


The American Creativity Association has announced that its 2006 International Conference will be March 22 through 24, 2006 in Austin, Texas (woo-hoo!!). Contact Executive Director Barry Silverberg at barry --at-- amcreativityassoc.org with questions or suggestions.
The call for papers for this conference has been announced. Proposals must be submitted before October 31, 2005, and you can get information from the ACA website, linked above.
Paul Schumann contacted me about putting together a conference track on advances in the understanding of innovation in organizations. He's hoping to have seminars, workshops and panel discussions on new systems and knowledge of organizational innovation, especially open, collaborative ones.
Topics of interest for this track would be:
* Developing insights in a complex future
* Discovering opportunities and threats
* Attracting collaborators and leading collaborations
* Open systems for innovation
* Issues of recognition and reward in open collaborations
* Microeconomics of innovation
* Measurement systems for innovation
Anyone interested in participating in this special track on organizational innovation should contact Paul Schumann, paul -- at-- theinnovationroadmap.com, before submitting a proposal on the ACA website.


I just found out last week that I'll be speaking at Unlocking Innovation, which is the 11th annual Innovation Convergence conference (there's a linked banner ad for this conference over to the right on this page). Innovation Convergence is the excellent conference series that Joyce Wycoff runs (now in conjunction with IIR). Joyce has a conference information blog here.
My presentation is "Serious Creativity Goes Online: A Case Study," based on the white paper I wrote about here a couple of months ago.
Keynote speakers include Michael Raynor, who co-authored co-author of The Innovator's Solution with Clayton Christensen; Kal Patel, who's Executive Vice-President of Strategy and International for Best Buy; Bob Henn, former head of global R&D for W.L. Gore; Robyn Waters, trends guru. There will also be speakers from such companies as Genentech, Sunbeam, Nike, Starbucks, McNeil, Motorola, and many more.
If you're coming to the conference, please be sure to do your homework! On the conference blog Joyce details the homework assignments: we are all to bring an innovation artifact and an innovation story.
If any IdeaFlow readers are going, please let me know!


The unidentified author from the CPH127 blog who wrote the snippet I posted here (a report on the 2005 Front End of Innovation conference) has stepped foward -- it is Chris Conley, Professor of Product Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Thanks to Jacob Bøtter from CPH127 for the correction.


I wasn't able to attend this year's Front End of Innovation, but here I'll cite snippets from blog posts that are themselves snippets of the conference:
Microsoft blogger Kevin Morrill included in his report this exchange from Jack Welch's speech:
"...An audience member cited a report speculating how America will need more innovation in the 21st century to compete globally and then asked who Welch thought is responsible for this, as if it was some centrally appointed person or a government agency that needed to be formed. Welch said simply: “you!” Everyone in America is responsible for innovating. He pointed out that the only job security is customers, not companies—something that’s so true, yet so under appreciated in America."
and this from Peter Senge's speech:
"Senge started by focusing on how many companies start with great missions and values, but when you really talk to people on the ground floor the company moves to a different beat. One enlightening example was a t-shirt he saw: on the back it outlined the company’s key values such as honesty, integrity, focus on the customer, etc; on the front was the Enron logo."
For Chris Conley at the cph127 Design + Innovation blog, the highlight of the conference was a dinner speech by Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander:
"It is hard to describe what we experienced. He basically worked through a series of stories and activities that included conducting the audience in singing Happy Birthday to one of the audience members, helping us see new distinctions through music, and demonstrating how he works with his music students by working with one right in front of everyone. His main theme is how life is a series of possibilities and how we can make amazing things happen through passion and excellence."
Chuck Frey from Innovation Tools asked his readers to send in reviews of the event....here's a snippet of a much longer review Chuck posted from Jack Hipple of Innovation-TRIZ:
" It was also interesting to hear a few presentations from industry innovation 'leaders' who had been asked to rejuvenate or start an innovation program within their companies and these presentations demonstrated some significant learnings from the last wave of these efforts in the 80's and early 90's. Many of the organizational mechanics of these programs have been greatly improved, but no one talked about the people aspects of this that have been highlighted in the past (using social and problem solving style differences to improve the effectiveness of these programs)."
If anyone else out there who attended this conference and wants to share, I'll be happy to post it, and I'm sure Chuck Frey will too.
NOTE: Post updated 6/2/05 to include Chris Conley as author of the CPH127 snippet.


