Emergence Marketing: innovation Archives

October 23, 2007

It's not the individuals that evolve...it's the species

I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend BIF-3 a few weeks back. As usual, the conference was jam packed with amazing presenters and thought leaders.

One of them was Clayton Christensen, who was interviewed on-stage by Walt Mossberg. While he focused much of his interview on his two new passions - health care and education - he also reminded us that it is not the individuals who evolve, even in the face of being taken over by mutants, but it is the species that evolves. The same is true in business - it is not individual companies that evolve, but the industry as a whole that evolves.

And off course, disruptive innovations happen when there is a new technology enabler combined with a new business model that can take that easy technology to market profitably. According to Christensen, that is exactly what is happening in both health care and education - both areas in which he doing a lot of research.

It will be fascinating to see some of the findings coming out of that research.

[Tags: innovation bif-3 disruptive innovation Clay Christensen]

July 24, 2007

In New Product Introduction - more is less

The Executive Corporate Board has a great white paper entitled "Boosting the Impact of Innovation and New Product Launch Processes." In it they have some mini case studies of how companies who try to achieve top line growth by introducing an increasing number of product/service extensions often times end up with reduced revenues instead.

They also recommend that companies focus on "market segment" innovation rather than pure product innovation - which has traditionally been used to help differentiate products. With the advent of fast followers becoming increasingly faster, product innovation no longer helps with product differentiation. They describe the case studies of P&G and Best Buy as good examples of "market segment" innovation - where you look at product innovation based on the insights gained from well defined market segments.

[Tags: innovation product introduction market insight]

June 25, 2007

Experts are made, not born...

An article in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review (not online yet) reviews the latest evidence that shows that experts are not born, but made - and that it takes years to become an expert. The article also suggests that expertise cannot be captured in "knowledge management" systems...

Fascinating stuff, more on it later.

May 1, 2007

How to solve your R&D problems

The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review has a great forethought on how to outsource your toughest R&D problems by HBS Prof. Karim Lakhani and Lars Bo Jeppesen from the Copenhagen Business School.

The authors analyzed all the problems that were broadcasted through Innocentive from 2001 to 2004.What they found is that on average each problem got the attention of 200 people and received 10 solutions. Other findings from their research were:

Problems should be broadcasted to people in various fields as radical innovations often happen at the intersections of disciplines.

Prices are necessary, but not sufficient. While people are expecting financial rewards for solving corporations' problems, the enjoyment of taking on a novel problem was a bigger draw.

Insiders are still important. Without it you cannot formulate your problems, nor can you assess which solutions are the best ones. So you cannot replace your internal R&D staff.

Cool stuff...

April 9, 2007

Doing market research differently

The Enterprise 2.0 RAVE that I described last Friday is not just another event. It came about as a market research project to increase the understanding around everything Enterprise 2.0 - product requirements, maturity of the market, success of pilot programs, etc. But instead of spending hours on the phone or in person doing interviews with willing candidates we decided to do something fun and get them all together at once for a giant brainstorming session.

The benefits of doing it this way are quite clear. Instead of having a one way delivery of value we created an environment in which there is a two way exchange of value - as every practitioner who is involved with Enterprise 2.0 projects is dying to meet other people who are going through the same pains. And the value to the market researcher is much higher as well - if we get 80 people to attend that means a minimum of 30 focused conversations with 8 people each on specific issues surrounding Enterprise 2.0 deployments.

[Tags: future of work enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 wiki tag blog]

April 5, 2007

Cross discipline innovation

I had the pleasure to participate in an innovation workshop with Frans Johansson, author of the Medici Effect, down at the Business Innovation Factory in Rhode Island.

Here are three AHA moments that I jotted down in my notebook.

The method of reverse assumptions - where you jot down the assumptions about your business and then see if you can create a business by reversing those assumptions - is a great method to brainstorm around business innovation. But while it may be hard for you to imagine a business that is based on reverse assumption, you should always remember that it is much easier for someone who is not in your business to imagine a business based on those reverse assumptions. So force yourself to let go of the assumptions because if you don't, you might get blind-sighted by an outsider.

