Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

The future belongs to those who are fast — Jim Carroll, from the opening to a keynote to an audience of thousands in Las Vegas!

Here’s a clip that I had out on Youtube, but realized that I had never worked it into the blog. It’s a quick clip on the “innovation killers” — the attitudes and actions that some people posses that manage to stifle innovation within an organization.

On stage in Las Vegas for a recent conference, Jim is speaking to the real trends that are driving global growth. Watch this in the context of a great observation by Bill Gates: “Most people overestimate the rate of change that will occur on a two year basis, and underestimate the rate of change that will occur on a 10 year basis.” Looking out over 10 years, it is clear that we are in an era that is still witnessing significant global growth!

Last week, I spoke to several hundred manufacturing executives from throughout North America, at IMX Las Vegas — the Interactive Manufacturing Exchange!

Here’s a key clip from the start of the keynote. Watch it, and ask yourself — are you guilty of focusing on short term volatility — or are focused on opportunity of the long term?

I’m finally back in the office full time after a very busy summer with my family.

And what do I return to? A September that seems to feature screaming headlines about a potential recession and some pretty wild economic and market volatility.

If you are thinking about how you are reacting to this fast-paced world in which we find ourselves, then here is a key question: are you going to stay focused on the future, opportunity and innovation – or are you going to allow yourself fall into the trap of aggressive indecision.

Watch this clip from a recent keynote I gave in which I challenge the audience on this very issue:

What happens when you ask 200 high school students to do EXACTLY what they’ve always been told to NEVER do — take out their cellphones and start texting!

You get some fascinating insight…. from the instant text message polling system that I use in all my keynote presentations.

Such was the scene the other day when I ended up doing a rather unusual kind of keynote — a talk about the future of careers for my son’s grade 12 Science & Technology program. I normally find myself on stage in front of senior level business executives in Las Vegas, Orlando .. and just previously this week,the CEO’s of a few global organizations with two events in Washington, DC.

My son asked if I could speak to his group, and we picked a date in the schedule. The theme? How would future trends impact their career – and what should they be thinking about in terms of future career and skills flexibility.

What a wonderful session! There was absolute shock in the room when I asked the students right at the start, seconds in, to take out their phones. We were going to do a live text message poll, I told them — and there were absolute murmurs of excitement.

My first question to them? The poll put to them asked if they had any degree of certainty on “what they wanted to be” when they grew up. The results weren’t unsurprising.

You can watch this section from the keynote in the video clip below; it is quite fascinating to watch the mechanics of the poll as it unfolded.

Later during the session, I asked them how many careers they thought they might have throughout their lifetime

This generation gets it — by far the vast majority knows that they will have multiple different careers throughout their lifetime.

Next up? How many jobs might they have?

Bingo! They definitely know that they are going into a workforce that will demand a lot of change and flexibility!

Last but not least, we spent some time looking into the concept of innovation. Check out what they think are some of the attitudes that most often hold them back from exploring new ideas:

Which begs the question: do their older peers discount their ideas and insight all too readily? There’s lots more to explore from this unique day, but I thought the results of the text message polls were particularly enlightening.

Watch the clip and see the fun unfold… (you might need to turn up the volume; we’ve got to adjust the audio a bit and are working on that!)

Here’s a clip from a recent event — actually, my keynote for the national meeting of the PGA — that I think speaks for itself.

I know there’s a big debate going out there, but from my perspective, the problem is real – the scope of the obesity challenge is surreal, mind-boggling and massive in scope.

From my perspective, there’s a lot of opportunity for transformative thinking.

Innovation is always about thinking boldly — thinking about big solutions to big problems.

This problem is certainly a big one, and needs a lot of bold thinking.

Here’s a clip from my 2010 keynote in Tucson, Arizona on the future of the workforce. It covers everything from generations in the workplace, the future of outsourcing, and the impact of specialized skills.

The best part? The story of a snowboarding kid who turned down a job because it messed with his time in the powder!

It’s a true story, and tells you much of what you need to know about the future of the workforce. Make sure you read the PDF story, “Don’t mess with my powder, dude! “

A clip from my keynote for the PGA, challenging the audience to think about innovation in a different way. Innovation isn’t just about the invention of new products and services — it’s also about focusing as a leader on how to “run the business better, grow the business, and transform the business!”

