JimCarroll

How Innovation Happens — Lesson #16: Watch for Competitors Outside Your Industry

October 22, 2026 by JimCarroll

I’ve been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I’ve discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next.

I’ve come back to this idea repeatedly in my work because the mindset behind innovation usually changes before the results do. What people notice, question, challenge, and act on determines how ready they are for what comes next.

The competitor that changes your future may not look like a competitor today.

That is one reason I have always pushed organizations to think beyond traditional industry boundaries. Technology lets companies cross categories quickly. A software company can become a transportation company. A retailer can become a financial platform. A device can replace a service that once required an entire industry.

If your competitive intelligence consists only of tracking the same companies you have watched for twenty years, you are studying history.

The disruptive competitor often begins at the edge, solving a problem your industry does not even think belongs to it.

So what does that mean in practice? It means challenging the assumption, habit, or hesitation that is keeping you anchored to the present. Here are three places to start.

Action Items:

List five companies outside your industry that touch the same customer problem.
Ask which one could remove a step that currently makes you money.
Track capabilities, not just competitors.

Explore the full How Innovation Happens series.

Real-World Examples

These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world.

AirPods Pro: When the hearing-aid competitor came from headphones

A traditional hearing-aid company might monitor other hearing-aid manufacturers, audiology practices and medical-device technology. The source of a different kind of competition turned out to be a familiar consumer-electronics product. On September 12, 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized a software-based over-the-counter hearing-aid feature for compatible Apple AirPods Pro headphones.

Intended for adults with perceived mild-to-moderate hearing loss, the feature allowed an existing consumer audio device, when paired with appropriate software, to serve a regulated hearing-support function. This is not the same as saying ordinary earbuds replace all hearing aids or meet every person’s clinical needs.

Fitting, severity of loss and professional care remain important. The strategic point is that software, acoustics, device penetration and changes in regulation can rearrange the competitive boundary of a sector. A company making premium headphones had accumulated capabilities that became relevant to a medical market.

An incumbent watching only familiar brands could miss the significance until millions of potential customers already owned a compatible device. The first warning of an industry shift may arrive in the product roadmap of a company that does not describe itself as being in your industry at all.

Why it matters: Identify who else already owns the technology, customer relationship or distribution channel needed to solve the problem you believe belongs to your industry.

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Starlink at sea: A rocket company redraws cruise-ship connectivity

Cruise lines rely on reliable internet for passengers, crews and operational systems, but ships far from land have historically faced expensive, constrained satellite connectivity. A conventional assessment might have treated the competitive options as a comparison among established maritime communications providers.

In August 2022, Royal Caribbean Group announced a fleetwide rollout of SpaceX Starlink broadband, following a trial aboard Freedom of the Seas. The plan covered Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Silversea vessels, with installation scheduled to move across the fleet rapidly.

SpaceX was known to the general public for rockets, but its low-Earth-orbit satellite network could affect a very different market. Royal Caribbean’s announcement framed the change around passenger and crew experience rather than space exploration. This was not evidence that every legacy satellite service had instantly become obsolete, nor that every ship would achieve identical performance.

It did show how a capability developed in one industry could suddenly become a commercially material alternative in another. Established maritime connectivity companies were not competing only with other firms that had spent decades describing themselves as maritime specialists. They were facing a new network architecture built by a space-launch company.

Why it matters: When the underlying technology stack changes, the next competitor may not resemble anybody on your current competitor map.

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From the Stage: Take Risks

October 21, 2026 by JimCarroll

From the stage

On stage, I took on the excuse I hear in almost every organization: it’s too risky.

“We have to take risks in order to get ahead.”

My challenge to the room was a simple, practical one:

“you should go home with a list of three things that you are going to try. Three things you haven’t done before”

Why it matters

The world, your markets and your customers are going to change whether you take risks or not. Standing still feels safe, but it’s the riskiest choice of all, because it guarantees you fall behind. Real innovators don’t take reckless bets. They take a steady stream of small, deliberate risks, and they look honestly at where their own skills and confidence are holding them back.

“You have to challenge yourself to try to do things that you have not done before.”

The takeaway

Write down three things you’ve never tried, and commit to them this quarter.
Look for the gap in your own skills that makes “too risky” feel true.
Remember: not changing is a risk too.

From the Stage is a weekday series of short clips from more than 30 years of keynotes, and the leadership lessons that still matter.

Keynote Case Study: MAPP — Manufacturing Learns to Work with the Machines

October 21, 2026 by JimCarroll

At the Manufacturers Association for Plastic Processors conference in Indianapolis, Jim Carroll placed AI inside the broader industrial transformation involving robotics, machine vision, digital twins, new workforce capabilities and faster product cycles.

The Challenge: Plastic processors needed to move beyond AI hype and identify where intelligent technologies could improve real industrial outcomes.

The Keynote: “Manufacturing Learns To Work With The Machines.”

The Message: The AI opportunity is the convergence of intelligence, automation, data and industrial know-how.

Six Trends Shaping the Future of Plastics Manufacturing

AI and Machine Vision. Intelligent inspection improves quality control and production insight.
Robotics and Cobots. Flexible automation expands what can be automated economically.
Digital Twins. Simulation helps optimize products and processes before physical execution.
Predictive Uptime. Data and AI identify equipment issues earlier and reduce disruption.
Future Skills. Modern manufacturing blends process expertise with software and data fluency.
Speed of Change. Compressed innovation cycles make experimentation a competitive advantage.

The MAPP keynote emphasized that the future of plastics manufacturing belongs to organizations that can combine industrial depth with faster learning and smarter systems.

Explore more keynote case studies.

