Innovator Profiles

Id Summary Bio Answer 1 Answer 2 Answer 3 Answer 4 Answer 5 Leader Actions
13  <p>Dr. Thomas J. Buckholtz, Ph.D., has served in many executive roles including Chief Information Officer for both corporate and governmental organizations. He has made key contributions to the business, technology, and governmental innovations. &nbsp;He has served as an advisor to many key startups, and works as a University Extension Professor guiding workshops on innovation.</p>  <p>Let people pursue their natural curiosity and good intensions.&nbsp; Nudge a person's curiosity, intensions, and pursuit toward outcomes that benefit the organization, its customers and other external constituencies, as well as the person's colleagues and self.&nbsp; Help people overcome shyness about trying to make a difference.</p>  <p>One impediment is a lack of broad-based, impactful thinking and action - both by individuals and at a societal level. This extends to&nbsp;enterprises, governments, suppliers of learning, and other components of society.&nbsp; People miss or misjudge key issues, opportunities, and problems.&nbsp; People overly focus on "yes or no?" regarding one possibility rather than on "to what extent?" regarding several possibilities.&nbsp; Problems outweigh opportunities.&nbsp; Busyness trumps business.</p>  <p>Organizations have opportunities to use various practices that people correlate with the word "innovation."&nbsp; I hope organizations look for, adopt, and adapt suitable innovation practices.&nbsp; I hope organizations avoid inappropriately immature or ossifying practices.</p>  <p>Positive change may occur based on people first focusing on useful opportunities, objectives, and endeavors and second involving appropriate thinking and useful resources - beyond and including technology.&nbsp; Some pivotal technology may correlate with helping people think more effectively. &nbsp;Others may correlate with people's choices of what to measure, how to measure, and what to do based on measurements. &nbsp;Still others may correlate with people's abilities to determine the extent to which people (and systems) rely on supposed information.</p>  <p>People who have "free time" and use it wisely.&nbsp; Organizations that foster creativity and the converting of creativity into innovation.&nbsp; Organizations that have adequately broad views of innovation and aspects of business, governance, and society for which innovation can be beneficial.&nbsp; Organizations that help people avoid undue busyness.&nbsp; Organizations that build society, customers, business practices, partners, suppliers, and relationships - along with lines of products and services. &nbsp;Organizations that reuse and teach - not just use - beneficial practices, processes, knowledge, and data.</p>  Thomas Buckholtz View Edit Delete
<p>Pieter de Villiers is responsible for establishing Clickatell as the world&rsquo;s leading mobile messaging provider, enabling tens of thousands of enterprises and millions of consumers to interact, communicate and benefit greatly via their mobile phone. De Villiers has led the organization through a decade of robust growth and innovation by providing high value, application-to-person (A2P) SMS services to banks and other financial services providers, governments, social communities, and a myriad of mobile developers in several additional vertical markets.</p>  <p>Building an organization or culture that embraces change is no easy task since both are a reflection of its people and most people do not like change -- we are, after all, &lsquo;creatures of habit&rsquo;. However, I&rsquo;ve found if the change or innovation is focused on efforts that improve, enhance, or simplify things you are already doing, it is generally accepted by smart organizations. You can then get those same smart people to innovate in areas outside of what you do today as long as you provide a clear &ldquo;Vision&rdquo; and &ldquo;Why&rdquo; to your people.</p>  <p>Not having a clear &ldquo;Why&rdquo; or &ldquo;Vision&rdquo; for the business that translates into relevance is a large impediment to enterprise innovation today. It is important for a company to know who and what it is and what is brings to the industry (example Kodak: Thinking of themselves as a paper or camera company instead of a company people associate with their most precious memories).</p> <p>Not having the courage to manage stakeholder expectations as you invest for change is another innovation impediment. Executive teams are measured on how well they meet quarterly earnings expectations, so it is understandable that many would prefer to just &ldquo;deliver the numbers&rdquo; than take risks. However, this does not produce an environment conducive to change and innovation. It is better to manage expectations and know that as your technology or company changes, the measurement and expectations need to change too.&nbsp;</p> <p>Organizational agility and management ability to &ldquo;re-tool&rdquo; for change is a must have. Managing people is difficult enough, adding in the complexity of &ldquo;re-tooling&rdquo; the organization with training and hiring creates an additional burden to an already complex role as a manager. A manager without the skills to handle these issues impedes effective change and innovation.</p>  <p>At Clickatell, we are thinking a lot about our &ldquo;Why&rdquo; and our relevance in order to update our thinking and match it with our customer&rsquo;s perspective. We have also allocated funding to new initiatives and products even though they only contribute to the bottom line in the &ldquo;out years.&rdquo; We have embraced new methodologies (agile/scrum) and tools/platforms as we design new solutions and optimize existing offers (Hadoop, Amazon- Cloud, etc.).</p>  <p>Two years is a short time frame, so it will have to be those technologies that have some level of &ldquo;mainstream&rdquo; acceptance already. This would include mobile technologies with their super-size reach, Cloud Computing which improves speed to market and reduces start-up costs and lastly Big Data &amp; Analytics which allows us to better understand our customer behavior and monetize in new ways.</p>  <p>People (typically product folks) that are very close to customers, engage them often and understand how they are using the product embody the innovation mindset. These are the same individuals who measure results frequently and are willing and/or able to iterate and invest in expanding/improving the organizations value proposition. I don&rsquo;t feel there is a specific company to name because for me, there is no singular company that gets this right all the time.</p>  Pieter de Villiers View Edit Delete
24  <p>Mark is the Head of Innovation at News Corp Australia&nbsp;and a former executive at AOL and Yahoo. Drasutis is&nbsp;an established business leader and digital expert with 20 years of media and digital product experience. He is focused on defining and delivering digital leadership and innovative and creative user-centric solutions within market leading, global digital businesses.&nbsp;Delighting all customers of digital products is a passion Drasutis brings to his teams and organizations. He has continually driven the creative vision and customer focus of his teams. He has implemented innovative and strategic thinking, as well as thought leadership, internally and externally, within all his roles and evolved customer perceptions of the businesses.&nbsp;<br /><br /><br /></p>  <p>News Corp is actually where the customers are, and that&rsquo;s the change. Its about innovating around the proposition that content is about &ldquo;and,&rdquo; not &ldquo;or.&rdquo; In the past, customers either bought a newspaper or consumed content on mobile, or on PC, or Tele, or listened to it on the radio. Now, they are consuming content in newspapers and on Twitter, YouTube, in their cars, and on Spotify, so if you take the &ldquo;and&rdquo; model, it becomes about curating great, relevant content and delivering it where and how the customer needs it.</p> <p>With declines of 15% circulation in Australia and 20% revenues on the newspaper side &ndash; you need to innovate yourself out of that bottle, but you need to innovate in the right way. We&rsquo;ve embraced the reality that newspaper companies are never again going to own content and distribution and packaging. In fact, we don't see ourselves as a newspaper company; we are a content company.</p> <p>Habits for consuming content have changed, and we can shape those habits. Do people buy newspapers for breaking news? No they don&rsquo;t: because news is broken on Twitter and Facebook and then on other platforms. Content habits have changed. But job of producing great content hasn&rsquo;t changed. We are recombining content in new ways for customers. We are now producing multi-dimensional long-form story telling in digital; creating a rich immersive experience in video, audio, graphics, everything. The Captivate platform in Australia allows us to build those.</p> <p>For example, we produced a story around Cinderella Man: the amazing journey of an Australian man to becoming the country&rsquo;s first heavyweight boxing champion. We&rsquo;ve just done a great piece of footage for surfers for an angle of a surf break which you would never have seen before, using drone footage, and two surfers: one a leftie, one a rightie. So how do we get to surfers? We promote it on Facebook, we promote it on Twitter, we made a 15 second video for Instagram, and then we moved it to content for tablet.</p> <p>The Wall Street Journal is doing the same thing, with amazing footage from the Oracle boat for the America&rsquo;s Cup. When we have these great stories involving multiple assets, we &lsquo;re able to quickly build rich story telling elements now that we didn&rsquo;t think we could do three years ago. So it&rsquo;s a case of: We&rsquo;re capable - lets do more of that.</p> <p>The reporters who do these pieces, like Trent Dalton, now know when they start looking at the yarn, they need a videographer, a photographer; he needs to understand how to work with a developer and designer to tell the story best via the digital channel. And that&rsquo;s just one space.</p> <p>On the other extreme, we just launched in Australia &ndash; news.com.au and Foxsports - on Snapchat&rsquo;s new Discover platform. Once again, here&rsquo;s another area where we&rsquo;re atomizing our content and saying we&rsquo;re going to create an edition every day which is relevant to a Snapchat customer, which is more a teen, kind of funny, laugh-out-loud type of experience.</p>  <p>FEAR of not knowing. If I don&rsquo;t know about it as a senior executive, I&rsquo;m not sure I want to unleash my team on something I don&rsquo;t understand. So, for instance, we built a digest App for <em>The Australian</em> and gave it to one of the lead editors to play with over Christmas. All it involved was his content recombined into an App, but now he understands what the power of that can be.</p> <p>Another challenge for innovation is fear of quarterly targets. The trick is to make innovation real in people&rsquo;s minds. Without that, people think that they wouldn&rsquo;t know how to execute the ideas they had; they don't have the confidence to ask for forgiveness, rather than permission. The key is to allow people to fail safe, and to lead with an approach where you show, not tell. Stop having meetings about meetings and show it to someone. They rightly say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and that a prototype is worth a hundred meetings.</p> <p>Its not technology that&rsquo;s the disruptor, it&rsquo;s talented employees thinking like entrepreneurs that is. This business had forgotten a little bit that it had an entrepreneurial spirit at his heart. Rupert Murdoch is one of the best entrepreneurs in the world: his three drivers are opportunism, innovation and intuition. As a staff member, you should be working on those three things. Go and do it. You still have to do the business casing &ndash; you can&rsquo;t work outside those processes. You still have to get new projects singed off by the finance departments and agreed by the board. So in essence, ideas are not a problem; timing and execution is the problem.</p>  <p>News Corp has had a couple of innovation efforts previously, but they were largely external, and my title didn&rsquo;t exist two years ago, which says something in itself. Certainly, there was recognition that the most expensive seven words in our business were &ldquo;But that&rsquo;s how we&rsquo;ve always done it.&rdquo; Though I wasn&rsquo;t here at the time, I&rsquo;d guess I might rate our innovation culture in 2005 at about 3 out of 10; now its perhaps around 6 out of 10, with our digital offerings, and now that people know they can do these things, and are less afraid of things not looking the same.</p> <p>When I joined, I remember someone commenting: &ldquo;Great &ndash; someone with all the answers.&rdquo; I countered with: &ldquo;You&rsquo;re already got the answers, and you&rsquo;ve got the employees &ndash; we just need to create innovation as part of their job and something they&rsquo;re not scared of.&rdquo; The words disruption and innovation kind of counter each other. I realized that news didn&rsquo;t have a clear definition of what innovation meant, and that&rsquo;s really key. For us, that definition is: &lsquo;Recombining content, people and processes in new ways for growth.&rsquo;</p> <p>That idea then resonated across the business &ndash; that it&rsquo;s not about drones or virtual reality or futuristic hardware. And changing the perception of News Corp in Australia was one of the key pieces &ndash; as a content company, not a newspaper company. We&rsquo;ve got an ideation platform we put in, which allows you to pop in and say &ldquo;that&rsquo;s a good idea&rdquo; or &ldquo;that&rsquo;s been done&rsquo;&rsquo; or &ldquo;actually that&rsquo;s something I&rsquo;m working on; lets work together.&rdquo; I&rsquo;m all for open innovation, most of our ideas we&rsquo;ve gotten are from outside the office. We sponsor a co-creation space for startups, called Fishburners &ndash; that&rsquo;s important; it opens peoples&rsquo; eyes to what entrepreneurs are doing.</p> <p>We are not afraid to experiment with different models &ndash; and we have a system where you can fail safe with experiments. We have an internal system called News Foundry &ndash; an internal fail-safe environment that allows people to come up with new ways of doing things. They come out with loads of ideas; one of them drives the kind of content on our Snapchat channel, for example. I&rsquo;m a big advocate for quiet change, which is that you show, don't tell; you take people on a journey; you plant seeds within the business.</p>  <p>Anticipation of content is something I think will become important&nbsp; &ndash; data signals will be there to anticipate a certain time of day you want a certain type of content &ndash; based on your location; based on your behavior; everything. Content about things you care about should come to you like a tap on the shoulder.</p> <p>I think there is an interesting move back to truth in the content space&nbsp; - where many customers don&rsquo;t want an oversimplification of news. People have a thirst for more knowledge than the snack they can see. Snacking news is relevant; as Twitter&rsquo;s 140 characters show, but consumers are already responding to the in depth background content we are providing, with lots of links.</p> <p>The disruption will be that people will be able to access as much content as they want quickly, but that they probably want a little more detail around the five areas they care about the most, and that&rsquo;s where media companies come into play. I never try to predict technology trends, but I look at connected cars, and I think there is something there for media; a space where we can play.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Paul Whittaker, editor of the Daily Telegraph in Australia, and his team are supportive of an app that gameifies news for commuters on buses here in Sydney. It allows you to play a game against others around beacon technology: it matches headlines to the pictures, which means you have to read the headlines &ndash; so you consume the news via a game. That&rsquo;s quite interesting as a model. I&rsquo;m not saying that&rsquo;s the future of news, but its interesting. I feel the same with Snapchat. They are both great ways of providing content to the consumer.</p>  Mark Drasutis View Edit Delete
