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.
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.
Innovation and Process Automation for Small Businesses
In the world of small businesses, there are only three golden rules you need to keep in mind:
How Can Personalization Improve Your Business Impact?
If there’s one mistake that marketers keep repeating, it is treating their customer base as a demographic instead of as a group of individuals. With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that personalizing your message increases your engagement rate while personalizing your brand as a whole tends to give your customer loyalty a boost.
Defining and Demystifying Retail Experience Futures
It's that time of year, following the holiday excess many of our waistlines are looking a little fuller and our email inboxes are full of newsletters, including 2018 predictions and the key trends to consider.
5 Things Innovative Companies Can Learn From Amazon
It is no secret that Amazon is a titan of industry. Given their tremendous success, they are quite obviously doing more than a few things right. While there are undoubtedly a myriad of different reasons that this company has become the giant that it now is, today we will be taking a look at five of the lessons that other companies can learn from Amazon.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Happiness, Meaning & Innovation
Can an organization be too customer oriented? What are the consequences of letting short term requirements of existing customers cannibalize the exploration of your own an agenda? How can a sense of meaning be reinstalled in disillusioned development organizations? Read Susanna's latest blog post to find out.
Five Ways to Commit Innovation Suicide
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.
Joe Pine: Economic Value Creation Through the Experience Economy
The Experience Economy is accelerated by the current global crisis according to Joe Pine. People don’t want more stuff, in this post-growth global economy people start questioning what they really value and that is experiences with others, loved ones, colleagues, friends, etc. There’s more demand for experiences and this will create job opportunities, moreover because commoditized services are being outsourced and offshored.
How to Combine Innovation with Lean and Six Sigma
Innovation never takes place in a vacuum cut off from other initiatives to improve performance. Doug Collins takes a look at how to team up with people in the Lean and Six Sigma processes.