"Creativity" is too large a word and "design" is too small a word.
That's my one-sentence summary of the keynote speech given by Dr. Edward De Bono a couple of weeks ago at the annual conference of the American Creativity Association. I was privileged to attend this speech, and I've been reading a lot of De Bono lately too.
For De Bono, "creativity" is not a focused enough word. He prefers "idea change," which he says better captures the "skill in thinking" aspectof creativity, as opposed to considering creativity as a gift or something that manifests itself only in certain circumstances.
"Design" is too small a word for De Bono because he considers "design" as more than just putting together visual elements. He uses the word "design" to describe the process of deliberately putting together new ideas in order to deliver value.
The ideas put forth in De Bono's speech can mostly be found in his book Serious Creativity, which is one of my favorites.
Now that innovation is a corporate hot topic, I predict that DeBono's focused approach to creativity will gain more popularity. Most of the more touchy-feely (oops, I mean right-brained!) approaches to creativity and innovation aren't well suited to corporations -- I can attest to that! We've had clients who, even though they understand they originally hired us to bring them new ideas, greet every idea put forth with "that won't happen here." It's daunting. And our approach is already pretty serious and process-oriented.


Register for 10th Annual Innovation Convergence conference by August 20th and you can save $100 off the standard registration fees. Innovation Convergence, scheduled for September 26-29 in Minneapolis, has a big IdeaFlow-related presence: Joyce Wycoff is the conference chairperson, and she and both Henry Chesbrough and John Wolpert will be speaking.
At Innovation Convergence you can explore the latest innovation processes, tools and structures, and learn new ways to generate and implement breakthrough ideas that create value and enhance sustainable growth at your organization. Other speakers include Tom Kelley from IDEO, Larry Keeley, Steve Denning and many more.
Register to attend at www.iirusa.com/convergence or call 888-670-8200.
Note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for Innovation Convergence; if you register because you found out about it from us, please let them know!


Reporting in from Maribor, Slovenia.... 7th Biannual International Conference on Systems Thinking, Innovation, Quality and Entrepreneurship is full of energy. Maja Bučar presented an excellent report on the relationship between national innovation policy and innovation in the transitional countries in the European Union. I'm impressed with the serious attention policy makers give to the topic of innovation, how it is measured and supported in the European Union countries.
It is an exciting time for Slovenia, which is about to celebrate the 13th anniversary of its independence as a country, a time for such a young country to examine how it can prosper.
Alfred Posch and Gerald Steiner from Austria presented a fascinating report on their efforts to find a sustainable development approach for geographic regions in transition. Their efforts to tackle some difficult problems yield lessons for those who want to make the world a better place through innovation.
I'll post more as the conference progresses....


