The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

With the start of a new year, let's look back at the most downloaded episode of 2021.

As an innovation leader, I encounter loads of information every day. I like to use tools that capture/organize this information and bring it together in a way that's easy to access. I need these tools to be accessible on an iPhone, Android, laptop, and iPad. Here are the five tools I use which fit my criteria:

• reMarkable 2 tablet
• Kindle Oasis
• ai
• Readwise
• Roam Research

I like to separate my tools into categories like information collection, organization/combination, and the serendipity effect. I used to use Moleskine notebooks for collection, but now I use the reMarkable 2 tablet. It's similar to writing on paper. All my information is sent to my phone and desktop for storage. I also like using the Kindle Oasis to highlight and save information that I find important or interesting. I use Otter.ai when I am running ideation sessions. This tool acts as an AI-powered assistant, recording and transcribing meetings and other meaningful conversations.

I listen to many audiobooks and podcasts, hardcover books, and online articles. I need a tool that can gather all that information and synthesize it. That is where Readwise comes into play. This tool does all that and pinpoints things I may have missed initially, triggering serendipity. I like to pair Readwise with a tool called Roam Research, which organizes and makes connections between the information Readwise collects.

With the start of a new year, let’s look back at the most downloaded episode of 2021.

As an innovation leader, I encounter loads of information every day. I like to use tools that capture/organize this information and bring it together in a way that’s easy to access. I need these tools to be accessible on an iPhone, Android, laptop, and iPad. Here are the five tools I use which fit my criteria:

I like to separate my tools into categories like information collection, organization/combination, and the serendipity effect. I used to use Moleskine notebooks for collection, but now I use the reMarkable 2 tablet. It’s similar to writing on paper. All my information is sent to my phone and desktop for storage. I also like using the Kindle Oasis to highlight and save information that I find important or interesting. I use Otter.ai when I am running ideation sessions. This tool acts as an AI-powered assistant, recording and transcribing meetings and other meaningful conversations.

I listen to many audiobooks and podcasts, hardcover books, and online articles. I need a tool that can gather all that information and synthesize it. That is where Readwise comes into play. This tool does all that and pinpoints things I may have missed initially, triggering serendipity. I like to pair Readwise with a tool called Roam Research, which organizes and makes connections between the information Readwise collects.

To know more about my favorite innovation tools, listen to this week's show: Most Downloaded Episode of 2021

Creative people can think of new ideas, and creative ideas are those ideas that are new, useful, and different. It all starts with the creative person. What is so special about them?

Creative people often have a sense of limitless creative freedom and experimentation. Their creative genius is a natural part of who they are. If you are not naturally creative, you can learn and develop your creativity by applying creative qualities.

1. Curious: Creative people are always asking questions/looking for new ideas. They're not content with the status quo.
2. Creative Confidence: Creative confidence is the feeling when you know that what you are about to do/say/or create is original. Creative, confident people are not afraid to fail because they know it's part of the process.
3. Thick Skin:Creative people need to have thick skin, take criticism, reject rejection, stay persistent, and be unafraid of failure.
4. Independent Rebellious Streak:Creatives can't be afraid to blaze their trail and stand up for their ideas. They need to find the right balance between their independent, rebellious streak and supporting the team mission.
5. Flexibility: Creative people need to be flexible. If not, they might overlook new ideas, or you might not be able to adapt to changes a new idea would impose.
6. Playful: Playing with ideas can help break through mental blocks by going outside the box to create new solutions or inventive ways of looking at old ones.
7. Thorough: Creative people are more comprehensive than most because they never stop at the first idea. They always look around at what else they can do.
8. Ambitious: Creatives are ambitiously striving to push the boundaries of what is possible. They crave feedback from others to improve and have a desire to create something new and unique.
9. Energetic: Creative people are constantly moving, inspiring others with their creativity and constant energy.
10. Naïve: Creative people are often naïve about their limitations but can also be more creative than others because of this naivete. It's important to balance creativity and practicality.
11. Dreamer: Creative people are sometimes referred to as "dreamers" because they imagine new possibilities.
12. Persistence: Creatives are persistent in their efforts over time despite any obstacles they may face. Creative solutions result from patience and tenacity.

Most people are afraid of what others will think about them if they do anything out of the box. It's easy for people to lose sight of their identity and uniqueness. So how do leaders and individuals combat this fear of taking risks?

