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Who Distinguishes Objectives From Solutions? In his book, Lead With a Story, Paul Smith tells about Jayson Zoller’s experience as a student at the University of Central Florida 20 years ago. One of Jayson’s favorite professors often arranged research projects for the class with community leaders. In one such case, the professor described an unusual …
How On-Demand Insurance Will Shake Up the Industry On April 6th, 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that a fintech startup called Trov (“fintech” refers to any technology innovation in the financial services industry) had raised $45 million to bring on-demand services to the property and casualty insurance market. Trov is an interesting case of …
Why Big Data Underperforms at Innovation – Part 2 There’s a simple way for leaders to obtain the customer information they need for innovation, but it’s not big data. In my last article, I argued that big data underperforms at innovation because it does not reveal causality, i.e., why people buy. Even “predictive” analytics does …
Why Big Data Underperforms at Innovation – Part 1 The American Market Association recently estimated that companies will spend approximately $92 billion on big data by 2026. But is big data delivering the return on investment in innovation that leaders want? Forrester reports that only “29 percent of firms are successful at connecting analytics to …
A Better Way to Formulate ‘Blue Ocean’ Strategy Many readers may be familiar with the 2005 global best-selling book “Blue Ocean Strategy” by professors Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim. In the book, they introduced the concepts of red and blue ocean markets, which are still helpful today for leaders operating in competitive markets. Yet, …
There’s a Better Way to “Refresh Your Brand” We know from study after study that the key to successful growth is having a clear understanding of customers’ unmet needs. It’s very hard to innovate, differentiate, and grow if you don’t know where your target customers’ needs remain unmet by your own offerings and your competitors’ …
Forget About Trying to Create Customer Needs Many people believe that the most innovative companies create customer needs with breakthrough new products. Nobody knew they needed an iPhone, the thinking goes, until Apple created the need for it. Hence, if you want to be an innovation leader, you should find ways to create customer needs. …
Increase Your ROI on R&D In a recent McKinsey survey, 84 percent of global executives reported that innovation is important to growth strategy. Yet only 6 percent are satisfied with their innovation performance. That’s a staggering 94 percent dissatisfied rate — worse than Congress! Perhaps even more disheartening is the finding that very few of …
How to Differentiate in a Mature Market Driving growth in mature markets is hard. By definition, a market is “mature” when most of the customers’ needs are well-satisfied. The reason it’s so hard to differentiate, innovate and gain market share is because there are very few unsatisfied needs left to exploit. This situation tends to …
Drive Growth By Redefining Your Market Definition of a market: “A medium that allows buyers and sellers of a specific good or service to interact in order to facilitate an exchange.” — Investopedia Note that this definition is based on current goods and services. Consequently, it should be no surprise that many business leaders define their markets …
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