Futurist Keynote Speaker Jim Carroll: Disruptive Trend & Innovation Expert

Futurist Keynote Speaker,  Author, Innovation Expert. 

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Archives for June 2007

Faster is the new fast: innovating for the new, high velocity customer

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In the fast paced world of instant obsolsolescence and rapid innovation, time-to-market is becoming a key factor for success.


This is a video clip from a recent keynote that I gave for hundreds of executives from the grocery and consumer products industries, titled Faster is the New Fast: Innovating for the New, High Velocity Customer. I take a look at what innovative retail, packaging and consumer goods companies do differently.

This is the third retail presentation that I’ve done for a major retail conference this year; earlier, I spoke to several hundred convenience store owners and their franchisees; as well as to a group of executives involved in health care retail.

There are a few key themes that I wove through this keynote that retailers, consumer goods and packaging companies need to be thinking about, as well as their advertising agencies:

  • velocity: i.e. collapsing product lifecycles
  • instantaneity: faster trends; I have a wonderful story about dive-in movies, that I use to describe how the new global idea sharing machine results in faster product to market!
  • spontaneity: social networking, rapid emergence of new “hits”; there’s a new suddenness with consumer choice!
  • intensity: business operational excellence is critical; I have a story of a video game distributor — 45% to 60% of profit of a new video game occurs in the first FOUR TO FIVE days. I explained similar short, sharp shocks of revenue are coming to consumer goods
  • unpredictability: sudden, rapid shift of consumer choice, with nicheing, impact of new packaging, etc.
  • simplicity: the new consumer wants nice, simple solutions that fit into their life; there’s a great story here from the work I did with the American Nursery Landscape Assn, that spins directly into consumer products, beverages etc, in that simplicity is the new branding.
  • volatility: great unknowns; water on planes, melamine/pet food; we have to be prepared for unforeseen risks!
  • attractability: there’s another video that I’ll post soon that involves a story of the plasma people and the cardboard people. suffice it to say, the new consumer will be more highly interactive, sooner than we think
  • unfocusability: short attention spans, consumers scan 50 feet of shelf space per second; we’re seeing collapsing newspaper/magazine spend, rapid growth of online spend, etc.
  • virtuality: Screen Digest, a media consultancy firm, predicts that 80% of active Internet users will become involved in a virtual world by 2012.

Related postings:

  • Next big home entertainment trend? Dive-in movies!
  • Can you run your business at video game intensity?
  • High velocity retail innovation
  • Creativity, trends and innovation in retail, packaging & consumer goods

Innovation in the global energy industry

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energyindustry.jpgI spent a half day last week with the CEO and senior management team of a large global energy company.

They engaged me to provide them with insight on the trends which will impact the global oil, natural gas, energy and distribution sectors in the years to come.

It was a small, intimate get-together with about 40 senior executives; I provided my insight into the trends that I believe will have the most impact. That was followed by about an hour of very intense, deep probing discussion; I obviously stirred up some creative thinking within the group.

While not going into the specifics, the broad brush strokes of what I covered off included my observations that they should be thinking about these issues.

  • presume massive market disruption: Think GoogleCar: don’t limit your view of the future as to what might transpire. The future of any industry will likely bear no resemblance to the industry structure of today. Future competitors will probably come from completely outside of an existing industry. Challenge every assumption that you have about the future.
  • prepare for significant transformation: realize that existing insurmountable challenges are simply a big opportunity to someone else. Someone, somewhere, is going to figure out how to plug hundreds of thousands if not millions of small, local, home based renewable energy sources into the energy grid. It’s mostly a computation/mathematical issue: the energy grid was not designed for two way electricity transmission, and so there will have to be an intense amount of computational dynamics to structure a solution. Result? An organization that is a master of massive computational capabilities — and hence, grid management — might very well be the new energy company of the future.
  • find opportunity in scientific rapidity: we’re in the era of global collaborative knowledge generation, and R&D is rapidly externalizing. The infinite global idea loop means that scientific discovery is now happening faster than ever before, which provides for more product and market opportunity. Innovative organizations plug in, ensuring that all staff are in tune with the rapid rate of scientific advance that surrounds them, and are prepared to ride new emerging ideas as soon as they begin to emerge.
  • capitalize on skills fragmentation: the war for talent will define future success. We’re entering a time of massive skills specialization and ever smaller knowledge niches. As I covered off in my keynote to a global financial audience in the Cayman’s, it’s the organizations that can build a culture, structure and flexibility to attract and retain skills that will find the key to success in the high velocity economy.
  • structure for volatility: extreme volatility is the ‘new normal.’ If you have the capability to quickly adjust strategy, structure, plans, skills, projects and teams, you’ve got the right stuff for the new world of constant change.
  • prepare for business intensity: innovative organizations plan for more rapid entrance and exits from new markets. They do so through flexible structure. Partnership takes on new role in era of exponentiating, fast complexity and the rapid emergence of new opportunities: if you can scale up, you can win big.

