Innovator Profiles

Id Summary Bio Answer 1 Answer 2 Answer 3 Answer 4 Answer 5 Leader Actions
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
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
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
35  <p>With more than 15 years in R&amp;D, Francois Ragnet specializes in successful transfer of innovation into Business. More recently, he focuses on pre-sales and is a technology evangelist, as well as managing an R&amp;D group within Xerox Global Services in charge of transferring breakthrough innovation. Francois has spent almost his entire career at Xerox, and understands Xerox's innovation strategy from many angles. For the past 8 years, he has focused his innovation experience at Xerox Services, and received the Netherlands National Contact Centre Association (NCCS) Innovation Award for the technology developed &amp; deployed by Raganets&rsquo; team in call centers in the Netherlands.&nbsp;He also currently holds 21 patents in the United States for various technologies he has developed since 2008 with various team members within Xerox. Francois holds a Masters in Telecommunications from the <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/edu/school?id=12465&amp;trk=prof-edu-school-name">Institut national des T&eacute;l&eacute;communications</a> in France.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Xerox has a long, well-known innovation tradition; it&rsquo;s widely known for producing game changing inventions in particularly the 70s and 80s, with light lens copiers for instance, and the mouse. But, historically, we were not always so effective in capitalizing on those innovations. But while the culture has been maintained, and deepened to all levels, Xerox has transformed dramatically in recent years. We are now the leading enterprise globally in BPO services in areas like healthcare, financial services, education and even transportation.</p> <p>In terms of traditional innovation and also blue sky research, we have 5000 scientists and engineers generating truly amazing things. The Xerox Innovation Group is a dynamic network of centers worldwide, including in the US, Canada, and France. We also have our major partnership in Japan with Fuji Xerox, and a center in India to capitalize on emerging markets.</p> <p>We have a strong innovation culture company-wide, making sure the blue sky research we have going in Xerox Innovation Group is repeated and amplified across our services business. Some of this work does not relate directly to our core business today, but we want to keep that flexibility of researchers to come up with totally new ideas.</p> <p>Innovation has been incremental in the BPO area, with profound results &ndash; you don&rsquo;t have millions to spend on R&amp;D in the service world, but the nice thing is that it is much more disruptive; you can innovate without multi-year projects. On the downside you have to be much quicker &ndash; you don&rsquo;t have multiple years to develop those inventions.</p> <p>Recently I&rsquo;ve been involved more in customer care &ndash; an area we&rsquo;ve invested quite a lot in, and where we place a lot of our innovation focus. Evidence of this is the Call Centre Association Innovation Award that went to our Xerox Virtual Performance Indicator product in 2013 &ndash; which is now deploying across the corporation, and which we plan to sell to external customers.</p> <p>The indicator is really a small innovation, technically &ndash; but it does make a huge difference, once you make it right, you make 50,000 agents deployed more motivated, more productive, and more into their job. We have invested a lot in gamification &ndash; we&rsquo;re motivating those agents by bringing an element of games and fun into their day-to-day work. They have key performance indicators, but we don&rsquo;t want it to be a case of &lsquo;Big Brother watching you&rsquo; &ndash; we want to use gamification in a positive way, and get people into their jobs. We are finding that agents are enjoying the spirit so much that they virtually belong to the customer company.</p> <p>Turnover rates can be 100% for traditional call centers, with people too stressed or bored. With these technologies, you ensure they stay longer; they are more competent; I suspect there is even less sick leave taken. We have created a real sense of community and engagement in the call centers.</p> <p>I believe we are able to make innovation work in a very difficult domain &ndash; Business Process Services - but are also able to deliver economies of scale, and even create potential new business for our customer.</p>  <p>The challenge the Business and Document Process Services sector is that it is a fast paced domain, which is constantly evolving with &ldquo;mini&rdquo; fixes &ndash; large, breakthrough innovation, although well needed, is not possible. Large corporations outsource largely to cut costs, and so &ldquo;cost-down&rdquo; is the primary driver for innovation. Reducing costs is a difficult driver for innovation &ndash; you start a project, put small fixes here and there; test and build successful innovations, and quickly drop those that aren&rsquo;t working.</p> <p>There is also a danger of deploying technology for its own sake. So we have ethnographers and scientists who study how work is being done; to tell us where technology can help, and be effective; and not just be technology for its own sake.</p> <p>We increasingly have a mix of ethnography, user-centric design, research, and &ldquo;Agile Innovation&rdquo; -&nbsp;part of this was to learn to fail quickly. Furthermore, innovation models were quite rigid &ndash; planned, multi-year innovations which are focused on industrial design; not adapted to services.</p>  <p>Innovation has been part of Xerox&rsquo;s DNA forever. Indeed, although Xerox has a long-standing tradition being focused on industrial products, the ACS acquisition in 2009 took us into a totally new world. We had to rethink processes - including innovation - totally.</p> <p>When we moved into Services and acquired Affiliated Computer Services we had to adapt drastically our vision for innovation &ndash; in ACS it was happening at a grass roots level, in small pockets. We have homogenized and built processes that touch just about everyone across the organization.</p> <p>Within our services business, it is important to have the right structures, so we have the office of the CIO for Services; we have executives in charge of bringing innovations to maturity. Each line of business has its own CIO, and each group proposes new innovation projects that make the whole company more agile, and the creative energy cascades down to everyone.</p> <p>We also like to be very customer-focused &ndash; so we have different ways of reaching out to and collaborating with our customers. For some of our top customers, we have Innovation Councils; we also have what we call &ldquo;Dreaming Sessions&rdquo;, where we bring customers out to our home in Grenoble (France), and show them some of our cutting edge research, and they talk to us about potential applications.</p> <p>Internally, we&rsquo;ve got processes for IP generation and for ideation, which encourages just about anyone, from call center agents to executive, to provide inputs.</p>  <p>A lot of technologies / models are potential game changers &ndash; cloud, mobility, SOA, BPM - the buzzword list is long! But at the end of the day, in our business, work is performed by humans and agents. I personally think technology alone will not be sufficient &ndash; we need to find other biggest leverage for motivation is gamification.</p> <p>Another key technology area is automation &ndash; to understand business processes and automate as much as possible with technologies such as Robotic Process Automation.</p>  <p>We want to revolutionize the call center arena, and making machines ever more intelligent in satisfying a customers&rsquo; request is a worthwhile goal. We haven&rsquo;t yet passed the &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo; &ndash; where, if you make a customer service call, you would not realize that you were talking to a machine. But we will be getting there someday hopefully -&nbsp; and there might be times where you actually will prefer talking to a machine, in terms of the speed and accuracy of the solution. The key will be that Machines could detect when frustration is growing in the voice of the caller, and hand it over smoothly to a human.</p>  Francois Ragnet View Edit Delete
29  <p>With both corporate wellness and elite staff retention increasingly critical for large enterprises, President Charles Lusk and his partners at On-Site Dental Solutions have pioneered a game-changing model that is solving multiple challenges at once.&nbsp;</p> <p>It turns out that in an economy where employee populations are best treated as treasured communities, an on-site dental suite offers far more value than an additional amenity to the gym and the company laundry.&nbsp;</p>  <p>We&rsquo;re very proud of our title as the first fully dedicated provider of turn-key dental suites. We sought to create a care delivery model for dentistry that previously did not exist in the same form, quality and packaging for campus environments.&nbsp; We wanted to bottle the magic of private dental practice and drop it into corporate settings in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, and customized to those settings. We love the way clinical settings of every kind are trending more towards aesthetically pleasing environments as opposed to sterile and impersonal settings as found in days gone by. &nbsp;</p> <p>We like to think of ourselves as pioneers in this area.&nbsp; Dentistry is perhaps the most interpersonal form of healthcare, since the services are provided &ldquo;face-to-face.&rdquo; While we are unable to eliminate every element of that experience, we strive hard to control the things within our reach to positively impact the clients senses.&nbsp;But the value-adds have been game changing too. We know that a filling today avoids a very costly crown tomorrow. But there is also a high correlation between a lack of routine dental care and large medical claims involving chronic disease later on.</p> <p>One of the most valuable commodities is time, and employers are measuring productivity in terms of not just absenteeism, but also &ldquo;presenteeism&rdquo;, which involves remarkably significant losses &ndash; the degree to which they don&rsquo;t have fully engaged employees within the workplace. If you have toothache, it's probably a major reason why you&rsquo;re not mentally engaged.</p> <p>Also, a lot of our clients are really interested in optimal recruitment and retention &ndash; and they know the millennial generation is looking closely at the work environment.</p> <p>Having a boutique dental office on-site goes a long way for clients in communicating the message that we really care about our community.&nbsp; In fact, we do frequently have prospective employees come into our offices, because the employers are very proud of these amenities.</p>  <p>The &ldquo;status-quo&rdquo; is always an impediment.&nbsp; We realize this isn&rsquo;t unique to our organization but rather a consistent theme throughout organizations looking to meet needs in new and innovative ways.