Top Five Challenges When Pitching a New Idea
Hardly an innovation event passes without mentioning how Kodak passed on the digital camera or how Blockbuster decided not to invest in streaming entertainment. But with the rapid rate of disruption, how do you ensure that great ideas can penetrate established organizations?
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.
How Innovative Brands Cut through the Commerce Cacophony
Three principles to navigate the blurring lines of retail, content, and new product development to simultaneously solve for consumer and commercial needs.
Do Startups Need Auditing Early On?
Running a business is a complicated process, especially considering all the paperwork, accounting and financial statements which need to constantly be managed.
How do we Replace Plastics? Innovation Needed
With all the concern about plastics polluting our oceans it is time to think seriously about innovating with packaging.
Global Expansion – The First Things You Should Consider
Taking an innovation, product or other service global has many advantages, but also throws up many challenges. Overcome the challenges and what you are likely to see is a more robust and profitable concern - but get it wrong and you are likely to incur some losses and potentially damage your business.
Design Thinking: the Road Towards Innovation
Design thinking is methodology that combines creativity and logic to improve operations, products, and decision-making. Its iterative cycle identifies a need or opportunity and ultimately improves profitability by adding to your knowledge, and boosting productivity.
Innovative Ideas for Combining Traditional and Digital Marketing
In 2010, Pepsi invested millions of dollars in the “Pepsi Refresh Project,” moving their entire marketing strategy to social media. The campaign was, of course, widely promoted via online networking channels and, in the beginning, it seemed like a huge success.
Here’s Why Consistency is Your Greatest Asset
Whether you’re an executive, a manager, or part of the team handling day-to-day operations, you’ve probably thought more than once about what you bring to the table within your organization. What do you feel is your greatest asset? Chances are, consistency never tops the list—but perhaps it should.
How Innovative Social Media Campaigns Can Boost Your Brand Exposure
Increasing brand visibility and exposure is something that can really make all the difference, because no matter how good and unique your product or service is, you won’t have too much success if you don’t promote it through social media platforms.
How will Your Organization Prepare for Extreme Scenarios?
A BISS-project powered by the Service Science Factory
Rapid changes in technology, customer needs and society forces large organizations to constantly adapt to a changing context in order to remain relevant. Organizations therefore need to shift their strategy from a reactive to a pro-active approach, or in other words, they need to anticipate the future to prepare for it. Developing extreme scenarios paints a picture of the future and poses the opportunity for organizations to prepare for upcoming challenges and to make use of new opportunities.
7 Ways Startups can Foster Innovation through Sustainability
Here’s a spoiler: 90% of all startups fail. The 10% that make it have one thing in common - they all are bringing in innovation through sustainability. These startups are all about evolving by providing faster results with less wastage. It’s a never ending process of innovating for the present and future generations.
How do You Develop Standards for Innovation Management?
ISO is an independent, non-governmental international organization with members in 163 different countries. Through its members, it brings together experts to share knowledge and develop voluntary, consensus-based, market relevant International Standards that assist particularly in facilitating international trade.
How Open Innovation Can Be Used in the Financial Sector
In a recent article, The Financial Brand discussed the biggest threats to the financial and banking industry. They included a long list of everything from profitability to making good hiring decisions. However, we thought that there were a few problems that could be particularly fruitful when applied to open innovation systems.
How to Make Your Business More Innovative
Are you trying to think of ways to make your business more innovative? Innovation has become a vital part of success for business. Technology has made it easy to expand globally, reach a larger target audience and significantly boost profits, but it’s also brought a lot more competition. This means that to keep up, businesses need to ensure they’re innovative and capable of consistently delivering new and exciting products and services.
Critical Steps to Validate Your Startup’s Business Model
A business plan is at the heart of every business. But instead of just writing down your business plan, your startup’s business model will require proper validation before you start doing business. If you don’t validate it, the investor simply won’t invest. You can validate your business model through three core assumptions: delivering, creating and capturing value.
