underutilized assets &ndash; like homes or cars &ndash; and what is fundamental about this is that a set of technologies and business models increase utilization of physical assets, and that is profound. Because if you can do it with cars and homes, you can do it with anything.</p> <p>The whole notion of AI is exciting, in terms of the convergence of technologies. Look at what Kaiser is doing in Healthcare; they are at at forefront making patient records not only electronic, but minable.</p> <p>With a good enough data structure, you can start to look at prevention, not just&nbsp; treatment. A patient was recently diagnosed in an emergency room by referring to data from the person&rsquo;s FitBit.</p> <p>Novel ways to use technologies; that&rsquo;s what is exciting for me.</p>  Alex Blanter 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
63  <p>Bryony Winn is the Chief Strategy Officer for Anthem, Inc., a U.S. provider of health insurance. Anthem is the largest for-profit managed health care company in the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.&nbsp;She is responsible for developing Anthem&rsquo;s Enterprise strategy and growth plans, as well as continuing to expand Anthem&rsquo;s focus on delivering innovative solutions to all stakeholders. Prior to Anthem, she was Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. Before that, she was a partner in the Chicago office of McKinsey &amp; Company.</p>  <p>I believe strongly that to successfully transform an organization to embrace and lead on digital innovation and change&hellip; you must ensure innovation is both <strong><em>everywhere</em></strong>&hellip; and <strong><em>somewhere</em></strong>. What I mean by this is that you must instill an innovation mindset within every nook and cranny of the organization... while also dedicating a full-time team to the ambition. If you only do the former, you risk the effort stalling due to weak ownership. If you only do the latter, you risk creating a silo, innovating in a vacuum and in a way that doesn&rsquo;t make sense or isn&rsquo;t embraced across your business.</p> <p>In sum, digital transformation requires a &ldquo;yes, and&hellip;&rdquo;not an &ldquo;either/or&rdquo; approach. You must drive cultural changes across the entire organization <strong><em>and </em></strong>set goals / launch dedicated initiatives within and owned by every single part of the business <strong><em>and </em></strong>build a team dedicated solely to driving innovation.</p>  <p>Innovation in healthcare... is hard. It is a highly regulated industry; has incredibly varied delivery systems across the world, limiting the spread of best practices and innovation; is dominated by large industry incumbents and significant barriers to entry for new players; and is unparalleled and high stakes &ndash; with lives potentially on the line when innovations don&rsquo;t work.</p> <p>This has all contributed to digital innovation (and even adoption!) significantly lagging behind other industries. Compared to the digital transformations in other industries (think: the electric car, app-based food and grocery delivery, music streaming, etc.) the disjointed and often analog consumer experience within the healthcare system can feel archaic to consumers.</p> <p>I see my sector&rsquo;s history of innovation paralysis, however, as a fantastic opportunity to leapfrog. And, this leapfrogging is well underway &ndash; new healthcare technologies (virtual care solutions, remote monitoring, AI algorithms to read chest X-rays, personalized medicine therapies&hellip; the list goes on) and advancements in data and analytics are transforming my industry at an unparalleled rate. This transformation has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which placed intense and immediate pressure on my industry to respond. We rushed to develop vaccines, create virtual care options, and adapt our products and services to the &ldquo;new normal.&rdquo; COVID-19 has fundamentally changed my industry, and we will continue to invest in innovation to meet the demands of our time.</p>  <p>At my company, we are intensely focused on fostering an innovation culture and mindset in all of our employees. Equally important, however, are the organizational changes we are making to enable these culture changes and mindset shifts. We recognize that it is not enough to tell people to think creatively with an eye towards the future&hellip; you must also provide an environment that will enable and empower these changes. This means re-imagining the often long-ingrained processes and structures that can hold back innovation to create a more agile organization. At my company, this means re-designing everything from the way we measure and track our performance to the way we run our day-to day meetings, to the format of our materials and agendas.</p>  <p>I believe the acceleration of consumerism will be the defining force of the healthcare industry in the post-COVID-19 era. By this I mean so much more than consumers demandingmore user-friendly products. Rather, the &ldquo;consumer voice&rdquo; in healthcare, already influential, will grow and consumers will expect more of our industry than to simply provide healthcare services &ndash; they will demand <em>health</em>.</p> <p>They will demand <em>health</em> that is affordable &ndash; to meet the ever-increasing affordability challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 epidemic (44% of US consumers reported not being able to pay a $1K medical bill).</p> <p>They will demand <em>health</em> that delivers chronic condition management, not just urgent care. (American consumers are aging rapidly, and this growing population has significant health needs, with over 2/3 of seniors living with more than 2 chronic conditions.)</p> <p>And finally, they will demand <em>health </em>inclusive of mental, not just physical care (as COVID-19 increases the prevalence and severity of already under-treated behavioral health conditions).</p>  <p>One of the pitfalls I&rsquo;ve seen when an organization launches an innovation strategy is the &ldquo;endless pilots&rdquo; trap &ndash; meaning, they constantly incubate and test ideas, partnerships, and new technologies&hellip; but never bring anything to scale. The best innovation teams tackle this risk head on, continuously assessing their pipeline for promise of success and scalability, defining stage gates at which to evaluate their initiatives, and deploying strict criteria to evaluate impact. The result? The portfolio of initiatives become incredibly curated and purposeful; pilots without impact are sunsetted rather than stalled; and successful initiatives are implemented quickly and more broadly. These team are seen as a true incubators of the company&rsquo;s future &ndash; rather than a lone-ranger team running wild with flashy, crazy, impractical ideas. &nbsp;</p>  Bryony Winn View Edit Delete
