Monthly Archives: October 2009
Your prospects don’t care what you do. They don’t care how it works.They’re only thinking of themselves. And can you blame them?Their butt is on the line if they don’t deliver results, cut costs, delight their own customers. They have their own problems, their own pain, their own priorities.Your prospects don’t care what you do. They will only care about you if you can solve their problem. Ease their pain. Make their job easier. Make them look like a hero.Your prospects don’t care what you do. They care deeply about what you can do for them.There is only demand for your product if there is more demand for the solution it represents.Sell that way.Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.
We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Francois Ragnet’s talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.Francois Ragnet, Managing Principal, Technology Innovation at Xerox spoke about technology transfer and the paper-free office. Xerox generated 940 patents in 2008 and has 8,000 active patents and invests $884 million in R&D (5.2% of revenue). 5,000 world-class scientists & engineers are generating more than 2 patents a day for Xerox. They recently started an Innovation Hub in India where they will try to leverage open innovation.From Francois’ perspective, part of the difficulties in innovating in the services space is to create something that is repeatable and differentiated. Innovation in services relies on learning from failure.”We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and … Continue reading
We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Dr. Steven K. Goers’ talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.Dr. Steven K. Goers, VP, Open Innovation and Investment Strategy at Kraft Foods, oriented his talk towards ‘Innovating the How’. Dr. Goers sits in the R&D department and looks after Knowledge Management, Intellectual Property, and Open Innovation.Kraft Foods has 99% penetration into United States households, but still is trying to grow the company at 5%+ (which translates to $2B a year). To help achive their goals, they are trying to harness the power of internal innovation networks – 2,000 scientists and engineers and 98,000 employees – while also leveraging external innovation networks. They are currently expanding their innovation capacity (ability to do more) and capability (to integrate open innovation).Kraft Foods needs to innovate because they are in … Continue reading
We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Jack Anderson’s talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.Jack Anderson, Innovation Specialist at Chevron, spoke first about innovation and IT’s overall posture (High Level IT Posture Within the Organization):Systematic innovationManaged innovationDefined innovationSporadic innovationInitial/Ad hoc innovationVersus the view of IT as:Cost CenterService CenterInvestment CenterValue CenterJack Anderson works in the technology group at Chevron:Chevron leadership sees innovation as a connectorOne of Chevron’s core values is based around ingenuityChevron employees are expected to be collaborative and to be ingenious, but you still have to know the right person to ask for the data”How do we get the great ideas articulated so that people can do something with those ideas?”Chevron has three modes of innovation:RadicalIncrementalReappliedReapplied is the one that people have the most difficulty with (an innovation designed for a different … Continue reading
We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Dr. Daniel Sturman’s talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.Dr. Daniel Sturman, Engineering Director at Google, spoke from an engineer’s perspective, not from an innovation director’s perspective, about the culture at Google. The main key in his mind?Make sure you have good people, that they know what direction you’re going in, and then as a manager, try to get out of the way:Rich and broad mission scopeTolerance of failure and encouragement of risk-takingDecentralized action towards a commin mission and platformTechnical leverage (cloud computing)The Google approach to managing people and launching and iterating, may very well not be applicable to other areas, but it’s what they do. Dr. Sturman talked about how he wouldn’t necessarily want his surgeon launching and iterating.From his experience, there was no master plan … Continue reading
Innovation Perspectives is our monthly feature to present our loyal readers with different perspectives on a single topic all in one place along with the ability to compare, contrast and discuss them in the comments here on Blogging Innovation and in the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn. This month’s topic was: “What roles do engineers and marketers play in an innovation setting, and what conflicts can arise based on their perspectives and approaches?”Thank you to Steve Todd for submitting this month’s topicHere is a list of all of the authors that participated this month and links to their articles on this topic.Braden Kelley – Engineering versus Intangible ValueJeffrey Phillips – Engineers, Marketers and InnovationMike Brown – Operationally Smart MarketingMark Roser – Fighting our StereotypesRowan Gibson – Matching Possibilities with NeedsIf you would like to suggest a topic for next month’s Innovation Perspectives, or would like to contribute, please leave a … Continue reading
