Scott Amyx

Are You Ready for Disruption?

How do you turn disruption into innovation? In PwC’s Annual Global CEO Survey, 62% expressed concern about the impact of disruption in their industry. Disruption is coming from all directions – from the Internet of Things, blockchain cryptography, AI/machine learning, data analytics, decentralized computing to changes in consumer behavior.

According to an Accenture study of 1,000 large enterprises, big companies struggle with innovation. The biggest barrier is not a lack of vision but because, by definition, big companies are mature.

Organizational structures and processes are in place to guide the company towards efficiency. Seasoned managers steer their employees from pursuing the art of discovery and towards engaging in the science of delivery. Employees are taught to seek efficiencies, leverage existing assets, and listen to their best customers. Such practices and policies ensure that executives can consistently deliver positive earnings to Wall Street, but they also minimize the types and scale of innovation that can be pursued successfully within an organization. No company ever created transformational growth by doing what they do a tiny bit better and a tiny bit cheaper.

Exponential Disruption: Is Your Organization Ready for the Era of Human-Machine Innovation

Disruption is a great term, as long as it’s being applied to your competitors and not your firm.

Exponential technologies are creating disruption. The convergence of exponential technologies is expected to disrupt almost every sector and business. Changing trends are forcing leaders to take a hard look at their business models and core competencies. New entrants are threatening to displace “cash cows” and prominent brands.

How is your company positioned to take advantage of the multi-billion dollar opportunity that beckons? Or is your business at risk from the advances in technology? If your company  is not embracing technological and business model changes, it may be in danger of becoming obsolete.

The Future of Innovation & Jobs

The new marketplace for industries like manufacturing, energy, gas and oil, and construction is a far cry from that in decades past. The perfect storm of problems has been brewing, as novel challenges cut into revenue and force corporations to scramble to find fresh opportunities.

Obstacles to growth come ion many forms. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that there has been a gradual slide in worker productivity, not over just the last few quarters, but over the last decade. However, just as some industries are struggling, there is little doubt that the tech sector is going strong and that it is shaking up other verticals to create value and opportunities for expansion and growth.

While it is not likely that a single solution can bring about significant change in the industrial sector, the appropriate application of advanced technologies, data analytics, machine learning and robotics can result in a greater optimization of business workflows and processes, enhanced safety, improved research and development, and the creation of new revenue streams.

The silver lining is that innovation also ushers in new types of jobs hat didn’t exist before. Innovation coupled with continuos lifetime learning and retraining creates a flexible and adaptable labor force.

How to Consistently Think Outside-of-the-Box for 10x Growth

Your boss tells you to create the next multi-million dollar blockbuster product. After all, you are the expert. Yet, no matter how much your team tries to think outside-the-box, your innovation iterations can’t seem to break through the legacy product. Sure it has better bells and whistles but at the end of the day, it’s still the same widget with a new name.

Scott shares that companies can systematically achieve better innovation outcomes by utilizing a combination of crowdsourcing and AI computation to create serendipity. Great ideas don’t have to occur once in a blue moon; t can happen consistently.

Scott asserts that great ideas are inspired from other domains. Using a proven research-based methodology, Scott helps your organization to solve highly complex product development and innovation projects by utilizing the symbiosis of human-machine innovation.

How Constraints Help or Inhibit Innovation

What is one of the most frequent feedback that leaders receive from product/project teams? “We don’t have enough budget, people and/or time” So, do constraints help or inhibit innovation?

Conventional wisdom advocates eliminating constraints for innovation to flourish. Some research, however, suggest innovation improves when constraints are imposed. Afterall, this is the philosophy behind Agile management, lean startup principles and daily stand-up meetings. Yet a recent study suggest that constraining the creative process too much backfires after a threshold. It turns out finding the right balance is much harder than we thought. Scott explains how, why and when constraints foster or hinder creativity and innovation.

Why Innovation Benefits from Dissent

How are decisions made in your organization? We like to believe that we make optimal decisions based on group consensus. According to research, even the best orchestrated consensus thinking is less creativity than the sum of their members. By definition, consensus is a general agreement among members of a group.

In order to reach consensus, there are trade-offs. We start out with a complex problem with many dimensions, much like a heptagon with 100 sides. As concessions are made, the once jagged polygon smooths out to a simple rounded polygon with less sides. What we get is something not dissimilar from what others have already come up with, including out competitors. We fail to achieve a breakthrough.

Scott shares that in order to produce superior decision-making, organizations must embrace authentic dissenting viewpoints. Based on research, Scott indicates that when a team member shares a dissenting viewpoint, the creativity of the group increases. Dissent stimulates thought that i divergent, and leads to greater innovation and creativity. It improves the quality of decision-making. We become more independent thinkers and, more importantly, we think divergently.

Why Innovation Shouldn't Start with Business Requirements

There is an exciting new project kicking off at your work. So naturally, you start with requirements gathering. You hold a series of requirements  gathering working sessions with stakeholders and users. The questions are generally oriented towards “what do you want?” However, this is highly problematic, especially if this is a new product or service. Matter of fact, asking your target customers what they want might even lead to disastrous results.

Scott represents the concepts of benefit-oriented and emotion-oriented requirements methodologies that will not only sharpen your requirements  process but produce a profoundly innovative solution that will be lauded and loved by your customers.

A benefits-oriented approach summarizes the greatest user needs to the highest abstraction level. It forces us to lift our eyes up from granularity of feature set to see the big picture.

An emotion-oriented requirements approach increases user adoption, engagement and ultimate succes of a new product or service by focusing on the underlying human emotional goals.

How AI is Transforming Retail & Financial Services

Scott walks the audience through the lens of a customer journey as he interacts with retail and financial services powered by AI. From chatbots to human like digital assistants (AVA), Outernets’ computer vision technology that turns any windows and surfaces into interactive experiences, Endor’s social physics platform that applies AI predictive data analytics to human behavior, fraud prevention powered by AI to Digits that converts credit cards and debit cards into cryptocurrency cards for parchases, the AI evolution is just beginning.

How to Transform a Nation

How to build a Fourth Industrial Revolution-driven nation to spur sustainable economic growth, to build new industries, to create jobs, and to raise the human capital of local citizens.

The World Economic Forum’s survey gives us hints when the future will have arrived. When we have robotic pharmacist, when our clothes are internet connected to when AI is seating on the Board of Directors. These disruptions cannot be stopped. It represents rapid and unstoppable evolution in the human innovation curve. With this massive automation and intelligence, many will lose their jobs – anet 7% of U.S. jobs by 2025.

So how can a nation instead of being disrupted become the disrupter?

Scott shares a framework for transforming a nation. In his presentation, Scott shares the role of futurism, R&D, experimentation, investment, implementation, and knowledge transfer in the transformation of a nation.