Posts

Axel Schultze

A glimpse into the future of innovation, AI and human ingenuity

Allow me to start the year with a perspective on the future of innovation.

Despite everything that went on in the world, BlueCallom had a great 2021 and 2022 started with a big boost.

LINEAR VERSUS LATERAL THINKING

It is no news that linearly managed business process transformation like digitalization or creating breakthrough innovation, has never really worked out. Linear thinking for any type of complex structure is not really a good idea.

In the fall of 2021, we worked feverishly on finding better ways to visualize the difference between linear and lateral thinking. At the same time, I was asked by our data scientists and engineering team to visualize the data flow in each innovation process episode that feeds the AI system. All charts I’ve seen of lateral processes were hopelessly convoluted visuals where virtually every piece of a process was connected with at least half of all the other processes.

To visualize the complexity we had to build a bridge to a linear model. Once I looked at the process connections, I realized a pattern of parallelity – some actions ran in parallel, and some even in different directions. While a core process is active, a few processes can break out and run outside the core and some even in different directions.

AI is the first technological way
to build laterality with a computer.

Laterality could be shown in a linear manner, visualizing the lateral process. When looking at the AI from autonomous driving, we see a very similar mechanism. 

The chart below compares a linear process on the left column with a lateral process and its many columns to the right. How it works and how this can serve the human mind is described further down.

BlueCallom Lateral Business Process Network

Managing complexity is a very difficult task – no matter what. And if we need to ask teams to creatively innovate but also manage highly complex processes we will either lose the creativity or the manageability. Is that the end of managed innovation? No – not at all. We decided to use Artificial Intelligence for managing almost infinite complexity and all we need to do is to train the system in a way that guides their human companion through the maze. GPS? Compass? Stars? Yes, nothing new but in a very different world transforming the future of innovation.

HOW AI CAN SERVE THE HUMAN MIND – NOT DISPLACES IT

With the above learning we made two important decisions:

  1. We will not ask anybody to become a lateral thinker – instead, we decided to build solutions that do what humans are not so good at, like following complex lateral processes. We are using AI, Neuroscience, and Genetic Computing as the first Human Intelligence Augmentation solution. It is designed to help people stay on top of processes no matter how complex they are. This is freeing the brain to do what it can do best, including innovate, create, socialize, identify meaning, see opportunities, work on unique things, entertain, and countless other talents. 
  2. We will focus on making those innovative and creative jobs highly predictable so they can be judged, assessed, and analyzed before making major investments and giving long-term commitments. Therefore, we developed a unique and very powerful Innovation KPI Framework with 1 core KPI: “Success Probability”. Roughly 200 “Contributing KPIs” and approximately 20,000 data points are used by multiple algorithms to compose the one, ultimate Innovation Success KPI. The BlueCallom KPI Framework is a novel design of cascading KPIs leading to one “Mother Of All KPIs”.  

Human Intelligence Augmentation was an original idea from Douglas C. Engelbart, documented in October 1962. It was Engelbart’s hope that very intelligent machines will help the human mind to perform tasks of nearly endless complexity. However back then this was technically not yet possible. Today we are stepping on his shoulders and are introducing what he has envisioned.
Deep Innovation Design-based innovation processes consist of 10 episodes, with approximately 12 major tasks each and approximately 10 activities in each task. More than 70% are creative, ideation-related tasks that work with stimuli and patterns that we learned from neuroscience. With an innovation team of 10 people, we are dealing with approximately 1,200 thought, research or feedback objects. With reviews, considerations from previous episodes, predictions into new episodes, we reach a staggering 20,000 aspects to consider in such an innovation project. Far too much for a normal human brain to keep in mind while being in a creative process. Either you work more creatively than you can’t manage administrative work at the same time or you follow the rules and never create any substantial innovation. Our laterally organized AI system however can take off all the administrative and coordinative work and let the ingenious minds flow freely, Reports, worrying what the next steps should be, process orientation, and other administrative works are taken care of by the AI system.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM BLUECALLOM IN 2022

VISION – Our vision remains unchanged, we exist to build the most predictable innovation and business transformation solution helping teams elevate the way people do things.

GROWTH – You may have noticed that we are looking for quite a number of people to join the team and support our vision in the future of innovation. A pretty elaborate hiring process is helping us to find the best possible talents including AI experts and neuroscientists. If you have any connections or ideas to help is get the right talents, we would really appreciate it.

