Monthly Archives: March 2011
That hungry whirring noise heard around offices across the U.S. is the sound of March Madness brackets being fed to paper shredders everywhere. Bracket busting is reaching historic levels in this year’s NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball National Championship Tournament. Since the tournament was created in 1939 this is the first time there are no number 1 or 2 seeds in the Final Four. All of the country’s top eight teams, as anointed by the experts, will watch the Final Four from home. That’s amazing. It’s the first time in March Madness history that two teams, Butler (8) and VCU (11), seeded 8 or worse in their bracket will play each other in the Final Four. So if you shredded your bracket, you’re not alone. According to ESPN Research only two people out of the 5.9 million who filled out and submitted brackets in the ESPN Tournament Challenge have the … Continue reading
There is an old American joke that goes: “When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME.” How true. While I won’t deny their usefulness, assumptions can be dangerous things. They are particularly dangerous when made about your customers. Polaroid was a pioneer in digital imagery, having designed a digital film back for large format cameras in the early 1990s. However, they didn’t bring their invention to market until 1996 because they had been trying to find a way to bundle it with a printer. Polaroid was so caught up in producing instant prints, it never occurred to them that their customers might be willing, indeed happy, to look at images on a computer screen. They had made assumptions based on their then current business model, which had been in place for decades. Likewise, about a dozen years ago a company then called the Nation Publishing Group … Continue reading
In 1987, president Ronald Reagan gave his famous speech in which he implored Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” I’m going to paraphrase his history-altering quote and urge today’s business leaders to tear down these walls! Which walls? The ones that get in the way of cross-communication within organizations and prevent innovation from taking place. Unlike the Berlin Wall, you can’t see these walls because they’re invisible. But they exist, and they represent major impediments to creating meaningful innovation, especially in large companies. Just look at the way most organizations are physically set up. Accounting in one area, marketing in another, management on the top floor with the nicest offices and best views out the window. Employees rarely interact with other departments unless they need something to get their jobs done. In addition, many leaders and managers hesitate to share information with other departments, believing that … Continue reading
According to Wikipedia, a common thread running through all definitions of social media is the blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value. This fits well into what I see as the underlying concept of the intersection between social media tools and open innovation; it is about how we can involve various stakeholders in creating better innovation outcomes. Kaplan and Haenlein, two researchers, state that there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual communities. Within these categories, I find the below tools to be the most relevant for open innovation efforts: LinkedIn: Knowledge is the key element to innovation and LinkedIn is a great tool for identifying people with knowledge. This works especially well if you upgrade to a business account. It is also possible to get good replies if you start … Continue reading
Exclusive Job Posting The Coca-Cola Company has an exciting opportunity for an Innovation Director to join our team in San Jose, Costa Rica. This position stewards the innovation process of the Latin Center Business Unit ensuring that it responds to our growth needs. Working with different areas of the business (marketing, technical, HR, etc.), the position supports the growth of the innovation capability across four components: leadership, processes and routines, people and skills, and culture. The position helps the organization to steward the innovation pipeline, manage the stage and gate process to ensure effective and efficient deployment of initiatives, monitor innovation performance metrics against established objectives, and lead the development of an innovation culture. Key Duties/Responsibilities: The rest of the job description can be found in the 5,400+ member strong Innovation Excellence group on LinkedIn here. Don’t miss an article (2,450+) – Subscribe to our RSS feed or join us … Continue reading
I was thinking recently that one of the biggest barriers to innovation is the fear of change. Most businesses are very comfortable operating in markets and interacting with customers that they understand. Changing the parameters of the market, the customers or prospects you work with or the products that you offer risks disrupting the relationships that exist. In this line of thinking, therefore, the least amount of change applied creates the greatest amount of certainty. I wonder if there is a greater fallacy enacted on corporate management and individual stockholders anywhere else in the business world than this one – that it is safer and more responsible to operate a business as if the markets, regulations, competition and environment is not changing, and therefore investments in new ideas, or exploration of new markets is not as important as maintaining the “core” business. Today, March 2011, it seems that everything …
