Crowdsourcing. It’s one controversial yet increasingly popular topic. From marketing agencies to scientific research, many industries are taking a hard look at how crowdsourcing may be a solution for problems too big for one person or even one company to solve.
But why is crowdsourcing catching on—and how will it affect the future?
The specific solution varies by industry, but for most, crowdsourcing is a low cost way to acquire a greater (in quantity—and hopefully in quality) solution set to a defined problem. In other words, crowdsourcing is fulfilling an unmet need for many industries—the need to attain more for less. But what about the flip side of crowdsourcing? What about the consumers?
Without willing participants, crowdsourcing simply doesn’t work. If people are unwilling to participate, then there’s no content. And that chance is a big gamble. So what makes people want to contribute their time and effort?
A cause. Beyond cash, (see Chicago based CrowdSpring for an example of how some people make a living from the flip side of crowdsourcing) most people find that either helping others or contributing to a cause is a worthwhile investment—a good reason to be part of the crowd.
Take a look at the Aha mobile app, for instance. Sure, Aha guides users via GPS, allows users to customize food alerts on the travel path and has even been designed with a 65MPH-safe interface. But it’s the community aspect that sets it apart. Aha is a driver to driver network that connects drivers to each other and to relevant information from the internet. For instance, if a user is motoring down a busy interstate and traffic suddenly slows due to an accident, that user can record a voice memo alerting fellow drivers traveling (or planning to travel) down the same roadway. After all, news does travel faster via networks as proved by events like the Hudson River plane crash in January of 2009—the public was notified via Twitter first, not by mainstream media—an example of self-initiated, crowdsourced news reporting.
And speaking of networks, Facebook has also integrated crowdsourcing to solve content and policy problems—The Facebook Community Council. This council is a crowdsourced tagging application open to only select members. And once invited, the user can tag content that has been pulled for review with one of 8 tags—Spam, Not English, Skip, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking, and Violence. In effect, Facebook users are now patrolling the network for free in an attempt to keep up with content created and shared by its 350 million users.
The most innovative companies of the near future will replace less efficient and commoditized processes with crowdsourcing to bring tangible value to stakeholders and consumers through increased operating efficiency and higher quality products, services, and business models.
What areas of your industry could benefit from crowdsourcing, and how will it affect you?
A healthy innovation pipeline requires an understanding of the customer. By organizing customer information and making it easily available to decision makers in the company, you open up the gates of innovation. There are many tools available today to organize and extend the value of a customer database.
“Can you describe your customers for me?” Ask that question of a company with a healthy innovation pipeline and the answer will be timely, thoughtful and reflective of distinct profitable segments.
At companies struggling to maintain relevancy in the marketplace, however, customer information is often old, anecdotal, or biased; maintaining a momentum that can destroy a critical connection in the company’s innovation pipeline.
This difference has become more apparent as companies fail in this credit starved economy.
The problem is not always that companies are not finding out about customers, it often is that they have not made the effort to organize the data. Enter customer management technology. You can call it Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Management Software, or Sales Automation (SA), but it all amounts to storing information in a way that facilitates a consistent, timely and descriptive understanding of your existing customer base.
A former client in the beer industry used Salesforce.com Dashboards to provide real-time information to brand managers about their customers (and non-customers). Even though they didn’t transact directly with end customers, they aggregated surveys, customer inquiries, and third-party studies coming from different functional areas of the organization at an individual level (when possible). In this case, decisions about sports sponsorship, promotion and marketing programs reflected the customers’ changing tastes and interests. They didn’t have to wait for a meeting to discuss the information to be gathered — it was on their desktop.
Using technology to track customer information is no longer just for the big guys. There is an offering to fit every business size. From products like Salesforce.com that can be purchased and up and running in a month, to customer data mining applications that take enterprise level integration efforts.
Additionally there is a robust marketplace of applications that work with these systems. Salesforce.com’s AppExchange has add-ons that put powerful survey, email campaign, analysis, and visualization tools in reach of your employees. Riskonnect ERM is one of the most innovative risk management tools that I have seen. It provides a visualization framework that can be customized with information such as customer satisfaction or life-stage distribution.
The potential uses of organized customer information can feed marketing, product development and even M&A activity. The claim of a merger based on complimentary customer bases would be far more convincing with the means to quantify it.
Innovation happens because employees care about meeting customer needs. Thus, meeting customers should be a core competency of every business.
Making predictions is no easy business. Take this, for example:
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
— Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.
But, with accurate insights and reflection and analysis of those insights, we can begin to develop a sense of what the future might hold. For 2010, many are predicting change to occur in technology, pop culture and personal life. Here’s what we think is next for products, services, and business models:
The integration of Conscious Capitalism will spur long-term growth.
Conscious capitalism is a way of thinking about "social responsibility," the idea that an organization (government, nonprofit, business) has an obligation to act not only in its own best interests but also in those of all its stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society).
In the developing consumer driven market, companies will no longer be responsible to only their investors—not if they want sustainable profit, anyway. Instead, companies will either adopt Conscious Capitalism or be forced to once they realize that doing good allows businesses to advance beyond previous limitations.
And the proponents of this change? First of all, they will be people like John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. Along with John Mackey, many CEOs in parallel industries have already built the essence of Conscious Capitalism into their business models.
Secondly, but more importantly, the consumers will drive this change. With the power to choose products and services created by companies who no longer see business as a machine driven by profit only, consumers will exercise this measure of control to empower corporations and facilitate change for the world.
Vertical learning will be of increasingly high value.
Vertical Learning is the pursuit of knowledge of our own assumptions, ways of interpreting experience and our beliefs. But, it has been long overlooked and placed secondary to Horizontal Learning—knowledge acquired through training, education and work experience—expanding our skill sets, in short.
Horizontal Learning is, of course, absolutely necessary. For instance, those who want to design products must learn the proper techniques and acquire the necessary technological information to do so. But Vertical Learning is seen as a lesser skill—introspection is not currently viewed with equal value.
However, with the two working in tandem, we are less likely to think about products, services, and business models in binary terms. Instead, we are encouraged to “think through” and think around the obvious obstacles to innovation and renovation—therefore building something of far higher worth.
If we take both into account, we can better see developing trends with objectivity in relation to each other and discern the implications of those relationships as opposed to seeing the individual issues and tasks involved in innovation.
Although making predictions can be tricky, there’s nothing outrageous about our predictions and other future trends. After all, businesses and consumers are ready for positive change in the world—the most successful companies of 2010 and beyond will embrace this unmet consumer need.
Let’s say you’re driving home from work when all of a sudden your front left tire drops into a massive pothole causing you to swerve right. Luckily, there are no cars in the right lane, but regardless you’ve narrowly avoided an accident, and with good reason, you’re upset.
So what?
Well, a few years ago, you might have complained to your friend in the passenger seat and just kept on driving. But now, people have the power to report local issues with the click of a few buttons and the power of GPS.
City residents can now use an app like SeeClickFix, a mobile application that allows its users to take a photo of a pothole, a burnt out street light, fresh graffiti—basically anything that needs to be fixed by the local government—and report it using a mobile GPS device. Along with a photo and GPS location, users can add notes and track progress, as well as receive and view alerts on nearby city issues. Then, users can see how many other people have reported the same issue and monitor the most reported, a.k.a “hot issues” in the selected city.
Just one app out of the many that have been dubbed “Gov 2.0” by the tech community, SeeClickFix is utilizing GPS location in an attempt to make local government more efficient and responsive—and the app supports a trend that we’ve watched develop over the last decade called “Track Me, Help Me.”
The “Track Me, Help Me” trend was sparked by recognition of not only the popularity and functionality of GPS navigational systems on-board mobile devices, but also by the recognition of consumer willingness to offer up a very valuable piece of the puzzle:
Location, location, location.
Many people with smart phones have come to depend on apps like Google Maps, but now, as demonstrated by apps like SeeClickFix, people are ready to take location to the next level. Whether it be the power to innovate local government operations or the pleasure of playing virtual put-put, consumers are receiving relevant benefits when they give this information away—more evidence of not only “Track Me, Help Me,” but also of the evolving consumer-driven market.
But the GPS centric apps currently available are just the tip of the ice burg. As app developers begin working in tighter conjunction with the government, corporations and organizations, GPS innovation will be streamlined and even more integrated into our daily lives. In fact, many industries have just now recognized this trend and are developing applications to catch up to this unmet consumer need, meaning that even more people will be saying “Track Me, Help Me” while being enabled to accomplish tasks—no matter how big—with efficiency.
It is easy to blame chief executives and senior management for not devoting enough attention to introducing new products, but that is too simplistic an explanation for why radically new products are so rare. Marketers deserve some of the blame for at least three reasons:
Successful strategic innovations need more than a great idea.
There's no shortage of new product concepts. We are willing to bet you could come up with a handful of intriguing ones before lunch if you set your mind to it.
But new ideas by themselves are worthless. You need to move from idea to execution, and that is where the majority of companies stumble. You need a new-product development process—one that is codified, efficient, and repeatable, and which allows you to turn a notion into something you can sell.
But there aren't a lot of marketers who have tried to formalize a new-product introduction. Too often, marketers see their job as simply coming up with the idea. They leave the actual development and production to someone else and then profess to be surprised when the finished product is not exactly what they had envisaged. (This is true, by the way, whether we are talking about introducing new consumer products or selling business-to-business.) It is always nice to have someone else to blame when something goes wrong—such as, the product didn't sell. But it isn't the best use of your time, or of company resources.
The takeaway point from all this is that you want to create a process that will allow you to introduce a new product the same way every time. The procedure needs to be replicable—and easily understood internally—so you can train new hires to execute it. The process should become a legacy in your organization.
There is a shortage of Renaissance men (and women).
This builds off the previous point. As we have just seen, there are two distinct components to developing a successful new product: Coming up with the idea and then putting it into practice—i.e., executing it. We must make sure that it is produced exactly as designed and that the marketing that follows is consistent with the overall message the product is supposed to communicate. Failure can arise when we look for people who possess both skills, but in reality such people are extremely hard to find in any organization. Most people are naturally better at one or the other part of the process.
Instead of looking for someone who is good at both, it would seem more efficient to let people do what they do best. Since most companies have people who are fairly good at carrying out a mission once it is defined for them, it probably makes more sense to keep that capability in-house, and to look to outside resources to help you discover new ideas and fresh needs in the marketplace. Once the outside firm has unearthed those opportunities, the company can develop them.
Marketers tend to be fatalistic.
Marketers seem to go into new-product introductions with the expectation that they are going to fail. So they deal with new-product failures rather like the way an overweight person does with their problem: We periodically make half-hearted efforts to fix things…and then give up.
Just like someone who resigns himself or herself to being overweight, marketers conclude that there is nothing they can do to improve their batting average when it comes to introducing new products. Instead of throwing up their hands and saying "woe is me," they should be studying their past successes to see what they should do the next time they introduce something new.
That, of course, takes us full circle, underscoring as it does the need to have a replicable process to make new product development as painless as possible.
Blaming the CEO and others for not being more supportive about new product development is a waste of both time and mental energy. Look in the mirror and try to figure out how to make things better. Addressing the three problems we just talked about is a good start.
Certain fundamental tensions exist everywhere. In our personal lives it's "spend now or save for retirement?" In sports the question is often "bet it all on winning this year, or build for the long-term?"
It's no different in business. Do you give in to the temptation of immediate gratification—satisfying Wall Street for this quarter—or increase the research and development budget?
The tension is never more apparent than when trying to balance the innovation pipeline against the needs of your sales force to have something new to sell today.
Know Your Sales Force
We've done lots of work with companies that are sales-driven. Our first customer (nearly 20 years ago) was Superior Coffee & Foods—now part of Sara Lee. We've also helped Keebler create new products quarterly for Sam's Club and Costco and worked with food-service and manufacturing giants driven by sales forces that have an insatiable desire for new products. Lately we've done a lot of work around agent-driven industries like life insurance. All of these experiences have made us acutely aware of the roles speed, ego, business models, instant results and inertia play in sales-driven cultures.
These are the things you need to remember about salespeople. They:
• Need almost immediate results • Get bored with ideas quickly, so they need a short-term pipeline • Become dependent on "innovation news" as a way to sell • "Eat their own young" if they are not busy or happy. We once worked with a company who had gone from having the best year in history to dysfunctional feuding because they lacked a pipeline of new things to sell. • Are numbers driven—sometimes to a fault—which isn't surprising since the best are often paid on commission.
The excellent news is the innovation bar can be set fairly low when it comes to satisfying what the sales force needs. Salespeople are often happy with evolution, not revolution:
• ShinyGlow cleaner with new packaging graphics • ShinyGlow cleaner with a new, resealable top • ShinyGlow cleaner in an applicator pen • ShinyGlow cleaner "now with static guard" • ShinyGlow cleaner in an easy-to-pour package • ShinyGlow cleaner with built-in sunshine softener
These types of ideas are usually easy to come up with and to execute, and are often created in response to a competitor's product. If the sales group likes these ideas, they tend to be successful because the salespeople work harder to make them a reality.
