Futurist Keynote Speaker Jim Carroll: Disruptive Trend & Innovation Expert

Futurist Keynote Speaker,  Author, Innovation Expert. 

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Fast to innovate. Fast to build. Fast to market.

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innovation-ont.jpgThough I spend my time travelling the world with my innovation message, it’s nice to find some recognition at home. I’ve been living in Ontario, Canada, for the last 22 years, a region that has long been an economic powerhouse.

The economy here, like many others, has its ups and downs; and in going forward into an economy of rapid change, it’s the innovation capability that will make the difference.

The Premier of the province, Dalton McGuinty, has just issued his first Ontario Innovates newsletter; I’m interviewed within it. The Premier notes that “we’re living in an exciting era where ideas are springing to life faster than we can blink.” He goes on to note that “in today’s hyper-competitive global economy, “it’s not about the big overtaking the small. It’s about the fast overtaking the slow.”

I agree, commenting “We can be wide open to the world and participate in global opportunities, or we can retreat and hide away from it ….. I sense folks are dispirited, especially in smaller communities. It’s like they feel they tried it and it didn’t work. We need to remind people of what is possible.”

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What’s happening with our workforce?

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workforce.gifLast week, there was a common theme to my keynotes for the University of Oklahoma and for the national Blue Cross Blue Shield Association: “what’s happening with our workforce?”

There is an intense degree of interest amongst executives as to the extent of the looming skills shortage, how to retain and attract critical skill sets, and how to deal with the challenges of the next generation.

I’ve rolled this into an overall keynote topic: “What’s Happening With Our Workforce: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Skills Agility.” In these types of talks, I’ve been taking a look at a wide variety of trends:

  • every organization is faced with an increasingly complex, restless, age-diverse disloyal, and highly specialized workforce — and a workforce that will have the longest life span ever, from hyperactive 15-year-olds to wizened, not-ready-to-quit 85-year-olds.
  • with the coming “end of retirement,” most companies will come to realize they’ll need a lot of telephones with big buttons for members of the 70+ folks who are still a part of their workforce — and a lot of innovative workplace practices as well
  • the arrival of “Gen-Connect” — the kids who have been wired with a mouse since birth — will lead to the question of whether “good luck” will be the only possible response to the question of “Managing Gen-Y.”
  • this workplace weirdness will only be compounded by the ongoing rapid evolution of knowledge and skills, such that most organizations will find it impossible to find the highly specialized skills needed in the economy of the future
  • The “War for Talent” will be the new competitive battleground, and organizations that can attract, engage, retain and amuse an increasingly complex workforce will be the ones who find success in the rapidly evolving global economy.
  • in an era such as this, firms are faced with a future that requires a new form of human capital agility: the ability to deploy the right skills at the right time for the right purpose — regardless of where the skill might be required, or where the skill is sourced
  • at the same time, organizations are faced with an increasingly global talent base, a reality that demands new forms of collaboration, insightful project management, and deep insight into the effective utilization of those skills. The way to the future is clear: it’s no longer about managing time: it’s about successful skills deployment

I’ve captured these thoughts on the workplace challenges of the future in a recent Trends Overview: 21st Unique Characteristics of 21st Centuries Skills, available here.

Given the number of calls that I receive, this is certainly one of the hottest topics for 2007!

CNBC : The Business of Innovation

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BOI_Logo.jpgThe air date for the five part CNBC series, “The Business of Innovation,” hosted by Maria Bartiromo, has finally been set: it will air March 4, at 9PM EST, and again at midnight. It will air in Europe and Asia subsequent to that.

I’m a featured guest expert on the show, chatting about what companies must do to instill a culture of innovation.

Innovation and the future of education

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What’s happening with our worforce? That is increasingly the focus of many of my recent talks.
oku.jpgYesterday I spoke to the staff and faculty of the University of Oklahoma College of Continuing Education / College of Liberal Studies.

The overall theme was “innovation in the world of high velocity education.”

Broadly, my talk was based around one of my favorite quotes: that of educator Lewis Perelman: “Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.”

There’s a lot of opportunity for innovation in any educational institution: innovating with the methodology of education upgrading, new knowledge opportunities, and innovation in the overall administration and delivery of education. Beyond that, there’s the overall issue of ensuring that in a high-velocity world, educators are delivering the right knowledge at the right time for the right purpose.

To that end, I outlined what I believe to be the primary areas for innovation:

  • the rapid emergence of new educational opportunities, with foundation knowledge, and with knowledge refreshment
  • a need for constant change and upgrading of core skills
  • more partnership opportunities due to complexity – as organizations offload knowledge refreshing / upgrading requirements
  • greater specialization of knowledge topics – and bigger opportunities for academic centres to focus as world class leader in specific niches
  • instant, just in time knowledge takes on a unique role and opportunity

There’s more to be found in my list of “10 big trends for educators,” and many of my assumptions as to where we are going in the world of education is based upon my listing of “10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills.”