Suppose you want to build an environment where everyone works together towards a common goal without fear of failure or judgment - one that encourages risk-taking alongside calculated caution - these steps will help guide your efforts!

1. Open Communication:Consider open communication between all employees at every level. This fosters trust, allowing employees to contribute valuable input, empowering them rather than confining them.
2. Active Collaboration:Active collaboration takes things to the next level. Design and construct your collaboration by looking for opportunities to leverage capabilities, expertise, resources, diversity of thinking styles, and experiences. Involving all employees in everything from start to finish can lead to impressive results because it utilizes their unique strengths and abilities.
3. Extreme Transparency:Transparency is a key component in building an effective innovation cycle. When employees at every level are aware of major and minor changes, they feel empowered and included. Transparency builds trust, which then creates confidence.

To cultivate a growing organization, leaders need to ensure employees feel comfortable taking risks and not judged if they fail. Leaders need to set clear objectives and expectations for their team.

For innovation leaders, it is vital to learn how to turn failures into successes. Innovation is all about seeing opportunities others don't see and seizing them. Successful failures lead to successful innovations.

The experimentation phase is within the innovation process, often full of failures. These failures are not always negative. When things don't go as planned, failures allow us to see what needs change. Successful innovations require risk and a capacity for productive failures, which reveal something new about the problem you are trying to solve. To experience productive failure, you have to fail successfully. Three characteristics help you figure out if your failures are successful.

1. Effort: Innovators must have a strong sense of commitment even when others give up hope. Ask yourself this question, "did you put your 100% best effort into a project"?. If so, you are one step closer to a productive failure.
2. Perspective: Reflect on what happened during each failure, learn from it, and apply what you learned to future innovations. Ask yourself, "what does the experience teach you about what works and what doesn't"?
3. Inspiration: Failure from experiments might lead to lessons about the nature of the problem, inspiring better solutions. They can also teach us something about how we think. Through failures, you can learn how to solve problems better. Ask this question, "Does this new understanding inspire a new understanding that wasn't there before?"

It is crucial to stand out among the crowd in a world filled with so many innovations. Organizations that want to improve their innovation impact need to implement a high-impact strategy. We will be exploring the seven essential ingredients of agile innovation.

Agile is the ability to think/understand quickly and move quickly and flexibly. Agile innovation helps teams deliver high-impact innovations. It consists of constant testing and experimenting to solve a problem. The ultimate goal is to provide innovation that is scalable and sustainable.

It is essential to keep in mind that agile innovation is a process. When viewing the agile innovation framework, understand that it's not a "one size fits all." It would be best if you adapted this framework to your organization.

The first ingredient of agile innovation is collaborating with stakeholders or those that benefit from what you deliver. Collaborate closely with them because this helps you build a shared understanding of the problem. From this, you'll gain a higher likelihood of success and ensure met needs.

The second essential ingredient is focusing on high-impact innovations. Focusing on impact helps ensure the value of impact delivered. The team needs to be on the same page in this process. The third ingredient is a culture of continuous experiments. Continuous experiments help organizations learn fast and make decisions that lead to sustainable results.

In 2020, we had Stefan Thomke from Harvard Business School on the show, and he wrote an excellent book on this topic. The fourth ingredient is self-organizing teams. These teams are responsible and accountable for their work. They don't have to wait for permission to take action, which speeds up decision-making and execution. Define and agree on the problem statement, and let the team execute.

The fifth essential ingredient is a cross-disciplinary team. Teams with diverse backgrounds and skillsets are unique and powerful. The sixth ingredient is the right innovation agility metrics. These are not just usual innovation metrics such as the 3M metric used to ensure that new product revenue grows. An agile-specific metric would be something like how many things are in your innovation queue. Stick with a few metrics, and don't go overboard with them.

The seventh essential ingredient of agile innovation is short iterative ideation, testing, prototyping, and repeat cycles. This is done in a structured way. Keep aggressive schedules with planned progress towards the execution. Remember that if you run into a wall and something is simply not working, stop. Be willing to kill the project and move on to the next.

We are finishing up a two-part series on innovation leaders. Innovation leadership skills go beyond the basic skills associated with managing people or processes. They are leadership styles to increase creativity, competency, and collaboration that result in innovations that contribute to the organization's success.

The Harvard Business Review recently said, "A major paradox managers face is that the systems that enable success with today's model reinforce behaviors that are inconsistent with discovering tomorrow's model." Today's rules and structures for organizations create innovation roadblocks. It's vital to appoint a leader with the characteristics to lead your innovation effort. Secondly, it's essential to support them with resources (people, time, and money) and give them space to work.

