Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Architected, Inc. (IAI).

Today IAM Talking with Ethan Bloch CEO and Co-founder of Flowtown, and we’ll be talking about Flowtown’s evolution (thru two pivots or restarts) into the Gift Marketing platform it is today. Keep your eyes open for what they’re up to – this is a shift in marketing that everyone should pay attention to. It’s an interesting twist on influence, guerilla marketing, and stunning people with great products and services, not beating them over the head with TV ads and traditional media.

Free Samples aren’t just for Costco Aisles

Ethan is a whip-smart entrepreneur, tied into the best of both technology (a given), but also into deep roots of marketing and human behavior. He and his Co-founder, Dan Martell (with the rest of the Flowtown team) are bouncing right on the waves of the social media revolution to do things a bit differently.

We talk briefly about the pivots/restarts of Flowtown, where the earlier incarnation to the current model was experiencing rocket growth only to be shutdown and rebooted entirely.

The newest version of Flowtown, off to a great start since the launch in November 2010, focuses on Gift Marketing.

Gift Marketing?

Never heard of it?

Pay attention to the stories Ethan mentions of a little coffee shop in San Francisco down the street from Flowtown’s offices, and the “Crush It” success of Pretzel Crisps, which Ethan almost forgot to mention, but is (ahem) tremendous food for thought.

Unexpected gifts, customer engagement, listening to the market – that’s right folks, it’s a new world, but the good news is… it works. It’s cheaper. It’s faster. And you should be trying it right now if you haven’t already.

Comments or Questions?

Wondering how to apply Gift Marketing to your company? Can you use similar techniques inside your company? Comment below, and we’ll answer and discuss together.

Listen now!

If you’re looking to “Enterprise 2.0″ to make you:

• Better at collaboration, or
• More social, or
• Better at innovation, or
• Anything else that is equally vague… stop right now.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

And certainly, do not buy or build any Enterprise 2.0 tech just yet.

Let’s Back Up…

• What will “better collaboration” actually do for me? Me – as in the one person currently reading this post (ok, you, if you insist).
• What would that do for my normal team of co-workers?
• What about the random teams/projects I get pulled into?
• What about the company as a whole?
• What about relationships to my partners, suppliers, customers, clients, patients, you name it?

Get specific, or go home…

A recent video posted by the Danish company Podio, illustrates a glimpse into the day in the life of a research scientist, and the wide variety of very specific, and quite different tasks/projects he needs to juggle to get his daily work done.

Watch below… (and back after the break)

Make a Project out of Getting Task-y

After watching the video…

• Have you really thought through the *specific* and real-life tasks, projects, etc. that you or other people in your organization really need to get done?
• In the places where they’ll be doing the work?
• With structure (when needed), or freeform (where desired) to support *real* work – and not just some vague idea of a “collaborative environment?”

Is the toolset you’ve bought, built, or are about to use actually going to be useful in a “day in the life?”

• If yes – fantastic – go forth and multiply. You wouldn’t believe how rare your situation is – run like the wind and make great things happen!
• If not… please put your RFP on pause for a second, and look at the *specific* work that is done currently in your organization, and ask what will support that work – to enable more useful collaboration, to create the transparency that you need/want, makes it easier to share information for those who need it (while protecting truly sensitive information).

Trust me – “better collaboration” is not what you really want (see article on Internet Evolution from last year, or listen to an interview with Carlos Dominguez, SVP at Cisco). Better collaboration takes focus, and technology is the least of your worries. As Carlos said “If you suck at collaboration in real-life, you’re just going to suck virtually.”

For thoughts on other collaboration scenarios, see this webinar from last year:

How are you specifically supporting Collaboration/Innovation in your company?

I’d love to here the specific tasks, roles, etc. that you’re targeting with Enterprise 2.0 (or whatever term you happen to be using).

I’ve been involved an interesting series of workshop engagements recently (mix of Enterprise 2.0 and Innovation) which made me stop and pause to think about what’s transpired to my own approach to work over the last few years.