PRODUCT – We can imagine that you want to get your hands on the new system or see it in action. A beta test version and demos for BlueCallom DEEP II are scheduled to be available for selected customers soon. We will publicly introduce it in May 2022.

IN 2022 – We will be able to demonstrate a first step of what was thought to be impossible any time soon: an AI system that will augment human’s intellectual capabilities beyond its natural capacity – and – without drilling holes in the skull. The dream of the late Douglas Engelbart to create Intelligence Augmentation is now becoming a reality. 

HUMAN INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION This year we envision the first customers to work with human intelligence augmentation to run their innovation projects. The BlueCallom AI solution is built so that executives will experience a never-before-seen degree of predictability from complex processes in real-time. Innovation or change management teams will experience a level of intellectual support by getting suggestions, reminders, data, and feedback. Envision using BlueCallom, similar to driving a car with GPS and augmented reality. You will still want to decide where to go, what to see, and where to stay – even to drive if you want. But the GPS will tell you the fastest way to your destination, where to find gas stations, restaurants, and points of interest. It even navigates you around traffic jams or accidents. Also in BlueCallom you will still need to create the ideas, explore the hopes and dreams of your customers and define the purpose of your innovation, But reporting, reminding you on meetings, not forgetting what your previous research indicated, reminding you to consider how to bring it to market or not forgetting to consider a great user experience and hundreds of other consideration for an excellent outcome is managed by the AI system. Soon you will be able to do all that by talking and listening to your team and to your BlueCallom – no more computer.

INNOVATION SUCCESS PREDICTABILITY – BlueCallom’s Human Intelligence Augmentation and its approximately 20,000 data points, aggregated throughout the entire process, is allowing the AI system to calculate a never seen before innovation success predictability. Executives can observe the success prediction in real-time and conduct their own risk assessments, decisions to move forward, and any financing approvals.

WHERE WILL WE TAKE IT LONG-TERM?

To build a better future of innovation, we need everybody to be able to innovate and rapidly resolve complexity. Our contribution is to build a solution that allows almost everybody to build their own future. A future of new materials, new technology, new medical systems, new renewable energy, new medication, new transportation, new mobility, new distribution structures, new education models, and more. BlueCallom will further invest in research and science, both on computer science and on neuroscience getting a deeper understanding of how our brain behaves and how we can interface with its natural “APIs”.

Our future lies in building systems and solutions that can amplify and augment the human intellect. With our learning from Neuroscience and AI, Human Intelligence Augmentation is the core of our own development. By the end of 2022, we will invite all our business friends and customers to the first BlueCallomPredict, a small conference for Innovation Thought Leaders to look ever deeper into that future of innovation. :)

INNOVATION THOUGHT LEADER ROUNDTABLE – If you are interested to contribute and supporting our work from the outside, we will continue to develop collaboration with our customers and Innovation Thought Leader Roundtable members. The next Innovation Thought Leader Roundtable will be in March 2022. You will find more info at: https://bluecallom.com/innovation-thought-leader-roundtable/


This is the most exciting, most compelling, and also the most challenging venture I ever had the opportunity to work in. I’m deeply grateful for having amazing minds support this journey.

I wish you a great 2022, whatever is around us, and thank you for all the support!  Together we can do even more for the future of innovation.

Axel Schultze and the BlueCallom Dream Team

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Axel Schultze

Innovation Opportunity for Enterprises

Innovation opportunity for enterprises. What worked for startups can now also work for enterprises. Even the innovation process would be the same. And purpose and reasoning should be the same too. The only difference is the leadership structure. And that requires a new understanding of what actually makes the difference between the two company types today.

No – it has nothing to do with size or capital, And yes both are driven by human beings.

Over the past four years, we learned so much about the difference between innovation in corporations and in startups that we today realize: Enterprises had not even a chance to be innovative even when acquiring a startup.  The full details can be downloaded as a Whitepaper. 

HOW ARE INNOVATIVE IDEAS CREATED
When thinking of innovation it is most helpful to understand how homo sapiens is performing the creation of innovative ideas. Without knowing how innovation is done, it is hard to manage the process and innovation remains to be a process. The key learning is that ideas are composed by our neurons from past experiences. There is no mechanism that just “creates” ideas.

INNOVATION PURPOSE
Without exception, the most innovative solutions were created in an attempt to solve a problem. Random experimentation and hoping to find a great idea never led to groundbreaking innovation. Innovation is an outcome – it cannot be a desire.