12  <p>Wendy Mayer is Vice President of Worldwide Innovation for Pfizer, responsible for driving ideas and fresh thinking across the organization through the identification of transformative and disruptive innovation platforms, and through the development of capabilities and a culture that will support continued innovation.</p>  <p>You have to have that enthusiasm and drive from the kind of grassroots level of the organization, but then they have to be supported and feel as if they have the ability to take action on those ideas from above. And so it's the combination of those two that really enables, I think, productive activity across an organization.</p>  <p>I think a big one that people very often talk about is the fear of failure. The best innovations have really iterated and require actually a lot of failure and learning from that failure in order to deliver successful innovation. And so, if people feel as if there is no tolerance for failure, or that that is a mark on their reputation or on their career path, that will kill innovation right in its tracks.</p> <p>The other thing I think is the funding aspect. If funding is only available for projects that have a demonstrated ROI, then that will also kill the ideas. If you're comparing new ideas to established proven tactics or strategies, the innovation and the new idea is going to lose every time. So depending on what sort of metrics or bar you're holding up as a success measure, that could very often, if you don't have the right one, be a barrier to innovation.</p>  <p>I think [CIO] titles vary across organizations. To me, the point is that there is an element of getting out from under the business and influencing strategy, even organization, at a senior level. And so, there's been a lot written about the importance of having [the] innovation function reporting high into the organization. I think you also need to be strategic around where you innovate. Organizations need to be thinking at a high level strategy standpoint, as to what's the innovation ambition. Do I think you need to be a chief innovation officer? No, not necessarily. Obviously that's not my title, but I think it's more to the point that it needs to be a high level role, and one that can influence and be comfortable amongst senior leaders within an organization.</p>  <p>[Big data] changes the game in a few ways. Internally as an organization, it presents a lot of information you have accessible to you, as well as new channels and new opportunities and ways in which you could use that data. So, it can become fodder for innovative ideas. The second thing is just the evolution of computing power and technology, and accessibility to data. This is the democratization of innovation where beyond the walls of expert organizations, this information is available, and people have the ability to use it to develop new products, to come up with insights and offer that up to some of the more traditional organizations.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Our CEO has been very active in the program that we're working on now, and has been extremely vocal in sharing across many forums across the organization to tell people: this is a priority capability for our organization, and this is going to be required for our future success.&nbsp;</p>  Wendy Mayer View Edit Delete
23  <p>Les C. Meyer is a results-driven serial entrepreneur, global executive leader and MBA with extensive experience in mindful innovation and self-actualization. He has demonstrated creativity in transforming health and performance improvement through innovation leadership. He has worked with many organizations to help them achieve an optimal healthy workplace and workforce and achieve functional wellbeing outcomes via science-based mindfulness, resilience, vitality and sustainability next practices. He has also implemented game changer approaches to the creation of health care delivery, innovative health policies, advanced primary care systems, planned care coordination and proactive community health assurance initiatives. He has integrated meaningful enabling technologies and consumer-centric, integrative health services for a wide variety of worldwide stakeholders.</p>  <p>We guide clients toward viewing their organization, in all facets, with a mindful innovation (MI) approach. MI is a tuned in, creative-thinking leadership engagement process &mdash; coupled with a five-step systematic approach including assessment, culture, strategy, implementation and measurement &mdash; empowering CEOs to improve the health of the enterprise and its workforce, reduce costs, improve productivity and ultimately, profitability in a global economy.</p> <p>My idea of &ldquo;hard-wired MI&rdquo; emerged in mid-2009 as I watched CEOs working feverishly on getting their arms around their &ldquo;Big Idea.&rdquo;&nbsp; And then, watching them formulate strategic plans to transform their companies by advancing their breakthrough brainchild as a &ldquo;constructive, disruptive innovation.&rdquo; Over and over these leaders were relying on outdated &ldquo;thriving on chaos&rdquo; playbooks not recognizing the competitive imperfections in the marketplace.&nbsp;</p> <p>The MI approach prompts quick-response adaptation when CEOs drive the process top down and encourage their people to embrace &ldquo;imagining&rdquo; from the bottom up &mdash; with all stakeholders striving for the competitive advantage that lies in the health of their people.&nbsp;</p> <p>MI is moment-to-moment, surround-sound awareness of organization health achievement in action. It generates CEO imagination, ingenuity and creative execution in the boardroom. Most importantly, MI upholds the principles of disruptive innovation guru, Clayton Christensen, who introduced the criteria by which a product or service rooted in simple applications relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.</p> <p>MI is imagining what the future could look like, identifying mega-opportunities and building game-changing ways of delivering business value to all stakeholders. We do this by focusing our attention on next generation hard-wiring MI capabilities, technologies and learning system collective impact community collaboratives that provide MI solutions to the health industry in the short and long-term.</p>  <p>Health care costs are unsustainably high and health outcomes are suboptimal. To curb these trends, movement toward value-based care must be put into action.</p> <p>Colleagues at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies: Roundtable on Population Health Improvement, Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO) Employer-Community Collaboration Committee recently noted two major impediments:</p> <p>1. Health care improvement underperformance, inefficiency and exorbitant costs continue in the U.S. health care system. Although biomedical knowledge, innovations in therapies and surgical procedures, and management of chronic conditions have substantially advanced, American health care has failed to significantly improve in many areas. They include modern medicine&rsquo;s complexity, the high cost of care and limited investment value to achieve the best care at lower cost. <br /> <br /> 2. Despite spending almost one-fifth of the economy&rsquo;s output on health care, the quality and safety of care remains uneven. Patient harm remains too common, care is frequently uncoordinated and fragmented, care quality varies significantly across the country and overall health outcomes are not commensurate with the extraordinary level of investment.<br /> <br /> Data is available to make the right decisions to transition into performance improvement incentives, patient-empowered self-care methods and consumer-centric optimal healing environments innovations.</p>  <p>Our focus is on game-changing ideas from independent leaders who create meaningful distinctions in the market and suggest an insightful exchange of information for sound decision making. Our cutting edge methods and innovations performance improvement process tackles the tough organization health challenges impacting enterprise-wide growth, profitability and customer experience optimization to help drive improving value on investment in health care through ground-breaking collective impact methods and sustainable MI leadership engagement innovations.</p> <p>Health innovation strategy is critical to an organization&rsquo;s success. It trumps everything else. MI is not a genomic-DNA capability we&rsquo;re born with per se but rather a hard-wiring self-actualization, performance improvement process, which helps CEOs reclaim their creative confidence.&nbsp; The innate ability for leaders to vision breakthrough ideas is strengthened through systems that encourage innovative prowess to move progressively from idea to collective-impact upsurge.</p> <p>MI has moved from a largely obscure practice to a mainstream organizational idea in some leading organizations around the world. Mindful innovators like Mark T. Bertolini, Chairman and CEO, Aetna are accelerating the awareness of &ldquo;mindfulness use&rdquo; in the board room and &ldquo;self-actualization creative execution&rdquo; in the C-Suite including workforce team member front line alignment to create an upsurge in economic development worldwide.</p> <p>Mindful &ldquo;organization health&rdquo; is defined as the ability of an organization to identify, engage, establish, elevate, achieve and renew itself faster than the competition to sustain stellar business performance. This <strong>MI </strong>strategy is among the most powerful an enterprise can execute to create value-based, optimal customer experiences and sustain the power of long-term, brand-equity.&nbsp;</p> <p>Aligning organization health leadership creative confidence and self-actualization is leadership at its best. Remarkable leaders conduct business in a new way &mdash; one that imagines a healthy workforce productive advantage, maximizes human potential and tethers the organization to a common set of principles. The task of highly effective leaders is to design high-impact business goals to attain organization health.</p> <p>Thriving organization health business models embed mindful collective impact stakeholder collaboration connections. This is done via a community-based, learning health care system and optimal healing environments that enable a user-friendly connectivity interface. What&rsquo;s important is that this interface is consistently reliable and seamlessly improves key components. They include population health promotion capabilities and functional wellbeing systems in which science, informatics, incentives and culture are aligned for continuous improvement and innovation. The approach must be aligned with best practices that are seamlessly embedded in the care process, as well as patients and new knowledge captured as an integral byproduct of the care experience to achieve the best care at lower cost.</p> <p>Our MI attitude to think the unthinkable&nbsp;with board chairs &mdash; and making the invisible visible with CEOs &mdash; continues to drives business success and provide a pathway to achieve competitive advantage and optimize commitments to accelerate organization health action plans and workforce health achievement.</p>  <p>MI is the final frontier to transforming health and performance improvement innovation leadership, achieving optimal healthy workplace realization and making healing as important as curing to sustain company-wide profits and competitive advantage while helping their organization&rsquo;s workforce evolve, achieve and thrive. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;</p> <p>The &ldquo;Masters of MI&rdquo; realize that creativity is essential to success and something you practice throughout the MI creative confidence, hard-wiring self-actualization achievement process. Bottom-line: Hard-wiring MI activates a cracking-the-code mindset for CEOs and their ability to stay ahead of the innovation curve and sustain company-wide profits and competitive advantage. &nbsp;</p> <p>We are working on other meaningful distinctive hard-wiring MI capabilities, technologies and learning system collective impact collaboratives that will drive the biggest changes in the health industry over the next two years. They include: <br /> <br /> <strong>Health date analytics technologies</strong>: MI approach to empowering organizations with better analytics and informed decision-making guidance to change the course of their organization health strategy and advance plan design action plans.<br /> <br /> <strong>Accountable health and wellbeing initiatives:</strong> MI approach to accountable health collaboratives and the Wellbeing Initiative for the Nation (WIN) via a public-private partnership for national prosperity to collaborate, coordinate and guide global organizational health innovation strategies enabling company-wide profits and competitive advantage, workforce effectiveness and community success.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Optimal healing environments:</strong> MI approach to transforming health and performance improvement innovation, achieving optimal healthy workplace realization and advancing healing as important as curing.</p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Living well invisible drivers of work-life health and economic wellbeing measurement:</strong>&nbsp; MI approach relates to commitment to be personally responsible, self-reliant and accountable to achieve better living and &ldquo;Vulnerability Index&rdquo; reporting which measures the balance of a population's or individual's mix of &ldquo;unmentionables&rdquo; &mdash; life-context conditions like financial stress or caring for an aging parent &mdash; and their ability to cope with these conditions.</span><span class="s2">&nbsp;</span></p> <p><strong>Healthy life expectancy:</strong> MI approach relates to improving health-related quality of life and wellbeing for all individuals and takes account of the number of years that a person at a given age can expect to live in good health taking into account age-specific mortality, morbidity, and functional health status. In other words, dying with as much vitality as possible. <br /> <br /> <strong>Oncology care improvement:</strong> MI approach to advancing oncology care best practices and improve the service experience of cancer patients and their families. <br /> <br /> <strong>Home hospice and palliative care:</strong> MI approach to optimal healing environments in home hospice and palliative care to achieve breakthrough improvements in relieving human suffering, including pain, anxiety, dyspnea and helplessness, as well as finding meaning in suffering. <br /> <br /> <strong>Precision medicine and genomic innovations in health: </strong>MI approach to precision medicine and genomics-driven diagnosis, complex and rare chronic disease testing and treatment alignment capabilities.</p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Enabling technologies, scientific discovery and telemedicine capabilities:</strong> MI approach to accelerate best care at lower cost via primary care and complex care management solutions; value-focused comparative effectiveness outcomes research and life sciences innovations; and advances in mindful use of center of excellence telemedicine capabilities via remote consults for appropriate individual medical, behavioral and population health promotion problems instead of visiting emergency rooms, urgent care centers, and physicians&rsquo; offices.</span><span class="s2">&nbsp;</span></p> <p><strong>Wearable computer technology and remote monitoring technologies:</strong> MI approach to wearable computer technologies and tracking devices and strategies to achieve meaningful behavior change.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Organizations worldwide see MI as essential to fortifying the fabric and culture of their enterprises. A commitment to MI, compelling ideas and the use of transformative MI is making mindful innovators constantly aware of their mindful intent to amass enterprise-wide economic well-being.</p> <p>Our work with the Samueli Institute&rsquo;s Wellbeing Initiative for the Nation (WIN) &mdash; a national effort that convenes CEOs, C-Suite executives and health policy thought leaders from the private, public and military sectors &mdash; is working to expedite the transformation of our health care system to one that enhances community health and fosters a flourishing society. <br /> <br /> Samueli Institute&rsquo;s vision and its WIN public-private partnership for national prosperity &mdash; includes a next level measuring social wellbeing collective impact approach &mdash; and advances a new system of currency that may seem like a fantasy, but it&rsquo;s this type of radical thinking that&rsquo;s needed in America to stop the progress of chronic disease and unhealthy living in its tracks.<strong><sup>1</sup><br /> <br /> </strong>Imagine that there was a Social Wellbeing Index (SWI). Alongside the Dow Jones stock market index and other reports of financial wellbeing, the state of social wellbeing would be announced each day, broadcast on television stations, streamed on the radio, and featured on financial market and Internet news sites.</p> <p>Imagine that this index was used as a metric for tracking the health of our society and could be reported for a city, state, county, country, community, company or for any organization. Imagine that policies and laws could be made to encourage the investment in increasing this social wellbeing index and that both tax incentives and profits were tied to it. Imagine that something of value such as a SWI currency, redeemable for physical or service resources or social appreciation and recognition, could be gained from those who boosted the SWI. The greater the contribution to the index the greater the value of the SWI currency, which could be accumulated, saved and spent.&nbsp;</p> <p>At its heart of the SWI would be a measure of the degree to which social engagement and bonding was being enhanced for the betterment of society as a whole. The value of the SWI currency could be weighted according to the degree to which collective wellbeing was arising from this social engagement. Activities such as investment in time would be considered a key resource and given value for the SWI.&nbsp;</p> <p>Surrounding this core SWI measure would be other more traditional measures of individual and collective flourishing in order to determine the impact on social wellbeing in the culture as a whole. These would likely be the parameters usually tracked such as morbidity and mortality, public health measures, health behaviors, education success, stress and happiness levels, disparities measures, environmental health, nutritional sustenance, levels of safety and violence, economic stress, and degrees of altruism and civic engagement.</p> <p>If simplified into a core index, reported daily and tied to both economic and social reward, the Social Wellbeing Index could become its own ongoing worldwide wellbeing driver and have multiple other uses, such as for the Wellbeing Initiative for the Nation (WIN) Challenge.</p> <p>In conclusion, we continue working with our colleagues to expedite the transformation of our health care system to one that enhances community health and fosters a flourishing society.</p> <p>1. <strong>Reference</strong><br /> <strong>Think Big for Social Wellbeing</strong><br /> Posted on December 4, 2014, by Wayne B Jonas, MD, President and CEO, Samueli Institute <br /> <a href="http://www.SamueliInstituteBlog.org">www.SamueliInstituteBlog.org</a> &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>  Les C. Meyer View Edit Delete