I’m going to cover this in a two part series…

Try, Fail, Own, Learn… Part 1

Can’t Improve What You Won’t Acknowledge

An article in The Economist (“Fail Often, Fail Well“) and a Discussion in the Design Thinking group on LinkedIn collided for me recently.

The Design Thinking discussion came first – and to respect the privacy of the group, I won’t quote from the discussion with direct attribution.

The gist of the conversation was around an issue of the group members discussing, essentially  ”Why isn’t Design Thinking recognized and appreciated by more people?”

Part of the discussion was on the “brand name” of Design Thinking, and part of it around the lack of more widely accepted credentials, such a degrees, in Design Thinking vs. more traditional skills or roles such as Accounting, Law, Medicine, and the like.

One member described the frustration at being a “guiding force” type of manager within his organization, but frequently received no credit for providing a Design Thinking approach to getting things done in projects and meetings. My response to him focused on whether there were incentives, across members of a team …

Failure, Bias, Learning, Controversy

Nobody really wants to fail, but admitting that nothing is perfect, and explicitly addressing the fact that there is always room for improvement (sometimes dramatic improvement, as the ship might be sinking) has *real* implications for organizations. From The Economist article, one paragraph in particular that stood out for me, was:

A more tolerant attitude to failure can also help companies to avoid destruction. When Alan Mulally became boss of an ailing Ford Motor Company in 2006 one of the first things he did was demand that his executives own up to their failures. He asked managers to colour-code their progress reports—ranging from green for good to red for trouble. At one early meeting he expressed astonishment at being confronted by a sea of green, even though the company had lost several billion dollars in the previous year. Ford’s recovery began only when he got his managers to admit that things weren’t entirely green.

And which of the major American Automotive manufacturers both owned  up to their fragility in the 2008-2010 economy and also refused to take the easy way out and get bailed out?

That’s right, Ford Motor Company.

Turns out they did make a better, faster horse than the others in the game, eh?

One of the comments to The Economist article, from Tom Agan, a Managing Director at Nielsen Research, was:

According to a study we did at Nielsen across consumer packaged goods companies in the US, companies that learn from their innovation successes and failures by having standardized post mortems and a knowledge management system average between 60 and 100% more revenue from new products than those that do not. But only a relatively low percentage of companies take these high impact steps. The real challenge is overcoming the internal organization barriers that hinder learning. - Tom Agan

Well look at that, 60-100% more revenue from new products through Knowledge Management.

For those of you who wonder what good is “Knowledge Management?,” or who go on and on about  how “Knowledge Management is Dead” (or it was always broken, or Wikis are the One True Way, etc.) – let’s stop focusing on labels, trends, and details that don’t matter.

Call it whatever you want – but I’ll take real (and massive) results any day of the week over bickering about what term we should use.

No Blame? Less Pain

You either want to own your future, and do something about it, or you’re playing the blame game.

Or perhaps even worse, you’re a bump on a log, waiting for someone else to take responsibility.

If discussions in your business are focused on blaming the technology, the economy, competitors, minions, colleagues, bosses, executives, customers or anything other than yourself and the responsibilities you *could* take, if you were willing to face your problems and deal with them, my advice to you is two fold.

1. Wake-up and realize if nobody is willing to rock the boat to call attention to real problems and not the surface indicators, it’s only a matter of time before your organization is doomed. It’s time to beef up your personal social networking strategy to bail out and create a new position for yourself (and on a personal level, I’d be happy to help – LinkedIn has been a great resource for me since 2003/2004).
2. Decide to act on getting results and focusing on the jobs to be done, rather than blaming. As I told a potential employer a few years ago “I’m the kind of guy who sees a piece of trash on the floor and picks it up. Please, tell me now if this is the kind of environment that wants people to do what needs to get done, or only ‘does their job.’” (I didn’t end up taking the job, among other reasons, because the answer to that question was not what I was looking for.)

Get things done, fix problems, search for opportunities, and keep your improvement radar tuned so you can live to fight another day.

Where are you in your learning cycle?

Are you sitting things out, or:

1. Trying?
2. Failing?
3. Owning?
4. Learning?

It’s not just for companies however – I recently stumbled (via Mashable) onto a combination paper resume, QR Code, Mobile and Video Pitch by a fellow looking to intern for a Creative Agency.

