Los gurús de la innovación han advertido en Hit Barcelona 2009: “El fomento de la creatividad, de nuevas prácticas y la erradicación del miedo al cambio y al fracaso serán aspectos clave para encarar el futuro” http://www.electro-imagen.com

“También en el ámbito del HiT Barcelona se celebró el XV Foro de Inversión de ACC1Ó, un punto de encuentro entre proyectos innovadores con gran potencial de crecimiento y un gran número de inversores y agentes empresariales con el fin de generar relaciones a largo plazo y ampliar su cartera de contactos.” http://www.cidem.com

“En los próximos años veremos un cambio drástico en la definición de líder. Estará menos relacionado con tomar las decisiones clave o tener una visión de futuro y más con crear las condiciones necesarias para permitir a otra gente innovar y crear esa visión.” Entrevista a Gary Hamel por Manuel Ángel-Méndez, en Hit Barcelona 2009.

“La conferencia fue inaugurada contando con la presencia de las más altas personalidades políticas y empresariales de Catalunya y de España, donde el principal ponente fue Gary Hamel, que ha sido reconocido “el mayor experto en estrategia empresarial”. Comunidad Pensamiento Imaginactivo.

“To punish failure is to encourage mediocrity”

Highlights

• Usually it seems more safe to do the same thing it has been done before.
• Innovation isn’t easy, but that is OK.
• Compare a project with a box. The box can be big or small but should be in accordance with a realistic business plan and financial return.

Micromanagement

• Micromanagement is the best path to effective management because it effectively links the person in the top to every person in the process.
• Creativity can deal with apparently unsolvable financial problems.
• If you care about every point (of the picture) taking attention on the hole picture, you get great results.
• Micromanagement is about keeping your eyes open.
• Micromanagement also requires failure.
• Once human filters are in place the possibilities will be endless.

Risk

• The more times you fail, the closer you are to success.
• People are afraid to take risk.
• The world has become a single dot. We are all standing at the point of a needle.

Media

• Internet has taken budget necessary for projects to extremely lower level, leaving creativity as the only meaningful variable.
• Each media has its strength and weaknesses.
• What matters is the quality of the content.
• Whatever your business stands for, the best way to archive the best long term results is to look inside your box.

Extract by Josep Oriol Ayats and Guillem Mateos.

“How do you get companies to innovate?”

Moderator: Jennifer Schenker

Michael Eisner

• You have to constantly challenge the people that work with you.
• There is a change going on in home video.
• Music industry is going through a metamorphosis which is still not figured out.
• Bigger is better (business).
• If you are bigger and you are innovator, you have the financial resources to do things and do them fast.
• Basically people want to please the boss.
• Its essential how the CEO chooses the head of departments.
• Inertia overrides innovation in successful organizations.
• Put people in a room till they are so annoyed and so tired and so upset until they have a new idea. Keep going on till you are upset.
• There are thousands of good ideas, the problem is recognizing them.
• There are a thousand reasons why a good idea dies.
• If you want to innovate the last thing to do is research.
• If you are not prepared to lose, you are not going to take the right hand of risk.

Eric Weber

• Its very difficult to put an equation to innovation.
• Many organizations are just too short on their patience.
• Individuals tend to work for companies where they fit.
• Measuring innovation has always been a challenge.

Extract by Josep Oriol Ayats and Guillem Mateos.

“Future is now. Future is not about what you do in the future.“

Highlights

• Strategy is about next practices.
• For you to be a leader in 2030 your opportunity gap is a lot bigger than your performance gap.
• We need different methods and capabilities to succeed in the future.
• Don’t think about best practice think about next practices.

Three box model

• Box 1: manage the present
• Box 2: Selectively forget the past
• Box 3: Create the future

Emerging markets

• Customers of the future will be fundamentaly different, and will demand fundamentally different companies.
• An emerging market will transform the corporation trying to adapt to it.
• Grow up in emerging markets cannot be caught up with box 1 approach.
• Emerging markets represents a huge discontinuity.

Three reasons why companies find it so hard to use next practices

• Physical inertia.
• Psychological inertia.
• Strategical inertia.

