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.

It’s big, and its’ getting bigger!

That’s the location intelligence industry, which is resulting from the rapid dominance of location-aware mobile devices, the rapid emergence of massive sources of spatial (geographic oriented information, i.e. Google Maps), the rapid user adoption of location-based applications (i.e. iPhone Apps), and a significant amount of innovative thinking as to how to capitalize on these very fast paced trends.

There’s a lot of people building a lot of new businesses around these trends. And it’s happening extremely quickly:

• in a just-announced test of location based advertising in Finland, MacDonalds’ has reported that location-relevant mobile ads resulted in a 7.0% click-through rate. Of those who clicked through, 39% then used the click-to-navigate option to find the closest restaurant. These are significant numbers Continue Reading

I had quite a few financial oriented keynotes through the last year, for banks, mortgage groups, credit unions and others. If there was a key theme as to the insight my clients were seeking, it was this: what are the BIG trends that are going to impact us (I’m a futurist), and what do we need to do about it (I specialize in insight on what global leaders are doing in the area of innovation.)

The scope of some of these engagements is pretty significant; Diners’ Club featured me as the opening speaker for their global franchise conference; my focus was on the big trends that would impact the organization into the future.

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My January / February CA Magazine article is out; entitled “Stranger than Science Fiction,” it examines a major theme that has been part of many of my keynotes throughout 2009: what happens to your industry when the pace of innovation is no longer set within the industry itself, but rather, is set by the blistering rate of change as set by Silicon Valley?

Stranger than Science Fiction

by Jim Carroll, CAMagazine, January 2010

Is your industry in the midst of a transition at Silicon Valley speed? If it isn’t, it could be very soon, because I’m seeing it happen wherever I go. Take the global credit card industry. For a long time, the pace of innovation has been relatively slow and deliberate; aside from the chip found in your new credit card, it’s still been about the same old piece of plastic.

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I’m a big believer that many of the big transformations that will occur in the future — and which will drive new billion dollar industries — will come from innovations around solving the “big problems” that society faces.

Here’s a video clip from a recent keynote, in which I talk about what will happen in the long term care industry, as we transition to a world of home based, community oriented senior citizen care

A lot of people have convinced themselves that there aren’t a lot of growth markets out there. They don’t see what I see. Think “BIG challenges = BIG transformations = BIG opportunities!”

Over the next several weeks, I will be speaking at a series of events sponsored by Microsoft related to their Windows 7 launch. The audience includes key executives (CIO’s, CFO’s, CTO’s and IT managers) from a wide variety of industries.

While much of the news coverage of Microsoft focuses around the “consumer” side of the Windows 7 launch, of equal significance is the release of several new server infrastructure upgrades that permit large and small business to take their business into the next level of operational innovation.

In Toronto the other day, Steve Ballmer was speaking to this aspect of innovation. I find that some media gave the message short shift, because their planned story spin didn’t fit his message.

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Back in 2006, I keynoted the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers at their annual conference in Tampa. At the time, YouTube was only just beginning to have an impact, and social networking was still in a nascent stage. It was January — Twitter wasn’t even around!

But there was a lot of talk at the conference about the rapid rate of change that the cable and telecom industry was facing. My job, as opening keynote, was to get them in the right, innovative frame of mind to deal with an upcoming tsunami of change.

I ended up writing an article for Broadband Magazine, on my keynote theme, Are We Thinking “Fast” Enough? I dug the article out the other day with respect to another upcoming talk within the industry.

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For years, I’ve been advising my clients that one of the biggest trends for the next decade is the rapid emergence of an intelligent energy infrastructure.

It’s happening now — it’s happening all around you — and the implications are pretty huge in terms of economic growth.

Here’s a video that was filmed two years ago, in which I talk about what happens “when thermostats join the cloud.”

Today, I bought the new ipThermostat app for my iPhone; it provides instant, seamless access to the two Internet-enabled Proliphix thermostats in my home and ski chalet/cottage. I’ve written about these devices previously on this blog. (I could link to my thermostat before, but it was via a Web page. iPThermostat makes it seamless and fast.)

Such connectivity allows me to actively manage my energy spend, and better manage my own little environmental footprint. Take us into a world in which hundreds of millions are doing the same thing, and you put a serious dent into heating and air conditioning spending.