Years and years ago (more than I care to admit), I did a similar pitch for a gaming company in Cambridge, MA (blocks from our new office). I was not using QR Codes and YouTube (neither existed, and the web was but a dream), but it was a similar approach intended to leap over the normal plain resumes, cover letters and white envelopes to get in the door for the interview.

It worked for me – as it did for this fellow (read comments on the Mashable article).

See video of the resume to video pitch below. Great approach.

QR CODE – Content-rich Resume from Victor petit on Vimeo.

Two questions for you…

Are you pitching yourself like this? If not, why not? If so, what was the reaction?

If you are hiring people, can handle receiving resumes like this? Or would your “hiring submission process” blast his resume straight into the trash?

Anyone who has recently been hired or is hiring – I’d love to hear your reaction to this type of approach.

It’s a new world folks – are you ready?

Today, the topic is about redefining innovation – Hint: You’re not starting from Ground Zero.

Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Architected, Inc. (IAI).

Today IAM Talking with Ken Tencer, the CEO of Spyder Works Inc. and co-author of the book “The 90% Rule” which we’ll be discussing in this episode.

Ken’s company, Spyder Works, is a branding + innovation firm that enables clients to look at themselves more strategically… to imagine themselves differently in the marketplace. Find out more about Spyder Works at spyderworksdesign.com, and more about the book at 90percentrule.com.

Thanks goes out to Tom Martin of Tom Martin Media, Ken’s PR guy (and a common friend between Ken and I), for making the introduction, and arranging for a soft copy of the book to arrive at my office in advance of the interview.

Key Concepts of the 90% Rule

There is so much attention given to the 80/20 rule (Pareto’s Rule) – which is typically phrased that 80% of returns come from 20% of the appropriately targeted efforts – that immediately the 90% Rule caught my eye.
The core concept of the 90% Rule aligns perfectly with what I’ve been promoting for several years – stop thinking of innovation as THE NEXT BIG THING! (what I call “BIG I INNOVATION”) and focus more time on leveraging what you’ve already done – that 90% of the repeatable core of your business/products/services that you can use to pivot to your next piece of business.

It’s continuous improvement (or what I call “small i innovation”) and offers far more bang for the resource buck than people seem to give credit for.

Ken has some great examples of these pivots or extensions in the interview (listen below) and of course in the book, directly.

As you’re listening to the interview, we briefly discuss the Six Steps to Creating a Culture of Continuous Innovation, and which Ken was kind enough to provide the infographic we discuss, as eye candy to go with the discussion.

Six Steps to Creating a Culture of Continuous Innovation

The end-to-end process and infographic from the book:

Breaking down the six steps, we have:

Step One:  

Revisiting your company’s origins and identify where you want to take it long-term

Step Two: 

Exploring what you *can* be, not just what you are (Note from Dan: We hone in on this step in the interview)

Step Three: 

Building a relevant brand rooted in customer-centric thinking.

Step Four: 

Maximizing leverage by outlining your best opportunities and the criteria upon which to assess them (Note from Dan: decision making and critical thinking lags in almost every organization I run across – ideas are only part of the battle, folks)

Step Five: 

Building an opportunity matrix to determine the human and financial resources required for moving ahead.

Step Six: 

“Speaking” to be heard clearly by all your audiences. (Note from Dan: If you’ve done your work up front in this Design Thinking approach to Innovation, you already know your audience quite well – and now it’s time to reflect that knowledge right back)

Comments or Questions?

How are you defining innovation? How do you target? Are you building on your 90% base, or going for disruptive innovation opportunities? Comment below, and we’ll answer and discuss together.

Listen now!

More details on our practices related to Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

Credit: Herzschlag / photocase.com

Stop the Innovation Wars is the attention-getting title of a Harvard Business Review article published last year, attempting to generate controversy in the business world. The article is written by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, both on the faculty at Dartmouth, and co-authors of a new book on innovation titled “The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge,” which was published in late 2010. (See original article at the Harvard Business Review)

What is the Innovation War?