Sales Teams as Innovators
Salespeople are great innovation advocates. They get excited. They know a ton about your customers and their business. They'll fight for their own ideas and will them into success.
Here's the best news about salespeople: They often feel neglected. Not many companies do a good job of leveraging the excitement they show for your product. If you can harness what your sales team knows and the energy they bring, you will have a huge competitive advantage.
How do you do that? Here are five ideas:
• VOS. Voice-of-the-customer research is the cornerstone of new product development. In your case, voice-of-the-salesperson research is just as important. There are many techniques to regularly enlist the minds and hearts of your salespeople. Success criteria should come largely from them. Platforms should come largely from them. Ideas should come from them. For example, arm your sales force with Flip Video cameras or explorer journals. Ask them to capture competitive insights, opportunities, or what's on their wish lists. They see things out there that you should know about.
• Enlist the alpha influencers. Sales teams are like packs. There is an alpha. Actively tapping these influencers is amazingly powerful. Imagine having them present your (their) innovation pipeline. We recently used this technique and got a standing ovation from 200 insurance agents. They did not realize they were applauding their own new product and service ideas. (Or did they?) Planned and facilitated round tables with sales alphas are a highly effective way of creating this type of buy-in and momentum.
• Create short-term and long-term pipeline tracks/projects. The goal is to help the sales team create their short-term innovation "fix" and sales goals while they envision what the future can and should look like. With their short-term needs addressed, we are free to help them create an exciting future via new products, services, and business models. Every meeting we review where we are in the short term vs. the long term and adjust the pipeline accordingly. An example would be to focus on their next two sell-in meetings with quick ideas. At the same time, work on ideas that are five years out.
• Make it fun. Why do all the marketing people get to come up with the ideas that others have to sell? Schedule regular, engaging, and fun brainstorming sessions. Use the insights your salespeople brought you in your VOS meetings to build innovation platforms. Let the world know that the sales group came up with the ideas. Give away innovation awards. You can plan and facilitate these quarterly meetings and more importantly, screen and prep the right alphas to be in them.
• Educate. Along the way, stop and inform the sales group about the techniques you are employing. Make them aware that the work you are doing together is critical. Help them build concepts. Share research findings with them. Make them appreciate the rigor that great ideas and their thoughts deserve.
We love working with salespeople. Companies that have learned how to use them to drive innovation are not only faster to market but more connected with their customers (and, of course, more successful).
Does innovation that requires the complete renovation of technologies, ideas and even personnel be performed efficiently, or can a company reinvent rapidly while re-working everything?
Hank Adams, CEO of Sportvision, explains how companies can use materials that already exist to implement new products, services, and business models efficiently.
Hank is a member of the Maddock Douglas Global Expert Network, an exclusive group of thinkers that includes entrepreneurs, professionals and specialists. GEN members span the globe and are hand picked to provide insight and expertise for specific opportunities and challenges. These experts often come from a parallel industry or have a specialized skill that relates to the challenge at hand. And this cross-section of thinking creates relevant, and frequently groundbreaking, ideas. Do you have a GEN? And if not, how do you plan to infuse outside expertise into your next big challenge?
The winner of the Wall Street Journal 2009 Technology Innovation Awards is on pace to change the world. Sure, Tapulous, the maker of the hit, one million dollar per month games is changing the face of mobile gaming technology—but technology innovations that hold the promise of making everyday life better for millions of people across the world are the ones to watch.
Ibis Biosciences' T5000 sensor, which won Gold at this year’s awards, allows for the detection of unknown organisms—a viable solution for the identification of novel infectious diseases. In short, the T5000 is intended to answer the question: "What microorganisms are in my sample?"
How will this apply to us? Take a virus like H1N1 as an example—immediate detection and strain identification can help protect the masses and make responding appropriately to unknown diseases faster and easier—which could mean saving lives.
Ibis Biosciences Inc. developed the sensor to fill an unmet need—rapid identification of the unknown. And the T5000, the product that meets that need, is the first in a long line of rapid detection mechanisms that will alter the way we respond to disease.
But what about the communication that connects the two?
As disintermediation begins to fundamentally change industries, consumers will start demanding bioscience and healthcare communication that’s easier to digest. People want a deeper understanding of the bioscience (and tertiary) technologies that have the ability to change their lives.
How much fun are you having at work these days? Let's face it. Having fun isn't as easy as it used to be, even for the most courageous, creative, and curious. Today just reading the headlines can turn an optimist into a fearful pessimist. The stories all seem to make you worry about the very real possibility of losing your job.
Here is a critical insight for you. It is impossible for teams to innovate effectively while they are afraid. Impossible. Nothing kills great ideas like fear.
The good news is that fun is the antidote to fear. So if you are an innovation leader in a company that has become fearful, your people are on the road to failure unless you can change your culture. Cue the music, it's time to infuse some fun into the workplace.
The place to start? With you.
Leaders know how to laugh at themselves. Show us a person that can stand up in front of his team and say, "Call me stupid, but I have no idea how to do this," and we will show you a person with great leadership potential. Humble leaders with this trait create cultures that don't take themselves too seriously; cultures willing to take risks; cultures capable of creating and supporting a greater number of ideas.
The Daily Huddle
Why not start every day with a fun meeting? The daily huddle is simple practice that jump-starts the day and sets the stage for big ideas. Verne Harnish, "growth guy" and chief executive officer of Gazelles, which is an outsourced corporate university for midsize firms, taught us about the daily huddle. He developed the practice after studying and writing about John D. Rockefeller in his book The Rockefeller Habits.
Our company meets every day at 9 a.m. for no more than nine minutes. The agenda is simple. We share good news, bad news, and how well the company is doing. We use video to connect offices so everyone can attend the meeting. We encourage everyone to take a turn at running the huddle. Most importantly, we try to make them casual, transparent, and fun.
In the last year, our daily huddles have included baby pools—where everyone guesses when someone's baby will be born; whether it will be a boy or girl and what it will weigh—costume contests, music trivia, engagement announcements, love poems, and ballads to welcome new employees. Yes, there is a lot of silliness, and not surprisingly, there is a lot of laughter. Much of the laughter has led to jokes, observations, and comments that have in turn led to ideas that have directly impacted our clients and company. (See www.bringchangehome.com, a viral marketing campaign with the humble goal of simply changing the world.)
Says Harnish, "Of all the practices we teach, the daily huddle is probably the simplest and most powerful way to infuse fun, accountability, and momentum. When companies embrace the huddle, we always see a positive impact to their bottom line and culture."
Loosening Up the Suits
He's right. In fact, our clients actually like to come to these huddles. That should tell you something about the experience.
We first started noticing the liberating possibilities of linking fun and work in the early '90s in a meeting with an extremely conservative, extremely large utility company. You have probably been in a similar room; think suits; think fear; think awkward silence.
During this "mandatory" brainstorm session, someone offered up an idea as a joke. "I know," he said, tongue firmly in check. "We can send customers a bill that actually explains all the charges in plain English." He meant it as a joke, of course. And one joke led to another. Then something amazing happened: At one point the most senior person in the room commented, "You know, that's really not that bad of an idea. We could actually do that." Eventually the idea that started as a joke wound up being seen by 40 million consumers as a new kind of phone bill—one that was simple to understand. Not only did consumers embrace the joke, so did other phone companies who have adopted the idea. How great is that?
The Equation
There are two lessons here. First, it is not difficult to stage events that create this type of result, and leaders should be intentional about creating them. More important, we must learn to pay attention to laughter. Where there is laughter, there is an idea that holds people's interest. The pleasant by-product of all this: Work becomes more enjoyable, and that, too, increases the chance that you will be able to innovate successfully. It turns out that if you are having fun, you are more creative.
Here is an equation for you to consider the next time you are wondering why nobody is coming up with big ideas: I = F + H.
Ideas equal fun plus humility on the part of leadership to support the idea—and embrace those ideas that may come out of it.
There’s been a lot of buzz around 4G and what it means for innovation. Maddock Douglas recently interviewed Jeannie Weaver, Regional General Manager at Clearwire, the first 4G network already up and running, to talk about the future of mobility.
Innovation is defined as the synchronized intersection of an unmet need or insight, the idea (business model, product, or service) that meets that need and the communication that connects the two. Let's uncover the innovation behind Clearwire and what it means for the future of mobility.
What was the unmet need or insight that Clearwire is responding to?
Consumers want and need to be able to access data at broadband speeds on the go—and we don’t think that experience should be painful.
What was the idea that inspired Clearwire - how are you filling the unmet need?
The current 3G network is provided by voice-centric cell phone companies who are accommodating the data needs of consumers. Clearwire is just the opposite—we are a data centric network. The reason AT&T is having trouble bringing quality data service to market right now can be attributed to building a network based on voice and having to retrofit for mass data use thanks to the iPhone. Clearwire is built for data volume from day one.
And the communication—what has Clearwire been doing to make yourselves known to your target consumer audience?
We want people thinking about CLEAR—we want to intrigue them. We are currently implementing multiple layers that include grassroots salespeople, partnering with local businesses and street teams. We are talking to people the way they want to be communicated to.
With 400 million people already using 3G (HSDPA/WCDMA) technologies today, what is Clearwire’s plan to increase mobile usership?
We ideally want to take marketshare and entice those customers on an inferior network to utilize our faster 4G network.
Clearwire has been extraordinarily helpful in industries with location challenges, construction for example, where people are working in remote areas—CLEAR is plug and play and the pricepoint is very attractive for small and medium sized businesses.
What roles do you see big investors, Sprint, Google and Intel playing in Clearwire’s future?
Sprint holds 51% of Clearwire and they have provided the funding that is allowing us to build out our network. Intel is creating laptops and other hardware with built in WiMAX capabilities, and Google will continue to assist Clearwire strategically.
Comcast is currently reselling our service under their brand, and advantage to Clearwire because we benefit when network usage increases.
What does the future of mobility look like and how do you see Clearwire affecting that future?
I think we already are. Having the capability to accomplish things on the go, but have an experience like a home broadband connection is amazing. Clearwire will effectively support and drive a better mobile experience while helping to feed the cloud.
Also, imagine if the 4G network were implemented in, for instance, Chicago’s parking meter system—there’s a huge lag time when a customer uses a card to pay, resulting in a long wait. The ability to speed things up can make so many day-to-day things easier—and safer. For public safety purposes, the ability to live stream video could bring surveillance to a higher level of efficiency. Devices with built in WiMAX capabilities will become more common as manufacturers rush to provide consumers with the ability to lifestream rich content to their personal and social networks on the go.
Both technologies are sound and in the future, 4G will seem like a commodity. Yet, we have the advantage of speed to market. We'll see how the rest plays out in 8-12 months as LTE goes online in major metropolitan areas.
The top four free Finance category iPhone apps all have something in
common (besides being located in the iTunes store):
Practical Functionality
With these four apps users can check balances, look at statements and monitor their finances with no unnecessary add-ons or frills. In other words, the apps are a complement to the already existing online banking sites, not a replacement. And while some users describe these apps as “nothing special,” that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Although mobile devices are quickly becoming a primary means to accomplish tasks, find information and experience media, their very scale and design helps dictate functionality.
You wouldn’t use a snorkel mask to go scuba diving. (You wear one so you can explore the ocean—but not to the extent that you would with air tanks and scuba gear.)
So what does this say about the future of financial apps?
Although we will be capable of accomplishing more through our mobile devices as technology, bandwidth, and battery life evolves, the medium will continue to dictate the material. Applying for a loan, reading terms and signing a contract on a mobile device simply isn’t practical. Financial apps will allow users to accomplish the tasks they deem necessary on the go. In effect, there will be more financial apps for more financial institutions as the consumer needs grow, but the depth of the apps may not increase at the same speed. Yet, mobile banking and monitoring interfaces will become more intuitive and therefore easier to use—driving mobile banking usership alongside smart-phone technology.
Consumers are already considering mobility a factor when deciding on financial institutions. Does the user find functional value in the app? Is the interface user-friendly? These mobility-centric questions will continue to fuel innovation in the financial services decision-making process. One of biggest challenges for the future of financial apps is to, as Mike Maddock puts it in Always Bring Donuts, “Design useful things."
Maria is a member of the Maddock Douglas Global Expert Network, an exclusive group of thinkers that includes entrepreneurs, professionals and specialists. GEN members span the globe and are hand picked to provide insight and expertise for specific opportunities and challenges. These experts often come from a parallel industry or have a specialized skill that relates to the challenge at hand. And this cross-section of thinking creates relevant, and frequently groundbreaking, ideas. Do you have a GEN? And if not, how do you plan to infuse outside expertise into your next big challenge?
