We are all Innovators Who’s doing the innovating in your company? A central innovation group? R&D? marketing? Or, is everyone expected to be an innovator ? For many companies, the Holy Grail is to have the entire company innovating; and especially the front line employees. The front line employees, those closest to the work and the customers, usually have the best insights to improve performance, reduce cost, or develop new products … [Read more...]
Why did it take Nintendo so long?
As Pokémon Go smashes records, delights fans and scares parents across the mobile app world, we’re wondering why it took Nintendo so long to jump into the fray. Location aware games have been around for many years. Fans and investors have been begging Nintendo to unleash Mario & Luigi, Donkey Kong, Zelda, and Pokémon onto the omnipresent mobile phone platforms. Location aware games even advance Nintendo’s mission of ‘Connecting … [Read more...]
Taking Your Stage Gate to the Next Level
The stage gate process has been a cornerstone of product development since the 1960’s bringing efficiency and control to the development activities. As applied to innovation, the stage-gate process often yields incremental innovation. The same controls, metrics, gate reviews and screening mechanisms that bring control to the process also tend to weed out the true outliers – those game changing innovations that cannot be easily managed with … [Read more...]
How to increase the accuracy of consumer experiments
Why is it that test markets for a new product concept are often very enthusiastic, but that enthusiasm fails to materialize at launch? As entrepreneurs, marketers, and product developers know, consumers are notoriously fickle in their responses to new products and often are not able to give accurate feedback regarding their reactions and purchase intent. Far too often, we hear about wildly successful experiment results followed by pilot and … [Read more...]
Focusing Innovation Inside
Most of the time when we think about innovation, we think about launching new products, new services, new routes to market and new business models. But in fact, the application of innovation principles and methods inside a firm can often yield significant benefits in terms of how effectively we organize and serve our customers. How can we focus innovation inside or make functions simpler and more efficient? How can we achieve a step change in … [Read more...]
Learning from the Valley
Recently I had the pleasure to spend a week in Palo Alto with a client group, helping to introduce them to the topic of innovation through experiential learning. The week consisted of a combination of visits to the local innovation centres of companies such as SAP; talks by leading thinkers in the innovation space such as Prof Henry Chesbrough and Prof Bob Sutton; and workshops with innovation leaders such as Ericsson, Google and the Design … [Read more...]
Creativity Needs Aiming Points
Boundaries! It is teenagers and college students who seem to be most apt to challenge rules and push social boundaries, especially those we consider to be creative types. Creatives seem to be on the outside of the boundaries their whole lives. And, why not? Creativity should know no boundaries? Right? However, if you take a closer look, creativity thrives on what might be considered boundaries. And I believe that the reason youth and … [Read more...]
What are your customers paying you for?
One of the key strategic concepts that Senior Executives like to explore is Willingness To Pay(WTP). In commodities business, like iron ore or cement, radical innovations expected by Senior Executives are mainly related with revolutions in customer’s perceptions of value or alternative mechanisms to avoid price comparison in the market. Most of the time these executives don’t expect much from technology in the mid-term and lean operations are … [Read more...]
Culture, growth or both?
CEOs have to face the same pressures every day, delivering short term results that satisfy an ever demanding market and a share price that reflects this. And since most if not all CEOs realize visibility of innovation results is a major contributor, many will push their organization to deliver innovations time and time again. Just look at the recent news coverage of Apple. At the first sign of not delivering the amazing innovations that we have … [Read more...]
Corporate innovation culture – swimming against the current?
Corporate innovation culture can sound like a misnomer at times. The numbers can be depressing – an estimated 70-90% of corporate innovation efforts fail; publications like the Wall Street Journal are filled with high profile missteps made by large corporations costing billions of dollars. A comprehensive solution of innovation tools, processes, incentives, and technology can help avoid pitfalls and de-risk new ventures, but what about the … [Read more...]