32  <p>Described as &ldquo;a Renaissance man of the digital age,&rdquo; Pieter Nel &ndash; Senior Vice President of Operations at YouNow &ndash; is also a pilot, a yacht skipper, a mountain rescue volunteer, and a MIT-award-winning entrepreneur. Previously, the South African-born executive and engineer was the CTO who helped propel the massive early growth of Africa&rsquo;s largest social network, Mxit &ndash; which, at one point, was larger than Twitter.</p> <p>A <a href="http://www.sablenetwork.com/inspirations/advancements-achievements/why-mxit-should-be-a-source-of-both-lessons-and-pride-for-south-africans">new profile</a> on Nel on BPI&rsquo;s sister platform, the SABLE Accelerator, adds: &ldquo;The 40-year-old is a key innovator in three of the most coveted fields of the new economy &ndash; virtual currencies, machine learning and monetization strategy &ndash; and he&rsquo;s doing it all for YouNow: a platform which defines the social connectivity revolution.&rdquo; This live video social network is even disrupting the cable TV space, having recorded average active user times for its millions of subscribers at almost 50 minutes every day.</p> <p>Nel positively boils with ideas for disruptive technologies &ndash; and told BPI that he has retained his passion to innovate on mobile platforms to empower African entrepreneurs. Is this Q&amp;A, Nel also speaks about the potential for &ldquo;smart farming&rdquo; in Africa, enabled by drones and smart data. He has also harnessed his experiences of leading dozens of mountain rescues for a Thought Leadership project that principle tech founders and CEOs should use in navigating the fast-changing market landscape.</p>  <p>Open communication and easy interaction between people of different backgrounds always have a net positive impact on society. We saw this at Mxit where we allowed millions of users to interact and communicate at a mere fraction of the cost of an SMS. Once again at YouNow, we are using the video medium to allow users from all over the world to socialize, meet friends and exchange ideas. &nbsp;It&rsquo;s an extremely interactive platform &ndash; you are chatting directly with the broadcaster and fellow viewers, live. There is this powerful need for social interaction, to share ideas and opinions, and this is a fantastic channel for that impulse.</p>  <p>I believe very few American startups have an understanding of global markets and user bases and how to serve them well.&nbsp; The Internet has moved to mobile and the potential markets in Brazil, Africa, India and South East Asia are far bigger than what you find in the US.&nbsp; Understanding how to be successful in those markets early on in your growth is a key differentiating factor. In that respect, the Mxit experience was extremely advantageous, as we were in many respects years ahead of the curve in terms of building mobile-first global communities.&nbsp; In general I find South Africans to be much more comfortable in a global context and within a culturally diverse environment. &nbsp;</p>  <p>Innovation is a culture that is driven from the top. One needs to create an environment that allows for experimentation and failure. If your team is too afraid to fail, and not incentivized to experiment, they won't do it.&nbsp; It actually requires a lot of discipline too - engineers are bound to continue tinkering with something for too long and one has to have the discipline to move on to try new things.&nbsp; When Herman Heunis was running R&amp;D at his Swist Group Technologies - the directive was to try 10 new things each year.&nbsp; One of them ended up being Mxit.</p>  <p>It is going to become increasingly difficult for business leaders to be effective without the ability to engage deeply in analytical thinking and understanding data, complex systems and non-linear effects.&nbsp; We live in an increasingly complex world, and it's all too easy to make bad decisions based on data that is not fully understood. Every business executive should have a basic understanding of data science and statistics.&nbsp;</p> <p>From a technology perspective, mobile video, virtual reality and the Internet of Things are of course the big trends that most analysts agree on. In the emerging market context I believe that there is a large potential for drones combined with smart data analysis to revolutionize smart farming in Africa. Africa has enormous potential in terms of agriculture and it unfortunately doesn't come to it's full right given all the strife, corruption and policy failures like we've seen in Zimbabwe.</p>  <p>One of the successful behaviors of innovators is to bounce their new ideas off of as many people as possible. MIT professor Hal Gregersen describes this as one of the 5 traits of successful innovators in "The Innovator's DNA." Steve Jobs was always talking about his ideas to everyone - and a diverse set of people too.&nbsp; Innovators continually iterate and enhance their thinking in this fashion. The opportunity to do this is of course much better in dense environments like Silicon Valley, Cambridge, MA and NYC.&nbsp; It's a behavior I try to imitate all the time.</p>  Pieter Nel View Edit Delete
63  <p>Bryony Winn is the Chief Strategy Officer for Anthem, Inc., a U.S. provider of health insurance. Anthem is the largest for-profit managed health care company in the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.&nbsp;She is responsible for developing Anthem&rsquo;s Enterprise strategy and growth plans, as well as continuing to expand Anthem&rsquo;s focus on delivering innovative solutions to all stakeholders. Prior to Anthem, she was Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. Before that, she was a partner in the Chicago office of McKinsey &amp; Company.</p>  <p>I believe strongly that to successfully transform an organization to embrace and lead on digital innovation and change&hellip; you must ensure innovation is both <strong><em>everywhere</em></strong>&hellip; and <strong><em>somewhere</em></strong>. What I mean by this is that you must instill an innovation mindset within every nook and cranny of the organization... while also dedicating a full-time team to the ambition. If you only do the former, you risk the effort stalling due to weak ownership. If you only do the latter, you risk creating a silo, innovating in a vacuum and in a way that doesn&rsquo;t make sense or isn&rsquo;t embraced across your business.</p> <p>In sum, digital transformation requires a &ldquo;yes, and&hellip;&rdquo;not an &ldquo;either/or&rdquo; approach. You must drive cultural changes across the entire organization <strong><em>and </em></strong>set goals / launch dedicated initiatives within and owned by every single part of the business <strong><em>and </em></strong>build a team dedicated solely to driving innovation.</p>  <p>Innovation in healthcare... is hard. It is a highly regulated industry; has incredibly varied delivery systems across the world, limiting the spread of best practices and innovation; is dominated by large industry incumbents and significant barriers to entry for new players; and is unparalleled and high stakes &ndash; with lives potentially on the line when innovations don&rsquo;t work.</p> <p>This has all contributed to digital innovation (and even adoption!) significantly lagging behind other industries. Compared to the digital transformations in other industries (think: the electric car, app-based food and grocery delivery, music streaming, etc.) the disjointed and often analog consumer experience within the healthcare system can feel archaic to consumers.</p> <p>I see my sector&rsquo;s history of innovation paralysis, however, as a fantastic opportunity to leapfrog. And, this leapfrogging is well underway &ndash; new healthcare technologies (virtual care solutions, remote monitoring, AI algorithms to read chest X-rays, personalized medicine therapies&hellip; the list goes on) and advancements in data and analytics are transforming my industry at an unparalleled rate. This transformation has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which placed intense and immediate pressure on my industry to respond. We rushed to develop vaccines, create virtual care options, and adapt our products and services to the &ldquo;new normal.&rdquo; COVID-19 has fundamentally changed my industry, and we will continue to invest in innovation to meet the demands of our time.</p>  <p>At my company, we are intensely focused on fostering an innovation culture and mindset in all of our employees. Equally important, however, are the organizational changes we are making to enable these culture changes and mindset shifts. We recognize that it is not enough to tell people to think creatively with an eye towards the future&hellip; you must also provide an environment that will enable and empower these changes. This means re-imagining the often long-ingrained processes and structures that can hold back innovation to create a more agile organization. At my company, this means re-designing everything from the way we measure and track our performance to the way we run our day-to day meetings, to the format of our materials and agendas.</p>  <p>I believe the acceleration of consumerism will be the defining force of the healthcare industry in the post-COVID-19 era. By this I mean so much more than consumers demandingmore user-friendly products. Rather, the &ldquo;consumer voice&rdquo; in healthcare, already influential, will grow and consumers will expect more of our industry than to simply provide healthcare services &ndash; they will demand <em>health</em>.</p> <p>They will demand <em>health</em> that is affordable &ndash; to meet the ever-increasing affordability challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 epidemic (44% of US consumers reported not being able to pay a $1K medical bill).</p> <p>They will demand <em>health</em> that delivers chronic condition management, not just urgent care. (American consumers are aging rapidly, and this growing population has significant health needs, with over 2/3 of seniors living with more than 2 chronic conditions.)</p> <p>And finally, they will demand <em>health </em>inclusive of mental, not just physical care (as COVID-19 increases the prevalence and severity of already under-treated behavioral health conditions).</p>  <p>One of the pitfalls I&rsquo;ve seen when an organization launches an innovation strategy is the &ldquo;endless pilots&rdquo; trap &ndash; meaning, they constantly incubate and test ideas, partnerships, and new technologies&hellip; but never bring anything to scale. The best innovation teams tackle this risk head on, continuously assessing their pipeline for promise of success and scalability, defining stage gates at which to evaluate their initiatives, and deploying strict criteria to evaluate impact. The result? The portfolio of initiatives become incredibly curated and purposeful; pilots without impact are sunsetted rather than stalled; and successful initiatives are implemented quickly and more broadly. These team are seen as a true incubators of the company&rsquo;s future &ndash; rather than a lone-ranger team running wild with flashy, crazy, impractical ideas. &nbsp;</p>  Bryony Winn View Edit Delete
19  <p class="p1">Jorge is a global Innovation Insurgent and author of the innovation blog&nbsp;<a href="http://www.game-changer.net/"><span class="s1">Game-Changer</span></a>.&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">Jorge is known as the Puzzle Builder and Pain Reliever by companies such as FedEx Ground, TelVista, The Jumpitz, Tuni&amp;G, IOS Offices and Chivas USA. This is because whether it's planning and executing strategies to improve processes, helping companies "wow" their customers, or creating new capabilities, products and services and launching them in the market; he's done it.</p> <p class="p1">He is the Co-founder and Chief Strategist of Blu Maya. Connect with Jorge on Twitter&nbsp;<a href="http://www.twitter.com/jorgebarba"><span class="s1">@jorgebarba</span></a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgebarba/"><span class="s1">LinkedIn</span></a>.</p>  <p>Leaders that want to build an organization that innovates consistently must provide three things to employees: freedom, support and challenge.&nbsp;Those are the key ingredients needed to accelerate innovation in any environment. In other words, you can put it like this: Have bold goals, get out of the way and reward people for trying. The last point is very important because when people see that getting rewarded for trying, not getting punished, is like a badge of honor; they will start giving a damn.&nbsp;Try it, you'll see.</p>  <p>Innovation is as much about attitude and perspective as it is about process. So, the impediment to innovation for large organizations, today and forever, is human nature. The fear of losing what one already has is probably the most pervasive bias of all, and it reflects itself in how enterprises behave in the marketplace.&nbsp;There are some forward-thinking organizations that deliberately keep biases at bay by doing specific activities that force people to expand their perspectives, experiment and try new things, and collaborate with people outside their domain.&nbsp;The activities themselves are not hard to do, what's hard is accepting that you have to make time for "assumption busting" activities and that they are priceless for the long-term existence of the enterprise.&nbsp;</p>  <p>I'm a proponent of organic over systematic innovation. Embracing organic change is when the mindset is being developed in a slow but deliberate process; rather than being dictated. &nbsp;Systematic innovation takes a more MBA approach, where the assumption is that you can manage and measure innovation. This is the approach that is sold by consultants to large organizations. I don't believe you see a lot of breakthrough comes from systematic innovation. Heck, look at any list of the most innovative companies and most are innovators because they live the ethos of the innovator rather than dictate it.</p> <p>I am also a proponent of speed, so experimenting to quickly eliminate assumptions we are making is key for me. Rapid prototyping can take many forms such as physical products, mock ups, storyboards, role playing, etc.. The point of rapid prototyping is speeding through your list of assumptions, changing and getting to "better" faster.&nbsp;</p>  <p>There are many that in combination will drive massive change across enterprises and all size of business. Specifically, I'm looking at artificial intelligence, big data, augmented reality, virtual reality, natural language processing, and speech recognition.&nbsp;Why these? Because in aggregate we will see them both in the consumer and enterprise domain; specifically in how we get stuff done, how we hire and how we collaborate.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Nike, Porsche, McLaren Automotive, Darpa, Google, Amazon, Apple, Pixar; to name a few. The reason? Simple: they have bold goals, they don't compromise on their values, and they constantly push boundaries to make things radically better.&nbsp;</p>  Jorge Barba View Edit Delete
