In 2010, the Gillette brand, which is owned by Proctor and Gamble, held 70% of the U.S. market for razors. It boasted continuous innovation in product design, and enjoyed a gross margin of around 60%. Its market share has now slid to around 50%. It has suffered at the hands of two start-up companies, which went direct to consumer (DTC). They are Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club.
If you want creative ideas, you need to invest your creative energy not in ideas, but in understanding the problem and formulating provocative challenges, instructs Jeffrey Baumgartner.
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.
In a slow or no-growth environment, we know successful innovation is absolutely essential for companies to establish and maintain a competitive advantage. While that may be yesterday’s news, achieving it is hard work. How can you achieve high value from your innovation initiatives? In this article Adi Alon discusses four key success factors that can help you get a higher return on innovation.
To build a capability of sustainable innovation, the key is to work smarter, not harder, according to this GE engineer.