9  <p>Pieter de Villiers is responsible for establishing Clickatell as the world&rsquo;s leading mobile messaging provider, enabling tens of thousands of enterprises and millions of consumers to interact, communicate and benefit greatly via their mobile phone. De Villiers has led the organization through a decade of robust growth and innovation by providing high value, application-to-person (A2P) SMS services to banks and other financial services providers, governments, social communities, and a myriad of mobile developers in several additional vertical markets.</p>  <p>Building an organization or culture that embraces change is no easy task since both are a reflection of its people and most people do not like change -- we are, after all, &lsquo;creatures of habit&rsquo;. However, I&rsquo;ve found if the change or innovation is focused on efforts that improve, enhance, or simplify things you are already doing, it is generally accepted by smart organizations. You can then get those same smart people to innovate in areas outside of what you do today as long as you provide a clear &ldquo;Vision&rdquo; and &ldquo;Why&rdquo; to your people.</p>  <p>Not having a clear &ldquo;Why&rdquo; or &ldquo;Vision&rdquo; for the business that translates into relevance is a large impediment to enterprise innovation today. It is important for a company to know who and what it is and what is brings to the industry (example Kodak: Thinking of themselves as a paper or camera company instead of a company people associate with their most precious memories).</p> <p>Not having the courage to manage stakeholder expectations as you invest for change is another innovation impediment. Executive teams are measured on how well they meet quarterly earnings expectations, so it is understandable that many would prefer to just &ldquo;deliver the numbers&rdquo; than take risks. However, this does not produce an environment conducive to change and innovation. It is better to manage expectations and know that as your technology or company changes, the measurement and expectations need to change too.&nbsp;</p> <p>Organizational agility and management ability to &ldquo;re-tool&rdquo; for change is a must have. Managing people is difficult enough, adding in the complexity of &ldquo;re-tooling&rdquo; the organization with training and hiring creates an additional burden to an already complex role as a manager. A manager without the skills to handle these issues impedes effective change and innovation.</p>  <p>At Clickatell, we are thinking a lot about our &ldquo;Why&rdquo; and our relevance in order to update our thinking and match it with our customer&rsquo;s perspective. We have also allocated funding to new initiatives and products even though they only contribute to the bottom line in the &ldquo;out years.&rdquo; We have embraced new methodologies (agile/scrum) and tools/platforms as we design new solutions and optimize existing offers (Hadoop, Amazon- Cloud, etc.).</p>  <p>Two years is a short time frame, so it will have to be those technologies that have some level of &ldquo;mainstream&rdquo; acceptance already. This would include mobile technologies with their super-size reach, Cloud Computing which improves speed to market and reduces start-up costs and lastly Big Data &amp; Analytics which allows us to better understand our customer behavior and monetize in new ways.</p>  <p>People (typically product folks) that are very close to customers, engage them often and understand how they are using the product embody the innovation mindset. These are the same individuals who measure results frequently and are willing and/or able to iterate and invest in expanding/improving the organizations value proposition. I don&rsquo;t feel there is a specific company to name because for me, there is no singular company that gets this right all the time.</p>  Pieter de Villiers View Edit Delete
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
38  <p>Serving as Arla&rsquo;s Head of Open Innovation, Barraza is a chemical engineer by training who is passionate about collaborations between enterprises, academia and entrepreneurs. He studied intellectual property law to arm himself with a tool that has since proved critical in his work on open innovation, both at Unilever and now at Arla.</p>  <p>Historically, an export mindset, the focus on quality and the embrace of innovation have been competitive advantages for Arla.&nbsp; In general, a strong export focus in Sweden and Denmark was a big difference from co-operative movements in other countries. In Denmark, for example, one driver was exports to the UK of butter and bacon, which originated two of the biggest companies in Denmark today: Danish Crown and Arla</p> <p>I see the DNA of the company as not just being a co-op, but innovative in terms of product quality. That continues today &ndash; to be able to maintain our dominant position in markets like the UK, and bolster our ability to enter new markets in China and the Middle East and U.S. as well. Particularly in China and the Middle East, the credentials of being high quality about products really helps our exports&nbsp; &ndash; stemming from the famously stringent laws we have (in Scandinavia and Europe).</p> <p>In addition to having strong dairy products, we are also manufacturers for other companies, so we also need to be competitive in technologies and efficiencies for production.</p> <p>What I do is often researching about research &ndash; how can we find new ways to interact with other types of research partners, such as academic partners and smaller companies, to unlock ecosystems of innovation. A big game changer for us has been the ability to translate the Scandinavian traditions of dairy products and foods to deepen appeal within diverse global markets. One of these products is Skyr, which is based on an old Nordic tradition: translating Skyr according to the taste of other parts of world, like the UK and Holland &ndash; that&rsquo;s been a game changer. Another has been the change in formulation in some of our high protein products, which have allowed very successful recent launches in China.</p> <p>We are also moving toward more strategic partnerships with universities. Last year, we partnered with Copenhagen University and Aarhus University to launch the Arla Dairy Health and Nutrition Excellence Center. I believe dairy can unlock major global problems in terms of nutrition, and we have only begun to tap the potential applications of natural milk proteins. We actively seek out disruptive ideas from both internal and external sources; connecting with small companies and entrepreneurs. Our approach is based around &lsquo;technology push; consumer pull&rdquo; &ndash; so that potential new products must see a deep collaboration between from both scientists and marketers before launch.