Archive for: April, 2012

To find new market opportunities and grow, study non-consumers

Jorge in Innovation

The key to company growth is to create more value for your customers, which means better satisfying their unmet needs. With that said, if you’re an established business that is looking for growth opportunities, look for people who are not your customers. If you’re interested in investing, feel free to check out craft.co/shiftpixy. Non-consumers, people who are not taking advantage of the benefits your product or service delivers, represent the best opportunity for innovation.

This is what Walmart is doing with its “Pay with Cash” program. It is offering a solution for customers without debit or credit cards:…

Innovation must reads of the week: Do companies require radical innovations to woo consumers? No

Jorge in Must reads of the week

What Doesn’t Motivate Creativity Can Kill It by @teresamabile – Follow @teresamabile
The 8 Essentials of Innovation – Forbes
What Consumers Really Want: Do companies require radical innovations to woo consumers? New research suggests…no! – INSEAD Knowledge
How Great Leaders Create Game Changers by @mikemyatt – Follow @mikemyatt
How to Spot the Future – Wired
4 Steps To Getting The Market Timing Right For Your Innovation by @philmckinney – Follow @philmckinney

The Table of Strategic Elements: Visualize and Create New Strategies

Jorge in Innovation, Strategy

Creativity is all about combining different ideas. It’s elements, its attributes. They can all be combined to create something new. Here’s something interesting, a basic table to visualize strategies:

Table of Strategic Elements

Created by Adobe’s Chief Strategist, Mark Randall, the “Table of Strategic Elements,” lets him analyze existing companies to identify new combinations. He has identified 14 “elements” ranging from bD, (big data), through Ga, (Gamification), to Ad, (advertising).…

Job swapping: The new innovation tactic

Jorge in Innovation

Saw this on my Facebook newsfeed yesterday. This is a very strategic idea and one that I’ve talked about before. It is meant to create surprise, to shake things up by bringing an outside perspective. Everyone benefits from job-swapping.…

Are Startup Incubators too focused on Technology?

Jorge in Innovation

I tackled a similar question last year, but two articles I came across recently got me thinking.

Are incubators worth the trouble for startups?

But Vijayashanker took a pass. She’d noticed that many incubators focus heavily on technology development but didn’t teach the business skills she wanted to master. “I was talking to people who had graduated from these business incubators, and the vast majority were still asking business questions,” she recalls. “They were talking about ‘How do we market? How do we find customers?'” As she did her research, she found that entrepreneurs in a variety of fields who’d built a company outside of the incubator scene “had the most knowledge and experience,” she said.

The there’s Google Ventures, which takes a more collaborative incubation approach to jump-starting innovation:

Maris’s formula includes an unusual emphasis on data–and a team of researchers to quantify elements that lead to successful investments. Then there’s his Startup Lab. According to just about everyone in the startup scene, including rival VCs, Google Ventures is one of the most hands-on, full-service funders in the Valley. “They have recruiting partners, design partners, engineering partners, user research partners,” says Somrat Niyogi, who has raised money from Google Ventures for his social TV startup Miso. “That kind of structure, you just don’t get in the VC community. Period.”…

Positive Intelligence: How people and organizations can achieve their potential

Jorge in Behavior, Psychology

Happiness, behavior change, autonomy, purpose…

These words have moved into the everyday business conversation and taken on a life of their own in the last few years. They’ve spawned books and conversations. Yet few offer a systematic way towards better outcomes. And not just that, but also helping us become aware of what might be holding us back.

I think I’ve found a book that adds to the conversation, and fills that void.…