10 reasons why you must attend the Day of Innovation conference!

Day of Innovation - August 28 - Indianapolis, IN

10. “Either you choose to innovate or to commoditize” - Charlie McTargett, 2013 Day of Innovation keynote speaker and VP Product Development at Delta Faucet.

9. Network with others who share an innovation mindset.

8. Event you don’t want to miss because everybody is going to talk about it.

7. Challenge the status quo in your organization and learn from Indiana’s innovation thought leaders.

6. Educate your employees about innovation at a low cost (only $200 compared to other conferences of $1000+).

5. Because we don’t believe in the conventional way of thinking, our panel will bring an espresso shot of disruption to challenge the status quo. Expect (good) chaos.

4. Learn how to be innovative well beyond product development: marketing, customer experience, future planning, competitive intelligence, company culture, mindset.

3. Your competitors have already registered. What are you waiting for?

2. This will change the way you think about innovation in your organization.

1. Expose yourself to new perspectives you’ve not considered before.

Register now!

People who kill innovation

I have a firm belief that to stay relevant and be successful in this ever-changing, ultra-competitive, whacky world, we actually need to upgrade the way we think on a permanent basis. To think the same as we always have is to fall behind. The things that used to make us successful no longer work, your old thinking is now taken for granted, and our problem-solving abilities are now commoditized or digitized.

In a recent post, I discussed how organizations fail to innovate, and it very often starts with the (bad) people in place, starting from the top of the org chart.

In a December 18 article, Stefan Lindegaard defines 5 types of people who kill innovation.

Here is my list (non-exhaustive) of people of kill innovation.

Disclaimer: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. BULLSH#T! THEY REALLY EXIST!!

1. Executives who sell innovation to their employees like a car sales person sells a Humvee to a potential buyer trying to convince him it offers the best gas mileage. If a leader is not genuine in his intention to create a true culture of innovation, employees won’t buy into it. They are not stupid.

2. Incompetent “innovation” directors who kill their employees’ creativity and will to innovate because their ideas don’t fit in the “mold”. Hmm… it reminds me of my French literature teacher who used to give me bad grades because I had a different interpretation of a book from hers. Such directors are supposed to encourage innovation within their team, not to teach their team how to think like them. Fu#k it up! (read: funk it up).

3. Executives who want to hire employees with “an entrepreneurial spirit”, but don’t let those same employees experiment business ventures and innovation inside or outside of the company. How are such employees supposed to boost their entrepreneurial spirit if their attempts are shut down?

4. Managers who steal ideas from their team to make those ideas their “own”, transforming concepts to fit their “narrow” views, thus disengaging the very ones who came up with innovative ideas.

5. Formal or informal “leaders” who are put in place because of their “special” connections to the exec team (yeah, many companies still encourage boot lickers), discouraging the willing employees to come forward with ideas.

6. The “narrow-minded” people who only focus on what they can benefit from participating and miss the big picture.

7. Execs who are so afraid of open innovation and bringing outside thinkers that they still live in the stone age when Neanderthals protected fire from their enemies, fearing they would lose the “fire” (to innovate) they have in them.

8. YOU, if you are soooo comfortable in your sleepers that you refuse to grab the remote control and switch the channel to challenge the status quo. If you are afraid to fail, you will never move forward. You must upgrade your thinking. A quote of my kids’ favorite movie (Ratatouille): Gusteau “If you focus on what you left behind you will never see what lies ahead!”.


Conclusion: Steve Jobs’ quote “the crazy ones”
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Share your experiences. Who do you see as innovation killers?

 

To win or not to lose? The power of loss aversion

Because we feel the disadvantages of risky decisions (losses) more intensely than the advantages (gains or wins), we see risky moves as bad ideas. Opportunities that are forecast with certainty seem especially tempting since they are risk-free.
In a previous blog, I spoke about how we need to upgrade our thinking, how we must funk up the way we think.

In his LinkedIn post titled “The Power of Loss Aversion”, Cass Sunstein explains that “people dislike losses more than they like equivalent gains”. To illustrate his point, he talks about incentives programs for teachers to improve their student’s achievements. Unfortunately, many of these efforts have been vain. In an ingenious study, teachers were given money in advance and told that if their students did not show real improvements, they would have to give it back. The result? A big improvement in teacher quality, as measured by a significant increase in students’ math scores.

