"It’s very good, in fact some of the speakers are excellent.

There’s so much good content I’m finding it difficult to watch everything, though it is available on download later. Who needs Netflix when you have an Unconference?!"

Folks are enjoying the #Innov8rs Connect Unconference. In the third week, we had good conversations with Hugh Molotsi about employee-driven innovation, Charlene Li about disruptive leadership, Nate Nasralla about startup collaboration, Sherry Rahmatian about driving social impact and Tony Ulwick about outcome-driven innovation.

How The Most Innovative Companies Empower Their Employees to Work on Their Own Ideas

Perhaps the most under-utilized assets in most companies are the ideas in their employees’ heads. Hugh Molotsi together with Jeff Zias wrote a book about how they have driven grassroots innovation at Intuit.

In his Ask Me Anything session as part of #Innov8rs Connect Unconference, he shared components of an effective and sustainable internal innovation program.

Disruptive Leadership

Disruptive leaders are completely and relentlessly focused on the needs of customers in the future, constantly looking for opportunities for exponential change and growth. Disruptive leaders look at things counterintuitively.

During good times, they challenge their organizations to disrupt the status quo, paranoid that what works today won’t work tomorrow. And during bad times, they accelerate their investments for the future because they know that’s where the growth will be.

Charlene Li shared with us the Four Disruptive Leadership Archetypes: the Steadfast Manager, the Realist Optimist, the Agent Provocateur, and the Worried Skeptic. All four bring unique and necessary qualities to the team, but the Worried Skeptic may be the most difficult to win over to disruptive change.

Here's what Charlene suggested how to deal with this type of leader.

Built for Speed: Why the Fast Not the Big Will Dominate the Future

Corporates aren’t built for speed. They’re built to minimize risk. Yet, as business cycles accelerate and a global pandemic forces rapid change across our economy, the corporates who can’t move fast enough will be left behind — the greatest risk of all.

Leading corporates know this and are accelerating innovation by engaging with startups as a primary path to business transformation. Nate Nasralla suggested "speed" in this context actually has three dimensions.

Progress In A Post-CSR World: How Businesses Can Rethink Their Impact In This Moment

Traditionally, “doing good” within business has meant a form of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), but the time we are living in is demanding more. Consumers are no longer buying it - companies are being called out, and for good reason. In this current moment of collective action and attention, can brands finally find the sweet spot that balances societal impact with their own business needs?

When I asked Sherry (Sherzad) Rahmatian during her #Innov8rs Connect Unconference session last week about her answer: impact means progress.

One of the innovators on the call then went on to ask - how do we introduce this notion of innovation for impact? Here's her response.

Why Innovation Fails- And How To Fix It

80% of the innovation managers we surveyed believe that customers do not know what they want, and have needs that they cannot express. This gets to the root cause of the problem with current innovation processes and why the majority of new products fail.

During this session, Tony debunked the myths that currently plague innovation and gave you a framework to understand your customers that unite the entire organization around a common language of the customer.