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.

Kids today spend some 7.5 hours a day engaged with some type of media; with with multitasking, that’s 11 hours of screen time per day, or almost  53 hours a week, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation!

That’s more than a full time job, and more time than their parents spend at work.

Here’s a video clip where Jim was the opening keynote speaker for the 2010 US Navy, Air Force & Marine Child Youth Program Conference in Dallas, Texas, putting these numbers into perspective and speaking to the new realities in providing support services today

What do innovative organizations do? They re-orient themselves for an economy in which their ability to react to fast paced change will increasingly define their success.

In this clip, Jim Carroll outlines for an audience of several thousand the key attributes of today’s innovation heroes:

In essence, these organizations concentrate upon:

• an accelerated innovation cycle
• the rapid ingestion of new technologies / methodologies
• faster time to market
• rapid re-focusing of resources to deal with new opportunity or threat
• a rabid focus on operational excellence
• a  rapid response to volatility
• and a re-orientation to fast paced consumer and brand perception

Jim has studied the innovation attitudes of hundreds of global organizations, and has carefully come to define what it is that allows some organizations to achieve stunning levels of innovation success, while others become innovation laggards. These attributes are a good part of the defining characteristics for success.

What do you think?

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.

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

Futurist Jim Carroll, at CRIM 2010, outlines how global CEO’s are positioning their organizations for growth, through a focus on long term transformative trends. As the path to an economic recovery becomes clearer, I’m spending a lot of time speaking at leadership events for strategies for the upturn.

A great little video clip from a recent keynote that outlines the challenges you face if you try and be an innovator!

You can find some useful information on dealing with innovation under the Innovation Inspiration section of my site, and through the Innovation tag.

Jim challenges an audience to think about collaboration in the era of the ‘global idea machine’.

In this case, Jim was the opening keynote speaker for the 2010 US Navy/Marine/Air Force Child Youth Program conference  in Dallas, Texas, and was there to challenge them to think differently in terms of service delivery, particularly as parents and children on military bases come to expect different forms of support and interaction.

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.

Here’s an interesting clip about the emerging era of “personal energy infrastructure management.” It was filmed at my ski club back in January.

We put the clip together for the folks at CNBC Fast Money; they called expressing interest in the possibility of having a series of future trends vignettes that could be used to spark some discussion on the show. Hence, the reference in the clip as to “what does the Fast Money panel think?”

There’s been no progress yet on a go-ahead, but I thought it was a great clip anyways!

The clip was produced by David Mitchell, who is a long time snowbaord/skiing video professional; he’s currently the producer of the Disney XD show, Shreducation.

Bill Gates once observed that “most people overestimate the amount of change that will occur in two years and underestimate the change that will occur over ten years.”

In this video, I challenge an audience to think longer term, and utilize a 10 to 20 year trend perspective to really understand how a particular industry might change. In this case, the health care transformation, as we move from a world of reactive to preventative health care.

Could you be so out of touch with your customers that you have no clue how they truly perceive you?

More information:

• Blog post Is your brand from the olden days?

How is social networking impacting brands? Take a look!

How quickly can you scale if you encounter a new market opportunity? How quickly can you react to a crisis. In this clip, JIm takes a look at the concept of corporate agility

How do you master innovation? Through the powerful story in this video clip, I point out the challenges that organizations face with the different generations in the workplace — and introduce the concept of “generational collaborative capability” as being a key component of succcesful innovation.

“Do you we truly appreciate just how quickly things are going to evolve?”

What should brand leaders be thinking about in terms of the velocity of change with customers and branding.

This clip takes a look at the trends impacting brands….

A Key Trend for 2010! A huge number of global organiztions have me in to challenge their team to think about how to deal with the increasing speed of change in the world of business.

Here’s a clip from a Las Vegas keynote, in which I speak to the topic of business velocity. I believe that in 2010, a greater number of organizations will need to deal with ever increasing rates of change!