Understanding Audience

Knowing who your company or entity is communicating to, understanding who is impacted by your idea, finding out best practices in sourcing ideas and process improvements from your audience

3 Reasons Crowdsourcing is Good for Small Businesses

Running a small business is not easy, especially when the small business is just starting out. Any misstep, even well-intentioned, can cause a serious setback. But have no fear! There’s a whole untapped squad of people out there ready to work for you for free! Here are three ways crowdsourcing is good for small businesses.

Rob Hoehn2021-12-07T15:58:27-08:00August 15th, 2016|Categories: Organization & Culture|Tags: business development, cost savings, crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, customer engagement, efficiency, IdeaScale, resource allocation, ROI, small business, SME, smes|

4 Ways Your Travel Brand Can Innovate with the Help of the Crowd

When you’re thinking about innovation in the field of travel and transportation, more horsepower, hydraulics, and fuel efficiency might come to mind. But with the pace of change increasing rapidly, it’s difficult to imagine how government organizations and private companies will be able to absorb some of the most exponential and impactful changes that are sure to come in the next decade.

Rob Hoehn2019-10-15T15:22:17-07:00February 15th, 2016|Categories: Life Cycle Processes|Tags: Crowdsourcing, customer engagement, customer experience management, customer service, industry innovation, innovation, Open Innovation, safety, security, Technology, travel|

10 Ways to Reduce the Innovation Failure Rate

You are not able to stand still in this fast paced business environment, but most of the time innovation fails. Innovation process-expert Robert Cooper shows that of every seven new product/service projects, about four enter development, 1.5 are launched, and only one succeeds. Innovation is so difficult to master, indeed. I love to share with you five reasons why innovation goes wrong and give you ten ways to reduce your failure rate of innovation.

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:22:25-07:00December 4th, 2015|Categories: Enabling Factors, Idea Management, Leadership, Strategies|Tags: back end of innovation, Best Practices, Business Model Innovation, customer engagement, Failure, fuzzy front end of innovation, goal setting, habits, Ideation, innovation, innovation process, Innovation Strategy, innovation success, invention, lessons learned, mindset, motivation|

Innovation Without Borders: Six Best Practices to Improve Innovation Success Rates

While innovation is crucial for driving customer engagement and increasing share of wallet, companies continue to struggle with the “what” and “how” of it. For each best-practice organization that has streamlined its innovation processes, there are many that are still paralyzed by their haphazard approach toward identifying and evaluating ideas. Evalueserve interacted with many of its Fortune 100 clients and identified six strategies that enhance the likelihood of developing successful innovation programs.

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:21:04-07:00June 17th, 2015|Categories: Blog Archive|Tags: case study, customer engagement, download, in-depth article, Innovation Management, report|

Digging into Your Consumers’ Needs, with Naivety

In an inspiring conversation with Terese Alstin, co-founder of Hövding, the invisible helmet company, Cesar Malacon highlights the innovator’s ability to remain naïve when developing new products and introduces a contemplative approach to find consumers’ real needs.

Ideascale2021-12-06T07:47:52-08:00December 29th, 2014|Categories: Strategies|Tags: case study, consumer, customer need, customer satisfaction, job to be done, naivety, Product Development, strategy|

Market Intelligence Oriented Culture: a Key Driver for Innovation

It is always a great achievement when we can affirm that something has been done according to one strategic plan, goal or thought. Sound strategic planning capabilities depend on industry/sector specific understanding and full perception of the external competitive environment. In the sixth and last of a series of articles focused on Innovation Culture, the focus is on a process called Market Intelligence (MI). This process can be affirmed as a cyclic, continuous organizational process that deals with dispersed data, information and knowledge in a competitive sector, to produce knowledge to be applied by companies in their strategic marketing planning.

Ideascale2019-11-28T09:23:50-08:00December 11th, 2014|Categories: Organization & Culture|Tags: Change Management, Collaboration, collaborative innovation, innovation assessment, Innovation Culture, market change, market intelligence, market research, Open Innovation, strategy|

The One Word Answer to Why Innovation Fails

Innovation sounds easy, but it is not. The majority of enterprises report dissatisfaction with innovation performance. Three quarters of the CEOs of multinationals view external collaborative innovation as vitally important, but only half do it, and those only rate themselves as doing it ‘moderately well’. And remember - two thirds of organizational ‘change’ efforts fail. In case you are now asking yourself, why are these odds that low – we have a straightforward answer. It’s just one word.

