Be inspired to innovate, innovate to stay relevant. These were some of the main themes in Cynthia's presentation Complete with numerous examples of how innovation can be actuated both from a personal and organisational standpoint. Cynthia reminded us that innovation is a process and not merely an outcome

1. BY CYNTHIA PHUA
30 NOV 2015
Innovation

2. Cynthia Phua CV
• Present Organisation and Social Works:
– Consultant for Shared Services, ASME
– Trainer, Glocal Advantage Pte Ltd
– Independent Director, Viking Offshore and Marine Ltd,
– Director, Clarity Singapore Ltd
– Member, Catholic High School Management Committee
– Member, SMEC, SBF
– Chairman, RPWG, SMEC
– Member, CHAIR, Singapore Red Cross
– Honorary Adviser, Defu Industrial Manufacturing Association
and other temple and social organisations.
• Married with 3 children and I read, play golf and does
pottery utility wares.

3. Cynthia Phua CV
• Cynthia holds a B. Sc (Estate Management) Honours from the
National University of Singapore, 1985. She also attended the
Advanced Management Programme in Harvard Business
School in 2011.
• Cynthia has over 30 years of experience in the real estate
industry and over 10 years in the retail business.
• 2014 to 2015: Singbridge Corporate Pte Ltd, Executive Vice
President, primary role was to facilitate the transfer of
Singapore’s software to overseas projects.
• 2013: Knight Frank Pte Ltd , Executive Director and Head of
Retail Services. Besides retail consultancy locally also led the
consultancy teams for an Iskandar development in Johor
Bahru and in Vientiane, Laos.

4. Cynthia Phua CV
• 2002 to 2013: NTUC FairPrice Co-operative Ltd. Under Cynthia’s
leadership, FairPrice and Cheers expanded their footprint in Singapore
from 103 to over 254 outlets island-wide.
• Cynthia held many positions while serving in FairPrice:
– Managing Director of Real Estate Business Unit,
– Board Directors of NTUC related companies, NTUC Choice Homes Co-
operative and One Marina Property Services.
– Board Directors of invested properties: Chairman of Thomson Plaza
Mall (MCST) AMK Hub, Sengkang Mall, Clementi Mall, Chinatown
Point Mall ,
– General Manager of Cheers, a wholly-owned subsidiary of FairPrice
that operates 24-hour convenience stores throughout Singapore in
2004 to 2006. She was part of the team that led a progressive
conversion of about 60 retail outlets in Esso petrol stations into Cheers
Convenience stores.

5. Cynthia Phua CV
• 2001 to 2011: Cynthia was also an elected Member of Parliament in the
Aljunied Group Representation Constituency. She was known as a
grassroots’ MP and initiated and help to set up needed social services
centres for residents:
– TCM free clinic ( including acupuncture services),
– Xtreme Youth Centre ( school dropouts) centre;
– FAME club ( Mentally Challenge Recreational Club),
– Kampong Senang Children centre ( for learning difficulty children),
– Joylink Neighbourhood Link centre ( elderly social club).
• 2004 to 2011 : She was also the Chairman of Aljunied Town Council. She
conceptualised the first Town Council Iphone app for residents to
participate in Town Management in 2010.
• 1993 to 2002: Toa Payoh Town Council and Bishan-Toa Payoh Town
Council, Chief Executive Officer;
• 1985 to 1993, HDB Executive/Estates Officer

6. Creativity vs Innovation
• Creativity – Michelangelo, a brilliant painter.
• Innovation that drives change –Alexander
Graham Bell – extracted information and
created an innovative product- telephone
that create value and drove change.

