FMYI | For My Innovation

I’m back from San Francisco after a great experience at GreenBiz’s Innovation Forum. My take? The GreenBiz team did a wonderful job intentionally creating an interactive conference full of thought leaders who are defining what’s next. You can watch some of them by viewing the videos posted online of select plenary sessions from Nike’s Hannah Jones, GE’s Mark Vachon, and Steelcase’s Dorothea Seebode.

From brainstorming at the tables led by Nicole Boyer after insightful remarks from speakers, to interactive workshops that enables attendees to delve deeper into opportunities and challenges, having Krys Freeman on stage behind a laptop stoking the Twitter conversations, plenty of networking breaks, the fun Go Game “green” scavenger hunt through San Francisco (see the photos and videos posted above), the GreenBiz team successfully turned this conference of 250 people into an interactive event. By the way, shout out to “Team Woodstock” (Amanda, Jasper, Jennifer, Joel, and Kelly) — although we finished second to last, we had a blast =)

My workshop on “Enhancing Collaboration through Digital Tools” which was summarized on GreenBiz.com helped me get a sense of the challenges organizations are experiencing with online collaboration. Despite the onslaught of new features and new players in the industry, there remains the same age-old barriers to adoption at work which include too many emails in the inbox, enterprise platforms that people are required to use that are too difficult to figure out, and lack of clarity with the business case. I enjoyed addressing the barriers based on our seven years of online collaboration experience and painting a picture of what’s next with creating communities for action.

At the end of the conference, I came away with ideas for how to scale our impact, and with a greater network of change agents to help make it happen. Some of the burning questions about sustainable innovation shared by participants that we’ll try to solve in the coming months and years together:

• How do you make it intuitive?
• How do you institutionalize innovation and idea generation?
• How do you move from process to culture?
• How do you create focused innovation?
• How do we connect ideas with people with money?
• How do we balance short term with long term economic success?
• How do we approach individuals to create change and keep them engaged?
• How can we produce more attention for the good disruptive leaders?
• How do we encourage tapping into real needs?
• How do we get the accounting right for true costs?
• How do we allow room for failure?
• How do we change the business model?
• How can we create more “spear in the chest” moments?
• What is the vision for success and what we can do together?
• How do we get the messaging right?

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-Justin