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:18:56-07:00September 22nd, 2014|Categories: Organization & Culture|Tags: challenge, Communication, customer engagement, Employee Engagement, engagement, Failure, HR, Innovation Culture, Innovation Strategy, intrapreneur, intrapreneurship, management, psychology, startup|

Innovation Golden Rules

In a February 2014 presentation, Herman Wories of the DSM Innovation Center made a compelling statement about the role of innovation in any organization: “Innovation is no longer a competitive advantage: it’s a competitive necessity. In order to keep up, you need to continuously innovate.”

Rob Hoehn2019-10-15T15:17:31-07:00May 2nd, 2014|Categories: Idea Management, Life Cycle Processes, Open Innovation|Tags: Competition, Crowdsourcing, decision making, innovation, innovation lifecycle, Open Innovation, profit|

Your Consumer and the Innovation Equation – Why They May Not Be Involved Enough

Identifying (let alone creating) a new innovation that will dramatically grow your business is difficult. Line extensions and product / package refreshes will keep the business moving forward and engaged with consumers. But what about the breakthrough innovation that executives are expecting? Transformational innovation requires significant investment, risk taking, and preparation which can be a challenge to coordinate.

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:14:52-07:00August 26th, 2013|Categories: Strategies|Tags: collaborative innovation, customer engagement, customer integration, customer satisfaction, innovation life cycle processes, Open Innovation, portfolio management, Product Development, voice of customer|

Stakeholder Co-Creation: The firm as an orchestrator in innovation projects

Nowadays, firms simultaneously include a higher variety of different stakeholders than ever before in their innovation process. Such a diverse collective brings in different perspectives and competences, yet, also poses new challenges for firms. This article presents insight into the capabilities required for a leading firm in a stakeholder co-creation project, acting as a conductor of an orchestra of stakeholders.

Ideascale2019-11-28T07:59:55-08:00August 23rd, 2013|Categories: Open Innovation, Strategies|Tags: ambidexterity, Best Practices, co-creation, collaborative innovation, company culture, Innovation Culture, resource mangement, Stakeholders|

How to Find Customer Frictions

An innovation is a simple new solution for a relevant problem. That’s why at the start of innovation you should look out for relevant problems instead of ideas. But how do you find them?

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:14:53-07:00August 21st, 2013|Categories: Front End of Innovation, Idea Management, Life Cycle Processes, Organization & Culture|Tags: customer engagement, customer groups, customer satisfaction, innovation, problem identification, Problem Solving, process|

Silence the Voice of the Customer

Innovation is successful when it targets customers’ needs, but how sure can we be that this is something we can predict effectively? In this article Tony Ulwick argues that the traditional voice of the customer methodology is the wrong tool to determine customer needs. Tony presents an alternative methodology that makes it possible to determine all the needs of a given customer group.

Ideascale2021-12-05T17:05:58-08:00June 25th, 2013|Categories: Life Cycle Processes|Tags: consumer, consumer experience, consumer insights, customer engagement, customer integration, customer needs, in-depth article, innovation life cycle processes, innovation process, outcome-driven innovation, product management, voice of customer|

How to Create Products that Your Customers Will Love

How to create innovations that customers do not expect, but that they eventually love? How to create products and services, which are so distinct from those that dominate the market and so inevitable that make people passionate? A major finding has characterized management literature in the past decades: that radical innovation, albeit risky, is one of the major sources of long-term competitive advantage. But is that really the case? Read more in this article by Roberto Verganti, Professor of Management of Innovation and author of the book “Design-Driven Innovation.

Ideascale2021-12-05T17:05:57-08:00June 20th, 2013|Categories: Strategies|Tags: business model, customer satisfaction, design thinking, Design-driven innovation, Product Development|

Using a Story in Innovation Work

Business is changing. To be successful in the twenty-first century, businesses in developed economies must connect with people’s emotions. This move towards greater emotional intelligence explains why “storytelling” has become so fashionable in marketing and therefore, in the following article, we will explain how you can bring storytelling into your innovation work. The aim:helping you create novel concepts that also connect emotionally.

Ideascale2019-11-28T09:23:35-08:00April 29th, 2013|Categories: Enabling Factors|Tags: communication strategy, Creativity, design thinking, emotional intelligence, Problem Solving, storyforms, storytelling|

How to Unseat the Incumbent

Incumbents. Everyone who isn’t one hates them and if they don’t already tease you enough from their ivory towers you just know that their lazy overpaid salesman is playing golf somewhere waiting for orders to drop into his inbox before he goes to the nineteenth hole. So how will your sales teams topple the golfer?

Ideascale2019-10-15T15:13:39-07:00April 1st, 2013|Categories: Strategies|Tags: Best Practices, business development, Competition, customer engagement, customer satisfaction, endowment effect, entrepreneur, gains, how to, in-depth article, incumbent, knowledge transfer, leadership, loss aversion, risk aversion, risk management, sales, status quo, value creation|