A Guide to Embrace Innovation and Disruption
Julian A. Kramer is Chief Experience Ambassador EMEA at Adobe. He reveals why creativity drives innovation and how to embrace disruption in your industry.
AI, Digital Transformation, Disruption and the fear of Silicon Valley getting ahead: All these topics sell well nowadays and get you on stages, on magazine covers, and invited to roundtables. The reason is simple: It is hard to find the right answers to these changes and innovations and that can be downright frightening for business executives. The board expects solutions, the teams direction and it‘s somehow up to you to fix it.
If you feel like that, you are not alone out there — so do all executives who talk to me. Fortunately, there are answers. So Instead of discussing technology, let‘s talk about enablers to master these and other future challenges.
Skills for the future and the rise of the creative class
The World Economic Forum releases its report “The Future of Jobs” every couple of years, listing the top 10 skills for the future workforce. If you compare the predicted skills for 2015 and 2020 “complex problem solving” unsurprisingly remains at the top. More interesting: the skills “critical thinking” and “creativity” have climbed into the Top 3.
These are not exactly skills you traditionally learn for your business degree, so how do you actually leverage “creativity” and “critical thinking” for your real-world problem-solving challenges?
What qualifies me to give you advice is that I am speaking from the perspective of a creative within a business context; working for a software company that is the world market leader in enabling creatives around the globe to shape our world and a company that has completely transformed its operating business model in the digital economy. (See Harvard Business Review Case)
On Creativity and Disruption
But what is creativity anyway? Let’s look at a definition: “Creativity is the recombination of existing ideas to solve new problems.”
This is unarguably true for artistic genres like music or visual arts like painting. They get inspiration from past bodies of work or openly reject or reinterpret them. In our business context, we might just call this process “disruption”: technological, societal or cultural shifts like minimalism, sustainability, or the shared/access-economy or Gen Y reinterpret previous patterns of behavior.
Disruption often hits from outside your industry — contrary to the established patterns of competition, the Darwinian process of incremental improvements within an industry.
An Example: Industry disruption like the advancements of self-driving car technology did not come from observing the competition. Instead, it was a combination of advancements in multiple areas: LIDAR, GPS, high-resolution phone cameras, machine learning algorithms (for object recognition) and enough onboard computing power to process and interpret these inputs. These technologies combined and strapped on a car enable you to build a self-driving car without being a traditional car manufacturer.
Critical Thinking
When it comes to interpreting new technology we need to apply critical thinking first to cut through the clutter of hype and novelty. This way we can carve out its true DNA before we use our creativity to create new ways of problem-solving.
However, most of our interpretations are limited by thinking in constants and the assumptions we make about this world. (Read: “The Art of Thinking Clearly“)
Example: NASA coffee
Recently a pharmaceuticals executive asked me jokingly about the 3D printing hype (Gartner Hype Cycle). I assumed his question was specific to his industry so I replied that on-premise assembly in the medical space would make a lot of sense as you could personalize the drugs, use a private blockchain to authorize doctors prescriptions and then provide a direct subscription service for chronic conditions, reducing distribution costs and time to customer. He looked at me like I was talking about the year 3001 and asked if I was aware of any industries capable of doing this today. I replied, “Technically Nespresso coffee pads are on-premise assembly.” And all of a sudden the hype became very real.
Why was this so obvious to me but hidden from him? A few years ago I flew back to Europe from the Bay Area and talked to a researcher who was working with NASA on printing molecules in space. I learned: It’s much easier, safer and more efficient to launch raw materials into space and print required objects on demand. This stuck with me and my perception of 3D printing had transformed from the notion of “can build useless plastic keychain thingy” to the extremely relevant idea of on-premise assembly of objects.
Complex Problem Solving
If creativity and critical thinking are fundamental to solving complex challenges, you want to be in a position to select and recombine from the broadest possible solutions, ideas, and perspectives. And these come with people. True diversity demands equality and embraces differences at the same time.
By embracing different career paths, characters, genders, cultures, backgrounds, and creating a safe forum for the exchange of ideas and perspectives you dramatically increase the chances of being successful. The numbers don’t lie: diversity in your company matters and directly contributes to the bottom line.
