Arkadi has built a career on transforming financial services to serve ordinary people. Arkadi is CEO of ZenBanx and was previously Chairman and CEO of ING Direct, a radical concept in banking that helped Main Street customers save their money. He created the first ING Direct in Canada in 1997, and the United States in 2000, and grew their enterprise value to $3.2 billion and $9.3 billion, respectively.

Prior to this, Arkadi served as President of North American Trust and as CEO of Deak International, then a global leader in foreign exchange. Arkadi is an educator, an advocate of financial education, a speaker on finance and culture driven leadership, and is the author of two books on the latter.

Arkadi described the genesis of ING Direct’s revolution in banking as a shift from supply-driven financial services, with banks dictating how things are done based on what’s easiest for them, to demand-driven, where consumer needs and preferences determine services. ING Direct was famously willing to “break up” with some customers who needed more support than the low-fee, basic services model ING Direct offered – a testament, he says, to understanding the consumer they set out to target and sticking to that consumer’s needs. ING Direct was a sea-change innovation born inside a large parent company, The ING Group; Arkadi advised innovators in similar situations to be willing to turn down help from the larger organization when it doesn’t fit the innovative idea (for ING Direct, that meant resisting an IT system that would have added unnecessary features) and to maintain a company culture that fits the innovative product (in his case, bare-bones headquarters in line with the simplified model ING Direct provides).

In her appearance on the show, Yukari Kane discussed her book, just then released, and how she views Apple today. Among other topics, Ms. Kane discussed the specter of Steve Jobs, what the benefit to Apple of Steve Jobs’ presence was, and Tim Cook today. The discussion touched upon how Tim Cook today would manage a young Steve Jobs and delved into the nature of the young and innovative Jobs.

Ms. Kane graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and worked at Reuters and U.S. News and World Report prior to joining the Wall Street Journal. She joined WSJ as the Tokyo correspondent and covered Sony originally. In the United States, she is in the San Francisco Bureau and covered Apple during the end of Steve Jobs’ reign at the company.

Topic: Innovating in an ecosystem

Pandya and her co-founder developed their award-winning app, Easily.do, with it in mind that it would exist in an ecosystem, integrated with the many other social, work, and task-management apps in the marketplace; the founding team saw this opportunity after experience integrating other kinds of data on the back end of consumer hotline systems. As with most apps, Easily.do’s design was driven by the consumer experience (the app is still guided by the mantra “one or two clicks should get stuff done”), but so was its business model – Easily.do doesn’t run on ads because “its purpose is to help you know and do what’s important, and a personal assistant wouldn’t come to work and tell you a bunch of things you could buy downstairs on the street.” Pandya acknowledged the “app gold rush” playing out in the marketplace, but said Easily.do sees value in the app economy and plans to stay there and stay relevant by including users in every stage of the development process in order to fully understand their needs.

HetalPandya is committed to building mobile applications and solutions to help simplify life. She over 15 years of experience building and promoting mobile products, and she founded EasilyDo to enable consumers to be able to use their smartphones to actually do smart things for them. Most recently, she ran the Mobile Care Product and Marketing Division at Nuance Communications, where she built a $30+M revenue mobile care product portfolio from concept. She has also built many thought leading mobile applications and solutions at Microsoft (Tellme Networks) and Nortel Networks. She holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas, Dallas and MBA from Duke University.

Topic: Wearable technology and challenges to managing innovation in established companies

Anna Jen joined Innovation Navigation from SXSW in Austin, where she was presenting and participating in panels on Epson’s latest in wearable technology, Moverio BT-200 smart glasses and Pulsense activity monitors. Epson is best known for printing and imaging tools, and the innovation process for each of these new products, she explained, is an example of identifying new applications for Epson’s existing technology (the smart glasses are essentially “the world’s smallest LCD screens,” and Pulsense operates using green LED light) for a new market segment – in contrast to Google Glass and Fitbit, both focused on consumer opportunities, Epson’s devices are designed for enterprise applications. Innovation ecosystems were a theme of the day, and Jen highlighted that engaging with software and app developers early to understand the use case and user experience was key to Epson’s progress with both Moverio and Pulsense.

Anna Jen has over a decade of experience in technology strategy and marketing. Before her current role at Epson, she had leading roles in its photo imaging and photo-ware products, and in technology and retail marketing for Polaroid and mobile device strategy for Motorola. She holds a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Topic: Co-making and innovation collaboration between companies

Devin Liddell’s visited Innovation Navigation to share his vision of the next big thing in innovation: co-making, the arrangements under which two companies collaborate from the earliest design stages to create a product together (as opposed to simply co-branding a product one or the other made independently). Liddell believes this approach is responsible for some of the most original products to hit the market in recent years, including Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos and the Fiat 500 by Gucci; he hopes tech companies will overcome their focus on patents and IP protection to enter co-making relationships more readily, and imagines such examples as a driverless car by iRobot and a car manufacturer. Liddell outlined the keys to successful co-making, including beginning with two independently strong brands, focusing on iterative prototyping rather than iterative talking and brief-writing – many believe a tenet of any good innovation process – and relationship touchpoints to keep the partnership healthy.