While it may be a well-known fact that homogeneous teams ramp up faster than diverse teams, and that they plateau at a productivity level that is half that of diverse teams, most people forget that over time diverse teams will start acting as homogeneous teams - so you need to break them up. Most people also do not realize that diverse teams where only a few people contribute are essentially behaving like homogeneous teams.

People adjust their personal risk behavior to the overall risk of the environment. So increased car safety features do not decrease the overall number of accidents because people will start driving faster or just less carefully. The same is true in business, you cannot decrease the risk of failure by increasing resources - money, time, etc. People will just squander them in more risky behavior. That also means that if you have an idea and passion for that that idea you have to pursue it as the risk of failure will not change with resources.

AHA...

[Tags: innovation ideas medici effect teams risk]

March 27, 2007

Think beyond the product itself when identifying customer needs

Many products in the marketplace have reached or surpassed their functionality saturation point - that point where new features largely go unused and are no longer used as a competitive differentiator. Phones, many software applications, copiers, watches, cars, baby products and many other product categories have reached that point.

When trying to uncover customer needs for those product categories, product managers need to think beyond the product itself because it isn't the product itself that customers are buying anymore.

Take cell phones - some people are buying and using them as ultra-lightweight computing devices, comparing them to small notebooks when making a buying decision. Others are buying them as a fashion statement. In both cases it's not the phone needs that will lead to successful new products, it's all about understanding the current fashion trends and a user's mobile computing needs .

Or take the copier market - most copiers will have the same feature set as most other copiers in that price range and most will have a similar lifespan and lifetime maintenance cost. A small business owner may make her buying decision based on the financing options and upgrade plans that are available - in essence turning the copier selection and buying process into a financial product selection and buying process.

And how many people do you think buy baby products for their "product" features? Most are basing their decisions on safety factors - essentially buying safety products with a twist of fashion.

When looking around at product offerings in these categories, there is evidence that some companies are getting it. But there is also a ton of evidence that many product managers are still operating in the dark ages of "feature-itis."

[Tags: innovation product management new product development product innovations new products customer needs]

March 22, 2007

Innovation: do not forget to pay employees for their ideas!

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review has a cool forethought on innovation titled "$152,000 for your thought" (not online yet and requires subscription).

What the authors found is that the average employee reward to savings or increased revenue from innovation ratio is about .001% or $100 for a $10 million idea. The result is a very broken idea generation process in most companies. The authors suggest that companies raise the bar and require employees to prove and document the viability of their ideas in return for much richer rewards - as much as 50% of the first year's savings or increased revenue. Doing so can significantly increase the number of workable innovations - they found by as much as 20-40%.

The story that led to the title of the article is that of a $38,000 executive assistant at a consulting company who came up with an idea that saved the company $304,000 and walked away with a $152,000 bonus.

[Tags: innovation idea management]

March 19, 2007

Marketing shift: from 'one->to->many' to 'many<->to<->one'

At last week's Community 2.0 conference, an interesting discussion developed after John Hagel's keynote address, in which he said that customers do not want 1:1 marketing, but that they instead want to be put in touch with many connections and resources.

In a way, that is like describing marketing evolution from the one->to->many, to the 1<->to<->1 to the many<->to<->one, with the vendor having the opportunity to facilitate the connections between customers and other people and resources - also called community building. Despite a wave of excitement about the potential of 1to1 marketing in the 90's, popularized by the success of the One to One books by Rogers and Peppers, one attendee argued that we were never able to successfully achieve 1to1 and that therefore many-to-one may be an elusive goal as well.

But is this true? Is this truly an evolutionary process in which we cannot skip a step until the previous one is complete? Or did we missread the need for many-to-one as the need for one-to-one and launched on another marketing fad that never materialized? Could community-based marketing be like that as well?

