How to Keep Your Employees from Losing their Creativity
The most successful businesses and corporations in the world place employee satisfaction on the same pedestal as customer satisfaction. These corporations understand that without a loyal, creative, and cohesive team of satisfied employees, success cannot be attained.
What are Circular Business Models (CBM)?
Shortly, the demands and needs of approximately nine billion people will be about three times the current resources. At this time challenges will accelerate for the deficiencies of resources and enormous production of waste. Circular Business Models (CBM) is the solution for not only improving resource management and decreasing waste production but also reducing costs and expanding firm performance.
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.
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.
How to Foster an Organizational Culture that Encourages Innovation
Innovative and forward-thinking companies are successful because they have new, exciting, and useful products or services before others and consumers take notice of companies regularly producing the next big thing. These companies are more effective and they can grow more rapidly because their company culture encourages innovation among their employees. A company of “intrapreneurs” can quickly become a successful and noteworthy company.
How Does Brexit Impact Your Innovation?
With the Brexit and doubts of Theresa May’s suitability and approachability as a key negotiator, there is uncertainty of the UK achieving a progressive deal with the EU. How will the continued negotiations impact product-oriented businesses and innovators - particularly once discussions begin in a few months’ time?
Lessons from Apple on Why Aesthetic Innovation is Important
It’s pretty much impossible to argue with Apple’s success. It’s one of the most valuable companies in the world, and has maintained dominance for its reputation as an innovative company that produces top-of-the-line hardware. Because of its products and brand reputation, Apple has gained a cult following that will buy nearly every new product that emerges, year after year. So why, even with the high price tag, are so many consumers willing to shell out for every new gadget that comes along?
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.
Why Your Business Transformations Fail
Ambitious and impractical business schemes can often lack the fundamental elements needed to make them a reality, leaving huge expense and casualties of the blame game in their wake. The business world is littered with the remnants of unrealised programs and unsuccessful plans for development, several of them so high profile as to have attracted national notoriety.
How to Get Your Innovative Idea off the Ground in the Current Economic Climate
Incredibly, business confidence in the UK is continuing to rise, despite the spectre of Brexit and its potential implications on citizens. Many experts have attribute this to the growth of the manufacturing sector, which recorded a Credit Manager's Index (CMI) score of 62.7 during the first quarter of 2017 and a 1.5% increase from the previous quarter. This hints at significant growth potential for product-oriented firms, which are currently able to increase exports due to a more competitively priced (and fundamentally weaker) pound.
How Does your Business Stand to Benefit from Big Data?
Big data is becoming increasingly vital to business scaling and competition. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the three V’s of big data - volume, velocity, and variety - and discuss the many ways your company can benefit from incorporating big data into decision making, product development, audience analysis, and much more.
How to Make Your Design Thinking Program Turn Into Something Real
Why do a large part of the design thinking projects in the corporate world never pass through the prototype phase? In recent years I’ve been involved with many design thinking initiatives. Many of them related to the development of new products inside large companies in industries such as finance, health, education and consumer goods.
Rebuild Personas According to Your Next Product Innovation
Using personas in your design thinking framework is important, but are the results satisfying and clear? In this article, Product Innovation Manager Alex Igor Sanghikian discusses the Adjacent Possibilities framework for product management. By exclusively focusing on your persona’s one main need and trying hard to fulfill that need with your product, you can build the next feature with a more focused vision.
Involving Citizens in Government Product Development
The election of 2016 will certainly be one for the history books. Regardless of your political leanings, there was one sure thing to celebrate during this election cycle. The Innovate Your State Fix California Challenge—a crowdsourcing campaign aimed at promoting public participation in order to determine ways to improve government—had an initiative on the ballot in California!
Disruption Planning 2- Creating Options and Pathways
In this in-depth article Haydn Shaughnessy discusses why traditional ROI decision making is becoming irrelevant and how options planning is a key element of competitiveness. In these uncertain times firms need to recognise and analyse their options thoroughly in order to be ready for inevitable change.
Leap Innovation: a Strategy to Get Ahead and Stay Relevant
The importance of innovation for organizations to remain competitive is widely discussed and well accepted by scholars and practicing managers. However, failures in innovation attempts are quite common and raise many questions. Why do firms with innovative products fail? Does market acceptance of innovations alone guarantee continuous success? Is it innovation strategy that can ensure long-term prosperity? One can argue that it is not only how to innovate that matters, but also where, what and when to innovate that make the difference.
How is Crowdsourcing Uniquely Beneficial to Technologists
Innovation proves vital for companies across industries, but carries key importance in the technology field. Mainstream perception of the tech industry conjures illustrations of cutting edge, never-before-seen products poised to disrupt and revolutionize daily lives.
Getting Connected Products Right
Why do so many companies seem to be sitting on the sidelines when it comes to creating connected products and designing services that tie into them? The cost of adding wireless connectivity to a device is plummeting toward $1. Projections about how many Internet of Things (IoT) objects will be part of our lives, at work or at home, range from 12 billion by 2020 (Cisco) to 50 billion (Ericsson and Intel).
Product Innovation of a Trolley: A 3-step Journey
Consider the world’s most ingeniously designed products. Whether it’s your smartphone, your favorite racing bike or a nifty robotic lawn mower – they all have a one thing in common: rather than being conceived overnight, they were shaped by a series of consecutive, systematic innovations. But how does such a structured product innovation approach look? This CREAX project illustrates the ins and outs.
A Roadmap for Building Corporate Innovation Capabilities
What should a roadmap that helps you develop corporate innovation capabilities look like? How do you bring new thoughts and approaches together with current and past initiatives (both successes and failures) and turn this into a single framework? How do you keep pushing and developing your organization to become more flexible and agile without losing out on the current overall efforts and expected results?
The Next Level of Open Innovation: Is Your Organization Ready?
Getting started with open innovation and developing the right foundation for open innovation has been a key challenge at many companies in the last three to five years. Now, internal as well as external forces are moving these companies towards the next level of open innovation in which we go beyond just products and technology and start to explore how a more open and collaborative mindset can be applied to all more business units and functions. Think procurement and engineering as examples.
Integrating Agile with Stage-Gate® – How New Agile-Scrum Methods Lead to Faster and Better Innovation
Recent experiences show that Agile project-management methods can be used in the innovation process and has a great potential to reduce development time and increase the success rate of new products. The article briefly outlines how an Agile method, such as Scrum, can be used within a structured innovation process with milestones and decision points, such as Stage-Gate®, and what benefits it provides to both manufacturers and service-providers.
Medicine can Teach Business and Government a Powerful Innovation Lesson
Many companies develop their new products in secret and behind their own closed doors. They then launch their radical new approach with a fanfare of marketing expenditure. They are often disappointed. Paul Sloane looks at how organizations can harness the power of randomized control trials to drive successful innovation.
Involving the Crowd in Product Development
Even before the term was coined in Wired Magazine in 2006, crowdsourcing was utilized as a way to accomplish goals. The strategy had been used for several hundred years before it was officially given a name, but since being named, crowdsourcing has grown into a huge field, spawning subdivisions of the strategy and being used for a multitude of purposes. Wikipedia is one of the most recognizable and mainstream instances of crowdsourcing, designed to elicit and compile knowledge from the masses. Crowdsourcing has been used in real time to track public transportation and traffic updates with various apps.