Leadership Matters In More Ways Than One
No one is disputing the fact that leadership matters. In fact, there has never been a more critical time where leadership matters more than it does today.
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 [...]
The Art Of Innovation | 10 Things To Learn From Guy Kawasaki
The agenda of our first management meeting in 2021 was ‘How can we innovate to thrive this year?’ We were clear that if we continue to do the same thing we did last year, there is no way we can bring any change in our growth.
The Pandemic Pivot: The Need for Product, Service and Business Model Innovation
The pandemic and economic depression the world faces is a dark period for all businesses, but there are also opportunities. The companies that see the opportunities, and pivot to exploit them, will succeed, while those that fail to innovate will fade away.
The Three Factors That Drive Consumer Behavior
As the adage goes, the only constant is change, and such is the case with consumer behavior. Thus, tracking trends, using business analytics to predict where the next trend may be, and acting accordingly with your marketing is a recipe for success.
Why Your Employees Are the Key to Recovery
In this article, we will look at how to identify and understand employee contributions, and learn how to work with idea generators, evaluators, and activators.
TASC: A Practitioner’s Tool for Better Results in Open Innovation
Despite its popularity as a way to promote innovations, organizations face challenges in their open innovation (OI) initiatives. As knowledge flows are vital for the success of OI initiatives, organizations should identify right partners in their open innovation implementations. This article suggests TASC as a tool that can be used by practitioners for better results.
What Can We Learn from NASA About Crowdsourcing in a Pandemic?
When COVID-19 shut down the United States in 2020, everyone wanted to be a part of the solution. At NASA, the entire NASA workforce expressed their desire to help the nation combat the virus – even though most of their employees were asked to work from home.
Interview with Erich Joachimsthaler, Author of The Interaction Field
I had the opportunity recently to interview fellow author Erich Joachimsthaler, the Founder and CEO of Vivaldi, one of the largest independent global strategy and business transformation firms, to talk with him about his new book The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society, to explore the important role that connections play in both business and innovation.
Interview with Stefan H. Thomke, Author of “Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments”
I had the opportunity recently to interview fellow author Stefan H. Thomke, the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School to talk with him about his new book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, to explore the important role that experimentation plays in business and innovation.
Frugal Banking: An Opportunity to Create Customer Value in the Future?
Investments that are necessary to innovate and serve customers are no longer sustainable while COVID-19 hastens the need to exploit the potential of digital innovations. Serving customers accurately during unprecedented times requires a new mindset and business model innovations. If banks respond to customer requirements in completely new special situations, they can gain trust and integrity and become winners of the crisis.
Agile Development for Manufacturers: The Emergent Gating Model
Agile is employed within Stage-Gate for new-product development by manufacturers with positive performance results; but must be adjusted from the software version of Agile – the result: the emergent Agile-Stage-Gate hybrid model.
What is a Virtual Innovation Lab?
The Virginia Department of Transportation created their own Virtual Innovation Lab, where they collaborate to solve problems related to remote work, engineering topics, safety, and more with the help of their entire distributed workforce. Learn more in this December 15th webinar!
Introduction to Game Theory
Game theory is a theoretical framework for conceiving social situations among competing players. In some respects, game theory is the science of strategy, or at least the optimal decision-making of independent and competing actors in a strategic setting. Let's have a look at a few examples.
Innovation Programs & Entrepreneurship: Busting Myths
A lot of companies aspire to implement successful innovation programs but the programs fail surrounded by certain myths. A seasoned entrepreneur has bust those myths in the article based on his personal experience.
Key Learnings of a Regtech Corporate Startup
Corporate start-ups sit in a sweet spot between corporate venturing and an external start-up. These initiatives have the luxury of the big brother organisation watching over them, but it also comes with the policies and procedures of the big brother.
What are the Differences and Advantages between a Specialist and a Generalist?
In building your career, you're likely asked to choose one of two tracks: to become a specialist or to pursue the path of a generalist. This article takes a look at advantages and disadvantages of choosing either of these two paths, and discusses some grey area in between.
How has COVID-19 Accelerated Trends in Customer Service?
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, customer behavior has changed dramatically. To survive, businesses need to adapt by accelerating customer service trends that already exist.
The Key to Winning in the Attention Economy
The circumstances of 2020 have seen businesses push to increased virtual communication and online offerings. How do you compete in this new attention economy, especially with so much noise?
How Does Diversity and Inclusion Impact Innovation?
Nearly all executives believe the long-term success of their business depends on the flow, testing, and development of new ideas. One of the problems is the old belief in the “creative genius” – that creativity and innovation belongs to a talented few and not to everyone.
Have You Done Your Homework? Aspirations, Blessings and Curses of Working Remotely
One of the most significant ways the COVID pandemic impacted work has been to get much more of it done from home. Subscriptions to extra bandwidth and virtual meeting platforms skyrocketed. People’s imaginations and their capacity to make new things happen and change their work habits accelerated overnight.
The Hidden Culture Benefits of Crowdsourced Innovation
Crowdsourcing ideas has a number of different virtues: from improving the likelihood that you’ll source disruptive ideas to lowering the overall program costs of running an innovation program… but there are some other cultural benefits to a crowdsourced innovation program.
Why Bother with User Innovation?
Users are a hidden ‘front end’ of innovation, highly motivated, prepared to experiment and tolerant of things not working right first time. So it makes sense to try and bring this perspective to bear.
Interview with Scott D. Anthony, Author of Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization
I had the opportunity recently to interview fellow author Scott D. Anthony of consulting firm Innosight to talk with him about his new book Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization, which is his eighth book with his co-authors Paul Cobban, Natalie Painchaud, and Andy Parker. Congratulations Scott!
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.
When Discovering Customer Needs, How Do You Get Beyond Survey Bias?
When Yamaha conducts research to drive product development, they've found opportunities in previously unexplored areas of incremental change. Learn more in this podcast interview.
Digital Tools and the Future of Remote Work
Until about four months ago, remote work was somewhat of a rarity, and, at very least, something most people were unfamiliar with. One of the few COVID-19 silver linings, however, was that many companies were forced to have their employees work remotely due to stay-at-home orders. This meant more time with families, less time in transit, and, for a lot, a surprising sense of comfort at "the workplace."
How the Next Wave of Innovators Can Rebuild the Economy After a Crisis
Innovation takes many forms, and it will likely come from unexpected places in the next normal. Here are 3 ways business leaders can drive innovation regardless of what happens in the world.