A native New Yorker who grew up in a Lower East Side housing project, Burns started at Xerox in 1980 as a summer mechanical engineering intern and worked her way up to become CEO in 2009, according to NYDailyNews.com. She also made Xerox the first Fortune 500 company to be headed by a black woman.

But it’s more than just her background that makes her so inspiring, it’s the innovative leadership she brings to Xerox. Through the following statements from her Q&A, it’s clear that Burns is dedicated to the continued success of Xerox, a global document management company, in a time when digital communications and sustainability are top of mind at corporations across the globe:

• The best time to change is when everything is uncertain. That gives you permission to think about doing things differently and connecting that thought to action.
• Great researchers will solve a problem you don’t think is a problem.
• We do dreaming sessions with clients. We spend time understanding what they do. (Our) people are trained in listening and understanding what their work day looks like. Out of that, we understand true pain points and then our researchers go to work on solving that problem.
• We don’t frame ourselves as a green company. In the beginning we reproduced images on paper. We serve a real need. Our focus is:
  • Use less of everything. Have paper that uses more of a single tree than other papers do. We use 90 percent of a tree versus 10 percent (like less sustainable papers).
  • Use less water. We have a technology that use less water called “Solid ink.” Print devices use a lot of energy and create a lot of waste. Solid ink creates 90 percent less solid waste.
• How (does a company) become green? Take something that’s needed and innovate it to use less of what you’ve used in the past.
• In addition, business process is connected through paper. Can you figure out a way to automate that so paper is moving out of the system? (We spend) $10 billion on services, such that we’re not a paper/printed image company. We’re that, but we do many other things.
• It’s very feasible. Like any technology, you prove it’s possible. You can print on anything. The precision by which you do it is the leap.
• We’re past the “can you do it” phase and now we’re in the “how do we refine it and make it affordable” (phase).
• Some (innovations) are in printing. The breakthrough has to be in cost for the client. If we can get the price down, we can move more printing to color. We spend quite a bit of money in color marking technologies. How do we do it smarter, faster, cheaper?
• One of the things that being a transformational leader entails is allowing and letting. In our company, we had become used to operating in a space with boundaries and a leader who orchestrates these things. I’m not that leader. I want 130,000 people to understand the intermediate point we want to get to and understand that I don’t know the answers to all the questions and give them the ability to try and (permission to) fail to solve those.
• I define my business as broadly as possible. Before, if you have anything outside our definition, you couldn’t try it. Now if you have something to do with content unstructured, you should talk to Xerox.
• Our mitt is bigger than it was before. It’s the same set of skills. What I would consider my core system is very different that what people thought it was before.
• It’s about being flexible and moving relatively fast and not being afraid to say “this is not ours, lets sell it.”

Burns certainly has the right attitude to carry Xerox’s legacy into the future. And with Xerox’s second-quarter profits jumping 62 percent over Q2 2009, thanks in part to the February 2010 acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, a global leader in business process and information technology services, Burns’ leadership is already evident.

– Stephanie

(Photo courtesy of PhotographyByDov.com.)

Almost two years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act will “give the government new powers to break up companies that threaten the economy, create a new agency to guard consumers in their financial transactions and shine a light into shadow financial markets that escape the oversight of regulators.”

Passed with limited bipartisan support, the law, of course, faces criticism such as whether it’s tough enough, its lack of specific directions for regulators, and its failure to address Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Still, the President says the reform will support innovation.

“The fact is, the financial industry is central to our nation’s ability to grow, to prosper, to compete and to innovate,” Obama said when he signed the bill. “This reform will help foster innovation, not hamper it. It is designed to make sure that everybody follows the same set of rules, so that firms compete on price and quality, not on tricks and not on traps.

“It demands accountability and responsibility from everyone. It provides certainty to everybody, from bankers to farmers to business owners to consumers. And unless your business model depends on cutting corners or bilking your customers, you’ve got nothing to fear from this reform.”

But what does it really do for innovation?

In his weekly address last Saturday, Obama shared aspects of the plan that support innovation in America, including:

• Giving tax breaks and expanding lending to small business owners who are creating jobs in America, rather than overseas.
• Investing in a homegrown, clean energy industry with tax credits, loan guarantees and investments that will lead to more than 800,000 clean energy jobs by 2012.
• Cutting taxes for 95 percent of working families.
• Offering tax credits for college students.
• Making a new commitment to community colleges.

But, not everyone agrees with the President. In fact, the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of leading U.S. companies, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation, both released statements last week arguing that the legislation is too broad for the U.S. business community and will take the country in the wrong direction.