&nbsp;Both end users and employees have to embrace the bundling of traditional dental services in a non-traditional setting, the corporate or university campus environment.&nbsp; Because the patient has gone out for dental services for so long; it can take some time to comprehend the dentist operating where the patient already is!</p>  <p>Our company was founded on the principle of change.&nbsp; We have learned a lot about the need to build a culture that appreciates innovation and change. In interviews we describe &ldquo;change&rdquo; scenarios and ask those candidates as to whether those circumstances evoke feelings of comfort or discomfort.&nbsp; Of course, the excitement and adventure that comes with climates of innovation are highlighted as well as the challenges.&nbsp;</p> <p>We ultimately want individuals and team members to be where they are supposed to be, whether it be with our growing organization or another that can offer more of a daily routine. We believe no single person has a monopoly on good ideas.&nbsp; We love to celebrate the individual with a unique outlook on how to maximize our potential as an organization.&nbsp; This begins with the patient experience and extends to our institutional &ldquo;host&rdquo; clients.&nbsp; We try hard to craft each relationship with care and a certain level of customization. &nbsp;</p>  <p>Already, we are able to provide client employers with new analytical HR tools&ndash; bringing population health statistics to the table, which the employer can reflect on and use to make key decisions around their populations. At our core, we are still a services organization.&nbsp; Our product is our people.&nbsp; Leaders in the dental field will be distinguished by the excellence with which they provide high quality and ethical dentistry.&nbsp; Ultimately this comes down to the talent and ethos of the individual dentist and the care team that surrounds them.&nbsp;</p>  <p>I really like Spotify. You&rsquo;d think that there were so many different ways already out there to package music, but their approach really resonated for so many people, including myself &ndash; to offer music that reflects your mood. Similarly, our company is not reinventing the wheel in our space; we&rsquo;re just taking it down a path it hasn&rsquo;t been before, which is perhaps comparable to the exceptional Spotify approach.</p>  Charles Lusk View Edit Delete
24  <p>Mark is the Head of Innovation at News Corp Australia&nbsp;and a former executive at AOL and Yahoo. Drasutis is&nbsp;an established business leader and digital expert with 20 years of media and digital product experience. He is focused on defining and delivering digital leadership and innovative and creative user-centric solutions within market leading, global digital businesses.&nbsp;Delighting all customers of digital products is a passion Drasutis brings to his teams and organizations. He has continually driven the creative vision and customer focus of his teams. He has implemented innovative and strategic thinking, as well as thought leadership, internally and externally, within all his roles and evolved customer perceptions of the businesses.&nbsp;<br /><br /><br /></p>  <p>News Corp is actually where the customers are, and that&rsquo;s the change. Its about innovating around the proposition that content is about &ldquo;and,&rdquo; not &ldquo;or.&rdquo; In the past, customers either bought a newspaper or consumed content on mobile, or on PC, or Tele, or listened to it on the radio. Now, they are consuming content in newspapers and on Twitter, YouTube, in their cars, and on Spotify, so if you take the &ldquo;and&rdquo; model, it becomes about curating great, relevant content and delivering it where and how the customer needs it.</p> <p>With declines of 15% circulation in Australia and 20% revenues on the newspaper side &ndash; you need to innovate yourself out of that bottle, but you need to innovate in the right way. We&rsquo;ve embraced the reality that newspaper companies are never again going to own content and distribution and packaging. In fact, we don't see ourselves as a newspaper company; we are a content company.</p> <p>Habits for consuming content have changed, and we can shape those habits. Do people buy newspapers for breaking news? No they don&rsquo;t: because news is broken on Twitter and Facebook and then on other platforms. Content habits have changed. But job of producing great content hasn&rsquo;t changed. We are recombining content in new ways for customers. We are now producing multi-dimensional long-form story telling in digital; creating a rich immersive experience in video, audio, graphics, everything. The Captivate platform in Australia allows us to build those.</p> <p>For example, we produced a story around Cinderella Man: the amazing journey of an Australian man to becoming the country&rsquo;s first heavyweight boxing champion. We&rsquo;ve just done a great piece of footage for surfers for an angle of a surf break which you would never have seen before, using drone footage, and two surfers: one a leftie, one a rightie. So how do we get to surfers? We promote it on Facebook, we promote it on Twitter, we made a 15 second video for Instagram, and then we moved it to content for tablet.</p> <p>The Wall Street Journal is doing the same thing, with amazing footage from the Oracle boat for the America&rsquo;s Cup. When we have these great stories involving multiple assets, we &lsquo;re able to quickly build rich story telling elements now that we didn&rsquo;t think we could do three years ago. So it&rsquo;s a case of: We&rsquo;re capable - lets do more of that.</p> <p>The reporters who do these pieces, like Trent Dalton, now know when they start looking at the yarn, they need a videographer, a photographer; he needs to understand how to work with a developer and designer to tell the story best via the digital channel. And that&rsquo;s just one space.</p> <p>On the other extreme, we just launched in Australia &ndash; news.com.au and Foxsports - on Snapchat&rsquo;s new Discover platform. Once again, here&rsquo;s another area where we&rsquo;re atomizing our content and saying we&rsquo;re going to create an edition every day which is relevant to a Snapchat customer, which is more a teen, kind of funny, laugh-out-loud type of experience.</p>  <p>FEAR of not knowing. If I don&rsquo;t know about it as a senior executive, I&rsquo;m not sure I want to unleash my team on something I don&rsquo;t understand. So, for instance, we built a digest App for <em>The Australian</em> and gave it to one of the lead editors to play with over Christmas. All it involved was his content recombined into an App, but now he understands what the power of that can be.</p> <p>Another challenge for innovation is fear of quarterly targets. The trick is to make innovation real in people&rsquo;s minds. Without that, people think that they wouldn&rsquo;t know how to execute the ideas they had; they don't have the confidence to ask for forgiveness, rather than permission. The key is to allow people to fail safe, and to lead with an approach where you show, not tell. Stop having meetings about meetings and show it to someone. They rightly say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and that a prototype is worth a hundred meetings.</p> <p>Its not technology that&rsquo;s the disruptor, it&rsquo;s talented employees thinking like entrepreneurs that is. This business had forgotten a little bit that it had an entrepreneurial spirit at his heart. Rupert Murdoch is one of the best entrepreneurs in the world: his three drivers are opportunism, innovation and intuition. As a staff member, you should be working on those three things. Go and do it. You still have to do the business casing &ndash; you can&rsquo;t work outside those processes. You still have to get new projects singed off by the finance departments and agreed by the board. So in essence, ideas are not a problem; timing and execution is the problem.</p>  <p>News Corp has had a couple of innovation efforts previously, but they were largely external, and my title didn&rsquo;t exist two years ago, which says something in itself. Certainly, there was recognition that the most expensive seven words in our business were &ldquo;But that&rsquo;s how we&rsquo;ve always done it.&rdquo; Though I wasn&rsquo;t here at the time, I&rsquo;d guess I might rate our innovation culture in 2005 at about 3 out of 10; now its perhaps around 6 out of 10, with our digital offerings, and now that people know they can do these things, and are less afraid of things not looking the same.</p> <p>When I joined, I remember someone commenting: &ldquo;Great &ndash; someone with all the answers.&rdquo; I countered with: &ldquo;You&rsquo;re already got the answers, and you&rsquo;ve got the employees &ndash; we just need to create innovation as part of their job and something they&rsquo;re not scared of.&rdquo; The words disruption and innovation kind of counter each other. I realized that news didn&rsquo;t have a clear definition of what innovation meant, and that&rsquo;s really key. For us, that definition is: &lsquo;Recombining content, people and processes in new ways for growth.&rsquo;</p> <p>That idea then resonated across the business &ndash; that it&rsquo;s not about drones or virtual reality or futuristic hardware. And changing the perception of News Corp in Australia was one of the key pieces &ndash; as a content company, not a newspaper company. We&rsquo;ve got an ideation platform we put in, which allows you to pop in and say &ldquo;that&rsquo;s a good idea&rdquo; or &ldquo;that&rsquo;s been done&rsquo;&rsquo; or &ldquo;actually that&rsquo;s something I&rsquo;m working on; lets work together.&rdquo; I&rsquo;m all for open innovation, most of our ideas we&rsquo;ve gotten are from outside the office. We sponsor a co-creation space for startups, called Fishburners &ndash; that&rsquo;s important; it opens peoples&rsquo; eyes to what entrepreneurs are doing.</p> <p>We are not afraid to experiment with different models &ndash; and we have a system where you can fail safe with experiments. We have an internal system called News Foundry &ndash; an internal fail-safe environment that allows people to come up with new ways of doing things. They come out with loads of ideas; one of them drives the kind of content on our Snapchat channel, for example. I&rsquo;m a big advocate for quiet change, which is that you show, don't tell; you take people on a journey; you plant seeds within the business.</p>  <p>Anticipation of content is something I think will become important&nbsp; &ndash; data signals will be there to anticipate a certain time of day you want a certain type of content &ndash; based on your location; based on your behavior; everything. Content about things you care about should come to you like a tap on the shoulder.</p> <p>I think there is an interesting move back to truth in the content space&nbsp; - where many customers don&rsquo;t want an oversimplification of news. People have a thirst for more knowledge than the snack they can see. Snacking news is relevant; as Twitter&rsquo;s 140 characters show, but consumers are already responding to the in depth background content we are providing, with lots of links.</p> <p>The disruption will be that people will be able to access as much content as they want quickly, but that they probably want a little more detail around the five areas they care about the most, and that&rsquo;s where media companies come into play. I never try to predict technology trends, but I look at connected cars, and I think there is something there for media; a space where we can play.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Paul Whittaker, editor of the Daily Telegraph in Australia, and his team are supportive of an app that gameifies news for commuters on buses here in Sydney. It allows you to play a game against others around beacon technology: it matches headlines to the pictures, which means you have to read the headlines &ndash; so you consume the news via a game. That&rsquo;s quite interesting as a model. I&rsquo;m not saying that&rsquo;s the future of news, but its interesting. I feel the same with Snapchat. They are both great ways of providing content to the consumer.</p>  Mark Drasutis View Edit Delete
