10 Reasons why innovation matters for small business
I'm off today for a full day of filming for a small business portal that will be hosted on the site of MSN Sympatico, a major Canadian ISP, in partnership with Cisco.
The video clips filmed today will be augmented by a series of articles that focus on theme of "innovation for small/medium business" (often referred to as SME's!)
There are a number of reasons why there is unprecedented opportunity for innovation within the small / medium enterprise sector:
- the emergence of the contingent workforce: there has never been a better time for professionals and individuals with specialized knowledge to set up shop, and provide their services to a vast global client base.
- complexity drives partnership: as the high velocity economy evolves, organizations are finding an increased need for solutions to very complex problems; often, the only solution might be a very unique company or individual that is focused on that one particular issue.
- opportunity is endless: countless new markets, products, and new business models are merging on a continuous basis. Who will sell, support and service the new line of intelligent highway cones?
- flexibility is easy: one of the video clips will tell the story of a wood mouldings manufacturer I spent some time with; their innovation story, involving how they turned the tables on Home Depot through a logistics innovation, is truly inspiring. You don't have to be a big organization to succeed with innovation: you simply need an open mind and a will to change.
- lifestyle drives decisions: I bailed out of the corporate sector, and have been working out of a home office for 18 years. I have never regretted a moment, and now see a massive trend of people making the same lifestyle decision.
- rapid emergence of new markets: I identified the outdoor living room trend in 2003 -- and today, already, the outdoor living product market is now estimated at $15.7 billion, or 37% of total lawn and garden spending. There are a vast number of small and medium organizations who saw the trend unfold, and jumped in. Those types of rapid opportunities will continue to emerge in the future.
- lower cost to innovate: the cost of sophisticated technology continues to drop. SME's today can do things that were the domain of Fortune 500's five years ago; tomorrow, they'll be the most sophisticated operators on the planet, able to suddenly shift their skills and resources; marketing strategies and campaigns; operating methodology and structure. If they innovate correctly, they can do the things that big business does -- but do it better.
- new careers are emerging: think location intelligence professionals, hospitalists and manure managers (yes, seriously.) These are all some of the new careers unfolding before our very eyes: they've been covered in this blog, and are featured in the new book. Many new careers can emerge within the structure of the SME economy.
- it fits the fundamental transformation of business: there is a new workforce emerging, and SME's are a big part of it. There is plenty of opportunity for skills provision on a global basis as we transition from a 20th century organizational model to the flexible, adaptable, scalable structure of the 21st.
- the barriers to innovation are fewer: my experience has taught me that small and medium sized organizations have little of the "organizational sclerosis" that clogs up the structure of their larger, Fortune 5000 cousins. They can adapt and react quickly, and often don't get bogged down in the deadly process of killing innovation with attitudes such as, "you can't do that because we've always done it this way.
Watch this space, and I'll post a link when the first video/ article goes live, possibly within the next two weeks.
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Speakers 2.0 - The Evolution of the Speaking Industry
The business of speaking has evolved dramatically in the last five years — have you noticed?
It used to be event planners would spend quite a bit of time planning for next years annual conference. A committee would begin a slow, careful, and routine process of planning a program agenda, which would include finding a celebrity speaker or two to fill the agenda. Year in, year out, they’d carefully follow the same old process. Often, they’d end up with the same old conference.
Today, of course, faster is the new fast, and we’re witnessing a different role for both the speakers and the bureaus who represent them. Let’s call it “strategic knowledge delivery” — we’re helping organizations to get the right knowledge in the right place, at the right time, for the right purpose. Events have evolved from, well, events, to critical get-togethers that help a company, association or organization adapt to sudden new realities.
Today, a company might find itself in the midst of a rapid product launch — after all, product lifecycles are collapsing. (Just look at your iPod, and think of the rapid changes occurring in the consumer electronics industry!) There’s now a new requirement for fast knowledge — they need to pull together their sales force quickly, update them on the forthcoming marketing plans and sales strategy, and give them a strong motivational push out the door. They call a speakers bureau, and quickly line up a retail expert, an expert on selling strategies, and a top motivational speaker to boot.
Oh — and they need these people in two weeks!
That’s the new reality of the speaking business today. It has now evolved into a highly specialized industry, in which knowledge-brokers (formerly known as “speakers bureaus”) provide their highly specialized insight into who-knows-what, to provide their clients with the key knowledge-experts that they need. By doing so, they’re helping the client to quickly solve new business challenges, adapt to new markets, stay competitive, and deal with the reality of all the circumstances that come with our fast-paced world of today.