Instilling innovation with the “trends and innovation feedback loop”

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trendsloop.jpgIn the world of high-velocity change, how could you go about actually keeping on top of all the trends that might impact your business models, customers, distribution channels, competitors, and markets?

How do you develop a forward-oriented culture that allows you to immerse yourself in the developments occurring in the global innovation feedback loop, and provide for relentless, effective innovation in everything that you do?

With many of my clients, I walk through the “trends and innovation loop” : it’s a model that I developed a number of years ago. It’s a methodology, and a way of thinking, that can help engender an ongoing culture of innovation. There are several elements to the loop, all of which are always operating full-speed, flat-out:

  • Trends Radar: Innovation comes from the ability to see the obvious, and so the first step in the loop is to establish a form of “trends radar” that keeps you attuned to the future. Everyone throughout the organization should be prepared to keep a constant eye out for new developments and opportunities that might impact your business or market, and that might provide opportunities for innovation. They should also be watching for trends, issues, or signs that might indicate a potential threat or looming challenge. Everyone needs to understand that having a good radar can help the organization spot future opportunities and act upon them, as well as do what is necessary to ward off and deal with potential threats.
  • Trends Receiver: Having your people watch for trends, developments, all issues all around them is the first step in the loop; the second is to instill in them the confidence to share these observations with everyone in the organization. You can call this a collaborative capability: a cultural willingness to share information,
  • Trends Transmitter: A good trends receiver is critical to gather all of the observations that your people have, but without a transmitter, the ideas will go nowhere. The trends transmitter is the process of taking the observations and ideas generated from the receiver, sifting through them, and finding the ones that might be important. This is a project and strategic-oriented role, as well as an embedded cultural insight.
  • Innovation Trap: Many of the ideas that your trends radar might spot and share won’t make sense, and might be meaningless in the grand context of things. But on occasion, critical information will emerge that might spell a brilliant opportunity or a significant threat. When that happens, you must be able to turn those observations into actionable plans. The trap is a formalized or informal process that takes the best potential observations from the trends transmitter and turns them into concrete ideas and plans.
  • Innovation Factory: Your innovation trap can come up with a lot of great ideas, but if you are like many organizations, you’ll fail to see them turn into something that is real and sustainable. Most experts agree that new innovative ideas fail in many organizations, not because of a lack of imagination but due to a basic inability to turn ideas into actionable items. The innovation factory is a cultural willingness to embrace change; it is also the methodology by which new ideas are translated into real business processes, products, activities, and initiatives.
  • Innovation Runway: once the ideas have been translated into concrete, actionable plans, you’ll need a method to ensure that they are properly launched and integrated into the organization – that’s your innovation runway. Your actionable plans might involve experts at implementation, project management, and other individuals who can effect change within the organization.
  • Innovation Rear-view Mirror: To complete the process, place yourself in a position of continuous re-examination of your innovation success. You must constantly re-evaluate what you’ve learned, what you’ve implemented, and how well it has worked. Use this process to enhance your understanding of how to be innovative, by changing your approach for the next round of the innovation loop.

A LAST WORD
The key to the trends and innovation loop is that it is an ongoing, regular process. It must become part of the very fabric of the organization. A key point to the loop – to make it work, there must be a clear understanding that everyone in the organization is responsible for observing important trends that might impact the organization, for generating innovative ideas, and for helping to put those ideas into practice. Without that type of understanding throughout the organization, most efforts at innovation and dealing with the future will be doomed to fail.

Velocity, Agility, Complexity, and Flexibility……

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I’m doing a private conference call today with more than a hundred executives in the life sciences industry, on behalf of my client, SAP.

The theme, “Velocity, Agility, Complexity, and Flexibility: The Four Key Drivers for Competitive Advantage,” drives directly from the key theme in my trends overview: Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care.

Together, the panel will discuss the challenges they face every business day in the high-velocity pharmaceutical industry, and how innovation plays a core role in how they approach to tackling the challenges and opportunities that exist. In the call, we’ll talk to these executives as to what they have been doing within the pharmaceutical and health care industry to:

  • Increase their agility and flexibility
  • Forge innovative partnerships
  • Achieve improved business visibility
  • Pursue relentless customer-oriented innovation
  • Establish forward-oriented leadership
  • Leverage technology to meet your business objectives

Over the last few years, I’ve spent time with dozens of these types of panels with companies in every industry sector, and there is a huge amount of innovative insight that I’ve studied. In the case of today’s panelists, they’ve discovered such unique areas for innovation in manufacturing/planning; streamlining the “chain of custody” process in manufacturing, and how they have provided for innovation in how they manage volume discounts. As one panelist noted, “we get a few big wins and a lot of small wins, but the small wins really add up!”

That’s a key point about innovation: it isn’t just about hitting home runs. You can be innovative as heck by hitting doubles, singles, and triples, and getting the runs in.

For further background, read Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care

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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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Definitions: Core • Deep Dive I • Deep Dive II
Series: 2026 • Megatrends • Forward • Tomorrow