It is the battle between corporate operations groups, responsible for ongoing operations and support of existing products and services, and the teams formed for new initiatives, usually given names like innovation team.

The authors’ description of the powerful, extremely negative reactions to the idea of creating an innovation team with special responsibility for a new strategy and how it gave rise to their research is fascinating, but familiar to practitioners of Innovation Management of all stripes, and especially to the deep research background of TRIZ (Editor note: What is TRIZ? One of the most powerful innovation toolkits you’ve never heard of… until now).

What’s in a name?

The authors rename the operations groups the Performance Engine of the company, and prescribe a partnership modality, in which the Performance Engine partners with dedicated project teams tasked with innovation projects.

They present an interesting series of case studies:

1. BMW’s regenerative braking team,
2. West’s (the legal publishing branch of Thomas Reuters) creation of database products,
3. Lucent’s service businesses, and
4. WD-40′s new dispenser to demonstrate the universality of their proposed method as applied in a product, a service, and a component part.

Step one of the partnership process involves dividing the work between the Performance Engine and the dedicated project team.

One insight that I found quite useful was that it is not just the work to be done and the skills of the people that should be assessed, but also the past working relationships of those people.

If they have always worked in a hierarchical relationship, they may not be able to work in a flat organization (Editor note: Enterprise 2.0 issues – can’t flatten an organization with lumps of non-collaborative employees and managers in the mix).

If they have always worked on projects that have well-defined deliverables, they may not be able to work in an exploratory environment (Editor note: Agile anyone? [outside of software development, it's a mindset I see in successful Enterprise 2.0 work]).

And, of course, vice versa: one example showed how people who had typically worked very independently, or with a small technical support staff, were not well-suited to working in a large, structured team with complex, interdependent roles (Editor note: Organizations that are immune to the innovation virus – all too common).

The new organization will also need new metrics of success, new compensation/reward systems, and its own unique culture.

Organizational Change – Who Owns It?

Trimble and Govindarajan task management with creating these elements, but I’ve seen management fail more often than it succeeds as creating a specific culture – - it seems that the best that management can do is be sure that the metrics and reward systems are not contrary to the desired cultural elements. (Editor note: Organizational Network Analysis and Knowledge Management provide both targeting and change management tools to find the best/worst areas of culture to explore or avoid, for the time being)

For a short article, they did a good job at illustrating the kinds of problems that will occur in this partnership.

TRIZ and Business Management

TRIZ practitioners will recognize the physical contradictions in the situations of loose vs. tight management, team vs. individual metrics, and the technical (trade-off) contradictions in the schedule vs. completeness and new technology vs. traditional methods and new suppliers’ creativity vs. traditional suppliers’ reliability, etc.

Disappointingly, the authors did not use any of the insights available from business applications of TRIZ to propose solutions to these contradictions.

Their solutions to the problems of innovation are remarkably un-innovative.

Equally disappointing, they do not present any data or case studies showing that their proposed method works.

Case studies from which the method was derived are interesting, but obviously are available because they were successful for those companies in those circumstances.

The test should be to apply the method to new situations and evaluate its effectiveness, and iterated the method based on both failures and successes. I am particularly dubious about the effectiveness of changing the names of the operations and innovation teams as a key success factor!

Readers are invited to contribute their case studies and observations, and particularly any methods they have found effective in companies that use TRIZ in their innovation toolkit.

- end article -

Where are you in your TRIZ Education?

• Is your innovation toolkit non-existent?
• Have you struggled with how to connect the theory of TRIZ, to the application of TRIZ in your organization?
• Do you need a “language of innovation” to unify your employees – allowing both incremental and radical innovation?

Take advantage of our 5-Hour Online (+ 60 minutes of instructor feedback) and On-demand eLearning course, “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ created in partnership with Ellen Domb from the PQR Group and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

“Ellen is one of the world leading teachers in TRIZ. Her teachings will not only educate, but also entertain you. She is the first of all the TRIZ teachers who really researches in how to teach TRIZ the best way. But what I appreciate the most, are here really quick responses whenever I have a TRIZ-related question. And this is independent from the place she is staying at around the world.” - Robert Adunka, Innovation Coach, Siemens AG

The “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ course has five modules and includes approximately 60 minutes of class/homework feedback from Dr. Domb, to discuss the course and the application of TRIZ to your own work.

