Five Questions to Answer Before Crowdsourcing
As the director of the IdeaScale Crowd community, I recently had the opportunity to share some insights and best practices for innovators who are new to crowdsourcing, and may not have conducted their first campaign yet. We discussed five questions to ask as you prepare for your first campaign, why those questions are important, and some examples of good and bad answers to those questions.
Try Double-Handed Innovation
Most new products and services are developments or combinations of existing offerings. But just adding features can lead to a product overloaded with ‘feature bloat’. Instead try giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Add something different and take away something of little value. Start by focussing on the market leading product (or products). List its top features and identify the benefit which customers get from each of the features. What problems are solved and how important are they? Then prioritise the list. From a customer perspective which are the most valuable and least valuable features? You may need input from a survey or focus group to help at this stage. Ask what features could we add [...]
6 Ways to Innovate Your Business Model
The pandemic has given us all an opportunity to build a new business future. Market disruption equals opportunity for those willing to look and work for it. This is the time to adjust and innovate your business model to market conditions.
What Do Innovation Maturity Assessments Have in Common?
Building a repeatable model for innovation is a journey, not a trophy. An innovation department builds services and competencies across multiple disciplines – from research to communications and culture. And even with a dedicated innovation department, they must cooperate seamlessly with other parts of the business in order to deliver meaningful results on an ongoing basis.
Customer-Centric Innovation? Sure, But With Which Customers?
Today, putting customers at the heart of innovation is a no-brainer for most business managers. However, should the innovation process involve all customers or only specific segments? In this article we explore the hurdles of these initiatives and propose a method to select the most relevant customers with whom to innovate.
Four Ways to Innovate Right Now
While the pandemic has been difficult for all us economically, as business owners, we never run out of opportunities. No matter the business climate, there is always a chance to do something new and something better—you just have to find it.
Five Aspects of Innovation Governance
The leverage point is to let innovation shine via effective governance discipline, but not adding too much complexity. In this article, we'll look at what innovation governance is, and practices to help you manage a successful innovation program.
A Successful Approach to Corporate Innovation: ‘The 8 Ps of Innovation’
The business environment is becoming increasingly complex. Organizations have lived in a stable environment for many decades. The competitive advantage resulted from executing better than competitors. This is no longer the case.
How Mind Mapping Boosts Your Creativity
Everyone has the power to be creative, but how can you bring your innovative thoughts to life? Discover how Mind Mapping can unlock your creative potential in this article.
Five Innovation Practices for Building & Managing an Innovation Program
There is no “one size fits all” formula for innovation management success. Demystifying innovation takes experiments and practices. In this article, we'll explore five tactics to use in order to develop and manage a successful innovation program.
Recession, Innovation and Survival – A Lesson from Kellogg’s
In times of severe recession should you cut costs and focus on survival or take the opportunity to invest in innovation so that you can benefit from the eventual recovery? Let's have a look at a case study of Kellogg's, which took a leap to invest in a new type of cereal - and that paid off even in the face of extreme adversity.
Digital Transformation and Its Impact on New-Product Management for Manufacturers
For the manufacturer undertaking new-product development, Digital Transformation means smart new products with embedded software. Digital products in turn require software and hardware development teams to work together – a hybrid project – which ultimately leads to combining software development methods with the more traditional gating process that manufacturers use.
What Makes You a Great Product Manager? 4 Tips and One Extra
For the past 11 years, we’ve worked with product managers and helped them to perform better. We know their challenges and we know their worries and needs. For this reason, in this article, we want to share some tips that make their life a lot easier.
3 Ways to Reduce Costs While Maintaining Business Integrity
Integrity is regularly considered one of the top characteristics that a business leader can have — whether you're asking employees or CFOs. Sometimes, however, business integrity is considered a cost or burden — a commitment that is almost guaranteed to make a business harder to run over time.
5 Tips to Create a Strong Product Vision
Every startup and growth-oriented business needs to focus on innovation in order to come up with compelling brand stories and messages, engaging products and services, and amazing marketing tactics that will put the company on the map and allow it to become an authority in its niche.
Five Principles of Innovation Measurement
What gets measured gets managed. Innovation is not serendipity; it’s a managed process of transforming novel ideas to achieve their business value. You can only manage what you measure.
The Four Forms of Crowdsourcing
There are four ways to crowdsource answers to your innovation challenges: garden variety crowdsourcing, distant expert sourcing, expert targeting, and force multiplying.
Design Thinking: A Social Technology That Fosters Innovation
Enterprises need to innovate to stay relevant amidst technology advancements, a competitive business environment and demanding customer expectations. Design Thinking shows the way.
4 Ways Data Can Drive Workplace Innovation
The amount of data in our world is exploding, which means data sets can be a little tricky to analyze. However, for those able to harness this beast, big data can prove a gold-mine for innovation in the workplace.
Five Perspectives of Innovation Management Maturity
The success of innovation management is never an accident; it’s a holistic management process with an iterative thought-out planning and execution continuum.
Spotless: An Innovation Roadmap
Bridie Scott is an Innovation Manager at Spotless and she’s taken the business on a journey from a large-scale company with big goals to a company that is listening to and empowering all of their frontline employees in the innovation process.
How Can You Use Gamification to Boost Innovation?
A serious game based on innovation methodologies can be an extremely useful tool at different phrases of implementing innovation in a company. Let's take a look at how to implement gamification into your innovation strategy.
Why Experiential Marketing Is A Must In 2020
Consumers are no longer excited by traditional commercials, including display ads, banner ads, and native ads. In fact, these ads are causing a pandemic known as “ad fatigue” and symptoms range from disinterest, boredom, and more. The problem is worsening.
Innovation Via the Customer Journey
Innovation is usually spoken of in relation to products, research, and development. However, every aspect of your business can be innovated. In fact, one of the most important – and often overlooked – is customer service. Innovative customer service helps you build loyalty, encourages repeat business, and can also bring in new buyers as they observe how you care for your consumers.
Five Takeaways from Our Innovation Conversation with Clorox
IdeaScale hosts a monthly podcast with innovation leaders, intrapreneurs, and other game changers out there. This past month our interviewee was Dr. Navin Kunde who currently leads the Open Innovation group at The Clorox Company, a US-based consumer goods company in the Fortune 500.
Tips for Established Businesses to Survive the Startup Surge
So much has already been said about what smaller, fresh companies need to do in order to gain a competitive edge in a well-developed market, but how often do you think about what those well-established businesses should do to achieve the same?
How Do You Define INNOVATIVENESS? Getting it Wrong Could Cost You
Underlying an innovative culture driven by an innovative leader is innovativeness. Innovativeness drives business growth by increasing innovation opportunities.
Do You Know Your Company’s Implementation Rate?
With the rise of the innovation department, numerous organizations are focusing their attention on their company’s ideation rate. A good ideation rate generally predicts other positive company health indicators: profitability, higher employee retention rates, reported customer success, but there’s another innovation health indicator that we think organizations should pay attention to: their implementation rate.