Innovator Profiles

Id Summary Bio Answer 1 Answer 2 Answer 3 Answer 4 Answer 5 Leader Actions
60  <p>Mehdi Tabrizi is the CMO and General Manager of Innovation and Customer Experience for Moda Health. He says his role is about creating authentic connections,&nbsp; the best possible customer experience, and meaningful innovation. Above all, it is about making a positive impact in people&rsquo;s lives and the communities Moda serves.</p>  <p>Prior to coming to Moda Health, I worked for one of the world&rsquo;s most renowned customer experience, innovation and brand consulting agencies for over a decade. I was fortunate to partner with a lot of different companies around the world, from global Fortune 500 businesses to startups and across a very broad range of industries. My observation in working with those companies is that a culture of innovation requires a commitment at the highest level. That commitment has to include the right structure, resources and investments. Without that you&rsquo;re not going to succeed in creating a culture of innovation. You might have an innovation project, but then it goes away. Once you have a strong commitment, you must have a strategy that is closely aligned with the company&rsquo;s DNA and vision. If you&rsquo;re a technology laggard, you cannot suddenly become a technology disruptor. However, you might decide to become a fast follower. You really need to have a strategy that fits within the context of your business. You also need to understand where your innovation focus should be, which domain you&rsquo;ll concentrate on. Is it on the operations side, the product side, or the customer experience side?&nbsp; You also need to have the right structure and leadership that can build the necessary competencies in the organization and bring in the right staff and skill sets. &nbsp;Creativity is key to innovation, and therefore you need to have people with a creative background. Your innovation leaders need to have a rich understanding of what innovation is, how you build a strategy and how you put in place the processes to get there. It&rsquo;s important to find people who are both passionate and can drive the innovation process. Finally, you must have the appropriate systems in place to support them.</p>  <p>In the health care industry, governmental policies and regulations can be a real impediment. Innovation often requires a long-term view of the market. But if every four years or so there&rsquo;s a change in regulatory policy, it makes it very difficult to think long term. Also, I think there is often a lack of true innovation culture in health care organizations. Many of the people in health care have only worked in the healthcare industry and therefore they don&rsquo;t have experience in other industries where innovation is better practiced. So, in health care, some of the impediments have to do skills, culture, policy and, in some cases, a lack of true competition, which can spur innovation. The industry is also very fragmented. We have a lot of small operators who don&rsquo;t have the resources to both drive and scale innovation. However, I do think things are going to change. We&rsquo;ll see the larger players push significant innovations, and the smaller players will either have to innovate or partner with organizations that have developed new technologies and platforms. More generally, I believe there is also a lack of expertise about the practice of innovation. For example, organizations need to understand and appreciate that not every innovation is going to succeed. Failure is an important part of the innovation process. To be successful, companies need to have the right mindset.</p>  <p>Innovation needs to be inclusive. You have to empower people if you want to make innovation part of your culture. If companies want to make it part of their DNA, then everyone should take part. You need to celebrate your wins and understand that your failures are learning experiences that can also drive innovation forward. Another key factor is cognitive diversity. You need to celebrate diversity of people, backgrounds, thoughts and ideas. In organizations that are very hierarchical and top down, you often don&rsquo;t have the flow of information and ideas. Innovation happens top to bottom, bottom to top and sideways.</p>  <p>Two of the big factors that are driving change in the health care industry are affordability and the consumer. The impact of Covid-19 has only increased the consumer dynamic. The virus has shown that it can affect any of us, no matter what our income, ethnicity or geographic location might be. And when it comes to safety and security, people want to be in control. To meet the needs of the consumer, health care needs digital transformation. Right now, it is behind most other industries. However, digital transformation is coming to health care and it will drive major changes at every level, whether its operations, experience, treatment, such as virtual care or remote care, or wellness, with things like wearables and remote devices. Another big trend is the shift to home care. Home and local care is going to become more prominent. The idea that every time you&rsquo;re sick you go to a major hospital is changing. Something else we&rsquo;ve seen coming for some time is the shift from fee-based to value-based reimbursement. That is an important trend that is changing our industry. Ultimately, in terms of technology, I think the confluence of data and digital will be a huge driver of change.</p>  There is a lot of innovation going on in health care. Innovation can be compelling at a lot of different levels. There&rsquo;s the offering&mdash;the product and service side. There&rsquo;s operational innovation in terms of the business model, the network, and the infrastructure. One area that a lot of companies are focused on is engagement, which is the service side, the channel and the overall experience.&nbsp; On the product offering and experience side, an example of an exciting innovation is ultrasound-to-go, in which a pregnant woman is given an ultrasound she can take home and hook it up to her phone, so the doctor can do an ultrasound without the woman having to leave her home. From an operations perspective we&rsquo;re seeing diligent robotics that can take over many of the tasks now performed by nurses. There are new patient monitoring systems that take advantage of artificial intelligence and vision technology, so that patients can be effectively monitored without nurses having to enter the room. In terms of wellness, you&rsquo;re seeing new solutions that help people with aerobic fitness and conditioning. There is increasing amount of innovation starting to take place in health care across the spectrum. It is a great time to be in healthcare. And the most rewarding part is that you have an opportunity to make a real difference.  Mehdi Tabrizi View Edit Delete
58  <p>Wai is Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Serviceaide. A serial entrepreneur, he has been in the high-tech industry for 36 years. Wai held executive leadership roles at BEA where he was the EVP and Global Chief Product Officer and at CA Technologies where he was the SVP and GM of the Unicenter brand, SVP and GM of WW Services, and SVP and GM of interBiz.<br /><br />Wai received his Master&rsquo;s and Bachelor&rsquo;s degrees in computer science focusing on AI and Systems Architecture from Columbia University in NY.</p>  <p>It starts with the fundamental belief that we all have responsibilities to our customers, partners, shareholders and fellow employees. We have to believe that what we do is valuable to our customers and to the market as a whole.&nbsp; This is the foundation of why we have to keep innovating, changing and doing better.<br /><br />I have found that some people that are incredibly innovative in one area (ex: technology, operational processes, business model, etc.) can be very resistant to change in other dimensions.&nbsp; Individual and collective mental inertia and the organizational mandates that reinforce the inertia are what makes change hard.&nbsp; However, if an organization takes things to the extreme on the other end of the spectrum, people often revert to becoming cautious and hesitant in fear of doing the wrong thing because there is no clear set path.&nbsp; Finding the middle ground by creating an environment with a foundation that is multiple faceted enough to stand even when major pieces are being modified is key to innovation. This allows people to support change to get to a better place with the understanding that the pain of change is a prelude to something better.</p>  Standards and processes can be great, but when organizations go overboard it can lead to a checkbox mentality that isn&rsquo;t well suited for innovation. At the same time, if solutions are not thought out fully, and they predictably fail &ndash; this can greatly impact the trust in innovation and change.&nbsp; The key is to focus on the value of results, keeping innovations practical, when implementing new ideas.&nbsp; Of course, research is also important in determining which ideas are worth major efforts and which are not.  I believe that we should never say NO, immediately.&nbsp; Accept ideas as worthy of some mental investment and at least one discussion to tease out how it can create value for your constituents (customers, partners, shareholders and fellow employees). Of course, if it comes from any of the constituents, the likelihood of it being impactful is even better.&nbsp; The cycle of idealization to feedback to implementation back to idealization is an implicit optimization loop.  The AI model, based around insights and encoded knowledge, will be extremely impactful in the coming years.  There are many areas where an organization can innovate: technologically, operational processes and business models, etc. I see compelling innovation put to use constantly - the highly diversified technology threads of Google, the use of SaaS as a business model by ServiceNow, the full iphone consumer all-in-one experience by Apple, or IBM&rsquo;s Watson AI initiative.&nbsp; They are all industry changing from the value they have created.&nbsp; In many cases (like in AI), innovation in pure technology also makes possible innovation using the technology in operational processes and business models. That is where we at Serviceaide are making our own small contribution for Service and Support use cases.  Wai Wong View Edit Delete
64  Anne Schl&ouml;sser is founder and CEO of <a title="http://www.studiomem.com/" href="http://www.studiomem.com/">studiomem</a>, an innovation company and <a href="http://www.memoratio.com/">Memoratio</a>, a data driven venture builder. She has spent her career in solving innovation and design challenges for start-ups, mid-sized businesses and large corporations in Europe, the US and China. As a business designer and entrepreneur she discovers customer or market need, builds innovative offers and defines innovation strategy along the value chain of an organization. A lot of her work has been in transitioning product manufacturers into becoming service providers, and specifying the right digital product or business offer in a given environment. She studied Product Design at Art Center College of Design in California, and worked in consultancies in the US and Europe, before becoming a founder. She is at home close to Munich in the south of Germany, from where she collaborates with clients worldwide.  The ability to change is fundamental to the survival of any organism.&nbsp; Organizations, like organisms, are subject to the same type of darwinistic rules to evolve under. Finding a fit to the environment is key to survival. Successful organisms strive, unsuccessful ones wither. Beyond the ability to change and adapt, organizations need to innovate to anticipate the next critical adaptation. Digital Innovation, oftentimes is a disruption if not a successful evolution of an existing analog system. Digitalization is penetrating all areas of life. As much as the ability to change, successful companies have to find their right fit in the digital environment. For manufacturers of physical products it means to become digital service providers, just as much as service providers can&nbsp; &ldquo;product-ize&rdquo; their offer to remain relevant.  I personally believe &ldquo;unlucky opportunism&rdquo; is a big impediment to innovation, no matter what sector or organization. Things done opportunistically, not following overall culture or strategy will hinder change and adaptation. Managing opportunism across an organization can only be done with a strong evolving and guiding culture. Sometimes, however, opportunistic events, will turn into an adaptation, or even an innovation strategy, that&rsquo;s &ldquo;lucky opportunism.&rdquo; Both, agility and foresight are needed to navigate opportunism.  studiomem is a strategic innovation and design company, with a 12 year history of delivering innovation services from strategy to implementation to start-ups, mid sized businesses and global fortune 500 clients. We constantly ask ourselves: what is the future of our business, dedicate time to gain foresight and innovate our offer. The paradox is, that selling innovation services, does not make you innovative yourself. You&rsquo;ll have to eat your own medicine and dedicate as much time to innovate for your own business, as you expect from your clients. Earlier I mentioned that service providers will have to productize to be successful in a globally digitalized world. That&rsquo;s what we are driving forward now. Two years ago we co-founded the data driven venture builder, Memoratio. A logical consequence of our experience as an innovation company, ultimate proof of expertise in innovation means venturing into entrepreneurialism. Besides venture building, Memoratio and studiomem are productizing our services by offering our clients<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://studiomem.com/data-driven-innovation">Data Driven Innovation formats</a><span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>or our<span class="apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.studiomem.com/visioneering">foresight format &lsquo;Visioneering&rsquo;</a>. In these formats, we are combining design thinking methodology with Big Data and AI - our clients benefit by gaining never-before-seen precision in finding opportunity and in understanding their audience in the future.  It is March 2021, we are in the midst of the third wave of the pandemic in Germany. Countries are getting ready to start-up again. The post-pandemic world feels within reach. Right now, everybody is asking themselves, how will it be different? What will change, what will stay or come back, what will be gone forever? Technologies driving the next two years will be anything, which is enabling rapid advancement and the evolution of digitalisation. During the Covid Crisis the world has became smaller as we collaborate and compete across organizations, societies, continents digitally. The given circumstances delivered the need to adapt to new environments. Within these new environments customers demand and businesses will deliver a new fit. The post-pandemic world however will by no means be less troubled. The climate crisis is here and now, more than ever, radical transparency, boosted by global digitalization will drive forward environmental, social and governance criteria. Change and adaptation will be crucial, not only for the survival of the individual organism but this time for the survival of the species.  Our current transition is driven by the pandemic, digitalization and climate change. Organizations are trying to understand how the post pandemic world will be different, how climate change will impact their business model, and how they can use technology to drive forward these changes to create positive impact. We utilize our <a href="http://www.studiomem.com/visioneering">foresight format Visioneering</a> to support organizations in finding ways to deal with these changes and uncertainties. Visioneering is based on forecasting plausible future scenarios, based on technology, social, environmental and business trends. We help our clients to think forward 20-30 years into the future and imagine their organization&rsquo;s brand, products and services. We then sketch a roadmap backwards, giving them a long term innovation strategy and future purpose to work with. Our clients tell us, that besides the strategic outcome, their organizational cultures are deeply impacted by becoming more future-focussed and more aware of thinking long term.  Anne Schlösser View Edit Delete
