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Filed Under: World Innovation Forum

Published on: Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Innovation and the Workplace

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There are many ingredients to innovation, and some of the most important are those that define the workplace — culture, mission, leadership and identity.

However, if today's employers view their workforces as static or homogenous resources to be dialed up when opportunity knocks and dialed down when the economic outlook presents unforeseen challenges, they're missing out on the potential of innovation and really failing to recognize all the segments of their employee population.

 

Published on: Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Is Your CEO Using Social Media?

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If your CEO is not leveraging social media, this could change quickly as more companies increase productivity and drive higher engagement levels by using social media. According to a recent study by Social Media Insights and Trends, only 5 percent of all Fortune 500 CEOs are on Twitter. While we hear about Tony Hsieh of Zappos and Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media on Twitter, they are not leading large publicly traded firms. However, there is the beginning of a movement to explore the business benefits of using these tools for the CEO and top executives of larger companies. Is your company one of the ones with a CEO on Twitter?

 

Published on: Friday, September 23, 2011

Opening Innovation, Creating Opportunity

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What if you were charged with delivering $100 million per week in growth with a staff of 9,000? And the only way you could reach your goals was to add more than 1.8 million people worldwide to your team and enlist them to work for free?

That's the challenge Larry Huston faced while serving as Innovation Officer at P&G. The company needed to maintain 7 percent organic growth per year — $5 billion — but when sales started to flatten, Huston had to find solutions to what P&G saw as an innovation problem.

 

Published on: Monday, September 19, 2011

Scientists, Designers and their Role in Innovation

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As senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, Paola Antonelli strives to promote a deeper understanding of design's transformative and constructive influence on the world and how designers help bridge the path to the future.

Designers, as she sees them, are interpreters. They help companies sense needs and preferences and understand consumer behavior. Their work is deeply intertwined and mutually dependent on science and scientists, Antonelli said, because new discoveries and ways of unleashing their potential and connectivity with the human experience hinge on creativity, exploration, imagination and the innovation that results.

 

 
How are people motivated to be innovative and creative and energized to come up with breakthrough ideas?

From that simple but deeply resonant question, bestselling author and former White House speechwriter Daniel Pink moved delegates at the 2011 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees, to step outside the corporate hierarchy and business texts and consider what social scientists have learned about what motivates people.

As developed as today's companies and economies have become, however, today's employers remain bound by what Pink termed "the physics of behavior." It's very simple, he said. "If you reward behavior, you typically get more of it, and if you punish behavior, you get less of it," he said. It's the old carrot and stick routine.

 

Published on: Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Innovating Against Unprecedented Risk

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How would you feel if the person you cared about most was trapped a half-mile underground somewhere? That's what Greg Hall's company, Drillers Supply International, faced and what drove his high-pressure innovation to help rescue the 33 Chilean miners more than 2,000 feet below the surface.

 

 
World-renowned Harvard Business School professor, consultant and best-selling author Clayton M. Christensen knows the power and potential of what he calls "disruption innovation," but he also knows that unlocking it requires the courage to ask the simple questions competitors simply fail to consider.

"What causes successful companies to fail?" Christensen inquired at the 2011 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees. The revelation, he suggested, is resident in organizations' and leaders' respective capacity to risk failure and all that is required to explore disruptive innovation and their willingness to effectively envision business failure if they do not connect with customers' real needs.

 

Published on: Tuesday, June 07, 2011

More than Happy Feet

Posted By: Robyn Greenspan
Filed Under: world innovation forum, robyn greenspan, culture, tony hsieh, zappos, amazon, wif, values, happiness
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Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, has a simple mission: Delivering Happiness. Not only to shoe customers, but to those who buy anything from the company's growing product line, as well as Zappos' employees.

But why stop there? Hsieh wants anyone who has any experience with Zappos to be happy. Even more ambitiously, he wants to create a happiness-inspiring corporate culture that every company will want to model.

 

Published on: Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Innovation Library

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Once again, ExecuNet was invited to partner with HSM at their World Innovation Forum as key members of the Bloggers Hub, reporting the powerful insight and thoughtful commentary from the global leaders and business icons onstage — and backstage.

 

Published on: Friday, January 07, 2011

Robert Brunner on Innovating Ideas into Objects

Posted By: Robyn Greenspan
Filed Under: world innovation forum, robyn greenspan, innovation, risk, brand, design, robert brunner
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What draws diehard Microsoft users toward some Apple products? Or tempts someone with little interest in cooking to purchase a Fuego grill? Why, when we have a choice between similar products, are we often more likely to have a stronger feeling for one over the other? To Robert Brunner’s mind, it is the design. But what is design?

