How are the world’s leading organizations developing their people and honing employees’ skills? What is the role of the Learning & Development function today and how will that change in the future? We set out to answer these questions in our latest survey on the future of learning and development. (Download the report HERE) Over the years, we have encountered more and more L&D professionals looking to help build innovation into their training programs. In doing this, we learned that the world of corporate education is in the midst of a transition fueled by new technologies, greater time and resource constraints, and a heightened need to provide employees with emerging skills and competencies. In short, innovation in the marketplace hasn’t necessarily translated to innovation in the world of learning and development.

Many organizations we have encountered over the years have been held back by training programs that simply didn’t evolve and adapt with the rest of the organization. While Learning & Development professionals face a wide range of issues, some of the most prominent challenges are around the practice of training itself. The big “AHA!” many are realizing is this: the reason training offerings aren’t more successful isn’t because of the people that attend them (or don’t attend them) — it’s because of the courses themselves. If L&D teams want better attendance and better ROI for their training offerings, survey respondents voiced that course offerings and presentation need to change dramatically.

These learnings are especially powerful at a time when we are seeing so many organizations struggle to embrace innovation amidst the challenges posed by a smaller workforce, constrained resources, and the need to quickly adapt to a changed global business environment.

The Future of Learning and Development study was conducted while our own team was busy building The futurethink Innovation Institute. Over the past few years, we’ve seen organizations we work with change their perspectives on how, where, and when people could build innovation skills and capabilities. In response, we’ve adapted our own training programs, research products, and tools to fit a self-guided, eLearning format, giving organizations and individuals the flexibility to receive training on key topics in foresight and innovation without the difficulties involved in administering in-classroom sessions.

And so, we are proud to announce the launch of www.futurethinkinstitute.com, the new home of the futurethink Innovation Institute. We hope you’ll take a minute to click around and browse some of the eLearning offerings available through this new site. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at info@futurethinkinstitute.com.

How do you build skills around innovation in your organization?

The Clinton Global Initiative’s fifth annual meeting was held last week, bringing together business and government leaders from around the world to hash out potential solutions for some of the world’s biggest problems. Interestingly, the central theme of this year’s meeting was innovation. U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a speech highlighting the importance of innovation as a means to bringing the world’s economies safely out of our current recession. Numerous workshops and panels were held throughout the week to help leaders wrap their heads around what innovation means and how they might harness it to ensure growth and prosperity into the future.

But in reading the various re-caps and announcements coming out of the meeting, we were struck by how the conversation around innovation seems to have stagnated. Considering the collective power and stature of Clinton Global Initiative members (membership is restricted to CEOs and political leaders), there was very little ‘news’ emerging from the meeting. The problem is that very few people are thinking differently about growth and innovation. Generally speaking, we’re stuck in the past and shackled by our old notions of growth and success.

Umair Haque sums up the problem nicely in his Smart Growth Manifesto from earlier this year: “Tomorrow’s growth won’t come from a person, place, or technology – but from understanding why yesterday’s growth has failed. The same growth models applied to new people, places, and technologies will simply result in the same crises, over and over again. We have to reboot growth: the problem is not what is growing versus what is not, but how we grow.” Haque’s manifesto highlights some of the drastic changes in the global playing field that have occurred over the past decade, and reminds us that this new playing field requires new strategies. Fundamentally speaking, we understand this notion; but very few of us are actually doing things differently today in terms of how we approach growth and innovation.

If we’re truly going to emerge from our current economic crisis, we need to come up with solutions and strategies that look different from whatever it is we were doing before; because it’s clear that what we were doing before just didn’t work in the long term. The greatest success stories from the past few years are different. Successful companies today don’t just offer more features, more variety, and higher margins; they connect with their customers and deliver their offerings with consistency, reliability, and transparency. Yesterday, “growth” could happen on paper without the creation of any actual value. Tomorrow, growth can only happen when we find meaningful ways of creating real value.

How are you going to approach growth and innovation differently moving forward?

Below is the sixth ‘prediction’ in an 8 part series on “The Future in 2049″:

Cloning, once the purview of hardcore genetic scientists, is now a mandatory course taught when becoming a food scientist. And why not? In 2021, cloning was approved as a means for improving our food capacity problem and deemed completely safe. With the population greatly increased and land at a premium as a result, it is widely accepted that cloning is a great solution to better engineering food. Like our plants and vegetables that have been genetically modified for years (pluot anyone? Brocciflower?), now meats, chicken and fish are enhanced and reproduced, to create new, healthy, protein SUPERFOODS. With the taboo of cloning long past and the fear of human clones now seen as a science fiction fear (although we do clone body PARTS for regenerative reasons, amputees, surgeries etc). Cloning is a part of food-life and seen as a smart way to manage the food supply. Like plants that can be grown bigger and become more resistant to disease, cloned protein food acts much in the same way and are grown pre-enriched with vitamins than every before.

