Joy Thomas
November 15th, 2012 | Filed under: Innovation, Motiv | No Comments »
Yesterday, Motiv hosted a roundtable on social media for corporate innovators led by Stefan Lindegaard, a noted speaker and author of three books on innovation.
Stefan discussed how social media is a game-changer for innovation, allowing people to network and collaborate in more ways than ever before. ”Social media is a natural extension of open innovation,” Stefan argued, comparing the connect-the-dots mentality of innovation to that of social media. Keep reading »
Joy is a strategist for Motiv and spearheads business development and marketing efforts in addition to supporting client engagements.
Joy Thomas
August 28th, 2012 | Filed under: Motiv | No Comments »
I recently read a column by Jason Gross called “The Designer Will Make It Pretty” that made me pause. An excerpt (boldface mine):
I hear a phrase quite often that many designers would compare to nails on a chalkboard. The people I work with who do not handle the design side of our platform will often tell clients, “The designer will make it look pretty.” [...] When content is raw, unformatted or confusing to the user, it gets sent to the design department so that it can come out the other end “pretty.”
… [Designers] consider what we do to be far more important than decorating sloppy content and returning it in a timely fashion. Many of us would argue that our real job is to make content accessible, flexible, easy to use and easy to work with. The real value in design comes from what you can’t see or what you don’t appreciate; it comes from all of the trouble that you don’t have because we fixed it ahead of time. Thank goodness we know better: if we just made things pretty, all of our work would be in vain.
This rang strikingly true. Keep reading »
Joy is a strategist for Motiv and spearheads business development and marketing efforts in addition to supporting client engagements.
Joy Thomas
July 3rd, 2012 | Filed under: Innovation, Motiv | No Comments »
This Businessweek image featuring Motiv President and CEO Jeneanne Rae recently resurfaced at our office:
In just 3 points, Jeneanne defines the pieces that must fall into place in order for innovation to take root within any organization.
1. Drive innovation from the top
The company leaders have to be the ones pushing for innovation by creating a culture that accepts failure and promotes learning through experimentation.
2. Forget the gadgets
The best innovations center around solving customer problems.
3. Set up new systems
Develop the infrastructure for innovation by using trusted partners to help visualize and test scenarios.
Although superficially easy, implementing innovative processes at any level is a notoriously tricky endeavor and requires a brave and deep commitment to organizational change. As always, things are easier said than done, but knowing the steps to success is a critical step of any transformative journey.
Image: Bloomberg Businessweek
Joy is a strategist for Motiv and spearheads business development and marketing efforts in addition to supporting client engagements.
Joy Thomas
April 25th, 2012 | Filed under: Innovation, Motiv | No Comments »
Our CEO Jeneanne Rae led a virtual panel on revolutionary versus evolutionary innovation today. Held in association with HighTable, the discussion–which included former Coca Cola and GE Energy execs Danny Strickland and Ramesh Rangarajan–seemed to center largely around implementing innovation.
Jeneanne kicked off the discussion defining the title terms. Evolutionary innovation signifies incremental improvement, which tends to have fewer risks and involve fewer organizational dimensions. Revolutionary innovation, on the other hand, requires building new capabilities and large adjustments to current mindsets, and tends to involve heavier risk.
Risk is one of the largest detractors in the case for innovation. A company’s risk threshold can be very low, especially if its business model has historically proven very successful. But people are realizing that companies must innovate in order to keep up and remain relevant in their respective industries. Those that cannot adapt will not survive.
Keep reading »
Joy is a strategist for Motiv and spearheads business development and marketing efforts in addition to supporting client engagements.
Joy Thomas
April 23rd, 2012 | Filed under: Motiv | No Comments »
I came across this cool mind map from the Design Management Institute’s Flickr account of our CEO Jeneanne Rae’s featured talk at the DMI Design/Management Annual 35:
Shaping service through design //Image: DMI
It’s productive doodling, but macro!
Joy is a strategist for Motiv and spearheads business development and marketing efforts in addition to supporting client engagements.
Joy Thomas
April 16th, 2012 | Filed under: Motiv | 1 Comment »
It seems to me that certain industries/organizations are facing the same issues over and over again, often trying to use band-aid cures as opposed to treating systemic problems at their roots. Here’s a quick rundown on 6 industries I believe are in need of overhauls:
Education
Numerous reports have come out saying that Americans are falling behind in global rankings. Why does it matter? There’s a significant gap in skills that’s preventing open jobs from being filled even in this economy, and many argue that the federal government’s attempt at standardizing education isn’t helping. We’re throwing lots of money into the system with flat-lining or, for math and science, declining results. The US Department of Education reports that the average math score for 17-year-olds in 2008 was not significantly different from the scores in 1973. If our old strategy isn’t working, why are we still pursuing it so doggedly?