RETHINKING INNOVATION
When we know how innovation is created, we can request certain results, request to provide insights, and measure and manage the effort. Most importantly executives know what they are asking, even where and what to innovate.

INNOVATION READINESS
When you know the “what and how”, you can make sure that your business is ready to innovate in the first place and prevent unnecessary costs and delays.

INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
After all – innovation management can be performed like most other mission-critical activities, teams can be selected in accordance with the requirements and tasks and results become predictable and timely.

INNOVATION FINANCING
Successful innovations consumed more than $100 Million in funding, some reached into two-digit billion-dollar investments. Obviously, this is done in stages and in line with progress, KPIs, and timelines. Comparing it with a $500,000 startup would be a huge mistake because that was only their starting point.

FOLLOWING IS NO INNOVATION
Obviously, you can catch up with the market to survive. But the financial market will recognize it accordingly. A follower will not beat the innovator – not on the market cap.

RELENTLESS EXECUTION
Innovation is one of the intellectually most demanding jobs. Not only does it take 100% focus, it also requires relentless execution and the motive to do so. The Innovation Culture, team selection, and motivations are the ultimate driver of successful innovation.

The BlueCallom Deep Innovation Design method was modeled and shaped based on all the findings from our research and our own experiences, building 4 innovative businesses and helping hundreds of startups to get there too.

Whitepaper Download here.

 

 

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Axel Schultze

10 Things that Change with Neuro Innovation

Neuro Innovation – How ideas get created

Neuroscience had the single biggest impact on our modern understanding of innovation, in particular Neuro Innovation. One key aspect is the realization that ideas don’t come randomly and there are no “magic ideas out of the blue”. The brain composes ideas from past experiences and those compositions represent the power and the limit of our creativity.

Linear vs. Lateral

Your innovative brain thinks lateral. Your logical brain thinks in linear processes. That’s why almost all business tools are built in a linear manner – step by step.  But in recent years one business process has sneaked into our business life: INNOVATION. Yet, this creative process is still handled in a linear way: step by step. For instance “Empathize”, “Design”, “Ideation”, “Prototyping”, and “Testing”.  To make it more flexible, iteration is part of the process but that is still between modules and still not lateral.

Every idea ever created

Knowing how the brain is actually composing, processing, and fine-tuning ideas, has a profound impact on any type of innovation management process. Today, we know that every idea ever created, was a composition of past experiences. Our brain cells or neuron cells can not create any new idea from scratch. We also know that brainstorming has never created a single disruptive business model. We know that disruptive innovation takes on average 6 weeks to create. It will not happen on any hackathon weekend.

Deeper insights are provided during the education programs of the BlueCallom Innovation Management Academy.

Let us now explore the 10 things that change with Neuro Innovation.

1) Lateral Thinking

The good news is that we do not need to train anybody with lateral thinking. It is an integral part of our brain’s superpower. All we need to do is creating awareness of what exactly lateral thinking is and how it behaves. Simply speaking, instead of looking at things in a linear process (step by step | learn and repeat), we look at things in parallel and don’t repeat or iterate until it works. When you drive a car you steer the car, look at the street, once in a while in the rear mirror, on the speedometer, hear music, keep an eye on the remaining fuel, look at the scenery – all at the same time. Your conscious, sub-conscious, and motoric minds, work all in parallel. When you watch movies, you follow the story, wonder if certain things are possible, manage emotions, listen to theatrical music, and more.  When you THINK – any thought – you do that in parallel. When you “create”, meaning build and craft anything your brain works many tasks in parallel. Lateral thinking is a very fast back and forth of thoughts, verifications, and more.

Innovation is taking lateral thinking to perfection.

Attempts to make innovation, in particular ideation, a linear process is a perfect way to kill the outcome. The major episodes in the innovation process are linear and one builds on top of the other, but within the episodes, lateral thinking is the way to go. And one group of humans does it pretty well: startup-teams.
Creating a lateral thinking environment.

2) What should we innovate?