Company dedication to projects

• How many projects will be in horizon 1?
  Core business. It should be 60%-70% of the efforts.
• How many projects will be in horizon 2?
  Adjacent space. It should be 20%-30% of the efforts.
• How many projects will be in horizon 3?
  Entirely new business model. It should be 5%-10% of the efforts.

Strategy Architecture

• Non-linear shift
• Strategic intent
• Current core competencies
• Growth Playbook
• New core competences

Other highlights

• Because of the though economical conditions, projects are being more conservative today.
• Simple message: future is now. future is not about what you do in the future.
• Today I have to do two things: make the business work and invest in the future.
• The opportunity gap is enormous in the near future.

Extract by Josep Oriol Ayats and Guillem Mateos.

“The companies that will win in the future will be the ones that are really focused on human beings”

Highlights

• Management is one of most important technologies human has invented, and we need to reinvent that technology.Management was really invented to solve the problem on how to turn human beings to robots.Somehow we are satisfied with the same management system of middle 1900.

Gary Hamel’s interview from Hit Barcelona on Vimeo.

Why has management evolution stopped?

• Maybe we have solved all the possible problems or maybe we have simply been caught in a paradigm trap, which i think is the correct answer.

The 3 new challenges that face organitzations today are:

First challenge: Change

• Are companies changing as fast as the world is?
• A lot of companies have been left behind on the change curve.
• Product advantages don’t last as long as they used to.
• The dividing line between a leader and a competitor is usually months only.
• Change only happens in crisis.
• Today the challenge is building an evolutionary advantage over time.

Second challenge: Protection barriers

• The protection barriers companies used to have are falling.
• We have to be adaptable in a new environment.
• Innovation is the only protective barrier. There are ways to determine innovation is not a key point in a company.

Third challenge:  Knowledge is becoming a commodity

• We need to integrate knowledge in a creative way.
• We need a completely different way of thinking about our people.

Other highlights

• Worker values pyramid: Obedience, diligence, expertise, initiative, creativity, passion.
• The job of managers is not to get employees to serve the organization, but to build the environment to encourage people to collaborate and contribute.
• “All commitment is voluntary”.
• “If you never tell a colleague what to do it will never work with you again”.
• We have to destroy the notion of the CEO.
• How do you became a management innovator? You have to be willing to challenge conventional thinking.
• You have to go to the social revolution on the web to see the future of management.
• The assumption is that when you get people more freedom they get less disciplined.
• Involvement drives commitment.
• The single reason companies get into trouble is when they concentrate responsibility in few people so the organization depends on personal characteristics of that people.

If you had grown up in the internet world:

• Every idea should compete in equal condition.
• What matters is your contribution not your credentials.

Management is only on doing to simple things

• Amplifying human capabilities (the internet has done it)
• Aggregate those capabilities (we see that through open source)

The irony is we as individual are already adaptable, innovative and interested but our organizations are not as much.

“Exponential growth of information technology”

Highlights

• Progression today its not linear, its exponential.
• Target your projects for the world that will exist when you finish them.

• To be successful is not to make your project work, it is to be correct on the timing.
• The exponential growth is predictable and very explosive.
• We constantly try to predict whats coming

Predictability is completely unaffected by booms, problems and other successes.

Health & Medicine

• Health and medicine have become an information technology.
• We could identify the gens responsible for diseases and modify them to turn them off.
• Health and medicine will be a million times more powerful in 20 years.
• Human brain is being completely reverse engineered.
• Life expectancy will grow faster than you get old

Technology

• What now fits in a cellphone will fit in a blood cell in 25 years.
• Within 20 years we could completely replace fosil fuels with solar energy.
• Change is going faster and faster.
• Try to project where technology will be.
• Technology is an evolutionary process.
• Technology has accelerated itself.
• Biology is very subobtimal to what we actually engineer.

Information Technologies

• Information technologies follow remarkably predictable patterns.
• Information technology its a democratizing technology.
• Information technology has a fifty percent deflation rate.