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

Module 1: Introduction to TRIZ, Ideality and the Ideal Final Result

• History and Development of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
• History of TRIZ
• Defining Ideality
• Ideality and IFR
• Ideal Final Results: Examples
• Applying Ideality
• Using Resources

Module 2: Using Resources

• Using Resources
• Accelerating Innovation by Using Resources
• Example of Real-Time Traffic Information
• Examples of Using Customers as Resources
• Recognizing Energy Sources
• Checking Your Understanding – Using Resources

Module 3: Eliminating Trade-offs

• Eliminating Trade-offs
• How to Recognize a Trade-off
• How to Look for Assumptions That Cause Trade-offs
• How to Use the Contradiction Matrix and the 40 Principles to Eliminate Trade-offs

Module 4: Examples of the 40 Principles From Many Disciplines

• The 40 Principles
• How to Use the 40 Principles
• Examples from Business, Technology, Services and Society

Module 5: Eliminating Inherent Contradictions and Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

• Identifying Inherent Contradictions
• Resolving Inherent Contradictions
• Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

What exactly is the mental/cultural/political barrier for adoption of cloud computing and SaaS-based solutions?

It should no longer be technical barriers – nor cost – nor reliability – so what’s the disconnect?

Think about it…

Most companies do not own and manage (without third party suppliers/partners – the “analog” to cloud services):

• Their own phone company/network
• Their energy generation
• Their own internet service
• Their own shipping service
• All of their legal needs
• All payroll processing
• Insurance needs
• Marketing (Display advertising of all kinds, especially)

And the list could easily go on (please, feel free to add your own examples in the comments)…

Hint: You Are Already Partly Virtual!

So what do organizations *really* have to lose with letting go of control to put content/computing into the cloud?

A massive percentage of business activities have already been handed over/outsourced to a variety of other services/participants – so what makes the final conceptual leap to move into the cloud so difficult?

• Fear of saving money?
• Fear of delivering too quickly?
• Fear of too much flexibility?

Probably not…

• Fear of lack of skills to jump into a virtualized world? Perhaps.
• Worries about “hackers” and PCI compliance? It’s not necessarily more risky to hire someone else to shoulder that burden than to handle yourself (and I could recommend some penetration testers that will likely prove that you aren’t as secure as you believe).
• Concerns about ability to integrate to “non-cloud” applications/systems? Possible – but there are options for nearly any scenario.

For 2011 – What’s Your Cloud Strategy?

If you’ve run into barriers for cloud usage, or (perhaps) *you* (or your boss) are the barrier to cloud usage in your organization – what are you going to do to experiment with the cloud and validate whether the cloud concerns are real?

Comment below – let’s see what we can do to help others who may have run into similar issues.

Remember the watch phrase I’ve started talking about recently?

Distributed Convergence – what are you doing to take advantage of the strengths and opportunities of Distributed Convergence?

Cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud collaboration, cloud applications, cloud integration – all very real, solvable now, and getting better, faster, cheaper, more manageable every day.

The cloud plays a very real role here – are you ready?

Fascinating book so far – as usual, bought the book wirelessly while I was having a conversation about this book, and was able to flip through it instantly. Ah, digital content… subject for another day.

Distributed Convergence

As I’ve been mentioning recently, and the reason the book came up… the vast majority of work we’ve been doing lately (and the ramp up into 2011 is astonishing, honestly) has been explicitly about taking various approaches (depending on the client) to do what I’m calling “distributed convergence.”

You’ll be hearing more from me about this over the coming days and months. It’s a massive trend, and in all seriousness, no matter what size organization you are, you need to be thinking about this.

Chapter One – Illusions of Synergy

In the very first chapter is a primary case of exactly what clients are looking to avoid. Now the majority of our clients are not facing potential failure (usually) at the scale of a true “billion dollar lesson” (we should all be so… lucky?). Regardless, it’s a long-rising trend that it’s high time is ended.