Clayton Christensen is an excellent speaker, but he presented a very “by the book” presentation – literally. Even the jokes he told were from The Innovator’s Solution. (If you haven’t read it – you should. Ideaflow posts on this book can be found here: http://www.corante.com/ideaflow/archives/cat_clayton_christensen.php)
But there were a couple of interesting points brought out in the Q&A period.
One line of questioning was about companies disrupting themselves on the “low end” by figuring out a way to make money at the lower end of the price point by developing a more basic product that performs the jobs that underserved customers want done. Christensen said that, while unusual, it has happened before: Intel stole back the lower end of the market with the Celeron.
One important point: The reason companies must set up a new, separate company to handle disruptions is that “the new game begins before the old game ends.”
The trigger that signals when it’s the right time to start this new game: There is never a one-size-fits-all answer. If you wait until the data is clear, you’ll miss it, said Christensen. One clue: “Do it as soon as there are customers. When you lose business at the low end, you have to be aware of it.”
If you are considering executing this strategy via acquisition: “When you see somebody there, buy them as soon as you can and keep them separate. Once it becomes obvious to the financial market[that they are a threat to you,] it’s too late.”
Regarding the fact that once actual data is available to signal the “new game,” one audience member asked, “Are the thousands of people in market research recognizing the ‘people doing jobs thing’ and asking about function, rather than just doing regular marketing research?”
Christensen’s response: “The concept has been around for a very long time, and yet there have to be processes in companies that cause them to lose focus on the job [customers want done] and focus more on using the data that is available. Understanding the consumer is a failed paradigm. I think we’ll see mass market research that will focus on jobs consumers want done.
In addition to innovation, our company does marketing research, so here’s my take: You could get at the “jobs customers want done” information by conducting qualitative research, not quantitative research. And not with conventional focus groups – try non-directive methods like depth interviews, or observational methods like ethnographic research, or even “desk” research – monitoring blogs, online and offline user groups, and so on.
If you do conduct focus groups, try some unconventional methods, and for sure don’t just come out and ask the group if there are by chance any jobs they need doing that aren’t getting done by any existing product. You have to get at their stories, and listen with a keen ear.
Once you’ve got some hypotheses, then and only then should you try to quantify them – not by traditional segmentation, but by trying to quantify how many other people may need to have these particular jobs done.


Coming up: A series of entries from the conference "Managing the Front End of Innovation," which wraps up today in Boston. With 400 people (compared to last year's 140) this is a big event in the innovation world. Lots of talk here about how innovation as an actual dsiscipline is coming into its own.
In fact, one conference leader is leading an effort to actually banish the word "fuzzy" from the term "fuzzy front end," on the theory that we shouldn't consider the front end of innovation as "fuzzy" because that's a negative. Meanwhile people keep referreing to this conference as the "fuzzy front end" or "FFE" conference. Guess that just goes to show you really can't legislate language usage within communities (efforts by parents of teenagers notwithstanding!).
Joyce Wycoff (an occasional Ideaflow contributor) has been posting notes on this conference to her Heads-Up on Organizational Innovation blog. Check it out here: http://thinksmart.typepad.com/headsup_on_organizational/ .
If I see any other blogs covering this, I'll link to those too.


If you're in the Boston-New York area and are open to last-minute planning you may want to consider attending the conference "Best Practices, Tools and Techniques for Managing The Front End of Innovation," which will be held Monday through Wednesday at the Boston Marriott Quincy in Quincy, Massachusetts.
A quick description: Although many companies have dramatically improved product development cycle time and efficiency by implementing formal development processes, these processes won't work without ideas to feed them. A steady stream of new, high-quality concepts is necessary to fill a development process pipeline, and this conference is about how to manage that process -- the "front end" of innovation.
This conference has attracted a lot of attention partly because most of the main players in the world of innovation are speaking, including: Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, John Seely Brown of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Dr. Stephanie Burns of Dow Corning, Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School, Eric von Hippel of MIT Sloan School of Management, and Dean Kamen, entrepreneur and inventor of the Segway inventor.
I've written about almost all of these folks over the 18 months I've been writing this blog, so it will be no surprise to anyone that you will also find *us* at this conference! Decision Analyst Innovation Services will be an exhibitor at "Managing The Front End of Innovation," so if you come to the conference, come by our booth and meet us. Just look for the frogs!
If you want to register in advance, click on the banner ad to the right, go here, call 888.670.8200 or email register@iirusa.com.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know by mentioning this priority code: M1604XIF