59  <p class="p1">Eugene Xiong's leadership as president and CEO has allowed Foxit Solutions to grow immensely and become a worldwide leader within the PDF industry.</p>  First we work with an organizational chart to make sure everyone has clear responsibilities and also has support from other colleagues. It&rsquo;s important for people to understand their role in the company so they can feel empowered to make decisions, including some that might be &nbsp;non-conventional. Secondly, we promote customer and market oriented evaluation of people&rsquo;s performance, so they will treat outside input very seriously instead of looking inward all the time. This view allows for fresh ideas to flow into the company. Last but not least, we make a strong effort to encourage innovative work, including handing out recognition and awards.  <p>As organizations grow, it takes more and more people to change processes in order to implement an idea. with each added personal layer or filter, it becomes a little more difficult to move an idea forward. Also, innovative ideas often don&rsquo;t bring in short term results.</p>  <p>We are introducing the Baldrige Excellence Framework to Foxit, a big perspective of this framework is innovation. We are associating innovation with every aspect of our operation, including strategy, customer relationships, process management, valuation, improvement, and of course, results.</p>  We believe cloud technologies will the biggest driver in our industry for the near term. Not only are people moving data onto the cloud, they will move all applications on the cloud as well. Also, a lot of new use cases will arise because of cloud adoption. In the longer-term future, we also believe AI will drive very big changes to our industry as well, allowing applications and services to help people working with their documents more efficiently, and do more.  Foxit implemented a web-based PDF engine and through continuous innovation we made it very efficient. Right now we have the most efficient PDF engine on the web, and based on this engine, we have built web-based PDF applications that can be deployed and managed within enterprises easily. This also supports our innovative ConnectedPDF technology, which allows documents to be protected, tracked and managed across all use cases.  Eugene Xiong 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
53  <p>Michael McCarthy is a serial entrepreneur, an executive coach at Harvard and MIT, and a strategy consultant to scores of start-ups around the world.&nbsp;Having founded six start-ups, McCarthy now guides some of the world&rsquo;s most talented business minds at Harvard&rsquo;s Advanced Leadership Initiative.</p>  <p>Just last week, I had a healthcare company from Tennessee wanting to know how to do intrapreneurship pitches in-house; how to pitch things like app ideas that might be approved by upper management.</p> <p>There are the important basics for the intrapreneur process, like knowing who you&rsquo;re pitching to, and what their needs and criteria are; what <em>they </em>say &ndash; pre-pitch &ndash; would lead to their green lights and their red lights.</p> <p>But for the brainstorm phase, I coach a mastermind process designed to remove negativity.</p> <p>First, we gather five to six people from very different walks of life &ndash; different genders and ages and backgrounds and business units.</p> <p>The (originator) is asked to take three minutes to describe the idea or the dilemma or the challenge, and they have to describe the kind of solution they&rsquo;re looking for &ndash; like &ldquo;I am looking for a solution in the form of an app, not a new business division.&rdquo; You have to be clear on the kind of solution you want. Then there is three minutes of Q&amp;A, just to clarify the challenge or the problem. Then, the person with the challenge or dilemma has to physically leave the room and they take their self-limiting beliefs with them.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s important they leave because what they tend to do is interrupt too much &ndash; and say &ldquo;oh, I tried that; that won&rsquo;t work.&rdquo;&nbsp; When they&rsquo;re not there, people will be free to say the bad idea, and then leapfrog to a better idea.</p> <p>The format we use in the brainstorming session is &ldquo;yes, and,&rdquo; where the response must literally begin with &ldquo;yes, and,&rdquo; which makes the shy people and the introverts feel safe. You can still disagree, but it needs to be in a positive way &ndash; one person can say &ldquo;I think it should be purple,&rdquo; and another can say &ldquo;yes, and I think it should be any color but purple; but I might agree to maybe a shade of purple, like lavender.&rdquo;</p> <p>The person with the dilemma then returns to the room and just listens.</p> <p>Recently, in Boston, for instance, this method led to a challenge for finding sufficient recharging stations for shared electric scooters being entirely reframed with this total solution: that pre-charged scooter batteries simply be swapped out by users at the scooter racks, and forget about recharging altogether.</p> <p>And in Armenia &ndash; one of several developing countries where I have coached &ndash; the mastermind method provided an employment solution for returning refugees on either side of traditional working age, in an interesting social entrepreneurship challenge. The young refugees had few skills; and the seniors had skills but not the vigor to use them directly. So the group came up with the Armenian Shopping Network &ndash; based on the Home Shopping Network concept in the U.S. &ndash; with the returning Millennial refugees doing YouTube videos of the seniors teaching traditional Armenian cooking classes, and selling the products by mail. It turns out from the discussion that keeping the culture, the food and the language alive was particularly important in the diaspora. The young people do the social media, the baking and the shipping; the older people set up the recipes and the use cases.</p> <p>When I coach start-ups, the first thing I do is to encourage them to consider doing a service business rather than using a manufacturing model. If there is a way to offer a product&nbsp; as a service, it eliminates so many problems, and you don&rsquo;t have to worry that much about&nbsp; attracting venture capital and angel investment. Simply framing a business model around service stimulates innovation.</p> <p>My second fundamental piece of advice is to make it a need, not a want.</p> <p>The base challenges for startups in developing countries are quite different from those in the U.S. In Armenia, I observed that founders had a huge challenge with trust and personal cynicism.</p> <p>People told me there&rsquo;s no point in trying to start a successful business because the government is corrupt and they&rsquo;ll just steal your business, so why bother. So, I had to overcome this very negative attitude that everyone is a crook. In an auditorium of 200 people, about half were incredibly cynical &ndash; that negative iron curtain mindset is a killer for start-up development. A lot of developing world entrepreneurs have a challenge around shyness, and the need to learn American style pitching &ndash; right down to the humor, and dealing with the apparent meanness of venture capitalists. They need to learn how to keep their self-esteem intact after rejection.</p> <p>I must have talked to 1,000 would-be start-up founders, through my Harvard course on entrepreneurship, MIT Launch, Babson College and the $1 million Hult Prize.</p> <p>In the start-up world, I think there is way too much focus on making a ton of money as a motivation to start a business. Just paying your own bills through your idea, not having a boss and doing what you want, when you want &ndash; could be immensely rewarding. Most start-ups don&rsquo;t need to be focused on whether they&rsquo;ll become a unicorn for the idea to be viable. Starting the Budi Foods business made me happy to be alive.</p> Just focus on the life that you want.  <p>Self-limiting beliefs and negative thinking are the biggest inhibitors to innovation. If I have a brainstorming session and someone says, &ldquo;that won&rsquo;t work,&rdquo; I kick them out&hellip;literally. I&rsquo;d rather have someone with limited intelligence in a good mood than a brilliant person in a bad mood. They take all the shy people off the ideas board.</p> Also, being in your silo, or putting a ceiling on your business model, inhibits innovation. Saying, &ldquo;Oh, we only do apps; we only do things in the U.S.; or we&rsquo;re only in the food business&rdquo; will prevent innovation.  <p>One key element is that the CEO must believe in innovation, and that belief needs to trickle down. It needs to be embraced, not just tolerated &ndash;&nbsp; it can&rsquo;t be just &ldquo;Innovation Day&rdquo; for one day a year.</p> <p>Also, they need to set aside dedicated, respected time for innovation. Companies should not cancel out innovation time; that innovation time needs to be ring-fenced, irrespective of other events, like end-of-quarter. The clear sense must be: innovation is how we stay alive and relevant 100 years from now.</p> <p>When I had a chocolate company a few years ago, and we had our first commercial run at a new location in Ohio, I was on the production line on the first day. And I ended up involved with making a part for the chocolate machine, because they weren&rsquo;t coming out right. I absolutely recommend that C-suite executives spend time on the production floor. If I was the CEO of FedEx, I&rsquo;d go undercover as a FedEx driver for a day each month, and experience what it&rsquo;s like, and learn from customers. You will discover so much as a lower-end employee, or if you drop into different departments, especially if something is not working in that department.</p>  <p>The clear answer there is Blockchain &ndash; primarily because it benefits the consumer massively. Soon, consumers are going to see that certain services are much cheaper and faster. For example, when you want to buy an apartment, the commission will be cheaper because there are fewer middlemen, and it will be a much faster experience. Your references will be up in the Blockchain, instead of having humans reverify what was verified ten times before. It brings a lot of efficiency that trickles down directly to the consumer. Yes, Blockchain is in its early days, and I have yet to speak to someone who says they&rsquo;re making money directly from the technology. But they are starting to use it. You&rsquo;ll first see the benefits in financial services, like when you buy stocks or mutual funds &ndash; it will settle in minutes; you&rsquo;ll see funds and checks clearing immediately into your account; you&rsquo;ll be able to wire funds without a bank in the middle.</p> <p>You&rsquo;ll also see Blockchain efficiencies in supply chains, with shipping and tracking.</p>  <p>What I love is fractional real estate ownership, where you can buy a fraction of someone&rsquo;s house in another city; you can buy $1000 of someone&rsquo;s mortgage. You become a mini bank because you want the upside of the market exploding. You can resell that portion to someone else.&nbsp; Its already started in Australia with a company called Brickx.com. I love that it gets rid of the banks.&nbsp;</p> <p>And I&rsquo;ll tell you something that someone should be doing, but that doesn&rsquo;t exist yet to my knowledge. I think people&rsquo;s identity and records that prove what they&rsquo;ve done can be put on the Blockchain. So, for instance, if you become a refugee &ndash; something people don&rsquo;t plan for &ndash; you&rsquo;ll be able to get out of that refugee camp faster by proving that, yes you do have a PhD or engineering degree; yes you do have funds sitting in Vanguard to pay for a flight out. A lot of experienced teachers from Puerto Rico are now having to work as teaching assistants in Florida because the records showing their teaching certificates have been destroyed in the hurricane.</p>  Michael McCarthy View Edit Delete
