Gregg Fraley, Creativity & Innovation Consultant, Speaker

KILN Continues to Innovate Innovation Services

May 4, 2013

A peek at the contents of an IdeaKeg Single.

I’m off to the FEI show (Front End of Innovation) in Boston this week. In my view it’s the most serious innovation conference in the world, and the USA edition features speakers and participants from a who’s who of international organizations.

I’m particularly interested in hearing Denise Morrison CEO of Campbell Soup about their use of culture in the innovation process, and also Nelson Farris of Nike about corporate storytelling. It will be great to catch up with Idea Management System vendors like CogniStreamer, and innovation service firms like Ideas To Go and Maddock Douglas. They’re always doing something new.

I’m glad the show is in Boston. After the recent troubles it feels appropriate that a conference dedicated to positive change is taking place there.

I’m at FEI to represent KILN USA — the new branch of what has been until now a UK-based firm. KILN is announcing a new version of it’s IdeaKeg subscription service at the show. I’ll post the official release below with details about IdeaKeg Single.

KILN continues to innovate in the innovation services arena. Yes, I’m a principal of the company, so, this is hardly objective journalism. Still, show me another innovation consulting company that is offering what KILN offers. Does anyone else have a service like IdeaKeg? Can any other organization offer a kinesthetic and whole-brained process for turning global trends into new strategies and breakthrough ideas for your organization? We’re also rapidly becoming known as the go-to firm for training in innovation process and corporate storytelling (Kate Hammer’s StormForms is getting rave reviews, book her now or you’ll be talking 2014).

IdeaKeg Single, the new offering, is for organizations looking for a “power tool” to accelerate breakthrough thinking — on a one-time basis. Until now, KILN’s IdeaKeg was only available as a yearly subscription. This new, more affordable option, is ideal for organizations who already have a well articulated front-end-of-innovation process. IdeaKeg Single is a bit like adding hot pepper flakes to a pizza — it’s the same pizza but it has a lot more excitement!

If you are attending FEI, please come see me and give me a business card. I’ll get your name included in a contest to give away an IdeaKeg Single. Or, if you want to enter the contest through the web, click here.

***************** News Release *************************************

KILN launches IdeaKeg(tm) Single

Teams of all sizes can now conduct idea generation sessions with real objects of cultural relevance

Chicago, IL (May 4, 2013) – The first-ever 3-dimensional cultural insights stimulus box is now available to in-company teams and external facilitators for single-session use. Innovation catalyst company KILN will announce IdeaKeg Single at Front-End-of-Innovation Conference in Boston, MA 6-8 May 2013.

IdeaKeg Single offers teams a tangible, affordable, fun way to use KILN in Away Days and Brainstorms. You can run a whole workshop using IdeaKeg Single or include it as an exciting element in a broader agenda. In IdeaKeg Interactions, you’ll quickly find you ask bolder questions and generate your best ideas.

In an IdeaKeg Single, subscribers receive a box via Fedex that contains 7 cultural artifacts from all aspects of life. Each item represents an emerging trend, or is highly provocative as stimulus for ideation. Online materials (including a short movie) demonstrate how to use IdeaKeg effectively.

The new IdeaKeg Single provides a number of benefits to team leaders and group session facilitators.

IdeaKeg Single is multi-sensorial. Teams using IdeaKeg get to grips with cultural shifts and behaviour changes in a tangible form. This drives “breakthrough” thinking. Physical objects are plainly better at provoking new ideas than trend decks.

“The contents are inspiring” – senior research manager, major food manufacturer using IdeaKeg since 2011.

IdeaKeg saves time. KILN curates the collection, ensuring relevance. Our highly qualified team spots trends, makes sense of them and shares them in the form of physical objects. Users never have to read more than 300 words to make sense of an object.

Huggies “Little Swimmer” Inventor Paula Rosch observes: “Many companies have that ‘eccentric’ person whose office always looks like a museum store, shelves and desks filled with every imaginable item, from bath salts to kaleidoscopes to nanos. This individual has a knack for monitoring and collecting popular culture, from design to technology, giving it shelf space and allowing time for it to percolate into a valuable connection or idea. Not surprisingly, this is the office where a lot of the ideas come from.”