Instead of watching competitors – a far more effective way to innovate is to watch customers. The first question an innovation team should have an answer for is where and for whom they innovate. We know that disrupters could come from anywhere and can change the way an industry segment does business in just a very short period of time. But there is absolutely no magic involved. They simply found out what the respective audience has trouble with – whether they can articulate it or not. So why not do the same for your business? Moreover, you sit right in this market. The best way to find out is to conduct very specific research in your market. No questionnaire and no interview with countless questions. Just a well-guided casual conversation.
Creating leaders not followers

3) Innovation instead of improvement

instead of settling with improvements – focus exclusively on disruptive innovation. In our research, we discovered that the only difference between searching for a disruptive innovation versus settling with an improvement is the time and the way we interact with our brains. So there is no reason to accept an improvement if you can get to disruptive innovation. The first step is to get rid of brainstorming. While brainstorming was a great first step in leveraging the brain in the ideation process, it produced only very obvious ideas. And instead of hoping for a great idea that may strike you like a lightning bolt – our brain is able to get to amazingly disruptive ideas over a sequence of sessions that stimulates new and different searches. The final composition with a highly diverse team can be reached in 4 to 8 weeks of very specific exploration tasks.
Getting truly creative literally and laterally ;) 

4) Leveraging thousands of ideas

Instead of selecting one or only a few ideas from brainstorming – Neuro ideation produces thousands of ideas and idea pieces during a project. You will want to use them all – and you should. A complete disruptive innovation concept has never been just a single idea. Aggregating thousands of inputs including idea pieces, opinion, customer feedback, and research data can no longer be managed with colorful stickers and whiteboards.  You will need computer power to capture all the data, rate and rank them, sort and store them, and finally, analyze them. Looks like work but billion-dollar businesses do not come for free.
Creating full concepts not only ideas

5) In-market idea validation 

Instead of random experimentation in a lab – validate the “idea-success-fit” in your market. There is no better validation than exploration sessions with future clients. The added value of having your audience not only help validate the idea but also help shape it to the real-world application is priceless. To this point, there was not wasted a single penny in prototyping, experimentation, or testing. And please do not fear that somebody can steal your idea. Only weak and obvious ideas can be stolen. Little improvements can easily be stolen, so keep them for yourself – but please do not call them innovation.
Not wasting time, nor money

6) Innovation comes with team diversity

Instead of working only with experts – assemble a highly diverse innovation dream team. Having more of the same experience is of no value in innovation. But having a greatly diverse team brings far better results than the best expert team in the world. Experience diversity is the new order in innovation. On top of all, involve your customers and business partners in the process.
Producing the best possible outcome

7) Market born products

Instead of building prototypes and testing them in labs, use a unique “market born” product design method.  A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that shows only one feature is more important than a shiny but mediocre improvement. There is no lab that can compete with real user experiences. A lateral collaboration model with your customers and early adopters is bringing you more insights faster than any internal team ever can.
And still – no funding needed so far

8) Innovation financing

Current estimates show that 90% of innovation projects won’t make it to get funding. And the more innovative and disruptive a concept is, the less likely the approval to go forward. This, theoretically insane behavior, stems from the way disruptive ideas get perceived. In particular, finance people are conservative thinkers. Therefore, at last, one finance person should be part of the innovation team. Collaboration with the finance department on a bi-weekly cycle is highly suggested. Also here, neuroscience is an important guide on how to involve the executive bench in innovation projects to prime their thinking with what you are doing. Keep in mind that the next billion-dollar product line will need maybe a 100 million and more investment over time. To get such a financial commitment, the innovation management system must provide an extraordinary set of data to be able to defend an innovative concept. The fifty most innovative businesses from the past 20 years consumed more than $500 Million in funding before they became profitable. And investors worked with the management team on a weekly or monthly basis.
CFOs need relevant financial data – and learn to be an investor

9) Innovation to market

Instead of conventional market introduction, leverage neuroscience to select perfectly matching early adopters for creating a successful path into global markets. Innovative products will NEVER be purchased by 75% of your customer before the first 5% of early adopters got very excited. Most industry segments fail to innovate even with extraordinary solutions because they never had to do this in the past 20+ years. When IBM decided to go with an innovative computer into the market, they created a completely autonomous company: the “red IBM” but still did not manage to really scale it.
What every startup does due to the lack of a customer base

10) Executive level reporting

Executives need to understand every process in an enterprise – no matter what. And the way this is done today is simply through data. The Deep Innovation Design process, when run with the corresponding software provides on average 25,000+ data points to analyze and feed an entire KPI framework. When moving from LINEAR to LATERAL thinking and corresponding methods, we gain an incomparable amount of data. The data ranges from real-time budget consumption along the way, various timelines such as Time-to-Innovate TTI, Time-to-Validation TTV, Time-to-Market TTM, and ROI data that may be even dynamic based on the progress. The data also deliver qualitative data such as Ideation-Network data measuring the degrees of ideation connections and ideation stacks as well as quantitative data like idea contribution volume, contributor network size, or idea validation levels and volume, and more.
Neuro innovation and lateral thinking are the two keys to profoundly different innovation data.