40  Schell is a Member of the Board of Directors of the German speaking SAP user group (DSAG), specializing in business processes and digital transformation. Beside this, he also runs the bi-yearly Globalization Symposium for international user communities.  <p>Others try to be on the political side; some try to be advisors, but what we really offer is the practice. What we can deliver on is the knowledge and experience of 3000 company members &ndash; both large and also midsized.</p> <p>We ask &ndash; are you prepared for 24/7? Are you prepared for changing from products to services? Are you really cyber-ready? I am talking a lot about IoT &ndash; we need to change in terms of its promise. How do we motivate this group of people who are doing IT business processes to adopt new business models to reflect these capabilities?</p> <p>Many leading companies are evaluating the importance of digitization, and new business models, and I see a responsibility with vendors such as SAP to inform and accompany them in their transition to a digital future. I want to ensure people are aware of what they need to think about &ndash; to get from digital to practice. We don&rsquo;t know everything, but we do know there will be huge change. Companies will really be out of the game if they don&rsquo;t change their business models. There are companies which do sensoric very well, but they don&rsquo;t understand the business models, and there are those with good business models, but no clue about sensoric. We must bring those together.</p> <p>Business model development and innovation needs to have an iterative approach, not a sequential process. I think IoT will change asset-rich industries in a positive way &ndash; you&rsquo;ll know the usage and change in your assets. You can add sensoric to 10 year-old assets and derive a longer lifecycle. The question is how you change your business model around it.</p> <p>In terms of the mix of skills sets companies will need, what we see going on in the European ecosystem, for example &ndash; universities; schools &ndash; is that there is a lot of momentum to embrace a positive attitude about change. The question is only how far to take this attack mode. It is difficult to understand what&rsquo;s going on regarding China and India &ndash; they are so huge. Everyone in the west knew Amazon; not many knew Alibaba, and yet Alibaba is much bigger than Amazon ever will get.</p> <p>In Germany and Switzerland, and really Europe in general, there is nothing we can do anymore in terms of extracting materials from the ground. All we can provide is knowledge. In recent decades, our exports have been dominated by engineering; by producing the best machines. But knowledge is the future. Nevertheless, too many executives tend not to take the opportunity, and wait for others, which is a pitfall. More acting than (worrying) is the right thing to do.</p> <p>Some organizations still believe they can run with isolated strategies &ndash; with marketing/sales and production/purchasing in isolation. I firmly believe you can no longer do this alone. Companies need to have a clear glide path of where they want to go; they need clear buy-in that transformation is both top-down and bottom-up. What I think companies normally don&rsquo;t do, and what they should do, is to really attack markets. Uber attacked.&nbsp; Do you really believe that if Uber had entered the market in the normal, slow way, analyzing and checking everything &ndash; they would have succeeded? &nbsp;They did not wait. Many other companies should also move away from a risk-awareness position to attack mode.</p> <p>They need to ask: How can I attack other areas where I am strong? Many companies believe they are world-leading, and then some company in China, or Korea, or India has already overhauled them from an income perspective.</p> <p>Executives must ask: are we ready for the shared economy? Are we truly cyber-ready? A lot of people talk about data analysis and big data, but at the end of the day its not about the big data &ndash; its about finding a pattern from the data which creates a new business model.</p> <p>Too often, this is not what companies do. We analyze to death; we prepare for a presentation, and we wait for someone to make a decision. And when the CEO makes the decision, they are not ready for that decision because they are too large. The way of working together needs to change.</p>  <p>Companies need to move away from risk aversion and towards attacking markets. Also, companies need to involve the youth and their perspectives into the discussion. There are cultural barriers. We cannot truly go into the digital world in healthcare &ndash; which I would like, certainly &ndash; if we don&rsquo;t change the rules of engagement. We will never get 100% security, but we never had 100% security anyway.</p> <p>I see that some people are overloaded with what&rsquo;s going on &ndash; take the most talented marketing people: they need to understand that CRM will completely change everything in that field. So it is most important that people stay open.</p> <p>Will people lose their jobs? Maybe &ndash; but there will also be new jobs, and there will be a bridge between old skills sets and the new skill sets.</p>  <p>Within our organization, the culture of innovation runs very deep &ndash; because we have been doing this for the past 30 years; we do business processes; we do transition management. This is our advantage &ndash; we are practiced at this.</p> <p>There is real excitement about how we can use assets in a different way. There is a passion about the business value being brought by digitalized business models. About smart cities and automated driving, and many others.</p> <p>Open minds are the key. Imagine you are at door of a supermarket: it will already recover your data from your smartphone, knowing your behavior and your previous buying patterns &ndash; and you will be guided. This will happen much faster than we expect &ndash; and the next generation already expects it, and does not fear these kinds of changes.</p> <p>When we order from Amazon &ndash; do we wonder about security and reliability?&nbsp; No, we already know they are reliable. So trust in new technologies does not take decades, or even years.</p>  <p>Real Time. It will be a real-time world. You will get information in real time and make decisions in real time, because you have the capabilities and skills, and because consumers will expect it. You will be in front of a shop and they will know what you want.</p> <p>Business models will change &ndash; often, toward technology-enabled services. We had analytics before &ndash; just not this quickly. Now you have all this discussion about data, but what about business models? That is the next discussion.</p>  <p>What I find really cool is the potential in healthcare devices to actually do what we saw in Star Trek in the &lsquo;70s. Remember that noise &ndash; <em>doo-da-doo</em> &ndash; when they would go over someone&rsquo;s body with a handheld device to detect a defect? I think its great that that will happen. When I go to a doctor, I don&rsquo;t want to answer questions about my age; what I&rsquo;ve been eating and how much I have been exercising &ndash; I want them to know that already.</p> <p>As a consumer, I love to be recognized. I don&rsquo;t worry about old notions of privacy, when there are such amazing benefits.</p>  Otto Schell View Edit Delete
38  <p>Serving as Arla&rsquo;s Head of Open Innovation, Barraza is a chemical engineer by training who is passionate about collaborations between enterprises, academia and entrepreneurs. He studied intellectual property law to arm himself with a tool that has since proved critical in his work on open innovation, both at Unilever and now at Arla.</p>  <p>Historically, an export mindset, the focus on quality and the embrace of innovation have been competitive advantages for Arla.&nbsp; In general, a strong export focus in Sweden and Denmark was a big difference from co-operative movements in other countries. In Denmark, for example, one driver was exports to the UK of butter and bacon, which originated two of the biggest companies in Denmark today: Danish Crown and Arla</p> <p>I see the DNA of the company as not just being a co-op, but innovative in terms of product quality. That continues today &ndash; to be able to maintain our dominant position in markets like the UK, and bolster our ability to enter new markets in China and the Middle East and U.S. as well. Particularly in China and the Middle East, the credentials of being high quality about products really helps our exports&nbsp; &ndash; stemming from the famously stringent laws we have (in Scandinavia and Europe).</p> <p>In addition to having strong dairy products, we are also manufacturers for other companies, so we also need to be competitive in technologies and efficiencies for production.</p> <p>What I do is often researching about research &ndash; how can we find new ways to interact with other types of research partners, such as academic partners and smaller companies, to unlock ecosystems of innovation. A big game changer for us has been the ability to translate the Scandinavian traditions of dairy products and foods to deepen appeal within diverse global markets. One of these products is Skyr, which is based on an old Nordic tradition: translating Skyr according to the taste of other parts of world, like the UK and Holland &ndash; that&rsquo;s been a game changer. Another has been the change in formulation in some of our high protein products, which have allowed very successful recent launches in China.</p> <p>We are also moving toward more strategic partnerships with universities. Last year, we partnered with Copenhagen University and Aarhus University to launch the Arla Dairy Health and Nutrition Excellence Center. I believe dairy can unlock major global problems in terms of nutrition, and we have only begun to tap the potential applications of natural milk proteins. We actively seek out disruptive ideas from both internal and external sources; connecting with small companies and entrepreneurs. Our approach is based around &lsquo;technology push; consumer pull&rdquo; &ndash; so that potential new products must see a deep collaboration between from both scientists and marketers before launch.</p> <p>Last year, we put together the Arla Food Innovation Challenge, in partnership with the Creative Business Cup. This challenged entrepreneurial ideas in competition, and brought winners to Copenhagen &ndash; and we were able to see fantastic ideas from preexisting businesses as well as from early-stage entrepreneurs. Stimulating entrepreneurs in this way gives us a new way of thinking about our products &ndash; providing new insights from external sources. I am very passionate about working with small and medium enterprises, which is what we will be pushing going forward.</p>  <p>Innovating in the dairy products space may seem less sexy than creating the next digital app, so it is a challenge to attract top entrepreneurial talent to the industry. And yet we are doing so at Arla. Our goal &ndash; to create the future of dairy &ndash; offers the kind of ambition that interests young innovators. And our potential for positive impact on societies around the globe is immense, in terms of health and nutrition in particular. We are trying to raise the level of expectation of what we need from small companies in the food industry, and showing that we can create opportunities for innovation. We also challenge entrepreneurs directly through competitions like the Innovation Challenge.</p> <p>Another potential impediment to innovation in the industry is the traction of ideas between seniority levels. In some companies, just the fact that, say, a junior scientist comes up with an idea may mean that idea does not go forward. But while that is a barrier present in other companies, I see it as a big positive contrast for us. At Arla, everybody has a say, and the weighting is the same for good ideas, no matter where it comes from.</p> <p>I also think that having gurus on innovation does not suit our industry &ndash; it is more about what works. The ability for anyone to put forward a proposal leads to a broader source of internal ideas. On the flip side, there is a greater challenge to reach a consensus &ndash; you may think that breaking consensus would be a barrier to innovation in a conservative environment, but the way we try to address that is to harness external sources.</p> <p>I learned so much during my time at Unilever, which was one of the initial drivers worldwide of open innovation, together with Procter &amp; Gamble. Unilever was creating new models of innovation before they appeared in textbooks. But the pace was such that there was time to experiment and develop iterations of prototypes. At Arla, open innovation is also a major feature, but the culture is a little different, partly because the speed at which things need to happen is greater. We try different things and must make almost instantaneous decisions on what works and what does not work, which, at times, may be a challenge.</p>  <p>Arla, of course, has a long history of innovation, but I think our roots in the Nordic countries really promotes this culture, and that culture itself also presents Arla with a big advantage in foreign markets.</p> <p>To be successful in the future, dairy companies will need to have strong credentials on sustainability. Consumers and customers in foreign markets know that the emphasis on sustainability in the Nordics is way ahead of other parts of the world. Already, Arla is the biggest organic milk producer in Europe, and those efforts in sustainability are being recognized abroad.</p> <p>Within the company, there is already a deeply collaborative culture, and part of my role is to try to bring Arla to working closer with SMEs and entrepreneurs, and finding new ways of approaching products and business models outside our own. We invite our large customers to come and innovate with us at the lab. We want to duplicate this more and more, and also to be involved in the incubation of start-ups.</p>  <p>I think the main driver for our business in the future will be people&rsquo;s concern in living longer and healthier lives &ndash; health will be the big driver throughout the food industry. There are increasingly effective technologies being developed to measure your health and fitness, which will impact the type of products we introduce in the market.</p> <p>There will soon be constant monitoring of all of your vital signs &ndash; technology which may tell you: &ldquo;this week, your calcium levels are lower and you may need x grams of cheese.&rdquo; There is going to be a big connection between products with strong health credentials and the maintenance and self-reporting of heath. Arla is in the right place in terms of understanding consumption and health-monitoring technologies.</p> <p>3-D printing offers some interesting opportunities, linked to new digital challenges. One possibility which is interesting for me, for instance, is whether new technologies can bring back old traditions &ndash; such as the popular tradition in the UK, in particular, of having your dairy product and bottle of milk delivered by the milkman to your front step. These are things that might come back in the digital world, and we have some people researching in that space &ndash; but aerial drones delivery are not part of that research just yet!</p>  <p>Well, we saw a series of outstanding innovations at the Arla Food Innovation Challenge. The Challenge winner &ndash; Miss Can, from Portugal &ndash; was a great example of the importance of creative consumer-focused innovation in an industry that may not seem sexy for entrepreneurs; in this case, canned fish.</p> <p>I am also really inspired by the innovations Arla is creating in terms of producing products which are not only &lsquo;nutrient dense&rsquo;, as our scientists call it, but are also about enjoying your life. It is not just about counting calories &ndash; so butter for instance, can be enjoyed as part of the rich life experience, with the right formulation and balance.</p> <p>But top of my list might be Arla&rsquo;s successful translation of Nordic products into markets and cultures from the U.S. to China.</p>  Harry Barraza View Edit Delete