From the book, under a case study discussing the merger of two Disability Insurance companies with sharply different approaches and target markets – Unum Corporation and Provident Companies – and under the aptly title subtext of “UnumProvident: Giving ‘Disability’ a New Name”:

Unum and Provident talked before the merger about back-office efficiencies. But they began as a combined company with thirty-four separate information systems that didn’t talk to each other. As of 2005, six years after the merger, UnumProvident had managed to eliminate just four of those thirty-four systems.

The book is primarily about business management and culture failures – clashing cultures, misunderstood strengths/weaknesses, the fallacy of expecting 2+2 to equal 42 or more, in an overly optimistic timeframe… But, right up front, it’s a classic case of “un-convergence” or as we all typically call it “siloed systems” and the dangers lurking there. Silos aren’t necessarily bad – targeted functionality is what makes mobile apps, for example, so darn useful, and yes, those are stand-alone silos, essentially.

Shut down, Blow it up or Integrate?

Photo credit: muffinmaker / photocase.com

Now, does an aquiring company HAVE to shut down a system or many systems to make it more efficient? No.

Could they shut them down more quickly and systematically? No doubt – but big companies especially, tend to dance like elephants, as the saying goes.

Could they introduce integration layers, not necessarily BIG BUDGET integration layers, like an Enterprise Service Bus or SOA overhaul, but perhaps light-weight integration, say Business Process Management, Portals, Taxonomies, or Search technology to cut across systems? Yes. Rather… YES!

There’s no single clear path to untangle what is easy to see is an unholy technology mess – pre-merger, during or post-merger. But clearly, as this book indicates (based on lessons learned from extensive research into 750 major bankruptcies between 1981 and 2006, including Enron, Conseco, Texaco, Kmart, and Refco – as well as companies that survived, but were clearly hard hit in their businesses due to bad decisions and tragic assumptions), if you do not have your SYSTEMS in order, behind the scenes, not only are you crippling your ability to run the business on a daily basis…

But when you add extra fuel on the fire, through mergers & acquisitions, or economic downturn, or any other large shock to the system, it becomes all to clear how both fragile the new system is (2 merged companies that in theory are bigger, better and… more nimble? Contain that laughter!), and how resistant to change the old systems and sub-systems (departments, regions, vice presidents of divisions, suppliers, etc.) are.

Walk the Agile and Integrated Walk

I’ve been in working in and around IT/IS for a long time – and although I no longer (mostly) twiddle the bits and cables, much of my work surrounds strategy and implementation of technology.

Whether I’m brought in by IT explicitly (“I’m one of you, or least, was”), or by business sponsors as a bridge to IT (which happens far more often), I’m close enough to the problem that UnumProvident experienced to see it every day.

It is far easier to build systems, and groups of systems that are destined to fail… unintentionally… than it is to set up for both current and future success.

Looking too narrowly at a problem can cause serious pains in implementing solutions. Too often the BizTech problem that’s been solved is only a single pain point, and not the real, root-cause issues, or to be more positive, to enable the ultimate business goals of reduced cost/time/effort, increase revenue/profit, customer satisfaction/loyalty and the like.

As a result, the “systems” or solutions that are often put into place are a patchwork of solutions that are islands onto themselves, picking off a single or handful of issues, and (with luck and serious effort) those few issues or opportunities will be solved well.

But that leaves the organization’s systems as a whole as a fragmented minefield for the employees to navigate as the “human glue” between systems.

Scenarios like these are incredibly common – and very fragile.

Head Down, Prepare to Fail

When the economy tanks, and people are either laid off, or the company goes bankrupt, or the belts tighten and everyone fears for their livelihood, the only agile/flexible pieces in this “system” – the employees – suddenly become so rigid and fixed in their ways, with their heads down to play it safe and keep their jobs, that all of the break points in this wide array of systems stresses even further and in many cases, blows itself into a million bits.

I’m not trying to sell you on suites, or in spending a single other dime on “new” solutions – that’s not likely to help, really.

Our business is not in selling or re-selling solutions, nor in doing hands-on integration work.