Devin Liddell leads the brand strategy offer for design consultancy Teague, working collaboratively with clients such as Anheuser-Busch InBev, The Boeing Company, Intel, JW Marriott, Microsoft, and SC Johnson to create research-driven brand strategies and consumer experiences. With more than a decade of experience in brand strategy and design, Liddell has worked across a broad spectrum of industries: aerospace, higher education, software/technology, food and beverage, and retail. His work has been featured in Brandweek and Brand Strategy, and he teaches regularly at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, Washington.

Eshan talked about the innovation methods behind the wildly successful Chrome browser. In particular, he discussed the process behind the creation of Build with Chrome, a web experience in Chrome that allows users to build anything they’d like with LEGO bricks online.

Eshan Ponnadurai attended Monash University, and worked at Procter & Gamble and Ford Motor Company prior to working for Google. He is based in Singapore.

Bill Jensen’s book, Disrupt!invites readers to pick a chapter or two that interests them and read those and try to apply its lessons; it’s a book designed for people to read out of order, in order, or in whatever way they want to take away advice using it. On the show, he discussed some of these important ideas further, such as thinking not only about the customers, but also the workforce in order to innovate, thinking like a child and asking “dumb” questions, and applying the lean startup methodology to everyday life.

Bill Jensen attended Rochester Institute of Technology and worked for Ziff-Davis Publishing before founding The Jensen Group, a management consultancy.

Carlos Cordon brought a new perspective on innovation to the show with his work in innovation of the supply and demand chains. It is a difficult idea to bring innovation to bear on the supply chain, but CEOs have said that this is a major area they see themselves and their companies working on in the twenty-first century, as it is central to success today. Cordon introduced his work and discussed “Big Data” and other concepts relevant to supply chain innovation.

Professor Cordon is the LEGO Professor of Supply Chain Management at IMD. Prior to this role, he was trained as a civil engineer at EscuelaPolitecnica de Barcelona, received his Ph.D in management at INSEAD, and worked for Accenture and GrupoEspañol General Cable.

Amber MacArthur began her career at Razorfish in San Francisco during the dot-com boom. She later worked for Microsoft in Canada, was a co-host on G4TechTV, a reporter for CityTV in Toronto, and she co-founded Konnekt, a digital marketing company. Today, she is the bestselling author of Power Friending, works with Konnekt, has written in numerous publications, has been the keynote speaker at more than 250 events, regularly appears on numerous television programs.

On Innovation Navigation, MacArthur outlined social media as a tool for innovators and young organizations. She recommends that individuals and companies new to social media resist the hype on every new platform in favor of choosing one or two platforms to use well and consistently, and to go into social media engagement with a specific goal and a clear idea of how it fits the organization’s or product’s strategy. She shared a prediction that social media is trending away from today’s thousands-of-friends broad and shallow networks toward niche, private networks of small groups of close and trusted connections; in MacArthur’s view, this specialization in social media presents a great opportunity for marketers and brands which are able to engage in newly targeted ways.

Sheryl Connelly has been serving as the in-house Futurist for Ford Motor Company for almost a decade. In this role, she tracks global consumer trends to aide in the discussion of long-term planning and strategy across the entire company, including design, product development and corporate strategy. Prior to joining the trends team, Connelly spent eight years of her 18-year career with Ford in a variety of field positions in Marketing, Sales and Service roles. Before working for Ford, she practiced law.

In addition to a Juris Doctorate, she holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and a master’s in business administration. She teaches design research at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan. Connelly has been a guest lecturer at Massachusetts Institute for Technology, University of Michigan and Wharton School of Business and a featured speaker at TED Global. Her strategic viewpoints have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Financial Times and BBC, and she has been profiled in Automotive News, Forbes and Edmunds. Fast Company magazine named her the 24th Most Creative Person in Business in 2013.

https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/people/sheryl-connelly.html

Sheryl spoke about how the longer, 3-year cycle from a concept to a product, process of Ford’s business creates a need for a futurist at the company in order to observe and interpret trends to act upon. One important trend she mentioned was the increasing technology of the car, with the Sync system out now and much more coming, and that being a reason that Ford is becoming such a strong voice at the Consumer Electronics Show. She also talked about how scenario planning in futurism happens, which is when futurists write multiple stories that are effectively predictions for possible futures that can be used to plan responses.