Every organization on the planet today is working hard to ensure that it can “keep-up.” I’ve certainly witnessed the trend first hand through the last five years, doing exactly this type of thing with some of the largest organizations in the world.
When you end up advising companies like Disney as to how to be creative, you get a different perspective of the world. Disney, for all of its vaunted reputation as a cauldron of creative genius, is like every other organization out there: it finds itself immersed in a whirlwind of rapid change, whether with its’ business model, product line, or rapidly changing consumer demand. (Anyone with pre-teen kids has seen the huge and sudden take-off of the hit High School Musical, or the explosive growth of the Hanna Montanna franchise, knows what I am talking about!)
Like any organization, Disney is constantly working to ensure that they can remain on top, by understanding the trends that will continue to impact them, and by ensuring they keep their creative spark fresh by seeking to learn what other innovative organizations are doing. For Disney, it’s almost as if they are beyond faster-is-the-new-fast : they’re in an industry in which tomorrow is simply today’s urgent problem. And that's why they call in outside experts -- someone like me.
The changes in the speaking industry — and the role that bureaus and speakers play — mirror the changes occurring in the fast paced world of business today. It’s all about just-in-time knowledge delivery. Understand that, and you’ll understand the context of the solutions that this industry and speakers bureaus can provide you.
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New article: Don't mess with my powder, dude!
Earlier this year, I wrote the Foreword for the book, The Rise of the Project Workforce: Managing People and Projects in a Flat World.
It was titled, "Don't Mess with My Powder, Dude", and tells the unique attitude towards work and life of a snowboarder.
The foreword, now available online, puts in perspective the unique and often challenging workplace changes now underway, which are often driven by unique and different attitudes towards careers and work with the younger generation.
It's worth a read; you can grab a copy below. You might also want to look at Rudolf's book.
- read Don't Mess with My Powder, Dude!
- Book: The Rise of the Project Workforce
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New book release: Ready, Set, Done: How To Innovate When Faster is the New Fast
My new book, Ready, Set, Done: How To Innovate When Faster is the New Fast, is now available in print.
You can purchase it directly through this site, with immediate shipping. In addition, the book is available worldwide via Amazon.com.
- purchase direct
- purchase via Amazon.com
Ready, Set, Done : How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast is a timely book - it captures the rapidity that is found in our world today, whether it be rapidly shifting business models, technological change, the rapid advancement of science, the emergence of new competitors, and rapidly evolving professional skills and knowledge.
The book takes a look at the concept of innovation in a new, and well, innovative way, in that it helps you understand how to link your innovation efforts to the high velocity change that surrounds you. It examines the concept of agility: how organizations can ensure they structure themselves to take advantage of and resopond to fast-changing circumstances. It builds upon that message, by examining some of the key innovation success strategies that you should be thinking about.
Sprinkled throughout the book are various observations that I have made, of some of the innovative practices I've seen wtih various organizations, large and small. When you've been looking for innovative stories for close to a decade, you discover quite a bit of wonderful insight.
The book will provide you the inspiration to adapt and change in order to keep up with high velocity change. It will also open up the minds of your staff as to the need for day to day transformation in what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.
And it will frame the issue of innovation for you in a new and critical way. As I noted in the opening chapter, "Forget about the concept of innovation as simply involving the design of cool new products. In the high-velocity economy, where faster is the new fast, it's your ability to adapt, change, and evolve, through a constant flood of new ideas, that will define your potential for success."
More information / extracts from the book
- Preview the book on Google Books
- Back cover copy
- Table of contents
- Introduction to Velocity
- Speed Freaks!
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Future trends - Of groundhogs, criminals and hackers
One of my recent, regular columns for a financial publication, managed to link together the issue of groundhogs (in my backyard), with the future of policing and financial crime.
The article relates my backyard war with a groundhog to what I refer to as an "anticipatory approach to those with a nefarious purpose."
I go on to note that "the issue of policing and law enforcement .....is much like battling a groundhog. The police deal with unique challenges that constantly change, whether fighting white-collar or street crime."
The future of policing? I comment that "through the next decade, police forces will start using sophisticated technologies such as clothing that will link to an in-car mapping system through a wireless network, allowing officers to perform a “hot-location” lookup of a colleague in the field during a ground operation. We’ll see today’s current generation of military hardware become a part of tomorrow’s crime-fighting infrastructure, such as unmanned aerial drones being used for highway surveillance to crack down on street racing. Police education will change as well, with a migration toward virtual reality training based on airline simulator models."