Keynote Case Study: Great Lakes Construction Associations — Separating AI Hype from Real Construction Impact

October 21, 2026 by JimCarroll

For the Great Lakes Construction Associations, Jim Carroll focused on what is real — and what is not yet real — in construction AI. The session was designed to help contractors, suppliers and association leaders move from hype to useful perspective.

The Challenge: Construction has a hype problem: everyone is talking about AI, but many organizations still lack a clear view of what is operational now.

The Keynote: “Where AI Meets the Future of Construction.”

The Message: Do not confuse today’s hype with tomorrow’s impact. Learn, experiment and prepare.

Six Trends Shaping the Future of Construction

Artificial Intelligence. AI increasingly supports planning, analysis, documentation and operations.
Robotics and Cobots. Flexible automation continues to expand on job sites and in support functions.
Digital Twins. Virtual models allow teams to simulate assets, projects and operating decisions.
Drones and Vision. New visibility comes from aerial systems and visual intelligence.
Safety Intelligence. Data, sensors and predictive systems improve risk awareness.
New Skills. Construction increasingly combines field expertise with software, data and AI capability.

The GLCA session made the case that construction does not need to chase every AI promise. It needs to understand what matters and prepare accordingly.

Explore more keynote case studies.

The 26 Principles, Revisited — #22: Boundary Divergence — What I Said, and What’s Actually Happening

October 21, 2026 by JimCarroll

Part of my “26 Principles, Revisited” series — checking my own math, nine months into the year I predicted.

Don’t stay in your lane. The future is happening in the blur between the lines.

Day 22 argued that disruption increasingly comes from outside your own industry’s boundaries — automakers disrupted by tech, finance disrupted by crypto — and staying narrowly in your lane guarantees you miss it.

2026 kept the pattern going: AI blurred the line between software company and every other kind of company, energy strategy became inseparable from AI infrastructure strategy, and the clearest opportunities kept showing up precisely in the blur between industries that used to be treated as separate.

Verdict: Held up — the blur got wider, not narrower.

Next up: Principle #23, Algorithmic Partnership — revisited.

How Innovation Happens — Lesson #15: Hire People You Don’t Like

October 21, 2026 by JimCarroll

Innovation suffers when everyone in the room thinks alike, talks alike and validates the same instincts.

Years ago I used a deliberately provocative phrase: hire people you don’t like. The point is not to hire unpleasant people. It is to resist building a team made entirely of people who make you comfortable.

A useful innovation team contains friction. Different backgrounds, different assumptions, different professional languages and different ways of seeing risk. If everyone immediately agrees, you may have harmony, but you probably do not have much cognitive diversity.

Comfort is wonderful for friendships. It can be dangerous for strategy.

So what does that mean in practice? It means challenging the assumption, habit, or hesitation that is keeping you anchored to the present. Here are three places to start.

Action Items:

Look at your leadership team and identify where the thinking is too homogeneous.
Invite one respected dissenter into your next strategy session.
Ask candidates what they disagree with your industry about, not just why they want to join it.

Explore the full How Innovation Happens series.

Real-World Examples

These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world.

TRM Labs: A CTO asks his team why his own idea is wrong

Hiring clever people is not the same as benefiting from what they think. At blockchain-intelligence company TRM Labs, an internal practice known as farming for dissent tries to make disagreement normal rather than career-threatening. In a June 2026 company account, employee Devin Blase described watching the chief technology officer, Rahul Raina, move around a meeting asking colleagues to identify flaws in his own proposal.

The meeting was not a performance in which staff were expected to flatter the boss before returning to business as usual. The stated aim was to challenge assumptions early and allow the better proposal to emerge regardless of where it began.

TRM explicitly distinguishes this from endless debate or rewarding people simply for being contrarian. It requires people who can challenge one another without converting disagreement into a personal contest. The account is a company description of its own culture, not an independent audit of whether every employee always feels safe to dissent.

Still, the practice offers a concrete test of a leader’s sincerity: does the most senior person in the room actively ask for a credible case against the idea they just proposed? If not, intellectual diversity may be present on the payroll but absent from the decision.

Why it matters: The most useful colleague is sometimes the one whose reasoning makes your favourite assumption impossible to defend.

Sources:

The military red team: The junior officer whose answer beat the generals

The US military has developed structured red-teaming methods because experienced leaders can become trapped inside the assumptions shared by their own group. An account published by the US Army’s NCO Journal describes a telling exercise after a 2014 cheating scandal involving Air Force nuclear missile officers.

Senior military leaders were brought together to examine the problem with a red-team instructor. Using an anonymized idea-rating technique, the group gave a top score to a suggestion: ask junior missile officers why they had felt such pressure to cheat. When a senior leader asked who had submitted the idea, a junior aide eventually identified himself.

The instructor’s point was that a familiar hierarchy might have prevented the group from hearing the idea if its author had been identified at the beginning. The story is presented in an Army educational publication as an illustration of groupthink mitigation, not as proof that the subsequent investigation was solved by this single suggestion.

Its importance is the mechanism: temporarily remove status signals so inconvenient perspectives have a fair chance to influence decisions. In most businesses, a person who challenges the senior team’s interpretation risks being seen as difficult. In this exercise, that challenge was the contribution.

Why it matters: It is not enough to hire people with different opinions. A decision process must keep rank, familiarity and politics from filtering out their best observations.

Sources:

JimCarroll

Real-World Examples

AirPods Pro: When the hearing-aid competitor came from headphones

Starlink at sea: A rocket company redraws cruise-ship connectivity

From the stage

Why it matters

The takeaway

Real-World Examples

TRM Labs: A CTO asks his team why his own idea is wrong

The military red team: The junior officer whose answer beat the generals

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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.

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.