The Pretotyping Manifesto - Stanford Graduate School of Business. We're All in the Knowledge Business Now. Disruption in Knowledge Businesses You may have noticed that record labels, newspapers and book publishers have been going through a bit of turmoil recently.
The common thread among them is that they are information-based industries – and by extension, they are knowledge-based industries. The dilemma facing such industries is that information distribution costs are falling to $0, which blows away many of the protective barriers in these industries. And it’s not just music, news and books. Greg Satell outlines how similar issues are affecting marketing. Fast Company. 40 Examples of Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing. We can call it open innovation, crowdsourcing or co-creation – or something else.
In short, it is about bringing external input to an innovation process and this is no longer a buzzword. Companies are learning that they must embrace this paradigm shift of innovation in order to keep up with the competition and those that are lagging behind, well, they will find themselves to be in big trouble in the coming years. This list of corporate initiatives is worth looking into if you want to get an idea of what is happening with the open innovation, crowdsourcing and co-creation today.
NOTE: The process of bringing external input into an innovation process requires lots of work that is often not visible to the public. So when you go through this list of examples, please remember that these companies have other initiatives related to open innovation. Audi Production Award. Determining Business Value. The topic of business value is a complex one and it’s easy to get mired in the morass of calculating ROI or in trying to define what intangibles are relevant to your organization.
What I will attempt to do in this blog is provide a model for looking at business value focusing on the portfolio and project levels. Business value is important for a couple of reasons: it helps us focus on what we think is important to our organization, and it helps us make priority decisions among our myriad of opportunities, projects, and product features. This Is Business Model Innovation for New Growth. Strategic Agility: The Antidote to a Hostile Business Environment. Remember when government was a friend to small business – the leading source of new jobs in the U.S.?
Me neither. And now it’s getting worse. The Job Creators Alliance — a non-profit organization whose mission is to educate the public and policymakers on what it takes to create jobs – recently surveyed 600 small businesses with 100 employees or less. They found that a majority of small business owners believe the federal government has become more hostile to free enterprise in recent years. The #1 concern for employers? The Strategic Plan is Dead. Long Live Strategy. In today’s fast-changing world, why freeze your strategic thinking in a five-year plan?
Take a moment and read these two words: strategic plan. Now close your eyes and picture one. The Difference between Creating Efficiency and Creating Value. Do you want to get better at what you do best or do something else entirely? That’s an important question and one that is not asked nearly enough. All too often the line between creating efficiency and creating value is blurred so much that we hardly even care to make the distinction.
There is, however, a difference and it’s an important one that requires some serious thinking about how you approach your business, especially as more of what we do becomes digitized. Why Firms Exist. How to nail your product market fit and sales pitch with a value proposition diagram. Products aren’t sold in isolation - they exist within ecosystems.
Great product market fit and sales pitches hinge on understanding and serving all the members of an ecosystem. Should a product fail to meet the needs of any one member, company success and sales velocity will falter. One tool I use with portfolio companies is the Value Proposition Diagram (VPD) which shows why a product is compelling to every customer - and most products are sold to more than one customer at the same time. The Actionable SWOT Analysis - Jose Palomino's Strategic Propositions Blog. Strengths.
Weaknesses. Opportunities. Threats. Yes, we’ve all sat through a SWOT exercise or two (or three). Much has been written about the SWOT analysis as a business strategy tool since it first appeared in the 1960s. Image credit: MyDigitalSR on Flickr. Mapping the Future of Digital Learning Games. A new report released this week aims to level up the learning games market by providing a blueprint for publishers and producers to create effective, engaging games and distribute them to schools.
The report, “Games for a Digital Age: K-12 Market Map and Investment Analysis,” includes a comprehensive analysis of the types of learning games currently on the market, as well as a market map of the K-12 school space. It’s a complex institutional market rife with challenges – policy changes, fragmented decision making, demand for professional development, etc. – as well as opportunities, as new ideas about technology integration and personalized learning make schools friendlier places to play games.
A great overview for anyone looking to better understand the contours of the games and learning landscape, this report is one of many useful resources to come from the newly-formed Games and Learning Publishing Council. Apple Versus the Strategy Professors - Justin Fox. By Justin Fox | 10:00 AM January 29, 2013 Someday, Apple’s now 11-year-long run of nearly unbroken triumph (I’m dating it to the launch of the iPod in November 2001) is going to end.
