Photo Slideshow: Front End of Innovation US 2012

Here's a look a look back at Front End of Innovation 2012:

Live from Front End of Innovation 2012: The Power of ‘Pop’-Culture to Launch a Brand

Keith Belling, Serial Entrepreneur, Co-Founder & CEO at Popchips, spoke to us about launching an innovative food product during our Champions/Taste session.

He leveraged health and wellness trend to transform healthy snacking options. There was a void, no real, healthy, great-tasting packaged snacks. they started with "great flavor" that appeal to the whole family. They wanted to create a new category, not just a product.

They continue to innovate. New flavors like Sweet Potato chips, and later this year will launch a new product line.

They were lucky to organically get celebrity taste makers, nutritionists, moms, and high level fans who influenced their followers and audience about the new product, which gave the company lots of social proof and credibility.

Part of their success was in choosing the "right" partners to help build their brands; leading airports, premiere gyms, college campuses....

They do grassroots marketing, lots of social media, they use their spend very, very carefully. They have a field marketing teams and an army of ambassadors covering 15 major markets.

They constantly look for new ways to build awareness especially since they don't have a big budget. They have never paid for product placement but they've been depicted on Twilight, Pitch, ...

They try to tell a story with personality. They are fun, young company, and they want to be seen as healthy, edgy and cool.

Music is a key marketing platform. They do a lot of grassroot and handpicked events like Coachella music festival. Very cost-effective campaigns fueled by social media.

There is so much passion and excitement around the brand. It has resulted in becoming one of the top brands.




Valerie M. Russo is a Senior Social Media Strategist at IIR USA with a technology, anthropology, marketing and publishing business acumen.  She is a published poet and also maintains a literary blog. She may be reached at vrusso@iirusa.com. Follow her @Literanista.   

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Live from Front End of Innovation 2012: Barry Calpino on Doubling Down on Innovation

Innovation is not for the faint of heart.

You have to be able to look yourself in the mirror, and it's easy to say, but hard to do.  It requires honest, frank discussions, that actually mention the proverbial elephant in the room.  It also requires transcending the all-too-common risk-aversion in which companies mire themselves.

One of the other demons that companies need to fight is the overfull portfolio.  Rather than trying to be all things to all customers, companies need to leverage their strengths, focus on the best projects, and put big bets behind their big brands.  As Steve Jobs's advised Nike CEO Mark Parker, "Just get rid of all the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff." (Orin's aside: see Jim Collins's take on the Hedgehog Concept).

There are two other key strategies that companies should employ:

1) Shift the emphasis to multi-year business plans that drive category growth.  Despite the apparent need for instant results, it is important to consider long-term strategies that drive brand growth across multiple years.

2) Increase resourcing and support, especially from the C-suite.  Innovation, development, and strategy require resources of all kinds, and that goes hand-and-hand with support from all of the C-level executives.

As noted, innovation requires tough conversations and hard looks in the mirror, but a solid portfolio that brings in hundreds of millions in revenue is hard to knock!


Orin C. Davis is the first person to earn a doctorate in positive psychology.  His research focuses on flow, creativity, hypnosis, and mentoring, and it spans both the workplace and daily life.  He is the principal investigator of the Quality of Life Laboratory and a freelance consultant who helps companies maximize their human capital and become better places to work.

Live from Front End of Innovation 2012: Business Innovation

Whirlpool’s Third Diamond: A disciplined Process to Realize and Extract Maximum Value of Innovation in Marketplace was presented by Moises Norena, Global Director of Innovation, Whirlpool.

At Whirpool, Innovation is about customer needs and taking that to innovate and create value for customers - fill that demand.

Their innovation process is about discovery and then developing opportunities and experimenting. They also measure innovation: innovation funnel, pipeline, revenue.

3 Diamonds:
Discovery
Develop Opportunities & Experiment
Measure Innovation

One example is the Fabric Care Pilot: Alpha platform which identified 20 opportunities to maximize value extraction. This case study is now used as the process for the company and the principles are applied on all their projects.

It’s Just Numbers, Right? Prioritizing Investments across the Global Business Portfolio with Ryan Frank, Director of Marketing, Global Innovation, Abbott

Brand categories often address consistent core needs for consumers globally. But global portfolios carry diversity and complexity. Lots of work but little return, but crucial for global expansion. Must do the homework.

For example, baby boomer trends, like healthy aging are becoming global trends, not regional: US, Asia, etc., Find those similarities or differences, understand the insights before placing something in the pipeline. Often, it's the internal artifacts of our business that drives the real differences.

• Start with insights
• Leverage core knowledge for phased impact of new tech
• Value early investments

Innovation Buy-In: Enabling Effective C-Suite Decision-Making Support for Breakthrough Innovation Efforts: with Gordon Hui, former AVP Innovation, The Hartford, Director of Business Design and Strategy, Smart Design LLC


Begin with the end in mind: what is the business going to look like when you bring this to market
Know why the pilot is happening
Think about long term growth, near-term impact

Valerie M. Russo is a Senior Social Media Strategist at IIR USA with a technology, anthropology, marketing and publishing business acumen.  She is a published poet and also maintains a literary blog. She may be reached at vrusso@iirusa.com. Follow her @Literanista.   

• Are Your Employees Drivers or Victims of Process Innovations?