It could be argued that this time we are dealing with the genuine article - and that some companies have known that for a very long time - skipping the 1to1 marketing wave all together in favor of many<->to<->one, and in the process reaping tremendous competitive advantages (note the bi-directionality of the arrows - a key ingredient to make it work!).

What do you think? Community-based marketing: another fad or a real competitive differentiator?

[Tags: community2.0 community 2.0 1to1 marketing community+marketing one-to-one]

February 14, 2007

How much would you pay for a latte while playing XBox or PS3 games?

That is exactly the model at the Seattle Terra Bite Lounge. There is no price list anywhere - customers decide whether to pay one dollar or three dollars for their coffee, or indeed nothing.

It is fascinating to watch what happens when more traditional bricks and mortar companies start experimenting with business models that have their roots in software open source movement.

(via Reveries)

January 29, 2007

Breakthrough ideas for 2007

The Harvard Business Review just released their annual survey of emerging ideas (free until Feb 26th). It is a great read with some real cool nuggets of ideas (via O'Reilly Radar).

Some of my favorites include:

"...influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don't seem to be required at all." - Duncan Watts, reporting on recent research he conducted on the role of influentials in trends and other social epidemics.

"Today, customers aren’t just voicing their needs to companies that are willing to listen; they’re inventing and often building what they want." - Eric Von Hippel, reporting on research that shows that the 70% to 80% of new product development that fails does so not for lack of advanced technology but because of a failure to understand users’ needs.

"As businesses respond to this backlash—as they consider management styles and marketing messages that effectively meet people’s needs for relief from continuous partial attention and the sensory overload it creates—they can differentiate themselves by offering what their employees and customers increasingly crave: discriminating choices and quality of life." - Linda Stone, reporting on living with continuous partial attention.

"By almost any measure, the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person." - Geoffrey West, reporting on recent research that found a general mathematical relationships between population size, innovation, and wealth creation.

"People who are social, religious, or political conservatives tend to have more children...In the United States, for example, fertility rates are 12% higher in states that voted for George W. Bush in the most recent presidential election than in the more liberal and secular states that supported his opponent." - Philip Longman, reporting on research that shows that we are headed for a more conservative period worldwide (YIKES!)

"...the key to getting payback on investment in a network is to think hard about exactly what kind of value you want the network to create. In other words, you must put the work in “network” first." - Chris Meyers arguing that "work" needs to be at the center of collaborative environments to predictably succeed (something we clearly found when studying successful collaboration teams & projects amongst eRoom customers.)

[Tags: influentials conservatism consumer generated innovation woinnovation attention work]

January 16, 2007

Escaping the middle-market trap

The latest McKinsey Quarterly (requires subscription) has an interview with Electolux CEO Hans Straberg in which he describes how Electrolux escaped the middle-market trap.

The middle-market trap happens when a market gets polarized with low cost Asian brands taking the low end of the market and premium brands growing at the high end of the market at the expense of the middle-of-the-road brands. This is a common occurrence in markets, a threat to which most companies respond by cutting costs. History is littered with companies - some well known icons - that have cut themselves into oblivion.

One of the main changes implemented in marketing was the way they segmented customers. Instead of using the traditional industry segmentation based on price and a "good-better-best" hierarchy they started segmenting customers by lifestyle - ending up with more than 20 different product positions. Amazing how companies are only now discovering the power of actual customer scenarios as a basis to segment markets - a technique described by Tom Peters in his very early books.

Another change they implemented - which allowed them to play at both ends of the market - was to set up two different business models, with separate sales forces, to serve the value end of the market differently than the premium end of the market.

Mass-segmentation does not work anymore, except perhaps for some commodity products - like gas, or corn. Most mass markets, however, behave like collections of micro-niches and benefit from being served the same way you would serve customers in the long tail.

[Tags: long tail mass market middle market trap community marketing]

January 3, 2007

You are your context

Try tapping a song for someone else – chances that the person you are tapping it for gets it right is 2.5%. What makes a lot of sense to you, because you have the song playing in your head – sounds like total gibberish to others. The same is true when you meet someone online for the first time – their chosen handle may symbolize some imagery for you that was totally unintended by that person.

