Annual Meeting Is a Showcase of Innovation in Action

Breaking Through: Fostering a Culture of Innovation was more than just the theme for this year’s ACT annual meeting. It describes the way the entire event evolved:

• A graphic recorder captured key messages in real time, through words and pictures on large canvases.
• Rap artists summarized some of the activities in rhythm and rhyme.
• Keynote speaker Bill Strickland discussed his innovative work with disadvantaged people.
• Audience members responded to poll questions using hand-held keypad devices and cell phones. They also met in small groups to share their ideas on issues related to ACT’s strategic plan.
• ACT senior leadership and panelists engaged all attendees in interactive discussions.
• Miguel Encarnação, ACT’s first chief innovation officer, described how ACT is creating a culture of innovation.

Attendees reflected on keynote speaker Bill Strickland’s message and its relevance to the ACT strategic plan. ACT’s Jon Erickson (left) and Martin Scaglione led the interactive discussion.

Jon Erickson, president, ACT Education Division, and Martin Scaglione, president, ACT Workforce Development Division, discussed the connections between Strickland’s work and ACT’s new strategic plan. They noted that Strickland is focused on many of the same key issues as ACT: people, education, vision, empowerment, information, innovation, creativity, and passion.

They distilled these into five areas of focus for ACT’s strategic plan:

Data for a lifetime: Transforming data into intuitive, interpretive information that provides tangible next steps to help people achieve education and workplace success.

Education and workforce trends: Determining demographic, economic, and technology trends that will affect learning, training, employment, and job skills in the future.

ACT Missouri state representative Jay Goff asks a question during a discussion.

Empowering employees: Enabling people to think broadly and to be more fully engaged in their work, so they can help create innovative products and services.

Importance of customer centricity: Understanding customers’ perspectives to ensure ACT is meeting their needs.

ACT’s leadership strategy: Positioning ACT as the go-to resource for improving college and career readiness and workplace success.

Attendees then split into small groups to identify ACT’s key issues, strengths, challenges, and ideas for the future for each of these five areas. On the second day, leaders from each group presented summaries of their discussions, and ACT board members reflected on the information presented.

Debra Lyons, ACT vice president, community and economic development (at podium), presents ideas from her small group’s session during a panel discussion. Panelists included, from left, Janet Godwin, ACT chief of staff and chief accountability officer; Mark Musick, chairman of the ACT Board of Directors; Jon Whitmore, ACT CEO; and Carl A. Cohn and Dixie Axley, ACT Board members.

Encarnação concluded the annual meeting by describing the role innovation plays in meeting the goals for these areas. Citing the book Breaking Away: How Great Leaders Create Innovation that Drives Sustainable Growth— and Why Others Fail by Jane Stevenson and Bilal Kaafarani, he said that a product, service, or company must have three essential characteristics to be considered innovative:

• It has to be valuable.
• It has to be unique.
• It has to be worthy of exchange.

Drawing on examples from the annual meeting, Encarnação asked participants whether Strickland’s work met these principles. They concluded that it did.

Innovation entails:

• Building on core competencies
• Constantly challenging oneself
• Benefiting from multicultural/multidisciplinary inspirations
• Taking risk
• Failing often, failing early, and succeeding eventually
• Building to think and thinking to build
• Storytelling

Participants used hand-held keypad devices from Turning Technologies to vote on poll questions asked throughout the meeting.

Using this list, Encarnação polled attendees on which of these aspects is most important for innovation at ACT. Attendees used their cell phones to text or tweet their responses. He also asked them to vote on what they think are the most important foundations of ACT’s culture of innovation. Answers ranged from “knowledge” to “process” to “actions” to “values.”

He then showed a series of slides depicting innovation at work—Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs’ parents’ garage designing a machine that led to the first Apple® computer, Procter and Gamble employees wearing hospital gowns as they create new products for consumers, and Google employees brainstorming on a prototype.

Encarnação is encouraging ACT to develop a similar environment. The Office of Innovation will determine which ideas collected from staff, board members, partners, and others over the past year meet the definition of true innovation.

“Innovation is as much art and science as it is a rigorous process. Failing along the way is natural and okay—as long as we learn from it,” he said. “We need to think big in order to keep up with rapidly evolving consumer and market needs.”

Miguel Encarnação, ACT’s first chief innovation officer, explains how ACT is building a culture of innovation.