The conference "Best Practices, Tools and Techniques for Managing The Front End of Innovation" is close to selling out. Because of the demand, last Friday the organizers announced that the conference will move from its original hotel to the Boston Marriott Quincy in Quincy, Massachusetts, where it will be held May 24 to 26.
More about the conference: Although many companies have dramatically improved product development cycle time and efficiency by implementing formal development processes, these processes won't work without ideas to feed them. A steady stream of new, high-quality concepts is necessary to fill a development process pipeline, and this conference is about how to manage that process -- the "front end" of innovation.
One reason this conference has become so hot is that most of the main players in the world of innovation are speaking, including: Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, John Seely Brown of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Dr. Stephanie Burns of Dow Corning, Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School, Eric von Hippel of MIT Sloan School of Management, and Dean Kamen, entrepreneur and inventor of the Segway inventor.
I've written about almost all of these folks over the 18 months I've been writing this blog, so it will be no surprise to anyone that you will also find *us* at this conference! Decision Analyst Innovation Services will be an exhibitor at "Managing The Front End of Innovation," so if you come to the conference, come by our booth and meet us.
Again, if you're thinking at all about registering, you should go ahead and do it now. To register, click on the banner ad to the right, go here, call 888.670.8200 or email register@iirusa.com.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know by mentioning this priority code: M1604XIF


The biggest names in innovation and creativity are on the agenda for the upcoming conference "Best Practices, Tools and Techniques for Managing The Front End of Innovation," which will be held May 24 to 26 at the Hyatt Harborside Hotel in Boston.
Why is the "front end of innovation" so important? Because although many companies have dramatically improved development cycle time and efficiency by implementing formal development processes, these processes won't work without ideas to feed them. A steady stream of new, high-quality concepts is necessary to fill a development process pipeline, and this conference is about how to manage the process of filling that pipeline.
Keynote speakers include: Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, John Seely Brown of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Dr. Stephanie Burns of Dow Corning, Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School, Eric von Hippel of MIT Sloan School of Management, and Dean Kamen, entrepreneur and inventor of the Segway inventor.
I've written about almost all of these folks over the 18 months I've been writing this blog, so it will be no surprise to anyone that you will also find *us* at this conference! Decision Analyst Innovation Services will be an exhibitor at "Managing The Front End of Innovation," so if you come to the conference, come by our booth and meet us.
Word has it this conference might sell out, and you don't want to miss this one, so if you're thinking at all about registering, you should go ahead and do it now. To register, click on the banner ad to the right, go here, call 888.670.8200 or email register@iirusa.com.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know by mentioning this priority code: M1604XIF


Heard at the Braintrust conference:
Q. How many innovators does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It doesn't matter - the light bulb has to want to change before any change can occur!


I’m going to do a little reporting on Braintrust, a conference on knowledge management I attended last week. My experience of knowledge management as a field is that it seems to take two approaches. The first approach, the one that interests me most, is all about creating knowledge and working collaboratively and sustaining “communities of practice.” The second approach seems to be all about the nuts and bolts of getting knowledge out of the head of employee A and into the head of employee B, via intranets and software models and concepts for collaboration that seem just a short step above the old company suggestion box.
Keynote speaker Nancy Dixon spoke about the conflict between these two approaches in a talk about conversation. “You can’t give someone else your knowledge – every person recreates the knowledge they apply,” said she, and therein lies the conflict. Conversations are a preferred way to get knowledge shared, although they are not always as effective a way to share knowledge, because communication by conversation inherently also creates confusion. But -- along with that confusion, conversations also inherently create new meaning. When the same word means different things to different people; when the listener quickly interprets what’s being said against his or her own unquestioned inferences and worldview; when each mind in the conversation creates its own knowledge that’s slightly different from what the other minds involved in the conversation are understanding and creating -- these factors make sharing existing knowledge difficult. But they also lead to the creation of new knowledge.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Dixon’s talk was that her suggestion for making knowledge-sharing through conversation easier is also a suggestion that will make creating new knowledge through conversation easier as well. Her suggestion: Ask the "powerful question." Assume the other person has a reason for their conclusion that makes sense to them, because the knowledge that you want is not their conclusion but the reasoning for their conclusion. So you ask a “powerful question” meant to discover that reasoning.
Said Dixon: “The powerful question is, 'Help me understand your thinking, how did you reach that conclusion?' Each time the question is asked the language is slightly different, but what is the same is that you are asking for the other to let you in on the connections that exist in his/her own mind. What is so powerful is that it is the thinking behind other's conclusions that provide the needed in-depth understanding.”
Why is the “powerful question” also a useful concept for knowledge creation as well as sharing? Because it uncovers the connections that the other person has made that led them to create the knowledge they are sharing with you. Assuming you do the same and share your connections, then the pool of information from which connections can be made grows, including what I’d call “meta-connection” information – information about the logical framework from which connections can be made. All of this in turn increases the chances of inventive recombination.