Device connectivity is but one small trend in a number of major trends that are coming together all at once:

• HVAC 2.0: major industrial players are adding intelligence to the next generation of commercial, industrial and resident heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment. We’re seeing remote monitoring and management; better analysis and insight into ; rapid response to out-of-norm operations. All of this allows people to more actively control overall energy usage
• increasing energy / electrical system demand: quite simply, despite the recession, the demand on our electrical grid continues to increase. This demands new solutions, with the result that a lot of people are putting a lot of mindshare to the issue of how to squeeze more out of our existing energy infrastructure.
• the new NIMBYism: one impact of social networking is that it is far more difficult for any utility to build a new power plant. The new activism can slow and delay such efforts, and often, successfully shut them down. This only makes the challenge of doing more with what we have now ever more important.
• Energy grid 2.0: do a search for “smart grid” and you’ll see a flood of news stories. There’s a tremendous amount of hype, but much of it is real. Cisco recently suggested that the connectivity component of the infrastructure will be worth more than $100 billion over five years. That’s some serious spending.
• the impact of analytics: raw computing horsepower will help to build the smart grid — companies like Google are aggressively involved. The same horsepower will help consumers and users better understand their usage, and allow more intelligent demand. Big, big trend!

So what does it all mean?

As thermostats plug into the cloud, everything changes.

More information:

• iPThermostat app from Our Home Spaces
• Blog post When thermostats get connected
• Blog post Silicon Valley: Is Innovation Dead?
• Blog post HVAC 2.0
• Trends document (big PDF); page 3 Analytics & the energy grid
• Proliphix Internet enabled thermostats

Here’s an interesting way to think about the issue of high-velocity product innovation.

I was keynoting a conference at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, last September, and was playing into the theme of how product innovation occurs today at a faster pace than ever before.

I told the story of a ‘dive-in movie’ that I held at home for my sons, and how a simple blog posting got picked up by a huge number of consumer technology companies — with an obvious result.

This particular story was a followup to a trend I was speaking about at an event in New York City in 2005 – that involving the rapid emergence of “outdoor living rooms.”

The key point? No matter what industry you are in — consumer products, financial services, technology — product innovation continues to speed up. New markets and products emerge faster than ever before. New brands, potential challengers, and innovative new ideas emerge at a higher velocity.

Related postings:

• Next big home entertainment trend? Dive-in movies!
• It’s in to be out! – outdoor trends:

Last November, I released my “What Comes Next” trends perspective, outlining some of the significant trends that I believed would have the most impact in our longer term future. It’s still worth a read, and I don’t think the economic turmoil has changed anything written there.

So I admit I was surprised, given the massive quantity of doom-and-gloom thinking which is smothering creativity everywhere, when I came across this advertisement, offering a 3-day executive level course on ‘Competing with Analytics.” And right there, they’ve quoted my “What Comes Next” document, which was re-printed in Toronto, Canada’s Globe and Mail earlier in January of this year: “Analytics is hot….it’s where the next-billion dollar industries will be born.”

I don’t disagree with that assessment, and neither does IBM CEO Sam Palmisano.

As quoted widely, and from an article in eWeek, in early November he made a speech in which he “called on the next administration to invest more money in refurbishing the electronic grid system to reduce the amount of energy required to power it, make better use of information technology to reinvent the way healthcare is provided and green technology investments that would enhance traffic and mass transit systems to make everybody who depends on these systems more efficient.”

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Last week, I spoke in Palo Alto for a a small, intimate dinner of a number of CIO’s for a variety of companies based in Silicon Valley. The focus of the talk was “how to provide for a culture and focus on innovation during a down market?”

I spoke to this issue from a number of perspectives. One issue I touched on was the inevitability of a rebound in the fortune of IT. If we cast our minds out two to five years, or perhaps even sooner, there are certain key trends in which we see a massive amount of innovation:

• pervasive connectivity: we’ve barely scratched the surface of the era in which everyday devices gain connectivity and intelligence. The Internet enabled thermostat in my home is but a harbinger of what is yet to come. With it’s own Web browser, it has become a fascinating tool by which energy usage can be more closely monitored. The same device is deployed throughout the Arby’s chain, and offers a significant new method of controlling energy-spend.

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One of the key issues I point out when speaking about innovation strategies, is that organizations need to continually challenge themselves as to whether they can “act fast enough.”

In other words, innovative organizations “check their speed.” If they aren’t responding quickly enough to rapid market, product, competitive and business model change, then they aren’t following one of the key traits of successful innovators. If they aren’t ensuring they are keeping up with rapid consumer and customer preference, service levels or marketing and branding innovation, they become an innovation laggard rather than a leader. If they can’t collaborate and share knowledge as a team, in order to capitalize on new emerging opportunities or respond to threats, then they aren’t operating at the right pace.

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It’s been announced that I will be a keynote speaker at the World HealthCare Innovation & Technology Conference, to be held in Washington, DC in December. In particular, I’ll be taking a look at the importance of one of the most significant trends that is just starting to unfold.