That leaves us with the freedom to be able (in many cases) to tell clients that they probably do not need to spend much more in software/solutions, do not have to blow it up and try again, or spend thousands of man-hours to migrate from an “old” system to a new one.

Not to drop a “pie in the sky” strategic plan that’s impossible to implement… but actionable strategy.

My questions to you as we head into 2011…

• Is your strategy head screwed on tight, and focused on planning for both short-term pain elimination and longer-term integration opportunities?
• Are you laying bridges across systems and solutions so your employees can spend less time navigating the vast landscape of applications (a recent client estimated they have at least 20,000 applications in various stages of use/implementation), and focusing on delivering value to your clients?
• Are you taking a system rather than single solution point of view when you update, upgrade, replace or install a new solution from scratch?
• Can you take advantage of the trend of employees working from home or across wide geographic distances, but that can still function as a team and a whole system of coordinated brains?

Make  no mistake – this takes work, and no “out of the box” solution will make the lack of integration you probably have right now, just go away.

No pre-built strategy document with the best of the “best practices” is going to instantly move you out of the worst practices of DIS-integration that you may be struggling with right now.

This is knowledge work, plain and simple, and there are far fewer organizations who are doing this well than are doing it poorly.

As I said in a tweet at the beginning of the summer of 2010:

So the real question is…

Are you prepared to converge?

What are you doing to prepare? What have you tried, and hasn’t worked? What have you tried and *has* worked? Your comments are valuable not just to me, but to your peers and colleagues as well. it’s time we shed light on assumptions of that past that just aren’t true now, if they ever were.

Photo credit: Bastografie / photocase.com

Recently, Robin Bew, Chief Economist in the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research division of The Economist magazine, posted the results of an EIU survey of large businesses.

With such a complex system as the world economy, I always have my doubts as to how useful research like this is, but an interesting statistic called out was:

Companies today earn a third of their revenues from overseas. In two years time that figure will have grown to 60%.

This information impacts the way I’m currently advising clients in at least two ways:

• If digital media is the primary marketing/communication vehicle world wide, and 33-60% of your revenue is likely to come from sources other than your own country, and therefore that media is likely to be consumed (in the case of US-based companies) in some other language than English… do you have a strategy to support multi-lingual content? At all? Without excessive costs and time delays for translation and localization? If not, what revenue, cost, and competitive opportunities are you missing?
  • Due to crowdsourcing techniques, and better, faster, cheaper and more directly integrated translation technology/workflow, it has never been easier to address this opportunity – but it does require the existing technical infrastructure and business-savvy to put together an intelligent content pipeline. If you have not looked into this in the last few years, you will be astonished by what is possible and at what price tag.
• Consumer and business behavior is not the same, worldwide. With an innovation hat on, do you really understand the needs of your ultimate customers, wherever they may live? Are your “innovations” user and need focused? (rather than product/company-focused, or “purely” demographics-focused)
  • Adoption of mobile technology, for example, and “smartphones” specifically, tends to lead in the United States, even though the cellular networks of the US lag behind other countries that have significantly greater (and cheaper) internet speeds. (This according to contacts I have in telecom – non-publishable/citeable stats).
  • Serving mobile customers (or employees, partners, suppliers) is still a dramatically underserved area – whether a smartphone or a “dumb” phone. There are many opportunities to think out of the retail store “box” (quite literally the “big box” stores), and traditional non-interactive media. Customer engagement, service, satisfaction, price-checking, order checking, etc., is still quite disconnected from the online vs. offline experience – even 15 years after the rise of the web. There is a real opportunity to leap beyond ignorance of the full power of the web on the desktop, and straight into the much faster growing world of mobile content and applications.

Have you looked far enough to see and act on these opportunities?

Whether you believe the rest of the macroeconomic and microeconomic predictions/analysis of The Economist or any other source – I don’t see any easy way to ignore the two above trends. Almost every inquiry which has come in to us in the last few months has been explicitly focused on these two areas – and the convergence/integration of these trends into the siloed infrastructure that most organizations have in place.