The difference here is that we all interpret signals based on the context we have. And when our context is different, we interpret things differently. A different context is also the main cause for friction and conflict between people.

In the past, there was a higher likelihood that people’s context in a particular geographic region was somewhat similar – there were only a limited amount of TV programs and radio shows, people had a much more limited supply of books and newspapers, music preferences were more uniform, there were fewer options for schooling and there were less churches to choose from. Now on the other hand, much of the popular culture is consumed through 100’s of cable channels or through the internet, you can read books that are self-published and reach audiences in the 100’s of people, you can read any newspaper in the world online or get your news from specialized blogs, you can pick from music bands that self-publish their music on social networking sites and have fan clubs in the tens or hundreds of people, and you can come up with educational programs that are totally unique to you. Add to that the increased mobility of people and the ongoing trend towards more extreme and fractioned faith-based groups – and you have a world when there is almost no shared context anymore. It’s what Wired Editor Chris Anderson calls the long tail…except that perhaps there are more people moving into the long tail now that it can be served.

Marketers, advertisers, communicators and politicians have been struggling with this phenomenon for a few years now – mostly because the old ways of “framing” issues does not work in a world where people’s context or “world-view” is so vastly different from one another.

A world populated with people that have very different contexts should also be a world where innovation explodes – or is Kathy Sierra right when she says that the “wisdom of crowds” mostly results in safe, well-balanced and non-offensive solutions?

What do you think?

[Tags: long tail wisdom of crowds innovation world view]

December 15, 2006

Co-creation and Innovation

As part of an interesting consulting project for FAST Search & Transfer, we got the opportunity this week to interview their CEO - John Marcus Lervik. The full interview will be posted on the FASTforward Blog , where we are hosting a conversation on Enterprise 2.0.

One particular thing that struck me was when we asked him about their Innovation process. As you know, search is at the core of many things 2.0 - including Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Community 2.0, etc. And staying ahead of the innovation curve in fast moving markets like that is not a trivial task. As it turns out, FAST has over 400 engineers, including 65 PhD's - a little more than 60% of their workforce is working on product innovation. And they do not stop there, they co-opt engineers from within their customer base into an extended innovation community - and as such they have a network of over 2,500 engineers driving their process innovation process.

If you have any interest in joining the Enterprise 2.0 conversation, drop me an email at symbiotic [at] emergencemarketing [dot] com.

[Tags: innovation product development co-creation Fast Search]

November 20, 2006

Open Source Innovation - it works!

The latest issue of the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge has a great interview with Harvard Prof. Karim Lakhani (his blog here), in which he describes the results of his latest research - the analysis of how open source norms of transparency, permeable access, and collaboration work with scientists.

After studying the effects of broadcasting or introducing problems to outsiders for 166 distinct scientific problems from the research labs of 26 firms over a 4 1/2 year period they found that this method, borrowed from the software open source movement, was yielding effective solutions. In fact they found that it was those with expertise at the periphery of a problem's field who were most likely to find the answers quickly!

Some of the best innovations do happen at the intersections of disciplines, which is why it is always a bad idea to have siloed organizations.

Another interesting finding is what motivates people to spend time in open source projects. Sure, reputation and the potential for rewards - as is the case for Innocentive - count, but some of the most important drivers are "fun and the enjoyment of problem solving." The more creative people feel in projects, the more likely they are to spend time with those projects!

[Tags: open source innovation problem solving open source innovation]

November 14, 2006

Dare I say something?

big yawnsm.jpg Are you afraid of speaking up at work? That is the topic of ongoing research reported in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Quoting from their research paper (abstract here) Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School and James Detert from Penn State, the two researchers, made some interesting observations in this email interview.