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• CROs & CMOs: Focusing On Innovation

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• Is there a Model for Rapid Innovation?

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Live from Front End of Innovation 2012: Michelle James on Using Improv to Foster Innovation

Yes...and!


There are few words as potent and powerful as "Yes," but it takes an improv experience to learn the exponential power of adding the word "And."  Over the course of several exercises, we did not just imagine the force of saying "Yes...and," we watched it happen.

Here's one example: Working with a partner, draw a creature one line at a time.  Each line can be straight, curvy, loopy, or otherwise.   Work in silence, and do not communicate with your partner in any way.  With each contribution, accept the prior line, yes...and draw your line.  When the creature is completed, name it with each of you adding one letter at a time.  At first, it seems weird.  Then, the idea takes some shape.  Then it gets weird, and then it takes shape again.  This process repeats over and over with each partner bringing new twists and ideas into the drawing, and it goes in ways that are creative, interesting, and often beyond the imagination!

When I did this with a partner, we ended up with a creature that sort of resembled Count von Count.  At first, I was posing him giving a "Thumbs-up," (see the drawing), and then watched with a snicker as my partner turned  it into a cigar.  The most humorous moment (which got us roaring with laughter when I told her afterwards), is when I drew what I thought was a button on the creature's jacket.  My partner thought I had started naming the creature, and put a "P" next to my O.  Our creature quickly found itself with the moniker "Skopellasti."

This is only part of the power of "yes...and" -- you never know what interesting things will come out!  But, those incremental steps capitalize on trust, creativity, partnership, and enthusiasm, and unleash the total power of innovation.  Improv and the insights it elicits are a direct translation of the innovation process and, like any gestalt, is a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.


Orin C. Davis is the first person to earn a doctorate in positive psychology.  His research focuses on flow, creativity, hypnosis, and mentoring, and it spans both the workplace and daily life.  He is the principal investigator of the Quality of Life Laboratory and a freelance consultant who helps companies maximize their human capital and become better places to work.

Live from Front End of Innovation 2012: “New” Mr. Potato Head:

Mr. Potato Head and Friends (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of our first Sandbox/Touch sessions here in Orlando, on the final day of Front End of Innovation 2012 was on “New” Mr. Potato Head: The Starch Reality of Refreshing an Icon and Finding Creative Inspiration in a Spud That’s No Dud with Wayne Marcus, Senior Director, Design & Development at Hasbro, Inc.

His superpowers are observing, playing, imagining, learning, collaborating - use your strengths, claim your power and stand it. One must have skill is definitely versatility, especially with the speed of technical progress.

Mr. Potato Head's superpower IS versatility.

Recently, he was redesigned and this was incredibly hard - how do you redesign an iconic beloved product?



They began with deep dive into consumer insight and concept design.

Added legs and pants for Mr. Potato Head, made Mrs. Potato Head's nose smaller, added cooler boots and lightened skin. They both now have legs, slimmer bodies, more expressive accessories to give them a sense of being more animated.

During the session, we also began drawing and conceptualizing our own redesign collectively. Have many tools to be able to constantly transform, readjust, look at things with an open mind and look at known things with a fresh lens, focus - have clarity and vision and tune into what people are really saying. Lastly, have fun.

Don't forget your super strength!

Valerie M. Russo is a Senior Social Media Strategist at IIR USA with a technology, anthropology, marketing and publishing business acumen.  She is a published poet and also maintains a literary blog. She may be reached at vrusso@iirusa.com. Follow her @Literanista.   

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Live from Front End of Innovation 2012: Jaspar Roos on Bringing Back the Fun in Innovation

Orin's Introduction: Jaspar presented a number of incredible ideas, so rather than try to reproduce his presentation, this post is going to challenge readers to think about several of the most interesting points he made.

* Attention becomes the major currency in content commerce.

* We can learn from failure (in fact, there's even a repository for it), and we should make sure to do so.

* How much, and in how many ways, do companies need a Chief Humor Officer?

* We take ourselves far too seriously sometimes.

* Are we too professional?

* Humor leads to more energy and increases the possibility of innovation.  (Orin's aside: To find out why, check out Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden-and-Build Theory).

Orin C. Davis is the first person to earn a doctorate in positive psychology.  His research focuses on flow, creativity, hypnosis, and mentoring, and it spans both the workplace and daily life.  He is the principal investigator of the Quality of Life Laboratory and a freelance consultant who helps companies maximize their human capital and become better places to work.

Live from the Front End of Innovation 2012: Cultivating and Celebrating the Journey of Student Entrepreneurship

Gordon Jones, the Director at Harvard Innovation Lab, believes every student should have the opportunity to put their ideas to use and push them as far as they can go. Innovation flows from many fields and the intersections can lead to all sorts of great innovation.

They work with students at every stage of the innovation pipeline: Idea refinement through scaleability and also helps them become agents of change.

The program includes:

Incubation and mentoring
Internship and residency
Laboratory and practicum
Entrepreneurship fundamentals

I-lab strives to fun, purposefully fun.

The Harvard Innovation Lab opened 8 months ago. You can follow them @innovationlab.

Valerie M. Russo is a Senior Social Media Strategist at IIR USA with a technology, anthropology, marketing and publishing business acumen.  She is a published poet and also maintains a literary blog. She may be reached at vrusso@iirusa.com. Follow her @Literanista.