Let's look at the nine characteristics every successful innovation leader needs. Firstly, innovation leaders need to be comfortable with risk. An innovation leader must have risk tolerance and analyze possible outcomes to make the best decision. Secondly, leaders need expertise in effective communication, conveying visions, commanding respect, and understanding ideas' inherent risks and advantages.

Thirdly, innovation leaders need to remain humble and open to new ideas. This will help cultivate an innovative organization. Next, innovation leaders need to have low anxiety since unnecessary stress depletes creativity. A leader with low anxiety will make their team feel comfortable and secure.

The fifth characteristic is self-confidence, as innovation leaders constantly deal with unknowns. An innovation leader believes they'll succeed and stay positive. The next characteristic is being oriented towards action. Innovation leaders feel energized by action and enjoy leading change that produces innovation. Next, innovation leaders are active collaborators, creating a culture of trust, mutual respect, and shared aspiration of a mutual goal. Innovations that come from collaborative sharing can propel organizations to greater heights.

The eighth characteristic is being a rule breaker. Innovation leaders understand that consistently following the rules can become rigid and put people in a rut. They seek to generate insight and knowledge through non-traditional ways, such as experimentation, free exploration, improvisation, and breaking the rules of doing something. Lastly, an innovation leader needs to be a keen observer, perceiving new patterns and details. The ability to notice things that may have gone unnoticed helps innovation leaders make accurate assessments and figure out the best solution to a problem.

• https://yscouts.com/10-innovation-leadership-characteristics/
• https://blog.trginternational.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-collaborative-leadership
• https://workingcapitalreview.com/2019/12/removing-roadblocks-on-the-road-to-innovation/

Innovation is the secret sauce to success. Unfortunately, efforts to create innovative products or services often get derailed by good intentions, market factors, or other roadblocks holding us back.

Business leadership has spent billions searching for innovation. From creating Innovation Centers to investing in incubators, organizations continue on a snipe hunt for innovation. It must be a snipe hunt because 94% of executives say they are frustrated with their company's efforts to harness innovation. The prominent paradox managers face is that systems enabling success based on today's management model reinforce behaviors inconsistent with an innovation culture.

Innovation leadership must remove the inertia barrier as a first step toward embracing innovation. To do this, start at the top with leaders that welcome and support new and more innovative ways of thinking. Leadership must lead with bold, creative ideas first. This will inspire the spark that can spread into a cultural conflagration of innovation over time.

Let's get specific on the eight leadership roadblocks that prevent organizations from achieving innovation success. Firstly, groupthink occurs when everyone makes the unspoken decision to follow the group's thinking. Groupthink stunts innovation and prevents some of the best ideas from being presented.

Secondly, there is burnout, which comes from firing on all cylinders, killing creativity. Innovation depends on creativity, so make sure to find time to rest. The third roadblock is a lack of resources, coming in time, people, and money. When innovation teams lack resources, it's hard to go past the ideas and into execution.

The fourth roadblock is insufficient trust, which is especially essential to innovation efforts. When trust within organizations is lacking, teams will be skeptical that their ideas will be executed and won't even try. The fifth roadblock is stopping at ideas. Ideas have to come with action by inspired and engaged employees. Letting good ideas die in the pipeline is a common innovation pitfall. Avoid that.

Next is preferential treatment, stemming from managers not valuing diverse opinions or only valuing one person's opinion. This results in fewer ideas and low-impact innovations. The seventh roadblock is a lack of collaboration, which comes from leaders giving individual credit for ideas. This creates an unwillingness to collaborate with others. Without a strong culture of collaboration, an organizations' innovation efforts will fail.

Lastly, there is the roadblock of fear. It's not safe to fail when there isn't any trust that failure is a normal part of the innovation process. Sometimes, the riskiest ideas end up being the best, and innovation efforts suffer without them. Leaders who promote an innovation-friendly workplace culture are crucial in today's world. Doomed leaders and organizations are those who don't innovate.

6 Potential Roadblocks to Innovation

Navigating Innovation Roadblocks

Why is Collaborative Leadership Important?

To know more about about leadership roadblocks, listen to this week's show: 8 Leadership Roadblocks to Innovation.

