The days of loose coupon clippings may be coming to an end, as the coupons we used to clip and carry are just about to go mobile. McDonald, Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, Clorox and Del Monte and others are all posed to send their customers mobile coupons, either via text messages (with their permission), directing the user to the company’s mobile coupon site or promoting the product through barcode technology where retailers scan the barcodes right from your cell phone as you stand in the checkout line!

This one-to-one marketing opportunity is huge–where messages are customized and localized towards individual’s tastes and behaviors. Today there are more than 230 million mobile phone users in the US; and an estimated three billion coupons will be issued to mobile phone users by 2011, amounting to sales of almost $87 billion.

How do consumers feel about coupons via cell phone? Three-quarters of consumers felt that a coupon would be the most effective incentive to get them to respond to a mobile marketing message and that half would use mobile coupons for a discount at a local store, according to a survey by ABI Research. Similar studies by Jupiter Research show that 30 percent of consumers would like to receive mobile coupons.

A start-up called Cellfire provides advertisers/marketers with the ability to promote special discounts or savings of their goods/services via mobile coupons (opted-in SMS). Some of the advertisers include Domino’s Pizza, Supercuts, EMI Music, LA Times and Hardees’ among others. McDonald recently conducted a regional test of mobile coupons where consumers could receive one of the chain’s new iced coffees for free. Subway is using mobile coupon to drive retail traffic with last-minute special offers. To date, more than 10,000 retail stores nationwide are said to redeem Cellfire mobile coupons.

The Kroger grocery store has entered into a partnership with consumer-packaged food companies like P&G, General Mills and Kimberly-Clark to offer mobile coupons at the end of the second quarter using Cellfire services. The coupons offered will be mobile-exclusive and will be valid for specific store locations.

Other mobile coupon providers include GoMobo, SnapTell and Ugotitfirst. With mobile phones being such personal devices, receiving opt-in savings messages from relevant businesses would be highly appealing.

Best of all in my opinion is that there’s definitely a “Green” advantage to mobile coupons in the potential to save billions of dollars in paper and printing costs!

I’m getting ready to help showcase a “Workshop of the Future” at the FAB LAB at Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wisc. The event is April 30th 4 to 6 p.m., and is designed to connect people and their ideas to the world!

I invite you to check it out. You’ll be able to create, collaborate, learn and build just about anything you can imagine, and then connect to experts who personally help make innovators’ dreams into reality.

A little FAB LAB background: The Fabrication Laboratory concept was created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Dr. Neil Gershenfeld and his team at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. It integrates local expertise, global resources and bench top fabrication technology to deliver personalized fabrication or rapid, proof-of-concept prototyping.

The FAB LAB at FVTC is only the 16th in the world and first production facility in the USA outside of MIT. It’s also the first to focus on entrepreneurs and developing businesses in partnership with the FVTC Venture Center. I’m proud to champion this resource!

If you’re an existing business, a student, a “garage inventor” or a creative soul with a great idea, you can have access to personalized product prototyping. The FAB LAB is open to FVTC students, our partner organizations and the general public, through a variety of packaged options.

he FAB LAB is a unique “Innovation Center” that provides innovators/inventors the knowledge base and resources to translate their idea into a prototype product. We provide industry expertise at FVTC in engineering and manufacturing who will help you make almost anything on specific technology needed for product prototyping. Learn how to use laser engraver cutters, CAD programs, milling machines and more.

If you’re an existing business, a student, a “garage inventor” or a creative soul with a great idea, you can have access to personalized product prototyping. The FAB LAB is open to FVTC students, our partner organizations and the general public, through a variety of packaged options.

Check out this link to learn more.

I’ve had a great time meeting with packaging industry leaders this week at the 2008 Packaging Strategies Summit in Bonneventure, Florida, where I was one of the featured speakers. With so many innovative developments in packaging design, I am fascinated by how these leaders are continually coming up with great new ideas that deliver differentiation and disrupt the store aisle!

One of the challenges I often hear about is how to maintain this growth while meeting the needs of what I call the Innovation Ecosystem (which I tell my clients is a top-priority!). Today I shared with conference attendees the main elements they must focus on as they design their own packaging innovation ecosystem. Environmental, economic and social considerations are the three main forces involved in sustainable innovation.