10 things that change with Neuro Innovation

All in all, some of the topics in Neuro Innovation have not even been part of the conventional innovation processes, so that means no change, only additional learning. In other words, we don’t touch existing neuro pathways but help build new ones. Summarizing the new ones:

  • What should we innovate?
  • Innovation Financing
  • Innovation-to-market

Neuro Innovation is a key factor in ideation, idea validation, innovation financing, and innovation-to-market processes.

Deep Innovation Design Training

All the above is part of a new, one-week training: Deep Innovation Design Champion starting Feb 22
See the full program here:

https://bluecallom.com/bcdm-training/

Innovation is no serendipity – Earth is no disk. :)

 

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Axel Schultze

Why do we think so boring LINEAR?

During school and later in business 90%+ of humans become unknowingly and with no bad intention from others an ever more linear thinker. Everything – and I mean everything – is structured in the next 3, 5, 10 steps to do this or that. Moreover, after we see positive results from that mechanism, we even ask: “What are the 3 most important steps to do this or that” or “the 5 most important activities, getting to this or that result” and so forth. When you look at the Question and answer board, “Quora”, hundreds of people ask for the three most important skills an entrepreneur should have, not even wonder, if “skills” are needed in the first place. When getting older you hold onto your 7 steps of “anything” that had been most successful throughout your life. Entering a completely new job is terrifying for most people because of ONE FEAR: There must be more than the top 10 steps to success. Yes, we intuitively feel that it is more than that. But we don’t know. All we know is step by step or linear thinking. Moreover, nobody ever really taught us any different way. But we absolutely can. Being change-averse stems from our simplified education to become successful – step by step.

Do we need to think lateral to be innovative?

We have to break one of the biggest rules in our education or in our business lives: to think step by step. As we started to think of methods and techniques to leverage our born ability to be creative, we needed to break something that seems to have nothing to do with innovation: Breaking Linear Thinking. Once we began to address that issue we realized how severe the damage is in our innovation management theories, methods, and even technologies when going by the “step by step” model. The next problem was to educate people to think lateral. After trying to tell people how the brain composes ideas from previous experiences by having some of our 86 Billion Neurons connect in new ways with each other – could not come and train them in lateral versus linear thinking. Teach how to think is the hardest training in the first place – so we had to find different ways. The theoretical answer to the question is yes, you need to understand how to think lateral. A far more practical solution however is to experience the results. This goes back to our analogy between the greatest thinker in the world and the most amazing athletes. Both achieve amazing results by using their body in a perfect way – without necessarily knowing each action in each microsecond of their doing. We wanted our innovators to not think how they think but literally “see” idea streams and focus on the idea, not on the mechanics of your brain.

BlueCallom Canvas Explained

The objective is: to “see” the state of activity in a lateral representation. We use a pattern that our brain is actually using as well: One part of the information in our thinking process comes from the right half of our brain, the other from the left. A very powerful apparatus, the Corpus Callosum sits in the middle and not only connects the two brain halves it also helps negotiating the idea pieces. And it is the “messenger” between two halves that tries to make sense from the rational impressions and gets the feeling from the other halve. This is why we arranged the fields in a nonlinear and actually lateral arrangement. Left is what is (rational) – right is what we could consider “creative”. We work on both sides and get to the middle where the signals – the messages – from both sides get negotiated. If in the middle is no agreement we need to go back to the rationale and see if we considered everything and go to the right side and see if we got the best possible outcome. Once we got the first set of information in phase 1 and some good ideas in phase 2 we bring the core summary in the middle. When verified with the inputs from phase 1, in nearly 100% of the cases, the team goes back to phase 2 and fine-tunes whatever they have here. Once satisfying, the needs or requirements etc. get collected, and the haves and wants weigh in. At the end of the episode, a decision shall be made on how to move forward. For simple processes like in a business model canvas, there is not necessarily a decision to be made. But in a ‘BlueCallom’, an entire innovation project, which may take years to complete, the earlier key decisions can be made the higher the success potential or the earlier the whole process can be stopped before it needs serious investments. Instead of verifying and iterating after major milestones, we do the iteration WITHIN EACH EPISODE. It saves time and cost and more importantly it accelerates the act of innovation.

