Oct 14, 2010 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is the driver of everything that contributes to improvement. Doesn’t matter if it is improvement in a factory, using the “5 why” tool, or some question, the answer to which advances our knowledge of space. The driver is curiosity, and the result, the potential to be better, to know more, to deliver benefit.
For a marketer, being curious should be second nature, but how long since you sat one-on-one with a customer and sought direct feedback on how your product performs Vs the competition?, why they bought it?, how could it be improved?, what job was it really doing? And so on.
It is one thing to absorb research reports, dig through the numbers, engage in esoteric conversations about innovation, and understand at a macro level the things that contribute to success, but it is something entirely different to get down in the weeds with your customers.
Oct 6, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Strategy
Innovation is an organic process, and it seems that only with the benefit of hindsight, when the papers are written, does the rationalization of errors, dead-ends, side-tracks, and jumping on the spot, occur to make it seem linear.
The best we can do is create the conditions where innovation flourishes, just as a farmer creates the optimum conditions for growth and productivity on his farm.
Sep 22, 2010 | Change, Communication, Innovation, Leadership, Social Media, Strategy
A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google argues that the demise of printed media, particularly newspapers and magazines is as much a result of their own hubris as it is the advent of new media, and that the opportunities for journalism have flourished rather than diminished.
Fairfax have just announced that the outcomes of a strategic review conducted by McKinsey will result in significant changes to their commercial profile over time, with greater emphasis on electronic media. About time they woke up, having lost huge slabs of classified advertising, their “Rivers of Gold” revenue streams, to specialist web sites like “Car Sales”, “Seek” and others. The tenor of the public announcements still smells of them seeing electronic publishing as a competitive force, rather than a very different but complementary one that will not go away.
Print has lost its immediacy over a long time, first to radio, then TV, more latterly the web, but the process has not been one that should have taken them by surprise, the challenge is to harness the fundamental two differences the web has enabled:
- Anyone can be a publisher now, in a variety of formats from print to photographic and video.
- The whole communication process is now 2 way, hugely networked and fragmented, no longer a one way broadcast, the source of Fairfax’s success last century.
My instinct is that it is too late for incremental change to their business model, even at a rapid rate, the game has moved on too far for them to recapture the fortunes of the past. Glad I am not a shareholder, although Fairfax chairman Roger Corbett has a track record in instituting rapid improvement that generates great returns.
Sep 20, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Social Media, Strategy
“Open source innovation” is rapidly becoming an accepted strategy, an increasing trend as the communication tools on the net make it progressively easier, and people think up new ways to use them.
Eric Von Hippel a professor at MIT wrote “Democratising Innovation” some years ago, and put it on the web for free download, P&G have a deliberate strategy of seeking innovation from outside the firm rather than keeping it all internal, this is not outsourcing, rather it is casting around for the best ideas wherever they come from. Now, the idea has spread to more modest companies, one of my clients is experimenting with a “Wiki” as an adjunct to their more traditional and too slow technical processes.
These types of initiatives thrive on low communication costs, low barriers and transaction costs, it is the speed to market, the creative networks, personal kudos, and energy created that works for the initiators and participants, not necessarily the promise of royalties.
Sep 12, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
Product optimisation is not product discovery, the techniques to get the best results differ, usually markedly, as the challenge to collect data to mitigate risk for entirely new products is substantially more difficult than collecting the same data for what is effectively a range extension .
However, in a web environment, experimentation is becoming easier and easier with the Google analytic tools now freely available, so product optimisation is easier and quicker than ever, to the extent that there is no excuse not to use them. The same tools also make collecting data on new products, almost as easy, so long as an “experiment” can be set up.
However, outside the web environment, where the results are not so immediate or transparent, a bit of creative thought will open up ways to use the tools of the web to track test markets, early adopter customer feedback and reactions, service difficulties, unexpected uses that evolve, and the myriad of other factors at play in a genuinely new product, it just takes a bit more effort to dream up and implement the experiment.
Aug 26, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Social Media, Strategy
The challenge of competing successfully in the digital age is to build the advantages of scale, without the inertia of the bureaucratic structures that usually come with it as a means to manage and control activities and investment priorities, not to mention the governance and compliance challenges.
This remains as true for services delivery as it is of manufacturing demand chains, private, NFP and public sectors.
The evolution of technology and its application to communication has wrought profound changes in the way we manage, and the pace is quickening.
For those of us who remember the emergence of the Fax, just 30 odd years ago, the sense that something extraordinary had happened was profound, but who has used a fax for the last 5 years? Since then email has emerged, followed by an explosion of web tools and mobile technology.
It is probable that the next innovation is just around the corner, are you ready?
