Innovation in Practice Blog
Innovation Adjacencies
Finding adjacent market spaces is an attractive way to grow. Adjacent markets are not too far away from your core business in terms of channels, technology, price point, brand, etc. Adjacent means: lying near, neighboring, having a common border, touchable. Although chasing adjacencies can be distracting, it is a much easier to sell internally. Adjacencies seem more achievable than far out, ethereal white space opportunities.
Adjacent markets are even more appealing when you apply a systematic innovation method to it. Giving yourself the gift of novelty in a new market space right next to your own seems like the best of both worlds. The trick is finding the right adjacencies.
The LAB: Monetizing Twitter with Attribute Dependency (February 2009)
Venture capitalists could increase the value of their investments by applying a corporate innovation method to those investments. Take Twitter for example. It just received its third round of funding – $35 million. Yet it has no revenue, no business model…just the promise of such. It is the perfect time to innovate.
I decided to take the challenge to create new concepts for the Twitter platform that have the potential to earn money. Others are chasing this, too, including the Twitter management team. It reminds me of the early days of Amazon when many (including me) wondered if the company would turn a profit. The difference between Twitter and Amazon is an important one. Amazon started with a business model in mind. From there, it had to achieve economies of scale. Twitter started with none. Economies of scale do not matter until it can define a viable business model.
Let’s see how innovation can help.
Wikinnovation!
Visit the Applied Marketing Innovation Wiki to see a collection of inventions across a wide array of product categories as well as information about innovation consultants. The information is from students at The University of Cincinnati taking the graduate course, Applied Marketing Innovation.
The LAB: Innovating The Kindle with Task Unification (January 2009)
As we await the arrival of Amazon’s Kindle 2.0, it is a perfect time to begin innovating their next generation device. Anytime is a good time to innovate, but it is especially meaningful to innovate just as you launch your latest innovation. It tells the world you are serious about creating a sustainable pipeline of new growth opportunities.
This month’s LAB uses the Task Unification tool of Systematic Inventive Thinking to create new concepts for the Kindle. The definition of Task Unification is: assigning an additional job to an existing resource. The general idea is to break the current product down into components and then sytematically give each component a new task or activity. This creates an abstract “pre-inventive” form that we then take and discover potential benefits, target markets, and adaptations that would make the innovation very useful and unique. This is what I call “Solution-To-Problem” innovation.
This month’s LAB uses the Task Unification tool of Systematic Inventive Thinking to create some new concepts for the Kindle. The definition of Task Unification is: assigning an additional job to an existing resource. The general idea is to break the current product down into components and then sytematically give each component some new task or activity. This creates an abstract “pre-inventive” form that we then take and discover potential benefits, target markets, and adaptations that would make the innovation very useful and unique.
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