As you can see, I ran a live interactive text message poll in the room — we had responses from 200+ people in a matter of two minutes. I was then able to use the nature of the response through the rest of the talk. For this group, innovation is really about ‘growing and transforming the business’.

One of the highlights of 2010 had to be the day that I was the opening speaker for the 94th Annual General Meeting of the PGA – Professional Golfers Association of America. It was the first time they have ever had an external speaker open their meeting; I was invited in to discuss the major trends that will continue to impact the growth of the game, and the innovation strategies that could be pursued to accomplish that.

So it is  a fitting way to close out 2010 as we wind down the officer here, by offering up a video clip from that keynote, “Where’s the Growth.” It’s from a section in the talk where I put into perspective some of the key trends and innovations which will provide for sustained economic recovery over time.

There some additional insight on trends going forward into the future in my post, “Trending in 2011: 10 Major Trends to Start Thinking About Now.”

Here’s to 2011 –it’s going to be a great year. Indeed, the future is going to be fabulous!

I’ve got a new Web traffic monitoring tool – Re-Energize — which is quite wonderful! And every day, when I look at how people are finding my site, it’s become quite obvious that a lot of traffic comes in for people looking for information on the sport of ‘zorbing.’

Why do they find my site? Because back in 2008, I wrote a blog post, “Zorbing – And Why It’s In To Be Out.” I guess the search engines have ranked it highly, particularly for the picture! It gets a LOT of traffic.

What is also interesting is that for years, I’ve been using the story of zorbing on stage for years, often in the context of what I’ve come to call “the big global idea machine.” Here I am on stage with that theme — and a story on zorbing – from an event in Salt Lake City for a few thousand people:

What is another way to think about the big global idea machine? In my overview of “What Do World Class Innovators Do That Others Don’t Do?”, I made the observation that “world class innovators focus on ingesting fast ideas: there are new technologies, business models, customer trends, product developments, scientific advances and countless other things that are increasing the pace of change. Innovators know that if they plug into the global idea machine, they can constantly discover a tremendous number of insights that help them to move forward.”

A quick video on innovation: how do you achieve breakthrough results?

A quick little video from a keynote in which I outline what organizations often do — with good intentions that go horribly wrong.

Think about what happens — suddenly, a message is established that only ‘special people’ on the ‘special team’ are responsible for innovation.

Here’s what I wrote in What I Learned From Frogs in Texas — which, by the way, you can now buy for your Kindle from Amazon or for your iPhone/IPad on iTunes.

Three Simple Ideas

The essence of innovation is really quite simple. It is all about coming up with new ideas that help you to run the business better, grow the business and transform the business. But it isn’t just about idea generation—innovative companies excel at implementing these ideas and making them work.

Let’s examine each of these areas.

Run the Business Better

There is plenty of opportunity in every organization for operational innovation; that is, doing what you can to “run the business better.” This type of innovation involves a continuous effort to change, improve and redefine business processes, whether they involve customer service, HR practices, logistics and shipping methodologies, purchasing processes or just about anything else.

Never think there isn’t huge room for improvement—most organizations are inherently inefficient, with outdated or illogical processes in place. There is countless potential for improving the way organizations work, and plenty of opportunities for innovative thinking with respect to the way things are done.

Add it up and look at the benefits from doing things smarter or more effectively and there can be a huge return.

Grow the Business

Second, make sure you understand the opportunities from “growing the business,” or what might also be called “revenue-focused innovation.”

Most often, new revenue comes from new products and the ability to enter a new marketplace. Yet that isn’t the only way to enhance revenue. Think about business model innovation, for example: new business ideas involving expansion in existing markets or new ways of reaching the customer that weren’t previously possible (or that no one had thought of before).

Revenue enhancement can also come from changing the nature of existing products, such as adding a service component to a product that can bring in additional revenue. It might involve enhancing the perceived image of a product so it is more valuable to the customer, resulting in the customer being willing to pay more for it.

The key is, don’t think about “growing the business” and revenue enhancement as simply coming from new products or new markets; there are plenty of other methods for innovative thinking that can lead to revenue enhancement.

Transform the Business

Last but not least, always keep in mind the concept of “transformational innovation.”

Transformational innovation involves taking a look at the way the organization is structured, and thinking how it might be able to work smarter, more efficiently and with better results by changing the skills makeup of the organization. It involves constant, probing questions that continually assess the organization and its skills, such as:

Do we have the people we need in the right places/positions?