47  <p>Nic Vu, GM and SVP for Direct-to-Consumer for Adidas North America, discusses how building relationships is today's number one sales strategy. Through this game changer interview, he discusses what customer-centricity really means in today&rsquo;s data-enabled, hyper-competitive brand environment, from the perspective of one of the premier performers in the global retail landscape.</p>  It's global change: our entire company worldwide, as well as the North American team. We specifically set out three major strategies, which include speed, cities, and open sourcing, and it really has changed the behavior and frankly the entire game in which we play. Before, we would create products and push them out and try to sell to customers, in the traditional model. But as we started to&nbsp;open source and invite our consumers to help us within our journey in a new innovative way, which has created a shift in the ecosystem that has been applied throughout the entire organization.<br /><br />We're obviously very well known for Kanye West, and co-creating products with his fashion, style and expertise. By leveraging our globally recognized brand and expertise with his product and personal brand, we are going to market with a tailored product that leverages the best of both sides. &nbsp;We strategically&nbsp;made a choice that we would co-create with our key partners to deliver the best products to their consumers, and we are now leveraging that open source strategy with a variety of different key partners.<br /><br />We have opened up a product creation design house in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Farm. We put our best designers there, and we are allowing customers &ndash; anybody who has a creative thought, anybody who wants to work with our brand &ndash; to walk in off the street and help us design products, give us new ideas; fresh thinking. We created an ecosystem internally with internal websites that allowed people to generate ideas, and their peers can vote it on their ideas. And that ultimately has driven thousands of ideas, including the very successful Avenue A initiative.<br /><br />With Avenue A, I have to give credit to Mark King, my boss, who's the CEO of North America. He is well known as a major innovator in the golf industry, and he has subsequently initiated and built this relentless innovation culture for Adidas North America in the past three years. In year one, we were all raising awareness, educating people on the process around innovation. In year two, we started to&nbsp;cultivate this ecosystem of openness. And now that we're in year three, you're seeing the net results organizationally, both within the North American marketplace but also on a global organizational level. At the same time, we launched the Innovation Academy, wherein we created an environment in which people can learn, get an education; effectively get an MBA in innovation.<br /><br />As the GM of Direct-to-Consumer for North America, I spend half of my time understanding consumer sentiment and listening to the ideas they have, and the other half of my time around merchandising and product.<br /><br />What's unique about Adidas Group is that we were born in sport, and we're sporting goods athletic apparel and footwear company. We can basically be an athlete&rsquo;s entire wardrobe, on-court and on-pitch, or as soon as they get off: we're there to support them through their own style and fashion as well. And we're a brand that wants to co-create.  People need to be educated and aware that they have the ability to contribute within their own organization, and to try new things. You can't create an ecosystem organizationally that shuts that down. You need to allow votes on people&rsquo;s ideas by their peers, not by their supervisors &ndash; so, their confidantes, if you will. And employees need to know that it is safe to fail,&nbsp;and they need to fail fast and frequently. Unfortunately, I would say the majority of organizations still penalize mistakes, despite the knowledge that innovation requires an ability to fail. <br /><br />Really, the impediment that I see within the industry is that, too often, people feel they have to have a 100% plan, ready-to-go, and that it has to be successful. Today, we have an innovation board within every single one of our brick-and-mortar stores and we invite not only our consumers to put ideas on there but we invite our own team members, our internal consumers, to give us ideas, and those ideas then are surfaced all the way up the "chain of command." Then, ultimately we create games that feature competition and collaborations, and then all of a sudden people feel like, "Wow. I'm a one-week-old employee internal to Adidas, and I submitted my idea and two months later, the top guy in the organization is reviewing my ideas! How cool is that?"  What I would say is we have to create a incentivized change-management process to induce innovation. I think you can't introduce innovation as a top-down mandate or even execute it in that form. I &nbsp;think you have to win hearts and minds within the organization, and you have to start by developing a budget or resources that are dedicated to it.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<br /><br /> So our newsletter four or five years ago was driven by functional heads and&nbsp;it was kind of like this laborious mandate from the top &ndash; me, in this case &ndash; where every function gave and updated them, and we&rsquo;d we post a static document and that would go out to the organization. We thought that was communication. Today, in contrast, the employees within each function, regardless of level, drive what content they want to express to the organization. And it's this living, breathing document that goes out every week now.  <p>Mobile technology will remain key &ndash; almost every consumer today has some level of smartphone in their hand, and the information that they can get via Google or other search engines is so quick and so fast that brands like us, Adidas Group, will need to make sure that we are there to help cultivate that experience for the consumer and answer those questions, or even anticipate those questions. So I would say mobile technology and all the apps that can be developed to connect the consumer's experience, is really the key in the future.</p> <p>We already have virtual reality in our stores today, which help educate and create a great experience for our consumers. So when we opened up our world flagship on Fifth Avenue, we had virtual reality in there wherein NBA superstar James Harden in a VR space was giving them &ndash; the consumers &ndash; the experience of a lifetime, because it felt like you were actually speaking with James Harden.</p> <p>Meanwhile, we&rsquo;re leveraging technologies from 3D printing to AI, and I think the key is to make sure that our digital and social ecosystem remains connected for the end-user experience. We're starting to implement local market manufacturing wherein we can bring speed of product-to-market faster. And we're talking months and weeks, we're not talking years and months.</p>  <p>My personal favorites include Tesla and also Faraday Future, that just came out with an innovation where you can basically sit in the car, and it will self-drive, self-park, and you can talk on your social platforms. And ultimately what I learned from the car industry &ndash; in this case, electric car companies &ndash; is that they're chasing the very same thing we are: a connected experience for the consumer in which they can interact with your brand, any which way they like, and for us to be prepared to be able to interact with them any which way they like: digital communities, hubs, and apps.</p>  Nicholas Vu View Edit Delete
66  <p>Bill brings over 30 years of experience in the communications and enterprise IT industries. He was CTO at SUMMUS Software. He served at Amdocs as a CTO of the Product Business Unit where he was responsible for the development of real-time customer experience platforms. Before joining Amdocs, Bill served as SVP of product planning and architecture at DST Innovis, where he was responsible for strategic technology platforms, product management and pre-sales for the cable, broadband and satellite industries. Bill is also known for designing and hand crafting custom furniture, as well as for his skills on the shooting range.</p>  <p>Everyone is talking about AI. The difference for Serviceaide is that we&nbsp;introduced AI into production&nbsp;all the way back in 2017.&nbsp; Our approach is also different in that we are focused on an AI-First approach.&nbsp; This means that our team considers how AI can take the operational lead in managing and automating routine requests and work tasks&nbsp;as we design and build systems; we don&rsquo;t just add in AI where it&rsquo;s easy.&nbsp;The industry will&nbsp;still need people, but&nbsp;Serviceaide is helping to shift their&nbsp;focus to more strategic, high value&nbsp;work.&nbsp; This will result in increased productivity and efficiency.</p>  <p>Technology is evolving quicky, in some cases daily.&nbsp; Take for example, Large Language Models, we have shifted our approach to&nbsp;monthly&nbsp;in order to maximize performance from&nbsp;the best model.&nbsp; For many customers, it's hard to keep up with the pace of innovation which makes having both the knowledge and maturity to consider the benefits of new technology in their DevOps and overall planning incredibly important. One example is examining how to make Ai driven automation work with legacy systems, and implement the changes required. To this end, Serviceaide is often introducing innovation and becoming an advisor on Digital Transformations to many of our clients.</p>  <p>Bringing innovation to Service Management is our company and departmental mission.&nbsp;The development team is passionate about leveraging emerging technologies to maximize worker productivity.&nbsp;Our&nbsp;service and support&nbsp;vertical extends from IT to potentially&nbsp;all departments of an organization.&nbsp;&nbsp;This passion for what AI can do touches everyone in the company from development to support to marketing and sales.&nbsp;When you have those&nbsp;&ldquo;ah ha&rdquo; moments and see all the ways the technology can be applied, it really motivates the team to drive even harder and naturally fosters creativity.</p>  <p>I see the issue as&nbsp;how a&nbsp;company adopts the newer technologies&nbsp;that either automates routine labor-intensive tasks or provides a boost to employees that must spend a lot of time searching for and working with information. &nbsp;Generative AI is certainly the biggest news at the moment, and everyone is rightly looking to capitalize on it, or be a victim of their competitors that do. &nbsp;But&nbsp;it can be scary to add something completely different&nbsp;that is not well understood and comes with risk if not leveraged properly.&nbsp;The great news is that Serviceaide&nbsp;and others are bringing new solutions to the market that will drive digital process transformation - not AI for AI&rsquo;s sake but AI that solves real problems and makes quantifiable improvements that go straight to the bottom line. My advice is to look for solutions that have&nbsp;designed an AI strategy into&nbsp;the product, have a clear vision and roadmap, and can&nbsp;show true ROI.&nbsp;Too many vendors are looking for quick wins with AI, and they are very likely to create unsustainable architectures and have a lot of churn in their product as a result.</p>  <p>Knowledge federation is really making a difference for a lot of bigger enterprises that suffer from having information scattered all over the place. Many organizations have one place to store personal information such as One drive or One Note, another tool to collaborate with your team, another system to get IT help, another to ask HR questions, yet another for internal business procedures and operations, and then a whole different set of systems that provide online training.&nbsp; Collaboration, operational and departmental and&nbsp;training systems being disconnected is a chronic problem for organizations. &nbsp;By pulling all this disparate information together, via knowledge federation, employees can find what they need from one source. &nbsp;Employing a good AI-based interface that can make inquires in natural language rather than using keywords or navigating to where the information is a productivity game changer.</p>  Bill Guinn View Edit Delete
28  Steve Hoffman is a virtual midwife to the future of humankind at Founders Space. &ldquo;Captain Hoff&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t just predict a world in which computers replace accountants and IOT chairs automatically adjust to your personal dimensions, but he actively selects and empowers the tech innovators who are shaping these kinds of revolutions.&nbsp; Named a Top 10 incubator in its first year of active mentorship, the Silicon Valley-based and globally focused accelerator is helping to mature hyper-innovative tech companies which could change our lives.   <p>We've been innovating on the incubator/accelerator model.&nbsp; Instead of just adopting the standard 'Y-Combinator' model, which is meeting start-ups once a week for 3 months followed by a &ldquo;Demo Day,&rdquo; we spent 18 months interviewing start-up founders and asking them what they'd like us to do differently.&nbsp; Here's what we learned:&nbsp;</p> <p>a) Three months is a long time to wait for a Demo Day.&nbsp; Most start-ups apply to their accelerator several months in advance, and then if they get accepted, it&rsquo;s another 3 months until they actually get to pitch investors on Demo Day. That means that many start-ups must wait 6 months or so from the time they first apply until they are in front of investors. In half a year, everything changes: competitors, market conditions, funding trends, etc.&nbsp; A start-up can miss their window by waiting.&nbsp; Founders Space solves this problem by having Demo Day at the end of the first month.&nbsp;</p> <p>b) &nbsp;The second issue founders have with the traditional model is being committed to stay in Silicon Valley for 3 months during a program. This is a big issue, especially if the start-up is coming from overseas and has employees, family and customers back home.&nbsp; Founders Space solves this problem by having a more condensed, intensive program.&nbsp; Instead of having mentoring and training sessions one or two days a week for three months, Founders Space has them every single weekday for four weeks, followed by Demo Day.&nbsp; This way startup founders can move quicker and get the same benefits.</p> <p>c) Lastly, the Y-Combinator model ends after three months, leaving start-ups on their own.&nbsp; It turns out start-up founders have more questions after Demo Day than they do before.&nbsp; But most programs end after Demo Day.&nbsp; Founders Space solves this issue by allowing startups to continue to attend all mentoring sessions and workshops for an entire year after Demo Day.&nbsp; This way startups can receive&nbsp;on-going support when they need it most. &nbsp;</p> <p>We work with a lot of corporations who say they are innovating, but when we ask them to sacrifice revenue, they recoil.&nbsp; The one strategy that we propose to our partners is to reward innovation with virtual dollars.&nbsp; These dollars count as real dollars, but they aren't actual revenue.&nbsp; This way managers can justify spending time on innovative projects.&nbsp;</p>  <p>We often find that founders who have a good idea &ndash; but not a great one &ndash; will get too stuck on it and keep hammering on it, as rivals pass them by. Acceleration needs to be that, and we push them hard to identify the best ideas they have &ndash; and if they&rsquo;re pushing a boulder up a hill, they should stop, and switch to something else. Also: Most people see a model or idea that works and then they copy it, making some incremental changes along the way.&nbsp; True innovation means rethinking everything and challenging all the assumptions you have.&nbsp;</p> <p>You need to question every aspect of your business.&nbsp; Why do we do it this way? &nbsp;Why is this the model?&nbsp; What if we tried this? &nbsp;And then you have to take risks.&nbsp; You have to be prepared to fail over and over until you discover a new way of doing it.&nbsp; Most managers in large corporations are risk averse.&nbsp; That's how they got to the position they are in.&nbsp; They don't want a series of failures attached to their names, so naturally they go for the safe bets.&nbsp; But safe bets don't transform a business.&nbsp;Risk does.</p>  <p>When we started Founders Space, we felt that we had to develop something new.&nbsp; There are thousands of accelerators out there, and we didn't want to just follow the herd.&nbsp; So we've been constantly experimenting and pushing ourselves to come up with new ideas that get better results for ourselves and our start-ups.&nbsp; It's a continual learning process, as we change and improve our model and program every quarter.</p>  <p>The startup ecosystem is constantly changing.&nbsp; Large corporations are now jumping into the startup game in a much bigger way with open innovation, intraprenuership, incubators and funding. &nbsp;We are launching new services to partner with global corporations and help them collaborate with startups.&nbsp; This is the biggest change we see on the horizon, and it's the biggest opportunity.&nbsp; We just launched a new service called Founders Edge, which does exactly this: <a href="http://www.FoundersEdge.com">http://www.FoundersEdge.com</a>.</p>  <p>It&rsquo;s simply inevitable that machines will replace the jobs we do &ndash; blue collar; white collar; every collar. Surgeons are going to be replaced by robots, which will do the procedure precisely the right way every time. The tax code is a system of laws to follow and optimize &ndash; so there is no reason an algorithm can&rsquo;t do it far better than an accountant.&nbsp; Legal contracts can all be written by computers. We will get to a very interesting point in society where people will have to ask themselves &ndash; what unique value can we provide? One wonderful impact will be in longevity. They are building nano-bots which we can put into our body to repair organs; and smart pills that can measure all the bacteria in your digestive tract, and tell you precisely what drugs or foods you need to take to be healthy and live longer. Ultimately, we will be upgrading our bodies; even our genetics.</p>  Steve Hoffman View Edit Delete