Here are some common behaviors people around us (if not ourselves) experience:

- holding onto a losing stock investment
- keeping a home with a mortgage substantially above its market value
- going to an event you don’t really want to attend because you have already paid for the tickets.

Because gains are fleeting and losses linger, people behave irrationally to avoid loss.

How can you leverage the power of “loss of aversion” to grow your business, motivate your people and increase sales?

When you promote the benefits of your products or services, frame your message towards loss prevention. If you pitch a product to a potential buyer that is designed to increase revenue, don’t just state the obvious benefit such as: “if you use our product X, you can expect your sales to rise by $120K annually”. Instead, remind your buyer that he would face losses from not using your product: “every month that product X is not used, you leave $10K on the table. This is money left that will not be recovered. You will lose money month after month. Can you really afford losing $10K a month?” Switching the message around to remind your buyers that they face losses from not using the product is a much more powerful message than just promoting the gains.

If your business sells products or services directly to consumers, leverage scarcity. Scarcity, one of Cialdini’s “weapons of influence,” is powerful because it represents a loss of freedom. If you are selling a product, promote its limited quantity, retire products early on a constant basis and introduce new products. Put an expiration date on your offer – car dealerships excel at this by pressing potential buyers to accept this one-time deal that may not be available if they shop around and come back two days later. If you are planning an event, make sure you mention the limited seating. Or perhaps you can offer early bird tickets, which gives you the opportunity to market to people’s loss aversion multiple times: once when tickets are announced, once when the early bird discounts are expiring and then just before ticket sales end.

When you define your pricing strategy, focus on the fear of losing money. Retailers who sell home appliances understand this very well. They offer a one-year warranty on a $1000 flat screen plasma or a $2500 refrigerator, reminding customers that after 12 months they are not covered but that they can extend the warranty by paying $200. What do customers do? They pay $200 extra in fear of losing their $1000 purchase, of the (very small) probabilities that their plasma or refrigerator will have some technical issues 3-5 years down the road when the extended warranty is over.

The same could apply to buying insurance, or flat-rate plans for mobile phones, etc. Consumers prefer to pay monthly fees of $40 to protect themselves for potential losses as well as variability of costs for their phone bills, instead of taking the risk to pay $20 a month and $60 another month. They are afraid of paying more, rather than seeing the benefits of paying on actual usage.When you formulate pricing strategies for your different offerings and services, do not forget to utilize the power of loss aversion with your buyers. A dollar gained and a dollar lost might equal zero on a pure economic basis, but it causes great pain to most buyers when behavioral economics is factored in. Buyers will generally pay more to eliminate this pain if your pricing strategy is framed correctly. Ignoring this powerful pricing tool means money left on the table and gone forever... and we all know how painful that can be.

Another principle is the theory of the foot in the door, or the tactic that involves getting a person to agree to a large request by first setting them up by having that person agree to a modest request. You want to create “ownership.” Loss of money (and the freedom of choice that comes with it) can be a barrier to people buying your products or services. However, once they’ve taken ownership of something it’s difficult to give that up. To illustrate, think of the various websites or publications which offer a free 30-day trial period. This is very effective when they require customers’ credit card information up front while allowing them to opt-out within the trial period (most surprisingly, most don’t opt-out simply because they already have a foot in the door). When you sell a product, think about this tactic. You can also easily apply this tactic to motivate your team by asking a small commitment which will lead to a bigger commitment. Imagine you apply the study described above with teachers to your employees… Let’s say you have a profit-sharing plan where your company gives a 10% bonus to your employees if all company goals are met. This is a nice incentive, but how can you be sure your employees give it all? How would it be different if you deposited at the beginning of the year a 10% bonus in their bank account (bonus would be frozen), and that they would have to give it back at the end of the year if your company does not meet its goals?

Power of loss aversion in your day-to-day communication. PR firms know a great deal of leveraging the power of loss aversion when reporting news or financial results. If you have more than one piece of bad news (or losses) to report, bundle up your bad news into one single statement. If you spread out the divulgation of bad news or losses across multiple announcements, you multiply its negative impact. The pain of losing $40 dollars at one time is less painful that losing $20 in two separate instances.On the opposite, when you have multiple pieces of good news to report, you are better off spreading them across several announcements, as people experience greater satisfaction gaining two times $20 versus $40 one time only. When you have a mix of good and bad news to report, try to mix small losses with big gains, but separate your small gains from bigger losses.