</p> <p>Last year, we put together the Arla Food Innovation Challenge, in partnership with the Creative Business Cup. This challenged entrepreneurial ideas in competition, and brought winners to Copenhagen &ndash; and we were able to see fantastic ideas from preexisting businesses as well as from early-stage entrepreneurs. Stimulating entrepreneurs in this way gives us a new way of thinking about our products &ndash; providing new insights from external sources. I am very passionate about working with small and medium enterprises, which is what we will be pushing going forward.</p>  <p>Innovating in the dairy products space may seem less sexy than creating the next digital app, so it is a challenge to attract top entrepreneurial talent to the industry. And yet we are doing so at Arla. Our goal &ndash; to create the future of dairy &ndash; offers the kind of ambition that interests young innovators. And our potential for positive impact on societies around the globe is immense, in terms of health and nutrition in particular. We are trying to raise the level of expectation of what we need from small companies in the food industry, and showing that we can create opportunities for innovation. We also challenge entrepreneurs directly through competitions like the Innovation Challenge.</p> <p>Another potential impediment to innovation in the industry is the traction of ideas between seniority levels. In some companies, just the fact that, say, a junior scientist comes up with an idea may mean that idea does not go forward. But while that is a barrier present in other companies, I see it as a big positive contrast for us. At Arla, everybody has a say, and the weighting is the same for good ideas, no matter where it comes from.</p> <p>I also think that having gurus on innovation does not suit our industry &ndash; it is more about what works. The ability for anyone to put forward a proposal leads to a broader source of internal ideas. On the flip side, there is a greater challenge to reach a consensus &ndash; you may think that breaking consensus would be a barrier to innovation in a conservative environment, but the way we try to address that is to harness external sources.</p> <p>I learned so much during my time at Unilever, which was one of the initial drivers worldwide of open innovation, together with Procter &amp; Gamble. Unilever was creating new models of innovation before they appeared in textbooks. But the pace was such that there was time to experiment and develop iterations of prototypes. At Arla, open innovation is also a major feature, but the culture is a little different, partly because the speed at which things need to happen is greater. We try different things and must make almost instantaneous decisions on what works and what does not work, which, at times, may be a challenge.</p>  <p>Arla, of course, has a long history of innovation, but I think our roots in the Nordic countries really promotes this culture, and that culture itself also presents Arla with a big advantage in foreign markets.</p> <p>To be successful in the future, dairy companies will need to have strong credentials on sustainability. Consumers and customers in foreign markets know that the emphasis on sustainability in the Nordics is way ahead of other parts of the world. Already, Arla is the biggest organic milk producer in Europe, and those efforts in sustainability are being recognized abroad.</p> <p>Within the company, there is already a deeply collaborative culture, and part of my role is to try to bring Arla to working closer with SMEs and entrepreneurs, and finding new ways of approaching products and business models outside our own. We invite our large customers to come and innovate with us at the lab. We want to duplicate this more and more, and also to be involved in the incubation of start-ups.</p>  <p>I think the main driver for our business in the future will be people&rsquo;s concern in living longer and healthier lives &ndash; health will be the big driver throughout the food industry. There are increasingly effective technologies being developed to measure your health and fitness, which will impact the type of products we introduce in the market.</p> <p>There will soon be constant monitoring of all of your vital signs &ndash; technology which may tell you: &ldquo;this week, your calcium levels are lower and you may need x grams of cheese.&rdquo; There is going to be a big connection between products with strong health credentials and the maintenance and self-reporting of heath. Arla is in the right place in terms of understanding consumption and health-monitoring technologies.</p> <p>3-D printing offers some interesting opportunities, linked to new digital challenges. One possibility which is interesting for me, for instance, is whether new technologies can bring back old traditions &ndash; such as the popular tradition in the UK, in particular, of having your dairy product and bottle of milk delivered by the milkman to your front step. These are things that might come back in the digital world, and we have some people researching in that space &ndash; but aerial drones delivery are not part of that research just yet!</p>  <p>Well, we saw a series of outstanding innovations at the Arla Food Innovation Challenge. The Challenge winner &ndash; Miss Can, from Portugal &ndash; was a great example of the importance of creative consumer-focused innovation in an industry that may not seem sexy for entrepreneurs; in this case, canned fish.</p> <p>I am also really inspired by the innovations Arla is creating in terms of producing products which are not only &lsquo;nutrient dense&rsquo;, as our scientists call it, but are also about enjoying your life. It is not just about counting calories &ndash; so butter for instance, can be enjoyed as part of the rich life experience, with the right formulation and balance.</p> <p>But top of my list might be Arla&rsquo;s successful translation of Nordic products into markets and cultures from the U.S. to China.</p>  Harry Barraza View Edit Delete