54  <p>&ldquo;Innovation has become the fundamental aspect of all development; without it there can be no progress in the Property Industry,&rdquo; says Leslie Fivaz, CFO for ALW Properties in Johannesburg, South Africa. Johannesburg is South Africa&rsquo;s economic powerhouse and one of the fastest growing emerging market cities in the world.</p>  <p>ALW Properties is a small yet dynamic and innovative property management and development company with its head office based in Norwood, Johannesburg, South Africa. We are a team driven by a passion for environmental conscientiousness in the design and development of commercial office properties.</p> <p>Our latest flagship development, Atholl Towers, in Sandton Johannesburg is an environmentally innovative office building, offering world-class AAA-rated, 5 Star green office space for commercial property letting. Up to 50 percent savings are offered on energy and water costs, which is accomplished through:</p> <ul> <li>Recycled heating</li> <li>Energy efficient lighting and motion sensors</li> <li>Water saving fixtures and rain and ground water harvesting systems</li> <li>Waste recycling facilities</li> <li>Low volatile organic compound paints, adhesives and carpets</li> <li>Recycled and locally sourced building materials</li> <li>Energy efficient &ldquo;REGEN&rdquo; elevator facilities</li> <li>Cyclist facilities</li> </ul> <p>We are determined to be and to remain responsive to a rapidly changing industry dynamic.</p>  <p>South Africa&rsquo;s commercial property market is facing many challenges. A number of factors are causing both local and international buyers to put off purchases until they have a clearer picture of where the country is headed. Factors include: Rand weakness, high inflation, weakening metal prices, ongoing violent strike action, a rising trade deficit, continuing uncertainty regarding property rights and land reform, high levels of crime, weak service delivery, and political in-fighting. Increasing input costs such as labour, electricity, water, property rates and taxes and raw materials, as well as skills shortages, and credit downgrades are further undermining South Africa&rsquo;s social fabric and spooking investors.</p> Yet it is not all doom and gloom. Confidence in the real estate sector has improved; there are suburbs across South Africa which are performing well, and property values are improving. The Property Industry is an extremely innovative industry full of people with innovative ideas and entrepreneurial spirit who continually find ways to counter the challenges. Encouragingly, industry observers continue to state that there are good reasons to remain confident in South African properties as an asset class.  <p>There is no doubt that within the next few years the Real Estate Industry is likely to look very different from the way it does today. There is recognition that patterns of demand are changing and the most forward-thinking companies and people in the industry are creating products that cater to the changes. Companies like WeWork and Regus are taking service offices to the next level by building sophisticated collaborative workspaces for entrepreneurs and professionals. They understand that the shift toward online business has not downgraded the importance of social interaction, but that there is massive demand among companies and individuals for environments in which they can talk to each other, generate ideas, and innovate.</p> <p>Innovation is enabling the property industry to make the most of one of its most important characteristics: that it is a people industry. New technology and disruption are not leading to a depersonalisation of Real Estate; quite the opposite.</p> <p>Steve Jobs says that &ldquo;Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.&rdquo;</p> <p>In Property, change and innovation are a given. In fact, they are key imperatives for any successful Real Estate company seeking to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving and consumer-driven marketplace.</p>  <p>New technologies are having a surprising amount of impact on the property industry.</p> <p>For commercial property owners, sustainability is more than a trend &ndash; it&rsquo;s a glimpse into the future. Sustainability is one of the biggest drivers of innovation in today&rsquo;s economy &ndash; and the commercial property sector is no exception. As the demand for green-friendly office spaces increases daily, particularly with millennials, building owners are embracing sustainable designs that lower monthly costs and reduce the building&rsquo;s carbon footprint.</p> <p>With cities around the world growing fast as development spreads to almost every corner of the globe, resources are scarcer than ever. Building materials, water and electricity will need to be produced, consumed and recycled efficiently to support the planet&rsquo;s growing population. The recent drought in South Africa, which brought water rationing in its wake, as well as the decade-long Eskom crisis with its annual electricity tariff increases, have inspired property owners and tenants to take action.</p> <p>Commercial buildings that feature independent power generation (through solar energy systems) and smart water recycling, are becoming increasingly popular with tenants &ndash; especially the younger generation of startup owners. Lower monthly utility bills are good for every company&rsquo;s bottom line. At the same time, environmental stewardship is an essential part of prominent brands, from SMEs to large corporates.</p> <p>While Green Star ratings are typically given to new developments, it&rsquo;s still possible for older buildings to shed their large carbon footprints and remain desirable. Many developers, including ourselves, are actively engaged with this process:</p> <ul> <li>Solar power systems and geysers can be retrofitted to some older buildings, as long as the building&rsquo;s structure can accommodate them safely.</li> <li>Energy-efficient lighting, air conditioning and office equipment can be fitted to almost all older buildings, reducing monthly consumption and utility bills.</li> <li>Some older buildings in up-and-coming areas can be renovated and re-purposed using green designs, giving them a new lease on life.</li> </ul> <p>With years of load-shedding, double-digit increases in electricity prices and now a catastrophic drought, South Africans have come to appreciate green features the hard way. The demand for green features will continue to increase as the high cost of utilities, along with electricity and water supply issues, force this to become a key factor in buying decisions.</p> <p>Technology is definitely disrupting Real Estate economics as the demand for eco-efficient buildings rises. Technology is forcing developers to relook at the way they construct buildings. Today, buildings must be low-energy, sustainable, and able to respond to future changes in the climate, technology and regulation. Buildings of the future will all be &ldquo;green.&rdquo; The Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark, an industry-driven organisation, is committed to assessing the sustainability performance of Real Estate portfolios worldwide; and Europe&rsquo;s Energy Directive is driving for near-to-zero energy buildings by 2020.</p>  <p>In addition to the call for green office innovation, collaborative workplace organizations such as WeWork and Regus are also knocking down the literal and figurative &ldquo;walls&rdquo; and changing commercial real estate dynamics. These flexible, shared office spaces provide various options for companies that either lack the capital or want to divest themselves of the real estate, furniture and services that were previously non-negotiable. These shared spaces are ideal for hosting meetings, and can also act as both on-demand and long-term space for satellite employees, mobile workers, and independent professionals.</p> <p>Many large corporates are realizing that they can dramatically reduce the office space required, not because of a fall-off in business, but rather as a result of technology innovation and changing human behavior, which have reduced the amount of required office space. Companies and employees are able to do more with less space &ndash; the very heart of innovation. Spurring this dynamic is the rapid growth in mobility technology, smartphones, tablets, laptops, Wi-Fi and exceptionally fast Internet connections, and cloud-based resources. These technologies have obliterated the need for file cabinets and server rooms &ndash; further reducing the need for dedicated IT space. The speed at which technology has evolved means that not only are business people able to take their work around the city as they hop from meeting to meeting, or home in the evening, but they are also able to carry out these tasks and remain cost-effectively and efficiently connected to their team and management.</p>  Leslie Fivaz View Edit Delete
25  <p>Kate Vitasek is an international authority for her award-winning research and Vested<sup>&reg;</sup>&nbsp;business model for highly collaborative relationships. Vitasek, a Faculty member at the University of Tennessee, has been lauded by&nbsp;<em>World Trade Magazine</em>&nbsp;as one of the &ldquo;Fabulous 50+1&rdquo; most influential people impacting global commerce. Vitasek is internationally recognized for her for driving transformation and innovation through highly collaborative and strategic partnerships. She has appeared on Bloomberg radio multiple times, NPR, and on Fox Business News. Her work has been featured in over 300 articles in publications like&nbsp;<em>Forbes, Chief Executive Magazine, CIO Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Journal of Commerce, World Trade Magazine</em>and<em>&nbsp;</em><em>Outsource Magazine.</em>&nbsp;</p>  <p>The University of Tennessee has been studying the nature of highly successful business relationships since 2003. Our research was originally funded by the United States Air Force with a goal to provide a pathway to long-term, collaborative success among business partners. We codified our findings into a methodology and business model that researchers coined as &ldquo;Vested&rdquo; or &ldquo;Vested Outsourcing.&rdquo; Our research first gained notoriety with the publication of <a href="http://www.vestedway.com/vested-outsourcing/"><em>Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules That Will Transform Outsourcing</em></a> in 2010. In a way that book began a movement that got people interested in learning how to work better with their strategic partners. The Vested methodology is based on five &ldquo;rules&rdquo; that when followed create a business model that fosters a high collaborative &ldquo;win-win&rdquo; relationship that purposely creates and shares value so that everyone achieves the win-win.</p> <p>The five rules are:</p> <p>- Focus on <em>outcomes</em>, not transactions: Flip the thinking from a focus on specific transactions to desired outcomes &ndash; instead of buying transactions, buy outcomes, which can include targets for availability, reliability, revenue generation, employee or customer satisfaction and the like.</p> <p>- Focus on the <em>what</em>, not the <em>how: </em>If a partnership is truly outcome-based it can no longer have a multiplicity of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that the buyer is micromanaging. The outsource provider has won the contract because he is supposed to have the expertise that the buyer lacks. So the buyer has to trust the supplier to solve problems.&nbsp;</p> <p>- Agree on clearly defined and measurable outcomes: Make sure everyone is clear and on the same page about their desired outcomes. Ideally, there shouldn't be more than about five high-level metrics. All parties - which may of course include users and other stakeholders that aren't directly signing the contract - need to spend time collaboratively, during the outsourcing process and especially during the contract negotiations, to establish explicit definitions for how relationship success will be measured.</p> <p>- Pricing model with incentives that optimize the business: Vested does not guarantee higher profits for service providers - they are taking a calculated risk. But it does provide them with the tools, autonomy and authority to make strategic investments in processes that can generate a greater ROI and value over time, perhaps more than a conventional cost-plus or fixed price contract might produce over the same period.</p> <p>- Insight versus oversight governance structure: A flexible and credible governance framework makes all the rules work in sync. The structure governing an outsource agreement or business relationship should instill transparency and trust about how operations are developing and improving. And, of course, of where the next threats and challenges may occur, because business happens.</p>  <p>Simply put, the biggest impediments to innovation are old-school, transaction-based, and risk-averse thinking. I&rsquo;ve found that waiting for the Aha! Moment when it comes to innovation generally means there will be a long wait&hellip;It&rsquo;s much better to create a transparent, incentivized environment that encourages innovation both from within an organization and in conjunction with an organization&rsquo;s partners.</p> <p>This is what P&amp;G&rsquo;s CEO, A.G. Lafley, did when he set out to reinvent the company&rsquo;s innovation business model in radical and precedent-setting fashion. Questioning the sustainability of the conventional &ldquo;in-house-do-it-ourselves&rdquo; model, Lafley determined that looking beyond P&amp;G&rsquo;s walls could produce highly profitable innovations. In his book, <em>The Game Changer,</em> Lafley wrote about how P&amp;G used innovation to spur company results. He wrote, &ldquo;In an innovation-centered company, managers and employees have no fear of innovation since they have developed the know-how to manage its attendant risk; innovation builds their mental muscles, leading them to new core competencies.&rdquo; &nbsp;We studied P&amp;G&rsquo;s highly successful Vested relationship with Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) for facilities and real estate management as part of our research. JLL has won P&amp;G&rsquo;s supplier of the year award three times and has won the International Association for Outsourcing Professionals GEO award for innovation in outsourcing for their progressive thinking in how they drive innovation through strategic outsourcing.</p>  <p>This is the million dollar question and why we actually put all of the effort into our research.&nbsp; A Vested agreement is all about engraining innovation into the very fabric of business relationships. Our deep applied research helped us learn what the best were doing. Then our challenge became codifying our learning into a methodology that any organization could use. We&rsquo;ve now got five books on the topic and seven courses that individuals and organizations can use to help them as they seek to embed an innovation culture into their business relationships.</p>  <p>I think the major trend will be the increasing realization that collaboration and transparent communication is a necessity in today&rsquo;s technological and globalized business environment.</p> <p>Another trend that will continue to gain traction is the move away from transaction-based business models and the old-school emphasis on lowest cost and labor arbitrage. You&rsquo;ll definitely see a rise in relational contracts that leverage a Vested or even a sound Performance-Based sourcing business model. Instilling collaboration through relational contracts will free everyone to do what they do best without constantly looking over their shoulder at the bean counters. The key is to make sure you craft these agreements properly. Far too many procurement professionals &ldquo;say&rdquo; collaboration and are beginning to shift to a relational contract mindset, yet they don&rsquo;t have a clue what they are doing. We are working hard to make education accessible and have made five courses available as online courses &ndash;so they are widely available. This includes are Creating a Vested Agreement and Getting to We online courses, which both come with an excellent toolkit to help individuals not only learn &ndash; but &ldquo;do.&rdquo;&nbsp;</p>  <p>I&rsquo;d refer once again to the P&amp;G example and share some of their case study that&rsquo;s profiled in the book <a href="http://www.vestedway.com/vested/"><em>Vested: How P&amp;G, McDonald&rsquo;s and Microsoft are Redefining Winning in Business Relationships</em></a> &ndash; which is related in chapter 2. P&amp;G brought its focus on innovation to its facilities management relationship with JLL by challenging JLL to not just <em>take care</em> of its buildings, but to <em>take charge</em> of the buildings. The companies created a commercial agreement that was Vested in nature, meaning that they collaborated to produce win-win results by sharing and creating value through innovative, performance-based goals. Basically they flipped the conventional outsourcing approach on its head: P&amp;G developed a business model around contracting for transformation and results instead of contracting for day-to-day work and transactions.</p>  Kate Vitasek View Edit Delete
