Innovation in Practice Blog
May 23, 2016
For most companies, the top marketer, usually called the chief marketing officer, is part of the senior leadership team and sits on the executive committee or […]
May 16, 2016
Have you ever heard the expression, "Riding on the Coattails of Others?" What it means is - achieving success by associating with other people or groups. In sales and marketing, it’s another great way to create opportunities and improve your sales revenue. Let’s look at how.
May 9, 2016
Adjacent markets are a great source of sales growth if you can spot them and if you have the right skills to go after them. Let’s look at how you do it.
May 2, 2016
Look at any industry, in any market, and you’ll find the same strategy playing out everywhere. Companies compete with one another in a mindless race to the bottom, matching products and services feature for feature, competing primarily on price. This commoditizes markets and drives down prices and margins. But ultimately, no one wins—not even the consumer--as quality, service and differentiation suffer. We call this senseless strategy “Attrition Competition”, and it is derived from prevailing military strategy, which seeks to overwhelm competitors.
April 27, 2016
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the Zika virus is a global emergency. To fight it, humans have to find a way to kill the Aedes Aegypti mosquito.
Two marketing agencies in Brazil have designed a novel way to do just that. They call it The Mosquito Killer Billboard. It's a great example of the Task Unification Technique, one of five in the innovation method called Systematic Inventive Thinking. Here's how their innovation works:
April 11, 2016
The division technique works by dividing a product or its components functionally or physically and then rearranging them back into the product. Division is a powerful technique because it forces you to break fixedness, especially structural fixedness. Division forces you to create configurations by rearranging components in ways you were not likely to have done on with on your own.
April 7, 2016
You've heard that old adage. Don't judge a book by its cover. The same holds true in creativity. We want to resist the temptation of judging ideas depending on where it came from. Yet, its very difficult for us to do this. If we like the person, we tend to like their idea. And if we don't like that person, well, let's just say we might see a few more flaws than we might have otherwise.
March 21, 2016
I love umbrellas and the many versions that demonstrate the five patterns of Systematic Inventive Thinking. Here's a new one that demonstrates the Task Unification pattern. Task Unification is defined as: assigning an additional task to an existing resource. That resource should be in the immediate vicinity of the problem, or what we call The Closed World. In essence, it's taking something that is already around you and giving an additional job.
March 14, 2016
Task Unification is defined as: assigning an additional task to an existing resource. That resource should be in the immediate vicinity of the problem, or what we call The Closed World. In essence, it's taking something that is already around you and giving an additional job.
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November 30, 2020
Have you found the secret sauce in your product or service? Well, it turns out, there are characteristics of highly innovative products and services that tend […]
December 1, 2020
Do you feel you’ve reached your optimum level of creativity? If not, when is that going to happen? And if yes, how do maintain that level […]
December 7, 2020
If you’re wondering why you just can’t be creative or you’re almost losing that sense of hope of being able to generate a creative idea one […]