Monthly Archives: July 2010
by Kevin Roberts Time’s recent cover story on Thomas Edison, America’s greatest inventor, makes both instructive and inspirational reading. Aside from patenting over 1,000 ideas in his lifetime, Edison gave birth to the modern ideas-driven organization. As the Time article points out, his Menlo Park “invention factory” was “the forerunner of every business-world creative cockpit, from the Ford engineering center to the Microsoft campus and Google’s Googleplex.” I’ve always admired Edison’s seemingly endless capacity for innovation. But, after reading the article, I am even more in awe of how focused and productive he was. The Menlo Park laboratory, Edison famously claimed, would produce a minor invention every 10 days, and a major breakthrough every six months. As if that weren’t enough, Edison’s invention to-do list was ambitious to say the least. It included, among other things, a long-distance telephone transmitter, an electric piano, a new version of the phonograph, and … Continue reading
Do Your Innovation Emperor, Rules & Idea Management Help or Hinder the Process? by Robert F. Brands with Jeff Zbar In the pursuit of innovation, many “enlightened” companies try to follow what they believe are established morays and best practices. They install someone to manage new product development or innovation. They set up a litany of rules. And they select only the “best” ideas for further development. Then they wonder why innovation falls fallow. A recent study from The Nielsen Company. found that companies with acknowledged, successful innovation practices also have limited involvement from senior management. The teams are guided, but freed of stifling controls. With the premise, “Manage Ideas Lightly, Manage Process Precisely,” the study of 30 top consumer and package goods companies found that ideation and new product development must be structured, but unconstrained. The companies enjoyed 80% more new product revenue when senior executives were less involved … Continue reading
What is it about Adidas sneakers that makes me so happy to wear them? Why does New Zealand’s mountainous landscape bring me so much enjoyment? These sound like rhetorical questions, but Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom wants answers. In his new book How Pleasure Works, Bloom takes a crack at explaining the nature of pleasure. Considering the complexity of his subject matter, the answer he provides is actually quite simple: “What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think that thing is.” When an art collector is told that his favorite Monet is a fake, it dramatically reduces the amount of pleasure he derives from the painting. Even though all that’s changed is the way that he thinks about that work of art. At the same time, everyday objects that have historical, sentimental, or … Continue reading
Best to Let it Be by Mike Brown Bloomberg Businessweek featured a pitiful review of the book “You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles after the Breakup,” by Peter Doggett in a recent issue. The theme of the rather tortured review (and one can assume of the book) was whether something could have been done to keep the The Beatles together, primarily because of all the money they left on the table. As a point of comparison, the Rolling Stones (essentially Mick Jagger and Keith Richards) were cited for having kept their creative partnership together in the face of impending bankruptcy around the same era The Beatles disintegrated. That’s certainly one point of view – keeping your failing creative partnership together solely for the money – but it’s a messed up one. I’ve always admired The Beatles for calling it quits before the complete collapse of their collective creativity. … Continue reading
In The Innovation Manual, David Midgley identifies three categories of challenge from which innovation can spring: customer, technology, business model. While examples of innovations in the technology category abound, they sometimes mask where the real innovation takes place. For example, the Wii is less about technology than about bringing to the video-game console a whole new range of customers (yoga beginners, grannies and families) that would not be your typical shoot-`em-up PS3 user. Likewise, despite being encapsulated in hi-tech products, Dell’s or Intel’s innovations were really about creating new ways of doing business. Apple – recently voted the most innovative company – appears to be a case in point. They master all 3 categories to the extent that they purposefully interweave them to create unbeatable formula that altogether: disrupt the prevailing business model (the music download industry with iTune/iPod, the publishing and online book retailing industries with iPad) open up … Continue reading
Okay readers, it’s time to test your business IQ. Which word does not belong in this group? Radar Kayak Raven Repaper If you answered “kayak,” you’re right! It’s the only word that doesn’t start with the letter R. But wait. If you answered “raven,” you’re also correct because it‘s the only word that isn’t a palindrome (reads the same forwards as backwards). Hold on a second. If you answered “repaper,” you’re also correct because it’s the only word with more than five letters. What’s the point of this exercise? To point out that in business, as in life, there are often many right answers. But we are trained to constantly look for the right answer. So when the first idea that comes up looks good, we tend to shut down our thinking processes and run with that idea instead of opening the door to other potentially better or different ideas. … Continue reading