44  <p>As CEO of Modria&mdash;the pioneering Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform&mdash;Scott Carr provides businesses and government agencies globally with a transformational tool for fast and fair resolutions, customer service efficiency, and even brand loyalty. The model provides a unique pathway to justice and institutional trust for global consumers, and is rapidly growing beyond transactional disputes. After 15 years of development and technological enablement, ODR itself has surged beyond its initial brief of legal cost savings and eCommerce complaint solutions to become a game-changing catalyst for brand building, civil justice access, and marketing intelligence. Carr says that between one and three percent of all transactions go wrong each year, and that clogged Small Claims courts are unable to cope with either the volume or the cross-border jurisdictional nature of online disputes, while consumers have neither the time nor the resources to pursue them through traditional channels.</p>  <p>We have created an online platform for online dispute resolution (ODR) that can resolve disputes of all kinds from eCommerce to relational disputes, and we are available to companies, government agencies, and ADR organizations, to deliver fast and fair resolutions across these categories. We have done a couple of things that I think are unique. One is that we built a configurable platform that has all the modules of dispute resolution that can be snapped together in different ways to solve particular needs. No one else has built a platform like this. We think of online dispute resolution as a business process or a civil justice process, and it is kind of like how salesforce.com created the CRM category&mdash;we have not seen anyone else do that for DR; it is like this underserved business process. Secondly, we built a team with a unique composition of experts, mediators, arbitrators, and technologists. Some are experts in building technologies in start-up environments, some have done international Mediation and Arbitration work, and some are just experts in ODR. No one else has assembled a combination of talents like this. We design the resolution journey, and in that way, we bring people together.</p> <p>The platform is a click away on websites where you are transacting your business: an online marketplace, or a merchant&rsquo;s website, and in some jurisdictions on an ombudsman site. We are increasingly working with ombuds organizations, especially in European jurisdictions. Europe has started to pass laws that require online businesses to provide online dispute resolution. In addition, we have innovated a SaaS-based business model focused on the value of making our customers&rsquo; customers happy. We deliver our platform as a service subscription, and the price depends on the number of disputes the customer runs through the platform. The more disputes you have, and the less you pay per dispute. We deliver value by making it more efficient for you to resolve a dispute&mdash;including resolving it through automate software&mdash;and making your customer happier.</p> <p>ODR is changing the traditional customer service role: Modria is reducing the number of customer contacts in the call center for a problem transaction, and freeing the agents up to do more account management, up-selling and outreach into the customer base. In customer service, for a typical US company, if I pick the phone up and call, and they answer my call and try get me a basic outcome, it is going to cost the company about 12 dollars for labor, technology, telecommunications, and overhead. That is before they pay me any compensation. Our system brings that cost down from 12 dollars to four dollars and eighty cents. We do that through the reduced contacts because we are resolving issues in software; for marketplaces, we resolve issues between buyers and sellers without CS having to get in the middle. We typically serve the space that you might classically think of as Small Claims. Our disputes usually involve 25,000 dollars or less, but resolutions are tailored and often involve solutions beyond dollars that might satisfy the customer. With an eCommerce site, the value is often 25 dollars to 150 dollars, but we also, for example, resolve insurance disputes. We have a large caseload in the state of New York, and with New York No Fault insurance those claims are higher because they are related to medical bills, but they are still not millions of dollars.</p> <p>We have spent a lot of time innovating the user experience, and trying to package up what we call resolution flows. What we see is that there are patterns of commerce and the disputes that arise from them. A typical problem we see from customers is that they didn&rsquo;t get their item. Or they did get their item, but it was not the way it was described on the website. We innovate by pre-building the resolution process, so we give our customers a jump-start when it comes to deploying online dispute resolution. They do not have to start from a blank piece of paper. We synthesize decades of experience in this. We are working with major airline companies on delayed flight compensation, and so far it is working well. If your flight was six hours late, and you missed a meeting, how do you build that resolution flow and make it available to multiple jurisdictions?</p> <p>Most disputes are resolved in the diagnosis and negotiation phases, and then there is also a neutral party in the mediation module. Beyond that, there is the arbitration pathway that also sees resolution in a short time, relative to the courts. We are now in a regulated process; decisions are typically given by retired judges who are arbitrators. All their decisions are published online, and are searchable. In a lot of ways, it looks like an online court, and is legally binding&mdash;a process the injured party opts into.</p>  <p>I think there are two things that hold back innovation. One is that people look at disputes as just customer service&mdash;to answer the phone and quickly dispatch an answer&mdash;as opposed to realizing that when a transaction goes wrong, companies or government agencies need to provide a resolution process that&rsquo;s not just giving them a return. We have a bit of resistance, and you need a change in people&rsquo;s thinking to realize that what customers want are resolutions, not talking to customer service agents. When our customers shift our thinking in that simple way, we can suddenly use technology to deliver resolutions with benefits for both parties.</p> <p>Also, customer service is usually seen as a cost center. When we try to bring innovation here, customer service teams see how this can transform the customer journey, and they can see how the economics are aligned. Our service often reduces the number of contacts into the customer service center, because people just work it out, or our software provides a resolution for the customer without a customer agent having to interact. Part of the enterprise challenge is to get companies to realize this is a sales and marketing benefit. This goes directly to your brand, to your customer retention, and it goes to Net Promoter Score (NPS) or customer referral. You must think broadly, and that can be a challenge to adoption.</p>  <p>We always have a bit of R&amp;D running, even though we are a young company. Innovation is encouraged within a framework we call &ldquo;Listen, Learn and Innovate.&rdquo; We drive innovation based on what our customers are telling us, and we use that to enhance the technology and the product. We aggregate data across the disputes platforms, in an anonymized fashion, for the benefit of all customers to improve the platform. What I have learned at Modria is that every time I turn to anther industry, I discover a category of disputes that have probably impacted my own life in the past, and that I wish I had had a mechanism to resolve.</p>  <p>Technology innovations you will see from us is the use of machine learning and AI to learn from our customer dispute volumes, and to tune policies to auto-resolve issues when we can. Based on the pattern and behavior our customer&rsquo;s customer has shown via the platform, if we know what the answer is going to be, then why are we sending them to a customer service agent? Let&rsquo;s say we are serving an online marketplace: when a customer clicks &ldquo;I have a problem,&rdquo; we ask them some questions. We take them through this diagnosis process. If in answering these questions, we realize 99 percent of the time the answer is going to be X, we can offer that solution right then and there. It might be as simple as telling them: &ldquo;A replacement is on the way; it&rsquo;ll be there overnight.&rdquo;</p>  <p>I think this use of data and AI is changing our lives in ways we don&rsquo;t even expect. I watch my granddaughter interact with technology, and people talking to their phones, and I watch Uber self-driving cars in San Francisco. The most interesting innovation to me is the way that software is going to become intelligent, and essentially become our companion as we travel through life. And it is sneaking up on us from a social perspective in ways people are not anticipating.</p>  Scott Carr View Edit Delete
57  <p>Robert Novo is a director in the global services division of BT (British Telecom) where he leads a department responsible for various proactive ITIL functions that are an integral part of a managed services contract for a multi-national, Fortune 200 insurance company. He and his team are responsible for a network with tens of thousands of devices, serving hundreds of sites worldwide. The team provides management and planning of various functions including capacity, inventory, change, problem, release, and knowledge as well as managing and supporting the tools used in the day to day monitoring and operations of the network.</p> <p>Robert has 30+ years of experience in the industry, having worked with customers all over the world, published papers/articles, and presented at conferences on leading-edge technologies in both Spanish and English. Prior to joining BT, Robert has held a variety of senior leadership positions in the telecommunications networking industry, in areas including business strategy consulting, research and development, product/service management, complex data analysis and forecasting, and software tool support. Robert holds a Master of Engineering degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.</p> <p>He has spent almost his entire career in customer facing roles because of the satisfaction he gets of seeing innovations being put into practice, particularly when making strategic decisions. &ldquo;Every day, we face complex problems that we are challenged to boil down to the right black and white, dollars and cents, decision point. Not enough depth in the analysis increases the risk of a sub-optimal decision. Too much can result in wasted effort and time or &lsquo;paralysis by analysis.&rsquo; Understanding the problem statement and determining that sweet spot is essential.&rdquo; He advocates innovation as early as possible in the problem definition process to maximize the potential benefit.</p> <p>Robert has developed telecommunications traffic projections for many customers worldwide, with forecasts ranging anywhere from 6 months to 15 years. &ldquo;The level of detail in the analysis has to be tailored to the forecast window. Near term projections are more driven by trends in existing customers and applications. Longer term, we need to look more into industry disruptors and social, business, and technology trends. Fifteen years ago, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat weren&rsquo;t around and Facebook was nascent. Fifteen years from now, the Internet may be dominated by a new generation of apps, but a constant will always be the people, companies, and machines behind them creating the traffic.&rdquo;</p> <p>In his current position, Robert leads a team of experts located throughout Hungary, India, The United Kingdom, and The United States. Two areas he considers essential to keep his team thinking ahead of the curve are collaboration in the decision making process and customer centricity. &ldquo;Innovation should not only be a personal objective. We should always look at ways to encourage and nurture it in others.&rdquo;</p>  <p>BT has established an operational model for some of our key, complex, globally-managed services customers, where we have separated the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) functions that are primarily proactive, such as capacity planning, RCA/problem management and inventory management from the more traditional day-to-day functions like maintenance and incident management. The latter functions are supported by the network operations (NOC) team, while the team that supports the proactive functions as well as the network management tools is referred to as TCAP (Tools, Capacity, Availability, Performance, Problem). Under this model, I lead the global TCAP team that is part of a managed services contract for a multi-national, Fortune 200 insurance company with hundreds of sites and tens of thousands of network elements.</p> <p>Because of this distributed operational model, BT is in a better position to engage in strategic planning discussions with our managed services customers; understanding their business plans and forecasts and their impact on the network. The team is better positioned to translate these business plans and forecasts into new requirements for analysis, reporting updates, and network monitoring and management tool features/capabilities.</p>  <p>One of the biggest impediments to innovation is inertia. While the objective of any innovation in the long run is a positive impact to the business, whether in savings or revenue, most innovations will require an upfront effort and investment to define a problem statement, hypothesize, test the hypothesis, measure the benefit and implement the solution. In particular, if it is an operational innovation, those who will use it will need to be trained and alter their daily working model to embrace it.</p> <p>It is an easy trap to focus solely on meeting day-to-day deliverables and obligations, thereby losing sight of the &ldquo;big picture&rdquo; and not dedicating enough time for problem analysis and planning of innovations. The challenge is in establishing a balance, and investing enough time in the short term for defining and analyzing key problems and subsequently planning and developing innovations to address them.