Since last fall, the news has been dominated by tales of woe: companies going under, layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, billions of dollars lost. It’s no wonder that organizations today feel handcuffed to the point that innovation takes a back seat to simply staying afloat. But a few companies are bucking the trend and seem to be more focused on growth and innovation than ever before. One of these companies is Google.

In the last 3 months alone, Google has announced groundbreaking new projects such as Google Voice, the Chrome operating system, and Google Wave. These projects, which have been brewing for as many as five years now, are major growth opportunities for a company whose core search business is beginning to plateau. While some companies have chosen to stop work on major, untested new projects, Google has opted to charge forward and is planting a number of important seeds for its future. Will all of these new projects be runaway successes? Probably not. Will at least one of them take off? No one can be sure, but given Google’s track record, it’s very likely. We’ve all read the snippet about Google launching its search business during the dot-com bust in 2000.

So what can we learn from Google? First and foremost, Google shows us how important it is to move forward with growth opportunities when those opportunities are the very future of your business. Google knows that its core business, search, is not a major source of growth into the future. There’s increasing competition from companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, and the business itself is mature. So Google is pushing ahead with bold new projects, any one of which could represent huge growth for Google in the years to come. Second, Google’s recent announcements show how seemingly random little experiments can lead to potentially breakthrough new projects. Google Wave, for example, is really the product of years’ worth of experimentation with various communication mechanisms. Finally, Google shows us that even an economic apocalypse (of sorts) is not enough to stifle innovation. Since the company launched in 1998, it is been every business guru’s poster child for innovation. It simply did things differently, and that led to great success; and in the face of this recession, while it has been forced to cut its staff and reign in spending, it has managed to keep innovation alive. The message that sends to its employees and, perhaps more importantly, to its customers, is invaluable.

What can you learn from Google’s recession-survival strategy?

As technology in the wireless age continues to bound forward, job roles between doctors and IT professionals are slowly becoming more similar. A woman was recently fitted with the first wireless pacemaker. The new pacemaker allows doctors to monitor the patient’s heart condition remotely, allowing the patient fewer visits to the doctor. At least once a day, the pacemaker will communicate with the server which will immediately notify the doctors if there are any changes in the patient’s condition. This type of remote technology could decrease the number of doctor visits a patient requires, potentially reducing healthcare costs and increasing the efficiency of healthcare.

Even for many of us not yet requiring pacemakers, the story begs many questions about the similarities between this and other mobile information tools at our fingertips today. What if I’m in a wireless dead zone? Can the pacemaker update my Facebook status? If I wanted to Twitter about my Arrhythmia, can it do that for me? Could this device, coupled with social networking, potentially be the start of a new norm for reporting personal emergencies? For instance, instead of dialing 911 when my grandmother takes a spill, I, along with the local fire department, will get a status update that she has fallen and can’t get up. Soon enough you will be able to go to the doctor/Geek Squad rep and have a “device” installed in your body that will keep you healthy, allow you to communicate with anyone, do your work for you and help you meet your significant other. Oh wait, there’s probably already an app for that.

The Times recently posted an interactive graph illustrating how different groups of people spend their day.  It’s fascinating to toggle through the various sorts to see how different segments of the population spend their time at various hours.  For instance, those with only a High School education seem to have work schedules that last throughout the night, whereas at 3am, nobody with an advanced degree is at work.

The activity I was most interested in viewing across segments was the baby blue section toward the bottom: Relaxing and Thinking.  Theoretically, this pocket of time is where the most innovative ideas could be spawned.  However, on average, only 1% of those employed engage in this activity throughout the day, versus 4% of those who are not in the labor force.

Obviously, there are numerous implications for these data.  Identifying opportunities in the market based on various daily behaviors.  If you’re targeting a specific segment of the population, it’s helpful to know how they spend their time and what, on average, they’re doing at a particular time during the day.  In a simplistic example, the combination of certain activities — for instance, household cleaning and TV &  Movies — could offer insights into when commercials for a Swiffer Duster should air.

Plastic Logic’s electronic reader may be the ‘Kindle Killer,’ but for many, this little innovation will be quite the savior.