7  <p>Chris Hummel has a 20+-year career in enterprise sales and marketing and is a globally-recognized thought&nbsp;leader and widely-respected senior executive in the technology industry. Chris Hummel is a true international executive, having lived, worked, and successfully led organizations around&nbsp;the globe, including the US, Germany, Eastern Europe and Asia.</p>  <p>Innovation is something you don&rsquo;t easily teach or even force on an organization.&nbsp; It requires fresh and unique perspectives gained from either pulling people out of their traditional roles and comfort zones or by bringing in outside perspectives through new talent acquisition or external expertise.&nbsp; At the same time, executive leaders must display and encourage a strong preference for thinking &lsquo;outside the box&rsquo; and a willingness to take risk to foster a change/innovation culture.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Innovation is stifled in companies that operate in silos, where leaders are inwardly focused, and where stakeholders have allowed business challenges, market dynamics or competitive pressures to dominate decision making and investment decisions.&nbsp; There is ample evidence of brands who have seen market leading positions deteriorate due to over-confidence and too much &ldquo;we know best&rdquo; mentality.&nbsp; Finally, companies whose research and development agendas are dominated by engineering or product focus rather than a market focus often fall behind peers from an innovation perspective.</p>  <p>A determined shift to a market-focused R&amp;D&nbsp; agenda is helping to drive an accelerated pace of innovation at my company.&nbsp; We have shifted away from investment decisions driven by the product portfolio or so-called &ldquo;long tail&rdquo; development projects toward a decision schema driven on careful analysis of industry trends and changing customer requirements.&nbsp;&nbsp; Those companies whose investment priorities are the result of market-facing analysis will have a faster time to value from innovation projects.</p>  <p>The emergence of improved collaboration and communications technologies will enable innovation workers to better come together as virtual teams and amplify the collective effort of today&rsquo;s &ldquo;anywhere workers.&rdquo;&nbsp; Such technologies will seamlessly combine voice, video, text, structured and unstructured content while also enabling a much improved collaborative environment that will drive not only higher levels of business performance but also accelerate the pace of innovation.</p>  <p>I admire Apple for what they have done for product design.&nbsp;&nbsp; Frog showed us the power of bringing customers into the conversation around innovation.&nbsp;&nbsp; In the end, I admire any company who has the courage to seek a better alternative when the &ldquo;good enough&rdquo; option won&rsquo;t do.</p>  Chris Hummel View Edit Delete
17  <p>Steven Bowman is a noted author and business advisor.&nbsp;He&nbsp;has an extensive background in the nonprofit arena. He is one of the world&rsquo;s leading governance and senior executive team specialists, having previously held positions as national executive director of the Australasian Institute of Banking and Finance, CEO of the Finance and Treasury Association, general manager of ExpoHire (Australia) Pty Ltd, assistant director of the Australian Society of CPAs, and director of the American College of Health Care Administrators.</p>  <p class="p1">Your own personal leadership is essential. From our point of view, leadership is about strategic awareness, where you are willing to be aware of the future possibilities, are nimble enough to turn to advantage any of these possibilities, and wise enough to know that your personal points of view are what creates your reality. Leadership and innovation do not come from policies, procedures or structures. It all starts with you. In the case of any organization, the culture of innovation and change starts with the CEO. If the CEO thinks they can train innovation by external advisors, workshops, incentives and rah rah talks, and the CEO does not choose this him or herself, then the culture of innovation cannot be created. And the hallmark of any really good CEO is their willingness to be strategically aware.</p>  <p class="p1">The main reason why organizations and cultures do not embrace innovation and change is because they have already decided what innovation and change is and is not. They have already defined the elements of innovation and change, even if those definitions begin with &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how to innovate and I don&rsquo;t like change.&rdquo; These are just definitions. There is extensive misunderstanding and misapplication about what innovation is. Most think it is about the new and the funky. Rather, it should be more about a state of being, a constant state of curiosity. It is actually about being aware and being willing to be the change that is required. It is about being the question from a sense of intense curiosity, not as a business imperative. Innovation is just a point of view. A fixed point of view about having already got it right in terms of market share, services, products and innovation leads to examples such as HMV, Kodak and Blockbuster. Any enterprise that thinks it has got something right, and is not willing to see different possibilities, is destined for the same fate.</p>  <p class="p1">We have chosen to function from no definition of what innovation is. We look for possibility in everything. We don&rsquo;t just look for the now, we also look for the future. It is about sustainable future and sustainable reality. Over last few years we have started to embrace the philosophy of being Pragmatic Futurists. A Pragmatic Futurist is about creating future potential possibilities (<a href="http://nomorebusinessasusual.com/pragmatic-futurist/"><span class="s1">http://nomorebusinessasusual.com/pragmatic-futurist/</span></a>). Being a Pragmatic Futurist and expanding the power to shape your future is more important than ever in our world of accelerating transformation. We keep ourselves aware of the changes that are coming and how they will affect us and our business, as well as our clients' businesses. We develop strategies to thrive in the coming new environment. Our business now has a global reputation for being innovative and inspirational, when in fact we are being the question and being curious. Another innovation process we have been developing very recently has been the philosophy behind Benevolent Capitalism, where we put our attention on maximising possibility, not just maximizing profit. This has had a huge impact on growing our businesses and our profitability/wealth.</p>  <p class="p1">3D printing. 3D printing &ndash; also known as additive manufacturing &ndash; is part of a rapidly growing market whereby a print head deposits very thin layers of resin on top of each other in a specified fashion to create a 3D object based on a digital model.&nbsp;3D printers are already in use among many businesses, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to consumers goods, and have generated a diverse set of use cases.</p>  <p class="p1">It is always tempting to use iconic global organizations such as Apple, Virgin, etc. However, we often find that some of the most innovative organizations tend to fly under the rdar. I would nominate Bill Strickland, President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation and its subsidiaries, Manchester Craftsmen's Guild (MCG), and Bidwell Training Center (BTC). Strickland is nationally recognized as a visionary leader who authentically delivers educational and cultural opportunities to students and adults within an organizational culture that fosters innovation, creativity, responsibility and integrity.</p>  Steven Bowman View Edit Delete