Example: used car sales in a time of technology uncertainty
A strategy consultant for a large automotive manufacturer discussed with me the shifting consumer trend of more personalized cars. Knowing that somewhat “unusually configured” cars could possibly cost a dealership a lot of money in depreciation per day, the trend of leasing poses a financial risk to dealerships and manufacturers who have to take the cars back. Add short term legislation (e.g. diesel bans in German cities) or a tectonic technology shift (e.g. the e-mobility Mexican standoff between infrastructure, battery technology and e-vehicle portfolios) and your asset portfolio is severely impacted over the next 3 model cycles — and outliers like Tesla might eat your lunch.
To solve the problem, lets recombine a few ideas from other industries: airlines and mobile phones.
Idea 1: Low cost airlines heavily rely on simplicity and consistent-configuration principles. They purchase a fleet of exactly ONE configuration of plane, reducing the complexity and inventory of spare parts, training hours for flight crews and maintenance staff, and becoming extremely profitable regardless of their routes.
Idea 2: If you look at the games or software on your phones, the biggest grossing apps leverage in-app purchases to unlock features and functionality.
Applied to cars this would mean all cars would come pre-equipped with heated seats, navigation and good sound systems, phone interfaces, etc. But the customer can choose his configuration unlocking specs as on-demand purchase: more horsepower, better sound quality or a massage seat on a long drive — via in app purchase, reducing configuration complexity and return costs while increasing personalization and economies of scale. I just wonder where they got this idea from.
If you took this a step further you could offer a personalized profile with all settings and interactions analyzed by an analytics and customer experience design platform like the Adobe Experience Cloud with a Magento Commerce Service Integration. Then you are prepared for a future of access-economy automotive ownership and differentiation. And that technology already exists!
So why should we embrace disruption now?
Many future answers will revolve around adopting a subscription-mindset / (English by Google translate) to your business. What is the customer experience, ease of use and utility you are providing? Why should people re-subscribe to you (metaphorically and actually)? How do you differentiate yourself?
- Old industries and economies like manufacturing will be augmented through a data layer. Within the next five to ten years the Internet of Things (or the age of sensors) will become a reality thanks to 5G networks. This will create a whole new opportunity for engineering-driven economies to redefine what benefits their industrial products can have for their customers. Ask yourself: What are your service models and customer experiences besides the industrial hardware?
- Less engineering-driven economies can leverage the rise of software development and service-model economies without the need of established manufacturing infrastructures (e.g. Spotify doesn’t need train tracks or aluminum foundries to be a global player.)
- Developing countries have the biggest opportunity to leverage the trends benefiting the less engineering-driven countries — as economic step function! The ability to code is the great equalizer with digital literacy being the entry ticket into the global labor market and economies. And you better try to hire this talent for their technical skills and their valuable different perspectives.
What should you take away
The good news is that you don’t have to become creative and artsy on your own — but you can create an environment that fosters the 2020 skills for the future of work.
Pay attention to other worlds — disruption comes from the outside.
Foster a culture of openness to inspiration.
Create diverse teams to draw from a wealth of perspectives.
Create spaces for critical thinking and make sure you hear all voices.
Challenge assumptions in a playful “what if?” and “but why?” mindset.
Adopt a subscription mindset to reinterpret your business.
Use customer-centricity and a flawless experience as a guiding principle.
Look for the human truth, the DNA of technology, not its features.
Only then ask for technology to bring it to life.
The future of our businesses will be exciting to shape.
We will see the growth of new industries and economies and hopefully benefit society, and you will be part of that. The only thing it requires is a bit of creativity to do so. And maybe a former film director to tell you this story about the future.
Julian A. Kramer is working as the Chief Experience Ambassador at Adobe, serves on the board of Education Y, an NGO dedicated to transforming our school systems for the future, supports girls coding initiatives and is exhibiting photography. In his previous career he worked at Google consulting the largest brands and designing executive programs on customer centricity, founded a startup, taught at university, directed and produced advertising films and to this day loves technology. To find out more about Porsche and Technology, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