The new eReader will provide users with access to Barnes & Noble’s abundant eBook store—this means more than 700,000 titles at their fingertips, while Amazon’s Kindle provides only 300,000 titles.  But the thing that positions this new eReader toe-to-toe with the Kindle—and has eBookers stirring—is that it will provide wireless access through AT&T’s wide 3G network; giving users unlimited access to new books in many more locations, ultimately providing added mobility.

Plastic Logic wants to target business users with itsnew reader—not just the everyday eBook user. In doing so, it will offer more than newspaper, magazine, and book content. PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and other business related documents will also be supported by the eReader. And its sleek 0.25 inch thick and 8W x 11L inch notepad size design with touch screen interface was designed for reading business documents, periodicals etc. with a battery that lasts for days.

Unlike Amazon, who uses in-house hardware only and Sprint’s CDMA access method, Plastic Logic’s eReader provides global communication and is not limiting its partnerships—its deal with Barnes & Nobles is not exclusive. Plastic Logic is prepared to revolutionize the eBook.   This is innovation that is cutthroat and cutting-edge.

Moans and groans over the cost of energy have been heard in just about every household, but with the smart grid those moans are likely to turn to sighs of relief.

Companies like General Electric have diligently been pursuing smart grid development, which promises to create a network including energy generation, transmission, and distribution that provides more efficient and reliable output than the existing power grid using advanced computer, digital, and communications technologies. The smart grid will also cater to alternate energy sources including sun, bio gas, and wind power.

GE’s innovative smart grid efforts are likely to change the way people live by changing the way they use energy. They launched a smart grid project that would allow residents to produce energy, using alternate energy sources, and share it with others. Residents in one part of the country can produce energy using solar panels or turbines and share it with regions that need it the most—regions that don’t have access to similar resources. With the existing power grid, you can only use alternate energy if you physically live near the source.

GE took energy efficient innovation one step further with their smart meter technology and smart appliances. Imagine coming home from work to a dishwasher full of dishes that you left dirty, but which are now clean. Or a dryer that was filled with wet clothes that are now dry. In conjunction with the smart grid, the smart meter tells users the best times to use energy—avoiding peak hours—to reduce cost and consumption. Smart appliances go on power-save mode during peak hours and then automatically turn on during low cost/consumption times. As GE and other energy companies continue to develop energy saving innovations that utilize energy in more efficient (off peak) ways we are likely to see a reduction in energy costs.

This is innovation that will change the way we live. Very smart.

To learn more, visit GE.

I’ve recently finished reading The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times, a new book by Innosight President Scott D. Anthony. As part of a ‘virtual book tour’ (we’re all very Web 2.0, you see), I agreed to review the book and post a brief interview with Scott. First, the review:

For anyone who’s looking to wrap their head around how to innovate in today’s tumultuous business environment, The Silver Lining offers some great advice. The book, a relatively quick and easy read at 210 pages, puts much of Scott’s previous work and research into a new context; it explicitly spells out how everything we’ve been saying about innovation still applies today. Indeed, the crux of the book lies in the argument that innovation today shouldn’t really look or feel any different from innovation during ‘good’ times. The reality—that innovation efforts in many companies do, in fact, look very different today because of strained resources and heightened risk aversion—simply points to the fact that many organizations weren’t innovating very effectively to begin with.

Scott opens the book with a nice discussion of what he calls “the great disruption,” a term he and his colleagues at Innosight have coined to describe today’s business environment.

An appropriate name for today’s times is the Great Disruption. Change is ripping through markets at unprecedented pace. Competitive advantage that took decades to build disappears seemingly overnight. While output might shrink and unemployment is sure to rise, companies that master these forces still have a chance to thrive; those that don’t are sure to struggle.

This opening sets the tone for the rest of the book—yes, things are different today, and we’re all a little confused and maybe a little scared; but it’s more important than ever to master core innovation competencies to insure you survive the storm and emerge poised for growth once storm has passed.

The seven chapters that follow outline different ways to manage innovation. These seven tactics, from “refeature to cut costs” to “learn to love the low end” are all applicable both in good times and in bad, but Scott argues that it’s critically important that companies embrace these innovation competencies today in order to preserve innovation efforts.

In the end, the core message of this book isn’t all that different than what today’s leading innovators already know. But for organizations whose innovation efforts were just beginning prior to the global economic ‘meltdown,’ or for organizations who are looking to keep ailing innovation efforts alive amidst the storm, this book reframes the basic tenets of innovation to illustrate the fact that innovation can, and should, remain a priority today. For innovators who are looking for a hopeful voice, this book is a must-read.