46  <p>CA Technologies has emerged as one of the world&rsquo;s largest independent software companies, based on a mission to "create software that fuels transformation for companies.&rdquo; Its consistent approach, across 40 countries of operation, is to remove obstacles in companies&rsquo; journey to success within the application economy, providing solutions on everything from digital transformation and security to customer experience and speed-to-market &ndash; and to bridge the gap between ideas and business outcomes. In March of this year, CA Technologies was recognized among software leaders as a &ldquo;2017 World&rsquo;s Most Ethical Company&rdquo; by Ethisphere Institute.</p>  <p>The CA Technologies Business Analytics team is a global corporate team that provides business insights to stakeholders across the company, including sales, marketing, customer support, customer success, product engineering, HR, finance &ndash; you know: everybody.</p> <p>The charter of my team is to help improve the top line of the company by changing our culture so that decision-making is very data and insight-centric, enabled by analytics. We have been quite successful in that goal.</p> <p>Today my team is changing the game by influencing the strategy and operations of the company. We are helping personalize the customer experience at every touchpoint by injecting customer insights at every point of engagement. In that regard, especially when it comes to large enterprise software companies, we are unique. In fact, over the last year, Forrester has published 'best practice' reports that have cited what we are doing at CA.</p> <p>If you think about retailers like the Amazons, e-tailers, and Googles, they all have B2C models that have used analytics to propel their business forward. We are leveraging concepts from the B2C world and bringing them to B2B, specifically in an initiative to transform CA from a traditional B2B enterprise software company to what we call a B2I, or &ldquo;business to individual.&rdquo;</p> <p>This is a response to how buying software has changed drastically. Millennial buyers have a very different mindset, even when it comes to enterprise buying. They are higher risk takers as compared to the traditional CIOs and the baby boomer buyers, which means they will not sign very large enterprise deals. They want smaller scale deals that they can test and get in and out of quickly. For enterprise software, companies need to foster a better connection with millennial buyers and engage them continuously throughout the buyer&rsquo;s journey. This means marketing and selling to them in the digital realm in a way that recognizes them as individuals and personalizes their experience.</p> <p>Our strategy calls for analyzing our customers not just from a firmographics standpoint, but also demographics, psychographics,&nbsp;and technographics perspective.&nbsp;Many companies are thinking about this approach, but they haven't embarked on this path because&nbsp;this type of transformation is a very difficult thing to accomplish. It requires top leadership, a very thoughtful&nbsp;process, and the right team geared towards innovation.</p> <p>To deliver the value our internal customers have now come to expect, we put a significant emphasis behind educating people in the art of possible. Our stakeholders don&rsquo;t always know what is possible with analytics. It is my job to show them. For example, last year we were able to pinpoint customers who will not renew contracts with a high degree of accuracy. This was a first in the company, and opened many eyes. Another example: Our chief customer support officer wanted to reduce the number of calls coming into his call center, and have more collaboration occur in the online communities where customers can discuss and solve their own problems. Essentially, he wanted to go into an omnichannel direction for support. With analytics, we were able to offer insights as to why people call the call center and suggest solutions to best leverage online communities. Calls have since been dropping, and engagement through online communities has increased.</p>  <p>Culture is the biggest barrier to innovation. If you are in a legacy company, there can be a certain mindset that I call the "not-invented-here" syndrome, or &ldquo;this is how we do it because this is how it has always been done,&rdquo; ideology. That to me is one of the biggest impediments, because it means that no matter how the world is changing, we are insular and we will keep doing things the same way.&nbsp;</p>  <p>The culture that I found when I arrived two and a half years ago is drastically different from what CA&rsquo;s Business Analytics organization is today. Many companies are controlled by top-down policies, but I believe to foster innovation, you need to set people free; let them think. Senior leaders can establish aggressive goals, but then need to let employees go on their own. They will make mistakes, so leaders must provide the air cover. Of course, if somebody makes the same mistake again and again, then there is a problem. But if an organization wants to succeed in innovation, employees cannot be afraid to try new things and sometimes fail.</p> <p>In my opinion, innovation is a drug. Once people get used to that mindset, the feeling of moving fast and being creative thinkers, you can&rsquo;t stop that, or people will actually leave.</p> <p>A start-up environment is a good example &ndash; they are free, they are innovative, they do cool stuff. You have to change the way an enterprise company operates to mimic that mindset and create an environment of innovation.</p> <p>So, we essentially created a start-up within CA&rsquo;s Business Analytics organization. Innovation is key at CA, and our culture, as defined by our internal Mission &amp; DNA, is one of innovation, customer-centricity, and collaboration. When it comes to hiring new employees, I look less at their technical skills because in our industry technology changes very fast. Instead, I ask: &ldquo;Are they passionate about what they do? Are they customer-centric? Are they collaborative? Are they curious? And do they have the willingness to learn and grow?&rdquo;</p>  <p>Artificial intelligence and robotics are the two things that will change the game in our industry and the world at large. In a succession planning discussion with my boss last year, he asked, "Who's your successor?" and I sent, in jest, a picture of a robot.</p> <p>I've been in technology for about 28 years now, and I have never seen a pace of change as rapid as I am seeing now. If you think back to the Hewlett-Packards and IBMs, why were they successful? Because they created something a customer valued. That measure of success hasn't changed.</p> <p>What has changed is the definition of value. We Baby Boomers used to value automation. There was a focus on productivity improvement, which was of value. But now, when I talk to my daughters, when I talk to the millennials, they value Snapchat or Instagram. The value system, and how long that value lasts, is fickle and rapidly changing.</p> <p>To be successful in this new millennial-driven market, companies must track their value system. It is not humanly possible to do that, due to our own internal biases. So, when it comes to artificial intelligence, it's not just about having data, analytics and insights - it&rsquo;s about using that information to analyze: How are values changing, and thus how are buying patterns changing? How does that influence your products and services? The only way to do that is through artificial intelligence.</p>  <p>Start-ups are entirely focused on product innovation and creating products or services that solve people&rsquo;s problems. Innovation is not an easy task, but it is simply easier to innovate when you are a start-up and don't have quarterly pressure to report performance to shareholders.</p> <p>Innovation must be customer-centric, and you should think about it as solving somebody's problem. To me, a perfect innovation strategy is when not only are you creating products and services that are absolutely moving the world in a new direction, but also satisfying shareholders and customers.</p> <p>I think two companies that are doing this successfully today are Tesla and Amazon. That is the magic sauce for innovation.&nbsp;</p>  Saum Mathur View Edit Delete
43  <p>Prith Banerjee is Group CTO of Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management and automation, with operations in more than 100 countries. With an EcoStruxure platform that defines its &ldquo;Innovation at Every Level&rdquo; business philosophy, Schneider leverages the most advanced data technologies&mdash;and an open, standards-based innovation strategy&mdash;for next-generation solutions and efficiencies. Its commitment to innovation is illustrated in an R&amp;D budget of 5 percent of revenue and a dedicated architecture for incremental, new-market, and disruptive innovation, defined as Horizon 1 (core or short-term), Horizon 2 (adjacent or medium-term), and Horizon 3 (disruptive or long-term). Historically, its disruptive initiatives include pioneering aspects of IoT itself in 1996, and with recent technologies like arc-fault detection and its new IoT-enabled M580 automation controller. Today, its connected circuit breakers, protection relays and variable speed drives are already reducing machine downtime for customers with remote reporting of actionable data, while pilot projects are underway to slash downtime even further, with asset performance management IoT systems predicting faults before they happen.</p> <p>Meanwhile, Schneider is now looking at business model transformations, in which guarantees of production outcomes can be sold as services. Seeing access to energy as a basic human right, the company&rsquo;s &ldquo;Life is On&rdquo; vision is to ensure that energy is available to everyone in a safe, reliable, and sustainable manner. Anticipating global megatrends like rapid urbanization and digitization as the defining parameters for this vision, Schneider recruited Banerjee as Group CTO specifically to drive digital innovation and the transformation to IoT. Banerjee was previously MD for Global Technology R&amp;D at Accenture, after serving as CTO for ABB and Senior VP for Research and Director of HP Labs at Hewlett Packard. In driving innovation and technology differentiation for these leading companies, he also leveraged significant academic experience. Banerjee has served as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Walter Murphy Professor and Chairman of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. He is also the author of 350 research papers.