In my latest Mass High Tech column I assert that making customer experience central, not technology, is the key to any innovation process.

The imperative of our time is to unleash the power of innovation to solve our big social challenges, including health care, education and energy. I think a lot about how to simplify the innovation narrative, make it more inclusive and become more experimental. Unleashing the power of innovation is about making customer experience central, focusing on outputs and looking up from our silos.

For starters we need a shared definition for innovation. Our rhetoric is all over the place and innovation has become a buzzword. Everything is an innovation and everyone is an innovator. When that happens, nothing and no one is. We conflate invention with innovation. They are not the same. A simple definition: Innovation is a better way to deliver value. It is not innovation until value is delivered one customer at a time. Often we don’t have to invent anything new to deliver value or solve a problem. We have to get better at reconfiguring and combining existing capabilities to deliver value. It is not technology that gets in the way of innovation, it is stubborn humans and organizations that resist change.

I am amazed at the number of innovation discussions where the voice of the end user is missing. Customer experience must be at the heart of any innovation and design process. Solutions are not about institutions, they are about patients, students, citizens and customers.

Continue reading Focus on the Customer Experience, Not the Technology in Mass High Tech

I’m not much of a car guy but when Ford announced it was dumping its Mercury line I got a little nostalgic.  I wasn’t born when “Rebel Without a Cause” was released in 1955 but remember seeing the movie as a kid and being in awe of James Dean.  Who can’t relate to the lonely rebellious outsider, with his slicked back hair and leather jacket, trying to fit in? No one remembers the name of the character Dean played (Jim Stark).  After a tragic death James Dean became the character in our minds for eternity. Don’t get me started on Natalie Wood. The thing everyone remembers and the real icon from the classic movie is the cool Mercury James Dean drove.  It was a 1949 six-passenger coupe, fitted with a V-8 and an attitude to match Dean’s character.  The Merc was coolness personified.

Don’t you wonder how the Merc became so cool coming from Ford where Henry’s motto was, any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.  The Model T was the iconic product of a new industrial era. Henry Ford gave us the assembly line and mass production.  He didn’t give us cool.  For that you have to look to his only son Edsel, who had a better idea.   I know we associate the name Edsel with failure but that is because of a disastrous Ford model that was introduced in 1958 well after Edsel had died in 1943.  Edsel Ford was not a failure. Read more

It’s rare that a book so squares with your world-view that you think the authors have taken up residence in your head.  Henceforth The Power of Pull shall be known as my new playbook. The alignment is uncanny. It is a must read for all innovation junkies and anyone who is trying to sort out the possibilities of the 21^st century.  Many have tried to help us understand and navigate the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy.  Few get below the buzzwords.  The Power of Pull not only captures the essence of the transformation under way it provides an actionable framework for individuals, institutions, and social systems.  It is a call to action reminding us of the opportunity and responsibility to remake our world in a way that deeply honors the potential of those around us.

I expected the book to be great. Just look at two of its authors.  John Seely Brown (JSB) and John Hagel are on my short innovation hero list.  JSB (How cool is it to be known by your initials?) was the Director of Xerox PARC with a front row seat in Silicon Valley before it became a household name in innovation circles.  JSB was one of the first people to encourage me when I was launching the Business Innovation Factory (BIF).  We both gave presentations at a conference in 2004 at Brown University.  After my talk, Innovation @ Scale; The Imperative to Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast, JSB told me the idea for BIF to create a real world laboratory to enable R&D for new business models and systems was compelling. He asked how we would deliver on the proposition and we haven’t looked back since. Read more

In my latest Bloomberg Businessweek column I assert that the U.S. Department of Education Race to the Top has the potential to catalyze system level change.  We must transform our education system and government has an important innovation catalyst role to play.  The student is waiting.

The best use of government is as a catalyst for social system innovation. Yes, that’s right: “Innovation bureaucrat” need not be an oxymoron. Leaders should get the innovation reaction started—and then get out of the way.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is showing how it can be done. The “Race to the Top” program offers $4 billion in grants to states committed to reforming their education systems. Duncan outlined a clear goal of restoring the U.S. as a world leader in preparing students to succeed in college and the workplace and announced the first grants on Mar. 29, 2010—$100 million for Delaware and $500 million for Tennessee.

Instead of spreading the money across the country as usual, Duncan sent a clear message. Imagine the reaction in statehouses across the country when they didn’t get a slice of the pie. By being clear and sticking to the announced criteria, Duncan sent a strong signal that states needed to demonstrate a willingness and capacity to transform. Any state with legislation on the books preventing development or expansion of innovative school approaches need not apply. Any state without the means to leverage data and accountability systems to improve measurable performance outcomes need not apply. And, my favorite, any state that couldn’t demonstrate effective alignment with local teachers’ unions on performance accountability and transformation plans need not apply.

Continue reading my Bloomberg Businessweek column here.

You probably haven’t heard of Richard LaMotta but I bet you have heard of and enjoyed his innovation, the Chipwich ice cream sandwich.  I rank the Chipwich right up there on my list of all-time favorite innovations along with Guttenberg’s printing press and Apple’s iPhone.  Like most great innovations the Chipwich didn’t require inventing anything new, just recombining existing elements in a new way to deliver value.  What could deliver more value than sandwiching soft vanilla ice cream between two, large chocolate chip cookies?  As if that isn’t innovative enough add in the piece de resistance, rolling the whole thing in chocolate chips!  Now that’s innovation.  LaMotta died last week and his classic entrepreneur story is worth remembering and celebrating. Read more

I was invited by Olin College President Rick Miller to participate in his President’s Council meeting this week.  I am glad I went.  President Miller and his team are doing great work at Olin.  They are reengineering engineering education.  Olin College was founded in 1999 and will graduate its fifth class this weekend.  Of course Olin had the luxury of starting from scratch but they have taken full advantage of the greenfield opportunity to rethink every aspect of engineering education.  President Miller refers to Olin as a laboratory for developing new engineering education models.  How refreshing.  A real world lab to enable student centered experiential learning.  It is music to my innovation junkie and Business Innovation Factory (BIF) ears.  And the early results are in, the unemployment rate for Olin graduates since the program’s inception is one percent. Olin’s aspiration is nothing short of redefining engineering as a profession of innovation. Read more

Prior to a recent trip to Toronto I tweeted:

Looking forward to getting an innovation fix in Toronto.  I swear innovation is in the air up there.