Design is the interface between a company and its constituents, and Robert Brunner, who has partnered form and function for Apple Computer and now runs Ammunition Group, a brand and product design firm, integrates emotional connection into his work. Brunner stressed that "Design is ideas, not objects," and reminded that while "Objects are important, there needs to be more." Design is "about an experience and what we feel." "Why do you care if Apple goes out of business? It's because of how the company makes you feel. Would your customers shed any tears if you were gone?"

 

 
"Green" is evolving from a regulatory or moral requirement to a business strategy. Companies have different drivers for adopting green initiatives, but collectively we're moving toward a third era. Joel Makower, author of Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business, defined these eras at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.




  • The Compliance-Driven Era: Do no harm

  • The Environmentalism Era: Companies can do well by doing good

  • The Business Value Era: Green creates value by providing better products


 

Published on: Monday, November 29, 2010

Realizing Educational Opportunities for All

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"The power and potential of an excellent education is limitless." From that guiding principle, Wendy Kopp, chief executive officer and founder of Teach For America, has created a vision for enabling the potential of children in schools around the world.

Twenty-one years into her own learning process about what it takes to provide an outstanding education, Kopp says the most salient lesson has been the inherent solvability of the problem Teach For America is trying to address. "The most motivating lesson in our work is that [educational inequity] doesn't have to be. All kids can have a decent education, and that's what fuels our work in this area," Kopp said at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

 

Published on: Monday, November 22, 2010

Follow the Leader: Michael Porter

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Michael Porter did a Q&A session with Bloomberg TV's Eric Schatzker at the World Innovation Forum where ExecuNet was reporting exclusively for attendees.

The biggest problem on Wall Street?
"I think that fundamentally what happened on Wall Street is a disconnect between what they are doing and what we need in a real economy. Wall Street is supposed to serve the real economy. The real economy creates wealth in the long-term -- not in a year or a quarter. Most stock used to be held for a decade, and loans were held to maturity. What's happened in the last 10 or 20 years is a disconnect and shortening of horizons. The average stock is held for less than a year, and the average loan is packaged and sold to someone who doesn't even know why the loan was made. As things got more short-term, we saw more trading, more volatility, more hedging. Wall Street began creating products for itself and not its customers. It created products with little value and lots of destructive possibility."

 

Published on: Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Marketing and Web 2.0

Posted By: Robyn Greenspan
Filed Under: world innovation forum, robyn greenspan, marketing, amazon, andreas weigend
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Andreas Weigend, Amazon.com's Chief Scientist until January 2004, is a leading behavioral marketing expert and Stanford University lecturer with some unique perspectives on the challenges of marketing and leveraging data to drive critical business decisions. "Data is the digital air that we breathe. Everyone is a publisher. Every company is a publisher," Weigend said at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

We are in the midst of a social data revolution, he shared, and living in a world that first sought to connect computers, then to connect pages and now, increasingly through social networks, to connect people.

 

Published on: Monday, October 04, 2010

Follow the Leader: Seth Godin

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Business leaders create value for organizations either through obedience or risk, and one is at a surplus and no longer needed, said author and marketing expert Seth Godin at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

Those who generate ideas and "work without a map" are the real high-value leaders, according to Godin, but many companies don't encourage employee innovation nor do they build a culture that fosters creative thinking for fear of failing.

But failure acts as a double-edge sword: "Doing what you're told is a sure way to failure," said Godin of obedience; however, corporate innovation is guaranteed in a culture of failure.

 

Published on: Friday, September 24, 2010

The Customer is the Driver

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"Leaders do not lead innovation. Leaders have to facilitate it. Leaders will impinge on everyone else's innovation," said Michael Howe at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees. Howe, described by Forbes as one of the top 10 innovators of the past decade, believes the goal of businesses should be to create the right environments and support to foster innovation, and to align innovative ideas around business strategy and customer needs.

Howe explored the pace of innovation through the approach he mastered as chief executive of MinuteClinic, pioneer of the retail healthcare concept.

 

Published on: Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Tweet All About It

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What once began as a "big, empty box to type into and post on the Internet," one few could understand the meaning behind, gave rise to millions of blogs and the force behind a continually expanding self-publishing industry. Similarly, "When we did Twitter," said company co-founder Biz Stone to Bloomberg TV's Margaret Brennan at the 2010 World Business Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported, "we said, 'Here is a smaller box, and you can type into it and put it on the Internet.' People will find their own reason to use it. Everyone will find their own path to it."

