Monthly Archives: January 2011
Many innovative new products have their genesis in simple observation. Observation reveals unmet user needs, problems and opportunities. These insights are the inspiration for great products that create new markets and a strategic competitive advantage, ultimately driving revenue growth. Understanding the power of observation is essential for building your company’s product development innovation engine. The Observational Study The observational study is intended to provide actionable information for defining user needs, creating problem statements and understanding use scenarios. These studies are generally not complex and usually consist of observers embedding themselves with people as they go about their daily work or specific tasks. Studies should be well-planned and have written goals and clear expectations for type and format of output. Depending on study design observations can be as short as hours or as long as days. The subject may be observed only once or multiple times over many days. The number … Continue reading
I know I’m late responding to this ad by Accenture, but I saw it today in the airport and it made me smile. Why? Because it is so “Field of Dreams”. There are so many assertions that are wrong with the statement that one hardly knows where to begin. First, innovation should be pursued in context of user needs. Inside-out innovation driven by products or technologies is rarely successful. Any one of us can point at many products that were built with the hopes that they met customer needs, and market plans that projected hockey stick adoption curves. But innovation doesn’t happen well in a vacuum. Second, who is this “they” the article asserts will come? The market at large? Your existing customers? New prospects? People you didn’t want as customers? Innovation should solve specific problems felt by people or prospects …
I’ve been asked to visit the Bluegrass Region in Kentucky on February 7-8 to help catalyze a community conversation on turning the region into an entrepreneurial and innovation hotspot. Why is it you can stand on your head and scream from the rooftops in your own hometown, with few listening, while the same message resonates in the community right next door? I guess it’s true when they say the grass is always greener, or in this case bluer! I can’t wait to visit Lexington and Louisville to spark an important conversation among the many passionate entrepreneurs, innovators, and community leaders who are working hard to transform their local economy. One of the essential ingredients to transforming any economy is an optimistic and passionate group of change agents and catalysts. The Bluegrass Region is fortunate to have many including Eric Patrick Marr the founder of LeXenomics, who I …
When it come to leadership age doesn’t matter – competency does. History is full of examples of leaders who have succeeded and failed at every age. The intangibles of passion, character, commitment, discernment, and talent are of infinitely greater importance than someones date of birth. I don’t care about your generational category (Gen X, Gen Y, or Boomer), but I do care about your ability to contribute. In today’s post I’ll give you a different take on the topic of ageism. Whether your advantage is youth or experience isn’t really the issue – competency is. Regardless of your age, venturing beyond your area(s) of competency can be a very dangerous thing to do. It has been my experience that there are generally two types of people: those that don’t know what they don’t know, and those that do know what they don’t know. All other things being …
“We need to out-innovate, outeducate, and outbuild the rest of the world” – President Obama In reading the stories and quotes from last night’s State of the Union address by President Obama, it is clear, and frustrates me to no end, that my government talks a lot about innovation but still does not understand how to foster it. Innovation in America, especially in the short term, is not achieved by pumping huge sums of money into government-sponsored research and development efforts. Yes, many successful innovations have resulted from government research investments, but we need to take a more strategic approach to these efforts. The focus on research and capital projects by the Obama administration also begs the question of whether long-term investments be our only approach to innovation. The Internet itself may be one of the most successful government research and development efforts, but we need more of these types … Continue reading
A few years ago I looked around the corporate and consulting landscapes and I noticed that there was a talent gap in both places. There are many occasions when consulting firms look to their bench and don’t have the talent they need there to fulfill a client need right away and so sometimes they lose business to their competition. And on the corporate side, there are many occasions when a manager or director has more work than they can possibly do themselves and what they really need is not a consultant but a smart, flexible resource that can parachute in and get up to speed helping them very fast. Having been called in to fill both of these kinds of gaps from time to time alerted me to the existence of these two market needs, and so I started to create extendedbench.com. There is definitely a need for an ‘extended … Continue reading