In conclusion, while you cannot model your business decisions solely based on the power of loss aversion, the opportunities abound where inclusion of these basic principles can be highly advantageous. You must upgrade the way you think in order to seek gains and put the fear of losing and failing behind you.

Join The Resistance Against The Status Quo

Tired of hearing the same old adage "we've always done it this way" which leads to nowhere but the status quo? At Centric, we are tired of it!

Join the resistance against the status quo at Indianapolis' Day of Innovation conference on August 28.

Innovation is not just about launching a brand new product on the market. It is a mindset that leads to the implementation of ideas.

Day of Innovation will feature keynote speaker Jeff Baxter, co-founder of Steely Dan and lead-guitarist of the Doobie Brother. Baxter is now a consultant for the Pentagon on counter-terrorism. He will teach the audience how to think non-linear in a linear world.

Speaking of (national) security, companies must keep an (innovative) eye on this matter. Jeremy Morton and Tom Baldwin, two executives at Stanley Security, will share with us how to keep abreast of change and remain the industry leader in innovation.

Doug Boles, President of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, will talk about the future of one of the most iconic sports venues in the world, host of the Indianapolis 500.

You can be innovative in marketing in one of the oldest sports in the world... soccer. Peter Wilt from Indy Eleven, Indianapolis' new NASL professional soccer team, will share with us how his team developed an innovative grass-roots and non conventional marketing campaign to defeat all odds and sell record season tickets.

You can be a product or device focused company but still genuinely care about your end users, in Roche's case, their patients. Laura Spiegel will tell the story of Roche's LifeMap Experience to say "no" to the status quo in Diabetes care.
Want to discover Google's behind-the-scene culture of innovation? We won't bring Vince Vaughn or Owen Wilson (they are not available, sorry!), but we'll have a true Xoogler (read: ex-Googler) - Joe Van Deman -  to share some secrets.

Because we don't believe in the conventional way of thinking, our panel will bring a espresso shot of disruption to challenge the status quo. Expect (good) chaos!

Finally, Day of Innovation will celebrate Indiana's most innovative organizations with the Indiana Innovation Awards ceremony.

Join the resistance against the status quo!

Unhappy employees are bad for your business

According to data compiled by Bolt Insurance, a whopping 80 percent of employees are dissatisfied with their jobs in some way. And when that dissatisfaction gets so high that employees jump ship, it can cost an average of one fifth of the employee's salary to find a replacement, not to mention the loss in productivity.

This infographic shows the industries with the highest turnover rates and what businesses can do to keep their employees more engaged in their work.

To me, beyond the monetary cost to replace an employee who has left the company, the disastrous and non-quantifiable consequences of unhappy employees are essentially a loss in productivity, a poor delivery of customer/brand experience, and ultimately a loss in the inner innovation power of the organization.

According to an analysis conducted by the Gallup Organization disengaged employees cost the American economy up to $350 billion a year due to lost productivity, because they are the lowest performing. To put it simply, if there had been engaged workers in those positions, they could have been far more productive.
Employee unhappiness can drag a company's image down. Take the example of Walmart. I guess it depends on the person, but I think that we can all agree that in general - perhaps with the exception of the elderly greeters - most Walmart employees don't seem particularly passionate about their jobs. I don't think I'm being unfair by saying that. Some even seem to really, really, really hate their job. I'm not judging, and I am not saying that Walmart employees should act as happy as Starbucks baristas... I can't help but wonder why they don't. Does Starbucks pay that much better than Walmart? Is serving coffee all day that much more fun than stocking or scanning stuff? Is there really that much of a difference? Is it just that working at Starbucks is cool but working at Walmart isn't? Are a person's identity and sense of self worth tied-in with the image of the company they work for? (If Starbucks is cool, then working at Starbucks makes me cool? If Walmart sucks, then working for Walmart means I suck?) Maybe, I don’t know for sure. I guess I could see a little kid wanting to grow up to be a barista: they make coffee, the coffee makes people happy, so it isn't a bad job. I don't know too many kids who would ever find working register 12 at Walmart fun or cool or rewarding.

