Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

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?

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.

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 a quick little rap on what innovators focus on:

There’s more on this line of thinking in the Innovation category of this blog. Enjoy!

Here’s one thing I’ve been stressing to many of my clients during keynotes, leadership and workshops: organizations need to work hard to ensure they establish an overall culture of innovation. What does that mean? Everyone throughout the organization has a mindset that they are equally responsible for innovative ideas; they’re colaborative with those ideas; and they focus on three key questions: how can we run the business better, grow the business, and transform the business.

Here’s a clip from a recent keynote in which I explore this theme

IBM seems to like my ideas; they put out a white-paper in January of this year, and included a quote that catches the key theme in this video clip:

According to futurist Jim Carroll, transformation is very doable for many businesses: “They are realizing that innovation isn’t some dark, mysterious ancient ritual: they’re realizing that it’s simply a mindset that involves constant probing to see how we can fix things, find new things, or transform things, whether those things be business processes, customer service methods, new products, marketing and distribution cannel concepts, or just about anything else.”

More information:

• IBM White Paper Business analytics: The perfect fit for the agile enterprise