Monthly Archives: July 2009
I first met Keith Ferrazzi at the incentive2innovate Conference at the United Nations. Keith is the author of the best-selling “Never Eat Alone” and the new bestseller “Who’s Got Your Back.” When his book tour stopped in Seattle the very next week, I had the opportunity to ask Keith on camera about the impact of relationships on innovation and collaboration. Here is what he had to say:As many of you know, innovation often comes as a result of triumphing over fear – fear of failure, fear of rejection, etc. By creating effective peer support groups in your organization (especially amongst innovation teams), much of this fear can be replaced with trust. As you can imagine, immense power comes from making this substitution.”Who’s Got Your Back” is a book all about the importance of building an inner circle of deep, trusting relationships that create success and won’t let you fail. These … Continue reading
THE POINT: Leading electronics companies can lead a movement to future-proof their businesses by innovating updatable products that encourage customer loyalty, sustainability and pragmatic fun.Creating Consumer Electronics 2.0It’s easy to blame tighter purse strings for falling electronics sales figures. But it’s not just lack of money that’s keeping customers away; it’s fear of instant obsolescence.Today’s consumer consideration set has fundamentally shifted. We now want long-term value, not just the latest and greatest.Yesterday we used an electronic device until it broke or a better one superseded it. We disposed of the old with great dispatch. Brands using a Parallel Model of product development kept us enthralled with a constant churn of new shiny objects and updated versions. Durables were recast as disposable. Sales and stocks soared. Best Buy created a whole new business, Geek Squad, to help us keep up. We wanted new toys, but needed Geeks to show us how … Continue reading
I want to return to an issue that sparked some healthy debate a few weeks ago but didn’t go far enough in my opinion.When Michele Obama first announced the Office of Social Innovation, bloggers like Allison Fine posed some really important questions about what is meant by innovation and how to ensure that the government doesn’t just reward the largest and most tested programs in lieu of smaller, sometimes newer, and even untested efforts at innovation. I’d like to pose this same question to the philanthropic sector.How does innovation get funded and are we ok with the way it currently works? Everybody knows that these are tough times for nonprofits and even tougher times for new nonprofits, IssueLab among them. We frequently hear from foundations that they are only supporting their existing grantees or that they aren’t currently accepting proposals from organizations they don’t already know. (A recent online discussion … Continue reading
Thanks to all of you, Blogging Innovation has experienced incredible global growth (even in Portuguese). To better serve you, the Blogging Innovation readers, I have decided to open up this blog to publishing the best innovation and marketing strategy insights from around the web.While I will still be writing articles for the blog, I will now become more of an editor and caretaker of Blogging Innovation and the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn. I will be focusing on publishing only the highest quality global innovation and marketing strategy insights from ad hoc and regular contributors. I’ve got a few re-publishing agreements in place but am looking for more.If there is an innovation author you think I should approach about writing for Blogging Innovation, please contact me or post a comment below. I am seeking:Articles – for Blogging Innovation (guest author example)Videos – for Innovation Interviews, YouTube, or Vimeo channelsOr, if … Continue reading
Congratulations to Evelyn Hannon!Evelyn has won the Innovation Insight Contest and a copy of “Rethink” by Ric Merrifield.Thank you to everyone who submitted their favorite innovation insight or quote, and to all of you that voted. I hope that you had fun with the process. If you have any suggestions for future contests, please add them as a comment to this blog post or send an @reply on Twitter to @innovate.Here is the winning entry from @Journeywoman (Evelyn Hannon):”Question all rules. 1900 Olympics only 15 women took part. It was feared if she ran too fast her uterus would fall out.”While all of the entries were great, there were a couple of things that struck me when I read Evelyn’s entry that aren’t explicity in the text:Smart organizations don’t see innovation as an effort, but as a movement. Too often we let the “rules” limit us, instead of seeing the … Continue reading
In the first video, Gever Tulley describes our child safety-obsessed culture and the impact this has on the young minds of our children. He then speaks about the different impact you can have by teaching your kids how to play with dangerous stuff. He highlights five dangerous things to let your kids play with, but is working on a book that will highlight 50 dangerous things. Check out the video: In the second video, Gever Tulley demonstrates the valuable lessons kids learn at his Tinkering School. When given tools, materials and guidance, these young imaginations run wild and creative problem-solving takes over to build unique boats, bridges and even a rollercoaster! On his blog he lays out the principles of kit-based learning, which are great things for teachers and parents to think about when teaching science to children. Parents have an incredible opportunity to supplement the achievement test-focused learning their … Continue reading