37  <p>Andria Long - VP of Innovation at Johnsonville Sausage - believes that effective innovation is, most centrally, about delivering on the ideas which actually solve consumer needs in a differentiated way. When it comes to innovation, her first question is: "what differentiators are consumers actually willing to pay for?"</p>  <p>We are a deeply entrepreneurial company, founded by a family of entrepreneurs and we are still family-owned today. It&rsquo;s no accident that we are ranked number one in our category. Ideas are not the hard part; rather, the challenge arises from actually delivering on those ideas.</p> <p>Everything can be made better, and I do mean everything. Differentiation is critical, but we&rsquo;ve found that you can skip some traditional steps in innovation: weeding through ideas and holding ideation sessions, and waiting for &ldquo;perfect information&rdquo; can hold up the process needlessly. We are focused on the front end &ndash; delivering on real insights of what consumers need.&nbsp;</p> <p>In the CPG industry, driving competitive advantage from innovation techniques is all about figuring out and meeting a consumer's unmet need in some new or different way. It is learning how to balance the risk and reward of how much you know with the amount and depth of information and research you need in order to make a decision. You're never going to have perfect information. You need to achieve that precarious balance of using good business judgment combined with enough consumer research to confidently approach the market.&nbsp;</p> <p>The success we&rsquo;ve had with the Fully Cooked Breakfast Sausage is a great example of delivering against a trifecta of insights. We found that convenience really is key for time-pressed consumers. We also thought about how consumers actually use products. It turns out that not everyone eats 12 sausages at a time, so we used re-sealable packs. And consumers want to see their foods, so we use clear packs. In essence, we lean in on where and what we need to know versus what is nice to know. Companies that do this well will have competitive advantage over others in their industry and will have greater speed to market.&nbsp;</p>  <p>The fear of failure impedes innovation because it is always easier on an existing business to know what lever to pull versus leaning in on a completely new initiative. Innovation is fundamentally contrary to human nature in that it requires willingness to change, willingness to fail, and a willingness to accept the unknown. Add to those challenges the natural inclination to form attachments to one's own projects. Innovators have to be able to kill initiatives, be agile, and shift when necessary. Failure is not failure if you learn from it. But if you fail and don't know why, then that is a concern.&nbsp;</p> <p>Another impediment to innovation is cross-functional collaboration. Innovation needs to be a top priority cross-functionally, but cross-functional teams often have multiple projects and initiatives across different business units, so ensuring that all of the leaders across those business units are working together towards similar goals with similar priorities can be a major challenge.&nbsp;</p>  <p>In recent years we have seen a dramatic increase in innovation-centric roles. This is due to the recognition that companies need dedicated resources, both people and financial, and dedicated leadership to accomplish innovation. In the past, innovation was a part of someone's job, and it is really hard to manage a base business with short-term goals and also try to deliver longer-term innovation goals. Also, not every person who manages a base business is also the right person to do innovation. So it wasn't that innovation didn't exist before, but the shift is in the discovery that it is essential to have those dedicated roles for innovation. The growth in the importance of designated roles has also led to higher visibility of those roles and as such we are seeing higher involvement from the C-Suite - which helps innovation to become better integrated in the overall company structure. Now, there are dedicated resources - both people and financial - dedicated roles, dedicated cross-functional teams, and a designated executive leader.</p> <p>At Johnsonville Sausage, we have found that the fundamental requirement is giving employees the freedom to fail. We've talked about the fact that fear of failure impedes progress. With the plethora of information out there, it is easy to iterate something to death in order to decrease risk, but not only can that iterative process dilute down what was once a great idea, we've also seen that in a rapidly-changing environment, those iterative processes can impede agility and speed to market, thereby contributing to a loss of competitive advantage. We've found that our organization itself and the people within it need to be comfortable with a rapid pace of change, and a lot of change, and as innovation leaders we have to be the champions of that change.&nbsp;</p>  <p>The pace and rate of change in our industry is dramatic. Three of the companies I worked for in the past 10 years no longer exist. The churn rate is phenomenal. The average lifespan of an S&amp;P 500 company used to be 61 years; now it is 16 to 18 years. Fortunately, Johnsonville is already over 70 years old, and more relevant to consumers than ever.</p> <p>I like the comment by Peter Senge, from &ldquo;The Fifth Discipline,&rdquo; which may help account for the success we&rsquo;ve had: &ldquo;The ability to learn faster than your competition may be the only sustainable competitive advantage than you can ever achieve.&rdquo; CPG companies who are able to shift and respond to the rapidly changing environment, use relevant consumer insights without getting bogged down in process, and get to market quickly will succeed.&nbsp; The ones that don't have a very good chance of being replaced by more agile competitors.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Well, as a commuter in Chicago, I can tell you that one innovation I particularly like is Passport Mobile Pay. Its revealing for me that, on top of a $3 parking fee, consumers are also willing to pay at extra 50 cents &ldquo;convenience fee,&rdquo; to pay their parking from their device, and not have to bother locating the parking pay station. And as a beer drinker, I like Yeti colster. I&rsquo;m always on the lookout for something to keep beverages cold, and I bought a Yeti colster, and it is phenomenal. Again, it tells you something that consumers like me are willing to spend $35 to keep their drink cold &ndash; that&rsquo;s amazing. I&rsquo;m also a fan of what Hello Products are doing in the oral care space &ndash; breaking category molds with design and consumer-centric thinking.</p>  Andria Long View Edit Delete
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
41  <p>Look at almost any plastic soda bottle, and you will find that it stands on five ribs that are integral to the walls. The invention of the &ldquo;petaloid base&rdquo; in the 1970s offers crucial insight into an innovation process that is highly relevant to business today, and to the growing movement away from functional roles and toward value creation. Because pressurized plastic expands like a balloon under pressure, bottles at the time were two-piece products that stood on a rigid cup &ndash; and efforts to create a one-piece bottle had cost tens of millions, without success.</p> <p>Gautam Mahajan&mdash;the co-inventor of the petaloid base, then head of research and engineering at Continental Can&mdash; told BPI that his team solved the problem by reframing it in this way: where does the bottle <em>want</em> to go when under pressure, and using the concept of entropy, where everyone including the bottle resists being forced into an ordered state? It had been assumed in the industry that the bottle would need an incremental innovation, and that the machines that make them would require an expensive disruptive innovation&mdash;since they would have to create far more pressure to force out those five bulges. Mahajan proved the opposite: the disruptive petaloid solution changed the entire industry, while the machines needed only affordable shock-absorbing improvements, and timing changes.</p> <p>Now a leading author and thought leader, Mahajan moves executives and academics globally to his belief that the purpose of companies is not to generate profit, but to create value&mdash;where profit and competitiveness are by-products. &ldquo;We all know the purpose of attending college is education, not grades. Grades are a measure of how well you have studied,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Why then do business leaders still insist that the purpose of a business is profits? Indeed, why do we study for a Masters of Business Administration when it should be a Masters in Value Creation? Everything is process-driven at present, but we want the mind-set to be changed.&rdquo;</p> <p>Mahajan&rsquo;s new book, &ldquo;Value Creation: The Definitive Guide for Business Leaders&rdquo;, was introduced this month by the Director of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, and received high praise at a recent business literary festival. Gautam is setting up Value Creation Forums around the world and catalyzing colleges to conduct research on Value Creation. He believes values create value, and that efforts beyond formal job descriptions&mdash;efforts as small as a smile&mdash; generate brand equity for both the employee and the company.</p> <p>Mahajan is now the Founding Editor of the Journal of Creating Value, which enables academic research become more responsive and relevant to business practitioners, while promoting value creation as the new &ldquo;true north&rdquo; compass heading for executives. This approach echoes recent findings at Harvard Business School, in which Michael W. Toffel noted that, &ldquo;The lack of practical relevance of much of our research might suggest that few of us also have the ambition to improve the decisions of the managers and policymakers whose actions we study.&rdquo; The business leader who Harvard quoted on the issue&mdash;Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council&mdash;also noted that, &ldquo;There is often a disconnect between practitioners and academics, who tend to be far removed from operational complexities and market dynamics&rdquo;.</p> <p>&ldquo;I see myself as a generalist, as someone who has created and who thinks differently, who doesn&rsquo;t get stuck with the run of the mill thinking,&rdquo; says Mahajan. Previously, he was President of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, which is the only bilateral chamber between the US and India, and includes 14 offices between the two countries. He is also President of Inter-Link India and Customer Value Foundation and went on to become a leading consultant to top Indian companies, as well as the author of three seminal books on value. Mahajan told BPI that his consistent advice to innovators is to ban any concerns about cost when at the early, explorative end of the innovation process. Conversely, he also advises executives to free themselves from the fear of making incremental increases on the prices of their products, since customers will pay for value.</p> <p>Mahajan poses a fundamental thought challenge to companies innovating in areas like customer experience and &ldquo;customer journey&rdquo;&mdash;where customers are provided ever-better experiences when returning defecting products. &ldquo;They forget that customers do not want that journey in the first place,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Why not rather innovate toward zero complaints, and zero product returns?&rdquo;</p>  <p>Value Creation is a distinctive mind-set. It is a mentality driven by enhanced self-esteem, awareness, and pro-activeness. It goes beyond just doing your job, it is doing something extra. Value Creation is executing proactive, imaginative, or inspired actions that increase the net worth of products, services, or an entire business. This creates better gains or value for customers, stakeholders, and shareholders. Value Creation stimulates executives and business leaders to generate improved value for customers, driving success for the organization; it creates customer-conscious companies.</p> <p>Value Creation Forums have been started in the US, Europe and Asia, along with Value Creation research. Programs are underway to modify MBA teaching to become less functional and more value creation oriented. The role of an executive is not just to be a good manager, administrator, or a good efficiency expert; his or her role is to create value. Ahead of my most recent book, I realized that value is completely misunderstood. Everyone has a meaning for it&mdash;some think value means price, benefits, or importance&mdash; you can think of it in any way. In business jargon, value is creating financial benefits, and for people around you, which will eventually create greater financial benefit for you. You cannot set out and say you&rsquo;re going to create value for yourself; you have to create value for others, such that they recognize you are a person of greater value.</p> <p>You hear words like CRM, customer satisfaction, customer experience, customer journey, customer this and that, yet all are only one part of what the customer is looking for. When you start investing heavily in things like customer experience and customer journey, you are essentially saying that they are very important&mdash;and they are&mdash;but you forget the context of their importance.</p> <p>Once I have bought a cellphone, what is the experience I really want? I want it to work; I don&rsquo;t want to waste a lot of time on maintenance. The moment I have to go back to the company&mdash;and that&rsquo;s the experience companies are investing on improving but not the experience I as a customer want in the first place&mdash;I am making an extra journey. I just want to be left alone. Companies tend to glorify a journey that customers don&rsquo;t want in the first place instead of making sure I do not have a problem. The real thing they should be working on is how to prevent that journey. Companies should be innovating toward zero complaints, toward zero defects.</p> <p>It is easier to give examples of value destruction because they are so obvious. Value creation in a very simplistic sense is everything that goes beyond your job. You could be an accountant who does efficient work, you can&rsquo;t fault his numbers, but the guy comes up to you and says, you know the tax laws are going to change and maybe we should do something with our investments and our accounting practice so we get an advantage. He&rsquo;s done something extra. Everyone whose career progresses is creating value, but often he does not know that because he is doing it unconsciously. If you were conscious about it, you might create a little more value, and might destroy a little less.</p> <p>Stephen Vargo is on the board of our journal, and he coined the phrase, &lsquo;service-dominant logic&rsquo;. Before that, there were other concepts, but he said no, it is not about products. Everyone is serving everyone and the product is just part of the service. This year, there might be thousands of papers written on service dominant logic, talking about value co-creation, but few people seem to know what value co-creation is. Many see it as some kind of a vague thing that is nice to think about.</p> <p>We first started a journal that addresses both academics and practitioners: that&rsquo;s a difficult mix because academics like to write in journals, and practitioners generally don&rsquo;t like to write. They like to read. What we want is for academics to write in the way that business people can really understand, that is relevant. Then we encourage the practitioners to use this. On the other hand, we want practitioners to write about things that make academics pay notice. So if I write about zero complaints, they may wish to do research and find the best way to get to zero complaints. The second thing we have done is start Value Creation Forums around the world, and we have leaders in their fields come together and discuss value creation.