15  <p class="p1">Innovation and creativity are at the core of Sam's practice and view of the legal profession, and he has for some time now been involved in projects which seek to use technology to change the way in which legal services are delivered and purchased. Sam is the founder of the pioneering online legal advice platforms,&nbsp;<a href="http:// www.virtuallawdirect.com">VirtualLawDirect</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.svperbar.com/"><span class="s1">SvPerbar</span></a>&nbsp;which use technology to make lawyers, legal advice and pricing more accessible, transparent and efficient, with an emphasis on standardizing legal advice and providing access to flat-fee legal products.</p>  <p class="p1">This is not an easy prospect by any means, particularly when working within an established and age-old profession. Change is seen as a threat to existing stakeholders in many cases, but law firms are beginning to realize that through pure market forces alone they will eventually be required to innovate in order to compete. I have found that having an international perspective on how things are done helps to instill a desire for change, not only in seeing how different work cultures operate, but also in appreciating the broad inter-connectivity that we now all experience, &nbsp;the need to keep ahead of the pack to serve clients' more diverse and ever more challenging expectations, and to compete effectively. Giving employees and partners the&nbsp;latitude&nbsp;to experiment with ideas and, perhaps more importantly instilling a culture of respect for different ideas and initiatives is a key element which law firms have traditionally struggled with given their&nbsp;hierarchical structures. To innovate, I believe that you need to &nbsp;instill&nbsp;a framework for acceptance of differing and new ideas and the creative potential of your people. This &nbsp;is a fundamental cornerstone, particularly for the legal profession, for building organizations which can successfully embrace change.</p>  <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I think it is traditional&nbsp;hierarchical,&nbsp;</span>command and control type management structures. &nbsp;It is the ability to instill a culture of acceptance and validation which largely produces growth and vitality: giving employees a feeling that they are valued and can make a difference to the firm, the work that it produces and to its clients leads to a 'buy-in' to the companies goals and objectives, and gives people the latitude to create and to produce efficiently. Stifling employees' creative visions by instilling fear, judgement and autocratic work structures and styles does not augur well for making and retaining creative and exceptional lawyers, particularly &nbsp;when the potential and tools for individual expression have never been more accessible.</p>  <p class="p1">There have been a number of changes within the legal profession, but lawyers are always few among early adopters. There has been a move to a more inclusive management style, but the profession still has the aura of authority which stifles the production and contribution capacity of newer entrants to the profession. It is not uncommon for associates in a law firm to feel isolated and directionless in what they are doing, which forces them to be less engaging or productive. A number of the potentially disruptive start-ups in the online legal space have provided an outlet for young associates &nbsp;to express their creativity by challenging the very structures that they studied for years to join. However, the profession &nbsp;itself remains tied to historical ways of doing things, preserved to a large extent by protective regulation, which restricts a lot of creativity in not only the way that legal services are offered, priced or accessed, but also in the way that law firms can grow and be funded. On the technology side, &nbsp;particularly the legal support or back office function, there has been a considerable degree of innovation, ranging from outsourcing more mundane or repetitive tasks such as due diligence and discovery, to document production and client access.</p>  <p class="p1">I would say mobile, and cloud infrastructures and systems, &nbsp;artificial intelligence and standardization technology. The latter two are particularly important in my profession, as they will serve to create &nbsp;extensive opportunities to limit the costs of legal services and to create more certainty in legal outcomes.</p>  <p class="p1">I don't believe that any one or more organizations&nbsp;have more of an innovation mindset than others. I think it is the people and their beliefs that are relevant here. &nbsp;Living in California today, you feel the innovation buzz all around you, whether it be in Silicon Beach &nbsp;or Valley, regardless of the enterprise or industry. There is a thirst for innovation which is hardly replicated elsewhere (with few exceptions, for example Israel). As an immigrant to the US, this is even more so apparent to me. A culture has been instilled and technology structures laid down allowing almost anyone to be a potential innovator if they put their minds to it, and which removes the older generation&nbsp;hierarchical structures which were premised upon limiting inclusiveness and a fear of failure. I believe that it is the fundamental American belief in freedom of expression and respect for the rights, and equal treatment of its people, mixed with access to technology, which has eventually resulted &nbsp;in such a fertile ground for innovation.&nbsp;</p>  Sam Miller View Edit Delete
21  <p>Diana Stepner is the VP of Innovation Partnerships &amp; Developer Relations at Pearson - a company which has been innovating since the Industrial Revolution. She helps business units accelerate digital innovation, drives global partnerships with startups, builds relationships with developer communities- including incubators and start ups- and runs the Pearson Catalyst for Education accelerator program. Diana's passion is to bring innovative user experiences, products, and partnerships to life by applying technologies that are not always ready for primetime.&nbsp;</p>  <p class="p1">We help teams across Pearson gain insight into emerging trends - what we call developments &ldquo;on the fringe.&rdquo; &nbsp;For example, over the last few years we have witnessed the consumerization of education. Students, teachers, and learners, for example, have similar expectations and behaviors in the classroom as they do outside. &nbsp;As a result, they crave rich digital experiences and believe learning can take place anywhere and at any time.