Monthly Archives: June 2011
A few days ago I was part of a brainstorming session for a client who recently opened a new restaurant in Mexico. The goal of the brainstorming session was to come up with ideas on how to create an experience that would make customers talk about it to their friends. With that in mind, I proposed an idea: What if we create a drink called Pulpo Enamorado that when delivered by the waiter, the customer gets a pie in the face? Result: Everyone started laughing! It caught everyone by surprise. Totally unexpected. As you can imagine everyone thought this was nuts. How can a customer not get mad after getting smashed with a pie in the face? Well, why not? The customer and everyone there is certainly going to remember it, I said with a grin 
Even though everyone thought of it nuts, it got them into the flow. … Continue reading
Is there a gorilla in your market? I’m not talking about the proverbial “800-lb. gorilla” that dominates a market. Almost every industry has one of those. I’m talking about the gorilla we don’t see. There’s a well-known experiment in which a researcher shows a videotape of six college students standing on a basketball court. Three students are wearing white shirts, three are wearing dark. A coach gives one basketball to the white shirts, one to the darks, and instructs them to randomly pass the balls amongst themselves. The researcher then instructs the audience watching the video to count only the number of passes between the white-shirted students in a one-minute time frame. The researcher gives detailed instructions for counting, and also suggests that one gender typically performs better than the other in this type of exercise. The students begin passing the balls, and audience members focus intently on counting the … Continue reading
From ‘What If’ to ‘What Is’ by Yann Cramer How best to describe the journey of an idea through R&D (Research & Development)? A simple version of the journey sees Research taking the idea from ‘what could be’ to ‘what can be’, and Development taking it further to ‘what is’. But in the most spectacular cases, the journey starts much earlier and proves more arduous that first meets the eye. It doesn’t start with possibilities but with what looks like an impossibility. Once upon a time, someone dreamed of eradicating diseases. Until Pasteur made his vaccination breakthrough, the idea was an impossibility, and yet, articulating it and taking it as a challenge was the first step of the journey. As the journey progresses, more possibilities get generated, more difficult choices have to be made. Combining the three horizons of R&D with the Stage-Gate methodology, a longer but more accurate description … Continue reading
The phrase “putting the cart before the horse” is meant to help us quickly identify that priorities or actions are in the wrong order. A horse does a far better job pulling a cart than pushing a cart, therefore the horse goes before the cart. In innovation projects, however, far too frequently the idea goes before the capability or competency. Let’s stipulate that to innovate successfully there are at least five key ingredients or attributes that are necessary. The one most people recognize without prompting is, of course, the idea, which is the celebrity of the innovation show. Of course, the show can’t go on without a number of other valuable and often overlooked features. Those are: Capabilities – processes, methods and workflows that define what to do with an idea Competencies – the knowledge and skills to act on the idea effectively Clarity – to understand key strategic …
For those of you who are not familiar with Muggles, they are people who are incapable of magic, and who are usually unaware of the wizarding world. Design Thinking is sort of wizardry, it takes certain type of people with the certain type of training, Hogwarts or Harvard. When Muggles think Design Thinking, they see nothing new there and they believe it has been around for a long time, it basically means they still don’t get it and may never will. They hardly see the real challenge, it is simply not to invent a better mouse traps. We care capable of doing more and being more innovative. The power of our imagination is what it is. “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” ~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 1999, spoken by the character Albus Dumbledore Design Thinking is … Continue reading
Now seems like a good time to remind you that you can’t ride on your past accomplishments for very long. If you aren’t working to stay ahead of the curve, your company is going to be left behind. Years ago I was bemoaning to a friend about how I had missed the opportunity to invest in BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM). They were on top of the world. Now app developers are leaving them, and everyone believes they are dead. This shouldn’t be shocking, especially to those people that study and specialize in innovation and disruption. It happens all the time, in every industry. And yet… it still is a little shocking. Even for disciples of books like How the Mighty Fall and Innovator’s Dilemma that show scientifically why it happens, we’re always at least a little surprised by the failures of …