</p> <p>We set up one in the Benelux with academics and practitioners, and many universities in the Netherlands came together and discussed three things: one, how can you create value for the student in the present courses. The second was to look at courses like HR and IT and see if you can just add one lecture on value creation for those courses. The third was to have a general management elective which is based on value creation. If you look at HR, it is probably one of the most important functions in the company since people--employees, partners and customers&mdash; are really important. The question I always ask is, &lsquo;Why don&rsquo;t HR guys become CEOs? Why are they called a staff function?&rsquo; That is because they do their functional work; they really do not do their value creation work. Once they start to do it, they begin to create immense value for the company.</p> <p>We have asked a college in India to look at values and value&mdash;what you stand for, such as ethics, morals, and integrity). The idea is that if you are a college that talks about values, do your students who become teachers do better than teachers for whom values were never inculcated? There is a professor at Wharton that does customer lifetime value; we want to work together so that he can correlate customer value-added with customer lifetime value.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Let&rsquo;s look at small things that prevent people from being innovators. One is self-esteem. If you do not believe in yourself, you cannot create value. Two, you really have to become aware; if you don&rsquo;t notice things around you, it becomes difficult to innovate. Most people who truly create value do not need a financial incentive to innovate; they are natural innovators because they have awareness and believe in themselves. Fear of failure comes in when you are concerned only about keeping your job.</p> <p>Another thing I find really slows down innovation is bringing the financial thought process onto the innovation table. You sit at the table, and someone comes up with an idea, and the guy next to him says, &lsquo;That can never work because it is going to be too expensive.&rsquo; You then discard it because you have forgotten that things become cheaper and cheaper. So, my advice to innovators is to forget the cost part of it and say, &lsquo;What is the best way of doing this?&rsquo; Then ask how to make it practical from a cost point of view. Too many good ideas just go away because some joker says it will hurt cash flow or will be too expensive.</p> <p>I am not sure that disruptive innovation is the only way to go. A few years ago, I went with students in an innovation course and suggested they work with the long distance taxi service to prevent one way hiring, and ensure the taxi guy got a return ride. It would save costs for the passenger and increase profits for the taxi person. This was like a pre-Uber move, but no one looked at it. Would this be called disruptive or an add on? Today, Uber would call it disruptive.</p> <p>With the development of the petaloid bottle base, we had machines that were taking a pounding, because the pressures required to blow the petaloid bottle were much higher than the simpler bottle. The design group came up with a way that would cost $75,000 per machine&mdash;in the late 70&rsquo;s&mdash;and we had about 45 machines. They were redoing the machine. That&rsquo;s disruptive. I said that is the wrong approach. We ended up doing everything at a cost of only about $8,000. We studied the machine and asked, &lsquo;What is the machine actually doing?&rsquo; Why not just reduce the shock impact on the machines with cheap shock absorbers, and proper timing and then they will stop braking?</p>  <p>I suppose we could have called value creation, value innovation. To me, creation is a little more basic, more intrinsic. Innovation is something that takes something and goes to the next step. The goal is to take something that exists and try modify it a little. If the core of an MBA course should completely change, from one of teaching people to be good managers or efficient administrators, to becoming value creators that could be disruptive.</p> <p>Because many of the functional courses would start to disappear, and people would really start to learn how to create real value in HRD&mdash;instead of measuring whether the guy comes to work on time, or try to measure his performance&mdash; you are really doing something that increases the value to customers and society. Many functions could get outsourced into administration departments, and true HR Value Creation would remain in HR. If your brand equity increases, the brand equity of the company increases. People notice when value is created. In the Netherlands, we are currently doing a program with Microsoft with finance managers. Oracle is going to do something in this area on the West coast in the US.</p>  <p>I think it is about mind-set. One is business schools moving toward value creation, and away from doing functional teaching. Instead of a masters of business administration, you have a masters of value creation, or value management. A second thing is that companies start to drive their businesses from the point of view of long term value creation. One example was the CEO of Unilever, Paul Polman, who was able to convince his board that they should look at long term results&mdash;one to five years&mdash;rather than quarterly. What they got was a higher rate of growth overall, and fewer perturbations in share prices.</p> <p>One of the things I fear is the impact of automation. Too many of the younger generation are so smart at using tools that they forget the fundamentals. Data analytics is a great tool as long as you understand what lies behind. It is great if you analyze and measure the customer journey to a fine science, except you might miss the fact that customers might not want that journey, and you are actually making the journey more important. The focus goes away from zero complaints. Everything is process driven; we want the mind-set to be changed. We emphasize the better mind-set through our value creation councils.</p> <p>In India, the Tata companies are moving from business excellence to value creation thought processes. Unilever is doing good thinking. When they decided not to buy palm oil from a group of growers in Malaysia and Thailand because of the ecological impact, the fear was that prices would go up and customers would not buy. However, customers continued to buy because they favored sustainability. We found at Tata Power that values create value.&nbsp;</p>  <p>This morning, I got a call from a wrong number, and I then received six calls from the same number. I thought: how do I block this guy? I would pay for an app that allowed me to do that! All jokes aside, the real disruptive thing will be when we start to build things the way the human body is built. Today, the structures we build are external, and our body is internal.</p> <p>There is complex innovation and complicated innovation. With complex, we are talking about moving targets. In a complicated one, we know it is only a matter of putting all the known pieces together, like a jigsaw puzzle. A complicated problem might be building a big building, but all the steps are known. On the other hand, if you are trying to make a building that is a living building&mdash;perhaps a self-healing building&mdash;that is complex. Again, if you look at great innovations, you&rsquo;ll tend to find a value creation mindset behind them.</p>  Gautam Mahajan View Edit Delete
31  <p class="highlight">As the Director of Innovation at Vodafone Global Enterprise, Shannon Lucas focuses on empowering global Fortune 500 businesses to stay agile, competitive and sustainable.</p> <p class="highlight">One of the world&rsquo;s largest telecoms companies, Vodafone has mobile operations in 26 countries; partners with networks in a further 55; and provides fixed broadband operations in 17 markets. As of June 2015, Vodafone had 449 million mobile customers.</p> <p class="highlight">Lucas is passionate about developing ecosystems which trigger collaborative innovation between multiple stakeholders, and has presented her game-changing vision at TedX.</p> <p class="highlight">Armed with the unique leadership and team lessons of having served as a mountain rescue volunteer, the Bay Area disruptor developed her career with cutting edge technology experience at companies like Microsoft and T-Mobile.</p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">At Vodafone, she&nbsp;</span><span class="s2">is part of the core team that focuses on a global&nbsp;</span><span class="s1">program to generate innovative solutions by turning enterprise customers into collaborative partners.</span></p> Within the enterprise, Lucas has not only supported dynamic intrapreneurship and a broad culture of change, but has invited employees to take on the role of customers in a program which has generated transformative ideation and engagement models.  <p>The Vodafone Innovation team is fortunate to be positioned at the intersection of the world&rsquo;s leading total telecommunications company, innovation and relationships with the largest global enterprises. Mobility is the heartbeat of today&rsquo;s innovation. While not every innovation is built on mobile, mobility is transforming the way the world operates. This gives us the freedom to embark on an innovation journey with our customers.</p> <p>We run approximately 100 customer innovation workshops each year and take the radical approach of having an open conversation without an agenda and ask big questions starting with, &ldquo;What if?&rdquo; We are confident that no matter what emerges, we can help our enterprise customers on their innovation journeys. This approach shifts the relationship from customer-vendor to collaborative partners. The conversation is focused on business transformation, not technology. Of course, we look at ways that technology is supporting an ever-changing world. But first we collaboratively develop the vision of, &ldquo;Where do you want to be in 3 years?&rdquo; At the end of the workshop, we collectively ideate solutions, refine and prioritize and then execute with a lean, agile approach. The innovation program is our think-and-do tank.</p> <p>Increasingly we see disruptive ideas or solutions emerge from our workshops that cannot be tackled alone. In response to this growing need for co-creation we launched the Enterprise Studio. It&rsquo;s both a physical space in Silicon Valley and a global methodology. We pull from a variety of innovation frameworks like design thinking, lean, agile, etc., but as each project is wildly unique, we have to be willing to adapt our approach. The Studio is not an &ldquo;app-factory.&rdquo; We tackle problems such as user-based, real-time car insurance in the UK, to financing for smallholder farmers in Africa, to holistic analytics platforms to manage supply chains.</p> <p>We have a lot of experience to draw from having run so many workshops in the last few years. At the same time, we recognize this is an iterative process and we are always looking to learn from our own experiences as well as thought leaders from across the global innovation community.</p>  <p>One of the biggest challenges to driving innovation into large enterprises is the size and complexity of these organizations. The size and scale of large corporations can enable truly transformative solutions. They have access to human and financial resources, a global footprint, and infrastructure that allows for scale. However, the complexity of navigating stakeholders, competing project priorities and finding the appropriate subject matter experts can slow down innovation. Within Vodafone Global Enterprise we are fostering a culture that embraces lean and agile concepts to help navigate the accelerating speed of change that businesses are facing today.</p>  <p>Two years ago we started running Innovation Bootcamps in Vodafone offices globally. We replicate and condense a customer innovation workshop and invite Vodafone employees to take on the role of the customer. We bring to life concepts like design thinking, divergence/convergence and personas.&nbsp; We have our employees ideate as if they were a customer. The experiential learning fosters a deeper understanding of the value of innovation as a tool for internal business transformation and as a differentiated engagement model with our customers. We have also started running workshops to generate new solutions or tackle business challenges internally.</p> <p>We don&rsquo;t want people to just take our word about the impact of the Vodafone innovation program. We share data regarding opportunities created, new executive customer relationships established and highlight examples of how the program has demonstrated positive impact with our customers.</p> <p>Optimization is a constant journey. The innovation team is by definition always finding ways to improve. &nbsp;We pause at the end of the year to reflect on what has worked well, where we need to improve, where we see innovation as a practice heading, and then create a plan for how to improve for the following year.</p> <p>This year we have a strong focus on scaling the program. The success of the workshops and co-creation engagements has generated a large number of opportunities that require a strong global bench of Innovation Champions (Vodafone employees) to help execute. We have created tiered certification programs for both the champions and the sales teams. We believe that the training opportunities we are creating for the Champions provide excellent personal and professional development. We know that a simple &ldquo;Thank you&rdquo; can go a long way, so we have also created a rewards and recognition program to highlight the efforts of these employees.</p>  <p>The ubiquity of connectivity cannot be overstated. As you look at the number of people joining the connected world in emerging markets as well as the number of connected things, the question becomes, &ldquo;Why do you want to connect with someone or something?&rdquo; not how.</p> <p>In our world of enterprise innovation, co-creation can be game changing. Organizations that successfully tackle big challenges will simultaneously create tremendous value for their company and for society. It&rsquo;s our view that this takes a new type of business relationship, where new partnership models evolve based on open innovation and co-creation to build disruptive solutions.</p> <p>Co-creation uses two companies&rsquo; current capabilities as a foundation, while building a new solution on top, creating something disruptive that could not have been easily accomplished by one company on their own. Co-creation also allows the team to tap into the collective wisdom of both organizations, de-risks the project and strengthens the relationship between the two companies. We are seeing demand for this type of engagement and are excited about the possibilities that can emerge.</p>  <p>There is no magic formula for innovation. It&rsquo;s a combination of openness (to new approaches, opinions, mindsets, partners), perfectionism (how do we make this better still?), collaboration (together is easier than alone), and hard work (good innovation takes practice!). Our program has embraced iteration as a key philosophy and we are always looking for ways to improve.</p> We have the found biggest determinant to our enterprise innovation program is employee empowerment. By providing a way for top employees to channel their passion, we create a win-win for the organization. The innovation program can have large impact with a very small core team, because we foster a global community of innovators who contribute their skills to the program. Those folks, in turn, get to participate in meaningful and exciting work while developing their professional skills and increasing their visibility within Vodafone. Because their voices are heard and their ideas acted upon, they are more likely to speak up and suggest ways to improve or help our customers. Not only that, but also they become key participants in building those solutions. They are the evangelists for new ways of thinking and doing business, which is what enables the innovation program to accelerate success. It&rsquo;s a virtuous circle of enterprise innovation.  Shannon Lucas View Edit Delete