I caught up with Scott to ask a few questions after I finished the book. Here are some excerpts:

In the book, you talk about how innovation during these turbulent times isn’t all that different from innovation during “normal” times. What do you mean by that?

It’s quite simple, actually. The turbulence we’re experiencing right now feels different, but in reality it constitutes a “new normal.” In other words, even when the recession abates, the turbulence isn’t going to stop. The pace of change is going to continue to increase for the foreseeable future, which has some pretty serious implications for how people think about strategy, growth, and innovation.

In the second chapter, you discuss the importance of trimming the innovation portfolio to avoid wasting resources on dead-end projects and free up resources for growth opportunities. While this makes intuitive sense, many companies we have worked with in the past find this to be an immense challenge. What is the first thing you recommend organizations do when looking to ‘trim the fat’ from their innovation portfolios?

The hardest word for the innovator to say is also one of the shortest: “No.” One simple thing that can help aid the conversation is to set objective criteria that can help to make the decision-making process less politicized or subjective. Another key is to not wait until times are tough to start trimming. If you establish a discipline of pruning during all times, it becomes much easier to make the necessary adjustments when times are bad.

When talking about the concept of disruptive innovation, you often talk about “the job customers are trying to get done” as a way to refocus offerings and uncover potentially disruptive innovations. For organizations that have been asking (and answering) this question for the past few years, do you believe our current economic environment warrants a new audit of sorts? That is, do you think the current economic environment has changed the marketplace to the point that last year’s answers to ‘the job to be done’ question are no longer valid?

Absolutely. There are some companies that I’ve worked with that are still making decisions based on market research that is three or four years old. In today’s quickly changing environment, that’s pretty risky. Companies have to re-think the way they do market research. It has to move from an episodic event to a continual event, or companies will make the wrong decisions.

For established firms that serve high-end, more demanding customers, how do you suggest lowering costs without compromising high quality or brand equity? Should a “luxury” company’s cost-cutting plan of attack be the same as any other company’s?

Well, a luxury company might end up cutting different things, but the process should be the same: make sure the customer’s definition of quality drives any decisions. That’s a change from how most companies cut costs. Cost cutting is typically an “inside-out” activity. That is, look at your budget, find the largest line item, and voila! Instead you really have to look at the customer’s budget. There might be things that don’t matter that much to the customer but are expensive to deliver. Or there could be things that are cheap to deliver but really deliver a customer “wow.”

The three industries that have arguably been hardest hit by the recession are media, automotive, and financial services. From the outside looking in, it seems that all three had been clinging to their ‘core’ businesses for far too long and were due for radical change. Do you think the current pace of change and upheaval, particularly in these three industries, is healthy? Or do you think other ‘stagnant’ industries can learn a valuable lesson and begin planning now for imminent disruption?

I think the pace of change in these industries is finally beginning to catch up with the pace of change in and around their markets. The biggest complaint I have is that in each case, it really take a crisis to precipitate action. And when a crisis sets in, it is very hard for even the smartest companies to take the right action. The question isn’t whether or not your industry will be disrupted. It is when, and by whom. Schumpeter would love today’s times, because it really is an era of constant creative destruction!

A famous innovation tidbit over the past few years talks about how Bank of America executives mandated that 30% of ideas had to fail. The rationale, of course, was that comfort around failure bred experimentation, and that experimentation is good for innovation. Along the same lines, Google famously mandated that employees spend 20% of their time on side projects and experiments that are generally unrelated to Google’s core search business. Many of these experiments go nowhere, but a few have become runaway successes for Google. Today, I think many are reluctant to tout these tidbits as a smart business practice—everyone seems to shrink back when the word ‘failure’ is tossed around. Even Google’s executives have pulled back on the 20% rule in favor of more carefully focusing resources on income-generating products. Do you think Bank of America and Google had the right idea initially, or is their new, more conservative approach more sustainable for growth?

I believe that rigor and experimentation are not actually opposed goals. In other words, you can be rigorous in the selection and scaling of businesses, while still encouraging rampant experimentation. It’s about making sure you shut off the bad experiments and double-down on the good experiments early. So I applaud Google’s effort to bring more rigor to its process, because while Google has been great at inventing new things, it hasn’t been that great an innovator, because it hasn’t built many large-scale new businesses. I love Bank of America’s approach. Some of the clients I work with try to make sure they don’t push for too high a success rate, because that’s a good way to stamp out any real innovation.