&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">Acknowledging that technology is helping to drive change in education to deliver on the expectations of learners and teachers. We have been able to quickly identify and connect Pearson teams with startups - particularly through connections with incubators and accelerators (<a href="http://rocket-space.com/"><span class="s1">RocketSpace</span></a>, <a href="http://www.1871.com/"><span class="s1">1871</span></a>, <a href="http://1776dc.com/"><span class="s1">1776</span></a>, <a href="http://www.marsdd.com/"><span class="s1">MaRS</span></a> and <a href="http://learnlaunch.com/"><span class="s1">LearnLaunch</span></a>). Then via <a href="http://catalyst.pearson.com/"><span class="s1">Catalyst</span></a>, Pearson&rsquo;s accelerator, we&rsquo;re able to build pilots collaboratively with the startups &ndash; all the while providing mentoring and insight that will help them grow and scale effectively.&nbsp; We&rsquo;re also championing the next wave of creators and makers by being involved with maker spaces where learners of all ages gain hands-on skills, whether it be in electronics, arts, science, or beyond. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>  <p class="p1">It&rsquo;s human nature to gravitate towards the familiar - things that have already shown they are effective and work from a business perspective. But education is becoming increasingly consumerized, therefore, we need to deliver experiences that match the ones learners have outside of the classroom. This requires education companies to innovate more quickly, like other technology companies, while also ensuring that all products are delivering the expected outcomes.</p>  <p class="p1">Pearson has a history of innovation. The company&rsquo;s origins were in the construction business during the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the story goes&hellip; &ldquo;Pearson became one of the world's largest building contractors at a time when the industry controlled development of the transportation, trade and communication links that fuelled world economies.&rdquo; Pearson had a similar forward-thinking approach when deciding to focus on education, especially the shift to digital, recognizing that technology was changing the way people learn.&nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">We started a Future Technologies team in 2011 to explore emerging technological developments and create prototypes that could be shared across the business.&nbsp; A network of 150 digital thought leaders, called Champions, was created to help promote the sharing of best practices and increase visibility into new platforms and products across the business. &nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">We also introduced a developer platform to enable developers both inside and outside Pearson to experiment with our content.&nbsp; In 2012, the Pearson Catalyst accelerator program was introduced. It is an open innovation program that enables anyone from across the company to submit a real business challenge.&nbsp; We then make a selection of those challenges and publish them so that startups can apply to be part of the program. The startup most capable to address each challenge is selected and works alongside a Pearson team to build a pilot solution. &nbsp;Each of these initiatives encourages open innovation. The focus is on collaboration and sharing; breaking down the corporate walls. &nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">Other innovation activities also include a new product lifecycle program to help the company adopt agile product development methodologies and a corporate-wide efficacy statement.</p>  <p class="p1">I&rsquo;m actually hoping technology is going to take more of a back seat over the next two years. &nbsp;I don&rsquo;t mean that technology will lose importance. It will remain a critical factor. But it will become invisible and serve as an enabler. We&rsquo;re already seeing the emergence of this trend with the Internet of Things and the rise of data science.</p> <p class="p2">On business models, open and free is always going to be a contender &ndash; especially as quality continues to rise. Yet it&rsquo;s <em>how</em> the information is presented that will be the differentiator. In education, the increasing focus is on personalized and adaptive learning - that means ensuring the right content is presented to you at the right time and being able to quickly filter through the content to find the relevant information you need.&nbsp; I also don&rsquo;t think we&rsquo;re close to the end of the sharing economy.</p> <p class="p2">More on the &ldquo;fringe,&rdquo; I am intrigued to see how the bitcoin blockchain is applied in new ways, including in education.</p> <p class="p2">We are seeing the rise of competency-based learning, which introduces more flexibility and a focus on learning practical skills or competencies, especially those that apply in the 21<span class="s1">st</span> century.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s also important to have a global outlook. Mobile developments in Africa, digital experiences in China, and creative approaches to learning in Australia cannot be overlooked.</p>  <p class="p1">I&rsquo;m a big fan of Rallyteam. &nbsp;The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco back in September 2014. The focus is on employee empowerment.&nbsp; Most companies have valuable side projects that don&rsquo;t get done simply because of lack of resources, funds, visibility or all three.&nbsp; With Rallyteam, a marketplace of projects is created.&nbsp; People in a company can submit a project or indicate they want to work on a specific type of project.&nbsp; Employees are able to gain and apply new skills all the while completing real, tangible projects for their employer.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a really exciting model - one that can help keep employees engaged and enable learning.&nbsp;</p>  Diana Stepner View Edit Delete
14  <p class="p1">Robert David is Director of Corporate and Professional Programs at the University of California, Berkeley - UC Berkeley Extension. He has more than 20 years in key sales and business development operational roles inside several technology companies. He specializes in helping HR and Learning &amp; Development professionals bring Berkeley-quality curricula to their companies through custom on-site training, sponsored tuition enrollments and intensive course program development.</p>  <p class="p1">Within UC Berkeley Extension, education innovation is highly valued. We tend to look for examples outside the organization and compare those with opportunities inside the organization, and then try to create an innovative approach to solving our objectives.&nbsp; Then communicate the value internally and embrace the change. But that's all very theoretical until you consciously try to do new things or do the same things in a different, more efficient or more effective way. It's very important to work at it. We tend to do 'pilot projects' to prove the concept and see what the outcomes are from both a financial and student satisfaction perspective.