While there are individual and contextual reasons why some people speak up more readily than others, the main reason why people do not speak up is "fear" - something that we inherited from our earliest ancestors. As the researchers point out: " it seems we're all hard-wired to overestimate rather than underestimate certain types of risk—it was better (for survival) to "flee" too often from threats that weren't really there than to not flee the one time there was a significant risk. So, we've inherited emotional and cognitive mechanisms that motivate us to avoid perceived risks to our psychological and material well-being...Thus, fear of offending those above us is both natural and widespread."

The interview talks about some ways to change a company culture so that people speak up more frequently. The reality is that changing a culture of hard-wired fear is very difficult. Add to that the fact that change hurts and it may be impossible to really change a company culture without also changing the fundamental hierarchical nature of companies.

[Tags: fear company culture hr change]

November 9, 2006

Co-creation at P&G

Procter & Gamble documented their product co-creation process in a white paper (pdf) (click here for the web site - via John Winsor).

In a program called Connect + Develop, P&G is trying to accelerate their internal R&D capabilities - provided by 7,200 R&D staff - by seeking to leverage ideas, talents and innovation assets of individuals, institutes and companies around the world. So they are not just trying to expand their innovation process to other employees besides their R&D staff, they are actually trying to expand it to include outside partners, customers, and even competitors.

Their primary focus is on ready-to-go innovations - solutions that have already been reduced to practice in some part of the world, and in disruptive ideas for their business categories. So in a way they are trying to identify lead users in their extended networks.

Some of the successes to date include Bounce, which was a ready-to-go technology acquisition, Spinbruch, which was a ready-to-go product acquisition, pump dispensers used for Olay Skin Care product, which was a ready-to-go packaging acquisition, and Swifter Dusters, which came from a partnership with a competitor.

Here is what A.G. Lafley has to say in his introduction:

I want us to be the absolute best at spotting, developing and leveraging relationships with best-in-class partners in every part of our business. In fact, I want P&G to be a magnet for the best-in-class. The company you most want to work with because you know a partnership with P&G will be more rewarding than any other option available to you.

Pretty powerful stuff!

[Tags: innovation co-creation product innovation P&G]

November 3, 2006

The winners will be determined because of marketing

$fract sm.jpg$ In a recent roundtable discussion at Wharton, C. Robert Henrikson, the CEO of Metlife said "In our industry, the winners will be determined because of marketing. By that I mean true marketing, not sales support, which is what the insurance industry is about in the United States" (here via a pre reading documents from the Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Research Center at Babson for their upcoming Idea-to-profit event which will cover the intersections of marketing and innovation).

Henrickson went on to say that most insurance firms have no marketing plan other than to be a fast follower of innovations developed by competing firms.

Now isn't that true for most industries. Marketers mimic their competitors, they go after the same customers with the same offerings, and they end up killing the market with price-wars...

The panel which also included an executive from a major drug manufacturer, a major real estate developer, a major bank CEO, a retired partner from a major investment bank, and a few Wharton Professors, were then asked if they saw major innovations coming from India and China.

Almost all said no, which is rather surprising even though there were no high tech players on the panel. After all, Muhammed Yunus just won the Nobel Price for Peace for Grameen Bank - which is not just a do-good organization, but a very profitable one at that. Does this not count as a major innovation in the financial services sector?

The health care experts saw little innovation coming from India because of their weak patent system, which they claim is holding innovation back. They also see the biggest opportunity in India being with clinical trials, saying that "there are massive patient populations there that have not been tapped in any major way."

Ouch! Is this perhaps a case of real-time marketing myopia? Perhaps those experts should take a look at open source business models - especially the ones that have been applied to non-technology products - and their potential for traditional business model destruction (or is it disruption?). And instead of looking at India as a massive source of (probably largely unprotected) people available for early clinical trials or cheap labor, they should look at it as a test bed for new business models. After all, it is because of Indian generic drug manufacturers that the price of Aids treatment came down from $15,000 a patient to less than $200 in 10 years time - and that Indian generics are now being used to treat half of the aids patients in the developing world. Does this not count as innovation in health care?

[Tags: innovation marketing marketing innovation india china]

October 31, 2006

Customer communities do pay off!