At 9am every morning Maddock Douglas—both our Midwest and east coast offices—convene for the Nine at Nine (9@9), the daily nine minute meeting where we share and discuss good personal and business news and ask “Does anyone have any stucks?” (The stuck question is our way of utilizing our resources and talents where we need them most, as if anyone is overloaded with work, they can step forward with a “stuck,” and anyone with extra time can volunteer to help.)
And instead of flying our entire Midwest office to our East Coast office, we use what many companies, families and organizations also use to stay connected:
Videoconferencing
More than voice alone, videoconferencing allows both of our offices to not only hear what’s going on, but to also see it. (This is especially important on Halloween.) And for many organizations that work collaboratively, or for those that require face time, it’s a travel cost reducing, environmentally friendly option that allows those involved to accomplish the same things they would have otherwise accomplished, in-person. But many already know about the consumer grade videoconferencing options and have even used them, but let’s talk about the next level:
Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) the company whose “vision is to change the way people work, live, play and learn,” has been in the videoconferencing game for a while, but it’s their recent development and the spreading corporate adoption of their offering that sets them apart—that and the experience they create with the installation of their system.
This is no plug and box operation—to ensure that their customers feel like they are literally sitting in the same room, wall paint, chairs and tables specific to Cisco Telepresence are installed. Lighting and acoustics, are of course taken very carefully into consideration. And the effect? Very impressive.
With Cisco Telepresence you can even record a video conference and send it to a mobile phone—the integration of high quality video into our daily lives is boundless with this technology. And with the recent acquisition of Tandberg, a Norwegian firm that offers similar technology, but on a smaller, cheaper scale, Cisco is building out their portfolio, according to Ned Hooper, a Senior Vice President. Building out their portfolio, indeed, but also innovating how we might communicate in the years to come.
So are you video conferencing? Is it changing the way you see communication?
It just makes sense to tap the intelligence of people who offer a product that shares certain characteristics with yours. You sell your product through insurance agents? Great. Talk to people in travel, publishing, Hollywood, real estate, and everyone else who uses agents. You'll discover they have solved many of your challenges in ways you haven't considered.
Enlisting the Best and Brightest
As fast as the world is changing, it's hard to argue with the premise that a company's capacity to create industry-changing products and services is directly tied to its ability to forge connections efficiently among big brains around the world and throughout your company.
But how do you identify and enlist your company's best and brightest in the innovation process, even if they are not usually part of your company's marketing efforts? It's easier than you may think.
1. Encourage Fun and Games. Your first challenge is to attract the "ideators," the people who traditionally come up with the biggest ideas, regardless of the topic.
Great ideators tend to be a bit competitive. Tap into that. Post challenges—through your intranet, bulletin board, or e-mail system—on behalf of clients, and offer prizes for anyone who can come up with the answer within a set period of time. Competitive, inventive people will respond with novel ideas that you can adopt. The prize can be simple: a free lunch or sports tickets. If you have cash in the budget, even better.
And if you don't have a current client project in need of solving, you can make one up. For example, if vacuum cleaners did not exist, how would you clean floors? The question isn't as important as the answers. The responses you get will give you a great list of innovative thinkers.
Not only will you have a great technique for solving many of your most daunting challenges, you will also have the makings of an innovation roundtable to draw from in the future.
2. Encourage Graffiti. Want a simple way to foster a culture of innovation and find out who has hidden strengths? Allow people to draw on the walls.
One thing that works particularly well for our firm when we are looking for new insights, or ways to tweak a product or service offering, is to paper the walls of a room with flip chart sheets. We write thought-starters and headlines that relate directly to the challenge at hand. For a vacuum project, we might post headlines like "things that pick stuff up," or "the cleanest surfaces in your house."
Then we ask everyone—no matter where they are in the organization, or what their title—to drop by the room a few times and have some fun. Build on others' ideas. Cut out pictures. Draw. Make connections.
Once the walls are filled, schedule mini-meetings where you moderate a discussion among small groups of participants to take the ideas further.
Here's the best part. You won't have to sell this idea. The room becomes a magnet. You will quickly get new ideas and you'll see who has the ability to connect, build, and reinvent. This costs nothing but time, and often results in astoundingly fresh thinking.
3. Raise Your Profile. The great thing about taking either or both of these approaches is that not only does the company benefit but it also gives those who would like to be seen as experts opportunities to raise their hands in a nonthreatening atmosphere.
If you're one of those people who is looking to raise your profile, participate in these exercises every chance you get. That will get you noticed. You will be seen as an idea catalyst, someone whose ideas, enthusiasm, and energy causes others to be more energetic and engaged.
People who help organizations identify and engage great thinkers are prized. And so are the great thinkers.
According to a new “Kids and Gaming 2009” report from the NPD Group, among all children in the United States aged 2-17, 82 percent or 55.7 million, are currently gamers.
And, to take it further, of these gamers, 9.7 million are aged 2-5, representing the smallest segment, while 12.4 million are aged 9-11, making up the largest segment.
Kids today aren’t becoming less and less passive—they demand interactivity with little or no wait time. They have grown up experiencing interactive media instead of gradually acclimating to it. And to leverage that fundamental truth, game developers, scientists, teachers and even NASA engineers are coming together to innovate one of the most important subjects of our future: education.
Of course, in the past, video gaming has been parlayed into various attempts to sneak educational material into the minds of kids—but it didn’t work, at least not on a large-scale. But now, with game developers like ARA/Virtual Heroes collaborating with NASA astrounauts to create games like “MoonBase Alpha” to better convey science, technology, engineering and math ideas to students across America, it seems that the video gaming trend is being recognized for the first time as a relevant solution for a very serious unmet need.
And the great thing about this innovation? It’s working.
As more industries realize the potential of gaming and the relevance of this future trend, adults may find themselves playing a lot more—or at least more regularly—to stimulate new ideas and observations about the world around them.
What happens when an already concrete, long-standing industry perceived as the opposite of user-driven tries its hand at innovation? What happens when the financial services industry makes the leap onto the user-driven Web and into mobility? Well, here’s one of our picks for a company that really got financial innovation right:
Mint.com
Mint.com is home to a free, ultra-customizable money management and budgeting system. Sure, there are a lot of companies producing software and websites to help people better track and manage money, but Mint is the first to offer an elegant, highly customizable solution for a very custom need. So what’s elegant about it? Well, according to some of the over 1 million people already using Mint:
It fulfills an unmet need.
Mint isn’t just design oriented—that is, while it’s full of relevant, detailed features; Mint isn’t all about the aesthetic.
And, as of now, Mint has a user base of over 1 million people and is tracking 175 billion in transactions, 47 billion in assets and has identified more than 300 million in potential savings for its users. But how did this financial services web-based start up that has only been in operation for two years manage to gain recognition as the web’s foremost way to manage money?
It all started with insight.
For Aaron Patzer, CEO and founder of Mint, Quicken was cumbersome. It just didn’t have the ease of use and the range of customizable solutions that is required by individual-specific financial situations. In short, it was an umbrella system. However, by assessing the finite points of personal finance and asking the simple, but powerful question: What would I want out of this? Patzer got it right.
So right in fact, that Intuit, the maker of Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax and the inspiration for Mint itself, recently acquired Patzer’s company for about 170 million in September of 2009.
According to Patzer, “we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people. Make something that is faster, more efficient, cheaper and innovate on technology or business models to make a healthy revenue stream doing it.”
By responding to insight, fulfilling an unmet need and by making clear communication, not aesthetic design, a primary concern, Mint.com is innovating how many manage their money—and how they see the financial services industry.
Maybe if members of the social responsibility movement were to spend less time hectoring companies about climate change, worker exploitation, and the like, and more time pointing out the greater profits these businesses could produce by implementing socially responsible ideas, they would be more effective.
If they recast the issue in terms of "and," as in "You can do X, which will increase earnings and by the way, contribute to the greater good," instead of "or," as in "You can do well or make money, but you can't do both," they would have to beat followers away with a stick. At its heart, social responsibility is an innovation challenge.
These are the thoughts we came back with after attending the recent Catalyzing Conscious Capitalism conference in Austin, Tex. (see highlights here).
Conscious capitalism is a new way of thinking about "social responsibility," the idea that an organization (government, nonprofit, business) has an obligation to act not only in its own best interests but also in those of all its stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society).
Needed: Clarity of Destination
Let us be clear. Our company is a huge believer in the idea of doing well by doing good. We are proud of the clients we represent and the contributions—both financial and in-kind—that we make. To us, this is not only good business but is also totally consistent with the kind of company we want to run. It aligns with our purpose and core values.
On the way back from the conference, we sketched the conscious capitalism framework in a way that borrows from the late psychologist Abraham Maslow and his well-known hierarchy of needs. We think it's an apt parallel. To us, the conscious capitalism movement requires clarity of destination. We want to be known as a company that makes money—the middle layer—but more important, we want our people to know what we believe so that everyone here can work effectively in unison, which in turn will allow us to make more money for our stakeholders and make more contributions to society.
Because of that, we don't cast the issue of social responsibility in terms of "earthmuffins" vs. "plunderers and/or greenwashers" (people who pretend to do good, but in actuality don't). That dichotomy is neither helpful nor accurate.
We prefer to talk about "going green" the way Ray Anderson of Interface or Jeff Immelt of GE do: "It is a way of making more money."
Not an End in Itself, but a Tool
It's much easier to sell a plan to reduce accidents by saying, "if we create a safer work environment, we will save money on insurance and manpower costs," than it is to run around screaming about the exploitation of the workforce.
We don't know who said it at the conference, but he or she got the idea absolutely right: "Conscious capitalism is a devastatingly good weapon." It is not an end in itself but rather, a tool.
Creating a win-win-win business model—with the wins being what benefits the company, its stakeholders, and the environment/society in general—is the only way to optimize value. That means that in addition to measuring your success monetarily, you need to adapt new metrics, in terms of relative intent and relative impact, that will tangibly illustrate the ongoing progress toward the interrelated desired outcomes of the model. At the onset, it could be as simple as charting your recycling efforts or as complex as measuring the return on investment on your employee-safety efforts.
It will be capitalism, not government or charity, that creates the kind of world we want our kids and grandkids to grow up in. Getting that world will require innovative thinking, but it is well worth the trip for many reasons, including money. Nonetheless, if you just see this as a way to make more money—which it is—you are missing part of the point.
As a friend once put it: We may not save the world, but it's important that our kids know we were on the right team and that we were trying.
The yearly Google Zeitgeist (translation "the spirit of the times"), is the summation of the most popular searches in all of Googledom—a sampling of what was on the minds of millions of Americans and international Web searchers. Let’s examine the top ten from 2009 more closely. What can we learn from this information—what are the insights—what’s at the core of it all?
First, let’s look at the top ten searches in 2009 in America:
twitter
michael jackson
facebook
hulu
hi5
glee
paranormal activity
natasha richardson
farrah fawcett
lady gaga
As you can see, search terms like “foreign policy” or “cholesterol” are not on this list. Americans searched for social, entertainment and celebrity topics with extremely high frequency...But what does this say about Americans? We think it may have something to do with this:
We’re curious.
You might be thinking, “well, that’s obvious,” but let’s dig deeper. Millions took to the Web to find celebrity information—the stories to match the headlines. But is the basis of that curiosity just tabloid fever—an obsession with the idea of celebrity? We think it might be something more: interest in the stories and lives of other people. Interest in the human story—and that goes beyond celebrity gossip—drives conversations online and off. But for many, social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Hi5 give people a faster, easier way to communicate ideas, ultimately facilitating the conversations. People flock to social networks to connect with others and search for the details of celebrity life to get more personal—perhaps all we want is to get beyond the introductory small talk—faster.
As demonstrated by Google Zeitgeist, curiosity is powerful. And at Maddock Douglas, we empower curiosity and celebrate our "sense of wonder". Where we find ourselves curious, we often find value and insight. And for us, insights are an essential part of innovation.
So what makes you curious? Are you using curiosity to drive innovation?
There has never been a better time to innovate. However it takes an entrepreneurial mindset to see that what most people view as a crisis is actually an opportunity for you to pick a battle you can win.
When everyone else is taking flight, it's the perfect time for you to stand and fight because the odds are in your favor.
In 1915, Walter Cannon published his seminal work on acute stress response. (Anybody under acute stress right about now?) His theory basically states that all animals—including humans—have evolved to deal with stress in one of two ways: We stand and fight or we run like crazy in the opposite direction.