</p> <p>The risk of organizational inertia emphasizes the need for effective and cascaded goal setting, both at the personal and organizational level; i.e., establishing, tracking and validating completion of relevant and SMART objectives yearly, monthly, weekly and in certain cases even daily, and ensuring appropriate targets for innovation are included in those goals.</p>  <p>The first part of the question is an interesting one. I would say that innovation has not become engrained in our organization&rsquo;s culture, because it has been there all along. We have been thought leaders since 1846 when the Electric Telegraph Company was first formed in The United Kingdom. The founders were excited by the business applications of innovation, excited by the commercial potential of electricity and magnetism could offer for communications. And since 1984, we have become truly global, extending our presence with locations and customers all over the world.</p> <p>As a company, BT has a portfolio of approximately 5000 patents, and files over 100 new applications every year. Over the last five years, we have invested over &pound;2.5B in R&amp;D. We leverage substantial academic engagements with more than 30 elite universities around the world, including MIT, Cambridge University and Tshinghua University.</p> <p>Locally and more specifically to everyone on my team, innovation is essential to our day-to-day jobs. We optimize innovations through the goal and objective-setting process (see above) both on a team as well as on an individual basis, and we measure the impact of any potential innovations against the overall benefits to the business.</p>  <p>From a networking technology perspective, security is an ongoing concern where growth and change continue to happen. Unfortunately, it&rsquo;s not just the &ldquo;good guys&rdquo; who are innovating. The threat landscape is rapidly changing. Every day we are hearing about new and creative ways people and companies are being put at risk, such as DDoS attacks, data theft and breaches and viruses, malware and ransomware. Hackers, with the backing of deep-pocketed organizations that provide endless resources are getting more and more sophisticated in their attacks. The industry has to constantly innovate by adapting its technologies and approach to stay ahead of the game in light of all these new cyber threats, designing services that are highly available and robust, and networks that are more resilient and making data more secure.</p> <p>From the point of view of process engineering, I expect automation to be the key game changer. As enterprises digitally transform further, automation will enable them to be more efficient, increasing agility and reducing costs. IoT, M2M and machine learning will be further catalysts for this automation.</p>  <p>I think that the best innovations occur in collaborative environments; when you are part of a wider ecosystem. Our research and innovation center in Adastral Park, near Ipswich, used to be a BT-only facility. However, it is now a collaborative, open community of close to 100 leading edge technology companies and 4000 employees between BT and its partners. Our strong track record of collaborating with many institutions, including our customers and partners, has led to many examples of mutual business benefits derived from the innovations that were jointly created.</p>  Robert Novo View Edit Delete
30  <p>In 2012, Greg Smith became an overnight game-changer in the debate for Wall Street reform, with his sensational public resignation in the New York Times: &ldquo;Why I am leaving Goldman Sachs.&rdquo; The former Goldman equities vice president is again tackling systemic inefficiencies and predatory practices in the financial world, but this time it&rsquo;s in the retirement savings sector. Smith recently accepted the role as President of Blooom, a Midwest startup which was named a Word Top 10 Innovative Company (2015) in the personal finance space by <em>Fast Company.</em></p> <p>The South African expatriate was motivated to move due to the realization that technology innovation had yet to be harnessed to bring down costs for consumers in the financial services sector &ndash; and his conviction that, in a gridlocked legislative environment, only innovation could trigger rapid reform.The company was created in response to these astonishing research findings: that four out of every five 401K plans are incorrectly invested, and that the average American unknowingly pays $150,000 in investment fees over their lifetime &ndash; the bulk of which are entirely needless. Also, its products were innovated on the basis of these twin conclusions: that 401K plans simply cannot be efficiently managed on a DIY basis, and that only the wealthy can afford financial advisers who can customize and maximize the investments while minimizing their costs.</p> <p>Just a year after its official launch, Blooom has already taken over management of 401K plans for clients in 48 states, using smart software which automatically rebalances investments, while lowering fees. Blooom manages close to $100 million of retirement assets, and employees at half of the Fortune 50 have already signed up as clients of Blooom.</p> <p>Blooom is also disrupting the competition with its flat fee business model charging individuals as little as $1 per month to manage and update their portfolios. Additionally, an essay was published in Time magazine this month exposing the astonishing inefficiencies in the 401k system. Smith is again giving a public jolt to conventional thinking. And his mission is nothing less than to see an entire generation of Americans harness smart technologies to secure their retirement future.</p>  <p>The US retirement space has changed significantly over the last few decades. People of a previous generation were more likely to receive a guaranteed pension either from their employer or the government. Today, Social Security is not enough to provide a stable retirement, and guaranteed pensions have largely disappeared. So Americans have to fend for themselves and are left with a legacy 401k system that was never designed for the middle class.</p> <p>It has an overwhelming amount of choice, often high fees, and often poor selections of index funds. Many people are bewildered and overwhelmed by this complexity, and make no choice, often missing out on a decade of compounding returns. Others can make bad choices and pay away up to a third of their nest egg in fees, often without knowing it.&nbsp;</p> <p>Blooom is the first company that has a completely fresh approach to the 401k space. We are an online service that analyzes any 401k, no matter where someone works. We then recommend the necessary changes. Finally, if the client hires us, we completely take over the management of their 401k &ndash; we make the changes for them, we keep an eye on the accounts, and we rebalance it over time. We are not a 'Do-It-Yourself' Solution. We are a 'Do-It-For-You' Solution. All for a Netflix-like subscription fee of $15/month or less.</p> <p>We use the image of a flower (hence blooom!) to represent the health of the 401k, instead of complicated jargon or charts or graphs that no one understands. Clients love the simplicity and we have grown quicker than anyone else in the automated advisory space in the first year since formal launch. We manage 401k&rsquo;s for people in 48 states, from age 22 to 67. Our mission is to fix broken 401k&rsquo;s for millions of Americans.</p>  <p>There are a few impediments that have really kept 401k&rsquo;s in the 1980&rsquo;s, despite the advancement of technology. Firstly, 401k&rsquo;s and retirement are seen as an HR function in the benefits department. Therefore the executives making the decisions on 401k&rsquo;s have ten other benefits to worry about and are not finance people. So the 401k&rsquo;s have often been littered with poor fund selections that end up being egregiously expensive for their own employees. There was even a time when the corporation would get kick-backs or part of the very mutual fund fees that their own employees were paying for their retirement.</p> <p>Paradoxically, retirement became a profit center for the very corporation that was supposed to be providing you with benefits. The second major issue is that government largely thinks of the savings problem as a tax issue instead of a complexity issue. I.e. Government thinks if they can just offer you more attractive tax deferrals in your Roth IRA, that tens of millions more Americans will save more money. But behavioral economist after behavioral economist has told the Senate that it is not about taxes. The overwhelming majority of Americans don&rsquo;t understand the complex tax system. What they need is a very simple system, without jargon, that makes making the &ldquo;right&rdquo; choice an easy proposition. There is no innovation, use of technology, or simplicity in the 401k system. This needs to change.</p>  <p>Well I am quite new to Blooom, but am not new to its mission. I think we try to think of every decision we make through a human lens. Finance is complicated &ndash; often purposefully &ndash; so no one can understand it and so that lots of people can continue to make lots of money off an unsuspecting general public. Our view is that anything we do needs to be understandable to someone who knows nothing about finance.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s why we charge people a transparent, monthly subscription fee instead of the industry standard of &ldquo;basis points&rdquo; or &ldquo;expense ratios&rdquo; that get deducted out of people&rsquo;s accounts without them knowing it. That&rsquo;s why we use simple imagery to explain one&rsquo;s 401k instead of a complicated chart. Because of this drive to make everything human, we are forced to keep things really simple. And in finance, keeping things extremely simple turns out to very innovative, and something that people love.</p>  <p>The biggest change will come within 5 years, when the millennial generation will constitute half the global workforce. People underestimate how differently millennials think about money versus baby boomers. Millennials like simplicity, transparency, the predictability of software, the ability to tap the wisdom of their peers and crowdsource an answer instead of paying an expensive advisor for the answer. And that advisor had to deal with lots of paperwork that also runs up the costs. All of this is going away in the investment management business. I think costs will come down and transparency will hopefully go up.</p>  <p>I think much of what is going on in the mobile banking space in developing countries around the world has been truly extraordinary. Examples like M-Pesa that started in Africa, which allows those who don&rsquo;t have access to a bank to perform much of the basics of banking &ndash; sending money, paying people, saving small amounts of money. Why doesn&rsquo;t the developed world follow this example and make it easier for everyone to be banked?&nbsp;</p> <p>I also think some of the &ldquo;Nudge" practices going on around the world in national savings systems is good. For example, we know that the only proven way to make people save money is to make it easy for them. I think the 401k system for example should move in an opt-out/nudge direction. For example, when a new person joins a company, start taking some small amount out of their salary and putting it away for them in a low cost, appropriate investment. This will then escalate this percentage over time or when the person gets a raise. And the employee can absolutely opt-out. But what economists find, is that few people do opt out, and ultimately are happy that this inertia set in.<br /><br />Companies<em>&nbsp;are&nbsp;</em>allowed to automatically enroll their employees to 401k plans, yet only about half of corporate CEO&rsquo;s choose to do so. This is very sad, since many people could be contributing to a nest egg, and often getting free matching from their company, yet they don&rsquo;t do so because they never get over the hurdle of signing up for their 401k in the first place.</p>  Greg Smith View Edit Delete
29  <p>With both corporate wellness and elite staff retention increasingly critical for large enterprises, President Charles Lusk and his partners at On-Site Dental Solutions have pioneered a game-changing model that is solving multiple challenges at once.&nbsp;</p> <p>It turns out that in an economy where employee populations are best treated as treasured communities, an on-site dental suite offers far more value than an additional amenity to the gym and the company laundry.&nbsp;</p>  <p>We&rsquo;re very proud of our title as the first fully dedicated provider of turn-key dental suites. We sought to create a care delivery model for dentistry that previously did not exist in the same form, quality and packaging for campus environments.&nbsp; We wanted to bottle the magic of private dental practice and drop it into corporate settings in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, and customized to those settings. We love the way clinical settings of every kind are trending more towards aesthetically pleasing environments as opposed to sterile and impersonal settings as found in days gone by. &nbsp;</p> <p>We like to think of ourselves as pioneers in this area.&nbsp; Dentistry is perhaps the most interpersonal form of healthcare, since the services are provided &ldquo;face-to-face.&rdquo; While we are unable to eliminate every element of that experience, we strive hard to control the things within our reach to positively impact the clients senses.&nbsp;But the value-adds have been game changing too. We know that a filling today avoids a very costly crown tomorrow. But there is also a high correlation between a lack of routine dental care and large medical claims involving chronic disease later on.</p> <p>One of the most valuable commodities is time, and employers are measuring productivity in terms of not just absenteeism, but also &ldquo;presenteeism&rdquo;, which involves remarkably significant losses &ndash; the degree to which they don&rsquo;t have fully engaged employees within the workplace. If you have toothache, it's probably a major reason why you&rsquo;re not mentally engaged.</p> <p>Also, a lot of our clients are really interested in optimal recruitment and retention &ndash; and they know the millennial generation is looking closely at the work environment.</p> <p>Having a boutique dental office on-site goes a long way for clients in communicating the message that we really care about our community.&nbsp; In fact, we do frequently have prospective employees come into our offices, because the employers are very proud of these amenities.</p>  <p>The &ldquo;status-quo&rdquo; is always an impediment.&nbsp; We realize this isn&rsquo;t unique to our organization but rather a consistent theme throughout organizations looking to meet needs in new and innovative ways.&nbsp;Both end users and employees have to embrace the bundling of traditional dental services in a non-traditional setting, the corporate or university campus environment.&nbsp; Because the patient has gone out for dental services for so long; it can take some time to comprehend the dentist operating where the patient already is!</p>  <p>Our company was founded on the principle of change.&nbsp; We have learned a lot about the need to build a culture that appreciates innovation and change. In interviews we describe &ldquo;change&rdquo; scenarios and ask those candidates as to whether those circumstances evoke feelings of comfort or discomfort.&nbsp; Of course, the excitement and adventure that comes with climates of innovation are highlighted as well as the challenges.&nbsp;</p> <p>We ultimately want individuals and team members to be where they are supposed to be, whether it be with our growing organization or another that can offer more of a daily routine. We believe no single person has a monopoly on good ideas.&nbsp; We love to celebrate the individual with a unique outlook on how to maximize our potential as an organization.&nbsp; This begins with the patient experience and extends to our institutional &ldquo;host&rdquo; clients.&nbsp; We try hard to craft each relationship with care and a certain level of customization. &nbsp;</p>  <p>Already, we are able to provide client employers with new analytical HR tools&ndash; bringing population health statistics to the table, which the employer can reflect on and use to make key decisions around their populations. At our core, we are still a services organization.&nbsp; Our product is our people.&nbsp; Leaders in the dental field will be distinguished by the excellence with which they provide high quality and ethical dentistry.&nbsp; Ultimately this comes down to the talent and ethos of the individual dentist and the care team that surrounds them.&nbsp;</p>  <p>I really like Spotify. You&rsquo;d think that there were so many different ways already out there to package music, but their approach really resonated for so many people, including myself &ndash; to offer music that reflects your mood. Similarly, our company is not reinventing the wheel in our space; we&rsquo;re just taking it down a path it hasn&rsquo;t been before, which is perhaps comparable to the exceptional Spotify approach.</p>  Charles Lusk View Edit Delete