The most recent Harvard Business Review reports on a study (requires subscription) that was done on the impact of customer communities on customer behavior at eBay in Germany (disclosure - I have an active interest in this topic as I have agreed to chair a conference on the business of communities - Community 2.0 - but more on that later).

The numbers are quite interesting. The experiment involved 140,120 eBay customers who had bought or sold on eBay but who had not participated in the eBay customer communities before. 79.242 were invited to join the online customer community, while the remaining 60,878 were used as a control group. Of the people who were asked to join the community, 3,299 became active participants and 11,242 became lurkers. Over the course of a year they compared the behavior of the active participants and lurkers to that of the control group and found that:

Lurkers and active participants won up to 25% more auctions

Lurkers and participants paid prices that were as much as 24% higher

Lurkers and participants spent up to 54% more money in total

Active participants listed up to 4 times as many items

Active participants earned up up 6 times as much monthly sales revenue

For first time sellers who were lurkers and participants, 10 times as many of them started selling on eBay after joining the community

All in all the activities of the lurkers and participants resulted in 56% more sales during the year of the study - bringing in millions of additional dollars into eBay's bottom line.

So can the results of this experiment be replicated in more traditional businesses?

Some people clearly think so, while others who used to be very enthusiastic about the business of communities are starting to become very skeptical.

Communities require a certain critical mass to get going - and not all companies have a large enough customer base to get to that point. They also require a lot more work and resources than most companies are willing to invest - to set up the infrastructure, to nurture the communities, to acquire content, etc.

Active communities of employees, customers and partners are clearly powerful management instruments that can dramatically improve core business processes like innovation, product development and marketing & sales. They can also backfire and have very negative impact if they are not managed properly, or set up wrongly. Before embarking on this path, companies have to truly understand the dynamics as well as the pros and cons of communities. They also need to find out if they have the resources and wherewithal to create their own communities or whether they should play in someone else's sandbox.

Unfortunately, many will start the process by throwing technology at the problem - let's just hope that those ignorants won't destroy the market for the rest of us like email spammers destroyed email marketing and (un)ethical zealots are slowly destroying word of mouth marketing.

[Tags: community management customer community community marketing wom word of mouth marketing]

October 23, 2006

Is global warming awareness reaching the tipping point?

the great warming.jpg

Right on the heels of Al Gore's fabulous "An Inconvenient Truth" movie on global warming, another documentary is scheduled to hit theaters in the next few weeks - Great Warming. This one is sponsored by various corporations who position themselves as "green" marketers. As part of the whole effort they also developed a free booklet on climate change for 13 year old kids which seems like a great little book.

If only they could distribute that in classrooms it would help reach parents through the kids.

October 10, 2006

Great list of quotes on Innovation

Lois Kelly captured a great list of quotes from last week's BIF innovation conference.

Here are a few more I found in my notes:

Creativity = take in info + process + recombine + spit out - Ivy Ross

You cannot understand the whole by looking at the parts - John Donoghue

A joke is the opposite of expectations - Richard Saul Wurman

We always overestimate the amount of change in the short term and we underestimate the amount of change in the long term - Larry Keeley

The space where innovation is possible is the space between people - Curt Columbus

Communities are not simple, they are complex - Michael Singer

You only live in this history - Gehry (ok he was not there but someone quoted him)

The people with the most stake in your company are your customers - Jeff Taylor

[Tags: innovation creativity bif business innovation factory]

CEO's with big egos are always bad news

CEO's are supposed to be like conductors, impresarios, major league sport team coaches, or movie directors - you pick the analogy that works best for you. The bottom line is that they need to coordinate disparate and sometimes dysfunctional groups of people - including stars (who frequently have good-size egos all by themselves), connectors, and losers - into doing great things! And they cannot limit themselves to internal resources only. The good ones will do it with externalized communities of people that include employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and resellers. And the best ones will even integrate competitors into their cast of characters that they can influence to achieve their goals.

So what happens when a CEO has a big ego? The answer is simple - a CEO with a big ego cannot play that role!