</p> <p>In an interview with BPI, Banerjee says that despite the massive strides already made with IoT-enabled solutions, the truly game-changing innovations will come from next-generation analytics on big data. And he says those leaps in efficiency are not only required for competitive advantage, but also for the macro challenges of demand and sustainability facing the industry. Banerjee also mentions a 300 percent increase in efficiency is required to deal with a 50 percent increase in global energy consumption in 40 years without significantly increasing carbon emissions. Fortunately, the company&rsquo;s portfolio of innovative products has vast consumption efficiency gaps to eat into, including 50 percent energy inefficiencies in asset-intensive industries and a stunning rate of 80 percent inefficiencies in the world&rsquo;s buildings.</p> <p>Banerjee says the bringing together of smart energy management, automation, and software could not only achieve the required efficiencies, but also lead to exciting new business models.</p>  <p>We deliver to our customers low and medium voltage products and automation systems that are all integrated in several end markets: buildings, data centers, asset intensive industries, and utilities. We have a host of innovations throughout those areas, and we invest 1.3 billion euros on R&amp;D. It is about faster, cheaper, better, so why do we need that deep level of innovation?</p> <p>Over the next 10 years, the energy consumption in the world will increase by about 40 percent, and electricity consumption will increase 80 percent thanks to things like urbanization, industrialization, and digitalization; you must be three times more efficient to keep carbon emissions near neutral. We found that in the domain of buildings, only 18 percent are energy efficient, so there is an opportunity for 82 percent of untapped energy efficiency in buildings. Data centers are 30 percent energy efficient. Asset intensive industries such as oil and gas, mining, and metals are about 50 percent efficient. The grand problem we are trying to solve is making sure your energy efficiency is running close to 100 percent.</p> <p>I work with the five business CTOs to harness the innovations springing from that $1.3 billion investment. Connectivity is a major part of the solution. We are on the IoT journey, and our innovation chain is tied to IoT and digital transformation. Connectivity is about bringing value to our customers, and it can be cost reduction, efficiencies, performance, or all of the above. It also promotes safety, and safety has always been a core value in our customer proposition.</p> <p>We look at innovation in the portfolio approach. A large percentage of investment&mdash;about 70 percent&mdash;is on Horizon 1: short term innovations on our core products. With Horizon 2, we have products like Masterpact MTZ, which has an IoT and power monitoring capability. This is Horizon 2 or adjacent and medium-term innovations: bringing new technologies to the same product. H-2 also includes bringing the same product to a new geography, meaning bringing these circuit breakers to China or India with modifications. H-2 is about 20 percent of our innovation investment. Horizon 3 is truly disruptive and long-term innovations, and represents a lot of the stuff we are driving today, and is about 10 percent of our R&amp;D spend. Some of them are seemingly crazy, but with huge potential to completely disrupt our industry.</p> <p>I am responsible for all innovation, not just the digital parts. We are on the journey of IoT and digital transformation, and almost all our products&mdash;from automation systems to circuit breakers&mdash;are integrated with digital technologies. We are absolutely the market leader.</p> <p>Our new products are taking the industry by storm, and I am completely proud.</p>  <p>We are moving toward IT/OT convergence, so all of a sudden engineers who had been very focused on the physics of arc breaking and switching in circuit breakers find themselves in the world of cyber security and cyber trends, of analytics, and machine learning. How do you bridge the gap from the old physics-based engineering to new world technologies or social media, machine learning and data analytics? That&rsquo;s a challenge, and it needs a multi-disciplinary approach. Finding people who have knowledge in all areas is tough. Obviously, you do not need individuals fluent in all areas, but you do need individuals who can collaborate in large teams to solve customers&rsquo; problems effectively. The competency of people in our area is in the IT/OT convergence. We are an operational technology company, so we take care of the actual operations of the company&mdash;whether it is operating wells for Shell or what have you, whereas the IT companies like Oracle or SAP or Microsoft do the company back office.</p> <p>Siloes also present a problem, because in many organizations, each line of business is so focused on their own vertical that they don&rsquo;t think about the broader ecosystem. Companies that don&rsquo;t invest enough in innovation have an even greater challenge. If I had only the industry average of 2 percent of sales for R&amp;D, I would not be able to compete with the Schneinders of this world!</p> <p>Also, with a risk-intolerant culture, you get only incremental innovation. The only way to get disruptive innovation is to create a culture of risk tolerance, where it is okay to try crazy things. We have a culture where it is okay to fail, and even encouraged to celebrate early failures&mdash;but only early failures, not just putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a stubborn mule project. We try to spend on lots of wacky things, knowing that most will fail, and when they do I give the team a pat on the back and say thanks for trying that, and what have we learned? Knowing something does not work also adds to our knowledge. Organizations who do not tolerate failure become very incremental.</p> <p>For IoT, there are three main challenges: cyber security; inter-operability, or standardization; and legacy systems. There are systems you build on that could be 30 years old (brownfield systems) or one day old (greenfield systems). I think data security is a very big problem. The perimeter for attack is increasing daily with the 50 billion connected devices in the world of IOT. Cyber terrorists can create more havoc with cyber attacks than with bombs. We are giving a lot of attention to cyber security.</p>  <p>One of the things we pride ourselves on is the concept of open innovation, and that is something I have been practicing and preaching for years. Open innovation is a very big part of what we do, and we try build solutions for our customers with partners. Before we open an R&amp;D project, we always ask if there is any start-up in the world that is doing something related to what we are trying to do? If there is, lets investigate and possibly collaborate with or bring that start-up into our fold. We can innovate much faster with this approach. It took three years and 10 million dollars to bring a solution to customers before; now we can spend, say, one extra million and bring it to market in six months. That&rsquo;s the value of open innovation.</p> <p>We have partnerships with the top 50 companies in Silicon Valley and relationships with top venture capital firms, and we ask all of them: &ldquo;what are the top start-ups you are working with in the IoT space? In the sensor space? In the cyber space or in the drive space?&rdquo; We ask them for their technology strategy&mdash;what is it they are trying to do? From this, we typically identify three or four start-ups, and we try to identify the technology that best matches with our system. Conferences are also helpful. A week ago, I gave a keynote in Barcelona at the IoT world congress. We tell the world, &ldquo;this is where we are headed,&rdquo; and then 15 start-up founders came to me and talked about possible synergies.</p>  <p>As Group CTO, I am driving IoT, and there are four pillars that are part of my organization. One is working with the five divisional CTOs on driving about 1.3 billion euros in R&amp;D spend. The second is programs like open innovation. The third pillar is our corporate research center, where we look at Horizon-3&mdash;disruptive innovation. The fourth pillar is IoT. I was recruited at Schneider fundamentally to drive our IoT development, along three levels. One is connected products, which is fundamental, but not where the real value is.The next level is edge control, where in our application, our customers do not expect these IoT products to be connected and controlled from the cloud. We want to have local control. The third level is apps, analytics, and services, which we are building on top of the cloud.</p> <p>The first value is in services. In the past, if a transformer failed, you as the customer would have to alert Schneider and ask if we can fix it. Today, we will tell you your transformer has failed, and ask if you would like me to fix it. Remote services are the low hanging fruit we are going after. But the next level is having the transformer give signals before it fails so we can inform the customer that the transformer will fail Thursday, and replace it Wednesday. Now there is no downtime. It is called asset performance management with predictive analytics, and we are doing it with a whole range of products. The cost of 15 minutes of downtime for an Amazon data center can be a hundred million, so the value is enormous. The third value is outcome-based services&mdash;if you can guarantee the outcome. If you&rsquo;re making widgets in your factory, we can guarantee you will make 20,000 widgets per minute, no matter what. So rather than selling the 1,000-dollar transformer, we can sell the guarantee of 20,000 widgets per minute. You lease our products which we install for free, and you pay for the service of productivity. We are currently running pilots on this model. The IoT area will journey from products to connected products to services to guaranteed outcomes. We are increasingly moving toward a world where people will not own products, and instead will get services on demand where and when they need it.</p> <p>IoT also offers enormous benefits for continuous customer engagements. In the past, when we sold you a circuit breaker or panel that lasts seven years, the next time we would talk would be in seven years. With IoT, you have a 24/7 connection with the customer. We know exactly what is going on. Continuous engagement with customers is an amazing new opportunity for marketers, and the best thing you can do for your CMO. IoT is just the plumbing. The technology that will be truly disruptive will be the analytics on that big data you are collecting. How to use data is the most important question we discuss every day. Initially, you are collecting small data, but with data coming in 24/7 from 50 billion connected devices. How do you do artificial intelligence and machine learning on all that data? This is going to be the most exciting thing. Connectivity is the easier part; analytics on the big data is going to be the game changer.</p>  <p>I am very excited with some of the latest innovations in areas such as augmented reality/virtual reality, cognitive computing and machine learning, 3D printing, robotics and drone technology.</p>  Prith Banerjee View Edit Delete
