The Innovation Engine Community - Latest Articles

Five Insights into Innovating via Mobile Devices

Maddock and Viton — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:28:14 GMT

When formulating your mobile-related business-model strategy, think behavioral, not technological Hey, you rock star, you. You know all about innovating through mobility, right? You do the text messaging and the digital coupons. You're even developing the app your boss wants. You're mirroring what you have on your website. All in all, you have it under control. Yep, you can check another item off your to-do list. And six months from now, you can start explaining why the competition is outperforming you when it comes to retaining customers, winning new business, and communicating with existing customers and potential ones through their cell phones, PDAs, smartphones, and such other mobile devices as the iPad and HP Slate. Here's the problem. While absolutely nothing is wrong with being tactical—and that is probably what you have been doing up until now if you think of communicating with your customers' cell phone as "mobile marketing"—you need to do more. You must start thinking about where mobility fits into your overall business strategy. And if you are like most marketers and innovators, you haven't done that yet. Let's talk about what you have to do and how you can do it. To understand where mobility fits...

Why Innovation Is Beginner's Luck

Maddock and Viton — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:29:21 GMT

Your boss has been an industry expert for decades. He keeps talking about innovation. Your gut tells you he is about to fail again. Your gut is right By G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón Matt Kuttler founded, built, and sold a promotion products company, PhoneCard Express. Now he is running another business of his own invention, the office supply company ReStockIt.com. Rick Jamieson built and sold a successful accounting company. Now he is busy reinventing the automobile service industry as chief executive of ABS Friction . Mike Michalowicz started a successful technology integration firm, then built and sold a data forensics company. Dig into their backgrounds a bit, and you'll see they have the very thing you don't look for when you hire your leaders: inexperience. Each and every time, they started a business in an industry they knew almost nothing about. And therein lies a lesson for you. You like to hire people who know everything about the way business is done in your industry. You hire consultants that way: "Can you show me a case study that demonstrates how you have solved this problem before in our industry?" You hire employees that way: "I see here...

Innovation Needed: The Baltimore Orioles

Maddock and Viton — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:22:00 GMT

For the Birds and every other organization that needs a groundbreaking insight, here's how to find it By G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón Pity, please, the Baltimore Orioles, as we come out of baseball's All-Star break. Not only are the Birds the worst team in baseball, but they also score No. 102 out of 122 in the Ultimate Standings, ESPN's annual ranking of how much Major League Baseball , National Basketball Assn., National Football League, and National Hockey League teams "give back to the fans in exchange for all the time, money, and emotion the fans invest in them." We are intimately familiar with those standings. For the past eight years, we have been working with ESPN to create the rankings and with some of the teams themselves to capitalize on the market opportunities those rankings represent. What struck us about the teams that scored the highest was not that they had winning records. The world champion New York Yankees, for example, scored in the middle of the pack, No. 62. The higher-ranked teams did a better job at gaining an understanding of what their fans truly want. Winning turned out to rank as only the seventh most-important...

Is the Pet Industry Failing to Deliver on the Biggest Consumer Need of the Decade?

Raff Viton — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:17:35 GMT

"Wake Up Champ!" Is the Pet Industry failing to deliver on the biggest consumer need of the decade? "The more you love, the harder you fight." I was watching the movie The Champ again the other day...little Ricky Schroder really got to us in that 1979 tearjerker. Remember it? "Champ, wake up, Champ...hey, don't sleep now...we got to go home...got to go home, Champ...wake up!" It's a story of a father (during the depression of the 1930s) who is determined to give his boy a better future...he's an ex-boxing champion, turned horse trainer, who barely makes enough money to raise his little boy T.J. T.J. worships his dad, The Champ, who is tragically killed in the ring while working on his boxing comeback which was intended to give his boy the best life possible and ensure that he wouldn't have to give him up. It reminded me of another classic American story, of triumph over defeat, during the depression-era: Seabiscuit. Remember the part when Red Pollard is abandoned by his destitute father so he can be a jockey? Most of us can't even imagine the level of economic hardship back then (but some might be getting close to imagining it),...

