Kevin Kelly is quoted as saying that “The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: take X and add AI”. Indeed, and 2017 may well be the year A.I. becomes a buzzword because just about every new product and service is pitching it as a strength and point of differentiation (more on that below).…
One of the hardest things to do when defining what your business does is explaining it in the simplest of terms; the key challenge is distinguishing between features and benefits. The reason that this is so vitally important is that, in the words of User Onboarding: “People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves.”…
Understanding the difference between a customer’s wants and needs is a major key to succeeding in a retail merchandising business. Often what a customer wants is diametrically opposed to what they need. As a businessperson, your job is to give the customer what they want. Helping them to understand what they need is also important. However, it’s not your responsibility to convince customers to get what they need. Businesses make money by satisfying their customers. Often it’s easier to sell them what they want than what the need. So that’s where businesspeople should primarily focus their energy.…
Though the old Be Like Mike ads are cultural icons, Gatorade has found a way to make them more interesting. …
Does the term crowdfunding sound familiar? Have you ever seen a Kickstarter or GoFundMe page before? If all of this seems foreign to you, then you are missing out on a fabulous opportunity. Crowdfunding is a new way of funding projects, allowing anyone to contribute a small amount of money to help a new business get on its way or get the capital that it needs to succeed.…
As a well known Disney fanatic, I get asked about storytelling quite a bit. And, my number one and only tip is this: be authentic.
It doesn’t seem like a lot, but many people are afraid to be authentic. A great way to express authenticity through story is by talking about a time or situation when you were the best version of yourself (success); and likewise when you were not (learned from failure).
Why? Because it tells us two things that any person can empathize with: your success and your lessons from failure.
In essence, there is a transformation. Those are stories worth telling because they shaped who you are :). …
Happy New Year! Last week I vacationed in Mexico City, where I ringed in the new year. It’s the first time I’ve spent considerable time there, it’s a huge city and covering it in a week is impossible. Good thing they have sightseeing buses, or turibus as they’re known there, that take you on different routes to show you “what you need to see” around the city. So, I took one!
Even as a tourist I still reflect about the experiences I have with products and services I interact with in my travels. Friends of mine also know that, so when I posted a selfie of my cousins and I on the turibus I was not surprised that I friend of mine who lives in the city quickly tweeted back that he wanted to know my thoughts about my turibus experience.
Late that night, I sent him an email with my thoughts; which could be summed up this way: it was good, but not great.
The turibus, is a convenience “get to know the city” service Mexico City offers tourists and residents. The key word is “convenience”, a time saver. And as such it’s not bad, but it didn’t blow my mind either; I believe it’s the same situation with sightseeing buses in other large cities. Thus, you have the same expectations about sightseeing buses in large cities.
To a true innovator, that smells like an opportunity to raise or redefine expectations. How?
First of all, ask yourself a fundamental question: what are people really trying to accomplish? An easy answer is people hire a turibus to get educated about the city and its culture.
Great! Next, ask yourself one question: how might I make this more interesting?
The point of asking yourself, “how might I make this more interesting?”, is to question your own assumptions, shift your perspective and not mindlessly follow the first thing that pops into your head.
In addition, I like to use other adjectives such as:
The last three being the criteria I use to determine whether or not an idea has the potential to be innovative: new, surprising and radically useful.
The point is you shouldn’t accept the current reality as a given. Remember, reality is malleable; don’t be afraid to set standards. True innovators aim to be the only ones, not the best or first ones. That intent comes from setting, meeting and exceeding their own standards; not everyone else’s. Thus making competition irrelevant.
With that said, though I won’t do a thorough exercise on how I would approach said challenge, below are some questions that you can re-purpose for other domains to help uncover assumptions as well as understand current expectations; I’ll use the sightseeing bus experience example:
Next, ask yourself: how can we better the sightseeing bus experience by delivering an unexpected and radically useful solution?
Here are some thought provoking questions to get you warmed up:
Bottom line: products and services can quickly become dull and routine; even to tourists. Sometimes the fundamental goal people are trying to accomplish changes, other times it doesn’t. Our job as game-changing innovators is to constantly raise and/or redefine expectations by questioning assumptions, looking beyond the obvious, and understanding that oftentimes people can’t articulate what they really want. Let’s show them something they would never think off.