The Economist Intelligence Unit recently noted that “the ability to swiftly adapt to change represents the greatest challenge manufacturers face in creating long-term value.” That’s the bottom line for innovating in the high velocity energy industry.

Related posts:

  • The Google Car and massive market disruption
  • Global infinite idea loop
  • Talent, not money, is the new corporate battlefront adobe.gif

What do innovative companies do that other companies don’t do?

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innovativecompanies.jpgInnovative organizations focus upon the concept of agility: they can manage fast change, new risk, business market turmoil, staffing challenges, and market commoditization. They can do this because they are relentless focused on the future and the trends that will impact them.

They ensure that they innovate and adapt based on rapidly changing circumstances, on a continuous basis. Innovation isn’t just about new product; it’s an inclusive mindset, in which everyone knows that they must stay relentlessly focused on the religion of innovation: how do we do things differently to run the business better, grow the business and transform the business.

How do they do this? By adopting several key guiding principles that form the basis for all corporate strategy and activities going forward:

  • plan for short term longevity: No one can presume that markets, products, customers and assumptions will remain static: everything is changing instantly. Business strategies and activities must increasingly become short term oriented while fulfilling a long term mission.
  • presume lack of rigidity: Many organizations undertake plans based on key assumptions. Agile organizations do so by presuming that those key assumptions are going to change regularly over time, and so build into their plans a degree of ongoing flexibility.
  • design for flexibility : In a world of constant change, products or services must be designed in such a way that they can be quickly redesigned without massive cost and effort. Think like Google: every product and service should be a beta, with the inherent foundation being one of flexibility for future change.
  • build with extensibility: Apple understood the potential for rapid change by building into the iPod architecture the fundamental capability for other companies to develop add-on products. Think the same way : tap into the world. Let the customer, supplier, partners and others innovate on your behalf!
  • harness external creativity: In a world in which knowledge is evolving at a furious pace, no one organization can do everything. Recogize your limits, and tap into the skills, insight and capabilities of those who can do things better.
  • plan for supportability: Customers today measure you by a bar that is raised extremely high — they expect you to deliver the same degree of high-quality that they get from the best companies on the planet. They expect instant support, rapid service, and constant innovation. If you don’t provide this, they’ll simply move on to an alternative.
  • revisit with regularity: Banish complacency. Focus on change. Continually revisit your plans, assumptions, models and strategies, because the world next week is going to be different than that of today.

The future of the legal profession

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genconnect-lawyer.jpgSome weeks back, I spent a full day with about 40 senior lawyers with a major government agency, with the main focus both on the rapidity of change of legal skills, as well as rapid change with legal issues.

We took a look at the future of the profession, and had a workshop that examined issues of agility, rapid response and complexity of skills.

I put together a summary, based on a previous post here, that outlines both the challenges and opportunities faced by the profession.

The highlights of the document, available as a PDF, takes a look at such issues as generational warfare, evidentiary challenges, rapid change and specialization, and risk minimization, to name but a few.

Of the latter, I write that “One side impact of generational warfare is that “going underground” will become more acceptable. In the last few years we saw a fascinating battle between music companies and Kazaa, the music sharing organization, which used extra-territorial jurisdictional issues to provide itself some shelter against legal action. That type of activity is going to become the norm, not the exception, in the future. Indeed, going legal-underground is about to go mainstream.”

  • read 10 Big Trends for the Legal Profession: High-Velocity Change Providing Challenges and Opportunities adobe.gif

Trends and big transformative changes. Example: health care

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The view of the future by most is often short term oriented. What happens when you think about long term transformations?

In my keynotes, I often put into perspective the big, massive, sweeping transformations that can change entire industries over the longer term. That’s one of the best ways to begin a process of thinking of innovation, and in finding creative solutions to challenges as well as opportunities. There’s not enough long term thinking today; there is simply too much short term hype.

In this short video clip, I take a look at the world of health care, and the transformation that is occuring as we move to a world of personalized medicine.

  • read Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care
  • read “Are you watching the major transformations, or just the piddly stuff?”

Innovation – agility is critical

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I often talk on stage to my clients about the concept of organizational agility: that is, the ability to respond to fast-changing circumstances. In the high velocity economy, everything can move quickly : markets, customer expectations, competitors, products ….


In this video clip, I take a deeper look at the concept of agility, outlining that organizations that master the capability have several key attributes:

  • they are rapid movers
  • cost excellence is a major focus
  • their customers have set high expectations
  • they establish instant, need driven relationships in order to get things done
  • they excel at rapid response to new market demands
  • they focus on fast time to market
  • they have mastered the ability for quick marshalling of resources
  • ….and they have instant scalability!

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THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO ARE FAST features the best of the insight from Jim Carroll’s blog, in which he
covers issues related to creativity, innovation and future trends.

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