That is just the way of the business world. Trace in the Sand Software Architecture Journal. All of the intensity of my passion is focused on empowering and enabling architects to design and lead the building of more sustainable systems, in every sense of the word from technically to economically and environmentally to morally and personally, and this is reflected in the avenues explored in my journal.
To make this work more accessible, I'm assembling the topic map below (so far only about 40% of entries from almost 6 years of journaling have been indexed). I'll transform it into a pan and zoom visual structure once I've collected the link tree data. Because these are journal entries, the clusters under each topic heading are chronologically ordered. I still plan to add a summary for each major topic. The journal posts are not self-contained the way (mini-)essays, like most blog posts, are. Explaining Customer Centricity With a Diagram. SoMoLo Marketing: Nike Case Study. What is So(Social)Mo(Mobile)Lo(Local)? SoMoLo is an acronym, short for Social, Mobile, Local. As detailed in What is SoMoLo and Why is it Important to Marketers, SoMoLo is an accurate description of today’s consumer, and at the intersection of these three variables, Marketers can connect with consumers, presenting endless opportunity potential.
If Marketers aren’t able to define or locate that sweet spot for their target, their marketing efforts will be disjointed, an uphill battle to increase ROI. Four Ways Social Media Will Enhance Your SoMoLo Campaign is a good read to get your wheels spinning on utilizing social platforms that you may already be engaged with. SoMoLo a growing trend? McDonald’s wins on the fast food jobs-to-be-done that matter. I Rate This Consumer Edge Insight conducted a survey of consumer perceptions about 20 different fast food restaurants.
Specifically, how are they ranked by consumer perceptions on different attributes, such as: Good value Convenience Low prices Fast service Great tasting food. Strategic Thinking Exercises - Why New Product Launches Fail. What role do public relations efforts play when new product launches fail? Can public relations be the sole cause? How significant a role can the public relations strategy for a new product launch play in mitigating other launch-related issues? And what can a public relations professional do to play a more active, strategic role to contribute toward new product launch success even if problems surface in other support areas? These questions are all part of a talk I’m presenting at the PR Consultants Group annual conference in Kansas City. Chaired by good friend, Alex Greenwood, of AlexG PR, the session will focus on how public relations professionals can hone their strategic, creative, and innovation-oriented skill sets to be more effective with product launches.
You Tell Me the Strategic Thinking Exercises to Cover! Yes, that means when the presentation starts, I’ll have no idea what specific topics we’ll cover! Developing a Strategic Business Perspective. When Escape from a Previously Successful Model Is Impossible. Three visualizations describe the breakdown of PSMs--previously successful models: S-Curves, Supernovas and Rising Wedges. A successful model traps those within it; escape becomes impossible. I recently highlighted one historical example of a PSM (Previously Successful Model) in Our Dust Bowl Economy (November 20, 2012): in the ample-rain era of the 1920s, farmers in the semi-arid southern Midwest had reaped huge profits by plowing up and planting fragile native grasslands. They poured their profits into homesteads, equipment and more land to enable further expansion.
When grain surpluses pushed prices down, their "model" had only one "solution": plant more land and harvest even more grain to compensate for lower prices. When prices fell from $1 per bushel to $.25/bushel, the model collapsed. Usability in Practice: Useful, Usable and Desirable: Usability as a Core Development Competence. Usability in Practice. Fast Company.
What about the Competition? « Five Whys. Whatever happened to building strategic competitive advantage? With all the talk of business model generation, lean startups and customer development you might be forgiven for having thought that competitive advantage was all a bit last season. Gary Hamel on Enterprise 2.0 and the Post-Establishment Age. August 18, 2009 by Hutch Carpenter. Innovation Excellence. Clayton Christensen Doesn’t Get the Job Done In Clayton Christensen’s well-publicized milkshake marketing video and HBR article “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure,” he proposes doing market segmentation differently: around the job-to-be-done.
Newsletter - Newsletter - 3 US veterans to commence this year’s Product Management Series. “Blue Ocean” vs “Shaping” Strategy: A Comparative \\ Vaibmu. Executing Innovation (Part 1) - Video - Video. Innovation and Design Thinking - Idris Mootee. Innovation and Strategic Growth.