But entrepreneurs are behaving differently. They are seizing what they see as an historic opportunity to reinvent themselves, their businesses, and many times, the industry in which you are currently hiding, uh, competing in. Consider:
• Matt Kuttler, known for building a promotional products business, is reinventing the way small business supplies are purchased at ReStockIt.com;
• Rick Jamaison, known for building accounting businesses, is bent on creating the greenest brake pad company at ABS Friction;
• Marty Renkis, known for building an online training company, is bent on reinventing digital, wireless security systems at SmartVue.com.
And proving that you don't even have to go far afield to find new opportunities:
• Brad Handelman, known for being the largest manufacturer of bowling bags, is now putting any high resolution image you want on bowling pins and balls at Ontheballbowling.com
These are not just dreams. They are ideas that were quickly turned into multimillion-dollar businesses by people who saw a need, had an idea about how to fill it, and experimented until they got the formula right. Does that sound like your company today?
Probably not. But it should. In times like these, entrepreneurs should be your role models because no matter what is happening in the economy, they constantly ask "what if?" They are constantly examining—and reexamining—opportunities most of the people in your company will overlook.
Scrap the Business Plan?
It isn't surprising the entrepreneurs listed above, and thousands of others, are responding to the recession this way. Adaptability is the hallmark of a great entrepreneur, no matter what you may have been taught in school.
Anybody who has taken a business class has been told something along the lines of "The secret to success is a good business plan." The only thing this statement proves is that your professor has never run his own business.
Find an honest entrepreneur and she will tell you she has changed directions so many times that her business has little in common with the initial plan—if there even was a business plan in the first place. The point isn't that business plans—or the annual plan you prepare for your company—are worthless. On the contrary, they are an excellent way to envision, create strategy, raise funds, and test ideas. But sometimes—like now—sticking with the plan is the worst thing to do.
Mike Michalowicz is a serial entrepreneur who embodies the flexibility and vision many large companies lack. But he does not attribute his success to hard-line traditional business planning; in fact, his approach is the polar opposite. Mike launched his first company, Olmec Systems, with the intent of selling computers and training to law firms, but Michalowicz quickly discovered an unmet need in supplying proprietary information to hedge funds, so he changed direction and became a national player before selling the firm.
His second company, PG Lewis & Associates, also followed an unexpected path. He formed PGLA with the intent of delivering computer forensic services to large corporations, only to find a tremendous need in criminal investigations. Yet again realigning his company to service an unexpected niche, PGLA achieved national prominence within three years and was subsequently acquired by a Fortune 500.
Today, Michalowicz, the author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, is the CEO of Obsidian Launch, which advises small business entrepreneurs on how to grow healthy businesses fast, even in this challenging economic time.
"We can all learn from entrepreneurs," Michalowicz told us. "They are early adopters. They are innovators. They are risk-takers. While so many established businesses are in a frozen state of panic, entrepreneurs are trying new ideas."
Entrepreneurs know that freezing up, running away, or laying low just aren't options that will work for them. They would rather fail spectacularly than sit still and have the market do it to them.
We aren't advocating spectacular failure. We are advocating that you take some risks and stop acting like a Nervous Nelly.
Want some good news? Talk to an entrepreneur. Want big ideas? Talk to an entrepreneur. Want someone to tell you to grow up and stop crying? Talk to an entrepreneur.
Let's start with some numbers: in the first 24 hours of it’s release, Modern Warfare 2 sold 4.7 million units, or 310 million dollars in the US, Canada and the UK. Within the first 5 days, MW2 took in US$550 million worldwide. And yes, these numbers beat out music, book and movie releases during the same period. For some people, this shift in popular media might seem ludicrous. But for Maddock Douglas, it’s an event among many that continues to confirm a future innovation trend:
My Life is a Video Game.
Today, video games are becoming less ancillary and more integrated within our daily lives. As Mike Maddock said at Future Trends 2009 (video link) we use a Wii fit to get in shape—and to build on his point, we already are using video games to:
As the definition of “video game” becomes broader, individuals continue to utilize gaming for not just entertainment, but also for functional purposes.
Consider foursquare, the mobile app that allows you to “check-in”, tells your friends where they can find you, and recommends places to go & things to do near your current location. Foursquare openly credits a gaming component to their success, as every foursquare check-in (when users find new places—i.e. restaurants, stores, bars etc. in their neighborhoods) earns them points. And, after accumulating a certain amount of points, they’re awarded badges or even made “Mayor” of that location, which may qualify them to earn freebies.
It might seem silly to some, but to foursquare’s investors—the likes of Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter, Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, and SV Angels LLC, The angel group founded and backed by Ron Conway, it’s a seriously fun way to “make your city easier to use.”
As demonstrated by many forward thinking companies like foursquare, where function and gaming mesh together, the chance to innovate is far beyond maps or joysticks.
Orbitz has been doing it for years. And, so has Ebay. In this digitally inclined age of emerging e-commerce in which demand for evolved/innovative business models has risen dramatically, cutting out the middleman (or agent, dealer, distributor, etc…) sounds obvious and easy enough. After all, taking steps out of the picture always leads to lower prices for the end consumer and results in higher margins for the company- therefore it is the best thing to do, right? You might have guessed this was coming:
Wrong.
Disintermediation, the removal of intermediaries from traditional distribution channels, is never such a cut and dried issue. For a company like Amazon.com, disintermediation is a part of their business model—not just a marketing plan ; yes it works, for them. But for other companies that have jumped on the disintermediation trend in an attempt to innovate, stay relevant and generate more revenue; confusion and failure can follow. Just ask PeaPod (who at one point was expected to put grocery retail chains on their heels, but now remains an ancillary service). In every case, there is a delicate strategic balance of dancing with the one that brought ya and “working the room.”
So how do you decide whether or not disintermediation is the right path to travel down? What indicators signal the future of your industry lies in disintermediation?
1. Tune in & Evaluate.
Take an intensive, analytical look into not only your company’s channel strategy, that of your direct and indirect competitors and also at your industry as a whole. Is it slow to change? Ripe for change? Time for a challenger to shake it up? Most importantly, do your customers see value in the intermediate? Can you specify and quantify that value? Sometimes the consumer’s need can only be met by the intermediate – in homeowners insurance for example, the complex nature of the buying cycle can best be met by the agent (and only the agent), in other cases the best way to meet the need is to get the intermediate out of the way. Do segments of your customer base work around your middle man and flock to your competitors’ sites in droves to make purchases -(e.g., auto insurance : Geico, Progressive)?
Pay very close attention to your channels. Are they growing around you or with you? What is your channel strategy? Are they appropriately integrated? (From your customer’s perspective – not yours). Do they converge with your web strategy in the right places to add value—or not? By examining the foundation on which your distribution rests, as well as the channels of parallel industries, you’ll find even more insight that will be extremely useful in developing and executing industry & brand-specific strategies.
The answers to these among many other questions will allow you to assess whether or not there is a strong unmet need that may be fulfilled by disintermediation.
2. Diverge.
Compare your market’s trends and challenges with other parallel industries that may be sharing the same issues. By observing and learning from the strategies that thought and business leaders have executed under similar conditions, you’ll have a wider solution set and a helpful frame of reference.
3. Shift your perspective.
Consider looking at your channel as a stakeholder model, in which the elements are interdependent. This perspective demands that all strategies and upper level decisions are created based on their interwoven relationships and on solutions that deliver a win-win-win. And since removing the intermediary will affect the other interdependent components of the channel, you’ll have a leg-up on deciding if disintermediation is the best choice for your business, and your customers.
So should you disintermediate? Or not? The answer is simply relative.
We’ve discussed the importance of content, the power and potential of 4G, and now we’re ready to highlight some of our favorite mobile innovations picks:
Alertme is a UK energy management start-up creating devices that read and monitor energy data—no electrician necessary. The components, a Nano Hub (the “brains of the kit”) requires power and a broadband connection so it can talk to the reader and transmitter, gathering and distributing energy data to the AlertMe dashboard—an online interface for adjusting and monitoring your home energy spend in real time.
Without any further additions, AlertMe is already a wonderful idea. The fact that people using AlertMe services can, for instance, turn the heat off from work, and monitor those changes to save money and help decrease their footprint is hands-down innovative. But now Google had stepped in to take things to the next level.
Google recently partnered with AlertMe to add what they’d been missing—the device component for their PowerMeter offering. PowerMeter, a free application that allows users to “see electricity use from any Google PowerMeter enabled device,” brings real-time energy data to the mobile, anytime, anywhere level.
And with 4G speeds already up and running in major markets, going green never looked so fast.
There’s no doubt that for many, IKEA is the place to find forward thinking design that’s in line with conservative budgets. But, since the beginning of furniture buying, there’s been a problem:
How can people accurately envision how furniture will look and how can anyone know if the item will even fit in the envisioned area?
This problem is obviously a deterrent for purchases. But now, all you need to do is go to your Portable Interior Planner app, take a photo of that sofa you’ve been thinking about, aim your camera at the proposed area where the furniture might be placed, and see the sofa superimposed over the image of the room. Then, the product can be scaled up or down to match room size and saved for later reference. The Portable Interior Planner is a solution to a long overlooked problem—and the need is met by a mobile app that utilizes augmented reality.
Mobile represents one of the greatest untapped markets for 2010 and beyond. These are our favorite recent evolutions in an ever expanding new product, service, and business model environment. What are some of your favorite innovations in mobile technology?
Maddock Douglas CEO Michael Maddock recently shared his industry shifting predictions for 2010 and beyond. Watch an excerpt from Future Trends 2009 below:
Columbus insisted the world was round and then promptly missed America on his first attempt. The Wright Brothers claimed flying was possible and nearly killed themselves trying to make it happen. Steve Jobs launched NEXT computers—a hardware failure that most don't remember because they now think of him as the guru behind such ground-breaking devices as the iPod and iPhone. And, of course, Albert Einstein, whose very name we use as a short-hand for describing someone as a genius, was a lousy student. (As were many successful CEOs and entrepreneurs.)
Our point: Failure isn't fatal, in fact, failure is actually required for innovation success.
That is an idea you need to accept, if you are going to do your best work. It is an idea that you definitely have to get across to your team—and indeed your entire company—in order to free it from the innovation-limiting shackles of perfection.
The phrase "Be patient. God isn't finished with me yet" is a healthy mantra for most of us—and most of our innovation projects.
Soft Launches
One reason that's true is that in order to make a product or service everything it can be it needs to be repeatedly soft-launched with both internal stakeholders and external customers. This means literally sending the idea—be it a product or a service—into a limited part of the marketplace with the full understanding that it will be modified (perhaps extensively) based on how customers and consumers react.
For successful launches to happen, a team must be O.K. with the premise that they are starting with what some may consider a half-baked idea, one that very well may fail as constituted. You need to make this O.K. You need to tell your team that the real failure is fear of launching an idea until it is perfect.
To buttress your case, make the following points:
1. We're only right when the market tells us so. Right now, we presume to be right, and our thinking is based on as-good-as-we-can-get research, history, and gut feel. The market will help us see and hear what we can do to be more right (and also help us eliminate all the things our customers—and potential customers—don't like or don't want.)
2. We can make any changes quickly. We can simulate years of research data in the span of months once we are out in the marketplace. It is the fastest way to learn.
3. It has never been cheaper to test ideas; The Internet allows for instant feedback; empty strip malls allow for in-and-out shopping experiences with risk-free short-term leases; technology has made prototyping doable in days instead of weeks.
4. It is going to be fun. We're doing this to learn and improve, not to beat up an idea. (So there is no reason for anyone to get defensive.)
5. We will be making our "mistake" on a small scale, i.e. you are not launching the Iridium Phone or Segway only to find no one understands it or only 1,000 people want it. If we find out our idea is completely off-base, we're about to save the company millions of dollars and perhaps our jobs.
One more point: Be careful of the language that you use when describing your testing process. We often find that words like "prototype" and "beta" come with too much baggage to overcome. When they hear those terms, many people think it means that certain elements of the product (or service) that you are about to test are locked in place. That's not the message you want to send. Just about everything should be up for grabs. For our people "soft launch" sends the message we expect lots of things about the idea to change. But consider creating your own language that stresses the results you are trying to achieve, e.g., iteration phase 3 or "project optimize".
If your team still resists the idea of iterative soft launches, just remind them that if this approach was good enough for Columbus, Steve Jobs, and the Wright brothers, it is probably good enough for them.
November – a month of dropping temperatures, turkey consumption and… mustaches? Yes, Maddock Douglas is proudly participating in the internationally awkward yet best-intentioned movement known as Movember.
Simply put, Movember is an annual charity event to raise funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate and testicular cancers. But instead of wearing ribbons or wristbands, participants wear “hairy ribbons,” AKA, mustaches. Since its inception six years ago in Australia, Movember has grown (zzzing!) worldwide and raised more than $47 million in donations.