Healthcare
Big Pharma firms are shedding jobs left and right in its realization that its current business models are becoming increasingly unfruitful and unsustainable. Few drugs become the blockbusters that drug companies need in order to recoup their R&D expenses. The healthcare bill is causing havoc in the insurance industry, and there aren’t enough doctors to treat our population—not to mention a particular shortage of traditional generalist family doctors. Clearly, the healthcare industry is in need of systemic change and business model reinvention.
Print media
This isn’t new; it’s been making headlines for years. What continually surprises me, though, is how a lot of companies just don’t get it. The bottom line is that most people no longer rely exclusively on print, so companies shouldn’t rely so heavily on their print business models either. Many companies recognize this paradigm shift. Unfortunately, many others do not–and even if they see the trends, they fail to recognize them and adjust. Cases in point: Borders, Blockbuster, Kodak, and the U.S. Postal Service. For print media to stay afloat and thrive, it’s got to modify its business model. We don’t use the Pony Express anymore, and we’ve upgraded from the typewriter–we’ve found better ways to do what we want with the written word. In the same way, companies involved in printed media have to adapt in order to survive and thrive, rather than trying to muscle their way through a slow death.
Real estate
The real estate industry is in desperate need of new business strategies. Having suffered devastating losses at the collapse of the housing bubble, it badly needs an overhaul to lift consumer confidence in order to stimulate and sustain growth. Declining or stagnant incomes and the fall of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac spell uncertainty for the future of homeownership. It’s hard to say how real estate will emerge from the recession, but it seems that people will have a vastly different outlook on the industry in 2015 as they did in 2007. Industry professionals will have to pivot to readjust.
Nonprofits
The slow economic rebound continues to result in waning levels of charitable giving as cash-strapped donors clutch their wallets tightly. Nonprofits must learn to run their businesses more like for-profit ventures in order to decrease their dependence on grants and individual donations, as well as maintain a steady level of funding for upkeep of core programs. Encouraging creativity in approaching complex social issues may also give way to novel and highly effective solutions that are as-yet unimagined.
The U.S. Government
I once spoke with a frustrated consultant for the federal government. She was working to increase efficiency within a federal agency and recommended excising unnecessary activities and redundancies within the organization, and the agency balked. Instead of cutting out outdated processes, it ended up insisting on adding superfluous ones as workarounds.
It turns out that this isn’t uncommon: in fact, the US Government Accountability Office has listed several eliminations of duplications and overlap that could save the government “tens of billions of dollars annually.” No word yet on the government’s progress.
But it’s not just the debt crisis issue. In this global economy, it seems that we have become complacent in sitting atop the laurels of the past innovations that have brought us success. But to stay competitive in the world market, we must drive innovation and encourage thinking about issues in new ways as we develop new talent and move forward from the Great Recession.
What are your thoughts? What have I left out?
Joy is a strategist for Motiv and spearheads business development and marketing efforts in addition to supporting client engagements.
Joy Thomas
March 28th, 2012 | Filed under: Motiv | 1 Comment »
We’ve been so busy at Motiv that it feels like the first few months of 2012 just flew by. If you want to see what we’ve been up to, check out our
Spring 2012 News and Views (
PDF).
We send out 4 newsletters a year that are packed with insights, articles, and valuable information. Join our mailing list here.
To add to this excitement, I’d like to make a very special announcement: we’re hiring summer associates and interns!
If you’re creative, analytical, and an MBA student or a rising college senior/recent grad, apply for our summer internships! As a former Motiv intern, I am an expert on the subject. Here are just 10 reasons why you should intern with us:
Keep reading »
Joy is a strategist for Motiv and spearheads business development and marketing efforts in addition to supporting client engagements.
Joy Thomas
March 14th, 2012 | Filed under: Motiv | No Comments »
Innovation has been a buzzword for a long time, but it has rarely been coupled with the idea of change and change management. Jeneanne Rae’s latest 30-Second MBA for Fast Company discusses whether an openness to change can be developed:
What are your thoughts?
The original can be found on Fast Company’s website here.
Joy is a strategist for Motiv and spearheads business development and marketing efforts in addition to supporting client engagements.