CEO's with big egos will inevitably clash and compete with other egos in their ecosystem - be they stars in research, marketing, engineering, or other successful CEO's in their industry or region. Those people are their true competition. Big egos do not collaborate - they compete on the ego level. So what comes first in the case of a CEO with a big ego is not the company, the employees or the customers - it is their ego. What is important is how they will look in the eyes of constituents that they deem influential or important when it's all said and done?

At the extreme, the only way for CEO's with big egos to achieve their goals - come out ahead of other stars, or worse, eliminate the other stars while coming out ahead - is by weaving webs of deceit, building a protective cocoon around themselves, and by ensuring that there is a podium/pedestal for them to step on. They surround themselves and protect people who will foster their agenda blindly - in the process creating executive echo chambers and increasingly removing themselves from business realities.

Even though some are really good at hiding their true nature, there are so many tell-tale signs that can point to bad behavior and real bad news in the future. When a new CEO of a well known brand tries to inject himself in the brand by appearing in TV commercials - what do you really think the motivation is? Help change the appeal of the brand in the youth market? A subservient chicken or an office chimp seem to achieve that goal much better... And you know you're in trouble when your CEO tries to limit access to certain people - like the board. Or when she starts bad-mouthing other CEO's who happened to be ex-colleagues and who are now very successful and get a lot of credit for their achievements. And we can go on and on with early warning signs of leaders who can do more damage than good to their organization.

There are a lot of examples of companies with CEO's with big egos that ended up in disasters, and many others where ego-less CEO's are achieving beyond-great results. And as always, there are the exceptions - but we can not all aspire to be like Steve Jobs. But besides these extremes, and because of ego-centric leaders, there are too many companies who never achieve their true potential and too many reputations that get tarnished in the process for no good reason.

[Tags: leadership organizational structure ceo hr hr management]

October 9, 2006

All kinds of minds

all kinds of minds.bmp Randy Antik told the moving story of how he was instrumental in the founding of All Kinds Of Minds with Dr. Mel Levine last week at the Businness Innovation Factory's 2nd annual Collaborative Innovation conference.

Every year thousands of kids, who often times are not less intelligent, but more intelligent than average, suffer unnecessarily in the traditional learning environments as they learn differently. All Kinds of Minds is a non-profit Institute "that helps students who struggle with learning measurably improve their success in school and life by providing programs that integrate educational, scientific, and clinical expertise." They achieve this by educating K-12 teachers about the science of learning and on how to provide a good learning environment for all students. So far the organization has trained over 30,000 teachers and they estimate that more than three-quarter-of-a-million kids have benefited from their program! One of the biggest coup for the organization came when Mayor Bloomberg announced that all NYC teachers would go through the program.

It is great to see how ordinary people with a passion can get involved and achieve success in providing for a good future for our kids - but where is our government in all of this? Other than trying to bring more faith into the classroom, or to try to confuse our kids about what constitutes science versus dogma...which of course we all know they are doing a good job at!

[Tags: all kind of minds education bif business innovation factory]

October 6, 2006

When government and industry team together to make a better future for our kids

Rhode Island congressman Jim Langevin opened the second day of the Business Innovation Factory's Collaborative Innovation conference yesterday with the announcement that the Business Innovation Factory, a non profit sponsored by the Governor's office, in partnership with Dean Kamen's FIRST Challenge, will now bring a robotics program to every high school in Rhode Island.

Through a series of robotics competitions, Dean Kamen's FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) project brings together industry partners and schools to stimulate kids and instill in them a love for everything that is science and engineering related. Born out of the realization that we are losing our future competitive edge by not educating enough scientists and engineers, the program has been found to have a dramatic impact on science and engineering education. In fact, a study conducted by Brandeis University found that 59% of FIRST participants want to pursue careers in science and engineering. Not only that, the same study found that there is a 50% higher likelihood that students who participated in the FIRST program will go to college! FIRST participants are also 10X as likely to take on internships during their college Freshman year, and they are more than twice as likely to pursue a science and technology career.

