Execute Innovation and Creativity Will Happen Most people think that innovation and creativity are essentially the same thing. And, for normal everyday conversations, that’s fine. But if you’re responsible for developing winning new products and services, you must make some distinctions. Otherwise, your innovation efforts will continue to be hit-or-miss. If you want to turn ...

6 Steps to Turn Innovation into a Repeatable Business Process

Think Different Most people think of innovation as a mysterious and unpredictable act of creativity. That’s why most companies fail about 75% of the time. Instead, think of innovation as the process of discovering the target customers’ unmet needs and then devising solution ideas to address them. That’s a simple repeatable process. If you’re like ...

When Being Customer-Focused Isn’t Enough Many organizations proudly promote being “customer focused” in their vision, mission, values and/or culture. I think we can all agree that this is a good thing because, for starters, without customers, there wouldn’t be a business. And probably all of us can cite many reasons why we like doing business ...

What’s Wrong with Twitter’s Strategy? Despite Twitter’s social and political influence, the business has languished. It has struggled to make a profit and the stock price has gone virtually nowhere in 10 years. The problem: It’s a classic case of a “technology solution looking for a market.” Yet, Twitter is not alone. Many companies have ...

How to Turn Innovation into Simple Problem-Solving

Effective Ways to Reduce Innovation Risk (Published by the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) June 7, 2022)

Becoming An Employer of Choice I don’t need to tell you that the competition for talent is intense. Many companies continue to turn away customers because they don’t have the people to meet the demand. This was brought home to me anew recently when I got a first-of-its-kind request for a proposal. Instead of helping ...

Demystify Innovation and Growth Strategy If you want to be successful at innovation and growth, you must understand these 5 truths: 1.  Innovation is not inherently risk and messy. The way most organizations go about understanding their target customers’ unmet needs is risky and messy. By dramatically reducing “market risk” (i.e., the risk that people ...

This Mindset Shift Can Deliver Huge Results The Copernican Revolution took a major step forward in 1543 when Nicolaus Copernicus published his mathematical proof that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around. It took many years to be broadly accepted. Evidently, it’s quite normal for people to see themselves as the ...