Do we have the right people with the right skills available at the right time?

If we are suddenly faced with rapid market change, do we know how to access specialized skills and talent we might need?

With the global connectivity that has emerged over the last few decades, there is plenty of opportunity to do today what couldn’t have been done even five years ago, in terms of how an organization accesses the skills, resources, talents and capabilities that it needs to get the job done..

Organizational transformation also recognizes the concept of “partnership” as a key corporate structure for the future. In a world of mammoth complexity and constant change, organizations must focus on their core competencies and partner with others to accomplish the things they cannot or should not do. In essence, they must recognize that the path to the future is to concentrate on what they do well and on what is critical to their central mission, and to seek partners to help out with everything else.

Each year, Deloitte South Africa presents their annual “Best Companies to Work For In South Africa” survey, and coincident with that, they honour companies that show the best talent management practices. The companies are selected through a diligent process ; the entire event is built around the theme of world class HR and talent management practices.

This year, Deloitte engaged me to provide a “video keynote” that would touch upon the key themes from this years research into the best practices around talent management. The result is the video that you see below. It captures the essence of what makes for successful innovation in todays’ global high velocity economy.

The video was an international effort, with film production /editing done by David Mitchell of RiverBank Pictures of Canada and  further editing/production by FogHound Studios of Johannesburg. It was a true international project. Filmed on location in Toronto, Mississauga, Collingwood, Craigleith and Thornbury, Canada

Over the last fifteen years as a futurist and innovation expert, I’ve spoken to a tremendous number of agricultural groups. This has often included large groups of farmers, attending an event where I’ve been asked to speak at a community economic development event.

These talks have long involved a lot of research into key agricultural trends. And one thing I’ve come to appreciate is that farmers can be some of the most innovative people on the planet. Here’s a video clip from a keynote to a US Military conference in Dallas — yes, the military — and I’m describing to them the unique innovation insight that can be learned from farmers.

What are the trends they are innovating with? Take a look at 10 Key Trends for Agriculture.

This graph represents the model of product life cycles as taught in business schools for the last, oh, I don’t know, 100 years?

Companies would innovate, and introduce a new product. If it succeeded, they would experience growth. At some point, sales would peak. The product would then tend to become obsolete or overtaken by competitors,  and sales would decline.

What a quaint model. Too bad it bears no resemblance to todays’ reality. Many industries are now finding that product obsolescence now occurs during the growth stage; in the hi-tech industry, the “decline” phase caused by instant obsolescence can even occur during the introduction,

Back in June, I was the opening speaker for the Consumer Electronics Association CEO Summit in Ojai, California, and spoke to this trend. At the time, Lenovo had just pulled the plug on a pad-like product, even before it was released, because it was obvious that its’ limited feature set had already made it irrelevant and obsolete in a very fast paced market.

The reality of today’s market is that of instant obsolescence, and if you want to master innovation, you need to think about how your own product life cycle is changing.

Here’s a video take that is worth watching on the trend:

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.

Way back from about 1999 to 2005, I would often talk on stage about “things from the olden days.” It was a story that reflected how my young sons, from the ages of 3 & 5, saw certain things around the house as something completely ancient — when just a few years previous, they had been a part of my life.

Earlier this year, I keynoted the joint US Navy, Air Force, & Marine Child Youth Program conference in Dallas, Texas. I had about 1,500 folks in the room who manage social, counselling, day care and recreation programs on military bases worldwide. The focus of the talk was around innovation in delivery of services. In order to get across to this crowd the rate of change, I resurrected my olden days story.

It still makes for good viewing, and can help you to think about the rate of business change that continues to occur out there today. And in fact, if you look around you, you’ll find that an ever greater number of things are becoming things from the olden days, and it’s occurring at a faster rate.

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!

Innovation isn’t critical only in business — every type of organization must try to do things differently in a world of fast paced change.

Here’s Jim speaking at the 2010 US Navy, Air Force & Marine Child Youth Program Conference. He was asked to challenge the audience — child youth experts and counsellors on military bases worldwide — to think about innovation in the context of the youth and parents that they serve.

Clearly the demands, needs and forms of interaction with both parents and alike are undergoing significant change as the next generation of parents on military bases – lets call them “Mom 3.0″ – comes to rely on technology to a greater degree each and every day.