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Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, is a longtime friend of mine whose leadership has positively impacted countless people. Zoom is a sponsor of the show, and we are honored to have Eric join us to discuss game-changing innovations.

During COVID-19, Zoom saw explosive growth from schools, businesses, and individuals alike. Eric attributes two factors to Zoom's success: the product's architecture that supports a hybrid model and the ability to increase servers as more traffic arose. If more bandwidth were available, new features would be better, and quality would be higher.

Eric believes increasing bandwidth will be vital to Zoom's future innovations. Zoom's original goal was to create a quality video conferencing app, which they accomplished. In the future, Eric wants to transform Zoom into a platform company. He envisions bringing third-party contexts to the interface, such as games and other consumer apps.

Eric believes Zoom will be able to deliver a better meeting experience than face-to-face meetings. The opportunities are endless, from language translations during business meetings to doctors supporting live surgeries happening overseas. Eric is especially excited about Zoom's future in telehealth and education. Patients can comfortably receive the care they need when they need it, and this will only improve.

Higher education institutions and K-12 schools leverage Zoom across the world. Eric believes the future of education will be a hybrid model, similar to the future of work. Killer innovations come from the right collaborations, bandwidth, and artificial intelligence integration.

Eric believes the future of work is hybrid because it offers employees flexibility and shields them from mental health problems. When Zoom creates new features, they always ask if the features will support a hybrid work system. Different businesses are trying different setups for their hybrid work models. Focusing on making remote workers feel connected is a guiding principle for Zoom's innovations.

Recently, Zoom announced some exciting new features at Zoomtopia. They announced a live language translation feature. They also announced a Docusign integration and the adoption of other apps into the Zoom ecosystem.

Eric Yuan is the billionaire founder of Zoom, a popular video communications tool that took flight during the coronavirus pandemic. Eric was previously one of the founding engineers at WebEx, which Cisco Systems acquired in 2007. He went on to become the VP at Cisco Systems.

Eric is a Chinese native that moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 after eight failed attempts to obtain a visa. Business Insider named Eric one of the most influential people in enterprise technology. In 2018, Glassdoor voted him as the number one CEO of large companies and added him to the Bloomberg 50 Most Influential list.

We are back to discuss impactful healthcare-related innovations, specifically disability innovation. Kevin Spencer is an award-winning magician who is passionate about developing children with autism.

Kevin is a magician known by many as "the kid whisperer." Years ago, Kevin had a brain and spine injury from a motorcycle accident. During the therapy process, he started learning magic tricks to keep himself busy and motivated. After seeing how well it worked, he developed Magic Therapy, a program that uses simple magic tricks to boost motivation, curiosity, and creative expression.

When first testing the program, Kevin worked with adults but felt intimidated by children. He was hesitant to work with a child but took on the challenge. At first, his tricks weren't doing anything, but the child became curious and engaged after the second trick. After the session, Kevin noticed the child's father crying. The father told him that was the first time he had ever heard his child speak. After that experience, Kevin committed to developing children who have autism.

Kevin always wanted to be a magician and feels very privileged to use his passion in a way that impacts others. For kids told that they can't do things, performing magic tricks gives them the ability to do something that a peer or sibling can't do.

Kevin's team created an innovative program designed for a school system called Hocus Focus. The magic tricks address the objectives of a child's education program that develops functional skills. The tricks connect to a common core standard of learning. A teacher can use the trick to deliver academic content, and occupational therapists and speech-language pathologists can use the same trick to work on the child's functional aspects.

Kevin and a colleague developed an assessment for teachers to measure the impact of the Hocus Focus program. Dozens of school districts in the U.S use the program, but the most significant market is overseas. There is a greater appreciation of the arts in foreign countries.

I believe we need to bring back the arts to the U.S school system. There are so many things to be learned from the arts with no other way to learn it. Magic tricks give those on the autism spectrum the opportunity to think with flexibility. There is amazing creativity buried inside them, and they need a way to express it. If we can find a way to support them and bring them into organizations, they can unlock unbelievable amounts of innovation.

Kevin Spencer is the Director at the Center 4 Creative Arts, a Fulbright Specialist & Subject Matter for the U.S Department of State, a Research Consultant for the UAB Arts in Medicine and Occupational Therapy Programs, and a Faculty member at Carlow University.

Kevin is an award-winning performing magician who has toured the world with his wife and partner for over 25 years. He also serves as a Teaching Artist through the Hocus Focus and Magic Therapy programs.