36  <p>Tim Gilchrist is a Fellow at The Health Innovation Technology LAB (HITLAB.org), which is part of Columbia University and conducts grant work in healthcare research and technology, consults to organizations, governments, startups, and hosts the Health Innovators summit (<a href="http://www.hitlabsummit.com/">hitlabsummit.com</a>). HITLAB helps organizations ideate, create, and evaluate innovative technologies to improve healthcare around the world. Tim's involvement with the Lab and Columbia stretches back to 1999 when he first started guest lecturing on health informatics.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>  <p>One of the areas I am most active in is the application of machine learning to health care, specifically interpreting individual&rsquo;s social media feeds and determining their health status. This sounds odd but social media provides a unique environment where people openly discuss their personal lives: how they feel, what they eat, their activities, etc. Social solves a big problem in health data in that it is immediate where most health data are not immediate and often take months to gather and process. At the same time hospitals and individual physicians are moving from fee for service to quality based programs that place emphasis on health outcomes, not how many procedures were performed. This tectonic shift in health care creates a need for information regarding the health of people around; let&rsquo;s say a hospital, not just the people who come in the front door, but the ones living miles away.</p> <p>To meet this challenge I developed a system that listens to social media posts within a certain geographically defined area and deconstructs the stream of posts to predict who displays signs of having diabetes. It works by looking for word patterns in the text of the post and then matching that information to the person&rsquo;s profile information. In tests involving thousands of posts, it is 74% accurate. Some of the interesting patterns that emerge is that diabetics tend to have many friends on social media &ndash; over 1,900, but they don&rsquo;t tend to status very often &ndash; less than 65 times in a year. They also tend to say really funny things regarding their disease. Actual tweet:</p> <p><strong>&ldquo;Lets play a game called how many times will my relatives ask about my diabetes. #byyyyeeee&rdquo;</strong></p> <p>This system could be helpful to health providers who are looking to engage with at risk populations as problems emerge, not just when patients end up in the ER.</p> <p>The HITLAB is also active internationally and is part of (<a href="http://www.grameenfoundation.org/what-we-do/technology/mobile-health">MOTECH</a>), the groundbreaking mHealth initiative designed to increase the quantity and quality of pre- and post-natal care in Ghana.</p> <p>MOTECH uses mobile phone technology to improve maternal and child health knowledge and health-seeking behavior in rural Ghana. The program&rsquo;s Mobile Midwife Initiative provides pregnant women and new mothers with information on pregnancy and infant care, nutrition, malaria, maternal and childhood immunizations, and family planning, as well as reminders to seek timely health care. The initiative offers these services in either SMS or voice option, in multiple regional languages. MOTECH also helps community health workers identify women and newborns in their area who need healthcare services, while enabling these health workers to cut down on paperwork and increase accuracy by giving them the ability to enter patient data via their mobile phone.</p>  <p>Given the passage of the ACA and the increasing cultural focus on wellness, we are in a very supportive environment for our services. The major hurdle that remains is data. In the United States we just don&rsquo;t have a standard format for health data or a central repository to keep it in. This is unlikely to change anytime soon so we use the data we have to fill in the gaps and create as accurate a picture of someone&rsquo;s health as we can. Again, machine learning plays a big role here.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Many of us at HITLAB have classical training in the sciences (MDs, nurses, psychologists, statisticians) so we tend to approach challenges from the scientific point of view. You won&rsquo;t find anyone at the HITLAB who believes there is an unsolvable problem in health.</p>  <p>As I mentioned earlier, access to a standard set of data is one of our limitations. The market is rushing in to fill this gap as more people create and share health data through cell phones, wearables and medical devices. Not only are these data real-time, they capture aspects of health that no one has ever seen before in such quality and quantity. For example, a detailed record of an individual&rsquo;s movements and physical activity, the actual locations of where that activity took place.&nbsp;</p>  <p>When the HITLAB takes on a grant project or health study, the team always includes people from &lsquo;outside&rsquo; healthcare. We include musicians, artists, HR people in solving some very deep technical health issues and it never ceases to amaze me how these people from varying backgrounds contribute so effectively to our work. This practice is actually codified in HITLAB procedures.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve also seen research on what motivates people to change and develop healthy habits. Traditionally, healthcare looked at people with a disease such as type II diabetes and immediately focused on their need to lose weight, which seems logical but ignores the root cause of the disease. The root cause may be something very different, the person may be lonely or depressed. To directly attack the root cause researchers offered pet adoption to type II diabetics. This may seem unorthodox but what&rsquo;s the first thing you need to do with a puppy? Chase it around and walk it. Perfect! I would expect to see great progress in the field of behavior change through similar methods as the one above.&nbsp;</p>  Tim Gilchrist 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
26  <p>Voted one of Houston&rsquo;s &ldquo;40 under 40&rdquo; business stars by Houston Business Journal, Phillips has founded and grown a company which is changing the game for consumers in the healthcare field. In fact, in September 2014, PBS named 2nd.MD one of the Most Innovative US companies.&nbsp;Whether solving the most complex medical case, serving the poorest in Africa, or speaking at MIT, he is determined to make healthcare ridiculously easier, and more effective, for millions of families.</p>  <p>Medical knowledge is doubling every two years and most people are receiving poor, conflicted medical information. 2nd.MD's first goal is to make the ability to reach medical specialists more easily accessible.&nbsp;For example, our member​s can now&nbsp;​enjoy a video consultation with&nbsp;a top specialist from ho​me ​within three days,&nbsp;getting remarkable clarity and up-to-date information regarding their condition. ​We are combining high-tech with high-touch, and the marriage is beautiful. Healthcare gets faster, easier and more personal.​</p>  <p>One of the biggest impediments to innovation in our industry is simply being in the&nbsp;healthcare&nbsp;business. Things have been so bad for so long ​that organizations have stopped trying to improve. Large organizations control a lot of the industry, making big changes difficult, even if it would help everyone.</p> <p>A second impediment is that everyone is concerned about their&nbsp;data&nbsp;being shared or stolen. Healthcare data is incredibly sensitive, but unless you can understand and access someone&rsquo;s healthcare data, how can you help them?&nbsp;</p> <p>A third is the&nbsp;fear&nbsp;of the unknown. When speaking to a top doctor via video for a second opinion, doctors worry they might lose a patient; members worry they might offend their doctor by seeking a second opinion; hospitals worry that a procedure might be cancelled. Like most of our fears, they don&rsquo;t come true, but you can still expect resistance.</p>  <p>Our team is a group of people so unsatisfied with the current limitations and frustrations of healthcare that we cannot stop thinking about how we can improve it.​ Changing lives is the fuel that lets us know we are headed in the right direction. Our team continually reviews new apps and companies to evaluate if there is something we can learn and improve upon. We look over our shoulder constantly, knowing that our success can be shadowed by a new or current player improving on our model. Frustration, fear, and faith are three equal motivators that drive us to improve.</p>  <p>Being able to prick your finger and monitor 100 markers in your blood on your smartphone is particularly exciting to me. We trademarked 'hospital in your hand' as we see how the smartphone could become the center of healthcare.​ Having most of your medical encounters with medical professionals be from home will save tremendous time, cost, and frustration of sitting in a medical suite for an hour reading old magazines. Also, the ability to instantly access your medical records from various places will allow progress in our treatments and lessen waste, which will be a game-changer in its own right.</p>  <p>I honestly cannot think of a more compelling innovation than one which saves lives through linking people in need to right doctors when they need it most. And what industry requires innovation more urgently than healthcare, where our members remind us daily of the lack of clarity, unnecessary paperwork, unjustifiable cost, and rough edges of our healthcare system.​&nbsp;</p> <p>This week at a managers meeting for a famous company, an employee stood up and told us how 2nd.MD changed their child's life. They had been to see 40 specialists and were not sure of their baby&rsquo;s future. Today they have a plan and a new hope after a single video consultation with a top doctor.​ No innovation has driven customer engagement like stories people share with one another when a life has been changed.​&nbsp;</p> <p>Of note, my son will never know the healthcare we all struggled with. He will simply pick up his tablet, ask to speak to a doctor, video consult with a perfectly matched doctor who is looking at his records, diagnose his blood, and then, following doctors orders, will roll over and go back to sleep. That&rsquo;s what we are building.</p>  Clinton Phillips View Edit Delete