Of course, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all ecosystem, so each company must create its own based on its unique offerings and capabilities. To build an innovation ecosystem, you need to have an open-ended sustainable outcome by looking across the design, delivery of product, how it is used and how it is disposed of. These ecosystems involve complex relationships between many players: vendors, customers, regulators, influencers, shoppers, decision makers, management, innovators, brokers, competitors and others, where simple linear chains of events are not applicable.

The business objectives should focus on how to decrease the environmental footprint, improve the financial bottom line and operate the organization ethically to improve your relationships with employees and the communities where they live and work.

We also talked about the need for developing partnerships and alliances that complete their ecosystem and deliver sustainable, innovation-driven growth. Bottom line: It’s important to choose the right partners who have the eco-friendly designs and the disposability that you don’t have within your own brick and mortar walls.

Today we announced our partnership with the UK-based research firm Pure Insight, and it will produce something of real and usable value for anyone interested in learning about and applying innovation solutions! We’re going to be producing Web-based seminars, or “Webinars,” to show and tell the world about amazing insights and innovation best practices from some of the world’s leading innovation practitioners.

Innovationedge will be the sole U.S. solutions provider to host Pure Insight Webinars, which will enable corporate innovation leaders, inventors and entrepreneurs to access the most current innovation best practices right from their desktop. Not only will you be able to learn from and interact with these presenters in real time, you can also access a library of Web-based presentations.

These Webinars will cover a range of topics including strategy, structure, culture, open innovation and portfolio management, to name a few. Each Webinar presentation will provide examples and insights into ways to implement leading-edge innovation practices, and allow listeners to hear the successes and challenges directly from those who have successfully faced and solved them.

Pure Insight is admired by corporations across Europe, and I’m enjoying collaborating with its Chief Excecutive Klaus Schnurr and his talented team!

Be sure to check out the schedule for our live and recorded Webinar sessions. You’ll find them by clicking here:

It’s nice to know that other bloggers are writing about the importance of sharing innovation insights. Chuck Frey over at InnovationTools.com did a nice job capturing the Global Innovation Exchange 2007 event that I keynoted last month. The GIE was a 100 percent virtual event that in itself was a highly innovative online format. We had great participation and I enjoyed the feedback.

Events like GIE highlight the need for companies to focus on enabling open innovation through organizational structures that work. I often counsel clients to organize their companies in such a way to include innovation councils, communities of practice and venture boards.

I championed these measures at Kimberly-Clark, and I’ve seen how these structures work in many other companies. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, leverages communities of practice to share best practices, experiences and processes across business units.

At K-C, we used venture boards to manage the growth portfolio and drive a steady stream of new product and market innovations. The board members—all C-level people—were a combination of internal innovation leaders and external experts, who help the company enter “white space” business opportunities.

Nokia formed a venture group called the Innovent  to identify companies and technologies that could disrupt their business. These disruptors help in developing Nokia’s business plans and go-to-market strategies. By investing in and partnering with them, Nokia is able to prevent itself from being blindsided by the competition.

These organizational structures enable companies to take huge strides in building open innovation models that deliver real growth time and again.

In the past few years you’ve no doubt heard the term “speed dating,” the fastest way for singles to meet and greet eligible singles. What if you could find that in the business realm? If you are looking to connect with other innovators like yourself, here’s another great reason to sign up for the CoDev 2008 Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz.: Innovation Speed Dating!

Innovation Speed Dating is a brand new event for CoDev attendees interested in finding new connections for their own co-development and innovation efforts. It’s a structured approach to networking, ensuring attendees meet the people they need to meet, and designed specifically for CoDev08.

I’m chairing CoDev 2008, and I encourage you to get off the fence if you haven’t registered yet. CoDev is focused on presenting thought leadership and relevant case studies on open innovation, co-development and building networks of innovators to fuel growth.

Innovationedge and Venture2 are sponsoring the new Innovation Speed Dating event, which we’ve designed specifically for CoDev 2008 registrants, whether large company, emerging company, academic members or service providers. The event is designed to support a variety of connections’ opportunities, including:

• “company to company” networking for potential co-development or other collaborative opportunities
• “technology provider to company” networking for potential technology licensing opportunities
• “service provider to company” networking to match up company’s needs with service providers having a potential solution

Based on the collective preferences of all the attendees, we’ll create a customized schedule of 5 minute ‘speed-dates’ in multiple rounds in the same reception room at individual ‘stations’. It’s high energy, fun and amazingly effective at connecting you with the right people at CoDev08. Beyond the event, the online portal can be used for follow-up networking with connections of choice.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about office trends for companies who are now re-thinking the mazelike grid of gray cubicles to better use office space and improve productivity. It’s a great read. Click here to see it. The article talks about the benefits of the new office layouts that provide tables where several workers can gather, and lounge-like settings with armchairs. These emphasize a trend to congregate employees in open areas without walls.