IdeaKeg Single fills the gap if your business doesn’t have that in-house eccentric.

KILN models creative thinking. Each IdeaKeg Single includes poster-sized mindmaps containing trigger questions and leaving space for teams to add their own. By posing questions before generating ideas, teams can be bolder and more creative without needing extra time.

“The KILN System has been used by large companies with established early-stage innovation processes since KILN launched at the Front-End-of-Innovation EMEA conference in Berlin in early 2011,” said Gregg Fraley, co-founder and Chief Solver of Kiln Ideas Ltd. “Now that our operations have scaled, we can offer IdeaKeg editions on a one-off basis. This means Away Day organisers and innovation process facilitators can bring the power and the fun of IdeaKeg interactions to the groups they run.”

For USA purchasers, IdeaKeg Single is priced at US $2,999 including shipping. To get IdeaKeg Single, please register your interest with KILN at http://kilnco.com/contact/ or email ignite@kilnco.com

A Prize Draw is underway, with one lucky winner receiving IdeaKeg Single at no cost. To enter, please meet Gregg Fraley at FEI 2013 or email your name, role, company name, email address and work telephone to ignite@kilnco.com

Entries must be received by 9 May 2013 Midnight Eastern Daylight Savings Time.

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For further information, please contact:

Gregg Fraley KILN Chief Solver

Expert in Creative Problem Solving and Early Stage Ideation

+1 888 553 1002

+44 20 3318 5728 (in the UK)

ignite@kilnco.com

About the Company:

KILN was founded in 2010 in London, United Kingdom to provide unique products and experiences to improve company innovation efforts. We believe that every successful innovator scans the world, articulates a solution in order to solve a problem or meet a need. We also believe that work should be fun, the sense of touch is under-used in most people’s working lives, and when we’re adults it takes serious commitment to play.

Early uptake for the KILN System has been in North America. At the request of a Fortune 100 entertainment company, we opened our services division in summer 2011.

We are pleased to announce that from 2013 Gregg Fraley is operating KILN USA on a full-time basis from his base in Three Oaks, Michigan.

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Innovation in Michiana, How Whirlpool Creates Magic

January 29, 2013

Benton Harbor, Michigan, have you heard of it? It’s a big enough town that it shows up on the weather maps of Chicago TV stations. It’s directly across Lake Michigan from Chicago. It’s in tourist area, but it’s hardly a garden spot — not nearly as quaint as nearby victorian-gingerbreadish St. Joseph. Locals call the area Michiana, a term to describe the cachement of small and medium sized towns along the Indiana-Michigan border (Gary, Michigan City, Niles, Elkhart, South Bend, Three Oaks, New Buffalo…). Michiana is a lovely area — if you like the beach, vineyards, and the woods. It’s not exactly Silicon Valley. It wasn’t always so. Once upon a time Benton Harbor was home to one of my

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Top 40 Innovation Blogger? (Top 10!)

December 14, 2012

Precious readers, greetings from the dark night, where I write, jet-lagged, arthritis-nagged, caffiene-jagged — but writing for you, once again, trying to provide insight, information, and ultimately value about this wacky idea of innovation. Please forgive the somewhat naval gazing aspect of this post. The good news for you is over the past year you may have missed some of my more interesting posts and the bullet list below provides some quick links to stuff you might find interesting. A request for help: Every year, Innovation Excellence, a premier portal for innovation content, has a popularity contest style “Top 40″ Innovation Bloggers of the year listing. I admit, I wish to be on the list. I wasn’t last year and

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Get the Innovation Party Started

September 17, 2012

Can we just Get the Innovation Party Started already? One of the most frustrating things about being an Innovation consultant is watching organizations get stuck in a mud pit of inaction around innovation. Call it procrastination, lack of corporate will, a culture of bureaucracy — they all amount to the same thing: no productive innovation work done. I see it over and over, it’s as common as a head cold and just as unpleasant. I’ve written about this before — today’s post has a bit of a new wrinkle. Here’s the message: Have a party and get started. I mean it literally. Make innovation an ongoing company party. The common suggestions around how to circumvent this…innovation infarction…are many. They include:

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Six Reasons Not To Fire Steve Jobs

July 9, 2012

Ask John Sculley, the man who fired Steve Jobs — would he do it again? Probably. As Michael Corleone once said about a fellow mobster taking sides against him just as he took power — “it’s the smart play.” MBA’s are trained to manage, and that usually doesn’t mean disrupt. Let’s be frank, people who think different (high innovators on the KAI scale, a measure of cognitive style) are a pain in the ass. Even those who are very self-aware and have trained themselves in social graces eventually show their true colours in classic corporate settings. They can’t help it. They are less problem solvers than they are problem finders. Many of you know that I recently posted a piece

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Scaffolding to Better Ideas #2 (Getting More From Virtual Idea Generation)

July 5, 2012

Virtual idea generation is a growing trend in innovation. A trend I wholeheartedly endorse because it widens the cohort that normally contribute to “brainstorming” efforts. It gives people time to think and then post ideas as time allows in the nooks and crannies of their day-to-day jobs. It’s a great way to make idea generation and innovation part of the culture of an organization. It’s usually done with an Idea Management System (IMS) but in a pinch, it can be done with something like GoogleDocs or even email. Basically, you put out a focused innovation question and you ask for ideas. The virtual session could be as short as a few days, or as long as a few months. In

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Why Stepping Up as Innovation Team Leader is Insane

June 24, 2012

It’s easy to understand why many managers are not interested at all in heading up an innovation team. Saying no is the sane choice. The truth is Innovation Team Leadership is usually a thankless job. It’s often a job on top of another job. In other words, a lot of extra work spent on innovation initiatives means it’s a killer to keep up with the business-as-usual-operational job. So, that’s usually enough to kill innovation leadership motivation. But wait, there’s more! Not only is it a ton of work, it’s high risk. Many, even most, innovation efforts fail. Failure doesn’t look good come job and salary review time. People spout a lot of happy talk about learning from failure but the

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How to Start an Innovation Initiative

June 20, 2012

I was in France a couple weeks ago and was delighted to help someone learning English. They asked what is the most useful phrase in the language. I knew immediately. The phrase? “It depends.” It’s the answer to nearly any complex question. It buys you time to think, and actually, it’s nearly always true. And of course it allows you to pretend to know something you don’t. So, when I am asked how to begin an Innovation Initiative, the ultimate complex question, this is my answer — it depends. If I know context I can do better than It Depends, but it takes time, effort, and money to know context well enough to give a good answer. What does it

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Gonzeaux #8 — Florida

May 21, 2012

I spent most of the past week in the great state of Florida. While I hardly exhausted the potential of it’s vast expanse and endless coastline, I did get a gonzeaux dose of it. The FEI 2012 Conference lived up to it’s billing and reputation as the “serious” innovation conference. Hard to summarise, but let me try: great, insightful, relevant speakers, interesting interactions with both participants and vendors, and lots of fun and conversations around the edges. All about innovation of course. It’s expensive, but it you’re serious about innovation at your organisation and want to be aware of trends in the “industry” it’s well worth going. I made some great connections for KILN, which was my personal goal in

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Alabama Innovation, Gonzeaux #7 — Birmingham’s Future

May 14, 2012

Birmingham Alabama — Monday May 14th, 2012, Gonzeaux #7 It’s an image that was so arresting and shocking at the time that I’ve never forgotten it. It stained my memory like indigo on fine white linen, never to be washed out. I was nine years old. I’m talking about the sight, on national television, of black people being attacked by German Shepard’s in the Birmingham, Alabama race riots of 1963. The high-pressure water hoses were cruel, but the dogs, those vicious dogs, made my skin crawl, and it flipped a switch in my head. From that point forward I was a social progressive. I’ve not ever visited Alabama. I’ve been to nearly every state in the USA, but never had

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Open Innovation