Obviously, Walmart has an image problem, and the entire company's identity may be caught in a self-perpetuating vicious cycle of substandard customer-to-brand experiences.
Unhappy employees can turn even the best companies into "have beens". In contrast, happy employees can turn even the most average companies into worthy lovebrands.
Ask yourself: Do you feel special when you buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks? Do you feel special when you buy a BMW or an Apple computer? Do Starbucks, BMW and Apple employees play any role in that?

Do you feel special when you buy something at Walmart?

Do those companies' employees play any role in that? Do you think that those employees' sense of worth relative to their jobs has anything to do with how happy or unhappy they are to work there?

What can businesses do to address the problem? 

In his book Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh wrote about the practice of paying some employees $2,000 to quit Zappos. Though this policy may seem bizarre to some, it very likely winds up saving an organization money by preventing some of the negative outcomes mentioned above. If a very negative employee was allowed to continue acting out over a number of years, the cost to the organization in lost productivity could be much greater than $2,000.

Without being as extreme, Dave Lavinsky’s checklist to motivate employees is a very good resource.
As I wrote in a recent blog, a more a constructive approach is an engaged and empowered workforce.

How do you motivate your team? Share your experience with us.

Marketing 3.0: lessons from the food trucks

There has been an explosion of mobile food trucks over the past decade around the country. Indianapolis has its fair share, with food trucks serving food to Super Bowl fans in February 2012.

Food trucks are an interesting case study. They were first a spin off of brick and mortar restaurants, revolutionizing the food industry by bringing food to the customers, versus bringing customers to the food like conventional restaurants.  Over the past few years, the food truck industry has embraced digital technology to take the experience to another level.

Now food trucks use Twitter and Facebook to engage their customers, informing them of their location for the day, connecting on a personal level via online technology, as well as physical contact when customers come pick up their food. In Indianapolis, you can track food trucks and follow them on Twitter @IndyFoodTruck. 

Food trucks are about business after all, but the social aspect is not to be overlooked. They are about sharing experiences with food, connecting people. What they do with FB and Twitter is an electronic version of that share.

The food truck industry is doing marketing 3.0. Marketing 3.0 is the convergence of brick and mortar business (in case of food trucks steel and tires) 1.0, using digital technology 2.0 to create a new marketing/business model 3.0.

I heard in a recent discussion someone talking about digilogue. Digilogue is the convergence of analogue and digital, in other words, brick-and-mortar world 1.0 converging with online world 2.0.

When you think of Google or Apple, I bet you think digital. However, both companies are great illustrations of what digilogue or marketing 3.0 are. 50% of Apple’s revenue is generated from its stores (1.0), the other half from online sales. Apple shaped its customer touch points strategy on the best analogue model, the Ritz-Carlton.
On a different note, Google promotes online advertising via print mailing. It mails vouchers to business and customers who can in turn credit them to their Google adwards account.

Marketing 3.0 is the combination of 1.0 physical/material channel and 2.0 digital channel. Large companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Zappos do it. How about you? Why do you think Amazon customers buy both eBooks and hardcover books? Because they like the convenience of eBooks, but can’t get away of the feeling and smell of a paper book.
People want the convenience and speed of digital, but they also want the physical connection and touch of products or front-line staff.

One challenge online businesses face is the lack of physical interaction with their customers. To bridge that gap, they have to focus on unparalleled customer service to address any questions, claims, frustrations… In a recent article, an Amazon customer expresses his frustration dealing with poor customer service from the online giant. Zappos has adopted a similar customer care model as Apple, taking inspiration for the Ritz Carlton.

