Archive for: February, 2014

How do you identify innovation champions in an organization?

Jorge in Innovation, Leadership, Question-To-Innovate, Questions

How do you identify innovation champions in an organization?

Unlike scrappy startups, and maverick organizations, innovation doesn’t happen with a snap of a finger in traditionally managed organizations; it needs fearless leaders.

As I mentioned in last week’s question-to-innovate, innovation is a team game, and there many types of people who can fill those roles. Today, I’ll touch on the “who do we unleash to make innovation happen?” part of the equation.

Most likely you are in a traditional organization where management still rules the day, bureaucracy can stand in the way or enable innovation. Let’s imagine that you’ve talked about and agreed that innovation needs to become more than simple talk in your organization. To make this happen, you’ve decided to unleash the hounds: the fearless and passionate people who don’t follow the rules that you’ve sat on the bench.

Still, who among these mavericks can really push through?…

How to conduct an outside industry benchmark for innovation

Jorge in Innovation

To generate radical ideas, approaches and strategies, benchmarking withing your industry is not particularly valuable. You must look outside your industry and business. Only with outside-industry benchmarks can you overcome paradigm blindness and create game-changing ideas.

I’ve written before that traditional benchmarking is stupid because, frankly, it leads to me-too ideas. Not only that, but it also shifts you into a never ending fixed mindset. A more strategic way to benchmark, is to look outside your industry for ideas. This logic of innovation is “lift and shift.” That is, search for great ideas in unrelated fields, lift them out of the context in which they took shape, and shift them into your company.

This topic isn’t new, but just like ethnography, it is still a rarity in the business world.

The main obstacle to outside-industry benchmark is implementation because business practices are quite different from one industry to another.The key is how to transform those practices to fit your industry.…

Quick and Dirty Blueprint for Customer Development

Jorge in Design Thinking, entrepreneurship, Innovation

customer development

This is a guest post by Jonathan Lau, a growth hacker.

Alright, you’ve got the idea, now how do you quickly and cheaply see if anyone will pay for it? Despite all the hype about new PPC technologies and social media marketing strategies, I have found that for companies starting out, emails and phone calls remain the most effective tools for customer development.

Follow this blueprint for a cheap and easily scalable customer development strategy that people actually respond to.

The work flow is simple:…

Are all innovators alike?

Jorge in Innovation, Question-To-Innovate, Questions

Are all innovators alike?

Nuances and details are lost in the sea of bullshit that is media and human irrationality, and an outcome is one of the most dangerous things humans do: build people up to more than they probably are.

Sure, the world needs heroes that carry a positive narrative that others can latch on to and get inspired to make a story of their own. My heroes are Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan. You have your own, for your own personal reasons.

And just like you and I have our own motivations for why we do something, what we do and how we do it; so do other potential innovators.

Truth is, that in a world where people are fitted into boxes, everyone has their own creative style. Some people are more systematic than others, and some of us are more intuitive. I believe that failing to understand this distinction between people is a huge innovation obstacle!…

WhatsApp: The power of doing one thing extremely well

Jorge in entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy

WhatsApp has succeeded because it is focused on creating a great product, not another social network. What will make your business unique is what you deliberately choose not to do.

After almost two years of chit-chat, WhatsApp sold to Facebook for $19 billion yesterday. For a moment, let’s ignore whatever we think about the valuation, and whether in the larger economic picture this is something to be concerned about.

Here I won’t get into the whole strategic thinking behind why this deal makes or doesn’t make sense. What I will do is talk about the picture below:…

Q&A: Sangeet Paul Choudary on how open business models are changing how businesses compete

Jorge in entrepreneurship, Innovation, Interviews, Strategy

This is part two of a Q&A with Sangeet Paul Choudary on platform businesses and open business models. In part 1, he answered some questions about platform businesses.

Sangeet Paul Choudary writes the blog Platform Thinking which has been featured on leading publications and research labs including WSJ, HBR, WIRED, FastCompany and the MIT Centre for Digital Business. He is an innovation analyst and consultant who has lectured at leading academic institutions like MIT Media Labs and INSEAD and consults leading startups as well as traditional firms making the transition to digital platforms. He is a mentor at leading accelerators like 500Startups and serves on the advisory board of leading platform startups.

Follow him on Twitter at @sanguit. To know more about Sangeet, visit http://platformed.info/sangeet-paul-choudary/ and sg.linkedin.com/in/sangeetpaul‎.…