Converging and integrating to set the stage for rapid growth opportunities seems to finally be a consensus opportunity to power out of the economic troubles of the last 1-2 years (depending on industry and location). Both the cutting edge adopters and the laggards are running as fast as they can to take advantage of these opportunities… is your organization?

No Strategy = Less (No?) Opportunity

Are you ready? What have you done to prepare? Seen compelling reasons *not* to look at multi-lingual or mobile implications for your organization?

Photo by Mark Strozier via Flickr (Used with attribution under Creative Commons)

6 Years Ago…

When I started covering the software solution providing side of the Innovation Management coin 6 years ago – it was a lonely world as an Innovation Analyst and Consultant.

The software tools were so new, and with so little competition, that there was essentially no market there. And with no market = no attention = no spending = no awareness = no action.

Do not pass Go, do not even start, there is nothing to see here. But then something happened – which has been quite painful for most people, and the organizations they’re working in (or were).

Oh, What a Difference an Economic Collapse Makes…

What I’ve now come to realize, is that when times are good, only the people and companies who are already innovators (In Pursuit of Innovation Excellence, perhaps?) are the ones busy innovating.

For everyone else, the innovation gear is in neutral (might even be stuck in reverse) – and they are coasting down a hill, reaping the benefits of some innovation that may have long since past. And while they are coasting down that hill, running out of gas, wearing out the brakes… What happens when they need to accelerate up from the hill? What happens when they need to slam on the brakes and change direction – when they’ve burnt out the brakes coasting down the long, slow decline, or the steep and quick?

Be Prepared (and React)

I may not have been a Boy Scout for long (sorry Dad), but their motto of “Be Prepared” and the wonderful saying by the great scientist Louis Pasteur, ”Chance Favors a Prepared Mind” hold significant strength for me.

Like most everyone I know, I can’t say that I saw the economic collapse coming – at least not to the extent it did.

The challenge, of course, is that nobody has an infallible crystal ball – and the way to deal with change that may fall out of the sky is… to REACT!

I’ve said a number of times in the last two years, that starting Information Architected was either the smartest or stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and there’s been a fair amount of down with the ups in the life of a startup in the worst economy in my lifetime.

But what I have been  absolutely stunned by, is the fact that both the cutting edge innovators *and* the extreme laggards have both woken up in the last two years, and decided to take steps to make sure that the next time something like an “econolypse” happens, or now just over 9 years after 9/11, or essentially 10 years after the “dot bomb” – that they are prepared to innovate, constantly, everywhere, all the time, so that no matter what happens, they are not stunned and frozen in place, as so many have been, nor do they panic and cut staff and budgets in half.

No, they instead, equip themselves to do both “small i innovation” (continuous improvement), and “BIG I INNOVATION” (disruptive, game-changing innovation). We need both, we need more of it, we need all of to be more distributed throughout our organizations, because innovation does not happen in a vacuum, it most often does not happen with just a single participant, and although many have grown up to believe “innovation is someone else’s job” – we just can’t afford to give ourselves or anyone else in our organizations an excuse NOT to participate in innovation.

I’ll wrap up this post with a great animated adaptation of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on educational failings on creativity and the implications. See video embedded below.

Innovation can be taught, rather than prevented…

This particular talk and video happens to touch on many of the topics that we cover in our 1-2 day innovation workshops as well. Innovation and creative problem solving *can* be taught, and in all honesty, our innovation practice is the fastest growing area of everything that we do here at Information Architected.

Divergent tools, convergent tools, collaborative innovation, team-based innovation, leveraging strengths – all entirely relevant, and incredibly powerful. Over 5,000 business professionals have taken this course, and over 20 million kids were the starting point over a 25 year+ period in creating the “grown-up edition” of the course.

Find out more about our Innovation Workshop and Innovation Training – and take advantage of one of the few educational experiences that I know of (even of our other offerings) that you can literally apply the next day, in whatever industry, location, or size organization you might be in.

Learn More About the Innovation Workshop

What’s your experience with innovation in your own organization? Do you feel you have a License to Innovate? Prohibited from innovating? Dependent on technology to innovate? Your war stories and success stories are both welcome – please weigh in!