Let’s go back to our food trucks. How do they leverage online technology to enhance the customer experience?
Kianta Key shares 4 lessons she learned how to use social media while growing her food truck business.
1.Digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter use geo-location technology to notify followers of your location. At low-cost, food trucks interact with their customers, promote their business and day-specials, and notify customers of their location. FB and Twitter also provide the opportunity to partner with local business and cross-promote products/events… It becomes a community gathering tool.
2.Key to success is customer engagement like any other business. The great thing about food truck is that they bring the food experience to the customers, which in itself is a big step in terms of engagement. You can take the experience further by asking followers to choose what items they want to the menu for the day, offer suggestions. In other words, you personalize the experience and make customers feel engaged.
3.Strategy to engage customers is vain if you don’t follow up and respond rapidly to customers’ claims and requests. Follow-up is key to sustaining customer engagement. Customer engagement is about create a dialogue (two-way conversation), not a monologue where you just promote your business and notify of your location.
4.Emotional and personal connection is essential in developing long-term relationships with your customers. Sharing your story is a way to build that relationship, providing genuine content, not just promotional content. Let customers be part of your story telling.

Content becomes as important as context. Combining business 1.0 with technology 2.0 helps organizations create a new marketing/business model 3.0. 

Share your stories.

What the F.... groups!

About 18 months ago I attended my first Centric event (Centric is Indianapolis' innovation think-tank). The theme was “Innovation is the shit”, or how Delta Faucet, well known for making faucets, came to manufacture toilets. It was a provocative title (and presentation), which focused on how deep consumer insight research can bring innovation.  

I do agree that innovation is the shit.

How do you gather consumer feedback to bring innovation to your company? There are 3 main channels to collect consumer feedback. Focus groups, CRM/Big Data and consumer insight research.

This cartoon describes perfectly how it is hard to translate consumer’s feedback into a product. Along the way the message is lost in translation.

The danger of focus groups is that they make us feel like we’re getting close to our customers, which is good, right? The problem comes when we ask focus groups questions which they are not really equipped to answer. If you are trying to figure out which advertising approach to use, focus groups are great for getting comparative feedback on how people react to different ideas. If you want to get a handle on what people are thinking about a particular topic right now, focus groups are excellent. But they are not very good for helping us invent the future. This is because customers invited to be part of focus groups have their brain or their mind already formatted in a certain way.  Their brain is pre-conditioned. Some of them come with their own agenda; others are easily influenced by “leaders” in the group; others are just there for the fun or the money, in other words not fully committed. You will never get objective, unbiased information from focus groups. According to Doug McColgin from Collidea, “focus groups are a great tool for validation, but are decidedly lacking when it comes to inspiration. If you're trying to get consumer insights from a focus group, you are depending on consumers to deliver objective truth on your topic from memory. This creates numerous problems: people like to give the answer they think you want to hear, people are swayed by others' opinions, people's perceptions differ from reality, and many opportunities lie in details that don't seem relevant enough to bring up”.

There has been a lot of emphasis on CRM and Big Data the past few years. CRM can be the enabler to driving significant improvements in marketing and sales performance – and significantly improved customer service, however its direct impact on innovation has yet to be defined. Database analysis allows marketers to get a more accurate idea of consumer preferences, tracking behavior across channels and synthesizing the information to render more complete behavioral pictures. CRM and Big Data are great at keeping records on buys and preferences, tracking present trends and identifying what might be future trends. However, both track only existing and expressed behavior, that is consumer habits from a plethora of data. Unlike focus groups or consumer insight research, with CRM/Big Data you don’t get the emotional behavior of the consumer. Big data is good at understanding the what and when of consumer habits. Consumer insight research captures the why and how. According to a study by Gartner, the leading Information Technology research firm, only 50% of Fortune-1000 companies using CRM systems reap a significant return on their investment.

People don’t know what they want. Focus groups or CRM can’t express what people don’t know they want. Tim Kastelle wrote a very good article about how he found out he was buying Coke for the wrong reason. According to Doug McColgin, “going out into the consumers' world is far more effective for exploring what could be. Observational research, or watching a consumer interact with products in their natural environment can provide value in several ways. Compensatory behaviors, or ways consumers will teach themselves to work around poor design or find unintended applications for existing products, can be the basis for a new product. Differences between what consumers say they do and what they really do can provide a foundation for new marketing copy. There's no substitute for entering into the end-users' world to see and hear and experience life as they know it”. Deep consumer insight research enables companies to uncover unmet and unknown needs. Needs that consumers don’t know they have, or simply can’t express it.

In other words, companies need to FUnK up the way they think.

How does your company understand its customers’ needs? How does consumer insight drive innovation in your company?