65  A distinguished engineer and technology leader, Paul McEnroe has played a central role in the development of a variety of industry-changing technologies. Most notably, he and a team he formed in 1969 while at IBM created the Universal Product Code (UPC), also known as the barcode, along with related products, that transformed the retail and grocery industry. McEnroe recently published his book, &ldquo;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Barcode-Created-Worlds-Ubiquitous-Technologies/dp/B0CBTW2WM5">The Barcode: How a Team Created One of the World's Most Ubiquitous Technologies</a>.&rdquo;  <p>We started the bar code initiative because the CEO of IBM at the time, Frank Cary, wanted to expand the company beyond mainframe computers. At first, Frank wanted to find the best companies in Silicon Valley and buy them. But it was decided that no, if you buy small startup companies, the most important people would quit because they don&rsquo;t want IBM culture. They don't want blue suits and white shirts and red ties and black wing tips, and all that garbage. Frank&rsquo;s response was to try to find somebody within IBM and to get them to act like and treat them like they&rsquo;re a startup. Luckily, they knocked on my door. We were able to decide what business we would go after. We wanted something that was going to generate data and decided to go after point of sale. We saw that at the point of sale, particularly for supermarkets but also major retailers, there was a big need for item identification, automatic inventory control and automatic checkout.</p> <p>The barcode had a tremendous impact on operational efficiency and business intelligence. For big retailers like Macy&rsquo;s, it had a major influence on their purchase orders and their ability to see what sold quickly and what was effective. It really helped them with reordering and stocking their stores much more effectively and efficiently. For supermarkets it was a little different. Item prices were constantly changing, and there was a tremendous expense at price marking and remarking. But with the bar code, it could go back into the controller in the back room and look up the price. In addition, the scanner could read omnidirectionally so it wasn&rsquo;t necessary to orient the item to read it. Clerks could pull items across the scanner very quickly, which sped up checkout dramatically. You could also run tests on where to position products to improve sales.</p>  <p>I would say the impediments we faced were in two major categories: technical and sociopolitical. The success of the barcode was not entirely due to the quality of the code, but its incorporation into an entire system. To build the scanner we had to use a new, bright light source, and that was the laser which had just been made available. Then there was a communication system. We had to send a lot of data from the check stand to the back room. Some stores in Europe had as many as 40 scanners at the front of the store. Each one was sending a signal back. They had to be high speed signals all going into a box at the back of the store, which had a disc file that recorded everything. We had to change not only the communication technology into what later became a local area network, but we had to change the magnetic recording. We were the first ones to use the Winchester file technology that IBM had perfected. We had to make this system fail proof because if it failed, a store would have to shut down. Because of this, we had to duplex the controller, adding another layer of technology. So we had leverage duplex controllers, new magnetics, new communications, new scanners, in addition to the code, in order to build the system.</p> <p>The second impediment was the sociopolitical part. We were set to open one of the first stores in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. The engineer I sent to supervise called to tell me the store couldn&rsquo;t open. It wasn&rsquo;t because of a system failure. There were union picket lines blocking the entry to the store. They were afraid they were going to lose checkout clerk positions. But what turned out to be a more serious problem was the concern of legislators and government administrators who were concerned that the price coming off the item would be bad for the consumer. Eighteen states passed laws against the scanner or passed laws that made it more difficult. I traveled around the country to meet with state legislators and explained the advantages of scanning and the fact that the price would be marked on the shelf. Supermarkets were usually paying about $10 to anybody who got a mis-scan. But our code was very effective and had very few errors.</p>  <p>It was quite different than it is today. Today, pick up a newspaper or go on the Internet, and innovation and entrepreneurship is discussed widely. That wasn't so much the case in the late fifties and early sixties, and even the seventies. Innovation came primarily from the engineering organizations. IBM was divided up between sales, marketing, services, and so on. Development was managed by engineers. In the early part of that period we had something like 15 laboratories increasing to 20 or so worldwide later down the road. The laboratory average size may have been a thousand engineers and other support people. The bigger laboratories were many times larger than that and they were managed by engineers, and engineers were thinking about new products. We hired the best people we could. So they were pretty forward thinking people, and they were very innovative.</p> <p>Frank Kerry, the CEO, decided we needed to get into some new business. And after he decided to build from within, he realized you couldn't be innovative and have a whole bunch of rules. Some of those rules said things like you have build everything within IBM. But we realized that wasn&rsquo;t possible. A decade later, when IBM did the PC, the only PC part that was made in IBM was the keyboard. I wouldn&rsquo;t say there was a top-down commitment to innovation so much a commitment to excellence. IBM wanted to do the right thing. The right thing for society. The right thing for shareholders. The right thing for employees. Leadership hired top quality people, and those people did the innovation. Of course, it's a little different today.</p>  <p>I think that the most interesting technology right now is AI. I was involved with it a little bit back at IBM. We built some machines that kind of used that technique. I think of it in a simplistic fashion as guessing. With a computer nowadays, you can guess a million answers possible to something, and then test them in a fraction of a second. Then you put that together in a more complex way, and you're writing essays, and it looks like you're John Steinbeck.</p> <p>There are things in the bar code that are going forward that I think are going to change even more. We have QR code, which is a 2 dimensional code, whereas our barcode is one dimensional. And that's an opportunity for more complex applications. I think it's growth will be bigger than the barcodes. But I don't think the barcode will go away. The companies that use it, make themselves more efficient. I think the bar code is going be around for decades. But things like the QR code, RFID and other applications are going to develop markets that require larger data in each transaction or each item.</p> <p>It's always hard to predict what's going to happen. But certainly the Internet has given us a new way of learning, and you can get answers to lots of questions that were hard to find 50 years ago. We just need to develop our minds in such a way that we can stay open and keep looking to the future.</p>  <p>There are a lot of high level people thinking about that question today. And they're coming up with better answers, and schools and universities are working on that, too.&nbsp; And then we have the Internet to support these efforts. You can go on the Internet and get answers so fast, whereas before, the answer was stuck deep in a library. I think that all of the conversations taking place about how to go about this are very good. They help lead people in the right direction. I don't know which of those directions is exactly right, but I think it&rsquo;s very encouraging that we have so many successful people thinking about it and young people just coming along who are using their minds in open ways.</p> <p>If you want to get into innovation and be successful, look at the world from the point of view of what people need. Then have a level of expertise in a certain set of fields. I&rsquo;m looking at a flashlight on my desk. If you're in a company that's building lights, you need to think about everything from what are the materials that go into the product that you need to make? What do people need? How do they use lights? And then start thinking about different things and make proposals.</p> <p>Be sure that as you develop your capability to sell your ideas and to go meet with people and discuss these things and get them out into the open. I went to engineering school, but one of the things I did that was very important was being on the debate team at my university. Later, when I had to go to IBM managers to get money for my ideas, not unlike going to venture capitalists today, the skill to sell my ideas was really important.</p>  Paul McEnroe View Edit Delete
39  <p>Alex Blanter is a partner and leader of A.T. Kearney's innovation practice. Armed with over 20 years&rsquo; experience in driving high-tech business growth in Silicon Valley and beyond, Blanter is a global thought leader on new technology deployment for enterprise-scale businesses, and on novel solutions for complex problems.</p>  <p>This technological and business model transformation we are living through actually requires companies to innovate differently. The set of innovation practices companies could rely on to stay in the game &ndash; even recently &ndash; are no longer sufficient. In the past, and even the most recent past, the main philosophy was that innovation is a science &ndash; that you can go through a number of predictable steps: create new ideas; decide which ones to invest in; have an efficient development engine that gets those ideas to market; and manage your portfolio in the marketplace.</p> <p>What&rsquo;s happening now is that the level of disruption is such &ndash; and the level of fluidity is such &ndash; that this is no longer enough: you now need to plug into the ecosystem of these new technologies, and monitor your broader role in the marketplace. I explain it to companies this way, especially for larger enterprises: you need to play the long game fast.</p> <p>As we know, the capabilities deployed from new technologies allow you to do amazing things. But out of those 50 amazing things you can do, we assess which of those will actually deliver the most value within your timeframe, and what you need to do within that timeframe to take maximum advantage. Some of these technologies, and corresponding opportunities, are mature enough that you actually need to jump on the bandwagon and start developing a product right away, or start implementing a feature. Some technologies (and business models) are farther out, and therefore you shouldn&rsquo;t do that &ndash; but you do need to engage with the ecosystem and monitor the development of those technologies so you are in the flow, and are not left behind.</p> <p>Whether you look at IoT, or AI, or Big Data, or any one of those fundamental tech shifts &ndash; and even the business model shifts &ndash; we see that they are affecting the majority of the industries in a way those industries are not used to. Companies are either seeing real benefits or are suffering.</p> <p>Take IoT, for example. If you think about being able to source granular data in real time, process it and effect change back in the physical environment, you can think about all kinds of examples of solutions. Look at LA, where drivers lose millions of hours a year just looking for a parking space.</p> <p>If I can instrument my parking garages so that they can show the absence and presence of cars in specific parking spaces, and if I can couple it with positioning sensors in the cars so I can understand where they are going, I can actually create predictive models where I can direct drivers to the places which <em>most likely</em> have open spaces at the time of their arrival. I can even predict when a space will likely <em>become</em> available, or at least predict turnover on average stays. I&rsquo;ll know that 15 cars are leaving every 5 minutes. If I install sensors in various places in this whole use case &ndash; then think of it as a use case with multiple players &ndash; parking garage; traffic controls; individual drivers. I can actually collect and connect that information to optimize the whole use case and deliver value to multiple players at the same time.</p> <p>At a strategic level, we&rsquo;re helping companies figure out how technologies like IoT present a potential for disruption: in some cases, fairly minor, which can be dealt with in the normal course of business, but in other cases, the disruption will be fundamental. And the challenge is not just that they will be fundamental, the challenge is that they will sneak up on you. These start as an interesting curiosity, but before you know it, you are behind the curve.</p> <p>Industries with significant capital assets like oil &amp; gas are not going to be displaced by the next Internet company, but they can be materially affected from a competitiveness point of view. If some competitors start instrumenting their assets and increasing their asset utilizations &ndash; e.g., predictive maintenance based on predicted wear &ndash; that will be a competitive game changer that will demand a response.</p> <p>Let me give you another example. Let&rsquo;s say you have a logistics company with warehouses, which you might think is not a very cutting edge business. You will find that as simple a thing as a garage door can be the focus point for a significant opportunity. Residential garage doors in the U.S. have some level of automation at around 80%, but only about 30% of commercial doors are instrumented in any way. By 'simply' installing automation and the sensors on the garage door, you can significantly reduce energy consumption, because you&rsquo;re otherwise losing all that heat or AC to the environment &ndash; and who thinks about keeping the door closed? There is nobody in charge of closing the door within 10 seconds of a truck coming in. Then you go a step beyond that &ndash; with algorithms that allow me optimize goods and truck flow through those doors, and that creates additional opportunities from the same technological solution.