The Agency of Innovation is doing it’s part with our team, Mustache Douglas. With Raff Viton and Chad Fenoglio leading the charge, 15 employees (click here to see the roster) have joined the cause and our offices are full of mustaches, almostaches and good intentions. Says Viton, "Both Pink October and Movember are very personal causes for us at MD. Like everywhere else, we have close relatives or friends living with cancer.
My father has been living with prostate cancer for over a year, and one of our own VP's, Matt McKee, is a cancer survivor as well. We’re committed and passionate about doing not just what we can, but everything we can to make a difference in the fight against cancer."
As the month draws to a close and the giving spirit of the holidays is in full swing, we’re looking to make a final push for some “stache cash.” If you’d like to donate to our team, visit our donation page on the Movember website. All donations go to the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Lance Armstrong Foundation (LiveSTRONG).
Thanks to all those who have supported this warm-hearted and warm-lipped cause. And stay tuned for Decembeard – just kidding.
Last week, we talked about the mobile whitespace, the power of the app and consumer consideration. And as we know, brands are utilizing the mobile space to not only commercialize products and services, but also to assist the consumer. The Mobile Magic app, for instance, by Disney and Verizon Wireless is replete with relevant content: wait times for rides, restaurant information and where and when Disney characters will make appearances are all included in a data dispensing, real-time, GPS enabled mobile guide. Now, Walt Disney World patrons can make decisions based on helpful information—effectively creating a richer, more realized theme park experience. Disney and Verizon Wireless are ultimately creating an entity beyond the app. Instead of filling the mobile whitespace solely with entertaining content or just charts and data, Mobile Magic finds the cross hairs. In this case, it becomes more than an application— it becomes a resource—maybe even a necessity to fully experience the World of Walt Disney.
But what happens when 4G hits mobile commercialization? How does an app like Mobile Magic hold up? Yes, you guessed it: faster.
The technology moving the message is ramping up—in fact two weeks ago, Clearwire launched WiMax, (also known as 4G) in Chicago, facilitating the beginning of an ultramobile enabled market. With higher speeds come the ability to view richer media, and since streaming audio and video from sites like youtube.com accounts for roughly 27% of global internet traffic, it’s not difficult to see where brands are looking next.
Hulu is already doing it. If you want to watch a free movie, you have to sit through a mini 15 second spot. But if 4G speeds things up and consumers watch more, shorter length videos on their mobile phones, what does this mean? One second spots for every thirty second video? This sounds like either subliminal messaging or completely ineffective, but most likely both. (And an aside: Hulu recently announced they will be charging for their content.) So now what?
Next week I'll highlight some of the companies that are creating innovative products, services, and business models to take advantage of the coming developments in mobile bandwidth and technologies.
Is your company better at having an idea or making an idea happen? Knowing where your organization's strength lies is a vital first step toward innovation success
Perhaps no other country celebrates innovation the way America does.
This passion for inventions started early in our history. Did you know that George Washington signed the First U.S. Patent Grant on July 31, 1790, and the patent examiner was none other than Thomas Jefferson? (Thank you, Google!) In America, we're reminded of the life-changing power of inventiveness every day. Some of the greatest inventors of yesterday spawned the greatest brands of today. What do the names Chrysler, Coleman, Goodyear, Campbell, Colt, and Edison mean to you? Cars, tents, tires, soup, guns, and the electric lightbulb, of course.
When you dig a little deeper, you start to notice an incredibly important aspect of inventiveness: For every yin, there must be a yang.
For example, the next time you are marveling at the wonders of Disney, make sure you remember Roy. While Walt was dreaming about his Magic Kingdom and making a mouse talk, his brother Roy was actually making sure that Walt's dreams would come true. Roy was the operational genius; a yin for Walt's yang.
Turns out, the best companies are a lot like Roy and Walt Disney. They are naturally good at creating new ideas and executing them brilliantly. All too often, we here at Maddock Douglas (and maybe at your firm, too) stop at the first part, and pat ourselves on the back for being innovative, even though we aren't exactly sure what to do with a great idea.
At our firm, ideas come easy. In fact, we believe big, beautiful, million-dollar ideas are a dime a dozen. Want to see? Picture yourself sitting on a plane. Hmmm. Let's see. Airline ideas. Why don't airlines create a loyalty card? You'd pay for travel at the beginning of the year in exchange for some sort of special treatment or perks—say, no fees for checking luggage; free food and drinks (including alcohol), and access to their "president's club" lounges so you would have some place—other than the gate—to wait for your plane. Sure, you can pay à la carte for all these things, but it would be more convenient for you if the airline bundled it all together, and better for the airlines since they would get the money up front. Starbucks has created plenty of cash flow with this idea. Why not the airlines?
Here's another idea: Airlines should sell luggage engineered to fit perfectly into their planes. The airlines get new revenue and quicker boarding because bags are all fitting nicely into place. You get the picture.
For all of us who say ideas are easy, there are others who say executing is easy. These are the operational experts—the Roy Disneys if you will—who know how to drive the best ideas forward. The corporate equivalent of them would be the director of R&D and the COO. You don't think of them as product innovators, but once they have an idea they execute it—hopefully to perfection.
We find that companies, like people, are usually good at either creating ideas or executing ideas. The trick is to know which describes your company. If you or your company are about operational excellence, but desperate for big ideas, consider importing this kind of thinking via a business partner.
Want proof that we are on the right track? Venture capital companies are full of Roy Disneys, and they know it, so they don't waste time trying to think up new ideas. They know what they are good at and go do it. And here's a bold statement: We also believe that right now venture capitalists have a golden opportunity to revive the spirit of innovation in America. But we'll save that for the next article.
For now, ask yourself this. Is your company a Walt or a Roy? Figure it out and go find a yin for your yang.
"Spend enough time around innovation and you become aware of a startling
analogy: Ideas are just like children. Ideas need a loving set of
parents to conceive them, encourage them, challenge them, and protect
them until they are ready to stand on their own. Good parenting will
produce ideas — born as simple insights — that can change the world.
The problem is, we as corporate executives (parents) abandon our
nurturing role too early. And just like in any family (or company),
once the core set of parents is gone, the child (insight) suffers."
Watch a brief excerpt from the discussion below, and remember to raise your ideas correctly!
Intelligence is learning from our own mistakes. Wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others.
At Future Trends 2009 I spoke about infusing outside experts to solve problems you are working on right now.
At Maddock Douglas, we call upon our Global Expert Network (GEN) to help create solutions to complex problems. GEN is an exclusive group of thinkers that includes entrepreneurs, professionals and specialists that span the globe and hand picked to meet specific opportunities and challenges. These experts often come from a parallel industry or have a specialized skill that relates to the challenge at hand. This cross-section of thinking creates relevant, and frequently groundbreaking, ideas. Do you have a GEN? And if not, how do you plan to infuse outside expertise into your next big challenge?
Smartphones are everywhere. But what about smart content? Last week, we talked about the importance of strategy and insight. And now, it’s time to explore the ultimate creative commercialization frontier: mobile whitespace.
Many have done it before, that is, faced the “White Bull,” also known as the blank page. Only now, in the digital age, we’ve been presented with mobile whitespace, the gift of nearly unlimited digital possibilities that fit in the palm of your hand. What we choose to fill it with today has the potential to revolutionize the mobile space for years to come. With the purchase of two billion apps to date, we know that content is the lifeblood of anything worth paying attention to. And now, we also know that useful and interesting content gains more traction and leaves a greater brand imprint. But let’s go beyond that. Let’s talk targeted innovation.
For those of us without Tivo or DVR watching a favorite show, we’re bound to see the same thirty-second spot at least more than once. After the third time, you may be annoyed. Granted the strategy behind this placement is brand penetration, there’s a big problem: if anyone is interested in purchasing the commercialized service or product, they’re probably in one of many buying stages. And if they’re receiving the same singular message that is anchored to one stage, over and over, the brand loses relevancy. This content strategy is the equivalent of asking a multitude of various questions about the product and receiving the same answer, over and over—whether or not it makes sense.
To make a purchasing decision, people want more pertinent information, not the same set of facts. And in the mobile realm, we have an extraordinary opportunity to give people information they may want or need to assist them in making a purchase. Mobile content is faster—replacing a message is no longer a month long conundrum. And if customers are interested in a set of products and choose to opt in, we have the information we need to help them, instead of pushing one message into their faces, hoping for the best. After all, just as Apple puts it: Smartphones are “solving life’s dilemmas, one app at a time.” Why not help solve the purchasing decision dilemma?
Now is the time to innovate in this space and to turn insights into relevant realities. Now is the time to truly consider the consumer. And with mobile technology literally ramping up, we have the chance to do something revolutionary.
Next week, I’ll be discussing the emerging technology driving mobile innovation. Tune in next week to see what’s next and why.
Last time, in our column "Insurers: Effective Innovators—Almost,", we said—in total sincerity, we want to stress—that insurance had the potential to be one of the most innovative industries on Earth.
The response to that column was actually better than we expected. Yes, some of you laughed, others got offended, and more than a handful of you questioned our sanity (a special "thanks" for the offers to pay for the psychological counseling you felt we needed). But most of you got our point: To consistently launch successful new products, insurance companies, just like the firms within your industry, simply have to do a better job of understanding and aligning the three critical underlying components of innovation.
Marketplace success occurs when:
1) You discover a significant need.
2) You conceive of a new product, service, or business model to meet that need.
3) There is clear communication that connects No. 1 to No. 2.
Our point last time was that most insurers—like most businesses in general—spend the majority of their efforts discovering and fulfilling the need, and as a result short-change the communication portion. Innovation is a three-legged stool. If you get the insight and idea right but get the communication wrong, your launch will tip over. It will fail.
To keep that from happening, let us give you three and a half ideas to help you get the communication right. We often tell clients that a bad idea executed brilliantly is the same as a brilliant idea executed badly. They both result in failure. Insurance companies everywhere are sitting with two out of the three ingredients for innovation success in hand. They have created amazing financial tools to help businesses and people in a myriad of ways.
If you met with a creative expert in the insurance industry (they exist), you would soon find out that there are thousands of challenges—everything from putting your kids through college to dealing with the economic downturn—that insurance can help you meet right now. But very few people know about these solutions insurance companies can provide, because the industry has done such a lousy job of communicating about its innovative products.
As a high-ranking marketing friend in the insurance industry recently told us, "If our innovation score was like the SAT, we'd score very high in math but woefully low in verbal."
So how do you correct this issue? Let's say that, like the typical insurance company, you have identified a significant need in your market. And let's also agree that you have a new product, service, or business model that meets that need. Here are three and half ways to make sure your idea resonates with your customer or end consumer. (We'll continue to use the insurance industry as an example, but feel free to substitute your industry—or better, your company—every time you see "insurance.")
1) Speak English
Do you know what "Universal Life," "Variable Life," or "Whole Life" is? Like most industries, insurance often forgets that insurance professionals are the only ones who understand its language.
It is critically important that you constantly keep this in mind (and act accordingly): You are not the true experts of the benefits your products deliver—your customers are the experts. They use everyday words when they talk about their wishes, dreams, and fears. If you are not using the words your customers use to describe their needs as you go about explaining what you have to fill them, you are making your job 20 times harder than it has to be. The voice of the customer must resound clearly in all of your communication.
1.5) One Voice
If everyone has to agree on the key characteristics of the message you are going to communicate, you will end up with a really bland message. The higher the number of people who have to agree, the worse this gets. Create a small innovation team—or just one person—and empower that team. Get out of the team's way. Let it live (or die) by how often it's right. You will get a clearer, better message to market faster.
2) Get the Benefit Right
"Life insurance"? Seriously? Somebody decided to call it "life insurance"? We have a feeling that life insurance got its name because nobody wanted to sell something "death insurance." But people aren't buying life (or death) insurance. They are really buying benefits such as an inheritance for their kids or a paid-off home for their surviving spouse.
The point: Would you rather buy "Education for a Whole Entire Family Insurance" or "Whole Life Insurance"? When companies connect the correct insight/benefit (legacy) with the product (insurance) and communicate the benefit evocatively, e.g., "The Five Generation Scholarship Plan," something magical happens. It sells.
3) Engage the Influencers
Now more than ever, social media sites have allowed us to find those who really care the most and get them engaged in the new idea. We can ask for their insights about how to communicate it, and give them credit. Make them evangelists and carriers of the message. Once your campaign starts, they will be attached to it and help propel it.
This idea is critically important when it comes to people who sell the product directly—like agents. It is important for other advisers, too. For insurance, this would include CPAs. Think: Who are the influencers, advisers, and agents in your industry? When was the last time they helped you discover a need, invent an idea, and launch it?
It is easy to think a great idea sells itself. It doesn't. Learn to use the voice of the customer to communicate what you have while you are formulating the product itself. Your odds of success will increase dramatically.
