The 3 Biggest Barriers To Innovation, And How To Smash Them | Co. Design [This is the third post in a series of excerpts adapted from Luke Williams’s Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business. The first excerpt is here and the second is here.] How do you transform an opportunity into an idea? Well, the first thing is to get comfortable with the belief that any old ideas won’t do. 1: Feeling overwhelmed, directionless, and without focus In my experience, this is the direct result of relying on traditional brainstorming approaches, which, by the way, have been around since the 1930s, when ad-man Alex Faickney Osborn first popularized them in his book, Applied Imagination. [How are you gonna find the needle in there?! 2: Thinking in terms of isolated products, services, and information It’s getting harder and harder to compete if you don’t view the world in terms of holistic product-service-information hybrids. 3: Getting stuck at the water-cooler As a result, they rarely escape people’s heads and instead remain there, unformed.
The Age of the Consumer-Innovator Recent research shows that consumers collectively generate massive amounts of product innovation. These findings are a wake-up call for both companies and consumers — and have significant implications for our understanding of new product development. It has long been assumed that companies develop new products for consumers, while consumers are passive recipients — merely buying and consuming what producers create. However, a multidecade effort by many researchers has shown that this traditional innovation paradigm is fundamentally flawed: Consumers themselves are a major source of product innovations.1 Recently, this consumers-as-innovators pattern has led to the framing of a new innovation paradigm, in which consumers play a central and very active role.2 Rather than seeing consumers simply as “the market,” as the traditional innovation model has long taught, this new paradigm centers on consumers and other product users. National Surveys of Consumer Innovation Support user innovation.
Big Data + Machine Learning = Scared banks. By Jeremy Liew On February 27, 2012 The WSJ notes how tech start-ups are taking on banks. Some companies are even targeting niches like lending money for in vitro fertilization. But lending has historically been a very difficult business for startups, and for good reason: It is highly regulated, which creates significant cost overhead, and the consequence of a “foot fault” is catastrophic. So what is different now? In the wake of the credit crisis, the big banks are skittish. Wonga is one of the poster boys in startup alternative lending. Hinting at the originality of the site’s data capture, Accel’s Sonali De Rycker, now on Wonga’s board, says: “They use a lot of social media and other tools on the internet you don’t even think about. The crux of the algorithm is less about the individual pieces of data — your postcode, the colour of your car, how large your mortgage is — but how these pieces of information relate to one another. Each individual loan is small.
40 Reasons Why People Struggle with Innovation The fuzzy front end of innovation confronts you with a lot of questions. For the new edition of my book ‘Creating innovative Products and Services' I have posted a question on front-end innovation struggles to innovation practioners in more than 20 linkedin groups. The response was massive. I made a list of forty reasons why people struggle starting innovation in their companies in daily practice. A. We are uncertain if we can be creative and come up with ideas.How do we change our existing habits? B. Ideas are too ambitious therefore we can’t imagine how they ever will be feasible.It’s very hard to imagine the future.We fear failure.Those in our company that don’t understand the idea or new product will attack and ridicules the newness of it.The critical thing at the front end in our company is the demonstration of the positive bottom-line impact of the new service or product. C. D. E. G. Of course this is not a scientific proven list. About the author:
The User Innovation Revolution According to innovation expert Eric von Hippel, users are often the first source of new products — and that has important implications for businesses. Eric von Hippel is a professor of technological innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What if much of what you know — or think you know — about the innovation process is wrong? That’s a question Eric von Hippel thinks many companies — and businesspeople — should consider. Surprisingly often, von Hippel argues, ideas for new or improved products come first from users who develop improvised versions to serve their own needs. Von Hippel has decades of research to support his theory. MIT Sloan Management Review editorial director Martha E. Eric, you’ve been studying user innovation for many years. It began when I was hanging around MIT as a 12-year-old.
The Rewiring of Institutions Corporation. Non-Profit. Community. Business. Cause. Platform. Government. The clearly defined borders that have traditionally enveloped the institutions above are blurring and we’re trying to make sense of it all. We like definitions because they help us make sense of the world. Is this simply evolution as it has always been? Ultimately, IS THIS (whatever this is) WORTH OUR TIME AND ATTENTION? As I watch and interact with people across different domains of my life, I see lots of different responses to what’s happening right now. But, perhaps the most common scenario is that many of us have a hint of what’s happening, trying to make sense of newsbyte fragments flying past in the activity stream, but aren’t quite sure what to do, how to respond, or ultimately what any of this means for us, and the generations behind us. What’s really going on? Institutions are, in fact, being rewired before our very eyes. NY Times Columnist Thomas L. Reconsidering what we thought we knew
Alles kan anders...en beter: Boekbespreking: Winning at Innovation - The A-to-F Model van Dernando Trias de Bes en Philip Kotler Aan ambitie ontbreekt het dit boek niet. Als in de introductie staat “Our book, we believe, provides the most comprehensive blueprint view of the whole innovation process” kan je moeilijk beschuldigd worden van valse bescheidenheid. En wie hoge verwachtingen schept, loopt het risico... Aan de grondslag van het boek ligt de vaststelling dat er in veel organisaties een behoorlijke discrepantie is tussen de nood tot innovatie enerzijds en de aanwezige capaciteit om die te realiseren anderzijds. Een verkeerde inschatting van het begrip innovatie dat te vaak verengd wordt tot radicale doorbraakinnovatiesGeen eenduidige verantwoordelijke. Kernstandpunt van het boek is dat het niet mogelijk is om innovatieprocessen te gieten in een vooraf uitgestippeld stappenplan. 1) De Activator lanceert nieuwe innovatieprocessen in organisaties. · Business model innovatie: wijzigen van de wijze waarop waarde gecreëerd wordt · Procesinnovatie: sales, productie, logistiek o Face-to-face observaties o Forecasting
Mothers Of Invention: How Moms Help Huggies Innovate As the maker of Kleenex, Kotex, Depends, Huggies, and other products, Kimberly-Clark is already a leader in most of its markets. But they were looking for the next big thing, something they could develop into another hit. So they assembled a team to explore the options and asked me for assistance with guiding the process. One of the first things we did was set up several innovation sessions to explore possible new directions. As a way to spur our creativity and push beyond our current mindsets, we invited a number of outsiders to the sessions--external experts in fields related to (and also unrelated to) Kimberly-Clark’s core businesses. One of these leaders was Maria Bailey, a renowned author and talk show host, and the go-to authority on anything and everything related to motherhood. “I realized that the only way to do it right was to go out directly to the innovators, to the moms themselves,” Steve recalled. The main question was how to do it, and the answer wasn’t entirely clear.