JimCarroll

Health care industry keynotes

April 14, 2007 by JimCarroll

A bit of a backgrounder on my work in the health care sector/

Partial client list

Waters Corporation • MDS Nordion • American Society for Health Care Risk Management • VHA Georgia • Blue Cross Blue Shield national office • Association of Organ Procurement Organizations • Phamalinx annual conference • Health Care Industry Distributors Association • Trillium Health Care • Providence Health Plans • Harvard Pilgrim Helath Care • Canadian Medical Association • Glaxo Wellcome • American Academy of Opthalmology • North Carolina Medical Managers Group • Canadian Organization For Advanced Computers & Health • Health Administration Association of BC • Ontario Hospital Association • Roche Diagnostics • Essilor Eyecare

Areas of trends and innovation focus

• managing health in an era of constraint and challenge • opening up the minds of health care workers and adminstrators to the potential of the future • a futuristic examination of impact of digital technology and connectivity of health care • rethinking health care delivery in the digital age • business case issues for medical adminstrative staff on digital business • motivational kickoff/keynote for staff events • medical company sales force training and motivation • innovation — new business models, exploiting new opportunities in the health care sector • a look to the future • strategy sessions

Highlights

Jim recently spoke to 600 employees of a major health care supplier, from the perspective of “A Day in the Life of a Patient in 2030.” He took a look back at the massive and huge transformative changes which occurred in the world of health care from 2006 to 2030.
Jim provided the opening keynote for about 3,000 health care professionals at the annual American Society for Health Care Risk Management in San Antonio, TX, with an indepth futurist view of key health care trends
co-authored “Good Health Online” a book that examined the role the Internet can play in our own health care, long before this became an issue on the radar of the health care industry
Jim has provided workshops for senior managers of health care organizations, focussing on the issue of health care services in the digital age, and the impact of e-biz on the health care industry. He provided senior management of Blue Cross/Blue Shield Florida with an interactive workshop — and they were so thrilled with the result that they had him down for four more sessions. He has now walked 400 of their senior staff through workshops that have helped them to assss the future of health care
Jim helps health care professionals and executives understand the massive change occurring in the world of healthcare, and think about ways that healthcare services are provided and delivered in a time of rapid change
as a futurist, he takes a unique look at the opportunties and challenges in the world of health care as change envelopes the industry at a a furious pace, and helps administrators and medical professionals conceptualize the strategies and issues that need to be pursued

Messing with bits of business strategy ….

April 11, 2007 by JimCarroll

When you are on stage, you’re mind is working at light speed, as you synthesize your knowledge to the trends impacting the crowd. You often don’t get to reconcile a lot of it till later. I’ve had two weeks in the home office and have been working on my book, and preparing for a raft of upcoming presentations.

When you get breathing room, you can gain some insight from what you’ve been doing: : when it comes to innovation, I’ve been dealing with a lot of organizations who have had some very interesting, innovative approaches to business strategy. Here’s a short list to think about as to how you stir up some innovation by messing with your business strategy:

look out: don’t ask what you can do to run your business better — ask what you can due to run your customer, supplier or partner’s business better!
move beyond: most projects start out with one strategic goal in mind. Succesful innovators realize part way into the project that myriad other new, unknown, and very cool opportunities are opening up — that they hadn’t even thought of before. Keep your eyes open!
turn the tables: a lot of companies are being WalMartized and HomeDepotized, and have to meet certain operational expectations. Innovators go beyond this, and do cool things that let them regain more control over the relationship — usually with projects that give them more info on what’s happening on the shelf than the “big guys” have!
clarify fuzziness. In the last few years, companies have found that the reliability of information around chargebacks, end-cap fee management, promo display management and all the other esoteric stuff, has become extremely fuzzy, because they’ve lost control of the information. They’ve beat this back by making financial / accounting reconciliation important once again. It flows right to the bottom line …. and can be an easy win.
be cool: smart people don’t want to work for companies that have no innovation-oxygen. They’re looking for companies that are busting their markets, ramping up growth, and who are willing to take a risk. Your brand isn’t just your product — it’s your attractability-index! And here’s an even better secret: even existing staff want you to be cool. They’re seeing innovation, and they want you doing it too, even if they grumble and groan about it.
build your street-cred: your customers, suppliers and partners live in a world in which everyone has instant insight, operational excellence, and staff who know what is going on. If you don’t, you lose your credibility, and you lose more that that. You’ve got to continue to invest to keep up with the ever increasing minimum-bar-of-expectations that’s out there.
slice and dice: your a loser if you play in a commodity economy. Build the intelligence that lets you know where you can win by being premium, and toss the rest of your customers overboard.
routinely innovate: lots of companies continue to struggle with SOX and Rule 404. Few approached it as an innovation opportunity; but those who did won big, as they got away from spreadsheet based compliance, and realized real business process transformation. View any emerging regulatory requirement as an innovation opportunity, and you’re golden!
extend and embrace: make your insight your partners insight, and let your transcations be there transactions! While “portals” sounds so-90’s, it’s still one of the leading edge innovation strategies out there, and it has a big impact.