I meant it.  There are just some places that give off an innovation vibe.  I feel it every time I visit Toronto.

David Olive, a business columnist, for the Toronto Star saw the tweet and my recent Business Week column, Needed Urban Innovation Hot Spots.   He called and we kicked around the potential for Toronto to become an innovation hot spot.  I share his conclusion that the answer is yes and that it is likely to be citizen led.

Here is David Olive’s article: Toronto a ‘Laboratory of Urban Innovation’

I apologize to my friends in Toronto having to wake up on Sunday morning to my mug in their local newspaper.  I don’t apologize for starting an important local conversation and hope it continues among local innovators and spreads to other cities.

It is an honor to find myself in the tall cotton being mentioned along side my friend Richard Florida. The Rise of the Creative Class changed the way many of us think about the importance of human capital to urban development and economic prosperity.  Richard’s new book The Great Reset is on my must read list.  I am grateful that Richard is on the Research Advisory Council of the Business Innovation Factory.

While I readily accept the label of innovation junkie and catalyst I think David reaches in labeling me an urban planning guru.  Richard Florida is an urban planning guru.  I’m no guru, but that doesn’t stop me from sharing a point of view.

We need more cities to take up the challenge of becoming innovation hot spots.

I don’t know about you but I am disgusted by yet another example of the bystander effect.   Surveillance video from April 18^th made public this week reveals the full extent of our inhumanity as Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax, a homeless man in Queens, was left dying in the street as people just walked on by.  Hugo was stabbed while trying to save a woman from an attacker.  Seven people walked by the dying man in the hour and twenty minutes it took for first responders to react. Most just gawked, one snapped a picture on his mobile phone, and one person even turned Hugo’s body over exposing his wounds before walking away.  Are you kidding me?  Are we that oblivious and unwilling to get involved that we leave a man to die in the street while walking on by?  Apparently we are.  Psychologists have labeled this the bystander effect.  What ever it is called it is disgusting.

The bystander effect is psychobabble for the phenomenon where individuals do not offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present.  The theory is that the probability of help is inversely proportional to the number of bystanders.  The greater the number of bystanders the less likely any of them will help.  The bystander effect became widely recognized due to the Kitty Genovese case in 1964 that was sensationalized by an article in the New York Times (before YouTube and cell phone pictures).   The Genevese case is similar to Tale-Yax in that they both took place in Queens and involved a stabbing in full view of bystanders that chose not to act to help the victim.  In the Genevese case the perpetrator actually left the scene with Kitty unconscious and came back ten minutes later to finish the job while neighbors did nothing to help.  Amazing.  These cases are haunting and leave me thinking about the diffusion of responsibility within a crowd or within the community. Read more

Field trip!  What child doesn’t get excited when a teacher proclaims these magic words?  The permission slip is the first thing out of the backpack.  I remember counting down the days until the day finally arrived. You can probably still remember those school adventures like they were yesterday.  Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to get out of the boring classroom and to experience the real world?   The destination doesn’t matter.  Anywhere out of the classroom works. The enthusiasm and student energy is palpable whether the destination is the zoo, aquarium, museum, or a historical reenactment. Experience beats a boring lecture every time. With all of today’s technology why can’t we make every day in the classroom feel like a field trip?

An article in the New York Times this morning, Museums Take Their Lessons to the Schools, caught my attention.  Apparently with school budgets in a death spiral, field trips are a luxury that many school districts can no longer afford.  Field trips to the Boston Museum of Science are off 30% since 2007.  As someone who drove my three kids crazy with incessant trips to this very science museum I am troubled by any reduction in school field trips. No problem, the museum has figured out how to take the museum’s science experience to the classroom.  They have created fourteen programs that can travel to the classroom including an inflatable planetarium so kids can gaze at the galaxy, Animal Adaptations, Cryogenics, and the kindergarten favorite, Dig Into Dinosaurs.  These traveling programs are so popular the museum expects to visit 1,000 classrooms next year.  Katie Slivensky, an educator from the museum, refers to these travel programs as “backwards field trips”.  Great idea.  Bring the real world experiential learning opportunity in to the classroom.  We need more backwards field trips. Read more

How many times have you signed a contract barely scanning its force majeure clause? You know the paragraph, the one with all the legalese that basically lets both parties out of their obligations due to an extraordinary event like the outbreak of a civil war or an act of God such as an earthquake.  You don’t read the clause because you never ever expect it to take effect.  These things don’t happen, at least not to you.  Or do they?  Just in the last three months alone we have witnessed a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti killing an estimated 230,000 people and leaving 1,000,000 homeless, over 9 inches of rain causing the worst flooding in 200 years in my home state of Rhode Island, and of course Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull (I couldn’t resist getting this great name in to a blog post) volcano erupting for the first time in 190 years opening up a 2000 foot fissure spewing ash across Europe bringing air travel and the continent to its knees. No one expected any of these events to happen. It seems force majeure is not so rare.  Maybe we need to get better at expecting the unexpected.  Stuff happens. Read more