You walk through a lot of powerful examples of companies who have launched smart innovations during economic downturns. But many of our clients in the public sector, or those that work in nonprofit organizations, feel as if innovation is a different animal in their worlds. Do you have any advice for these types of organizations? Is there anything they should be doing differently than the P&Gs and Googles of the world?

I think the process by which these organizations should think about finding new opportunities should be the same. Of course, public sector or nonprofit organizations have different constraints, but they also have different opportunities as well. For example, without shareholders focusing on the next quarter’s results, nonprofit organizations can take a longer-term perspective. As you probably know, my colleague Clayton Christensen wrote two books last year on how to apply the disruptive innovation principles to two industries with a heavy public bent: health care and education. And boy, is disruption needed in those two industries!

We’re seeing companies increasingly turning to Foresight practices (scenario planning, long-term trend analysis, etc.) to fuel a smarter innovation program. And in The Silver Lining, you touch upon the importance of these activities. What advice would you give to an organization who currently has no structured foresight capabilities? How should an organization get started with mapping out the uncertainties of the future?

My view of process-based innovations is the same as my view of product-based innovations. That is, find a way to start small and learn as you go rather than launching an overly complicated effort that collapses under its own weight. Get some smart people together for a day to talk about the future. Bring together people with different perspectives because you never know what happens when those different perspectives interact. Pilot something at the level of a brand, or individual product line. And expand from there.

In The Silver Lining, you dedicate an entire chapter to ‘sharing the innovation load’—smart ways to reduce the risks and expense associated with innovation activities by partnering with external parties. We’ve been seeing a tremendous increase of external partnerships and ‘open innovation’ over the past decade. How do you think the current economic environment will effect these partnerships? In your experience, are companies more or less willing to enter partnership agreements in an environment when resources are so constrained?

One of the basic themes in the book is the scarcity that many companies are facing will force them to do what they should have been doing already. This is one of these areas. What company wouldn’t want to find a way to defray costs and risk? It’s an easy sell to management. I think the current economic environment will be a boon for external partnerships and open innovation.

Finally, what does innovation look like at this time in 2012? Will the innovation success stories we talk about 3 years from now be any different from the success stories we talk about today? What is your single most important piece of advice for an organization who is dedicated to becoming a success story in one of your future books?

I really think we are going to look back on this as a seminal moment in the innovation movement, where innovation went from being a field filled with mystery and misperceptions to one increasingly filled with rigor and discipline. We’ll be talking about healthcare, education and cleantech companies that are poised to transform their respective markets. We’ll watch with wonders as companies pioneer new ways to create growth and improve lives in emerging markets. It’s a bit cliché, but my one piece of advice is to keep focused on the silver lining. It’s very easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom. And if you succumb to it you will get defensive and miss the great opportunities that still exist in today’s markets. Remember, history shows us that no matter how dark the times, innovation is still possible. So go write your own success story.

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For more reviews of The Silver Lining and interviews with Scott, check out the other stops on the virtual book tour:

Monday, July 20th: Chris Flanagan, BIF Speak

Tuesday, July 21st: Jim McGee, FastForward Blog

Thursday, July 23rd: Jeff De Cagna, Principled Innovation

Friday, July 24th: Boris Pluskowski, The Complete Innovator

When it comes to innovation, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.  “Innovation inside” can be more powerful than even the flashiest of new product ideas – especially in today’s business environment.

While some companies are cutting funding for innovation projects during the economic downturn, others are turning to internal innovation to help them improve efficiency, cut costs,, and even generate funds for external growth initiatives.

Daryl Dunbar, SVP of Innovation for Reed Elsevier, puts it this way: “The current economy gives us an opportunity to focus innovation not only on new products and services, but on all the other facets of innovation, such as efficiency, cost saving, process, business model, and my latest favorite, management innovation.”

To fully embrace “innovation inside,” companies must train employees to think differently and recognize both internal and external innovation opportunities. Barbara Daniele, SVP & General Counsel for GE Capital Americas, says she’s always looking for “a new way to do the same thing, maybe faster, cheaper, easier.”  Her group has held internal innovation challenges to get employees to carefully examine ways to innovate. Often, this leads to incremental breakthroughs that would otherwise be overlooked. “Some of these projects we call Nike projects—it’s “Just Do It,” she says. “They’re quite simple. They don’t require any money, but maybe they make a contract simpler. Maybe they take out two or three steps in a process.”

How are you embracing innovation inside?