Lateral thinking is necessary, yet we don’t need to focus on BEING lateral – instead, SEEING  the process in a lateral way. 

 

This is why and how we say goodby to linear thinking. A lock-stepped process, going from one to the next, until we finished would be a linear thinking process. We find error or imperfection in either process. BUt in the linear process far too late and it is far too expensive.

The Corpus Callosum has been so inspiring for us that it gave us the name for the company – Callom as short form and the blue from the technical representation of this genius part of nature.

 

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Axel Schultze

BlueCallom Progress & Update

Remember our first webinars?

We talked about the concept of Deep Innovation Design in January this year. We made the analogy to athletes and how they went through an amazing transformation. In just 50 years amazing superstars!

Today we are ready to rock innovators, managing their minds, like others their bodies.

Today we have a very exciting introduction

Our software team made huge leaps with our Innovation Design Software. It’s the very first Neuro-Ideation-based software helping innovation managers to stimulate creativity like never before imaginable. “BlueCallom” is our enterprise-grade Innovation Management System with a very advanced executive dashboard.

 

BlueCallom EXPERIENCE 2020

Now EXPERIENCE yourself, together with innovation managers from around the world, what Deep Innovation Design and Neuro Ideation can do for you, when used in a methodical way and when supported by technology. A six-week program, where you experience an entire innovation process from “where to start” to groundbreaking innovation.

If you are up to an amazing experience, where you learn more about innovation and innovation management than in any program before, join the BlueCallom Experience. Of course, it’s all online.  See more details and registration

 

Please reach out to us any time if you have any questions or we want to know more.

Hoping to welcome you online at “BlueCallom Experience” on August 24.

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Axel Schultze
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From experimentation to “Innovation on Demand”

The Quest for more Innovation

In the last five to ten years, pretty much any business and any government was pushing for more innovation. But if somebody was asked “How do I innovate? Tell me to step by step”, there was no tangible answer. When I was asked that very question, in particular, the “step by step” part, it daunted me, that there was simply no answer that could satisfy this question. Tens of thousands of consultants help people to “open their mind”, other use the “design thinking” model to process ideas – actually very well. But the question remains: “How do you CREATE those innovative ideas on-demand” in the first place – so you can then process them in any of the models!

Innovation on Demand

Innovation was an accidental event – a combination of many instances, experiences, and the brain pushed out an idea. In some cases, those ideas have been big enough to warrant starting a whole new business. But today, we have a situation where we don’t want to have an accidental brain flash leading to a possible innovation. In times where we have a crisis, we actually would want to have solutions on demand.  But as long as we don’t even know how ideas are created, we are far away from creating ideas on demand.

Maybe the Biggest Shift in Innovation History

Neuroscientists helped me understand that human beings are not really creative – we can only COMPOSE ideas from past experiences, from whatever we saw, heard, felt, and so forth. All our daily experiences are actually get associated with existing experiences and create some interesting IDEAS of which we actually don’t really know. The biggest idea machine is our mind when we sleep. There is much to explain but the net of it is: We are not creative and we create ideas by the millions. So what is the problem?

Our historic evolution, our culture, our education, and our brain itself poses a problem: It is conditioned to allow only the most obvious and the least demanding ideas to pop up. Only one in a trillion or less is actually making it from our right brain to the left and stimulates communication between the two, which forms a “thought” that may break through all the other barriers. And once we understand that process, we have the foundation for creating innovation on demand, like we create a house or bridge or something as simple as a paper plane.

Deep Innovation Design – PoC

in 2016 we began our first careful attempts to help startups to come up with disruptive business models. What was thought to be a “one of a million” chance, turned out to be better than 50%. Half of the startups in that, for us historic batch, we’re creating a disruptive model – on demand. They created what we call a “Disruptive Moment”. Disruptive moments are the part of a business model that will push competitors to change their course in order to catch up with these startups. It was the first version of a Prove of Concept (PoC). In the past two years, we went deeper into the “mechanics of our mind”. We learned what we needed to actually DO to play with our billions of neurons and synapses to form those innovative ideas. After two years of work, we found an early concept that works well enough to come up with an innovative solution, whenever we want. It was in itself an innovative concept to create innovation. We called it the “deep innovation design method”.