7. What is innovation?
• Simply stated, innovation is the process of
translating an idea or invention into a good or
service that creates value above every existing
alternative.
• Is broad, diverse, complex and unpredictable
• Serves as catalyst for growth in business and
economics
• Has much impact on our lives: Makes our lives
easier, enhances our productivity, improves our
health entertains us and broadens our ability to
communicate and connect on a global scale

8. How does innovation Happen?
• Creative destruction or disruptive innovation
• Innovation starts with disrupting the old ways of
doing things
• Wanting to make the product or services efficient
and effective, arising from the environment ( eg
lack of manpower)
• At first disruption maybe too small to be noticed-
if not alert, companies will be obsolete. ( a no of
phone makers are no longer in existence)

9. Disruptive innovation
• Disruption occurs when a moribund industry
or vendor is unable or unwilling to react to
market and industry forces.
• Examples:
– AirBnb disrupting hotel chains,
– Uber disrupting taxi companies and
– Netflix disrupting Blockbuster

10. Types of Innovation
• In this decade, we think of innovation in terms of technology
• Innovation comes in many forms:
– a ground breaking product, iPod and then followed by iPhone.
– Creative new teaching method to enhance student engagement
– Unique incentive program to reward high performing employees
– Or a process, e.g. lean methodology which streamlines workflows and
eliminates waste to keep costs low
• Innovation can be incremental- simply improving a product or
service life cycle, business model innovation ( Reits, ) to pricing
strategies ( cloud service) , marketing and service delivery (
Amazon, Uber) or adding a new fragrance
• Many small entrepreneur built their entire business models
developing and producing products that help larger, well known
companies be more efficient or effective. Eg iphone glass covers

11. Cross-industry innovation
Baby pram meets landing gear
Eggs meets wine
Restaurant meets airport
Financial services / insurance meets mobile-
Norwich Union was the first insurance
company to start with the “Pay as you go”
formula from telecom.

12. Innovation Impact on organisation
Innovation
Employees
Finance
Sales
Human
Resource
Operations
Marketing

13. Innovation impact on Organisation
Technology has changed the organisations and the way we work and interact:
• Employers on workers’ requirements:
– highly skilled workers who can learn quickly ( outsourced workers in other
countries),
– lifelong learners ( technology mediated online courses)
– No lifelong employees, suitable employees that can respond quickly to
changes due to technology
• Employee expectations:
– Flexible working hours and schedules, latest technology equipment-
smartphones and tablets
– Available 24X7 (?) and shorter work week instead
– Work from home
• Workplace changes
– Establish Distance Teamwork to allow quick and seamless product creations (
Charles and Keith shoes)
– Workplace becomes the central gathering of information
– that leads to Big Data analysis and smarter decision making

14. Organisation’s facilitation of
innovation
• Capture Employee Ideas Easily Using Mobile
Friendly Cloud Based Service
• A user friendly dashboard allows you to easy
view and gather powerful employee
suggestions and ideas.

15. The Five Technology Megatrends
• The Five Technology Megatrends summarized
below are creating winners and losers faster than
ever before:
– 1. Big Data Will Transform Healthcare, Government
and a Host of Industries
– 2. A Supercomputer Will Appear in Every Purse and
Pocket even on your face.
– 3. The Internet of Everything Will Usher in a Major
Productivity Boon -“mobile, social, and global.”
– 4. 3D Printing Will Change the Game in Manufacturing
– 5. Cloud Computing Will Disrupt and Enable
Businesses

16. Applying the Five Megatrends to Your
Organization
• Awareness of these powerful forces of change is
not enough. Established companies are
notoriously bad as they are so busy managing the
day-to-day business.
• The key is to make these trends come to life for
you and your colleagues, and then use them to
disrupt your company.
• Use the questions below to jumpstart your
session. Look for ways to unlock new business
value from the five megatrends – and avoid being
late in .

17. Stay relevant, ask questions.
• What BIG data can we access that we’re not capturing now?
• Can we deliver one of our capabilities as a digital service?
• What possible new uses for the smartphone might we be missing that could
benefit our customers?
• What do we need to shed (stop doing, sell off, close down, abandon, etc.) in
light of these trends?
• What do we need to start embracing (consider, purchase, investigate and
research, etc.) to capitalize upon each of the Five Megatrends?
• How do we need to position ourselves differently in our markets?
• What new capabilities or services might we start offering customers (internal
and external) to ride these tidal waves of change?
• Which of the five have the most promise/potential for organization and why?
• How can we innovate to take full advantage of these driving forces of
technological and social change?

18. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate, Innovate
• Rejection is part of the process –Focus on learning fast
– The game Angry Birds released in 2009 was a huge hit for
the Finnish game developers, Rovio Entertainment. It sold
over 20 million copies on various mobile platforms. It was
the 52nd game, there were 51 earlier attempts before the
big hit arrived
– We see a similar process in the Arts and in Business. The
novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J K
Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers before it was
accepted. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was
rejected 38 times. The founders of Skype made 40
investor pitches before they were accepted and Google
around 350.

19. Suggested Ways to Create a Culture of
Innovation in organisations
• Define your company’s mission around innovation.
• Create the structure to allow employees to experiment
new ideas with unstructured time, ( 15 to 20 % -
Google , 3M corp)
• Recognize employees' contribution to the innovation
process.
• Debra Kaye, author of Red Thread Thinking asks
companies to return to the past.
• Continuous education (conferences, seminars…).
• Allow failure.

20. Scott Cook (MBA 1976) in 1983 Cook cofounded Intuit with
the novel idea of financial software as a consumer-oriented,
customer-delighting product.
• The key to entrepreneurship and innovation, says Cook, a 1996 recipient
of the School’s Alumni Achievement Award, is “solving the problem that
other people have ignored or can’t fix.”
• To find those solutions, he has aggressively implemented the notion of
“user contribution system”- work with customers, through their implicit
choices or explicit actions,
• and his brainstorming employees (in small groups within the company )
even without specialised knowledge;
• Intuit ( accounting software company) went from conducting a single
experiment with customers to running 600 experiments in 2010.
• Explains Cook, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in business, it’s the power
of rapid-fire experimentation: enabling your team to test, rapidly change,
iterate, and test again. Run experiments with customers and let them
vote, instead of relying on the boss’s vote.
• Nothing makes a team more creative and agile than that.” And nothing,
he might add, keeps a business as innovative.

21. Shell GameChanger
• Shell employs 92,000 people, spending $1.3bn on R&D.
• “The Shell GameChanger ( 12 in a team) programme identifies and
nurtures unproven ideas that have the potential to drastically
impact the future of energy.”
• There are 4 key criteria on which proposals are judged:
– 1. Novel – Is the idea fundamentally different and unproven?
– 2. Valuable – Could the idea create substantial new value if it works?
– 3. Doable – Is there a plan to prove the concept quickly and
affordably?
– 4. Relevant – Is the idea relevant to the future of energy?
• GameChanger is open to internal as well as external proposals. This
principle embodies my view of the longer-term goal of Open
Innovation – an idea meritocracy, where the best proposals are
accepted and implemented, irrespective of the source.

22. Shell GameChanger
• Since its inception 17 years ago, Gamechanger has
invested $250m into over 3,000 ideas, implementing
over 100 and working with 1,500 innovators. One of
the successful projects is massive, developing a
Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) plant, a truly
radical innovation. Another good example is using
solar power to make oil extraction more efficient
• Assessment of the industry is that Shell is likely to
remain a leader in the energy industry as none of
Shell’s oil and gas competitors appear to have anything
similar in place.

24. Stay Relevant
• In 10 years, over 40 percent of the Fortune
500 will no longer be around. By 2020, more
than three fourths of the Standard and Poor’s
(S&P) 500 will be organizations that we have
not heard of yet. Predictions like these are
common these days. What if they turn out to
be correct?

25. What must I do?
• Realise that you are in the midst of change and
that change is part of you
• Welcome change as possibilities and
opportunities
• Note your thoughts and attitudes. Positive
thoughts build possibilities and opportunities
• Face the change squarely especially when change
is imposed and beyond your control
• Figure out what to accept and what not to accept

26. Be Inspired
• If you always do what you always did, you will always get what
you always got. [Albert Einstein]
• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the
unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to
himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable
man. [George Bernard Shaw]
• Minds are like parachutes; they work best when open. [T.
Dewar]
• Most of the important things in the world have been
accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there
seemed to be no hope at all. [Dale Carnegie]

27. Be inspired
• Ideas are useless unless used. [T. Levitt]
• It is not how many ideas you have. It’s how many
you make happen. [Advertisement of Accenture]
• Innovation is the ability to convert ideas into
invoices. [L. Duncan]
• Everything is possible. The impossible just takes
longer. [Dan Brown]
• Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run
over if you just sit there. [Will Rogers]