Monthly Archives: February 2010
Nothing like putting your heart and soul into innovation, and then getting this:Man, tough audience. But very much in keeping with some the best advice on innovation. Which is, you can’t have innovation without some failure along the way. It’s inevitable.That advice is both true, and glib. Innovation consultant Jeffrey Phillips catches the right spirit when he says:”Another thing about ‘failure’ is that we try to kid ourselves that failure is a ‘good thing’ a learning opportunity. Well, not in most cultures.This is the reality of innovation. It’s tough. The more disruptive an innovation, the tougher it gets. And we’re in the middle of seeing how it plays right now with Apple iPad and Google Buzz.Let me ask you this: Do you personally think either the iPad or Buzz will be guaranteed successes for their respective companies? Be honest now.My guess is you’re like most of us: I don’t know.Well, … Continue reading
We’ve noticed a common thread among many companies these days. When thinking about innovation – most seem to be heavily focused on providing incremental features and benefits as a cornerstone for their competitive advantage. What seems to elude many executive leaders is a lack of understanding that people do not buy products, they buy into meanings.Maybe the reason for this is simply the physics of most organizations inhibits radical innovation and the competitive advantage that results. What matters the most to people is not the function of a product, but their emotional, psychological and cultural connection to what a product means to them. The key to sustained competitive advantage for companies is to innovate around meanings rather than function and performance. Radical Innovation does not happen when you bring people an incremental improvement of what they already know. Rather, radical innovation (and market leadership for that matter) is the result … Continue reading
Adam Werbach, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, recently spoke at the 5th Annual Teens Turning Green Summit in California to an audience of keen, sustainability-minded young people. His message – on the opportunities this generation has to create positive change and the power of DOTs – clearly resonated, and is now spreading like wildfire on the web. It’s a welcome shot of inspiration for anyone, whether you’re teen or senior, whether you consider yourself Green or Blue. Below is a shortened version of Adam’s speech, you can read the full version here. – Kevin Robertsby Adam WerbachThe Earth needs you right now. Our ecological systems are in decline, one-third of fish species stand at the verge of collapse, the glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide drinking water to over a billion people, are rapidly melting, the chemicals we’re putting in us, on us and around us are forming … Continue reading
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott FitzgeraldThat’s the quote with which Richard Lester and Michael Piore open their outstanding book “Innovation: The Missing Dimension.” The opposing ideas that they discuss throughout the book are interpretation and analysis. They argue that both are necessary components of innovation, but that they require completely different skills and mindsets to manage. Here is how they describe the issue:”In new product development, interpretation and analysis exist in perpetual tension. This tension is inevitable and unavoidable, and we believe it is the central management problem that innovative businesses must confront. The tension… springs from many sources. Interpretation proceeds through conversations over time – within and among the various communities that contribute to new product development and between the designers and the customers … Continue reading
I watched the @ThatKevinSmith and @SouthwestAir brouhaha erupt live on Twitter but didn’t write about it last week. Bunches of tweeters and bloggers hashing out who was right and wrong based on second, third, or five hundredth-hand information simply wasn’t interesting enough to warrant adding to the noise.Getting ready for a social media presentation this week though, I’ve been thinking about service defects and service recovery in the world of social networking.I sought an analogy to help think strategically about how a company prepares for an angry customer who wants to be heard and starts tweeting incessantly: handling a hostage situation is very comparable. Rather than a person though, it’s a brand’s reputation being taken hostage by a customer threatening irreparable harm unless demands are met. With the one-to-many communication capabilities of social media, this type of threat has never been more credible.Here are five hostage negotiation principles and related … Continue reading
It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I hear about a new company or a new innovation and slap my forehead wondering why I didn’t think of it first. Netflix was a little bit like that, but I heard about alice.com today and that one in particular bugs me because I have been writing about the basic idea behind Alice for nearly three years, I just hadn’t thought to turn it into an actual Web storefront.So what is Alice and why is it such an a great idea? Well, Alice (named for the Brady Bunch character – good move), is a site that sells consumer goods over the internet. Things like soap, toilet paper, laundry detergent, and so on. The clever part about their model is that they don’t make any money selling the products that they offer. They make their money selling advertising on the site, and selling purchase … Continue reading
