E46: How Innovation is Structured in your Organization with Braden Kelley of Innovation Excellence

Braden Kelley is an experienced leader of projects and programs focused on innovation, digital transformation, design thinking, organizational change, and process improvement.

He is the author of two books (1) "Charting Change" and (2) "Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire", and has helped numerous organizations increase their revenue and cut their costs through the creation of innovative strategies, organizational change, digital transformation, and improved organizational performance. He has maximized profits for companies while living and working in England, Germany, and the United States. Braden earned his MBA from top-rated London Business School.

Braden is passionate about digital transformation, innovation and change, and has written for numerous online publications including CIO.com, The Atlantic, Wired, and The Washington Post. In addition, he has written commissioned white papers on “Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation” for Innocentive, "Winning the War for Innovation" for Imaginatik, and "Five Ways to Make Your Innovation Culture Smell Better" for Planview.

In his spare time, Braden is a popular keynote speaker, workshop leader, and a co-founder of the world’s largest global innovation community – InnovationExcellence.com – home to 7,000+ innovation articles and is an innovation leader on Twitter (@innovate) with 19,500+ hard-earned followers.

 

About Innovation excellence:

 

InnovationExcellence.com is the online home of the global innovation community, building upon a rapidly-growing network with thousands of members from over 175 countries – thought leaders, executives, practitioners, consultants, vendors, and academia representing all sectors and industries. Their mission is to broadly enhance innovation by providing a forum for connection and conversation across this community – assembling an ever-growing arsenal of resources, best practices and proven answers for achieving innovation excellence.

Their community currently generates over 225,000 unique visits and requests more than 800,000 pages every month.

Braden also partnered with Rowan Gibson, Julie Anixter and Dean DeBiase to built Innovation Excellence and now has over 400 contributing authors around the world providing a range of perspective on the business aspects of innovation and how to help people succeed in their business.

 

What Innovation means:

 

Braden define innovation as a means to transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adoptive solution that values above every existing alternative. Several key things about this definition:

The tension between useful VS valuable - you can create lots of useful things very easily but the things that are valuable to people are much harder. The tension between invention and innovation - (they are not the same thing) often times people can get confused when they are inventing things and thinking that it is innovation. One of the key differentiators between innovation and invention is for something to make that leap from one to the other is that innovation must become widely adopted and must also, as a result of its inherit value be able to displace the existing solution even if it is the “do nothing solution”.

 

The 2 key to success for any organizations: What you have to do is to be really really good at what you do and but you also have to have one eye at the future. Your customer and understanding how their needs are changing overtime so that you are delivering the things that they look to you to provide in terms of the solutions. Innovation is all about value - so you have to be constantly on top of identifying where value comes from in your contacts and how to deliver value and translate that value for people to access that value. Innovation excellence Operational excellence

 

Value came from three components: Value Creation - the invention part of it Value Access - helping people access that value Value Translation - to help people understand how these new things will fit into their lives

 

The challenge that companies have in creating the innovation culture is RISK PROFILE. It is one key challenge that every organization have. Oftentimes organizations tend to over index whereas repeatability and operational excellence is they do that to deliver that consistency that the customers expect in that quality. Sometimes it leads people to feeling that they can’t make a mistake so you have to sort of change the mindset of the organization and make learning an accepted part of the culture because you can learn from success as much as you can learn from failures as long as you are set up to do it.

 

Braden’s Books:

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

Charting Change

 

Tips to captivate change: Organizational change - it is all about the mindset and what’s important to different individual You really need to segment inside your company for your customers It is all about the customer

 

Branden shares what excites him about the industry:

 

“Good artist copy and great artist steal” - Pablo Picasso

 

If organizations really want to be in it for a long haul and they exist  50 years from now, you have to put the right building blocks in place to build the right mindset and the right culture so that you will have the ability to change as the world changes around you.

 

You should not rush in without having an understanding of what you are going to do of people’s idea on the back-end. Do not start an innovation program if you are not committed financially, committed to time for people to work on the projects. Before you start asking anybody for anything, know what you are going to do with what they provide. Do you research, do your homework. It is not just about things in your area but keep a file of the things that you are trying to do that has impact. Look and learn from other people who are already doing it and see what you can leverage out of it.

 

“A body in motion stays in motion, a body at rest stays at rest”

 

Productivity tool: Notepad Outlook Calendar (online version)

 

Book Recommendations: Winning the Brain Game by Matthew E. May

 

Connect with Branden:

Website: InnovationExcellence.com and BradenKelley.com

LinkedIn: Braden Kelley on LinkedIn

Twitter: @innovate

Facebook: Innovation Excellence

 

Thanks again for tuning in!

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