Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

At the recent Consumer Electronics Association CEO summit in Ojai, CA, I focused on how social networks are coming to have a huge impact on brand perception.

But aside from that main thread, I also concentrated on my message of innovation in an era in which “faster is the new fast.” Here’s an older clip that looks at what’s happening in the world of product innovation.

I pointed out to the crowd – which included the CEO’s of some of the largest digital technology companies in the world — that some product lifecycles are collpasing to ZERO. Case in point — Lenovo announced a tablet computer at the CES show in January. They dropped it after the iPad came to market, perhaps because it was bound to be a dud compared to the feature set of the iPad.

But maybe if they got it out sooner, it could have established a beachhead.

What do you do in a world in which a product is dead before you can get it to market? Innovate faster. Focus on fast. Do fast. Be fast. In the high velocity economy, speed and agility are everything.

What happens when Silicon Valley takes over the innovation agenda within an industry? In this video clip from a recent keynote, Jim challenges his audience to think about what happens in the world of banking, particularly with the likely fast paced emergence of contact-less payment technology based on mobile devices.

Innovative organizations need to make sure that they understand the external factors that will influence their future, and need to react appropriately. And as we enter the era of hyper-connected intelligent devices, with the impact of location-intelligence technology and the rapid adoption of mobile technologies, we’re likely to see every industry — even beyond financial services — impacted.

New business models, disruptive competition, a shift in control, customer churn — everything is up for grabs once Silicon Valley seizes control and defines your future!

I was in Billings, Montana last week, speaking at the annual meeting of a financial group.  The audience included a large cross section of business executives from throughout the Midwest. My talk centred around the trends that might provide for sustainable economic growth. Here’s what I focused on:

• a significant and lasting change in perspective. I spend a lot of time with major international organizations, either in strategic leadership meetings or at various association events or conferences. I often run a text message poll at the start of such sessions to gauge the audience perspective of the current rate of economic growth. As I noted in this post, I’ve seen quite a change in attitude and perspective in the last few months.
• significant growth is emerging from “solving the big problems.” I am a big believer that the efforts to solve the big challenges with respect to energy, the environment and health care will provide the momentum to kickstart the economy once again. I spend a lot of time examining signs of innovation and growth; and there is a tremendous amount of mind share being devoted to each of these areas.
• fundamental and long lasting growth trends in global markets. Before the economy went sour in 2008, McKinsey was extremely bullish on the prospects for economic growth driven by the rapid industrialization of emerging economies, noting that “almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace in the next decade …. with an income level that allows spending on discretionary goods,” and that “the ranks of the middle class will swell by 1.8 billion to become 52% of total population, up from 30% today.” I think on a long term basis, those trends are still valid and will provide for tremendous economic growth. Continue Reading

In a whirlwind of activity over the last ten days, I’ve been the keynote speaker for conferences that probably represents the vast majority of global Fortune 1000 organizations, speaking to the trends that will impact the future of ‘corporate facilities.’

These have included keynotes for the  Professional Retail Store Maintenance Association annual conference in Orlando; the CoreNet Global Summit in New Orleans, and the International Asset Management Council Spring Summit in Colorado Springs. With these groups, we’ve got the folks who manage facilities for a good chunk of the world’s biggest retailers (including Apple, the Gap, Costco and others); commercial real estate executives for Fortune 1000 and government; and the senior executives who manage the same for large industrial and manufacturing organizations (Alcoa, Caterpillar, Whirlpool).