That path has led to 65 million Tweets per day from 200 million unique visitors per month. Despite widespread categorization of Twitter as a social network, Stone said the service functions more like an information network or news network. "You can follow CNN, Bloomberg or three of your friends. Whatever you want to pay attention to in the world."

 

Published on: Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Management Today is Outdated

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Why have there been advances in virtually every technology invented in the last 100 years, yet management is woefully out of date? At the 2009 World Business Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported, strategist and innovator Gary Hamel asked the delegates, "Could technology management change in this century the way it changed in the last century? Almost all organizations are running on 19th century management systems."

Management was created, the author and co-founder of the Management Innovation Lab at the London Business School said, to "get people to show up every day and do the same job over and over again like robots."

 

Published on: Friday, August 20, 2010

Do the Impossible - Ignore the Lizard

Posted By: Robyn Greenspan
Filed Under: world innovation forum, robyn greenspan, innovation, marketing, seth godin, cmo
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"Innovation means doing stuff that is impossible, otherwise people would have done it already," said author and marketing expert Seth Godin at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

Marketing, Godin said, has largely been about advertisers trying to figure out ways to get consumers to buy more, and, while never a great approach, that is even less effective now. "Mass marketing is to bombard people over and over again. That model — 'I'm going to interrupt my way to success' — is flawed and will stress you out."

 

Published on: Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Follow the Leader: Joel Makower

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"Green" is evolving from a regulatory or moral requirement to a business strategy. But, green will only succeed, said Joel Makower, author of Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business, when green equals better.

Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com and co-founder of Greener World Media, has tracked the greening of corporations over 20 years and seen it evolve from isolation in the environmental function to spread nearly enterprise-wide. At the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees, Makower talked to executives about how green innovation can fit into their organizations and careers.

 

Published on: Tuesday, August 03, 2010

When Failure Means Success

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In baseball, if a player averages three hits every 10 chances he's good player; if he averages four hits per 10 chances he's a first ballot Hall of Famer and the stuff of legend. Many call baseball the ultimate failure activity, but the pharmaceutical industry is much more challenging where else is a 1-in-10,000 success rate is considered acceptable?

One would think it's a challenge simply to get out of bed every morning knowing more failures surely await you in the office, but not so, said Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

 

 
Lots of very smart people talk about the critical nature of organizational culture as an indicator of future business performance. An equal number of business leaders talk about the importance of recruiting and developing superior executive talent to gain a competitive edge.

Yet the challenge of filtering the wrong people out of an organization when they poison the cultural well, so to speak, and keeping them out of your company in the first place, is so often overlooked.

 

Published on: Monday, July 19, 2010

Chip Heath and the Elephant

Posted By: Joseph Daniel McCool
Filed Under: world innovation forum, joseph daniel mccool, innovation, change, motivation, chip heath
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Troubled times set the tone for change in business and in life. Yet, there remains some fairly depressing cultural wisdom about change that suggests it's hard to teach the proverbial old dog new tricks, said Chip Heath at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

Heath, Stanford University professor and the co-author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, contends that mastering change is a task that forces us to recognize the two warring sides of our brains: emotional and analytical.

 

Published on: Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Xerox CEO Ursula Burns on What it Takes to Drive Innovation

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Xerox CEO Ursula Burns on What it Takes to Drive InnovationWhen the very name of your company is expressed as a verb, there are lofty expectations to meet and a requirement to continually innovate. For Ursula M Burns, CEO of Xerox, the nearly $17 billion company that is issued an average of 10 new patents per day, innovation is essential for business growth and meeting the ever-increasing demands of customers.

Burns, who shared her thoughts on innovating during the World Innovation Forum, says the global economic crisis forced Xerox to cut $1 billion out of its expense base to maintain its competitive edge and reposition.

 

Published on: Friday, June 18, 2010

Innovation Where You Least Expect It

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My head physically spins after two days at the World Innovation Forum from all the untapped possibilities that are out there just waiting for me to think of. For the last couple of years, just as we've done for several years at the World Business Forum, ExecuNet was invited by HSM to capture insights from the intellectual powerhouses on stage and produce thoughtful commentary for attendees and our members.

Without a doubt, the array of speakers challenged me to think in a different way; sometimes radically, like Michael Porter's reinvention of the healthcare delivery system; and sometimes incrementally, doing something to "earn my seat" at work every day, as Seth Godin said.

 

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