Generating Disruptive Ideas for the Hyper-Digital Era
Disruptive ideas don’t just happen - they must be championed. In doing so, intrapreneurs must address two fundamental truths when leading big idea innovation: that of value creation and that of persuasive communication. If you want to learn how to scale innovation across your enterprise and create a disciplined approach for creating market-changing ideas, One Hour Innovator is a great place to start.
Real Management Applications of Big Data
Big Data has had a big impact on the competitive landscape. Businesses that have embraced this explosive technology of digital media are better positioned to market faster with products and services that satisfy customers' needs adequately. Wise management of time is very critical in staying ahead of the competition. Utilizing Big Data solutions in processing digital data is one way of enabling managers or organizations and business owners to make quick, informed decisions that streamline efficient business operations. Here is an analysis of some of the real management applications of Big Data:
The Part of the Innovation Process that Everyone Forgets
One of the biggest challenges to innovation is the middle part of the process - where most of the work is happening behind the scenes. As your innovation campaign progresses, you must continue to instill excitement across all team members, and find ways to reengage them as advocates. In this case study, we’ll examine how Dick’s Sporting Goods engaged their employees in product development and effectively encouraged them to participate in their innovation community.
Ways to Exercise Your Creative Muscles
Feeling like you’re stuck in a creative rut? Creativity works a lot like a muscle—you have to exercise it for it to work properly. Once you get stuck in a cycle of routine, it’s easy to feel like you’ve lost your creativity. Maybe you’re not contributing innovative ideas during team meetings anymore, or maybe you just feel like you’re doing the same thing every single day. Whatever is making you feel uncreative, you don’t have to live with it. All it means is that it’s time to exercise your creative muscles more than you have been! Here are some ways you can stay sharp, innovative, and creative.
Optimizing Meetings to Maximize Individual Brainstorming Time
Are you overwhelmed by unnecessary meetings? We’ve all been there: one more meeting, and you feel like you’re going to scream. You’ve been trying to make some real progress on your creative project, but the constant meetings have really been cutting into your individual brainstorming time. If you feel like the number of meetings you’ve been attending is cutting into your productivity, you’re not imagining it.
Where to Start with Innovation? Begin by removing the Barriers
Surveys show that the large majority of senior executives see innovation as critical for their businesses but what if you want to make your organization more agile and innovative where should you start? You could launch a big initiative with grand statements, training classes and an ideas scheme but you tried all those last year and they fizzled out. It is better to begin with a brutally honest assessment of what is preventing innovation from happening today.
A New Emerging Practice: Innovation Communications
Closed innovation is a thing of the past. Scalable, open innovation as a business practice has yielded the most dramatic and successful results - and communication and connection with your audience is essential to success. By engaging through at least four of eight channels (website, email, social, public relations, partners, events, offline, and beyond), a robust communications process and schedule can yield valuable insights to help you innovate better.
How Big Radical is Reclaiming Design
Nobody doubts that design can be powerful. But while words and phrases like ‘design thinking,’ ‘agile’ and ‘lean’ may be officially welcome in the boardrooms of Deloitte, Accenture, PWc, McKinsey and similar firms, I believe that the full potential of design has been neglected and these terms misappropriated.
Considering International Expansion? Get Ready To Think Outside Your Comfort Zone
Globalization is great for business: it opens up new markets and allows businesses to bring in revenue and talent from all over the world. However, the first steps into international expansion can be fraught with growing pains, forcing companies to waste time and money on efforts that don’t gain any traction in foreign markets. To avoid this, company leaders have to get ready to embrace change and innovation outside their normal comfort zone. Here’s why it’s important to get comfortable with discomfort when you’re considering international expansion.
What Skills Are Rated Most Difficult When it Comes to Innovation? (The Answer Might Surprise You)
A common misconception is that innovation can’t be taught. Similar to how some people believe that artists are born, not made – innovation has often seemed to be the purview of the great thinkers, the elite, people whose creativity is given, not a matter of practice…
Five Ways Sustainable Innovation is Different from Normal Innovation
Today's innovation rules were forged in a world that paid little attention to sustainability, where profit was separate from this higher purpose. Yet the disruptive nature of sustainability must surely change the way we innovate too. We must continue to reinvent our innovation processes to ensure it is fit for a changing world, in the five ways highlighted here.