Twenty years from now, most people will look back and realize that right about now, we had three huge, transformative trends underway: device connectivity, geo-connectivity, and bio-connectivity

Essentially, everything around is about to become linked in — every device that surrounds your life. My home thermostat is linked to the Internet, and that has changed the scope of how I interact with energy.

Layered on top of device connectivity is spatial intelligence for each device — vis-a-vis Google Maps types of applications. Think about new forms of energy management built upon sophisticated geographic mapping applications.

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It’s been confirmed that I’ll be the opening keynote speaker for this large scale annual conference in mid-July.

My topic theme is “Smash that box” — I’ll take a look at the “key strategies and leadership ideas that have assisted some organizations to achieve breakthrough innovations and absolutely compelling levels of productivity.”

I’ve done an extensive number of high profile IT / hi-tech events like this – with clients like SAP, IBM, Ingram Micro., Microsoft, Motorola, NCR, the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Verizon, in events that have been internally focus, or are large scale opportunities for executives to rethink the strategic role of IT.

It will be a pleasure to share my insight in Sydney. I’m a big believer that many organizations have barely scratched the innovation-surface when it comes to IT deployment; many organizations are still in basic implementation mode, and haven’t learned how to really leverage their investment to provide for significant transformation of their overall organizational capabilities.

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An interesting article in InformationWeek, covering my Sunday night keynote for the Society for Information Managementa annual conference in Memphis.

First time I ever had to follow Elvis on stage : and maybe that’s what had me fired up!

Noted InformationWeek: “Carroll, the author of “What I Learned from Frogs in Texas: Saving Your Skin with Forward Thinking Innovation,” seemed to embrace the atmosphere of secular spiritualism. He prowled the stage like a preacher, exhorting the assembled crowd to take the message of hyper cultural and economic change fueled by information technology back to their companies and use it to force a closer examination of the role of their own technology efforts in new business models, management structure, and collaboration.”

You can read the full article, In the High Velocity Economy, IT is the Engine, here.

We’re in the era of instant obsolescence: can you innovate fast enough to keep up? Can you keep up, when faster is the new fast?

In the last few years, I’ve interviewed CFO’s and CIO’s with companies that have achieved rapid market growth, all of them customers of SAP. This includes such global success stories as J. Crew, Body Armour, Adobe, Purdue Pharma, Hunt Oil, Lennox, Jazz Semiconductor, Merit Energy, and others. SAP has had me in to keynote a wide variety of events, and host panel discussions with these senior executives. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to explore what innovative companies do in rapidly changing markets.

I recently lead such a discussion, both online and at SAPPHIRE 07 in Atlanta, under the theme, Velocity, Agility, Complexity, and Flexibility: The Four Key Drivers for Competitive Advantage. I interviewed CIO’s and senior IT executives with four high-growth hi-tech companies: Entegris, Intervoice, Avocent and Citrix (and it Atlanta, Checkfree.)

One of my opening comments: “We’re in the era of absolutely instant obsolescence. We can’t afford to take a week to roll up the sales numbers … we have to know what’s happened in the last 10 minutes.”

All of these organizations are faced with the challenge and opportunity of the high-velocity economy. Rapid growth, collapsing product lifecycles, and the need for a focus on” time to market.”

They provided wonderful insight into how they innovate in order to stay ahead of the market, manage global supply chains, build a cohesive, collaborative culture, and provide for real time insight into their business.

What do these organizations do in terms of innovation? Several things:

• operational excellence is a major focus
• there are high expectations for growth, and an IT infrastructure that enables such growth
• they have a need for instant, need driven relationships with their partners
• they focus on rapid agility for new market demands
• they are religious on “fast time to market”
• they focus on quick marshalling of resources to accomplish velocity
• they provide for instant scalability, given market volatility and rapid change

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

Well, for one thing, when light stops, velocity picks up!

A few weeks ago, I keynoted a crowd of 3,000 telecom professionals in Florida. One of the comments I made was this: when it comes to the velocity of change in the “big media universe,” we can only expect that the bandwidth and computing power in our lives will become ever more plentiful, and ever faster, because scientists are figuring out how to slow light to a crawl.

That’s important, because it migrates us from a world of “electronics based computing” to “photonics computing.” The difference in speed, capacity, processing power and everything else will be simply staggering. Think optical-chips based on light, not today’s model-T’s based on electrons.

This trend will make the electronic computers of today look like Cro-Magnon tools compared to the optical computers of tomorrow.

Last week, I caught an article in which the folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) predicted that optical chips will be here within 5 years.

A year ago, at another telecom event in Florida, I made the then bold prediction that as scientists learn to stop light, we’ll see bandwidth improvements of a huge degree. Some industry folks in the room were taken aback: it’s kind of interesting to read the article that was printed at the time (found below.)