I don't know how I come up with this stuff, but the article has certainly generated a lot of welcome comment, some of it puzzled!
More information
- Read "Of groundhogs, criminals and hackers
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Major trend - the future of the organization
Take a look at this kid.
He's your next employee. How are you going to recruit, retain, manage, interest and amuse this fellow? What's your workforce going to look like in 2012, 2020, or beyond?
There's quite a bit of focus on trends relating to the future of the organization -- and organizations are seeing innovative strategies to cope with the world of high velocity change that we find ourselves in.
Last week I was the opening keynote speaker, and a panelist later in the day, for an offsite of one of the world's largest professional services firms. Tomorrow, I keynote a get-together of key clients of a multi-billion insurance/financial services company. A few months ago, I ran a Board of Directors/CEO level meeting on the issue for a major industrial company.
If you don't have this issue figured out yet, you'd better start thinking about it in a hurry.
There are certain things we know for a fact that relate to the future of the organization.
- there is a huge amount of expertise walking out of the economy. In 2010, 3 people will leave the economy for every person that enters it; by 2012, 4. By 2016, 6 people will leave for every new worker that joins. Those are staggering realities.
- the current generation entering the workforce is completely rejecting the concept of a traditional career. More than 50% of young people in a US survey indicated they believe self-employment to be more secure than a full time job. They don't want to work for big organizations. They'll be nomadic, contingent workers, entrepreneurial and global.
- skills are fragmenting and specializing at a furious pace. Knowledge half-lives in most industries are compressing to a matter of just a few years. Knowledge extinction is real, and massive skills fragmentation is occurring at an extreme velocity. The result is that most organizations will find future failure will come from an inability to get specialized skills. A strategy that is focused on global access to extremely specialized skills will be a transformative factor for winning.
More information
- What's Happening with Our Workforce: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Skills
- Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills
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"He prowled the stage like a preacher"
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.
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The disappearance of change management?
I'm off today to Montreal, to keynote the 2007 International Financial Leaders Forum. This is a gathering of several hundred senior financial leaders from throughout the private and government sector.
One of my key messages in my opening keynote today is that as CFO's and CEO's, they must ensure that they are putting in place a culture of agility and flexibility, such that their staff are able to deal with rapid change that comes with the high-velocity economy.
Enter the new boarding pass bar code, as seen on the right: I'm using this Blackberry enabled boarding pass on my flight to Montreal. This is an initiative set-up by Air Canada -- you check in online with your mobile device. You are then sent a text message/SMS that contains a 2-dimensional barcode. At the airport, ostensibly, it will be wanded at security, at the gate, and I'll be on the plane. (The bar code shown will have expired by the time you read this.)
The reaction of my 14 year old when he saw it? "It will never work dad! I don't have good feelings about this."
His reaction, he explained, comes from his belief that the security people won't know what to do with it; that I will get some cranky gate agent who wasn't aware of the new technology; that simply, from what he has learned while travelling with us, is that this simply represents too much change, too fast.
I promised to text him along the way with any updates!
He does have a valid point though : today, we live in a world in which change management is a big issue. I've run (and continue to do) workshops or keynotes where I am addressing issues of how to cope with change. It's a big issue that I cover off in my new Ready, Set, Done: How to Innnovate When Faster is the New Fast book.
Yet a big question looming on my mind these days is this: what happens when the need for change management goes away? Twenty years out, we will have a generation in charge which has embraced technological change from their birth. They are attracted to new ideas, innovation, and new ways of thinking, like bugs drawn to a light. Their world will continue to involve a flood of new technologies, new ways of working, constantly shifting work structures, rapid micro-careers, and all kinds of other things that involve what we would consider to be rapid change.
What happens when change management disappears, and change occurs even faster than it happens today?
The airline involved in today's flight is quite focused on innovation. The big issue to watch is whether they are keeping the change-process up-to-date with their innovation process. Or whether the issue of change-management is starting to disappear and go away....
Nov 5 update
- the security people knew about it, but
- the first gate agent freaked out, muttered about management and new technology, and printed me a paper boarding pass
- the flight attendant didn't like it, and wanted the paper pass
- returning, it took 3 minutes for them to get the security line guy who had the bar code wand
- the gate agent flatly refused to accept it. She complained, complained...
Just about what I expected!
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