At the 8th annual Linkage Strategies for Integrating Customer Feedback
event, topics discussed will include centering your corporate performance around the customer experience to retain at-risk customers, increasing incurring revenue (B2B), reducing churn (B2C) and increasing bottom line profits. Learn how to link your customer data to your financial, operational, brand, customer relationship and strategic information. To register visit www.iirusa.com/customer or call 888.670.8200.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know by mentioning this priority code: XMIDEAFLOW


Braintrust is coming to Scottsdale, Arizona, Feb. 8-11. Now in its 6th year, The Institute for International Research's Braintrust is the only international knowledge management forum for practitioners. This year's keynoters include Dr. Nancy Dixon, Consultant and Author of Common Knowledge; Rob Cross, Professor, University of Virginia and author of The Hidden Power of Social Networks ; Victor Newman, Chief Learning Officer, Pfizer; Stephen Denning, author of The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations ; and Gregory Balestrero, CEO, Project Management Institute (PMI)
Workshop tracks include Delivering Global Capabilities, Measurement and Value, Enabling a Collaborative Culture, and Knowledge Enabled Business Processes.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know by mentioning this priority code: M1547IF


Braintrust is coming to Scottsdale, Arizona, Feb. 8-11. Now in its 6th year, The Institute for International Research's Braintrust is the only international knowledge management forum for practitioners. This year's keynoters include Dr. Nancy Dixon, Consultant and Author of Common Knowledge; Rob Cross, Professor, University of Virginia and author of The Hidden Power of Social Networks ; Victor Newman, Chief Learning Officer, Pfizer; Stephen Denning, author of The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations ; and Gregory Balestrero, CEO, Project Management Institute (PMI)
Workshop tracks include Delivering Global Capabilities, Measurement and Value, Enabling a Collaborative Culture, and Knowledge Enabled Business Processes.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know by mentioning this priority code: M1547IF


John Wolpert shared this quote at the ROI Conference:
"As a student of innovation for some twenty odd years, I still find it amazing just how hard innovation continues to be."
-- John Seely Brown
I figure if JSB thinks this stuff is hard, the rest of us have a right to be overwhelmed at times.


Sorry for the recent quiet...a weeklong business trip with bad connectivity plus some difficult personal issues plus the holidays equals blog silence. Catch-up mode starts now!
First -- Here's an interesting story from Technology Review via Corante’s Venture Capital news section:
The problem in the tech sector is not a lack of innovation -- it is the inability to commercialize innovative new ideas, according to Kenan Sahin, a successful entrepreneur and alumnus of MIT and Bell Labs. In other words, "The flow of new innovations has remained strong and unabated over the past few years. It's the mechanisms for implementing them that have eroded." The article analyzes the so-called 'innovation backlog,' warning that "vast numbers of potentially important advances [are] being warehoused or shelved." As long as the "innovation-to-implementation flow is out of sync, the consequences for our work force, our wages, and our standard of living are serious. Unless we act decisively, it could be very difficult and costly to restart and resynchronize the flow."
My take -- sounds to me like this is a very strong argument for the kind of open innovation espoused by IdeaFlow bloggers Henry Chesbrough of Haas School of Business' Center for Technology Strategy and Management and John Wolpert of IBM.
My experiences this fall at two innovation conferences and one PDMA-sponsored new product development conference have indicated that not everyone involved in corporate innovation is signed on to this agenda, however. In general, I've found that the people who go to conferences organized around a theme of "innovation" seem more open to this idea than people who go to conferences organized around a theme of "new product development."
This could be due to differences in seniority -- more top-level managers at the innovation conferences and more product-level managers and R&D folks at the new product conferences. But that shouldn't matter, if you believe as I do that the push for innovation needs to be company-wide.
John Wolpert made a very good point at the recent Return On Innovation conference: There seem to be two camps regarding innovation -- those who view it as something of a religion, a state of mind, a way of thinking that can't really be measured very well, and those who view it as a process that can be predicted, managed, and measured in order to result in new business models, business processes and products that will increase growth. The truly successful innovators, I believe, will be those who can embrace both of these kinds of thinking about innovation.