It’s awful nice to see predictions of the past become mainstream quicker than you might have expected!

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Optical Futures: Another ET Look at Light
24 January 2006
CT’s Pipeline

Among the many intriguing observations and reports shared by the SCTE Conference on Emerging Technologies keynoter Jim Carroll in Tampa two weeks ago was the progress that optical researchers were making on the question of how to slow down light.

In our ET report in last week’s Pipeline, we’d written on how it might have been interesting to have one of the industry’s many optical experts comment on “when, where and how this could happen.” Since then, we’ve heard back from the futurist Carroll and checked in with one of those experts.

“The slowing of light is nothing new,” Carroll wrote, referring to New York Times article from last November that cited Harvard researchers who in 1999 who were able to slow light drastically and two years later were able to bring light to a stop.

Of most interest to Carroll about this science project, which already was well under way six years ago, is its new scale. Whereas the Harvard researchers required a roomful of equipment, according to the Times, IBM scientists now have created a tiny silicon device to slow down light from its usual 186,000 miles per second to 600 miles per second–or to about 0.3 percent of ordinary light speed.

“Heck, I could have a little light-stop-chip in my laptop some time in the future, plug into my optical-wall-plug, and access the yottabit universe,” Carroll wrote.

There’s no quibbling with ability of a wide-ranging, connect-the-dots futurist such as Carroll in getting those (trade journalists included) who may be stuck in a particular niche to drop the blinders and look around, and ahead. His talk certainly was an effective way to jolt ET attendees into a forward- leaning frame of mind.

New optical thinking

For input from one of the industry’s optical experts, we turned to OpVista CTO Dr. Winston Way, who noted up front how thinking about optical networking already is undergoing a shift.

“Before, people only thought that you could manage packets, frames or bytes, but I think right now people have just started to think about the fact that light, or colors, can be managed also,” Way said. One of OpVista’s calling cards is its novel approach to reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs).

As for not simply managing, but arresting lightwaves, Way said: “I think that is really out-of-the-box thinking. It’s interesting. Slow it down so you can see what’s inside, then let it go again.”

Way said this project reminded him of work done at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1980s and early 1990s on optical signal processing, which sidestepped the physical limitations of the electronics domain. “I’m not sure it’s practical today,” he said.

What Carroll was talking about, of course, was not today but tomorrow, or rather the day or year (or decade?) after. “I don’t make my stuff up,” Carroll wrote. “The future surrounds us, is being developed all around us and all the (technologies) that people work on eventually come into our lives. I just think…that it is going to come into our lives quicker than we might think.”

Video game business intensity is coming to all industries.

This provides some important food for thought — can you run your business at the high degree of intensity that occurs within the high-tech gaming (not gambling) industry? Remember — the key words today are rapid time to market, agility, and execution.

One of the most innovative companies I’ve met in the last few years is a distributor of computer/console video games – they operate between the video game manufacturers and the retailers. They have one core mission — they make sure that new games get to the store and to the shelf on time.

The CIO of this organization indicated that 45-60% of the total life revenue stream of a typical video game is made within the first four days of its release.

That’s why this company is relentlessly, aggressive focused on operational excellence – their entire culture, information system, management structure and organizational responsibilities are completely focused on this market reality.

Tie this observation into the fact that accelerated innovation and rapid time to market is becoming a key trend in every industry today. With that comes short, sharp shocks of revenue hits, with a good chunk of total lifecycle revenue happening in just a few short days.

That’s why to thrive in the high-velocity economy, you’ve got to think about business intensity, and the concept of short-term, rapid operational and market excellence.

Can you do it? If not, you’d better look at your innovation mindset, and begin to adjust accordingly.

There are a few news stories today about Tesla Motors, which includes some of the founders of Google, involved in an effort to build a new electric car.

Let’s just call it the Google Car.

I’ve been predicting this type of massive market shift since sometime in 2004; there’s a video clip from January 2006 in which I talked at the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers annual conference about the concept of a Google Car (which in my view, will be delivered via FedEx and will come with a party in a box!). I even included the suggestion that you’d be able to pre-order online.

Hmm, look at that — you can!

I don’t think the scenario posted by Tesla is far-fetched at all — given rapid science, hyperinnovation, low cost offshore production, and the slow response of other traditional business models …. every industry today is ripe for massive disruption and the rapid emergence of new competitors. A big part of the equation is avoiding ‘legacy costs’ both in manufacturing as well as sales and support. Think FedEx, not car dealerships. Think smart engine modules that pop in and out, not auto mechanics. Think WalMart, not ReadyLube.

It’s all there, and someone just has to pull it together.