Author Archives: Gijs van Wulfen
Think different. That’s the essence of creative processes in coming up with ideas for innovative products, services or business models. An awful lot brainstorms or ideation workshops take place to generate fresh new ideas. At the end of idea generation you end up with a wall of ideas. Which is great! I like to quote the American chemist and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling who said “the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas”. Continue reading
You might get the impression that innovation is the right management instrument for every market, for every organisation at any moment. Well in my opinion innovation is not. That’s why I have made a list of 21 situations when you should not innovate. Continue reading
My first innovation job after graduating was as a marketer of dried soups, at the Dutch market leader called Honig. We sold around 50 million consumer packages per year. Not bad for a country with only 16 million people. Honig had a market share of more than sixty percent. There was only one problem. The dried soups market was not growing anymore. Continue reading
Innovation is all about getting new ideas for simple solutions to solve relevant customer problems or needs. When there is a sudden need for innovation the first thing people do is organise a brainstorming session. But often nothing innovative materialises. That’s why brainstorming has such negative connotations in a lot of companies. Because, when you brainstorm unprepared with the usual colleagues hardly anything new appears. Continue reading
A lot of people talk about innovative companies. All the management magazines and books refer always to the same select group of Apple, Google, 3M, Microsoft, P&G, BMW, Facebook, Virgin, Samsung, WAL-MART, Toyota, Amazon, INTEL, Starbucks and a few others. But so few people really work in them. This means a whole lot of people are working in not so innovative organisations. You are probably one of them, or a consultant advising them. Continue reading
An interesting question is if the size of the organisation matters in the process of starting innovation. In the linkedin group on the FORTH innovation method, consisting of front end innovation managers and experts from all over the world, we had a poll on this with a clear outcome. Continue reading