What are they thinking about? Adjusting to an economy that is more and more turning to growth. And to do that, I covered a wide variety of trends:

• they need to actively shift their role from tactical (managing costs in a downtown) to strategic (‘how do I help my organization to scale and support growth strategies?’
• ensure that the organization has the flexibility in terms of facilities and workforce to adjust to more rapid market and product innovation, faster competition, and more rapid change in consumer demand and choice
• take advantage of emerging opportunities with intelligent building management infrastructure
• be willing to challenge process and assumptions as to operations. I consistently used my story of broken business models, vs. business models built on rapid change – my Honda vs. Chrysler story
• adapt to a reality in which skills flexibility and innovation will be a key success factor. These folks need to access a lot of unique skills that are in short supply (i.e. green engineers), and so increasingly their success will come from their ability to access the right skills at the right time for the right purpose

Are people really thinking about growth? Here are the live results from a text message poll that I ran from the stage at the IAMC conference in Colorado Springs yesterday:

More information

• Innovation and the concept of ‘chameleon revenue’
• Riding fast paced trends in the consumer / retail sector 
• Finding growth with knowledge exponentiation (construction trends)  

Here’s a blog post that ran over at the Chicago Hospitality Insider blog with a report on my keynote last week.”

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Moving Beyond The Meltdown” with Jim Carroll
Posted on February 18th, 2010 by Jody Robbins

How is the tourism business impacted by a world where information is passed feverishly around the globe? Immediately and directly; that’s how, says Jim Carroll (Futurist and Trends & Innovation Expert!), today’s lunch-time speaker at the 2010 Illinois Governor’s Conference on Tourism.

Continue Reading

I spent a half day last week with the CEO and senior management team of a large global energy company.

They engaged me to provide them with insight on the trends which will impact the global oil, natural gas, energy and distribution sectors in the years to come.

It was a small, intimate get-together with about 40 senior executives; I provided my insight into the trends that I believe will have the most impact. That was followed by about an hour of very intense, deep probing discussion; I obviously stirred up some creative thinking within the group.

While not going into the specifics, the broad brush strokes of what I covered off included my observations that they should be thinking about these issues.

• presume massive market disruption: Think GoogleCar: don’t limit your view of the future as to what might transpire. The future of any industry will likely bear no resemblance to the industry structure of today. Future competitors will probably come from completely outside of an existing industry. Challenge every assumption that you have about the future.
• prepare for significant transformation: realize that existing insurmountable challenges are simply a big opportunity to someone else. Someone, somewhere, is going to figure out how to plug hundreds of thousands if not millions of small, local, home based renewable energy sources into the energy grid. It’s mostly a computation/mathematical issue: the energy grid was not designed for two way electricity transmission, and so there will have to be an intense amount of computational dynamics to structure a solution. Result? An organization that is a master of massive computational capabilities — and hence, grid management — might very well be the new energy company of the future.
• find opportunity in scientific rapidity: we’re in the era of global collaborative knowledge generation, and R&D is rapidly externalizing. The infinite global idea loop means that scientific discovery is now happening faster than ever before, which provides for more product and market opportunity. Innovative organizations plug in, ensuring that all staff are in tune with the rapid rate of scientific advance that surrounds them, and are prepared to ride new emerging ideas as soon as they begin to emerge.
• capitalize on skills fragmentation: the war for talent will define future success. We’re entering a time of massive skills specialization and ever smaller knowledge niches. As I covered off in my keynote to a global financial audience in the Cayman’s, it’s the organizations that can build a culture, structure and flexibility to attract and retain skills that will find the key to success in the high velocity economy.
• structure for volatility: extreme volatility is the ‘new normal.’ If you have the capability to quickly adjust strategy, structure, plans, skills, projects and teams, you’ve got the right stuff for the new world of constant change.
• prepare for business intensity: innovative organizations plan for more rapid entrance and exits from new markets. They do so through flexible structure. Partnership takes on new role in era of exponentiating, fast complexity and the rapid emergence of new opportunities: if you can scale up, you can win big.

The Economist Intelligence Unit recently noted that “the ability to swiftly adapt to change represents the greatest challenge manufacturers face in creating long-term value.” That’s the bottom line for innovating in the high velocity energy industry.

Related posts:

• The Google Car and massive market disruption
• Global infinite idea loop
• Talent, not money, is the new corporate battlefront