How to Find the Best Insights

Maddock and Viton — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:04:53 GMT

Follow these three rules to discovering penetrating consumer truths - these truths will drive business. By G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón It was a great question. "I understand your formula for innovation: You must have a market need, a product that fills that need , and communication linking the two," a member of the audience said after a recent speech we did. "And I've read what you said about the need being the most important. But can you give me any ground rules to follow as I search for insights?" We can. The following three "rules" represent wisdom we have accrued (often the hard way) over decades of experience. Here's what to keep in mind as you set off to develop insights. Rule No. 1: Be "Insight Agnostic" This one is hard for the left-brainers. You've grown up with numbers. You love data, math, statistics, measurement, charts. You get a secret thrill when the chief financial officer says, "Prove it." Because then it's about sizing the opportunity, quantifying the insight, modeling the return, etc. But there's a right time and a wrong time to require this level of quantification. The early stage of insight development is the wrong...

Proven Ways To Fill Your Innovation Pipeline

Maddock and Viton — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:09:56 GMT

Two categories of "investments" in your innovation portfolio merit extra attention. Here's how to leverage them for success By G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón We should have anticipated the question. Last time, we talked about how to construct your innovation portfolio . And as you will recall, we said the analogy to keep in mind is personal financial planning.Just as you divide your personal holdings among various asset classes—stocks, bonds, and cash—you want to divide your innovation efforts among different approaches. And then we rattled off the four to use: 1. Evolutionary Innovation. (Technically easy and a clear customer benefit.) This is where you keep current cash cows fresh and incubate brands in the market. 2. Differentiation. (Technically difficult and a clear customer benefit.) This portion of your innovation budget is used for making a distinction between your products and those of your competitors. 3. Revolutionary Innovation. (Technically difficult, and there's no way of knowing ahead of time if the customer will accept it.) Here you search to find groundbreaking ideas for products, services, and business models. 4. Fast-Fail Innovation. (Technically easy but no way of knowing if the customer will accept it.) This is the activity for...

Constructing Your Innovation Portfolio

Maddock and Viton — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:04:47 GMT

Factor the four classes of innovation into how your company contemplates investing in product development With the rather negative exceptions of Enron, Bernie Madoff, and WorldCom, finance is not the first place we think of when we hear the word "innovation." Still, asset allocation—a staple of financial planning—can be applied to your "innovation portfolio" with terrific results. We'll explain. When it comes to how you divvy up your personal investments, you have always been told that they should be spread among asset classes (stocks, bonds, and cash) and then diversified further within the classes themselves. For example, you might hold stocks in both foreign companies and domestic ones, enterprises with large and small market capitalization, retailers, and high-tech companies. The idea is to capture all the potential gains out there—the more bets you place, the greater the chances you have of being right—while minimizing risk. For example, if you're investing in the small-cap growth stocks sector and it tanks, your bond holdings might mitigate the loss. You can use exactly the same approach when it comes to innovation. In determining whether or not to invest in research and development, product tweaks, line extensions, or new offerings, it is helpful to...

Killing Ideas With Righteous Might

Maddock and Viton — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:52:00 GMT

Without even knowing it, you might be one of the passionate bull-headed big mouths who keep the best ideas from happening Do the most passionate advocates keep big ideas from happening? Based on a somewhat random recent conversation Michael had with a police officer, the answer is yes. The conversation started with this inquiry: "What do you think about legalizing prostitution?" Please note that it was not mission-driven curiosity that prompted the question; we have no interest in legalizing prostitution. Rather it was intended to lead into an informal brainstorming session about better use of public resources. Is law enforcement being spread too thin? Are there more serious crimes that should get greater attention? How can we do more with less? Are you frustrated about chasing some crimes over others? Some countries and a few U.S. states (in addition to Nevada, where prostitution is legal in some areas), have moved toward decriminalizing prostitution because of just these concerns. As it turned out, the officer was a strong fundamentalist Christian, and his perspective was a righteous one. At one point in his sermon (his response felt like a sermon and certainly not a brainstorm), he said the Bible was explicitly clear,...