</p> <p class="p1">It's also very important to recognize and encourage ideas for innovation from all levels of an organization. These ideas can be simple changes to business processes to large shifts in strategy involving relationships to customers or vendors. Don't underestimate the value of simple changes--in empowering the people who come up with them and in keeping the organization agile and welcome to change. We also like to use successful models or processes in one academic program area and try to apply it to completely different academic areas to see if it will work as a controlled experiment.&nbsp; Our Dean likes to share examples of how we innovate, or how we focus on quality of student experience, or work more collaboratively in all-staff meetings to inspire staff to bring about change.</p>  <p class="p1">Often it's fear of the unfamiliar or values that don't really welcome and encourage change. However, in today's economy, change and the need to innovate is practically a given.&nbsp;Given the shifts in communication technology that we have all experienced with cell phones, apps, social media, big data...it's hard to dodge the new. It's a way of life now and in many respects, that's an advantage. In higher education, business as usual mentality, highly bureaucratic processes, antiquated systems, risk adverse culture.&nbsp; In many cases, too, lower level staff often do not feel empowered to suggest changes, or to work across functional departments to streamline a process, or to do things differently.&nbsp;</p>  <p class="p1">My role was newly created last year, so basically everything I tackle requires the organization to respond in new ways. Sometimes it requires some arm-wrestling, but we're making good headway. &nbsp;Also, I work in education and it's a field that's experiencing tremendous innovation as we explore the opportunities and drawbacks of online corporate learning in all its various forms. &nbsp;&nbsp;Because we are getting real-time feedback from employers about workforce development needs, our organization is prioritizing the development of innovative 'intensive workshops' to spearhead new program development efforts.&nbsp;</p>  <p class="p1">We are at just the beginning of a wave of new technologies that will help people learn more, faster, and better. &nbsp; Mobile is a technology that educators are beginning to embrace as part of an overall blended learning experience for both traditional education as well as professional development and corporate training. &nbsp;It's hard to project what that will look like from here, but it is exciting. Data analytics will help to provide more real-time and better information to facilitate decision-making about course development and offerings.</p>  <p class="p1">Outside the field of education, firms in the biotech and high tech areas tend to best embody the innovation mindset. For higher ed, we can see big changes coming in corporate online education.&nbsp; The jury is still out as far as what the right business model should be, but we are clearly pushing the envelope as far as the use of online courses and flexibility of the delivery platform.&nbsp;</p>  Robert David View Edit Delete
55  <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Helen Simpson is Head of Innovation at Ikabo an online collaboration and innovation platform based in Australia. Helen holds a joint honours degree in Business finance and economics and a postgraduate diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing and has undertaken extensive training in creativity and innovation. Helen is responsible for brand positioning and communication, customer centric strategic planning, a customer driven product development pipeline and onboarding and training new clients.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Prior to joining Ikabo, Helen worked for Squiz in a business transformation role helping organisations better leverage digital technology to achieve innovation and growth. Prior to this, she has worked in customer insights and customer driven product innovation for some of the world's leading corporates in domestic, regional and global roles. She has led global teams to develop new products, insights programmes and innovation and communication strategies.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Ikabo is an online innovation platform which crowd sources insight and ideas to help problem solve, collaborate and co-create at scale. This results in the best ideas progressing, whilst dramatically increasing engagement and sustaining a culture of innovation and transformation.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Ikabo is an important digital tool for modern organisations who want to empower teams to transform the way they work and drive a culture of creative problem solving and innovation.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Helen is passionate about helping organizations drive innovation and positive change by engaging &amp; harnessing their people&rsquo;s talent. Ikabo works with business leaders to optimise employee engagement, amplify their innovation efforts and collaborate and co create solutions at scale.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s2"><a href="http://www.ikabo.com/">Ikabo</a></span><span class="s1"> is growing through taking a collaborative approach to innovation and growth and harnessing its ecosystem of partners to help solve client problems.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></span></p>  <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Ikabo is an online collaboration and innovation platform based in Australia. Ikabo&rsquo;s unique point of difference is that we don't just on board and train a new customer on to our platform, but we fully support clients on their first project, from framing the challenge to final selection of concepts to implement. Ikabo has also developed a fully automated customisable method of evaluating concepts into a rated and ranked order in order to help leaders make objective and democratic decisions.&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Ikabo partners its clients to create a path to innovation success by working with senior leaders to ensure the vision and strategic intent of the organisation is aligned to the challenges that are posted on the platform.</span></p>  <p class="p1"><span class="s1">The ideas management sector has developed and matured over the last 15 years or so and there are many new innovations taking place in the form of features and functions and pricing models being adopted. Artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions are also being explored to improve the customer experience in how ideas are converged and developed with limited human effort.