The pressure is on innovative capacity. Everybody agrees. Trends indicate shorter product or service life cycles. Customer satisfaction is short lived. Earlier than ever they want something new. Building on experience or a long lasting competitive advantage is less an option. However innovation can only be realised and delivered with a motivated team of knowledgeable people having sufficient entrepreneurial blood so they want to go and explore. They will explore the fundamental needs of existing and potential customers, but also their capacity to be creative and learn new skills and techniques and optimise team interaction. Younger employees tend to have higher education than previous generations. They are skilled in new technology however lack experience.
Learning and knowledge exchange or sharing patterns will need an upgrade. Not only is experience still an asset, existing workforce will need to work longer careers than previous generations. Increasing age and life expectance, decreasing numbers of younger people will require all of us to make longer careers. Understanding added value of all team members will become key differentiator for teams, groups and companies to maintain their market postion. We summarised the reasons for investing in innovation, knowledge creation sharing and new approaches to come to products and services in a slide doc stuffed with facts and figures about the need for investing in what is most probably the strongest sustainable asset you will ever have.