"Voice of the Customer" will be held Dec. 8-10 in Coconut Grove, Fla. This conference, which is the only PDMA-endorsed "Voice of the Customer" event, incorporates VOC findings throughout the value chain, from new product development and brand strategy to product launch in the B2B or retail space.
On the agenda: Professor Gerald Zaltman of the Harvard Business School (author of How Customers Think) and conference chairman Dr. Joseph Plummer, EVP of McCann-Erickson Worldgroup will present - for the first time publicly - their marketing survey findings on the newest corporate top-line priority: Creating Consumer Demand.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know.


"Return on Innovation: Measuring and Managing Your Innovation Investment," will be held Dec. 3-5 in Coconut Grove, Fla. On the agenda:
To register, go to www.iirusa.com/returnoninnovation or call 888.670.8200.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know.


"Voice of the Customer" will be held Dec. 8-10 in Coconut Grove, Fla. This conference, which is the only PDMA-endorsed "Voice of the Customer" event, incorporates VOC findings throughout the value chain, from new product development and brand strategy to product launch in the B2B or retail space.
On the agenda: Professor Gerald Zaltman of the Harvard Business School (author of How Customers Think) and conference chairman Dr. Joseph Plummer, EVP of McCann-Erickson Worldgroup will present - for the first time publicly - their marketing survey findings on the newest corporate top-line priority: Creating Consumer Demand.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know.


"Return on Innovation: Measuring and Managing Your Innovation Investment," will be held Dec. 3-5 in Coconut Grove, Fla. On the agenda:
To register, go to www.iirusa.com/returnoninnovation or call 888.670.8200.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know.


The IEEE 2003 International Engineering Management Conference will be held November 2-4 in Albany, NY. The IEEE-IEMC 2002 was one of the most useful conferences I attended last year, and I'm expecting another great conference this year.
Speakers include Dr. Rolf Smith speaking on "Diffferent Thinking for Diffferent Results." The conference organizing committee chair is Dr. Lois Peters, one of the authors of Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts, a book that both John Wolpert and I found to be extremely useful.
I'll be giving a workshop, "Unleashing Creativity: Creating an Innovation Focus for Engineering Teams." The workshop will include a discussion of an Innovation Framework as well as the use of InnoMediaries, citing work from both John Wolpert ("Breaking Out of the Innovation Box") and Henry Chesbrough (Open Innovation).
Talk about convergence!! Lots of our ideas will be coming together here!


"Voice of the Customer" will be held Dec. 8-10 in Coconut Grove, Fla. This conference, which is the only PDMA-endorsed "Voice of the Customer" event, incorporates VOC findings throughout the value chain, from new product development and brand strategy to product launch in the B2B or retail space.
On the agenda: Professor Gerald Zaltman of the Harvard Business School (author of How Customers Think) and conference chairman Dr. Joseph Plummer, EVP of McCann-Erickson Worldgroup will present - for the first time publicly - their marketing survey findings on the newest corporate top-line priority: Creating Consumer Demand.
Please note: IdeaFlow is a media partner for this conference. That means we're involved with the conference, though no actual money is changing hands! If you register because you saw this, please let them know.