Today we’d like to introduce you to William and Debra Miller.
William grew up in Dallas, graduated from Jesuit High School and attended Stanford University on a scholarship. After obtaining a Masters in Humanistic Psychology from the University of West Georgia, he began his career in corporate training. By the mid-1980’s he was the Head of Innovation Management at the Stanford Research Institute, where he became firmly committed to developing processes that would enable people across an organization to be innovative in their daily work.
William met Debra, his partner and wife, in 1999. With her background in the corporate world in Dallas, along with 9 years as a business coach in Austin, she immediately recognized the value of his work and began to work alongside him to evolve and mature his models so they could be more widely used around the globe.
In 2010, they chose to incorporate Values Centered Innovation (www.VCI.global) in India in order to serve the South Asia and Asia-Pacific markets. They subsequently incorporated a USA subsidiary with roots in Dallas to better serve the Americas and Europe.
While Values Centered Innovation today looks like an innovation consulting and training company, they are passionately working to develop a patent-pending IT system that will bring the field of innovation out of the “only specialists can innovate” era and into the “everyone can innovate” era. That means a cloud-based productivity tool that every person can use to increase their capacity to be innovative, think innovatively, and act innovatively in their daily life and work. Think INNOVATE 365™.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
In order to accomplish our long-term goal, which is to develop this cloud-based Innovation Enablement System, we knew we had to test our processes, assessments, analytics and tools with a wide range of cultures and industries around the world. Since we both love working across cultures, this has been a great adventure for us, with of course challenges along the way.
Conducting a global business in a developing country like India is one of the most challenging experiences we’ve had. To quickly demonstrate this, if you look at the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business Index,” you will see that the USA ranked #8 in 2017, while India ranked #130. The lower the number, the easier it is to do business. This ranking depicts the level of difficulty we’ve experienced in doing business in India.
There’s one thing that underlies everything we do, and that’s making sure that working innovatively is based in human values, those qualities of good character that you find across cultures and time. While many of our clients are attracted to this dimension of our business, they often find it difficult to introduce initiatives that focus explicitly on values as the basis for innovation. So we have to be patient yet determined to help clients realize that values are no longer “soft stuff,” but are the “hard bedrock foundation” for business success.
We love to write and have numerous published books, articles and blogs. To help communicate this message of human values, we’ve just completed an extensive book chapter titled “Enabling Innovation through Human Values: A Recipe for Transformation.” This mini-book will be published later this year by Springer in a compendium titled “Handbook of Personal and Organizational Transformation.”
All of our work is based in research, which is something we naturally enjoy. Over the past decade we’ve been following the trends related to innovation, and we predicted that a time was coming when Human Resources and Talent Development would need to get intimately involved in building innovation capabilities and the culture for innovation. Remember, our mission is to bring innovation out of the “specialists” era into the “everyone can innovate” era. This means enabling every person across the organization to be innovative, and to think and act innovatively in their daily work.
While HR’s awareness and ability to take up this role is still in its infancy, we’re beginning to see movement in this area, especially since HR is becoming more involved in the organization’s strategy process and is being held more accountable for delivering business results. We’re even starting to have high level meetings with HR and business units together to discuss how they can work collaboratively to build innovation capabilities. This is exciting to watch unfold, yet keeps us always alert and learning how to best be of service with this maturing process.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Values Centered Innovation – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
We’re all about helping people at all levels in an organization to be innovative in their daily work, which enhances their careers and engages them to produce better business outcomes. Normally, innovation is thought of as a “noun” like a new product or process. But for us innovation is a mindset and a set of behaviors that result in doing something new, better or different to produce a benefit, whether it is large or small.
Today, the realm of innovation continues to expand beyond products, services, technologies and processes. Knowledge management, talent development, business models and strategy, organizational design, customer satisfaction – all these and more are common focuses for innovation.
We know that every person has the potential to be innovative, so we use a framework with 10 integrated modules to bring out that potential as we build the capabilities needed to be innovative.
We continuously strive to demystify innovation, which is why we like to say, “innovation isn’t rocket science, but it is powerful enough to build a spacecraft!” Our most outstanding capability is to integrate the cross-functional innovation priorities of CEOs, CINOs, CLOs, and Business Unit leaders. Our clients from around the globe describe us as: authentic, knowledgeable, enriching, responsive, flexible, practical and invaluable.
We’re not shy about admitting that our clients always hold a soft spot in our hearts. When we work side-by-side with clients to help them innovate in a way that meets and exceeds their most important needs, those are memorable experiences that we always feel grateful for.
As we all know, behind every good company is a lot of great support. Besides our network of clients and colleagues around the world, we have immense appreciation for our Senior Administrator, Stephanie Com, who lives in France. For over 5 years, she has provided a strength and stability that allows us to confidently be engaged in continuously innovating our business.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
It’s an exciting time for us at Values Centered Innovation. We’re currently looking for a substantial investor or strategic partner who can build this cloud-based Innovation Enablement System and launch it globally in the marketplace. We’re in that zone that all entrepreneurs hope for: The window of opportunity has opened and we have the confidence that now is the time to be a first-mover to launch this disruptive product.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.VCI.global
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Values-Centered-Innovation-344571602418123/
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/3202242/
- Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/valuescenteredinnovation
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