“Regrettably, this legislation imposes a one-size-fits-all approach on a very diverse, vibrant set of economic participants, stifling America’s ability to encourage investment, innovation and job growth, while promoting economic uncertainty for small and large businesses alike,” the Roundtable said.

“This is nothing more than a financial regulatory boondoggle,” Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber said. “It won’t strengthen our capital markets. It won’t jumpstart the economy, and it won’t help create any new jobs except in government.”

On the other hand, SFGate.com said the White House could solve these regulatory issues by appointing an appropriate head for its new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The leading candidate, SFGate.com said, “is Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor who came up with the idea in the first place. Warren is a whip-smart consumer warrior who has fought the banks for decades.”

But Politico.com said the White House is reluctant to embrace Warren because of “opposition from Republicans and the business community.”

So what do you think? Does the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act support or stifle innovation in the United States? Share your thoughts below.

– Stephanie

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) announced in May that it’s launching three Energy Innovation Hubs, designed to “help advance highly promising areas of energy science and engineering from the early stage of research to the point where the technology can be handed off to the private sector.”

These hubs not only demonstrate the nation’s commitment to tackling our energy and climate challenges, but they also represent an innovation endeavor not often associated with the U.S. government.

Each of the three hubs will tackle a different energy challenge in a highly collaborative way that welcomes diversity of thought. They will “bring together top researchers from academia, industry and the government laboratories with expertise that spans multiple scientific and engineering disciplines under the leadership of a dynamic scientist-manager.”

They differ from other DOE R&D projects that have smaller teams, more clearly defined leaders and few disciplines represented.

The first hub, the Nuclear Energy Innovation Hub, will “allow engineers to create a simulation of a current operating reactor that will act as a ‘virtual model’ of that reactor,” which they can study to address questions about operations and safety. It will be located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory site in Tennessee.

The second, just announced yesterday, will focus on developing “a solar energy fuel conversion system through artificial photosynthesis and (bringing) it to commercialization,” according to FastCompany.com. The Fuels from Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub, will be led by the California Institute of Technology in partnership with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The third hub hasn’t been launched yet, but it will focus on designing, constructing and retrofitting commercial and residential buildings to make them more energy efficient than today’s buildings.

The topics these hubs address are top-of-mind across the globe as countries seek to reduce their emissions. These hubs will help the United States compete in the battle to go green.

Each hub will receive $122 million over five years. And, according to the press release, the hub managers will have “enough resources and authority to move quickly in response to new developments.”

That means they have a great potential to “achieve energy breakthroughs as quickly as possible.” I wish them well and look forward to following their progress!

– Stephanie

Indeed, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ (NAEP) 2009 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) Report Cards, students have improved in reading and math since 2003, but not significantly. The TUDA tests samples of students in fourth and eighth grade in 18 different urban district public schools. The 2009 assessment found that both reading and math scores for 4^th graders were unchanged. Scores for 8^th graders improved only slightly.

Yet in 2008, American 15 year olds still ranked 25^th in math out of 30 industrialized countries, according to Strong American Schools. What’s more is that the United States’ competitiveness continues to erode as well. And there is direct connection between the education of a nation’s people and its economic success and competitiveness.

And NCLB has certainly seen its share of criticism. For instance, according to Wikipedia.org, “the focus on standardized testing (all students in a state take the same test under the same conditions) as the means of assessment encourages teachers to teach a narrow subset of skills that will increase test performance rather than focus on deeper understanding that can readily be transferred to similar problems.”

This focus is one of the reasons writers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman say America is facing a creativity crisis.

In a must-read article in last week’s Newsweek, Bronson and Merryman say that despite 1,500 CEOs identifying creativity as “the No. 1 ‘leadership competency’ of the future” in a recent IBM poll, creativity is decreasing among Americans.

In fact, there’s a “gold standard” in creativity assessments (CQ) that indicates that people who are more creative as children grow up to be more successful than those who are less creative. This “gold standard” is a series of creativity tasks called the “Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking” designed by professor E. Paul Torrance in the 1950s and ’60s.

“The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.”

This sounds great, except that while IQ scores have consistently gone up generation after generation, CQ scores stopped rising in 1990 and have since then “inched downward.”

Bronson and Merryman said it perfectly: “The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. … Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.”

The lack of creativity in schools, teachers say, stems from pressure to meet curriculum standards.

But, “researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into the homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false tradeoff. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.”

