Monthly Archives: July 2010
Yesterday Blogging Innovation passed a significant milestone – we published our 1,500th article. We’ve come a long ways in the last eighteen months: THEN – 8,500 monthly unique visits and 13,000 pages per month NOW – Nearly 300,000 monthly unique visits and 1.7 million pages per month We’ve also broadened where you can find our articles and video interviews: THEN – RSS, Email, and Monthly Newsletter NOW – RSS, Email, Monthly Newsletter, Kindle, iPhone, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn Of course our goal remains to make innovation and marketing insights accessible for the greater good. You’re all helping to make that possible, and are of course welcome to contribute to the strong innovation community we’ve built together by doing any of the following: Leaving a comment on an article or participating in a discussion in our LinkedIn group Contributing an article or suggesting a blog author for us to add … Continue reading
Common Wisdom Regarding Purposeful Or Successful Innovation Is Wrong by Idris Mootee Walk into a Barnes and Noble you can find dozens of books on innovation. There are books ranging from teaching the ‘how to” to teaching creative thinking. There are not many good ones simply because the subject is a moving target with rules being broken and created every day. Meanwhile existing tools are becoming obsolete, and best practices are often worst practices. Much that is held as common wisdom regarding how purposeful or successful innovation happened is wrong. This is not to say that all organizations are not innovative; but obviously many are not, thanks to our management systems and education. Innovation does not require a revolution. What it does require is thoughtful construction of a good sense making process, a robust pipeline management approach and a strategic intent from top leadership. Innovation is not just about creativity … Continue reading
A recent #15inno Twitter Chat made me ponder on the worst and most common mistakes that companies do on open innovation. Here comes a list of my thoughts – still work in progress. 1. Companies do not identify proper business reasons for engaging with open innovation. 2. Companies copy competitor’s initiatives rather than creating their own unique initiatives that match their business reasons for doing open innovation. 3. Companies fail to make their employees, partners and customers understand what open innovation means to the company and they fail to explain the impact of such a new direction to the internal and external stakeholders. 4. The various organizational units – and in particular the operational ones – are not fully aligned with the innovation initiatives making it difficult to execute in full on otherwise well-devised initiatives. 5. Executives fail to understand that how they handle risk and fear of losing control-issues … Continue reading
Amassing Intellectual Property and Value Creation by Robert F. Brands What is the ultimate goal of process-driven innovation? Open a bottle of Coca-Cola – and read its performance reports – to get a true taste of the answer. In 1980, the Coca-Cola Company was struggling, and its market share was underperforming compared to its competitors. So at a worldwide management conference in 1981, CEO Roberto Críspulo Goizueta decided to refocus the entire organization on putting value creation first. The company refined its marketing investment, expanded into new markets, and acquired new bottling companies and the intellectual property and patents they held. The company created new products, including Diet Coke. It embraced a global vision; to wit, some market researchers say the company became the world’s best-known brand. This transformation of company and IP doubled the company’s market share in 15 years, and Goizueta reportedly created more shareholder wealth than any … Continue reading
This is the third of several ‘Innovation Perspectives’ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘How should firms identify innovation opportunities and predict market potential at very early stages and in new areas (“green fields”) and ambiguous environments?’. Here is the next perspective in the series: Where the Heart Leads, the Head (and the Wallet!) Will Follow by Mark Prus Identifying and evaluating market potential of very early stage innovation opportunities is definitely more art than science. As such, it is difficult to have an algorithm that says “input A leads to result B if conditions C are present.” However, an assessment of whether an idea has a “heartbeat” can often lead to opportunities that can be successfully developed. A well-known sales principle is that people buy on emotion and then justify the purchase with logic. In my experience, the same holds true … Continue reading
Nielsen, Consumer Products, Apple, Google… by Adam Hartung “Boost Innovation Without the Boss” according to an article by Paul Sloane. Citing data from The Nielsen Company’s study of 30 large consumer products companies showed that companies with White Space Teams (what they call Blue Sky) teams are far more successful at creating revenue generating innovation than companies trying to innovate through the traditional organization structure. And, as recommended in this blog, these teams are more than twice as effective when they are dedicated off-site teams! And, organizations with minimal senior executive involvement generate 80% more product revenue than those with heavy senior level participation. Hierarchy is an innovation killer. The higher a manager goes, the more he feels compelled to “weed out” options. Unfortunately, most of this weeding is based upon Defending & Extending the existing Success Formula. Doing more of the same better, faster and cheaper dominates …
