Braden Kelley

The world is changing and needs Social Business Architects. Gone is the epoch of the passive consumer, now customers want a say. At the same time, the quest for survival and growth is causing companies to stop looking at suppliers as someone to squeeze on price and instead as partners in innovation. And, employers are realizing that to maximize their success they need to attract and engage the best talent not just into internal talent pools, but external ones as well.

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Click on Part 1 or Part 2 if you missed them

Purpose and Passion

Ultimately, successful and sustainable innovation is all about purpose and passion. The people in your organization have to be clear on what the purpose of the organization is. Ideally, that purpose has to be something bigger than the individuals and something that people can get passionate about, because first and foremost, as Jeffrey Phillips has said, “You can’t force a disinterested person to innovate.”

Passion is a prerequisite not just for getting started with innovation; people leading innovation projects must have enough passion to fight through, over, around, or under any obstacles they may encounter in their effort to make a new idea a reality.

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Despite the fact that Twitter has been around since 2006 and Facebook has been around since 2004, social media is still the bright shiny object in the room (it’s still the current marketing fad). People still think they are being innovative if they use it, and unfortunately many people still approach it as something separate and scary instead of treating it as just one tool in the toolbox of anyone working in marketing or innovation. Yes, I linked social media to innovation in the last sentence and that’s because in the same way that social media is a tool that all marketers must learn how to use as part of an integrated marketing campaign, innovation managers must also learn how to use social media properly as part of their innovation efforts.

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If you missed Part 1, you can find it here

If You Want Systemic Innovation, You Need Systems to Manage It

If you are really serious about creating sustainable innovation in your organization and engaging more than just a handful of people in the generation of ideas, you not only need to have a group of people to manage the process (either part – time or full – time), but you also need systems to manage the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea development processes. This class of software is commonly referred to as innovation management software and it is often sold in a Software as a Service (SaaS) manner. Organizations with above average privacy or security concerns may choose to run this software locally in their own organization (see Figure 10.1 ).

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Key Dangers:

• Viewing innovation as a temporary, extraordinary effort in response to a crisis, or pursuing innovation as a competitive response.
• Treating innovation as the domain of only the R & D or Marketing department, or some other subgroup.
• Treating innovation as a project-based activity, instead of as an integral organizational capability to be invested in and professionally managed.

Success can be blinding. Organizations often drive themselves by trying to look through the windscreen and in the rearview mirror, only to get blindsided by something from the left or the right. Put another way, organizations often focus on what they’ve already done and moving it forward (often in an incremental way). Organizations also invest in defending and extending the core products and services that made them successful — focusing a huge amount of energy on protecting their flank. Don’t get me wrong, incremental innovation is important, but all of your competitors are trying to make their products and services incrementally better than yours at the same time. At best, your efforts will allow you to maintain or make slight improvements in revenue and profitability.

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In this webinar hosted by Innocentive I explore how organizations can utilize open innovation and crowdsourcing resources as an essential talent management strategy to drive their business.

You can engage me to create a webinar or white paper for your audience here.

I found a couple of great infographics over on BusinessInsider that you’ll find below.

They highlight some truly astounding activity numbers from what happens in the world of technology and on the Internet.

Did you know that in a single minute there are over 168 million emails are sent? That’s just one example of the mind blowing online activity that takes place every sixty seconds.

Here are some of the other amazing things that happen in 60 seconds (click to enlarge):

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As we are now in the middle of the Twelve Days of Christmas, I thought it might be fun to do a post from the innovator’s perspective of the kinds of gifts that might mean the most to an innovator during the holidays when it comes to their quest for innovation excellence. The song however does get quite repetitive so instead of running through it in song format, let’s look at the Twelve Days of Innovation as a list:

1. On the first day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – Top Level Support for Innovation

There is no doubt that whatever the Chief Executive takes the time to talk about (repeatedly) and measure, is what people focus on and support in the organization. Having the CEO or even the whole top level of management talking about the importance of innovation by itself isn’t of course enough to make innovation happen. When we talk about Top Level Support, it may include the top level talking about their support for innovation, but it is more important that they show their support for innovation by giving the innovation efforts of the company a voice and making resources available to support them and in some cases even measuring and rewarding the level of innovation contribution of the staff in order to make it go.

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I had the opportunity recently to interview Geoffrey A Moore, the best-selling author of such popular books as Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game and Dealing with Darwin. He has a new book out called Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past and having had some of his books on the Innovation Excellence Reading List for a while I thought it made sense to sit down and pose him some questions to get some of his latest perspectives, thoughts and insights on innovation.

Here is the text from the interview:

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FREE Innocentive Webinar on December 13, 2011 at 2PM EST

As more industries become commoditized and innovation becomes more of a focus, organizations are being forced to move beyond a talent ownership mindset to a talent attraction and engagement mindset.

In this webinar, we will explore how organizations can utilize open innovation and crowdsourcing resources as an essential talent management strategy to harness the growing numbers of retired scientists, unemployed experts, and underemployed talent around the world to generate ideas, solve problems, and further the goals of the business. The webinar will also explore how individuals can bolster their incomes and credentials by participating in open competitive challenges.

Three things you’ll learn:

1. Why having an external talent network strategy is becoming increasingly important
2. How leading organization manage their open innovation and crowdsourcing efforts
3. Strategies for attracting and engaging talent to your organization’s innovation efforts

Register for this FREE Webinar