Creativity isn’t just about art projects, it’s about the thinking process students take to solve problems in all fields. Bronson and Merryman said that students need problems that require them to first fact-find, then move to problem-finding, idea-finding and then solution-finding. This way, they’re using divergent and convergent thinking to arrive at original solutions.

The good news is that “creativity is one quality which every man is blessed with,” as entreprenuer Katherine Droguett said in her recent blog post. And people who don’t recognize that quality in themselves can learn techniques for uncovering and leveraging their creative potential.

But schools are essential in helping students learn these techniques. And right now they’re falling short.

What can be done to make our schools better able to foster creativity in the students?

– Stephanie

“One day, I thought of this idea,” she said at the World Innovation Forum last month. “Why aren’t the real leaders in our generation being recruited as aggressively to teach in poor communities for two years like they’re being recruited for Wall Street jobs.”

Two decades later, TFA is renowned for its aggressive and selective recruitment of the nation’s brightest college seniors.

“They’re more like an Ivy League graduate program than a volunteer organization. And that’s a feature, not a bug,” Ezra Klein said on WashingtonPost.com last week. “The difficulty of getting accepted makes acceptance an accomplishment.”

That just adds to value of TFA. Not only does it provide teachers to underprivileged students, but it also provides recent college graduates with something worth bragging about, as Klein said.

And that is what Kopp did. She bragged about the different ways TFA teachers are improving the lives of their students.

Indeed they are. There is no arguing that TFA is adding value in the classroom, particularly now that 66 percent of the teachers stay on after their two-year commitment ends. And proof of TFA’s success has been documented in books like TFA alum Steven Farr’s Teaching as Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap, published in February 2010, about lessons from TFA experiences that can help any teacher be great.

I am truly awed by what Kopp and TFA have done to change the notion that socioeconomic  status establishes educational outcome. That is true value creation. But I would have liked to have heard less about what a few teachers have done over the past 20 years and more overarching lessons that we, the audience, can take from TFA’s success to our own organizations to make them more innovative.

Teachers at underprivileged schools face a number of challenges beyond poor math skills and illiteracy. It’s clear that TFA teachers are finding new ways to tackle these challenges, but what about obstacles such as unsupportive administrators or resentful and more-experienced fellow teachers?

And what challenges does TFA face as an organization? What was Kopp’s process for launching this educational game-changer 20 years ago.

We all face challenges. TFA’s challenge are truly extraordinary. Surely these teachers and the organization have valuable lessons for all. What are they?

– Stephanie

(Photo courtesy of PhotographyByDov.com.)

Spogging, or speech blogging, “is an interactive approach,” he said. “I’m trying to tune my speech as I’m talking to you.”

It was an intriguing concept, but with Twitter down, again, it just didn’t really work. Too bad, I would have liked to have seen spogging.

Still, he shared some insights into innovation:

• Innovation is a team sport. On its own, an innovation is alone. It then needs someone that’s going to be an early adopter. Then they need a skilled media that listens, watches and learns.
• Our culture is telling out kids, “go out there and build something yourself.”
• Governments and foundations are offering challenges of all types. They’re asking general people all over the globe to come up with answers.

And he shared reasons why most startups fail:

• They confuse a clear vision with a short distance.
• Ego and greed.
• They don’t create an understanding of the product. If they don’t really understand their own product, how do they expect anyone else to?
• The products don’t iterate well.
• They’re not smart fast enough. Ideas are more perishable than ever before.

So while I didn’t get to witness true spogging, I did get a glimpse inside the world of innovation from the point of view of a venture capitalist.

– Stephanie

(Photo courtesy of PhotographyByDov.com.)

That’s exactly the question the second-richest man in the United States, Warren Buffett, is trying to answer. Along with Bill Gates, the richest man in the United States, and his wife, Melinda, Buffett is attempting to boost giving among the country’s wealthiest people through “The Giving Pledge.”

According to the Web site, “The Giving Pledge is an effort to address society’s most pressing problems by bringing more dollars to philanthropy.”

In 2006, Buffett made a pledge to donate more than 99 percent of his own wealth to philanthropy during his lifetime or at death.

“What I can do,” he said in his pledge, “is to take a pile of Berkshire Hathaway stock certificates – ‘claim checks’ that when converted to cash can command far-ranging resources – and commit them to benefit others who, through the luck of the draw, have received the short straws in life.”

All he asks of his wealthy peers is that they recognize the value of philanthropy, which most of them do anyway, and increase their collective giving from about 8 percent to more than 50 percent of their net wealth to charity during their lifetimes or at death.