</span>&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">New innovations are delivered through new product releases, I think one of the biggest challenges as in most product development, is feature overload, how to balance a myriad of client needs and wants with an optimal customer experience that remains simple and easy to use. Many of our clients have come from other innovation platforms that offer all the &lsquo;bells and whistles&rsquo;, so much so they tell us they literally don't know how to get started, because there are too many options to choose from. Keeping a simple user friendly interface that is beautiful and delivers a seamless experience, is always front and centre in our minds.</span></p>  <p class="p1"><span class="s1">When Ikabo was first established the founding team was involved in the co-creation of the product, the positioning, the go to market strategy and in lead generation and sales demonstrations. The team works in a low hierarchical, fast moving and agile way, there is high psychological safety and everyone can be involved in open discussions on key strategic decisions. Ideas and openly shared and discussed about how we might grow the business and how we can continually improve what we do - the customer is at the heart of everything we do at Ikabo. We actively and continually engage our customers in feedback both formally and informally, so that our product pipeline and new product releases are delivering customer relevant improvements that surprise and delight our customers.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">One of our values is &lsquo;better together&rsquo; (&lsquo;If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together&rsquo; - African proverb) and we truly believe (and know) a cognitively diverse team solves problems better and faster, and we apply this when we solve client problems, and how we approach the growth of our company. Ikabo has grown through taking a collaborative approach and harnessing our ecosystem of partners to raise awareness of our offer and collaborate on client problems together.</span></p>  <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I think we will continue to see artificial intelligence and machine learning being explored to improve the customer experience on innovation platforms, I think we will see different products being developed to meet market and price needs of different clients.</span>&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I think we will see clients putting a stronger emphasises on outcomes of innovation not just engagement, which in turn will encourage vendors to look at the entire range of innovation programs and products that organisations are using and consider how an ideas management platform can work more effectively and integrate with current activities to deliver improved outcomes overall. Gone are the days when organisations can employ different innovation programs and products, for example design thinking programme, to skunkworks, skills training and innovation labs and hackathons as discrete activities. Organisations at the highest level need to build a shared understanding of their common innovation goals so they can all work and make meaningful progress, together.</span></p>  <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I have been inspired by public sector reforms in Australia and some of the amazing work government agencies have been achieving. Bureaucracy, hierarchy, a challenging culture, limited resources and the machinations of Government all prove to provide a compelling reason for innovation and change NOT to thrive. However despite this, we are privileged to be working with &nbsp;a number of small teams who against the odds, come together and drive amazing change one project at a time.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Transport for NSW is an interesting case study, they are constantly trying to disrupt themselves and are putting the customer at the centre of what they do. They are looking at what it is that the customer really needs, and releasing real time public transport data was a huge step first step for them &ndash; they took a test and learn approach. They opened the market and a raft of start-ups got involved via a hackathon, and now we have a number of apps which provide customers with real time information to make their trip a whole lot easier. The latest initiative has been establishing the Smart Innovation Centre is NSW&rsquo;s which is a hub for collaborative research and development of safe and efficient emerging transport technology. One key project they are working on is to partner with industry to conduct trails on autonomous vehicles.</span></p>  Helen Simpson View Edit Delete

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20SELECT `Brainwafe`.`id`, `Brainwafe`.`issue`, `Brainwafe`.`ednote_title`, `Brainwafe`.`ednote_content`, `Brainwafe`.`feature_headshot`, `Brainwafe`.`feature_logo`, `Brainwafe`.`feature_logo_url`, `Brainwafe`.`feature_title`, `Brainwafe`.`feature_subtitle`, `Brainwafe`.`feature_content`, `Brainwafe`.`interview_headshot`, `Brainwafe`.`interview_logo`, `Brainwafe`.`interview_logo_url`, `Brainwafe`.`interview_title`, `Brainwafe`.`interview_subtitle`, `Brainwafe`.`interview_content`, `Brainwafe`.`contributed_title`, `Brainwafe`.`contributed_subtitle`, `Brainwafe`.`contributed_content`, `Brainwafe`.`enable`, `Brainwafe`.`current`, `Brainwafe`.`url_hash`, `Brainwafe`.`modifier`, `BrainwavesReport`.`id`, `BrainwavesReport`.`brainwafe_id`, `BrainwavesReport`.`report_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`brainwaves` AS `Brainwafe` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`brainwaves_reports` AS `BrainwavesReport` ON (`BrainwavesReport`.`report_id` IN (3, 5) AND `BrainwavesReport`.`brainwafe_id` = `Brainwafe`.`id`) 000
21SELECT `InnovatorProfile`.`id`, `InnovatorProfile`.`linkedin_url`, `InnovatorProfile`.`summary_bio`, `InnovatorProfile`.`answer_1`, `InnovatorProfile`.`answer_2`, `InnovatorProfile`.`answer_3`, `InnovatorProfile`.`answer_4`, `InnovatorProfile`.`answer_5`, `InnovatorProfile`.`leader_id`, `InnovatorProfile`.`modifier`, `Leader`.`id`, `Leader`.`name`, `Leader`.`job_title`, `Leader`.`company`, `Leader`.`headshot`, `Leader`.`company_logo`, `Leader`.`bio_full`, `Leader`.`summary`, `Leader`.`category`, `Leader`.`featured`, `Leader`.`program_only`, `Leader`.`game_changer_only`, `Leader`.`enable`, `Leader`.`created`, `Leader`.`modified`, `Leader`.`modifier` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`innovator_profiles` AS `InnovatorProfile` LEFT JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`leaders` AS `Leader` ON (`InnovatorProfile`.`leader_id` = `Leader`.`id`) WHERE 1 = 1 ORDER BY `InnovatorProfile`.`answer_3` desc LIMIT 40, 2018180
22SELECT COUNT(*) AS `count` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`innovator_profiles` AS `InnovatorProfile` LEFT JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`leaders` AS `Leader` ON (`InnovatorProfile`.`leader_id` = `Leader`.`id`) WHERE 1 = 1110