Innovation Velocity: Issue 1

Welcome to the first edition of Innovation Velocity, a forward-thinking digest for strategists and innovators where we talk about innovation operations in the age of artificial intelligence.

This newsletter is aimed at helping you:

• Crank up the velocity and resilience of your team’s innovation efforts
• See into the future of work, collective intelligence, and human/AI collaboration
• Develop gold-standard workflows for AI-augmented innovation
• And more! (Let's see where this goes)

Why innovation ops? Why now?

After nearly a decade of working on the frontier of immersive tech, emerging CX, and superfandom, I'm more excited about the future than ever and I think you should be too.

This newsletter is an easy way to share some of my inspiration and expertise with you.

A working definition of innovation operations:

Let's kick things off by establishing what I mean when I say innovation ops.

Innovation operations is the dedicated function, resources, and systems that are focused on rapidly translating ideas into disruptive innovations and operationalizing those innovations with cross-functional teams.

It equips organizations to consistently develop and scale step change innovations by:

• Implementing useful frameworks, governance, and capabilities that go beyond one department
• Empowering teams through simple, impactful tools with short learning curves
• Having the foresight to develop a decentralized test & learn practice for scouting and amplifying new employee-built solutions
• Migrating great ideas from test & learn towards Standard Operating Procedure

In today's era of exponential technology change, innovating quickly and intelligently is critical to competitive survival.

And beyond that, scaling powerful solutions across an organization is the new frontier of your competitive edge as AI continues to commoditize access to knowledge, insight, and subject matter expertise.

Work that previously required 3 months of expert input can now be done in a day by a single person with high AI literacy.

The baseline pace of play has vastly accelerated in the business world. If you're not able to accelerate with it, a rude awakening is near at hand.

Why is my expertise valuable to you?

Now that we've defined innovation ops, you might be wondering:

"Why should I care what Shep has to say on the matter?"

The answer:

1. I have innovated at almost every level of business, from startups to trillion dollar brands, with every technology imaginable, wearing every possible department's hat at one point or another, where failure was not an option.
2. This track has made me a rare breed of specialized generalist with a gift for simplifying the complex.
3. My unique insights at the junction of technical, creative, and strategic work streams will help you unlock new ways of thinking.

Innovation operations is both a horizontal and vertical discipline.

And while technology is ever more prominent in our lives, few professionals get the opportunity to develop expertise across such a full and complementary suite of innovation responsibilities for clients large and small.

Whether from luck, foresight, or sheer tenacity, I've consistently gotten rich first-hand experience in scouting, pitching, building, and optimizing innovative digital solutions for billion & trillion dollar brands across industries.

So I hope you'll find my insights valuable, because they're hard won and hard to come by on your own.

"Innovation operations sounds like an oxymoron."

But it's not. At least, not anymore.

The expectation that innovation is born within a single team or business unit and then disseminates outwards is outdated.

In actuality, the discipline of innovation is rapidly distributing itself across every level of your organization through sheer ChatGPT osmosis.

With 24/7 access to smart AI assistants, knowledge is no longer the bottleneck. Any team can have a big idea at any time, and great ideas can truly come from anywhere.

Our collective problem-solving capability is increasing daily as we equip team members with AI that can help them independently solve their own problems.

This newly achieved pace of play is akin to unlocking a superpower.

But it's also a pace that our systems aren't prepared to manage, and that teams need new process for.

In innovation terms, many of our ingrained intuitions about time to delivery and time to impact are wrong, and we need a paradigm-shifting recalibration.

Work that took you 3 months to finish last year now takes 1 day, or even just 59 seconds.

And empowering even a single team member to become an AI power user can create a profound change in a group’s productivity. Let alone when you have an entire team with advanced AI skills.

Innovation operations is the emerging field of play for teams that want to cultivate the internal driving force that will accelerate them into the future. It’s for teams that want to increase their innovation velocity.

Looking Ahead

This newsletter aims to provide what I believe are valuable perspectives, insights and frameworks to help teams accelerate innovation velocity and impact.

And I'll be bringing a multi-disciplinary lens that encompasses everything from disruptive new AI and spatial computing capabilities to systems thinking frameworks and business models.

In upcoming issues, I expect we'll cover topics such as:

• Innovative applications of AI in customer experience and marketing
• The role of computer vision in the modern innovation toolkit
• The future of work & collaboration from a spatial computing lens
• AI-driven disruption of sectors like music, technology, entertainment, advertising, and consulting
• Structuring your business information architecture for innovation velocity
• Promoting experimentation through access to data, tools and infrastructure
• Governing and sustaining an ethical culture of managed risk-taking in an era of rapid step change

The goal is to share provocative perspectives, insights, and thought exercises that will help you capitalize on the emerging innovations unlocked by the AI exponent.

I look forward to exploring ways we can reimagine innovation through the lens of artificial intelligence. Please feel free to share relevant topics you would like my perspective on and I’ll do my best to weave them into this newsletter.

Cheers!

??Shep