Monthly Archives: January 2011
If you can identify your unique selling point, you’re in a position to stamp your place on the map and even make inroads into enemy territory. If you don’t have anything that differentiates you from others you’re in trouble. For the Brits among you, imagine that I showed you photographs of the scenery at Brighton, Bognor Regis and Bournemouth and asked you which was which. Most people would find it difficult to tell them apart. Now suppose I added a photo of Blackpool. Nearly everyone would recognize it. Why? Because it has an enormous iron tower that is well known around the world. The tower is not modern, not used by most visitors to the town and not particularly attractive, but it is easily recognizable. Blackpool has something unique and memorable, which is one of the reasons why it gets 12 million visitors a year – more than any other … Continue reading
Social influence is important to innovation. One of the critical steps in innovating is getting our great new ideas to spread – and this is often an issue of social influence. Here is an excellent short talk from network researcher Sinan Aral about how to measure social influence: Sinan Aral: Social Contagion from PopTech on Vimeo. Here are some of the key ideas that arise from the talk: The economy is a network: in order to understand how innovations diffuse, and how ideas spread, we have to think about the economy as a network. We don’t make decisions in a vacuum – decisions are a social action (see the collected work of Mark Earls on this topic). Your network is also important for idea generation: Jorge Barba recently asked whether innovation is primarily an individual or a group activity. It’s a group effort – just as decisions are social actions, … Continue reading
The biggest excuse people make about why they can’t innovate is the lack of time. Really? “Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is to say ‘I don’t want to.’” – Lao Tzu “To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.” – Leonard Bernstein “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” – H. Jackson Brown “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” – Albert Einstein “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.”- Abraham Lincoln “Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.” – Napoleon Bonaparte “Your time is limited, … Continue reading
Without an evaluation process, ideas, and innovation programs can fall of a cliff. What makes ideas special relative to other user generated content is that ideas change things. Ideas put in motion a series of conversations and decisions about what the future will look like, and how you’ll achieve it. For organizations, the broadening of the innovation effort brings employees (internally) and customers and partners (externally) into the process, which is a sea change from historical norms. This is crowdsourcing, this is social business, this is Enterprise 2.0. This is not enough. A chronic problem with the digital suggestion box is doing something about the top ideas that are submitted. How do organizations effectively work through the ideas to make them a reality? That is the problem that tools like Spigit’s new release, Fusion, address. An evaluation workflow application enables organizations to accelerate innovation and ensure the best ideas are … Continue reading
More times than not, pricing decisions for new products are based more on internal production costs and less on the value of the actual benefits that these products provide for your customers. Probably the biggest reason for this is that it is far easier to calculate internal costs than to go out in the marketplace and do the heavy-lifting to ascertain the value of the benefits provided. But even if you go through the heavy-lifting of determining the economic value of these benefits, many times that information is compromised by the additional knowledge of your internal production costs. This is because is is much easier to rationalize a price based on known data (internal costs) than to rely on data that is much more abstract (economic value to customer) and far less defensible during the pricing debate. And so while we don’t like to admit that our pricing decisions are … Continue reading
China’s economy is set to become as big as that of the United States, by some estimates as early as 2027. Too often though, commentators speak about Chinese consumers like they’re some kind of monolith, somehow different from other customers. Yes, they represent truly enormous collective purchasing power, both now and increasingly in the future. But evidence is building that individual Chinese consumers are ultimately looking for high-quality products they can have an emotional connection to. This point was driven home in a recent article from China Daily, “Screens and dreams fuel Freud fever,” about the explosive popularity there of Sigmund Freud. Libraries have loaned out every copy of The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1899. Bookstores are sold out. Tens of thousands of Chinese students have sought training to become psychoanalysts. And the blockbuster-in-the-U.S. Inception, set in a stunning dream world and owing much to Freud’s theories – … Continue reading
