What Would Thomas Edison Do? At GE, It's a Guiding Business Question - Business It’s easy to forget the impact Thomas Edison had on the way we think about the technology business—this is the guy who took electricity commercial, after all. Edison was one of the principal founders of General Electric, which still towers over the U.S. business landscape 120 years after its inception. However, the company’s reliance on an overgrown financial business before the recession made it vulnerable during the crash. Today, GE is working to shift back to the industrial businesses it was known for in its glory days—energy, transportation, and medical equipment. Making that adjustment in uncertain economic times will require a nimbleness large companies aren’t known for, but GE is betting it can adapt with the best of them. “Longevity means you’re good at change,” says Beth Comstock, the company’s chief marketing officer and the face of its innovation strategy. “He was a great business innovator,” Comstock says. Photo via (cc) Flickr user Bekathwia
The Giant Mirror of Viganella Viganella is a small village in Italy located right at the bottom of a deep valley, and surrounded by high mountains on all sides. This means that naturally, every year from mid-November to early February, the region has absolutely no sunlight. The return of the sun’s rays on the 2nd of February was celebrated with joy every single year for several centuries. That is, until December of 2006, when the problem was fixed forever. Thanks to the brilliance of Giacomo Bonzani, an architect and sundial designer, there now resides on the slopes of a mountainside above Viganella, a giant mirror that reflects sunlight into the town square. A place that had not seen the sun’s rays during the winter since the beginning of time, was now suddenly bathed in its glorious light and warmth. According to Bonzani, who first came up with the idea of reflecting sunlight on to the square, no one believed it was possible at first. Reddit Stumble
Wanna Manage The Innovation Process? Focus On Planning Scenarios, Not Fighting Fires The following is an excerpt from Relentless Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t--and What That Means for Your Business by Jeffrey Phillips. Perhaps one of the biggest myths about innovation is the idea of the “lone” innovator, who works on ideas in the lab or office, without assistance or support. In this myth the innovator or inventor has a flash of insight, generates and manages ideas completely on his or her own, and fights the bureaucracy to overcome all odds to produce a commercially viable product. While these stories about individual innovators overcoming all odds are enjoyable, they are rarely true. In fact, most, if not all, ideas that become new products or services require the involvement of a significant number of people from a wide array of business functions--sales, marketing, legal, manufacturing, and distribution, to name a few. Likewise, innovators need strong, consistent processes and frameworks in order to manage, develop, and test ideas. When a Process Is Valuable
Ron Johnson: Retail's new radical He's the guy behind the Apple Store and Target's cool cachet. Now he wants to fix J.C. Penney. Who is Ron Johnson, and will his high-stakes makeover really work? By Jennifer Reingold, senior editor FORTUNE -- It's been a long time since Manhattan's Pier 57 has seen this much action. Or perhaps it's just the relentless optimism of Ron Johnson, J.C. "Wow! Johnson has spent years in the shadows, hatching two of the most significant retail concepts in a generation. Now Johnson, 53, is embarking on his toughest challenge. To attract customers, Johnson unveiled a radically simplified pricing strategy, a slimmed-down but improved selection of brands, and a change in the store's layout, which will consist exclusively of mini-boutiques arrayed around a "town square." The new pricing strategy is ambitious -- and risky. Johnson adjusting a mannequin before J.C. People want to belong to something deeper," says Johnson. The Cougars tied their first game. Learn it from the ground up he did. J.C.
Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. At the time, B.B.D.O. was widely regarded as the most innovative firm on Madison Avenue. Born in 1888, Osborn had spent much of his career in Buffalo, where he started out working in newspapers, and his life at B.B.D.O. began when he teamed up with another young adman he’d met volunteering for the United War Work Campaign. “Your Creative Power” was filled with tricks and strategies, such as always carrying a notebook, to be ready when inspiration struck. The book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became an influential business guru, writing such best-sellers as “Wake Up Your Mind” and “The Gold Mine Between Your Ears.” The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all.
The Innovator’s Blindspot: Even Your Best Ideas Will Fail If Your Partners Don’t Innovate Too The following is an excerpt from The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation. There is a blind spot that undermines great managers in great organizations even when they identify real customer needs, deliver great products, and beat their competition to market. Philips Electronics fell victim to this blind spot when it spent a fortune to pioneer high-definition television (HDTV) sets in the mid-1980s. Sony suffered from a similar blind spot, winning a pyrrhic victory as it raced to bring its e-reader to market before its rivals, only to discover that even a great e-reader cannot succeed in a market where customers have no easy access to e-books. In all these cases, smart companies and talented managers invested, implemented, and succeeded in bringing genuinely brilliant innovations to market. There is a growing trend to not go it alone. To be sure, great customer insight and execution remain vital. Dependence is not becoming more visible, but it is becoming more pervasive.
Why Innovations Are Arguments Too many executives confuse what an innovation is with what an innovation would do for them if they had one. The solution? Think of innovation as an if-then argument. Henry Ford’s argument for the Model T can be expressed as an if-then statement. Image courtesy of Ford Motor Company. Attend almost any conference on innovation, and one will hear someone in the audience ask, “Yes, but how are you defining ‘innovation’?” The problem is a serious one, not the least because companies send engineers, “technology entrepreneurs” and “technology scouts” in search of innovations when a shared understanding of what they are looking for may not exist across the organization’s people and functions or between “scouts” and managers. I propose that all true innovations are arguments. Let me explain. Arguments can always be expressed as if-then statements: If we agree to a proposition being true, sound or valid, then we can infer a conclusion.
Design Indaba 2012: Trust Your Gut And Take Risks To Really Be Creative “This talk is not to change the world, but rather to offer some words of encouragement,” declared Porky Hefer at the start of his Design Indaba 2012 presentation. After spending 16 years in advertising (and one step away from becoming the CEO of a major ad agency), he left it all to start his own venture, Animal Farm. Now, making a name for himself as a product designer, his ideas come to life by constantly sketching. One of his creations, Lite is a range wooden bulbs using indigenous African hardwood which function as lampshades and include an eco-friendly CFL bulb or LED light. He also showed his Nest tree house project, which was inspired by weaver birds’ nests. Built with no inner steel framework, each nest is meticulously hand-constructed using all natural material like bark and branches. Inspired by a dog running past him at the beach that looked like it had human teeth, he created the hilarious Rogz Grinz Ball. Are the words “Trust your gut” your mantra, and why? Thanks Porky!