Other highlights

• Exponential growth can not go on forever: it comes to an end.
• When prices reach a certain level, technologies explode.
• “Identify new applications and try to identify when they will be possible”.
• Very few people could do their jobs without innovations that exist today.
• Prediction for 2010: computers disappear.
• Prediction for 2029: an intimate merger 1000 times old computation equal 1000 times of human brain.

Extract by Josep Oriol Ayats and Guillem Mateos.

“Inspirational leadership makes innovation work”

Highlights

• Innovation travels from one place to another.
• The spirit is to create something that will endure.
• Innovation is a hot topic today.
• Innovation is the only way we are going out of recession.
• If you want new ideas you have to be open to all kind of ideas.

Imágenes exteriores generales y sesión de networking con emprendedores e inversores from Hit Barcelona on Vimeo.

There are 5 lessons essential to innovation, called “The 5 Fs”

1st: Focus

• They should be highly focused, but not focused on their business portfolio.
• They should be focused in a mission that unites the entire company for innovation.

2nd: Flexible

• Flexibility means to be flexible with respect to rules and processes. Every company needs to have the flexibility to take their own course separate from the rules that had been established.
• The lack of flexibility kills innovation more than anything else.
• Without flexlibility there is no innovation.
• Before becoming the right idea is someone’s crazy idea competing.
• If an idea looks really good means that we understand it, which in turn means it’s not so innovative.

3rd: Fast

• Companies should not bound to large hierarchys.
• “We don’t want boureaucracy anymore”.
• Companies should be more organized around projects than around bosses.
• You have to move fast because of the flexibility. Any team has a focus, every team that is flexible can move quickly, then they start to operate like companies, without burocracy.
• Everyone can and should self-organize.
• If you want to move fast you want everyone on your company to volunteer.

4th: Friendly

• It stands for collaboration.
• In order to success people have to enlight partnerships, internal and external.
• CEOs have to suspend their egos.
• Any company willing to learn from its parters is gonna get the best.

5th: Fun

• If it’s not fun to go through demands of innovation, nobody’s gonna do it.
• If the organizational culture doesn’t make it fun, it won’t succeed. It’s motivation that makes work fun.

Other highlights:

• Kanter’s Law: any project can look like a failiure in the middle. Specially when the ideas are very new. Persisting and persevering is the only way to get through it.
• One of the secrets of innovation is innovators have more success but also more failure, and that is just because they tried more.
• Every innovation often requires secondary innovations to get the primary innovation off the ground: innovation is also important in the processes and not just in the product.
• Innovation never drops itself in.
• People won’t let business stay without values.
• The thinking should be “I have two jobs: one at .. and the other to save the world”.
• ”Be the change that you want to see in the world” Mahatma Gandhi.

Extract by Josep Oriol Ayats and Guillem Mateos.

On June 17th Hit Barcelona brings together five of the most prominent business gurus for a unique day of top-level conferences, addressing critical topics in the current global economic uncertainty.

Get involved in the programme and ask Gary Hamel, Michael Eisner, Ray Kurzweil, Vijay Govindarajan or Rosabeth Moss-Kanter your questions directly via the following link: http://www.hitbarcelona.com/questions.

Each expert will answer the most voted for questions live during their session, you can follow their answers on HiT Barcelona’s blog and Twitter/HITBCN.

Don’t miss this opportunity, get online and get answers!

Sign Inn here to ask

The Wall Street Journal recently ranked Gary Hamel as the world’s most influential business thinker, and Fortune magazine has called him “the world’s leading expert on business strategy“. Wikipedia names him as an American management guru and the originator (with C. K. Prahalad) of the concept of core competencies.

As a consultant and management educator, Hamel has worked for companies as diverse as General Electric, Time Warner, Nokia, Nestle, Shell, Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, 3M, IBM, and Microsoft. His pioneering concepts such as “strategic intent,” “core competence,” “industry revolution,” and “management innovation” have changed the practice of management in companies around the world.

At present, Hamel is leading an effort to build the world’s first “Management Lab.” The MLab is a pioneering attempt to create a setting in which progressive companies and world renowned management scholars work together to co-create “tomorrow’s best practices” today. The goal: to radically accelerate the evolution of management knowledge and practice.