Currently, Buffett and the Gateses are inviting the wealthiest individuals and families in America to meet to discuss ideas about philanthropy.

According to Fortune.com, at one of these gatherings, Buffett declared the “best idea of the evening” was that “the rich should sit down, decide how much money they and their progeny need, and figure out what to do with the rest of it.”

That is just what Buffett did. “This pledge will leave my lifestyle untouched and that of my children as well,” he said. “They have already received significant sums for their personal use and will receive more in the future. They live comfortable and productive lives. And I will continue to live in a manner that gives me everything that I could possibly want it life.”

So far, Buffett has given the Gates Foundation, which combats disease and global poverty and funds U.S. education programs, more than $9 billion in Berkshire stock.

According to BusinessWeek.com, the Gates Foundation will receive 85 percent of his donation. The remaining 15 percent will go to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (named for Buffett’s late wife), the Howard G. Buffett Foundation (his son’s foundation), the Sherwood Foundation and the NoVo Foundation.

Anyone who makes the Giving Pledge may chose which charities to donate to.

Regardless, as Carol J. Loomis said on Fortune.com, the Giving Pledge “has the potential to dramatically change the philanthropic behavior of Americans, inducing them to step up the amounts they give.”

What do you think of this pledge? Will it work? Is it valuable?

– Stephanie

Now, I’d like to take a moment to get back to #WIF10 coverage. Day two of the forum started with a keynote by entrepreneur and author Seth Godin on marketing innovation.

He spoke about the evolution of marketing from simply making average people want to buy more average stuff to thoughtfully finding and connecting with groups of people based around their interests and developing products based on their needs.

“It’s a totally different kind of innovation,” he said. “Marketing management is now tribal leadership.”

This is a positive shift. But the problem, he said, is that our schools have beaten the creativity out of us.

“Innovation is hard because we send people to school and say ‘fit in.’ If you’re an innovator in school, you’re a ‘D.’”

And factory work of the Industrial Revolution led to interchangeable parts and interchangeable people. Today, Godin said, we need to be irreplaceable artists.

“The guys who set up the Mars Lander were artists. They used engineering and science to do something that’s never been done before,” he said. “If someone can write down what you’re job is, they’ll find someone to do it cheaper.”

His advice for being more innovative?

• “What we must take away from these two days is to do what hasn’t been done before.”
• “The idea of obedience is bogus. No company today would do better if employees were more obedient.”
• “Corporation after corporation is looking at what people who follow the instructions do and deciding they don’t need them anymore.”
• “I’m saying there is no map. It wouldn’t be worth anything.”
• “Challenge (yourself) to give yourself a ‘D.’”
• “Acknowledge that your next big idea will be laughed at. It frees you up to think.”
• “The fact that you’re stressed means this is the best time to innovate.”
• “Give gifts, not favors. A gift is something I give you because as an artist I can’t help it.”
• “We have to challenge ourselves to get over our fear. This kind of fear I’m talking about is real and distructive.”
• “We stopped rewarding cogs. Now all that’s left is rewarding people who do the unknown.”
• “If you want my permission, you have it. Please go make something happen.”

If you ask me, this is intimidating advice. Still, we all should be thinking about how might we make our jobs better? Or What might we develop and sell that would improve our clients’ lives? Let’s draw outside the lines.

How have you resisted the fear of breaking free to develop something new? What were your results?

- Stephanie

(Photo courtesy of PhotographyByDov.com.)

I’ve been asked to moderate tomorrow’s discussion. Here’s the framing for it:

Talking about innovation is great, but it’s nothing compared to actually doing innovation. At Fleishman-Hillard, we use P.O.I.N.T.S., our own proprietary problem-solving model designed to help our clients and teams develop, select, enhance, test and implement their ideas to deliver the greatest value, results and impact.

This six-step process takes teams from the point at which they decide something has to change through ideation to implementation and sustaining the change.

But it’s only one of many problem-solving models being utilized by organizations to help them apply creative thinking to achieve their goals.

I’ll start this week’s #innochat with a brief overview of P.O.I.N.T.S. and then open the discussion for pros and cons of other problem-solving models.

Thought starters:

• Why are models and processes important to the innovation process?
• What models and processes do you utilize to help your clients tackle their challenges? Why?
• What are your favorite aspects of the processes? Why?
• How do you continue to evolve the models as your client needs evolve?

This discussion is designed as a forum for sharing best practices and learning from our peers in the innovation industry. Looking forward to it! See you at 11 a.m. CDT!

– Stephanie

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@FHInnovation/@ssusman