The Front End of Innovation is that fuzzy bit where someone, or a group, conceives a new business concept. We say “fuzzy” because it’s the part of the innovation process that is the most purely creative. It’s a step into the unknown to create something new and calls for different tools and techniques. Because it’s fuzzy, we think it’s useful to break it down and look at it step-by-step.
You’re the leading branded FMCG player in your market. You are a well-known and respected company with a long heritage of consistently outperforming other major brands. Yet, despite this heritage, you are underperforming in one market segment that is showing strong growth. Bryan Urbick explores how to capture share of a lucrative and growing market.
A major shift is underway from fixed to flexible lifestyles, from commute to communicate forms of consumption. The Millennials or Generation Y are at the heart of it, both by choice and necessity; but the impacts will be felt far wider as new technologies enable a more flexible, pick and mix approach to life and work.
The Digital Age disrupts the practices and beliefs that gird the archetypical relationship between advertising agency and client. The Procter & Gamble Companies discarded a relic of the client-agency relationship, the creative brief. They seek more authentic engagement that leads to more compelling campaigns. What possibilities do clients open when they move from exchanging information to engaging in co-creation? What role might the practice of collaborative innovation play in redefining roles between client and agency?
Customers change. Competitors change. Technology changes. If you don’t do anything, new and competitive products catch up and overtake your products and services quickly. A study by A.D. Little has shown that the life cycle of products has decreased by factor 4 the last fifty years. So innovation is essential. But it is time consuming. It demands a lot of resources. And a positive outcome is very uncertain. In this blog Gijs van Wulfen offers a helping hand by identifying five common mistakes to avoid.
It is often in the commencement of one’s career that simple mistakes are made. Whether it’s a result of inexperience, blinding enthusiasm or fearlessness doesn’t really matter, as long as the lesson learned serves you, and others, well. Gijs van Wulfen shares a constructive experience from his first innovation position.
Have you participated in a brainstorming session that felt like wasted time? For some reason no new and interesting ideas were formed? Perhaps you need to get rid of your old ideas first! Gis van Wulfen explains.
In a recent SAP Community Network post Harun Asad mentioned innovation as one social strategy. In this article he explores the role of social in innovation strategy more broadly, and cites several real-world examples as well as shares some predictions for the future.
Companies put in lots of Market Research efforts to nail down the needs, wants, wishes and whims of the elusive consumers. But, how reliable are the results? Are there logical – or illogical – reasons why consumers sometimes say one thing and still do the other? In this blog, Bengt Järrehult uses the findings of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Laureate in Economy 2002 to understand more of this in the area of innovation.
The figures are clear, Emailvision’s survey shows that just 6,2% of the marketers are using social media to gain insights into customer preferences. According to a study by the Chartered Institute of Marketing only 20% of marketers use Facebook for market research. This means not fully utilizing the opportunities of social media and their data. Social media can provide an unparalled scale of real-time data, help identify unmediated consumer opinion and competitor perceptions or offer the ability to connect with those 'creative consumers' to co-create the solution with and strategically embed the outside-in perspective in the organization.
“Innovate or die” becomes the order of the day. People in response seek ways to innovate. Of late, many have embraced the practice of collaborative innovation, with its application of social media to sourcing crowds and ideas, and design thinking, with its structured approach to vetting hypotheses about new business opportunities. Having arrived in the organization by different routes, they exist as potential complements. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores ways to combine the practices to their mutual benefit.
Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking, and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or - even worse - commodity products and services that compete only on price.
Design empowered innovation combines the best of right and left brain thinking. It has the capacity to deliver better ideas, with more relevance, realized earlier. By focusing on individuals, moments and journeys in ethnography, insights become deeper. By embracing chaos and play in brainstorms, creative teams can explore further. By iterating and early prototyping, ideas become real and develop more rapidly.
Emotions, empathy, connection, love, storytelling, self-care – I am referring what I heard about the consumer. Creative revolution, democratization, social innovation, experience, passion – I am referring to what I heard about innovation.
For decades we’ve been taught the surest way to developing successful new products is to listen to the voice of the customer. And we’ve all experienced focus groups and surveys. Consumers tell you they want one thing and then turn around and do another. So which is the right voice to listen to? Harvey Briggs provides some guidelines.
