Monthly Archives: February 2011
Innovation has always been a challenging and risky business. These days, it is getting harder and harder for many companies to compete, escaping the forces of commoditization, as manufacturing spreads around the world to lower-cost regions. With the increasing flow of knowledge and information, largely spurred by the proliferation of the Internet and enabled by technology, product life span is shortening. As new products come to market with increasing frequency and take valuable market share, more and more companies are finding it increasingly challenging to keep up and compete. Product life span is further shortened by customers’ increasing demands for products and services customized or tailored to fulfill their needs better. The combination of these undeniable forces creates a commodity trap, an often perilous phenomenon that pulls at even the most innovative and successful companies. Many companies and industries are beginning or trying to make a shift as our advanced … Continue reading
One Frequently Ignored Secret of Facilitating Brainstorm Sessions by Mitch Ditkoff Here’s one of the dirty little secrets of corporate brainstorm sessions: When they are led by upper management, department heads, or project leaders, they usually get manipulated. Because honchos and honchettes are heavily invested in the topic being brainstormed, it is common for them to bend the collective genius of the group to their own particular point of view. Not a good idea. Participants — out of respect for the expertise (or position or parking space) of the facilitator — will invariably moderate their input. And while this can sometimes lead to good results, the results are usually disappointing. That’s why brainstorm facilitators need to remain neutral. Not neutral like vague. No. Neutral like free of any pre-determined concept or outcome. An empty window, not an empty suit. A facilitator’s role is to facilitate (from the Latin word meaning … Continue reading
I had the opportunity to interview Paul Sloane, editor of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing recently. Here is text of the interview: 1. Why should organizations be thinking about Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing? The pace of innovation has increased to a degree where it is difficult to generate the required number of high-quality ideas and initiatives using internal resources alone. Big companies like Kraft, Unilever and IBM have realized that they need to harness the brainpower of people outside their companies if they are to compete in the innovation race. Open innovation involves collaborating with outsiders to bring new products and services to market quickly. No matter how big or small you are, you should be doing something similar. The trick is to find the kind of open innovation that suits your business and your style. 2. When it comes to Open Innovation or Crowdsourcing, what is the … Continue reading
The reactions to my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons have been very positive. There have already been fifteen reviews of the book on Amazon and several university professors are looking at possibly using the book as part of their courses at different schools. Thank you to all of you whom have already purchased and read and reviewed the book. It is very gratifying and motivating to see people investing their money in taking the book home with them and investing their time to read it. I worked very hard to make the book both accessible and valuable, a book that can be useful to both current innovation practitioners and those just looking to either learn more about innovation or to jump-start their own innovation initiatives inside their organizations. And while I didn’t intentionally design the book to serve as a course text, reading back … Continue reading
It’s really astonishing to realize how little most firms understand about innovation, especially the fact that people are paramount to innovation success. In the title I’ve made a fairly definitive statement. Innovation is the last people-centric process, and yet we starve innovation efforts of our best people and chip away at the time dedicated to innovation even of the people who want to participate. I’ll claim innovation is the last people-centric process because most firms don’t have a well-defined innovation process. If you think carefully about how most businesses work, they are organized around well-defined business processes, some of which are named. The procurement to payment process manages how a business acquires products and services and how it pays for them. The order to invoice process manages how a business receives customer orders for goods and services and how it collects payment for those products and …
Peter Drucker tells the story about how a tiny photographic paper and equipment manufacturer from upstate New York ended up cornering the copy machine market in the second half of the twentieth century. And they did it by being a pricing innovator, not a technology innovator. It’s a reminder of the importance of using pricing as part of your overall strategy. One reason why the patents on a copying machine ended up at a small, obscure company in Rochester, New York, then known as the Haloid Company, rather than at one of the big printing-machine manufacturers, was that none of the large established manufacturers saw any possibility of selling a copying machine. Their calculations showed that such a machine would have to sell for at least $4,000. Nobody was going to pay such a sum for a copying machine [in the 1950s] when carbon paper cost practically nothing. Also, of … Continue reading