How do businesses grow to maximize profits and improve
productivity—all while maintaining a deep sense of purpose? To many
entrepreneurial organizations, these are sink or swim issues. For Rand Stagen, member of the Maddock Douglas Global Expert Network,
these are the benefits of transforming a reactive, revenue focused business
into a proactive, profit generating company.
A Senior Partner of Stagen, a management firm that
specializes in helping mid-market companies scale, Rand is a seasoned
entrepreneur who has been featured in The Columbia Journalism Review, Entrepreneur Magazine
and Fox-TV.
The Global Expert Network SM includes entrepreneurs, professionals and specialists
spanning the globe.
When we asked our expert why some moderately successful
businesses just can’t climb to the next level, Rand cited The Leader’s
Performance Paradox, the strategy that asks organizations to let go of their
winning strategies.
Sound strange? It might. Watch Rand’s video to learn why the
strategy that first made your business successful might actually be stunting
your growth.
What if we told you insurance is one of the most innovative industries we know? (Hold the smirks. We are serious.)
What if we went further and said that the insurance industry was poised to assume the leadership position when it comes to creating new products, services, and business models in our economy? You'd probably think we were trying to sell you a whole life policy.
Well, the fact that you don't believe us—and again we are totally sincere about this—says a lot about the problem insurance companies have when it comes to innovation, a problem that we bet your industry may have as well. And therein lies a tale.
1. There is a significant need or insight. 2. A product, service, or business model meets that need. 3. There is clear communication that connects No. 1 to No. 2.
By this definition, the insurance industry is clearly innovative—at least when it comes to creating a product that fulfills a need. Consider some of the more obvious benefits available through one type of coverage: life insurance.
Life Insurance
A. Need or insight
B. Solution
C. Benefit
Your heirs need money while your assets are in probate.
Life insurance benefits are paid quickly.
Your heirs receive the benefits from your policy quickly.
You need a way to protect your assets from creditors.
Creditors cannot get at your life Insurance assets.
Your assets are protected.
You want to make sure your heirs aren't saddled with any of your debts (including estate taxes and funeral expenses).
You can take out a life policy whose benefits are specifically designed to cover these costs.
Your loved ones are not burdened with expenses caused in your life or death.
You want to provide an estate for your loved ones, or to help fund a charity, after your death.
You can take out a life insurance policy and have the proceeds fund whatever you want.
You create the legacy you want.
The table begs one obvious question: Did you know about these benefits? Probably not. The insurance industry often has two of the three key ingredients for successful innovation: the need and the idea. What is missing is the ability to communicate these ideas in a way that is relevant to increasingly busy people.
A Failure to Communicate
An aside: The fact that up until now the insurance industry has fallen down when it comes to innovation is ironic because innovation couldn't happen without insurance. Every year, hundreds of new products are launched. Products that you put on your skin, your kids, your pet—services that require you walk up steps, get on new rides, and use heavy equipment. Business models that require you to write down your Social Security number and push "Send." The fact is that most of these new ideas would never be launched unless the potential liability associated with each was covered by—you guessed it—insurance.
So, you would think that the insurers would be a master at communicating the benefits they offer. But the fact that they are not is, unfortunately, not unusual. Many times the best insights and products are overwhelmed by poorly executed communication. If you don't agree with this, consider that perhaps the most successful insurance marketing in the past decade involves a talking duck and lizard.
There is nothing wrong with using a cute symbol to get someone's attention. But how many people could tell you a) the names of the companies employing either symbol, and b) what products they're selling, and c) what specific benefits those products offer? Our research shows: not many. Your honor, we rest our case.
The good news is that it is incredibly easy to fix this part of the equation, particularly when you have a suite of products that are quite flexible and a CEO who believes change is necessary. For this reason, we believe the whole insurance industry is at a dramatic tipping point. Expect to see much more relevant and creative products soon. Why? Because we believe insurers are taking a cue from other industries and beginning to uncover meaningful and immediate needs that their products can readily serve. Once they figure out a way to communicate them effectively, watch out.
Communication Is Essential
Two of the questions we always ask when people complain to us that their hot new innovation effort has yet to gain traction: "Do people know about it?" and "Do they think they need it?" Invariably we hear some variation of "Of course they do" in answer to the first question and "How could they not?" to the second. Let's stop here for a second. Do you know that feeling you get in your gut when your IT department explains—using industry shorthand—a cool new technology? Think. What percentage of those words did you understand or care to understand?
Do you remember how you felt on your first day in chemistry class, when you were being passionately taught something that had no relevance to you at all? What if this is how you are making your customers feel? What if they don't understand your product? What if the words you are using don't resonate with them? What if they don't see the benefits? What if they don't think your product is worth their time?
Think back to our definition of innovation. It occurs when need + product (to fulfill the need) + communication (about how the product fulfills the need) are completely intertwined. If the communication fails, your whole innovation effort is severely crippled.
Innovation opportunities within the mobile arena are major game changers. With the proliferation and widespread adoption of the smartphone, brands are faced with a wide range of possible solutions and strategic choices when attempting to fill in this commercialization whitespace. Although auto brands like Volkswagen and Audi have already seen considerable success integrating their brands into the mobile spaces by leveraging the popularity of mobile gaming, for many others, the mobile waters can be tricky to navigate. Pepsi’s app “Before You Score,” a mobile interface designed to help adolescent boys and young men target different “types” of women, “score” and then share their experiences on Twitter and Facebook, received so much negative feedback from both women and their target audience that Pepsi eventually pulled it. In this consumer-driven market, what makes mobile advertising successful—and what makes it a liability?
Strategy
Accurate insights and up-to-date data are crucial to great brand strategy.
Without it, brands end up overestimating the needs, desires and attitudes of their target market. And that, as we all know, ends up in near disaster. Mobile marketing is one of the most recent developments in the means of delivering the message, and for many it can be an innovative medium to build on. However, a foundation of solid research that supports an actual need is required to build something of worth—to the client and the consumer.
Content
We’ve all heard “content is king,” but what is content? For mobile advertising, the content is the medium within the medium.
People are great at avoiding, skipping, or just plain ignoring ads—why shouldn’t they? What value does a logo bar on an RSS feed add to the lives of your target audience? Probably not much. To successfully penetrate the mobile space and your target market, brands have to add value to peoples lives and give them something they want or need to use or see. The method of delivering relative content has become part of the content in the mobile space.
Question: If there have been skillions upon skillions of new and advanced safety products and services introduced over the past 20 years, why has the rate of industrial accidents remained so stubbornly high?
Answer: People are not using the products and services provided to them.
Innovative safety products work only if they are used. And if people don't understand clearly the benefits of your innovation, they are not going to use it, no matter how great it is.
The safety industry serves as a wonderful case in point. Failure to use protective gear provided at the workplace accounts for 40% of work accidents, according to the National Safety Council. Despite continuing workplace safety efforts, this statistic has been consistent for 20 years.
So where's the disconnect? Why aren't the safety innovations making more people safer? Indeed, why aren't people rushing to use your new innovative product or service despite its inherent superiority?
The answer can be found within our definition of innovation. As you'll remember, we believe that innovation occurs when:
1) There is a significant need or insight.
2) A product, service, or business model meets that need.
3) There is clear communication that connects No. 1 to No. 2.
We'll give the safety industry the benefit of the doubt that it's addressing the right needs with the right products. What's missing is the communication that connects the two.
Unlike the insurance industry, which communicates—albeit inadequately—the benefits of its products, the safety industry doesn't communicate those virtues in a believable or meaningful way at all.
The problem with that is obvious, no matter what you do for a living. You simply cannot assume your innovation's benefits are apparent to everyone, let alone believable.
The lack of response to the safety products raises at least one logical question: Why the irrational resistance to new things that will make our lives better (in this case, make us safer)? Research shows that our psyches have actually been wired to overestimate the possibility of good things happening to us ("We'll win the lottery") and underestimate the likelihood of bad things happening ("Seat belts—too much of a pain").
So why aren't people in high-risk professions, such as firefighters and police officers, buying and using the new products out there? There are three simple explanations:
1) They are not aware of the new safety regulations and standards.
2) Even if they are aware of them, they don't understand the safety regulations and standards or believe they apply to them.
3) They don't know the new products and services exist, don't believe they need them, aren't willing to pay the price for them, don't believe they'll work, and don't want to change their own behavior even if it's in their best interest.
1) Open ("Give me the information"): A small minority of people are actually receptive to change. They will require information and education, so make it readily available, accessible, understandable, and sharable.
2) Entrenched (It'll take an intervention): A larger group will be entrenched in em>not changing; they will require an enforceable law, mandate, and penalty to drive change. You need to show them the problems they will face if they don't take advantage of what you are offering.
3) Stubborn but not self-centered: The majority of people you are courting will not pull the trigger until social influence and social marketing are applied to get them to want to change for someone other than themselves ("My family and friends want me to change").
The thing to keep in mind in all three scenarios is this: The gap between knowing and doing is far greater than the gap between ignorance and knowledge.
Change is definitely ahead and Mike Maddock and the Maddock Douglas team were at the Future Trends 2009 Conference in Miami, Florida to be a part of the conversation. Brands like Starbucks, Best Buy, IBM Corporation, Unilever and General Mills were in attendance this year to talk about the topic on everyone’s mind: the future. Among the many inspired thought leaders and concepts presented at this year’s Future Trends, Maddock Douglas found the following innovative companies and ideas had the exceptional ability to get our wheels turning:
2) It’s not who you are but how you relate to others.
3) What kind of world are you buying into with the brands you buy?
Coca-Cola had a standout presentation, examining the core beliefs and ideas behind “Happiness and Other Concepts Your Business School Forgot to Mention.” Asking “What does your brand mean” and “how will it change,” Coca Cola tapped into the heart of a now consumer-driven market and addressed why understanding it is so crucial to a brand’s success. Ultimately, a brand isn’t just a brand. It’s a choice.
Nokia presented The Morph concept device, a flexible, self-cleaning communication tool that utilizes nanotechnology. While nanotechnology is already used in foods, chemicals and fabrics, this utilization of stretchable, transparent materials for a mobile device is utterly groundbreaking. The Morph has the ability to change shape and ultimately size by using the same principle behind spider silk—woven, mesh-like coverings that allow elasticity, enabling the device to bend and morph without damage.
1)Technology based innovation vs. User centered design
2) High velocity human factors
3)Revolutionizing the Mission Critical Design process
Motorola uses observational research and insight to innovate communication products for police departments, firefighters and the like—the Mission Critical applications. And in these cases, nothing is more important than functionality. Motorola innovates for the sake of the market they’re serving—not just for aesthetic appeal. Demonstrating the importance of focusing on what matters, the insight and the quality of the product, Motorola innovates for purpose. At Maddock Douglas, an innovation agency, we see Motorola’s insight as directly correlating with the actual quality of innovation. By considering the high velocity human factors, and gathering observational and application data and using real-life stories to develop concepts, Motorola is evolving toward the future with purpose-built design.
After all of the meeting, greeting and innovating at Future Trends 2009, we’ve decided the future is looking bright indeed. Are you ready to evolve?
The seven deadly sins of the innovator—and how you can stop yourself from committing them
Just for fun, let's take a look at seven of the most common and deadly sins of the innovator. We've seen all of these cause failures of Biblical proportions.
1. Lust. Innovating in a space you have no business being in. Trying to innovate outside your operational expertise or brand footprint creates incredible inertia internally. It also causes unhealthy confusion externally. "Wait," the customer says. "My longtime supplier of plastic molding injection equipment is now making iPhone (AAPL) accessories? What gives?"
2. Gluttony. Trying to create too many initiatives with too few resources. Innovation takes emotional and financial capital and focus. Instead of making a number of small bets, focus your team and resources on one or two initiatives that have the greatest probability of hitting it big.
3. Greed. Taking short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth. The stock market demands a high rate of return, which naturally results in safe bets like line extensions — leaving you at risk of being blown out of the water by an industry-changing idea. The solution? Create two teams. Put one in charge of evolution and the other in charge of revolution. You'll get both short- and long-term growth.
4. Sloth. Taking short cuts. Too many otherwise brilliant leaders have made the mistake of thinking that speed and short cuts are the only way to successfully innovate. While we agree that being overly cautious — "Let's test the idea for the 83rd time" — is also potentially fatal, there is a happy medium. Think big, quantify, qualify, refine, and launch. This should take no more than 12 months.
5. Wrath. Being so focused on your competition that you miss the same opportunities your rivals are missing. You can't read the label when you are sitting inside the jar.
Don’t get kicked to the curb by someone outside your industry who is rightly focused on the consumer (and not either one of you).
6. Envy. In the context of innovation, envy means launching a "me too" product instead of finding a space you can own. So when your sales team comes to you and demands that you launch a product to compete with the "hot" new offering they just saw from the competitor, don't take the bait.
