Innovation : think big, start small, scale fast!

Home > Archives

Innovation Stories

When you’ve got 4,000 people in the audience, you can suggest small ideas, big ideas or whacky ideas - but they're still ideas.


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

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.

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.

When you’ve got 4,000 people from large cities and small towns across America, thinking about how to solve some of the big problems faced by society, you can suggest small ideas, or whacky ideas. Here I am on stage, with a suggestion involving the latter.

More information:

  • PacManHatten

Here I am speaking to an audience of 4,000 at the National Recreation and Parks Association Congress in Salt Lake City – a keynote in which I challenge recreation professionals to think about the future!

This was the keynote in which I received an email thanking me for “changing lives.” It was a powerful day, a powerful talk, and I’ve got lots more video to share in the days to come!

UA-117171-1

Powered by Web Design Company Plugins