Four ‘T”s, one “M” of Deep Innovation Design

1) TALENT
We need people who have a “talent” for creating innovation. Very much like others are talented to play music, paint pictures, drive race cars, cook amazing meals, create fashion, help others or simply entertain people. Talent is the ability to play with ideas, seek experiences, are least pre-conditioned, reject conformity, create their own rules. We have millions with that trait. Almost any toddler has that talent until we press them into a societal system that unknowingly suppresses that talent, but it is still there – hidden. Do you remember: “Don’t be so childish”, “you are a dreamer, be more realistic”, “Focus, learn your lesson, you need to repeat it tomorrow in class.”

2) TEAM
Like a music band, or a football team, innovation is a team sport – if you do it alone you end up waiting for accidental ideas. And one of the most important players in the “Innovation Play”, are the affected people: Customers, users, victims. If you start the game without them you are doomed to lose. And if your actors (innovators) are all of the same trade, you will lose as well. Diversity is the magic formula. Understanding that part makes it also very obvious why enterprises CANNOT be innovative. They try to surprise the customer with their ideas instead of co-creating an experience. And their ideas come from a monoculture called R&D centers, engineering teams, or other experts. And finally, the decision-maker, who may not be able to ‘experience’ the idea in their mind will need to reject the idea. It almost couldn’t be worse. We learned that ‘innovation’ is one of the most counterintuitive activities humankind is conducting – yet mother nature is pushing it out wherever she can.

3) TRAINING
Our brain is an old machine with lots of upgrades. More upgrades than any other organ in our human apparatus. It is also the most adaptive body part. To overcome some of the 300,000-year-old habits and some even go back 5 million years, we need to train our brains. I often wonder how long our children would crawl if we never help them to walk. We need to train our bran in opening a treasure chest that is heavily guarded by about 200 million nerve strands or Axons, our so-called Corpus Callosum.
With good talents, a great team, and well-defined techniques we actually can. And that is the beginning of “Innovation on demand”.

4) TOOLS
You know the saying: “I think my head explodes”- right? And that is always when you reach your capacity limits of learning or thinking, or comprehending – or – innovating. In an interesting way, it’s all the same. For the last 12,000 years, we experience this more and more often and we have built more and more tools and ever bigger teams to deal with exactly that problem. We have yardsticks to measure distances much easier than computing them in our brain. We build cranes big enough to lift the weight we need to lift without architecting it over and over again. And today we developed tools, methods, and finally technology that shall help us to go through this rather demanding process called innovation. And guess what – it is no different from what athletes perform in their contests, musicians on stage, race drivers on the street or on the water, and so forth. Both athletes and innovators, can easily loos one or two Kilo of body weight, during such processes. When I processed complex ideas or learned entirely new things rather fast, I fall asleep, equally exhausted than after a 20 km run (12.4 miles). Our brain can consume massive energy! That energy consumption is of extreme importance to know when we try to get groundbreaking ideas out of it.

5) MARKET
Here is when the rubber meets the road. There are an estimated 100 Million patents in drawers that have been never used. It shows that the initial value of innovation, even patented is exactly ZERO. The value is only and exclusively created when an idea gets executed, brought to life, and into the market. The value then grows with the size of its distribution. We can be as innovative as we want – if we cannot make it available to a market or the market is not interesting, the value remains to be zero. In the end, sales channels, creative marketing, service and support organizations, transport (and if it is the Internet) are key to the success of any innovation. This success is seen best when we look through the macroeconomic lens: A company creates a product. It is sold through distribution and dealer channels, it is shipped across all oceans, it is serviced locally, maybe education organizations provide training, maybe consulting companies help apply the product. At the same time, new ideas pop up from companies that build add-ons to that product and create even a market extension. All of a sudden a company with 5,000 employees actually creates 50,000 indirect jobs. That innovation is clearly valuable. The worst of all versions is to create a valuable idea, get a patent and then not only not use it but prevent anybody else from creating it. It is a crime on society – stealing an advancement, just based on self-interests.

How to start from here

On April 23, the BlueCallom Group who worked on the Deep Innovation Design Model for four years is providing a free online seminar (webinar) and explaining how the Deep Innovation Design Model works, where you can get trained and how you can create innovation on demand. The World Innovations Forum is providing training programs and support in emerging countries and is able to provide stipends for talented innovators to learn how to be extremely innovative.

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