Recently Ever Evolving had the pleasure of presenting at the Centric Indiana Day of Innovation at Butler University. It was a fantastic event filled with thought leaders and ideologists living in the space we call innovation. There were people presenting new ideas around how to be innovative and others just looking to share the latest tips and tricks to be the most effective innovators they can be. The following is a summation of the presentations that we were able to attend throughout this fun and exciting day.
Christian Cotichini – Crowd 2.0 – How Organizations & Individuals are Collaborating
The event was kicked off by Christian Cotichini speaking about leveraging the crowd through open-innovation and incentive challenges. In his keynote, Christian spoke to the “era of crowd 2.0”, where he shared concepts, real-world insights, examples, and actionable ‘how-to’. He shared his insights on how organizations can succeed in this new era. To share insights on how your organization can thrive in this new world. It was refreshing to hear someone else speak on a topic we at Ever Evolving hold so near and dear to our hearts. While we advocate for an open innovation approach, we also understand this may not work for all companies or teams which is why we made our InnoSpection Framework flexible enough to operate with open and non-open innovation environments. This was directly followed by the Indiana Innovation Awards. The awards sought to recognize individuals and organizations who successfully lead innovation in Indiana.
Lauren LeMunyan – The 55/5 Rule to Solutions-Based Innovation
Lauren LeMunyan introduced our group of innovators to the 55/5 Rule. The rule is a solutions-based innovation strategy that helps individuals prioritize their time with a focus on target market. The rule also helps practitioners to get out of their own assumptions. Most people spend their time thinking about solutions and a very small amount of time on the end user. But the 55/5 Rule has you look from the customer’s perspective and determine why they would be looking for solutions, so you have a deeper understanding of the customer prior to thinking of the actual solution to their problems.
Steve Palmer – Charting a Course Through the Innovation Minefield
Steve walked the crowd through the major muscle movements involved in successful innovation planning. He guided the members of the session through the necessary tools, tips, tricks, and techniques to implement proper innovation. Using the Ever Evolving developed, InnoSpecting Framework, he laid out the steps needed for an organization to identify areas ripe for innovation and the process to best capitalize on new ideas.
Beth St. Clair / Beth Outland / Travis Puntarelli – Cultivate a Creative Mindset
Beth St. Clair led a highly interactive post lunch session where she focused on providing everyone with tools to cultivate a more playful mindset. She explained how research shows that cultivating a playful mindset leads to increased cooperation and trust, connection and community, and creative problem solving. According to that same research, play is looking to have a more critical role in creativity than ever imagined.
Molly Cain – Innovation at the Department of Homeland Security
Molly Cain was brought into DHS to help them with innovation. When people think innovation, they normally think of cool technology or state of the art processes that dramatically change an organization. According to Molly’s methodologies, innovation within DHS looks considerably different than it would in any other organization. The methods she and her team personally used to ‘think outside of the box’ and approach problems flew in the face of many of the traditional methods of thinking, operating, and even acquiring services for the Government.
Chris Denson, Innovation Crush – Six Degrees of Separation
Chris Denson closed out the day by covering a bunch of topics from biohacking to social memes, virtual reality, mobile design thinking, and demonstrating that there are a bunch of ways innovators can integrate into how consumers connect to the things they love most. Some of the most insightful advise he had to innovators was:
- Be aware of “surprises” along the Innovation journey and be prepared to capture them and use them.
- “Be a part of the community you are trying to serve BEFORE presenting a solution.”
If you are interested in hearing more about the event or would like a copy of our presentation, feel free to contact us on our website and reference this blog post.