7. Pride. You won't give up on your favorite idea — even when the numbers prove you're wrong. When it comes to your ideas, you must take a long, hard look at the data. Unless the data are overwhelmingly in favor of your idea, drop it and work on the one the team secretly knows is better.
Religion tells us the seven deadly sins are fatal to spiritual progress. We will let you debate that thought with the theologian of your choice. But we can tell you they are definitely fatal if you want to innovate successfully.
"The people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, usually do."
–Think Different campaign, Apple 1984
With the economy in a recession and your customers relentlessly distracted with falling 401(k) values, layoffs, and a seemingly never-ending stream of bad financial news, the importance of innovation as a differentiator in the marketplace has never been greater.
You consider yourself a leader, yes? Well imagine that you are the CEO of a company driven by innovation. Obviously, you realize it is critical to have a highly functioning innovation team. What follows from that are two things:
1. You need to find just the right person to run it. You need to fill the seat of chief innovation officer (CIO) if you haven't already.
2. You need to determine who is going to work on this team (and who is expendable as the recession worsens).
Because the position of CIO is so critical, let's start there.
When it comes to innovation leadership, there is of course the common image that the perfect person is the loner with an off-kilter approach to both life and the problems that need to be solved. Innovation leaders are the "crazy ones" who choose to recreate systems while others are focused on refining the old ones. The ones who envision a completely new product while their counterparts only see incremental change. They question convention, always believing there is a better answer, and they are relentless in discovering it.
Well, from our experience, the most effective innovators are not as crazy as one might think. Infusing experts into our innovation process has afforded us the immense pleasure of brainstorming with hundreds of brilliant innovators over the years. These experts come from all walks of life: inventors, anthropologists, strategists, trend experts, scientists, engineers, writers, dreamers…
As you might imagine, we've thought hard about what makes them so special when it comes to the art of RE-creation (by the way, if you ever wonder if innovation should be fun, take a good look at the word recreation).
So here, based on our experience, are four criteria for choosing a great CIO, or, "The Most Innovative Person in the World."
The Balanced Innovator
Crazy does not necessarily equal creative. People seem to think the best innovators are mad scientists, tortured 24 hours a day by what could be. While Thomas Edison may have had his Van Gogh moments, from what we have been told most great innovators are wildly innovative at work yet still know when it is time to go home. The best know about balance.
John McCain for CIO?
One of our favorite parts of the Presidential election campaign was hearing John McCain tell the world he was a maverick. We love mavericks. Innovation requires mavericks. Mavericks have the guts and the ability to buck trends.
Look at companies that are innovation leaders—Apple being the most obvious choice, of course—and you will notice that most successful new product or service launches are led by a person who doesn't mind leaning into adversity. Since innovation by definition is meeting a need in a new way, it requires leadership from someone who welcomes the idea of doing things differently. And doing things differently means swimming against tradition and politics, a tough challenge for most. That's why seasoned mavericks usually make excellent innovators.
You can't lead an innovation crusade without a spreadsheet. Nobody famous said this. It's just true. There is far too much risk in business today to invest money in an miscalculated dream. For an innovation initiative to gain the support and maintain the momentum, the product or service you are developing must have to actually get to market. You must show the board the money you are going to make. That's why your CIO must be able to segment the opportunity, build strategy, and basically do the math. He or she must be able to be as innovative with mathematical modeling as he is with marketing concepts.
The joy of curiosity is at the heart of innovation. It propels you to discover new things and enables you to hear old ideas in new ways. We are all full of wonder as children, but it is something we seem to lose as adults. Do your company a favor. Find a CIO who still finds joy in being curious. There is no more important trait for the role.
This leads us to another brutal reality. Lack of curiosity and the corresponding absence of optimism is a deal breaker. Innovation simply can't stand up to a team of cynics and know-it-alls. If you have a cynical leader, fire him immediately. It has been said that if you want a happy team, fire all the unhappy people. If you want an innovative team, fire the cynics and incurious. This is the best way to tighten the belt in your innovation group—recession or no recession.
Great innovators—whether they serve as your CIO or are "just" a member of the team—are not crazy; they just see the world differently. Great leaders have learned to identify, respect, and harness this magic. There are still some in senior leadership who don't believe in this type of thinking but we suspect most of them will soon be unemployed.
What if we told you that you could come up with a great idea anytime you wanted?
We'll go further. We can show you how not only to summon new and innovative concepts on command but also to teach your people the same skill. This may sound like an infomercial ("Order our revolutionary system within the next 20 minutes, and we'll throw in a set of steak knives absolutely free"), but it's true.
The five techniques outlined below have one thing in common: They free your brain to let your best ideas flow.
As it is, you undoubtedly have too much on your mind. When you're driving during rush hour, you are too busy dealing with traffic to notice the scenery and enjoy the ride. The following practices eliminate mental traffic and help you liberate the great ideas inside you desperately trying to get out.
1. Shower your way to creativity.
Yep, it's absolutely true. There is a scientific theory that water hitting your head helps trigger the synapses and that's why people get great ideas in the shower. But we think it's simpler than that: The ideas occur because you are not making an effort to think. You aren't worried about anything. You are not stressed. Hence some of your best thinking occurs.
2. Sleep on it.
Remember how your mom used to say, "Why don't you sleep on it, honey?" when you were wrestling with a big issue? Well, when it comes to big ideas and problem solving, Mother really does know best.
The next time you want to solve a major challenge or be unusually brilliant, think about it in bed. Don't push yourself to figure out the answer before you fall asleep. Instead, just go through the issues at hand and tell yourself that you will have the answer in the morning. In our experience, this technique amplifies the power of the shower, because there are even fewer distractions to occupy your mind when you are asleep.
You can employ an alternate version of this while awake. The next time you can't think of a name, date, or important fact, just tell yourself aloud, "I will not think about this for a while, and the answer will come to me." This technique clears the traffic in your mind and lets your subconscious go to work. Your answer will often pop into your head the moment you stop "thinking about it."
3. Engage in mind-mapping
Purging is a great way to make new connections and create bigger ideas. Have a tough challenge to solve? Get a giant piece of paper (write small if you can't find one). In each quarter of the paper, write a keyword related to the challenge. For example, if you want to plan a cool family vacation, you might write the words "destinations," "transportation," "memories," and "kids."
Then, in no particular order, begin to brainstorm any word that comes to mind when you think of each of the keywords. For example, for "Transportation": plane, train, automobile, John Candy, pillows, sleep, sleeping bag, tent, treehouse, memories, dreams, daydreams, smells, popcorn, movies, adventure, pirates, islands, Swiss Family Robinson. Eventually, you will begin to make connections, and ideas that unify the key aspects of your goal will pop off the page.
Strive for as many words as you can, and don't judge the words. Judging is looking at the traffic when you are driving—it keeps you from coming up with ideas. Eliminate the traffic.
You can employ this simple technique yourself or do it in groups to loosen up your team. Imagine how much fun you'll have explaining to your family how you came up with the idea of renting a tree house for your vacation in Costa Rica.
4. Schedule Your Daydreaming
We all have a time of day when our brains work the best. For many, it is first thing in the morning, before rush hour. Unfortunately, the CrackBerry addiction has many of us checking our e-mail just when our brains are the most capable of creating.
The moment you check your e-mail, voice mail, or to-do list, you have hijacked your imagination. You have created a mental traffic jam. Do yourself a favor and schedule daydreaming. Unplug during the time that you know you do your best thinking and find a place that makes you feel energized. A lot of people love the local coffee shop. The buzz of conversation, the smells, colors, and energy create a safe haven for the mind to wander. Some prefer the library or the park. Whichever it is, go there. Let your mind wander.
5. Yuk it up.
Laughing is another great way to liberate your brain. Often consciously doing silly-seeming things will get the creative juices flowing. Spin a top. Get an ice cream cone.
As you test these five techniques, you'll find some work better than others. If it turns out you really do get your best ideas in the shower, be conscious of the circumstances under which they occurred. What was the water temperature like? How long had you been in there? What time was it? Replicate the experience.
You'll find the effort worthwhile. "The bottom line is that gifted performers are almost always made, not born, and that the journey to superior performance is for neither the faint of heart nor the impatient," says Rand Stagen, senior partner of Stagen, a management consulting firm that specializes in helping mid-market companies scale. "Just as in sports, becoming an elite performer in business requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest (often painful) self-assessment. Depending on the scope and difficulty of the skill to be learned, it will take months and probably years to achieve a high level of proficiency or mastery."
Learning how to implement these approaches is often what separates a brilliant thinker from a creative want-to-be. Really. At first, you may feel silly, but we promise they will work.
Introducing new products and services successfully requires: a) sufficient expertise and resources, b) a defined process (BusinessWeek.com, 5/8/08), and c) leadership resolve (BusinessWeek.com, 5/20/08).
But talking about expertise, process, and resolve is boring to everyone except engineers (and people who introduce new products successfully). So, with apologies to David Letterman, here's our list of the top 10 reasons your next new launch will fail.
10. Science Run Amok.
Companies use their research and development capabilities to come up with unique products, instead of making customer needs their starting point. They begin with what they are good at, as opposed to what customers want. New products aren't bloodhounds that go find markets. They must address an unmet need.
9. The Lemming Effect.
"The competition has just introduced an X, so we need to have an X, too." If all you are offering is a me-too product, you can only gain market share by cutting price, and who wants to go that route? Find an unmet need and go after it.
8. "Team ACME."
See if this sounds familiar. Someone comes up with an idea and it gets implemented by an ad hoc team with money found in a slush fund. It's a daring approach. It's innovative. And it almost never works because it isn't sufficiently thought out.
If you have ever watched a Wile E. Coyote cartoon you understand the problem. The Coyote's ad hoc solutions to the problem of catching the Road Runner always seem on the surface to make sense, but they always contain a fatal flaw that causes them to blow up in the end. If you substitute your company for Wile E. and "a nagging consumer challenge" for the Road Runner, you'll see why there are better ways to go. Meep Meep.
7. It's Scary Out There.
There are thousands of reasons not to be bold. The economy is weak; the market is unsettled. Somebody needs a hug. Fine, go get yourself one. Then buck up and get aggressive.
6. The Market is Too Small.
For a new product to be successful you need sufficient sales. It sounds ridiculously obvious, doesn't it? But you would be amazed at the number of companies that design a product for too small a market. Say your new product is targeted at households with at least $55,000 in annual income. Well, that's only 50% of the 105 million U.S. households. But it's really just for the 18-65 age group—there goes another third of the market that's left.
And this mythical product will only appeal to those with an active lifestyle: one-third of the remaining 35 million homes—some 12 million. Say you get 33% to try it, and of those 4 million households, only 50% said they would buy it again. Your potential market is about 2 million households, and sales at that level won't cover the developmental costs, advertising, etc.
Instead of acknowledging this, we redefine the market as "for everyone 18 and over"—and then wonder why a product designed for a narrow target didn't sell well.
5. Dartboard Product Design.
There is almost never sufficient thought given to what the total product should look like. Let's say there are four key components—price, packaging, size, and usability—that could affect how well it sells. And each one of them has four options. So there are 256 different ways you could manufacture that product.
What's the predominant technique used to choose among them? People sit around a conference table with some pizza and soft drinks and say, about a new paper towel, for example, "Let's go with 500 sheets, super-high absorbency, and middle-of-the-road packaging, and priced 10% above the market leader."
What's the probability they've chosen right? By definition, it is 1 out of 256. Maybe they have some expertise; that boosts the odds to 1:128. Better, but still not great.
4. Death by Consensus.
If everyone has to agree on the key characteristics of a new product, you are going to end up introducing really bland products. The higher the number of people who have to agree, the worse this gets. Create a small task force of new product experts and empower them. Get out of their way. Let them live (or die) by how often they are right. You will get more compelling ideas to market faster.
3. Lack of Alignment.
You have a great idea. But because your process did not identify key stakeholders and influencers, it is your idea, not everyone's. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Pat Lencioni does a great job talking about what happens to teams when trust is not established. Your success criteria should reflect the wants of the stakeholder. Trust builds momentum. Want to see your boss kill an awesome idea? Fail to include him early and often.
2. Leadership Churn.
Great ideas are like kids. They need to be nurtured, protected, pushed, challenged, and loved. Innovators are the proud parents that make sure this happens. So when these parents move from one brand to another, are poached by competition, or simply burn out, the kids suffer. (See? It really is always the parents' fault.)
1. Ready, Fire, Aim.
Tom Peters and Bob Waterman perpetrated one of the biggest crimes ever against Corporate America when they told it to do a little homework, get the product in the marketplace, and make corrections based on market feedback, a concept they called "ready, fire, aim." Speed to market is a killer concept in the negative sense. It kills new products.
