Purpose in Innovation

Simon Sinek’s TED presentation, is a must see for any leader and anyone trying to grow through innovation. The presentation, part of the promotion for his book “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action,” is quite simply an explanation of why some companies inspire followers rather than just satisfy customers. Sinek [...]

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What are you feeding R&D?

As you kick-off your growth efforts for this year, have you given any consideration to what you should be feeding the teams in your new product development process? Just as we all need to start the day off with a healthy breakfast and limit our intake of junk food, your new product development efforts will [...]

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Tomatoes, single-tasking & innovation?

Okay, so a tomato can’t make your new product innovation move any faster, but a little concept called the Pomodoro Technique might help eliminate some of the bad multi-tasking that wastes time and can slow any new product project down. I’ve written a lot lately about eliminating multi-tasking for personal and corporate productivity, but only [...]

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Is your market dying for change?

In the Fast Company Article Change or Die, Alan Deutchman, shared a statistic that blew me away.  After just  a year, more than 90% of heart bypass patients return to the 5 behaviors (overeating, not exercising, too much stress, excessive drinking, and smoking) that put them on the operating table to begin with. Ninety percent! [...]

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Is process really your innovation problem?

I recently spoke with a company that was terribly frustrated by the results of their new product innovation process. Or should I say the lack of results – because they readily admitted that projects never finish on time and rarely deliver even half of what they project.  Even so, this was a successful company whose [...]

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Teaching old markets new tricks

Many companies write old markets off – relegating them to either cash cow or harvest status.  How can you blame them? They keep investing and don’t see any return so the easy thing to do is to tell yourself that it’s a “mature market.”  One where new product or service innovation just won’t provide the [...]

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The hyping of innovation

Isn’t it time for a moratorium on using the word innovation in advertising where it’s been relegated it to a nearly meaningless, over-hyped buzzword. As an example, a recent commercial shows a young father-to-be who realizes that his two seat sports car is not exactly going to be family friendly.  He proceeds to walk around [...]

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Too little – Too Late?

There have been a many recent articles on the launch of Windows 7 mobile. Most have praised Microsoft for getting it right this time, but as Walt Mossberg puts it in his WSJ column, “My conclusion is that Microsoft has used its years in the smartphone wilderness to come up with a user interface that [...]

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Should innovation be one of your core competencies?

Should innovation one of your core competencies? Peter Drucker may have answered that question best when he said that since businesses exist to create customers, the two essential functions of any business are marketing and innovation. And most CEO’s agree or why would they reinvest (aka spend) anywhere between 30 and 50% of their net [...]

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Starbucks to eliminate multitasking

That’s right – even a coffee chain knows that trying to do multiple things at the same time is a bad idea. This WSJ article details the ubiquitous coffee house’s efforts to improve quality and customer experience by limiting the number of drinks and the number of espresso machine’s run at the same time. Here [...]

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