This demonstrates how industry and government can team up together to truly deliver transformational projects in the area of education. Hopefully many other states will follow suit!

[Tags: innovation education bif business innovation factory]

October 5, 2006

Use sound to get your creative team on the same page

Ivy Ross, spoke yesterday at the Business Innovation Factory's second Collaborative Innovation Summit about some of the techniques she has used over the years to successfully stimulate innovation and creativity at companies like Mattel and Old Navy.

In one scenario she had music created that required both sides of the brain to work in order to interpret the scores. After her team members spent 20 minutes a day, three times a week for six weeks in specially designed musical chairs listening to the scores, she was able to demonstrate through standard creativity tests that the creativity of her team had increased by 18%!

It would be interesting to know if other activities that require both sides of the brain to work - like playing piano, or playing video games - would have the same effect on training the brain to use both sides.

In another experiment she improved the results of brainstorming sessions by finding the frequency ranges at which people "resonate." She then found the common frequency at which everyone on the team resonated, produced a CD with sound of that frequency and increased results of brainstorming sessions by playing the CD in the background during those sessions. So in effect she brought her team on the same page through sound.

She made another interesting point when she said that you cannot expect a team to innovate without feeding the team a lot information first. If there is no "input" in the innovation process - why would you expect good "output?"

[Tags: innovation creativity bif business innovation factory]

Why is nobody teaching people about service innovation?

If 80% or more of the GNP in the US and the EU comes from services, then why is it that there are only a handful of business schools offering courses in service innovation? And why aren't more service companies prototyping? And perhaps best of all, why are so many companies looking at innovating customer "transactions" instead of the whole "customer journey?"

Those were some of the questions raised by Jeneanne Ray from Peer Insight during her story-telling time at the Business Innovation Factory conference this week in Providence.

Come to think of it, even most product companies, who are familiar with product innovation, and with developing partnerships where needed to create "whole products," are too often forgetting what the "whole customer journey" or experience looks like - from product selection, to purchase, to unpacking, to post purchase customer support.

Apple could be the exception. From selection, to purchasing, to unpacking the experience is a true delight - elegant and powerful in its simplicity. They may be falling short in the post purchase support area as they demonstrated with their arrogance around the early iPod battery problems, or as they are demonstrating with a friend of mine who lost access to her hard drive while it was under warranty - offering only to rebuild the hard drive without offering any data recovery services and yet promising an almost 100% guarantee that all data would be lost.

[Tags: business models service innovation innovation customer journey bif business innovation factory]

September 13, 2006

Most important trends for global business in the next 5 years

mckinsey trends.jpg McKinsey quarterly just reported (requires subscription) on a survey which they conducted with executives from around the world. In it they asked those executives to identify the top three trends that would affect global business and how those trends would impact their company's profitability.

The top three trends to affect global business over the next five years are:

the growing number of consumers in emerging economies
the shift of economic activity between and within regions
the greater ease of obtaining information and developing knowledge

Other noteworthy trends from the top 10 include: the increasing communication/interaction in business and social realms as a result of technological innovation (#6), shifting structures/emerging forms of corporate organization (#7), and more social backlash against business (#9).

Interestingly enough, the survey found that executives perceived the potential impact of those trends to be significantly larger on global business than on their own company's profitability - perhaps signaling a weakness in their ability to translate global trends into corporate strategy.

Another finding - perhaps predictable considering who was surveyed - is that 85% of the executives describe their business environment as more competitive than it was 5 years ago.

When asked what single factor contributes most to the accelerating pace of change in the global business environment today they identified the main reason as innovation in products, services and business models. Other interesting reasons were greater ease of obtaining information, developing knowledge (#2), and rising consumer awareness and activism (#8).

[Tags: macroeconomic trends business trends product innovation consumer knowledge rate of change mckinsey]

September 12, 2006

Open source beer...what is next?

In the last issue of Wired Magazine, Larry

Emergence Marketing

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