27  <p>As COO and Chief Information Officer at NutriSavings, Niraj Jetly and his team have pioneered a way to make healthy food both affordable and understandable, and are building a new ecosystem which is changing the game for corporate health costs and employee productivity in the process. A spin-off from corporate services giant Edenred, Nutrisavings has harnessed data technologies, nationwide grocery partnerships, research, and innovative thinking around food choices to save costs for large employers and health plans, while boosting productivity and even life longevity for tens of thousands of users.</p>  <p>When we launched, there were several research sources which showed that the health of employees depends far more on what you eat than on how often you work out - yet there were very few solutions, if any, based on nutrition. You could attend seminars on how to cook healthier; you could get recipe books; you could be coached by dieticians. But you&rsquo;d generally need to leave your workspace to attend those sessions, they weren&rsquo;t scalable; and they asked people to do something they were not doing already. They also did not address the fundamental problems of affordability and confusion for the consumer.<br /><br />Several research papers showed that the average American finds it much easier to file their own taxes than comprehend the nutritional fact panel of a food item in a grocery store. Go and pick up any food item; I bet you will not have heard half of those words in your life.&nbsp; We know that sugar is generally bad for us &ndash; but it turns out that there are about 200 different words for sugar. Meanwhile, we found that there was a perception that certain brands were healthy, and certain brands were unhealthy &ndash; but that just isn&rsquo;t true. There is in fact a wide range of nutritional value across the products offered by the same brand.</p> <p><br />To decipher this confusion, we recruited a panel of dietitians, and we created an algorithm based on prior research which takes into account all food items and all nutritional information on the packaging. We were able to generate a nutritional score between zero and hundred; the higher number, the healthier the item.So for instance, our participants in the NutriSavings program can download our mobile app, scan the bar code of any food items in grocery store with their smart phone, and get the nutritional score right then and there.Using input from our panel of dietitians, users can also immediately learn what it is about that item that is good for you, and what you should watch out for.</p> <p>But we do not tell someone not to buy this or that. Instead, the app will also show you healthier alternatives; foods with a similar taste, but with higher nutritional scores, as a gentle nudge in the right direction. But we also recognized that the absolute nutrition score of any food item was not as important as the change in score over time for participants, so incremental behavior change, and the ability to track that change, is the exciting game changer for large employers.</p> <p>Many people do want to diet, but to do it they need to log their food intake &ndash; and who has the time to log 1000 meals per year? We can actually manage an individual&rsquo;s pantry, and provide the log and the trends for them. We had to figure out a way that is scalable- so we built a network grocery stores &ndash; 10,000 nationwide - which we actually built connectivity with. Once we have permission from participants to reach out to grocery stores, we can use their rewards cards as unique identifiers and track the items they&rsquo;ve actually bought. In addition to the primary benefits of health, we are passing along discounts from those stores to the members for items which show good nutritional scores &ndash; so healthy food has become more affordable.</p>  <p>Food is very diverse; very fragmented; and hard to comprehend for many people &ndash; it&rsquo;s also very politically driven. So fear of taking risks is one of the biggest challenges to innovating in this industry. Fear of failure in general is the broader challenge &ndash; its human nature; you don&rsquo;t want to be on wrong end of decision making process.<br /><br />The scale of the problem of unhealthy eating, and the confusion and lack of education surrounding it, is intimidating for companies. So we took the challenge and broke it down into small boxes.&nbsp; People are surprised to hear that I did not use new data technologies when we started NutriSavings; but what we did was use them in different ways. It was the business model we needed to primarily solve, so we used technologies my team was familiar with.</p>  <p>Nutrisavings is a spinoff from a large parent company, Edenred, and the innovation culture is very different. When you&rsquo;re a publically held company you tend to be more conservative. For me, there are two kinds of innovation &ndash; technology-driven, and customer-focused. Edenred has a strong innovation philosophy called &ldquo;Customer Inside,&rdquo; and we have built on the idea of focusing on a customer&rsquo;s journey, and focusing on it step by step to figure out how to improve it.<br /><br />I believe innovation requires one more attribute in your teams &ndash; not taking &lsquo;no&rsquo; for an answer. &lsquo;No&rsquo; is just the beginning of a discussion at Nutrisavings. But a key to being disruptive for us is going with your gut. I like that famous story about Henry Ford, where he was asked: &ldquo;Before you built you automobile, did you go and ask what people wanted?&rdquo;, and Ford responded to the effect of, &ldquo;No, because people would have said they wanted faster horses." At some point you need to stop asking and use your gut feeling. If you, as my business partner or client come with a question, I will not say I have all the answers&ndash; but we will tell you we will figure out answers together. The mindset is more important than the tools.</p>  <p>Big data and personalization. Eventually, our nutritional scores for the same food item will be different for different individuals, depending on their unique needs. If any of us has prior conditions or allergies, the recommendations change. The cloud is helpful because it gives you scale, but I&rsquo;m not looking for analytical technologies which can process large amounts of data which can create actionable personalized content for my audience. Keep in mind we are trying to create a scalable model scaled throughout the country &ndash; so if you are buying spinach or eggs or chicken, I need to give you relevant and easy to understand content.</p>  <p>The pace of technology innovation is breathtaking. I&rsquo;m scared to go to bed because, I know when I am sleeping, the world around me is constantly changing. And I don&rsquo;t want to miss it! This is best time to be in technology. And there are so many exciting new business models; such wonderful applications for things like crowdsourcing.<br /><br />What Tesla has done with its battery technology and its open innovation approach is very interesting. Patents create turf wars, which can put constraints on innovation, but we&rsquo;re seeing the end of turf control in some industries. With the approach Tesla is taking with open innovation, imagine the multiplier factor we&rsquo;re going to see; it&rsquo;s mind-boggling.</p>  Niraj Jetly View Edit Delete
34  <p>Barry Money insists that the Japanese innovation concepts of kaizen and kaikaku represent the twin competitive engines for a cramped automotive market. With Toyota already hailed as a classic model of both disruptive and incremental innovation, Money says the most urgent challenge is to direct disruptive strategies toward creating lifelong customers, and to transforming the used vehicle market.</p> <p>Scores of dealerships in Australia are already reaping the rewards of offering personalized benefits to repeat customers, driven by integrated big data tools, and a laser-focus on loyalty. While some brands are offering car sales directly online, Toyota is using digital resources to enrich person-to-person relationships throughout the dealer network, including an innovative sales and service collaboration.</p> <p>Money tells BPI that other connectivity technologies are also being piloted. However &ndash; having worked everywhere from the production line to the logistics desk at Toyota &ndash; Money believes that trust remains the one truly indispensable asset.</p>  <p>Toyota has the largest number of units in operation in the Australian automotive market. We have more owners on the road than any other brand. Our strong dealer network services many of these customers. With innovative service, finance and repurchase products, we have the ability to move customers from their existing vehicle into a newer vehicle &ndash; which provides the customers with that Oh What A Feeling emotion as well as great value.</p> <p>The specific innovation that my team has delivered is combining the best of our service and sales departments and assisting our customers to move from their current vehicle to a new vehicle. We call this sales and service collaboration. It&rsquo;s been tried before in the market, but this time we have strong system support, combined with training, on site consulting, KPI management and follow up and most importantly segmentation and one-to-one marketing that tailors the offering to the needs of the customers.</p>  <p>The dealer network and the automotive franchises have a strong culture and process that has worked well for a long time. But with an increase in the competition in the market from new entrants such as newer manufacturers as well as newer technologies that facilitate the automotive buying process, plus the threat of policy changes by government, it is important that the industry continues to adapt and change in a dynamically changing economy and market.&nbsp;Therefore, the biggest issue is creating an innovative and dynamic culture that looks to new ideas, new ways, new opportunities and challenges the status quo head on. Risk is part of business and understanding and managing that risk is important. But progress in the face of risk is mandatory. Standing still is not an option.</p>  <p>Toyota is synonymous with kaizen &ndash; continuous improvement. After ten years in Japan, I saw with my own eyes the lengths to which Toyota goes in order to create even better products and services. I was captured as a young executive by the passion and intelligence of my kaizen mentors and I have tried to bring that to the Australian market. <br /><br />Toyota practices kaizen in every thing it does. However, sometimes, incremental improvements are not enough &ndash; that is when &ldquo;kaikaku&rdquo; or revolutionary innovation is required. As part of the Retail Development team at Toyota, we are trying new technologies and processes in order to transform the way we do business with our dealers and more importantly how we engage with and satisfy our customers.</p>  <p>Consumers shop across brands and industries. They expect to be able to experience the same levels of excellence in any category &ndash; they carry their expectations horizontally across different industries. This expectation has been facilitated through the internet.</p> <p>As the new vehicle market has plateau&rsquo;d, the franchises will be looking to capitalize on their existing owners, the loyalty from these owners and products and services that optimize the customer experience for this segment of the franchise&rsquo;s market.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Recently we have undertaken a study of various technology-based products in the market that would be useful for our dealer network. WIFI based customer tracking and profiling, sales process support technologies, MAC address tracking on handheld devices among others.</p> <p>While each technology has great merit in the right context, the key is not in the technology. It is in the connection to the consumer on a one-to-one basis. Technology that can support and facilitate that type of tailored connection with our customers is the next step for automotive franchises, in my opinion.</p>  Barry Money View Edit Delete