10 Long Term Trends of Real Substance

April 3, 2007 by JimCarroll

The level of hype right now with “social networking” and technology is getting a bit out of hand. It’s a little bit like 1999 all over again! While what’s happening right now is important, it’s more fun to think about some of the things that are happening on a 15-20 year horizon. Big change is everywhere, and most people miss the big transformations while they are underway. Here’s my list of some of the trends we should really be watching.

rapid movers start to predominate: some of today’s XBox/Wii players are going to be CEO’s of big companies within 15-20 years. The high-velocity economy is just starting to take off. Just wait until the Gen-Connect starts to run things.
everything is gaining intelligence: chips and connectivity are immersing themselves into everday, ordinary things, and you likely aren’t even noticing. Hyperconnectivity changes everything: bioconnectivity and device-intelligence are the things to watch.
volatility is the new normal: increasing connectivity increases the likelihood of cascading failures. Risk management is becoming more important, and more complex. Fewer organizations pay serious attention to the complexity of risk, leading to greater potential for short, sharp economic shocks.
boredom increasingly drives markets: people can’t stop fidgeting with their cell phones long enough to pay attention to anything. Clarity of value is critical, creativity is crucial, engagement is the next brand foundation.
transformational change is everywhere: there are lots of people dying to mess up the fundamentals in almost every industry, and they aren’t your competitors. Industry blurring will continue unabated, as rebellion against established business models becomes the norm; think GoogleCar, not Toyota. Flexibility with change is critical.
the bar of expectations continues to increase: you have to innovate to keep up with the expectations of your customer, partners and suppliers, or you don’t survive. An increasing number of brands will expire and become something from “the olden days,” simply because their organizations lack the ability to innovate.
the “created in China” phase comes next: half the population is under the age of 25. They’re wired, highly collaborative, and have tasted the early stages of economic success. Innovation is thriving – forget manufacturing, think design.
big trends rule. Over 20 years, health care transitions from prevention to detection; ethanol moves from distillation to production; manufacturing goes from production to fabbing. There are big, sweeping industrial changes underway, and it has nothing to do with the current hype around “social networking,” et al.
knowledge and discovery exponentiates: the new global-mind generates new knowledge at furious rates. We’re going from 19 million known chemical substances today, to 80 million by 2025, and 5 billion by 2100. Any new substance can lead to the emergence of a billion dollar market. Discovery rules, time-to-market defines.
experiential capital dominates over financial capital: over a 20 year span, it’s the depth of experience that counts; the agility to respond to rapid change that will define the success or death of an organization. Money thrown at innovation doesn’t work; the knowledge that comes from trying things out, and learning from the experience, leads to greater innovation success.

These are all things I’ve written about on this blog over time. The trends are all quite simple to understand, surround us today, and are breathtaking in scope.

10 Truths about the Future

March 30, 2007 by JimCarroll

In my keynotes, I often talk about how the rate of change — whether with business models, product lifecycles, skills and knowledge — is speeding up. With such change, there’s a lot of uncertainty within many industries as to what to do next: a senior executive of one client commented to me from his perspective, “….entities are engaged in survival tactics because they don’t know what to do next ….”

Innovation is all about adapting to the future — and if the future is coming at you faster, then you need to innovate faster. Innovation shouldn’t be about trying to survive the future — it should be about thriving.

At a recent keynote to executives within the direct marketing industry, I outline some truths as to the future:

It’s incredibly fast: Product lifecycles are collapsing. It’s said that half of what students learn in their freshman year about science and technology is obsolete or revised by their senior year. There are furious rates of new scientific discovery. Time is being compressed.
It involves a huge adaptability gap: Earlier generations — boomers — have had participated in countless “change management workshops,” reflecting the reality that many of them have long struggled with change. Gen-Connect — today’s 15 and under — will never think of change management issue. They just change.
It has a huge instantaneity: The average consumer scans 12 feet of shelf space per second. Most news becomes old hat within 36 hours of emerging. We live in the era of the rapid idea-cycle.
It hits you most when you don’t expect it: Every organization must deal with two realities: the rapid emergence of new technologies, the sudden adoption of old-hat ideas. If you want to understand what comes next, study Gartner’s concept of “hype-cycles”
It’s being defined by renegades: Increasingly, the future of many an industry is being defined by industry expatriates. When a real innovator can’t innovate within a company, they step outside, form a startup, and spark massive industry change on their own. Before you know, they’ve reinvented you.
It involves partnership: Old business models involved asking, “what can we do to run our business better?” The new business model is this: “What can we do to run our customers, suppliers and partners business better?”
It involves intensity: We must learn to run our business at video-game intensity: in fast paced markets, we need fast paced business capabilities.
It’s bigger than you think: I used to joke about a futuristic GoogleCar. I don’t think it’s a joke anymore. Complacency is a dangerous thing, particular when every organization is faced with constant, relentless external innovation from unexpected competitors.
It involves innovation intensity: With rapid change, everyone in an organization must innovate. My biggest frustration in appearing on Maria maria bartiromo’s CNBC Business of Innovation show a month ago, was that it featured a lot of “innovation elitists” who seemed to indicate that only special people can “do” innovation. Wrong : thriving in the future has a leadership that involves everyone in innovation. No idea is too dumb, no opportunity is too small.
It comes from experiential capital: With a fast future, you’ve got to learn and relearn. Corporate equity isn’t just money: it’s the cumulative experience and knowledge of the team. While Verizon takes a lot of abuse from analysts for its’ big fiber optic bet, here’s what I see: the CEO stating that the cost of installing fiber dropped 30% in 2005, and that there was a further reduction of 15-20% in 2006. By the end of end of 2006, they expect it to cost 1/2 that of 2005. That’s experiential capital, and that’s an invaluable asset.

The future is going to hit you whether you like it or not; it’s your approach to it, and how you innovate with it, that defines your future success.

Links:

Can you run your businses at video game intensity?
The GoogleCar
Gartner’s Hype Cycles

Video – innovation and education

March 29, 2007 by JimCarroll

Some weeks ago, I spoke at the University of Oklahoma, on the role of innovation in education.

The biggest area for any educational institution in the future is in the area of “just-in-time knowledge.” Whether we are dealing with medical, scientific, financial and business, mechanical or engineering issues, one thing is clear: the knowledge that people need to know to do their job today is becoming infinitely more complex every minute, with a constant, relentless flood of that which is new. In such an environment:

the ability of obtaining rapid, instant knowledge generation is becoming an urgent necessity in almost every field of endeavor;
the ability to quickly digest, understand and assess new knowledge is an increasingly important skill – one that not a lot of individuals have mastered;
the ability to reformulate our thinking, assumptions and capabilities to respond to the constant change being thrust upon us is of increasing importance
That’s where the concept of “just in time knowledge” comes in, as it best describes the nexus of these realities.

And from an innovation perspective, there is plenty of opportunity for meeting the demands of our fast-paced world through just in time knowledge.

This video is linked to the post I originally made when visiting the folks in Oklahoma; you can read that post, What’s happening with our workforce here

High velocity retail innovation

March 27, 2007 by JimCarroll

Back in October 2005, I identified the major trends that would sweep the retail and consumer products industries, and some of the key innovation methods that organizations should pursue in order to avoid product and service commoditization. You can read the original post here.

Since then, we’ve seen continued massive rates of change in these sectors. Three weeks ago, I keynoted a major convenience store conference, speaking both to store and franchise owners, as well as dozens of executives from major consumer product companies.

The retail industry today is now driven by hyper-innovation, rapid technological advance, increased customer expectations, rapidly evolving product trends, and increasingly fickle consumers driven by the rapidity of instant trends.

How can people turn these trends into opportunity? It comes from innovation — not just with new products, but with business process, store design and layout, rapid adoption of new products, format mix, and partnerships between the retailers, consumer goods companies and packaging companies.

Some of the trends I highlighted in my talk included:

the rapidity of change: The retailer of today is drowning in new product innovations. According to the Washington Post, some 33,679 new products were introduced into the consumer products sector in 2004, up 53% from 10 years earlier. With room for only so many new SKU’s, it can be pretty difficult to keep up.
constant format change: There’s a lot of innovation with in-store formats and display technology : constant experimentation with store formats, brand partnering promo innovation, new in-store displays, logistics and tracking studies, and countless other new ways of doing things within the store are all critical.
zero-attention span customers: The average consumer now scans 12 feet of shelf space per second. News becomes old news within 36 hours. The average age of a video game player is now 37 years old. Today’s consumer has precious little attention, and you’ve got to work extra hard to get them interested in a product while in the store.

In a follow article that I wrote for the conference, which will come out in June, I summarized my guidance to the audience: “Get on board the tornado of change in retail and ride it for all it is worth! You should develop a team that has a finely-tuned radar for unique trends, experiments, success stories and innovations. They’re swirling around you continuously, they are constantly reinventing the world of retail on a minute by minute basis – and you’ve got to understand them and capitalize upon them.”

JimCarroll

GET IN TOUCH

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.