You don't want to make your mistakes in public. To launch a product before it is ready with a $40 million campaign is just idiotic. The problem is, it isn't seen as idiotic. It's seen as one of the costs of doing business. That's sad. People who do this should not be seen as bold, they should be seen as bad marketers.
After reading this, feel free to smile knowingly, roll your eyes in frustration, or forward it to unresolved leaders. Better yet, why not take a look at your current innovation initiatives and make sure none of these things is happening on your watch.
Corporate culture can distort creativity without innovators realizing it. Luckily there are several telltale signs, and tips to freshen up your perspective
There is a great saying in the South: "You can't read the label when you are sitting inside the jar."
From our experience this saying applies directly to your ability to innovate. If you have been with a company for more than six months, it is time you realize something: You're stuck in the jar. The way you think about new ideas is distorted by the corporate container you find yourself working within.
As a result, it is extremely difficult for you to see the priceless ideas that are all around you, ideas that will become the very new products and services your competitor will use to steal market share and give your boss a reason to question the effectiveness of your whole innovation strategy.
We know, we know. We can't be talking about you. We had the same reaction initially. But if any of the following sounds familiar, you are in the jar—just like we were. (And fear not, there is a way out, which we will tell you about.)
You know you are in the jar when you hear the following:
"We've tested that idea. It didn't work."
What idea exactly? People who are in the jar interpret ideas based on how they last saw them. In their minds, when they hear about a scooter, they think skateboard, not Segway. When they hear about an auction, they think Sotheby's, not eBay. They have literally judged an idea before it has been re-envisioned by the brilliant people around them. Their experience blinds them to the possibilities of the future.
Silence.
When your team is trying to brainstorm new ideas, the room gets eerily quiet. The reality is that they are probably desperately trying to be creative but they keep seeing hurdles. They don't want to appear negative, so they decide to be silent and nod a lot.
"Yes, but…"
Trying to be polite, people will just "but" other people's ideas to death. ("It is a really interesting idea you are proposing, but it will never work because…") This is usually not about intent—they really want to be helpful—but they are too busy thinking about regulatory issues, manufacturing issues, political issues, budgetary issues…deadening their ability to be creative. Not only are they in the jar, but the lid is really tight.
An idea for (yet another) safe line extension.
Line extensions and evolutionary innovation should be a large part of your plan. But when that's all your team is producing, it probably means they have lost the ability to recognize big ideas, or worse, they no longer have the fortitude to push the rope up the hill. Even when senior management begs for revolutionary thinking, they already see the outcome—"Let's just add a button, a flavor, or a perk and move on."
"Huh?"
If you are often asked by really smart consultants or newcomers to your company what in God's name you are talking about, you're probably in the jar. Seems that after a few months in the jar together, we develop our own language. Often laced with industry-borne acronyms, this strange way of communicating seeps into our customer and client communications. These industry clichés keep our customers from recognizing great innovation.
A few years back we scored big points with about 40 million customers when we convinced a client to change the last line on its monthly billing statement from "Account Balance" to "What you owe." You are surrounded by hundreds of similar examples.
At the root of Zen philosophy is the ability to objectify your situation, to be able to step outside your situation and see it for what it really is—warts and all. So now that you see yourself in the jar, what do you do about it? Following are three simple tips:
1. Get experts from outside your industry to help you stay honest and see what is happening outside the jar.
2. Get outside your office and act like an anthropologist. Spend time with your customer and bring an expert interpreter and a couple members of your team. Compare notes; you will be shocked at how differently you all see the situation.
3. Be very careful about the language you use. In this case, "voice of the customer" should be taken literally. Customers recognize, respond to, and build from their own words more than yours. So use their language when exploring insights, writing concepts, and introducing new products.
Ever notice how a 5-year-old can walk into a situation and ask an innocent question that elicits the "because that's the way we do it" response? Then you realize you've never really questioned why you do it that way? Five-year-olds are too young to be in the jar.
Michelle Oldham, Vice President of Innovation (@mahdlo1)
If you are attending, be sure to join us in Salon B (Track 1) on Tuesday, November 2, 2009 from 1:45-2:30PM for Michael Maddock's presentation on Trends from the Trenches: Tapping Networks to Find the Next Blockbusters.
FT'09 is your opportunity to join industry experts, corporate
visionaries, trendsetters and other revolutionaries to uncover and
action the trends that matter most to your business, brand and service.
Look not only into the immediate future and way ahead- where will we be
in 50 years or more? And focus on making it relevant for your business
- before others do. Lead your team to relate trends to make decisions,
engage in real conversations, and create meaningful change.
Welcome to the new Maddock Douglas corporate site. We exist to bring industry changing ideas from mind to market, and our new website reflects some of the innovative work we have done for 25% of the Fortune 100. Browse our articles and watch videos from our Global Expert Network and innovation thought leaders within Maddock Douglas. We hope you return often to share insights, review fresh content, and explore the evermore conscious world of Maddock Douglas, The Agency of Innovation.
Think of some of the research and innovation reports you’ve read (or may have even written). There are usually hundreds of pages of tables, pie charts, numbers, quotes, pictures and commentary to wade through. I am willing to wager that in many cases, if someone put a gun to your head, you couldn’t summarize the findings within the amount of time it takes to ride the elevator to your office.
Generating good research and developing good ideas is only half the battle (and arguably the easy part). If you want to be successful you need to develop a good, sticky story. This will enable you to sell the findings and ideas both vertically and horizontally. As you know, it’s imperative to sell the ideas to your management, your client and eventually to consumers.
A few years ago I read the book Made to Stick, and one thing really stuck (pun intended). Within the book, the authors relay a story of Nora Ephron’s first day in journalism class. Nora is a screenwriter whose credits include Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle so she has some storytelling street-cred. The students all entered the class knowing that a journalist needs to get at the 5Ws (who, what, where, when and why). Sound familiar? If not, you have more problems as an innovator than storytelling. Anyway, the assignment was to write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher read the facts:
“Kenneth L. Peters, the principle of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California Governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.”
Before you read the rest of this blog, I want you to do two things:
1. Re-read the facts.
2. Jot down what you think the lead of this story is.
Done? Ok, read on.
According to Ephron, she and most the other students wrote leads that essentially regurgitated, reordered and condensed the facts into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School Faculty in Sacramento on Thursday…blah, blah, blah.” Does your lead read anything like this? Do any of the research reports you have read or written remind you of this?
The instructor paused and finally said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’ ” In this instant Ephron says she realized that every assignment had a secret to uncover — a hidden point that the students had to uncover in order to tell a good story. The same holds true for research and innovation. You can gather all the facts in the world, but without digging deep and/or laddering up and going beyond just regurgitating the facts, all your work might lead nowhere. And if you are ever on the elevator with a crazed Chief Innovation Officer with a gun in his hand, getting the story right could save your life.
Attracting and retaining the most creative and ingenious employees, the Alphas, means feeding their hunger to innovate. Here's how to do it.
Much of what we've read and certainly everything we have experienced running our firm tells us that the keys to attracting and retaining the best employees — the Alphas — are working on something 1) meaningful, 2) in a lower stress environment, and 3) with a reward system that makes sense.
Now it just so happens that being innovation-focused naturally attracts Alphas, and this in turn drives a better culture. The reason is simple: Successful innovation is intrinsically meaningful. Said differently, you have to be solving a significant need in order to have success with a new product or service. The best and happiest employees want to work on something meaningful. So they naturally gravitate toward innovation assignments.
So how do you attract Alphas and keep the ones you have around? Offer them your most heady, rewarding challenge. Think about what would happen if you had a project like that for every Alpha in the organization. The result would be a magnetic culture that attracts and retains the best people. It would be the Alpha Effect.
Healthcare. Now that’s a loaded term these days. What can we do to create a solution? First of all, we might start with the people involved.
Buying healthcare services is like no other purchase process.
When people make big purchases, they’ve usually done their research and know exactly what they’re paying for. For instance, automobile information is everywhere. And that’s why no one walks up to their local dealership and says “I’ll take that one and decide later if it’s really what I need and if I can afford it.” Information allows people to avoid big financial and personal burdens. But in the healthcare industry, information that helps to make a balanced decision that directly impacts quality of life can be hard to come by. The traditional healthcare information infrastructure does not invite the patient to be involved in understanding exactly what a medical course of action could entail and how much it could cost. The doctor’s role is to do what’s best for the health of the patient, versus administer the financial aspects of the treatment and services. So, healthcare professionals focus on keeping patients healthy, but patients end up receiving the financial information months after the treatment.
People confuse health insurance with healthcare.
Because provider services including hospitals, exams and pharmaceuticals are out of reach monetarily for most Americans, insurance companies are seen as the gatekeepers of healthcare. Instead of looking first to our individual healthcare needs and then purchasing a policy accordingly, many Americans first select a plan which becomes a proxy for healthcare choices, further complicating how an individual is entangled in finding a healthcare solution.
Because healthcare and health insurance are so intertwined, finding a solution for one part of the problem just doesn’t work. We might as well be plugging a small crack in the dam while water seeps through other, equally vulnerable points.
To be a part of something better, we have to think differently about healthcare, health insurance, and how they’re related. To build a solution we need to:
1.) Help create ways for people to manage healthcare using health insurance as one of many significant tools. This would mean that people could shop smarter for health insurance and get access to the healthcare they need, while managing the financial impact of it in real-time.
2.) Re-think the ultimate external factor: our lifestyles. For many Americans, a sedentary lifestyle fueled by poor food choices has become the norm, causing a myriad of health problems. By breaking out of this cycle, Americans could lessen lifestyle-associated diseases and conditions, as well as the high costs that come with them.
3.) Change the existing information flows about healthcare choices to improve patient outcomes both physically and financially.
There is no single solution that will change the factors building momentum toward a healthcare meltdown. Instead, we need many ideas from which evolutionary and revolutionary solutions will be developed.
Do you have “idea parents" inside your company? If you don't you should.
Your children AND your ideas need love, support, discipline and protection.
read more »
Leadership implies movement. Leadership implies a destination.
So, leaders of innovation, here’s question No. 1... “Why should I follow you?”
Your team wants to know why they should follow your lead. They need to see and understand how you are going to take them where they need to go. Don't tell them; show them — by focusing on the essential, not the merely important, by staying above the drama, by leaning in to adversity and by finding opportunities.
1) Focus on the essential, not the merely important. Here’s an “essential vs. important” cheat sheet: The important is rational; essentials are emotional. The important you put on a to-do list; essentials go on a to-die-for list.
2) Stay above the drama.Recessions/transitions/restructurings are by definition temporary. Understanding that is key to your ability to focus on the desired outcome and the kind of organization you want to build.
3) Lean into adversity and find opportunities. Believe in yourself, and if you need inspiration to stay the course, borrow from the best. Warren Buffett made his fortune by following an adage he came up with a long time ago: "Be fearful when others are greedy — be greedy when others are fearful."
Insurance (yes, I said insurance) will be the launching pad for great innovation in the near future. This article tells you why we believe this is true and checks to see if you will be a leader or a surprised follower. read more »
It used to be that being a venture capitalist meant playing bad-cop and tightening up a sloppy company. Today the smartest VCs recognize that the rules have changed and they face an unprecedented opportunity to help the world innovate. read more »
I’ve worked on more than 200 innovation assignments with companies ranging from the Fortune 100 to VC-backed startups. That’s enough to give me a good representative sample to understand what works and what doesn’t. The biggest insight I have for you is that the VC’s approach to “true” innovation is hands down the best model to follow. read more »
If you were to ask me today what I thought was one of the most significant innovations in recent history, I would without hesitation say, Pandora.com. read more »
Crowdsourcing. It’s one controversial yet increasingly popular topic. From marketing agencies to scientific research, many industries are taking a hard look at how 
Take a look at the 
Making predictions is no easy business. Take this, for example:
Let’s say you’re driving home from work when all of a sudden your front left tire drops into a massive pothole causing you to swerve right. Luckily, there are no cars in the right lane, but regardless you’ve narrowly avoided an accident, and with good reason, you’re upset. 
Drive your innovation platform—and increase sales— by making use of your salespeople's front-line customer contact and thirst for new products
How will this apply to us? Take a virus like H1N1 as an example—immediate detection and strain identification can help protect the masses and make responding appropriately to unknown diseases faster and easier—which could mean saving lives.
When looking for a big idea, you don't necessarily want to hear "Eureka!" but laughter
There’s been a lot of buzz around 4G and what it means for innovation. Maddock Douglas recently interviewed 
At 9am every morning 
As we mentioned previously, the best, most innovative, companies are discovering the incredible return on investment that comes from 
early 
Let's start with some numbers: in the first 24 hours of it’s release, 
November – a month of dropping temperatures, turkey consumption and… mustaches? Yes, Maddock Douglas is proudly participating in the internationally awkward yet best-intentioned movement known as 
Healthcare. Now that’s a 
