in Innovation
Tim Morris, co-founder and director of Dynamic Horizons, a leading Australian innovation consultancy, has produced a fantastic video entitled "A brief exploration of the state of innovation in Australian business. Irreverent, frank and hopefully interesting." Although the statistics in this video refer to Australia, this message holds true for every business.
A key to implementing a kick-ass business strategy is doing what others are unwilling to do, this is shifts the rules to your advantage.
One of the most important pillars of any great business is making your customer happy. Yet, it seems to me that businesses are only focused on what they want, but not what their customers want. Profit over brand is a ruling mindset! If you find yourself in a market where this is the case, make it your mission to compete by making your customers happy, and make your competition irrelevant.
Your competitors will be trying to figure your strategy out and since they can’t think of making customers happy as a strategy (it’s not logical?), they won’t be able to compete! They’ll think you’re out of your mind.…
in Innovation
The worlds most recognizable brands where born out of some innovative product or service that created new value for consumers. But what lead them to that specific innovation? Why not check out this custom interior signage here for more info!
The Branding Strategy Insider came up with a short list of factors that lead to innovation:
• A penchant for experimentation and action over analysis
• The realization that in many industries, approximately 70% of innovations are developed by users, not the firm bringing the product to market (from research done by Professor Eric von Hippel at MIT)
• The importance of connectivity. An enterprise has a much higher success rate if it is interconnected with the widest variety of potential idea sources, suppliers, business partners, customers, universities, governmental agencies, etc.
• Build on your strengths, don’t waste your efforts on hiding or compensating for your weaknesses. Identify your assets and amplify them.
• Envision the positive outcome that you seek.
• Be optimistic and constantly work until your optimism is justified.
This is by no means a complete list but in my opinion it’s quite simple. If we were to trace these factors back and look for patterns these would show up in one way or the other.
What other factors lead to innovation?
How do you win in the marketplace? Seth Godin argues that creating a sustainable competitive advantage can take many forms: own something that’s hard to copy, creating a brand, creating a network where most of the power rests on you, creating switching costs and building a culture that’s innovative.
Innovation is difficult to do. There are numerous books out there about innovation that teach you a certain aspect on how to innovate yet are clearly written for experts.
Richard Watson put together a well written comprehensive article about innovation that any person can understand. Read it, share it with your team, discuss it and accept that if you want to create anything new you’re bound to fail more than a few times.
There is no magic formula!
(Fast Company)
(Blogging Innovation)
in Innovation
A few weeks ago Umair Haque said innovation needed to be innovated. In an effort to do that he’s open sourced the Awesomeness Manifesto to his readers:
The goal is to produce a stronger, collaboratively written manifesto on awesomeness, rich with real-world example, discussion, and commentary.
Here then are my thoughts:
Awesome for me is something that let’s me do or experience something that I’ve never done before. This can also be called innovation, but then again we always had phones until the iPhone came along.
Bottom line ’Awesome is a dramatic improvement over what was before.’
Products and services that make my life more awesome are:
In conclusion:
Awesome enables me.
Awesome empowers me.
Awesome activates me.
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What are your thoughts on awesome? What products or services do you consider awesome?
in Strategy
The Business Insider interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his thoughts about Innovation, particularly how he came up with the idea while at Harvard and how he’s been able to get FB to it’s present state of 300 million users in 5 years.
While I don’t think Facebook is good at pure innovation, I think they’re a good at identifying and integrating great ideas from other companies into their product to make it better and ultimately this is all that matters.…