Strategically Directed Innovation Will Change Your Game!
Strategic Innovation Consulting is a professional services firm assisting clients in the optimization of specific strategic, organizational and marketplace initiatives. We serve a wide-ranging clientele including corporations and not-for-profit organizations both in North America and internationally, ranging from Fortune 100 companies to start-ups.
Our programs provide an effective, systematic method whereby we guide leadership teams in the successful development of purposeful innovation within a timely, cost-efficient context.
John acknowledges, “Not all ideas are innovation. Solutions must be value driven and capable of implementation.†Our innovation program accelerates the achievement of powerful new strategies. We facilitate the process of idea generation and the creation of a strategic implementation plan leading to measurable, breakguide and through results.”
John is the author of MINDING THE GIRAFFES: The People Side of Innovation (2012). In this book, he demonstrates how a viral organizational culture of innovation is formed and what leaders can do to maximize innovation by identifying and empowering those individuals who are gifted innovators. In it, John recounts how, early in his career, the company CEO recognized his natural talent for innovation and lost no time placing him in the position of leading the corporation’s strategy and innovation. His innovative marketplace initiatives proved extremely lucrative for the company.
John designates business innovators as ‘Giraffes’ because they can ‘see’ above and beyond the daily fray and possess a unique ability not only to visualize solutions, but also the roadmap to successful implemention.
Finding and minding your Giraffes is key to a thriving culture of on-going innovation and to becoming a leader in your industry. Strategic innovation creates and sustains competitive advantage through the consistent achievement of marketplace breakthroughs.
A Fire-Fighting Fiasco aka It’s Easy to Miss the Point
For nearly one hundred years, the U.S. Forest Service sought to prevent forest fires using every conceivable means, including the famous icon, Smokey the Bear. At first, these efforts appeared to work as the number of forest fires caused by humans significantly declined while the number of visitors to national parks and forests increased annually. But did this strategy achieve the goal of protecting our national forests and parks? Unfortunately not. Despite a decrease in the number of fires, to the dismay of the Forest Service, the intensity of fires increased. Why? The Forest Service’s fire prevention measures had, over time, inadvertently created the necessary tinder for fueling large scale fires. While periodically occurring fires burn off ground based, low hanging growth and rarely threaten the larger trees, they also serve to prevent the build-up of kindling that fuels the less frequent, but immensely devastating fires which destroy entire forests. Native Americans understood this and regularly started fires for the specific purpose of clearing brush. Corporate culture can sometimes mimic the Forest Service’s unsuccessful problem solving approach. We focus on specifics without a clear understanding of how our actions will impact the organization as a whole. As a result, we sometimes create more serious problems in the process of attempting solve lesser ones. The U.S. Forest Service eventually conquered the problem by applying the ancient Native American practice of setting fires to cause prescribed burns. It worked like a dream! In business, we must be wary of the most obvious and immediate solutions. With careful research and creative thinking, we can achieve integrated solutions for optimal outcomes without creating new problems.
Consulting on Marketplace Initiatives
As a strategic consultant, John assists companies in achieving breakthrough initiatives in:
- Increasing Profits by Improving Customer Service & Employee Loyalty/Productivity – ‘Cultural Metrics Dashboard’
- Innovative New Products, Services and Product Line Extensions
- Fostering an Organizational Culture that Promotes Innovation
- Distinctive New Products, Services or Product Line Extensions
- Breakthrough Solutions to Complex Problems
- A Plan for Increasing Employee Loyalty & Productivity
- Streamlined R&D to Market Pipeline Strategies
- Process Flow & Systems Improvements
Business Development & Integration – Maximizing Synergistic Outcomes
In business today, integration is key. Accelerating change, technology and global competition demand that organizations function in an integrated versus piecemeal manner. Otherwise, an improvement to one aspect of the business may be the direct, but unrecognized cause of costly losses in another. Clearly, a holistic approach to all of an organization’s functions is essential. John has pioneered an approach he terms the Approach: Three Key Phases of Innovation for leading organizations through their iterative response to internal and external change. John assists organizations in confronting the challenges and opportunities they face through a well prepared and fully integrated system for organizational response.
Strategic Open Innovation Consultant