18  <p class="p1">Thomas White is a co-founder and CEO of the C-Suite Network, which offers services and programs to connect business leaders. From invitation-only conferences, custom-tailored content, C-Suite Radio and C-Suite Television, to the educational programs from C-Suite Academy, the network aims to cover the diverse needs of high-performing professionals. Prior to C-Suite, Thomas started 10 companies in the fields of technology, publishing, market research and corporate consulting. He also holds four patents and is co-author of a book on business process technology, executive producer of radio programming and a speaker.</p>  <p>Leadership must allow people to take risks without fear of being fired. Companies only innovate when they are willing to go outside the box. Out-of-the-box thinking allows organizations to see new opportunities and execute against those opportunities. Change happens when leaders realize they can no longer maintain their vision through status quo.</p>  <p>Status quo. People hate getting out of their comfort zones unless their organizational culture challenges them to make improvements and strive for excellence. Status quo will kill innovation.&nbsp;</p>  <p>We&rsquo;re never satisfied with the way things are. That doesn&rsquo;t mean we don&rsquo;t celebrate our successes, but we recognize that each success is a milestone &ndash; not the destination. The day after the celebration, we get back to new challenges that bring us to the next level of innovation and change.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>  <p>First, changes in digital media allow everyone to tell their story through video and online storytelling. This flattens the playing field so large companies and small companies have the same opportunities. Second is the use of digital technology used to create more authentic relationships with customers. We now know so much about them and are able to connect with our customers without pigeonholing them into these big buckets of stereotypes. Big data allows companies to reverse the trend of depersonalization, which sends customer loyalty through the roof.</p>  <p>The obvious examples are Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, but innovation doesn&rsquo;t just happen in the venue of big companies. We&rsquo;re seeing businesses like Dropbox and DocuSign really take off and provide essential services to organizations around the globe. There are also startups like Uber and Fitbit that are changing our society and inspiring both entrepreneurs and larger organizations with their innovative technologies and solutions.</p>  Thomas White View Edit Delete
57  <p>Robert Novo is a director in the global services division of BT (British Telecom) where he leads a department responsible for various proactive ITIL functions that are an integral part of a managed services contract for a multi-national, Fortune 200 insurance company. He and his team are responsible for a network with tens of thousands of devices, serving hundreds of sites worldwide. The team provides management and planning of various functions including capacity, inventory, change, problem, release, and knowledge as well as managing and supporting the tools used in the day to day monitoring and operations of the network.</p> <p>Robert has 30+ years of experience in the industry, having worked with customers all over the world, published papers/articles, and presented at conferences on leading-edge technologies in both Spanish and English. Prior to joining BT, Robert has held a variety of senior leadership positions in the telecommunications networking industry, in areas including business strategy consulting, research and development, product/service management, complex data analysis and forecasting, and software tool support. Robert holds a Master of Engineering degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.</p> <p>He has spent almost his entire career in customer facing roles because of the satisfaction he gets of seeing innovations being put into practice, particularly when making strategic decisions. &ldquo;Every day, we face complex problems that we are challenged to boil down to the right black and white, dollars and cents, decision point. Not enough depth in the analysis increases the risk of a sub-optimal decision. Too much can result in wasted effort and time or &lsquo;paralysis by analysis.&rsquo; Understanding the problem statement and determining that sweet spot is essential.&rdquo; He advocates innovation as early as possible in the problem definition process to maximize the potential benefit.</p> <p>Robert has developed telecommunications traffic projections for many customers worldwide, with forecasts ranging anywhere from 6 months to 15 years. &ldquo;The level of detail in the analysis has to be tailored to the forecast window. Near term projections are more driven by trends in existing customers and applications. Longer term, we need to look more into industry disruptors and social, business, and technology trends. Fifteen years ago, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat weren&rsquo;t around and Facebook was nascent. Fifteen years from now, the Internet may be dominated by a new generation of apps, but a constant will always be the people, companies, and machines behind them creating the traffic.&rdquo;</p> <p>In his current position, Robert leads a team of experts located throughout Hungary, India, The United Kingdom, and The United States. Two areas he considers essential to keep his team thinking ahead of the curve are collaboration in the decision making process and customer centricity. &ldquo;Innovation should not only be a personal objective. We should always look at ways to encourage and nurture it in others.&rdquo;</p>  <p>BT has established an operational model for some of our key, complex, globally-managed services customers, where we have separated the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) functions that are primarily proactive, such as capacity planning, RCA/problem management and inventory management from the more traditional day-to-day functions like maintenance and incident management. The latter functions are supported by the network operations (NOC) team, while the team that supports the proactive functions as well as the network management tools is referred to as TCAP (Tools, Capacity, Availability, Performance, Problem). Under this model, I lead the global TCAP team that is part of a managed services contract for a multi-national, Fortune 200 insurance company with hundreds of sites and tens of thousands of network elements.</p> <p>Because of this distributed operational model, BT is in a better position to engage in strategic planning discussions with our managed services customers; understanding their business plans and forecasts and their impact on the network. The team is better positioned to translate these business plans and forecasts into new requirements for analysis, reporting updates, and network monitoring and management tool features/capabilities.</p>  <p>One of the biggest impediments to innovation is inertia. While the objective of any innovation in the long run is a positive impact to the business, whether in savings or revenue, most innovations will require an upfront effort and investment to define a problem statement, hypothesize, test the hypothesis, measure the benefit and implement the solution. In particular, if it is an operational innovation, those who will use it will need to be trained and alter their daily working model to embrace it.</p> <p>It is an easy trap to focus solely on meeting day-to-day deliverables and obligations, thereby losing sight of the &ldquo;big picture&rdquo; and not dedicating enough time for problem analysis and planning of innovations. The challenge is in establishing a balance, and investing enough time in the short term for defining and analyzing key problems and subsequently planning and developing innovations to address them.</p> <p>The risk of organizational inertia emphasizes the need for effective and cascaded goal setting, both at the personal and organizational level; i.e., establishing, tracking and validating completion of relevant and SMART objectives yearly, monthly, weekly and in certain cases even daily, and ensuring appropriate targets for innovation are included in those goals.</p>  <p>The first part of the question is an interesting one. I would say that innovation has not become engrained in our organization&rsquo;s culture, because it has been there all along. We have been thought leaders since 1846 when the Electric Telegraph Company was first formed in The United Kingdom. The founders were excited by the business applications of innovation, excited by the commercial potential of electricity and magnetism could offer for communications. And since 1984, we have become truly global, extending our presence with locations and customers all over the world.</p> <p>As a company, BT has a portfolio of approximately 5000 patents, and files over 100 new applications every year. Over the last five years, we have invested over &pound;2.5B in R&amp;D. We leverage substantial academic engagements with more than 30 elite universities around the world, including MIT, Cambridge University and Tshinghua University.</p> <p>Locally and more specifically to everyone on my team, innovation is essential to our day-to-day jobs. We optimize innovations through the goal and objective-setting process (see above) both on a team as well as on an individual basis, and we measure the impact of any potential innovations against the overall benefits to the business.</p>  <p>From a networking technology perspective, security is an ongoing concern where growth and change continue to happen. Unfortunately, it&rsquo;s not just the &ldquo;good guys&rdquo; who are innovating. The threat landscape is rapidly changing. Every day we are hearing about new and creative ways people and companies are being put at risk, such as DDoS attacks, data theft and breaches and viruses, malware and ransomware. Hackers, with the backing of deep-pocketed organizations that provide endless resources are getting more and more sophisticated in their attacks. The industry has to constantly innovate by adapting its technologies and approach to stay ahead of the game in light of all these new cyber threats, designing services that are highly available and robust, and networks that are more resilient and making data more secure.</p> <p>From the point of view of process engineering, I expect automation to be the key game changer. As enterprises digitally transform further, automation will enable them to be more efficient, increasing agility and reducing costs. IoT, M2M and machine learning will be further catalysts for this automation.</p>  <p>I think that the best innovations occur in collaborative environments; when you are part of a wider ecosystem. Our research and innovation center in Adastral Park, near Ipswich, used to be a BT-only facility. However, it is now a collaborative, open community of close to 100 leading edge technology companies and 4000 employees between BT and its partners. Our strong track record of collaborating with many institutions, including our customers and partners, has led to many examples of mutual business benefits derived from the innovations that were jointly created.</p>  Robert Novo View Edit Delete