</p> <p>At A.T. Kearney, when it comes to innovation and disruption our differentiators are three-fold.</p> <p>First, we have a very deep understanding and knowledge of the industries in which we operate. So, for a project we did recently for an insurance company, we brought our financial services group and our high-tech group together, both to the pitch and the project.</p> <p>Also, because many of us here are engineers or technologists by training, we come into all of that with a very pragmatic lens. Its very easy to get completely absorbed into the hype: &ldquo;Okay, robots and Big Data are taking over the world; AI is the next best thing since sliced bread; IoT is nirvana.&ldquo; And to present big messages and great forecasts.&nbsp; But where it becomes valuable for our clients is our ability to actually translate that into what it means for their business, now and in the medium and long term, and how they need to respond to it in very pragmatic terms. Very few companies have unlimited money &ndash; therefore, while you can have the best strategy, you still need to be able to make the right choices.</p> <p>A third differentiator is that we are truly a single global partnership; there is no friction in bringing together our capabilities in the Silicon Valley and in Korea or Germany. Many of our competitors are regionally or even locally structured, so they have a more difficult time in bringing a global perspective to bear. What we can help companies in a very collaborative, open way, is to really drive to a better set of choices that will allow them to do what they need to be successful in this ever-changing landscape.</p> <p>Beyond the right choices, companies are faced with the need to incubate things that have a much longer gestation period. If you are an automotive insurance company, for instance, instrumenting all the cars in order to take all their information will change your business model, from a statistical, actuarial model to an individual use model. But you&rsquo;re not going to instrument old cars en masse, only new cars, and you&rsquo;ll need to achieve fleet thresholds &nbsp;&ndash; so its a 5 or 7-year horizon. Look at what&rsquo;s happening at Intel &ndash; the pre-eminent chip company is laying off 12,000 people, and its because they were not fast enough; not agile within the ecosystem when it came to mobile. With the new technologies, that agility will be even more important.</p> <p>I have looked at how innovation has evolved, going way back. In the Middle Ages innovation was mostly considered magic, and the winner became a tribal chief and the loser possibly was burned at the stake. In later centuries it was then driven as art, and it evolved to a more or less a science by the end of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. We are in transition right now, and it is now fundamentally culture driven &ndash; a culture that requires rapid experimentation and constant involvement in the ecosystem.</p> <p>Even the recent past, when you were innovative, your prize was your position of dominance in the market.&nbsp; What you have now as a prize is simply an opportunity to innovate again; that&rsquo;s all you actually get. Just science isn&rsquo;t enough; you actually have to change the DNA of the company to innovate differently.</p> <p>Different industries will move at different speeds. The number of technologies that are now available for a broader set of industries and how those technologies interplay with each other is fundamentally changing the business environment.</p> <p>Before, you had communications and computing at certain speeds, and sensors at a certain cost &ndash; when you put them together, each of those things was useful, but they were not reinforcing each other. Now they are all at the level of cost/performance where you can put them together in a way that creates completely novel outcomes. They are no longer additive; they are multiplicative.</p>  <p><em>In a major presentation to executives in Silicon Valley last year, entitled &ldquo;Rethinking the 'How' of enterprise innovation,&rdquo; Blanter listed some key obstacles to innovation within large organizations, including:</em></p> <ul> <li><em>Stable &ndash; and somewhat frozen &ndash; business models;</em></li> <li><em>A complex regulatory environment, and resulting risk aversion;</em></li> <li><em>Culture of large organizations &ndash; with its premium on current performance and business stability;</em></li> <li><em>Legacy infrastructure &ndash; and significant costs to re--platform.</em></li> </ul> <p><em>He added: &ldquo;Addressing these challenges one-by-one is a losing proposition. A change in DNA is required.&rdquo;</em></p> <p>Blanter told BPI:</p> <p>&ldquo;The incumbency curse is real. And old innovation methods will deliver old innovation results." Organizational inertia is a real challenge; every large enterprise is struggling with the notion of delivering value today, with adapting and adjusting to delivering value tomorrow. And the metrics are built for the very short term.</p> <p>Playing the long game fast. The majority of innovations, when they are just starting out, are not material enough to a big company to matter. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges to innovation is to figure out how to stay the course with these small but very new projects, while at the same time executing on the business plan for revenue. You simply don&rsquo;t know which of the twenty small projects are going to be the next great thing.</p> <p>Look at Amazon &ndash; one reason they are so successful is that, for many years, they told a story to the street that they were not expecting to be profitable in near future. That allowed them to plough money back into the business &ndash; like echo device or cloud services. Most regular companies would never have had the foresight to do that.</p> How many companies are actually able pull off not just the story, but the execution? It comes down to DNA of the company.  <p>Culture isn&rsquo;t an objective; it's a means to something bigger &ndash; growth or profitability or competitive advantage. We don&rsquo;t want to destroy value &ndash; there are countless examples of new CEOs turning companies upside down just for the sake of change, and destroying value.</p> <p>But many large enterprises are clearly not evolving fast enough, with average tenure of companies in the S&amp;P500 dropping by 80%. So we look at the culture through the lens of the journey the company has taken; where the CEO and the executive team wants to take the firm, and what things need to change, and for what purpose.</p> <p>To measure innovation the right way, you are actually introducing a level of discomfort into the organization, because that&rsquo;s a mechanism to change culture. You can&rsquo;t just delegate innovation to people in the corner, you actually need to change the culture &ndash; and that is probably the most difficult thing to do; certainly, more difficult than changing strategy. You want to amplify the right messages and behaviors, and to create barriers for the wrong ones. One interesting metric for innovation is revenue from new products. But what is a new product? &ndash; that&rsquo;s actually not a trivial determination.</p> <p>Removing organizational barriers and silos, and all the normal problems enterprises grow up to have &ndash; difficulty in collaborating across regions; difficulties in taking risk; difficulty in connecting engineering with manufacturing; difficulty in driving revenue from new products; it is all a challenge for changing culture.</p> <p>On metrics: We worked with a semiconductor equipment company, whose main business is equipment, but they also have a significant services and spares businesses. We found that the innovation measure for their equipment business needed to be very different from their innovation measure for their services business.</p> <p>Conversations with our clients start at the business problem level &ndash; some of those are actually big enough to require culture change.&nbsp; Within Kearney itself, we try very hard to practice what we preach in terms of an innovative culture. We have put in place mechanisms for collecting ideas; we have a global innovator competition, where winners get real resources to implement those ideas. We look across our client portfolio, and look at which project was most innovative, and what lessons can be learned from that.</p> <p>But we found that the infectious impetus of personal passion can also drive culture change. We do a lot of work in the digital space, but we started with a number of partners and staff who were simply passionate about innovations in that space, personally, and that had its own momentum.&nbsp;</p>  <p>The transition we are in is being triggered by a collection of new technologies, not a single one. But, okay, take 3-D printing.&nbsp; Some people believe that this will disrupt manufacturing overall in the near term. Yes, it will materially impact how manufacturing is done, and, yes, it will allow people to make things locally, versus globally. But I don&rsquo;t think it will change manufacturing in the near term; the installed base is just too great.</p> <p>That said, I would argue that the impact of 3-D printing will be much greater on design: it will allow design engineers to design parts that could not be made now, and especially in designing simpler, more reliable products with fewer parts. Its value is disruptive in nature in the short term, rather than a huge monetary impact. Cars are not going to be 3-D printed in 3 or 5 years, but the design of cars will start changing because of it.</p> <p>Big data and analytics will bring a level of insight that was never possible before, for a broad range of industries, and in ways those companies can start taking advantage of it in more explicit ways. I think the number and variety if business models companies will be able to deploy will increase significantly. Insurance is a good example &ndash; when companies start to charge on actual use, rather than on statistical models, that&rsquo;s a very different business model, leading to a very different relationship with the customer.</p> <p>If I look at large industrial equipment: at the moment I make it, I sell it; you pay me to use it. What if, now, I can instrument that equipment to better manage it, so that I can guarantee things to you that I could not guarantee before?</p> <p>The Nest Thermostat started as a replacement for individual consumers to regulate their private heating and cooling. Yet it is emerging as a remarkable tool for power utilities &ndash; because it has information from individual homes, the company can go to the power utility and say: &ldquo;in this part of the grid, by making very minor automatic adjustment to the temperature, we can reduce your peak load requirements, so you don&rsquo;t have to bring additional power plants online, or build them.&rdquo;</p> <p>Business models based on a combination of integrated technologies &ndash; that&rsquo;s the game of the future. Its not jumping on the bandwagon of a single technology, partly because none will deploy fast enough, especially in the industrial space. A lot of companies underestimate this potential.</p>  <p>The whole proliferation of sharing business models, enabled by technology, is something no one saw coming at this level.&nbsp; You have a set of underutilized assets &ndash; like homes or cars &ndash; and what is fundamental about this is that a set of technologies and business models increase utilization of physical assets, and that is profound. Because if you can do it with cars and homes, you can do it with anything.</p> <p>The whole notion of AI is exciting, in terms of the convergence of technologies. Look at what Kaiser is doing in Healthcare; they are at at forefront making patient records not only electronic, but minable.</p> <p>With a good enough data structure, you can start to look at prevention, not just&nbsp; treatment. A patient was recently diagnosed in an emergency room by referring to data from the person&rsquo;s FitBit.</p> <p>Novel ways to use technologies; that&rsquo;s what is exciting for me.</p>  Alex Blanter View Edit Delete
68  <p>Tanya&nbsp;Accone&rsquo;s&nbsp;career has focused on helping international public and private sector organizations understand how to amplify their impact through the convergence of&nbsp;people, technology and&nbsp;innovation.&nbsp;She is committed to applying innovation for social impact and as a public good, especially with and for young people.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>  <p>Life-saving innovation for children has always been part of UNICEF&rsquo;s DNA. We&rsquo;ve been changing the game in the international development and humanitarian sectors by innovating at scale for decades, introducing solutions like oral rehydration salts in 1975, considered one of the most significant lifesaving innovations of the 20th century, saving hundreds of millions of children's lives.</p> <p>Since 2015, UNICEF explicitly pursued innovation within a corporate strategy. We established the sector&rsquo;s first Global Innovation Centre, launched the first Venture Fund, and introduced the first Crypto Fund. This has enabled us to push boundaries with frontier technologies such as AI, blockchain, drones, and machine learning, and develop a track record of effectively applying innovation for problem solving at scale.</p> <p>Building beyond this foundation, the Innovation Nodes work I lead focuses on possibility-led innovation to unlock the potential of previously unknown areas of innovation for children in underserved communities. Through a process of systematic discovery and initial knowledge-based derisking, Nodes allow us to investigate "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns" in fields like precision health, next generation renewable energy, and biotechnology, as well as practices like emerging business models in social innovation. This transdisciplinary approach allows us to engage and equally inspire others to act along the new frontiers that can contribute to transformative change for children worldwide.</p>  <p>Every resource is precious in the development and humanitarian sectors, so it is more important than ever that innovation demonstrably delivers value to our core business. Measuring what truly matters and communicating impact effectively are therefore also more vital than ever.</p> <p>Urgent and immediate needs take priority and the challenges facing children tend to overwhelm the available resources. It&rsquo;s not surprising that time poverty Is another challenge, and its implications on an operating environment that can nurture testing, learning and iteration. Innovation and the time to engage in are fundamental parts of core work where the concrete results are evident.