51  <p>Nancy Selph is the COO for Innovation and Data Governance at Deutsche Bank in New York. She manages the central team that supports the innovation function globally through labs in locations around the world. The labs collaborate with a global focus and share three principal goals: to help the bank evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, to develop a culture of innovation, and to contribute to the bank's digital strategy.</p> <p>The launch of the Deutsche Bank Innovation Lab New York in March marked the fourth lab in the iconic bank&rsquo;s global initiative to create an ecosystem for Fintech innovation. Representing an integral component of the Frankfurt-based bank&rsquo;s broader, growth-oriented digital strategy of enhancing products and service to clients, the labs explore and evaluate scores of start-ups and emerging technologies to unlock business benefits such as better risk management, tighter controls and enhanced client experience.</p> <p>The innovation labs were the brainchild of Kim Hammonds, Member of the Management Board and Group Chief Operating Officer, three years ago after she joined Deutsche Bank from Boeing. The labs are located near Deutsche Bank&rsquo;s business and technology centers and embedded within top innovation ecosystems. The core function of labs teams are as innovation specialists representing the bank&rsquo;s interests. They seek to understand the demand challenges of internal partners within the bank and then look to globally vet new and emerging technologies. They then explore if there is a match and conduct experimentation to see if the solution can work inside the bank.</p> <p>Among the technologies Deutsche Bank has adopted via the labs is a web-based financial risk analysis tool. The new service alerts credit risk officers so they can actively manage client ratings, thereby supporting better business decisions and liquidity for clients. Another tool helps analyze surveillance data harvested from multiple sources bank-wide.</p> <p>The labs help transform the bank through adopting emerging technologies and by working on the more complex process and technology themes the bank faces. Digital retail banking, Distributed Ledger and the future of international payments are some of the larger challenges they are exploring.</p> <p>&ldquo;Some people believe innovation has to be instant and revolutionary. But all eureka moments come from years of hard work and evolutionary change. Global banks will evolve to where we want to be in this same way. We will utilize new technologies to solve challenges that will be rolled out incrementally across the bank.&rdquo;</p> <p>Having worked for a Fintech pioneer in the early 1990s, Selph has the benefit of having both witnessed the impacts of several game-changing innovation generations in the finance sector, and of understanding changing expectations in an age of digitally empowered customers. In her career, she has held key operations and executive roles with five investment banks.</p> <p>&ldquo;I joined a small company called Teknekron Software Systems in 1990, which revolutionized the way trading floors operated,&rdquo; she recalls. &ldquo;Teknekron developed the middleware which distributed digitized stock market data to trading floors. The company became TIBCO in 1994. That technology in the early &lsquo;90s was game-changing. We knew more about technology than the people using the systems, which is typically not the case today. This is because most people working at Deutsche Bank, or any other enterprise, tend to have access to faster and cheaper consumer products than we can provide inside of the bank. Banks have merged and they have been acquired, and they have different systems for varied purposes. It is very challenging to fully integrate those systems. That is one of the challenges the bank has when adopting new technologies.&rdquo;</p>  <p>The idea of the lab presence itself is about giving people a space to come and think differently and engage with us. We run demand sessions with our business teams to get to the root cause of their challenges and then find solutions to meet those needs. It is the applied adoption of new technologies with a return on investment by decreasing risk, simplifying the environment or increasing revenue. By the time we have introduced the technology into the bank, we are confident it will make a difference.</p>  <p>All large banks have challenges. The size, credentials and history of the bank reflects the complexity of the underlying systems and processes that need to be transformed. The labs have been created specifically to tackle these challenges on all fronts. Some are easier than others to solve, but the needs of our business and technology partners within the bank are always our focus. Something that helps overcome impediments is how well the labs have been embraced by the bank. There is huge support and engagement at the executive level to make Deutsche Bank great from a technology perspective.&nbsp;</p>  Innovation is one of the pillars of Deutsche Bank and at the cornerstone of everything the bank is doing. Our CEO, John Cryan, talks about the innovation labs often in his public speeches as a means to enable us to service our clients in a better fashion. It is a top-down imperative with a bottom-up implementation, making the lab accessible to everybody. The labs are for all Deutsche Bank employees. People come in and see the bank has invested in working differently. Everybody who has walked through our doors or spoken to one of us feels the excitement and takes it back to their desks.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;  <p>Over the next few years, technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and analytics will transform the banking industry. What these new technologies can do with analyzing and transforming vast amount of data is amazing.</p>  <p>I love how Panera Bread leveraged technology to change the ordering experience. The wait was long and the orders were not always right. They transformed their ordering process through in-store kiosks and a mobile app, so now it takes a minute instead of eight to order your food there. I&rsquo;m always looking for ways to save time in my life, so this resonates with me.</p>  Nancy Selph View Edit Delete
26  <p>Voted one of Houston&rsquo;s &ldquo;40 under 40&rdquo; business stars by Houston Business Journal, Phillips has founded and grown a company which is changing the game for consumers in the healthcare field. In fact, in September 2014, PBS named 2nd.MD one of the Most Innovative US companies.&nbsp;Whether solving the most complex medical case, serving the poorest in Africa, or speaking at MIT, he is determined to make healthcare ridiculously easier, and more effective, for millions of families.</p>  <p>Medical knowledge is doubling every two years and most people are receiving poor, conflicted medical information. 2nd.MD's first goal is to make the ability to reach medical specialists more easily accessible.&nbsp;For example, our member​s can now&nbsp;​enjoy a video consultation with&nbsp;a top specialist from ho​me ​within three days,&nbsp;getting remarkable clarity and up-to-date information regarding their condition. ​We are combining high-tech with high-touch, and the marriage is beautiful. Healthcare gets faster, easier and more personal.​</p>  <p>One of the biggest impediments to innovation in our industry is simply being in the&nbsp;healthcare&nbsp;business. Things have been so bad for so long ​that organizations have stopped trying to improve. Large organizations control a lot of the industry, making big changes difficult, even if it would help everyone.</p> <p>A second impediment is that everyone is concerned about their&nbsp;data&nbsp;being shared or stolen. Healthcare data is incredibly sensitive, but unless you can understand and access someone&rsquo;s healthcare data, how can you help them?&nbsp;</p> <p>A third is the&nbsp;fear&nbsp;of the unknown. When speaking to a top doctor via video for a second opinion, doctors worry they might lose a patient; members worry they might offend their doctor by seeking a second opinion; hospitals worry that a procedure might be cancelled. Like most of our fears, they don&rsquo;t come true, but you can still expect resistance.</p>  <p>Our team is a group of people so unsatisfied with the current limitations and frustrations of healthcare that we cannot stop thinking about how we can improve it.​ Changing lives is the fuel that lets us know we are headed in the right direction. Our team continually reviews new apps and companies to evaluate if there is something we can learn and improve upon. We look over our shoulder constantly, knowing that our success can be shadowed by a new or current player improving on our model. Frustration, fear, and faith are three equal motivators that drive us to improve.</p>  <p>Being able to prick your finger and monitor 100 markers in your blood on your smartphone is particularly exciting to me. We trademarked 'hospital in your hand' as we see how the smartphone could become the center of healthcare.​ Having most of your medical encounters with medical professionals be from home will save tremendous time, cost, and frustration of sitting in a medical suite for an hour reading old magazines. Also, the ability to instantly access your medical records from various places will allow progress in our treatments and lessen waste, which will be a game-changer in its own right.</p>  <p>I honestly cannot think of a more compelling innovation than one which saves lives through linking people in need to right doctors when they need it most. And what industry requires innovation more urgently than healthcare, where our members remind us daily of the lack of clarity, unnecessary paperwork, unjustifiable cost, and rough edges of our healthcare system.​&nbsp;</p> <p>This week at a managers meeting for a famous company, an employee stood up and told us how 2nd.MD changed their child's life. They had been to see 40 specialists and were not sure of their baby&rsquo;s future. Today they have a plan and a new hope after a single video consultation with a top doctor.​ No innovation has driven customer engagement like stories people share with one another when a life has been changed.​&nbsp;</p> <p>Of note, my son will never know the healthcare we all struggled with. He will simply pick up his tablet, ask to speak to a doctor, video consult with a perfectly matched doctor who is looking at his records, diagnose his blood, and then, following doctors orders, will roll over and go back to sleep. That&rsquo;s what we are building.</p>  Clinton Phillips View Edit Delete
16  <p>Lilach Felner is a marketing consultant and lecturer specializing in building customer trust. She helps companies and brands become trustworthy by injecting trust into their businesses. As a marketer of multinational consumer brands for over 15 years, Lilach has experienced first-hand the tsunami of consumer militancy towards companies and brands, social media escalation and the dramatic transition of power to consumers.&nbsp;Her Trustworthy Marketing Approach helps organizations and brands become more worthy of their customers&rsquo; trust in the age of open social communication.&nbsp;</p>  <p>First, the organization must be managed by strong leaders that know where the organization is heading, and have a clear purpose and clear goals. Second, in order to make the changes happen, the organization needs a management that "walks the walk", adheres to its values and lives by them. Essentially, an organization needs management that believes in the necessity of change, and is willing to be committed to the change and its implications. Third, rolling out the change depends on management's ability to lead and inspire its employees, to empower those who come up with ideas, nurture them and activate them as advocates.&nbsp; In order to execute change, the employees must be involved. This is why the management should have an "open door policy," encouraging an open flow of communication and demonstrating high levels of accessibility. Fourth, another critical parameter for rolling out innovation and change is trust. In an atmosphere of trust, innovation and speed reach their full potential.&nbsp;</p>  <p>Based on my experience, the biggest obstacles to change and innovation are as follows:</p> <p>Short term-ism: A short-term managerial attitude includes management that is focused on short-term gain rather than long-term growth, management that finds it difficult to balance the need for long-term strategy with short-term results demanded by the market, and management that doesn't communicate a long-term vision for the business.</p> <p>A continuously decreasing Chief Executive Officer tenure: CEOs and senior executives with short tenure seem to have few incentives to embrace long-term oriented behavior. They find themselves facing an intriguing ethical dilemma between optimizing their financial pay-off within their own tenure and securing the longer-term well-being of the organization. According to a 2014 report released by The Conference Board, the average tenure of a departing S&amp;P 500 company CEO has decreased in recent years, from roughly 10 years in 2000 to 8.1 years in 2012.</p>  <p>The innovation process should start from the CEO and the management team in order to give it the focus and the priority it deserves. A special committee for innovative change should be appointed with representatives from all relevant departments. Employees should feel they are involved as well. In order to examine the effectiveness and the results of the process, a 'before and after' survey should be conducted.&nbsp;It is recommended to plan a kick-off session with all relevant employees in order to create involvement and engagement and build their commitment.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>  <p>Given the erosion in customer trust towards organizations and brands due to a history of over-promising and under-delivering, not only do we find more and more customers who arm themselves with as much unbiased information as possible but also more and more consumers who trust what their peers say. In this reality, I believe new technologies should focus on the 'social customers', those customers that are constantly engaging with one another in order to seek out advice and opinions from their peers. Engaging these powerful, trusted voices has become even more important considering that 92 percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family (Nielsen&rsquo;s Global Trust in Advertising Report). &nbsp;Another area that challenges new technologies lies in the proliferation of communications channels. The challenge is to create a seamless, omni-channel solution that will provide a single, <em>seamless experience </em>for the customer across all channels. The customer views the company as being one company no matter how many channels it has. Each platform needs to have awareness of the other. This means a lot of coordination between IT and marketing.&nbsp;</p>  <p>I have two examples of trustworthy leaders who embody the innovation mindset in the way they lead.</p> <p>Tony Hsieh, the inspiring widely-admired founder and CEO of Zappos.How often do we see a company where most of its efforts towards customers happen after they&rsquo;ve made the sale? How often do we see a company that has reps who are trained so that when a customer is looking for a specific pair of shoes, if they&rsquo;re out of stock (for example, they don&rsquo;t have their size), they will look on at least three competitor web sites and refer the customer to that competitor if they find the shoe the customer is looking for? Hsieh has innovated the way Zappos treats its employees, its customers, and its suppliers. Hsieh is an inspiring example of a leader who believes that being true to your own values is fundamental to how others will perceive you.</p> <p>Peter Aceto, the President and CEO of Tangerine&mdash;formerly ING Direct Canada. How often do we see a CEO who measures his employees&rsquo; views about his leadership after his first year as CEO? After his first year as CEO, Peter Aceto decided to send a company-wide email, inviting everyone to vote on whether they wanted him to remain in charge. He was prepared to leave the position if the employees weren&rsquo;t inspired by his leadership. The response rate was 95% and of those who responded 97% said he should stay.&nbsp;</p>  Lilach Felner View Edit Delete

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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 20, 2020200
22SELECT COUNT(*) AS `count` FROM `bpinorg_dev`.`innovator_profiles` AS `InnovatorProfile` LEFT JOIN `bpinorg_dev`.`leaders` AS `Leader` ON (`InnovatorProfile`.`leader_id` = `Leader`.`id`) WHERE 1 = 1110