16  <p>Lilach Felner is a marketing consultant and lecturer specializing in building customer trust. She helps companies and brands become trustworthy by injecting trust into their businesses. As a marketer of multinational consumer brands for over 15 years, Lilach has experienced first-hand the tsunami of consumer militancy towards companies and brands, social media escalation and the dramatic transition of power to consumers.&nbsp;Her Trustworthy Marketing Approach helps organizations and brands become more worthy of their customers&rsquo; trust in the age of open social communication.&nbsp;</p>  <p>First, the organization must be managed by strong leaders that know where the organization is heading, and have a clear purpose and clear goals. Second, in order to make the changes happen, the organization needs a management that "walks the walk", adheres to its values and lives by them. Essentially, an organization needs management that believes in the necessity of change, and is willing to be committed to the change and its implications. Third, rolling out the change depends on management's ability to lead and inspire its employees, to empower those who come up with ideas, nurture them and activate them as advocates.&nbsp; In order to execute change, the employees must be involved. This is why the management should have an "open door policy," encouraging an open flow of communication and demonstrating high levels of accessibility. Fourth, another critical parameter for rolling out innovation and change is trust. In an atmosphere of trust, innovation and speed reach their full potential.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Based on my experience, the biggest obstacles to change and innovation are as follows:</p> <p>Short term-ism: A short-term managerial attitude includes management that is focused on short-term gain rather than long-term growth, management that finds it difficult to balance the need for long-term strategy with short-term results demanded by the market, and management that doesn't communicate a long-term vision for the business.</p> <p>A continuously decreasing Chief Executive Officer tenure: CEOs and senior executives with short tenure seem to have few incentives to embrace long-term oriented behavior. They find themselves facing an intriguing ethical dilemma between optimizing their financial pay-off within their own tenure and securing the longer-term well-being of the organization. According to a 2014 report released by The Conference Board, the average tenure of a departing S&amp;P 500 company CEO has decreased in recent years, from roughly 10 years in 2000 to 8.1 years in 2012.</p>  <p>The innovation process should start from the CEO and the management team in order to give it the focus and the priority it deserves. A special committee for innovative change should be appointed with representatives from all relevant departments. Employees should feel they are involved as well. In order to examine the effectiveness and the results of the process, a 'before and after' survey should be conducted.&nbsp;It is recommended to plan a kick-off session with all relevant employees in order to create involvement and engagement and build their commitment.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>  <p>Given the erosion in customer trust towards organizations and brands due to a history of over-promising and under-delivering, not only do we find more and more customers who arm themselves with as much unbiased information as possible but also more and more consumers who trust what their peers say. In this reality, I believe new technologies should focus on the 'social customers', those customers that are constantly engaging with one another in order to seek out advice and opinions from their peers. Engaging these powerful, trusted voices has become even more important considering that 92 percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family (Nielsen&rsquo;s Global Trust in Advertising Report). &nbsp;Another area that challenges new technologies lies in the proliferation of communications channels. The challenge is to create a seamless, omni-channel solution that will provide a single, <em>seamless experience </em>for the customer across all channels. The customer views the company as being one company no matter how many channels it has. Each platform needs to have awareness of the other. This means a lot of coordination between IT and marketing.&nbsp;</p>  <p>I have two examples of trustworthy leaders who embody the innovation mindset in the way they lead.</p> <p>Tony Hsieh, the inspiring widely-admired founder and CEO of Zappos.How often do we see a company where most of its efforts towards customers happen after they&rsquo;ve made the sale? How often do we see a company that has reps who are trained so that when a customer is looking for a specific pair of shoes, if they&rsquo;re out of stock (for example, they don&rsquo;t have their size), they will look on at least three competitor web sites and refer the customer to that competitor if they find the shoe the customer is looking for? Hsieh has innovated the way Zappos treats its employees, its customers, and its suppliers. Hsieh is an inspiring example of a leader who believes that being true to your own values is fundamental to how others will perceive you.</p> <p>Peter Aceto, the President and CEO of Tangerine&mdash;formerly ING Direct Canada. How often do we see a CEO who measures his employees&rsquo; views about his leadership after his first year as CEO? After his first year as CEO, Peter Aceto decided to send a company-wide email, inviting everyone to vote on whether they wanted him to remain in charge. He was prepared to leave the position if the employees weren&rsquo;t inspired by his leadership. The response rate was 95% and of those who responded 97% said he should stay.&nbsp;</p>  Lilach Felner 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
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

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11SELECT `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`, `BrainwavesEvent`.`id`, `BrainwavesEvent`.`event_id`, `BrainwavesEvent`.`brainwafe_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`brainwaves` AS `Brainwafe` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`brainwaves_events` AS `BrainwavesEvent` ON (`BrainwavesEvent`.`event_id` IN (129, 127, 53) AND `BrainwavesEvent`.`brainwafe_id` = `Brainwafe`.`id`) 000
12SELECT `Program`.`id`, `Program`.`title`, `Program`.`subtitle`, `Program`.`summary`, `Program`.`description`, `Program`.`image`, `Program`.`thumbnail`, `Program`.`date`, `Program`.`feature`, `Program`.`enable`, `Program`.`created`, `Program`.`modified`, `Program`.`modifier`, `EventsProgram`.`id`, `EventsProgram`.`event_id`, `EventsProgram`.`program_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`programs` AS `Program` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`events_programs` AS `EventsProgram` ON (`EventsProgram`.`event_id` IN (129, 127, 53) AND `EventsProgram`.`program_id` = `Program`.`id`) 110
13SELECT `Event`.`id`, `Event`.`name`, `Event`.`date_start`, `Event`.`date_end`, `Event`.`date`, `Event`.`not_exact_date`, `Event`.`location`, `Event`.`description`, `Event`.`url`, `Event`.`image`, `Event`.`category`, `Event`.`event_type`, `Event`.`created`, `Event`.`modified`, `Event`.`modifier` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`events` AS `Event` WHERE `Event`.`category` = 0 AND `Event`.`date_end` >= '2025-04-29' ORDER BY `Event`.`date_start` asc LIMIT 3000
14SELECT `Report`.`id`, `Report`.`date`, `Report`.`title`, `Report`.`subtitle`, `Report`.`summary`, `Report`.`author`, `Report`.`body`, `Report`.`upload`, `Report`.`image`, `Report`.`internal`, `Report`.`url`, `Report`.`featured`, `Report`.`program_only`, `Report`.`related`, `Report`.`enable`, `Report`.`created`, `Report`.`modified`, `Report`.`modifier` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`reports` AS `Report` WHERE `Report`.`id` IN (3, 5)220
15SELECT `Tracking`.`id`, `Tracking`.`referrer`, `Tracking`.`user_id`, `Tracking`.`non_member_id`, `Tracking`.`report_id`, `Tracking`.`report_download`, `Tracking`.`other`, `Tracking`.`date` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`tracking` AS `Tracking` WHERE `Tracking`.`report_id` IN (3, 5) 000
16SELECT `Download`.`id`, `Download`.`user_id`, `Download`.`non_member_id`, `Download`.`report_id`, `Download`.`tracking_id`, `Download`.`date` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`reports_download` AS `Download` WHERE `Download`.`report_id` IN (3, 5) 32320
17SELECT `Program`.`id`, `Program`.`title`, `Program`.`subtitle`, `Program`.`summary`, `Program`.`description`, `Program`.`image`, `Program`.`thumbnail`, `Program`.`date`, `Program`.`feature`, `Program`.`enable`, `Program`.`created`, `Program`.`modified`, `Program`.`modifier`, `ProgramsReport`.`id`, `ProgramsReport`.`report_id`, `ProgramsReport`.`program_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`programs` AS `Program` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`programs_reports` AS `ProgramsReport` ON (`ProgramsReport`.`report_id` IN (3, 5) AND `ProgramsReport`.`program_id` = `Program`.`id`) 110
18SELECT `Tag`.`id`, `Tag`.`tag`, `Tag`.`created`, `Tag`.`modified`, `ReportsTag`.`id`, `ReportsTag`.`report_id`, `ReportsTag`.`tag_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`tags` AS `Tag` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`reports_tags` AS `ReportsTag` ON (`ReportsTag`.`report_id` IN (3, 5) AND `ReportsTag`.`tag_id` = `Tag`.`id`) 000
19SELECT `MediaCoverage`.`id`, `MediaCoverage`.`date`, `MediaCoverage`.`title`, `MediaCoverage`.`author`, `MediaCoverage`.`summary`, `MediaCoverage`.`publisher`, `MediaCoverage`.`url`, `MediaCoverage`.`created`, `MediaCoverage`.`modified`, `MediaCoverage`.`modifier`, `MediaCoverageReport`.`id`, `MediaCoverageReport`.`media_coverage_id`, `MediaCoverageReport`.`report_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`media_coverage` AS `MediaCoverage` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`media_coverage_reports` AS `MediaCoverageReport` ON (`MediaCoverageReport`.`report_id` IN (3, 5) AND `MediaCoverageReport`.`media_coverage_id` = `MediaCoverage`.`id`) 000
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_4` asc LIMIT 2020200
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