</p> These factors place pressure on time horizons for innovation to evolve and mature, and especially to deliver at scale. &ldquo;At scale&rdquo; has truly global meaning for an organization like UNICEF, which works in more than 160 countries and territories. Ground-breaking innovations will struggle to emerge or deliver profound social impact for children if we&rsquo;re unsuccessful in addressing these impediments  <p>Innovation is an explicit part of UNICEF's organizational strategy, competency framework and accountability and governance structures. It is also an implicit part of organizational culture -- not being the preserve of the few, but the business of all, with relevance and value across every function and level of the organisation.</p> <p>Opportunities to innovate to deliver results are integrated in so many aspects -- from orientation and professional development opportunities, to incentivized innovation challenges for intrapreneurs, and structured programmes to support business units in integrating innovation into their strategies and plans</p> <p>We also recognize that our innovation culture drives not only our organisational success but also influences broader global ecosystems of which we are a part.</p>  <p>Our Innovation Nodes work is entirely future-focused, looking at a 3-10 year time horizon. There are a number of possibility spaces that we are excited about, but the two I&rsquo;m might be surprising if you were expecting me be typical and choose among emerging technologies.</p> <p>One is unlocking greater value from existing innovation investments than is currently being realized by reducing the gap in science-policy-society interfaces. This is about unlocking new markets, novel applications and use cases. Currently, researchers may not fully grasp the potential applications of their technologies in unfamiliar contexts. Policymakers may lack access to expertise on emerging technologies and be less effective in their policies, incentives and regulation. Development practitioners may struggle to explore unknown domains of emerging science and connect these to the challenges and contexts they know well. Young people may not be meaningfully engaged in exploring the implications of science, technology and innovation on their lives. We&rsquo;re working on closing these gaps.</p> <p>The other aspect is new and emerging business models for innovation for sustainable development. We are particularly interested in financially sustainable models that can continuously deliver social impact without depending on extended charitable funding. Understanding and applying these models to create and capture value so that that transformative impact for children can be sustained would be significant in our industry.</p>  <p>The terms interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary are frequently used, but it is transdisciplinary approaches that evidence shows are particularly well-suited to addressing complexity and complex sustainability challenges. No matter what industry you&rsquo;re in, the world is increasingly complex and so this is a particularly useful strategic approach.</p> <p>By &ldquo;transdisciplinary,&rdquo; we mean taking a purposeful approach to drive sustainability by working across different fields, collaborating, integrating, and jointly creating knowledge in a diverse and multi-directional way. Not without its challenges, a transdisciplinary approach helps with the sweet spot of investigating how emerging technologies can meet future challenges effectively while considering the unique and changing variables of different communities, markets and contexts.</p>  Tanya Accone 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
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
67  <p>Antony (Tony) White is Executive Chairman, enChoice. He has extensive experience in launching, developing, and managing technology-based start-up companies. He was instrumental in founding both of the predecessor companies to enChoice, namely ICI Solutions, Inc. and en technologies corporation. Tony is a pioneer in the ECM industry, having been active in the segment since 1989. His prior career included 15 years with IBM, where he advanced to a senior position before leaving to launch a start-up.</p> <p>Hidden in plain sight as unstructured content, a treasure trove of information lies in corporate repositories just waiting to be unleashed. If AI can discover, search and interrogate this content, then it will be able to deliver key business insights &mdash; and, ultimately, a powerful competitive advantage.</p> <p>But companies still need convincing.</p> <p>&ldquo;Every organization has a natural resistance to change, especially when it comes to investing in something that&rsquo;s not yet proven,&rdquo; says Tony White, executive chairman at enChoice. &ldquo;But today, you need to be technically innovative to be competitive.&rdquo;</p>  <p>It&rsquo;s a great question, because it really goes to perhaps the most important aspect. I just have one word to address that question: belief. You have to find something that you buy into, believe in, and then make. So what does that belief comprise? It&rsquo;s a belief that must be acceptable for the business, in terms of market innovation and acceptance, and something that your people can really buy into.</p> <p>In our case &mdash; we&rsquo;re a 30-year-old organization &mdash; our strong belief was that there was just too much paper in the world. The key to the future was to digitize paper and employ it in business processes. While we weren&rsquo;t the first to believe in that, we were one of the very early companies that commercialized this area in the mid-market. It was a critical component of how we started.</p> <p>Although it took an awfully long time, this belief turned out to be very accurate in that it developed into unstructured content. All the various kinds of content in an email, e-business, social media videos comprise unstructured content, which is 80% to 90% of all the key information in any organization. In those days we just called it imaging, which was converting paper documents to electronic content.</p> <p>With AI emerging, unstructured content emerged as a key resource for AI. We sort of got into a sweet spot.&nbsp;So that's how I believe we validated&nbsp; our belief and culture.</p>  <p>We have to convince our customers to believe that unstructured content is definitely a component for AI and business processes, which changes the way organizations do business. It&rsquo;s easy to establish the principle, but the the how has to be convincing.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s impossible for any organization to have the skill sets across all the components needed to make any company technologically self-sufficient. This is a real challenge for our customers but also where enChoice can provide the solution..</p> <p>One of the things that every organization faces is a natural resistance to change. No one likes it when something new comes out. Yet we&rsquo;re asking people to completely uproot traditional ways of doing business and invest in something new that, in their eyes, is not proven.</p> <p>To me the biggest impediment is, how do you convince people to spend a lot of money &mdash; to do it properly doesn't come cheaply &mdash; and make that change. It&rsquo;s a challenge because there have been past failures of key technology projects and often someone gets fired. Everybody wants to hang on to their job.</p> <p>But you still need to innovate if you want the benefit.</p>  <p>Innovation has always been part of our life, part of our culture, because we&rsquo;re in a rapidly developing industry. Our people want to be on the forefront and constantly bring us new ideas, especially the new generation who are extremely digitally aware.</p> <p>In our case, we got into the right area but it was very painful for a long time. Very slow adoption. Then recognition emerged that digital automation is a necessity for the future of every organization to be competitive.</p> <p>Imagine a cake where AI is the frosting on top. Your cake is your massive, unstructured content. It is not easy to manage and leverage it. So there&rsquo;s a huge pool of unrealized resource &mdash; unstructured content &mdash; that we've been fortunate enough to get into. We still have the problem of convincing organizationsthat the risk can be managed and the payoff is huge.</p> <p>Now we can honestly say it's key. Our expertise in unstructured content fuels the AI journey, and we hang our hat on it.</p>  <p>We deal with large companies that know AI is critical to be competitive but don&rsquo;t know what to do about it. We have the capability to get the unstructured data needed for AI, and big companies partner with us because of&nbsp;this.</p> <p>Anybody can use Chat GPT to write an essay, but how do you apply AI to your business? It&rsquo;s a much more complex question. The reality is there's a lot of work and a lot of preparation and understanding needed.</p> <p>But process innovation, like I said earlier, runs into resistance to change. Companies cancel projects because they can&rsquo;t get users to accept the new technology and new way of working. Successful projects happen when top management buys in and insists on the change. While this may be a little painful, it almost always pays off in the long run with improved competitiveness and efficiency, higher profitability and employee morale.</p> <p>One of the ways companies can ease cultural change is to tie the new technology, new way of doing things, new innovation to something that benefits society or, if you like, the planet.</p> <p>For instance, we&rsquo;re involved in helping threatened species. We provide technical support for a project called SPARK, or Sentinel Protection Against Rhino Killing, aimed at keeping rhinos from extinction. The project leverages the Internet of Things and AI. It&rsquo;s a good, positive thing. Our employees love it, and our customers love seeing us doing something outside of selling.</p>  <p>Strategy is changing the cost benefit equation. How do you show what is worth doing? That's the challenge for all of us. The good news is that the current availability of tools and technologies, from the cloud, containerization and subscription pricing, has changed the equation for so many companies and projects. Everything is more feasible and effective, and so we can do things that we couldn&rsquo;t do before.</p> <p>We know technology has made things more efficient. Just take a look at workflow in insurance. Paper documents used to float around, and it would take two weeks to process a claim. With digitized content, it takes only two days. Now we have pictures showing how many filing cabinets we&rsquo;ve saved just among our current customers. You couldn&rsquo;t fit them in a room.</p> <p>We still scan paper documents and manually enter them in the right place, but now we can start using AI to pull a lot of the information off a document.</p> <p>These are the things that take away the drudgery, drive innovation, and help you become more competitive in a challenging marketplace. It&rsquo;s absolutely worth doing. Now you have to take the leap and do it.</p>  Tony White View Edit Delete
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
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

Page 1 of 3, showing 20 records out of 58 total, starting on record 1, ending on 20

< previous123

Actions

(default) 22 queries took 1 ms
NrQueryErrorAffectedNum. rowsTook (ms)
1SELECT `Menu`.`id`, `Menu`.`slug`, `Menu`.`referrer`, `Menu`.`url`, `Menu`.`report_id`, `Menu`.`other`, `Menu`.`created`, `Menu`.`modified` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`tracking_routes` AS `Menu` WHERE 1 = 115150
2SELECT `Article`.`id`, `Article`.`date`, `Article`.`title`, `Article`.`author`, `Article`.`publisher`, `Article`.`description`, `Article`.`url`, `Article`.`program_only`, `Article`.`innovator_news`, `Article`.`created`, `Article`.`modified`, `Article`.`modifier` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`articles` AS `Article` WHERE `Article`.`program_only` = '0' ORDER BY `Article`.`date` DESC LIMIT 8880
3SELECT `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`, `ArticlesProgram`.`id`, `ArticlesProgram`.`program_id`, `ArticlesProgram`.`article_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`programs` AS `Program` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`articles_programs` AS `ArticlesProgram` ON (`ArticlesProgram`.`article_id` IN (1365, 1361, 1359, 1360, 1358, 1363, 1354, 1355) AND `ArticlesProgram`.`program_id` = `Program`.`id`) 440
4SELECT `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`, `ArticlesLeader`.`id`, `ArticlesLeader`.`article_id`, `ArticlesLeader`.`leader_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`leaders` AS `Leader` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`articles_leaders` AS `ArticlesLeader` ON (`ArticlesLeader`.`article_id` IN (1365, 1361, 1359, 1360, 1358, 1363, 1354, 1355) AND `ArticlesLeader`.`leader_id` = `Leader`.`id`) 000
5SELECT `Tag`.`id`, `Tag`.`tag`, `Tag`.`created`, `Tag`.`modified`, `ArticlesTag`.`id`, `ArticlesTag`.`article_id`, `ArticlesTag`.`tag_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`tags` AS `Tag` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`articles_tags` AS `ArticlesTag` ON (`ArticlesTag`.`article_id` IN (1365, 1361, 1359, 1360, 1358, 1363, 1354, 1355) AND `ArticlesTag`.`tag_id` = `Tag`.`id`) 000
6SELECT `Article`.`id`, `Article`.`date`, `Article`.`title`, `Article`.`author`, `Article`.`publisher`, `Article`.`description`, `Article`.`url`, `Article`.`program_only`, `Article`.`innovator_news`, `Article`.`created`, `Article`.`modified`, `Article`.`modifier` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`articles` AS `Article` WHERE `Article`.`innovator_news` = '1' AND `Article`.`program_only` = '0' ORDER BY `Article`.`date` DESC LIMIT 4440
7SELECT `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`, `ArticlesProgram`.`id`, `ArticlesProgram`.`program_id`, `ArticlesProgram`.`article_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`programs` AS `Program` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`articles_programs` AS `ArticlesProgram` ON (`ArticlesProgram`.`article_id` IN (1247, 1245, 1244, 1217) AND `ArticlesProgram`.`program_id` = `Program`.`id`) 000
8SELECT `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`, `ArticlesLeader`.`id`, `ArticlesLeader`.`article_id`, `ArticlesLeader`.`leader_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`leaders` AS `Leader` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`articles_leaders` AS `ArticlesLeader` ON (`ArticlesLeader`.`article_id` IN (1247, 1245, 1244, 1217) AND `ArticlesLeader`.`leader_id` = `Leader`.`id`) 000
9SELECT `Tag`.`id`, `Tag`.`tag`, `Tag`.`created`, `Tag`.`modified`, `ArticlesTag`.`id`, `ArticlesTag`.`article_id`, `ArticlesTag`.`tag_id` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`tags` AS `Tag` JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`articles_tags` AS `ArticlesTag` ON (`ArticlesTag`.`article_id` IN (1247, 1245, 1244, 1217) AND `ArticlesTag`.`tag_id` = `Tag`.`id`) 000
10SELECT `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` = 1 ORDER BY `Event`.`date_start` DESC LIMIT 3330
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_5` desc LIMIT 2020201
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