I couldn’t agree more! Where and how you work is an important element in creating your corporate culture of innovation. As you know, I am a strong proponent of sparking employee engagement through a number of energizing experiences that help teams become more innovative. 

Just a few weeks ago my Innovationedge team moved in to our new office building headquartered in Neenah, Wisconsin, into a creative space designed to enable the flow of innovative ideas. We’ve had many clients, colleagues and friends stop by, and it’s been great to see their reaction as they look around in amazement. “This is really awesome,” is the phrase that confirms we accomplished precisely what we set out to do.

Home sweet home: The Innovationedge sign announces our arrival on Commercial Street in Neenah, Wis. last month.

In the past several months I’ve had the pleasure of designing this unique space not only with my team’s input but with several partners who are in sync with the latest creative interior elements. Throughout this space, we’ve created multi-faceted areas with reconfigurable furniture, integrated technology, and creative props–all of which allow for communicating rapid decision-making processes, ideation and strategy development.

Wide open spaces:  Cheryl (right), ideates with Ashley Crikelair and Caryn Sudduth in our cubicle-free space, while Roy Luebke concentrates nearby in his noiseless office.

The end result is a space that looks nothing like traditional office spaces. Large windows almost completely surround our building, and our individual offices along the outside walls are separated from our interior creative space with floor-to-ceiling walls of glass. This open concept bathes us in natural light no matter where we are inside. Even our interior kitchen wall allows light to pass over the open space above. The team loves the flexible work spaces, which they tell me allows them to “work out loud.” And judging from the creative toys, books and other fun personal effects decorating their desktops, I believe they’ve settled in comfortably.

I’m preparing for a live Webinar event this afternoon called “Insights to Innovation,” and it’s a free, 45 minute overview of contemporary tools and techniques for uncovering hidden customer and consumer insights and translating those insights into business building innovation.

Innovationedge is teaming up with EMM Group to host the Webinar, and you can find out more about the webinar at 2 p.m. Eastern time by clicking on this link. EMM Group’s Hunter Hastings and I will deliver a best practice approach to discovering hidden customer and consumer insights and sharing and applying those insights to generate innovation ideas to deliver top-line growth.

Hunter and I also collaborated on another big project, and I’m excited to tell you that Hunter’s new book titled, Improve Your Marketing To Grow Your Business hits the bookstores this week. I helped Hunter pen one of the chapters in the book, and the foreword is by my friend and former boss Tom Falk, CEO of Kimberly-Clark.

My chapter deals with generating insights about your customers and their unmet needs, and then leveraging those insights in unique or unusual ways based on the motivations that drive their behavior to create sustainable innovations. I encourage you to pick up a copy. I’ve posted a new book review under my site’s “Books on the Edge” tab, and you can click here to order online.
 

What if you had a tool in a box that—when opened—could stimulate your employees to innovate? Inventables  is does exactly that, and has some of the most innovative product developers and designers achieving enormous success.   One of Inventables’ client companies, Nike, says: 

“Inventables is a great tool to stimulate thinking; an excellent catalyst to the process of design synthesis. It helps you recognize how elements of an object you experienced in the past, may enhance the development of the concept you are working on now.” –Tom Berend, Advanced Innovation for Nike 

Check out this new video report on CNN Money about how this forward-thinking company is helping thousands of clients discover new possibilities. (Here is another archived article, and a recent interview on National Public Radio.) Inventables has been around for about five years now, the brainchild of Zach Kaplan and Keith Schacht who wanted to empower product developers with stimulus of what is new and now possible.  

Four times a year, Inventables sens a box of 20 odds and ends to subscribers at companies like P&G, GM, and Black & Decker. The team’s “Technology Hunters” seek out largely unknown yet interesting materials, electronics, capabilities and “wow” products from trade shows, journals, foreign markets, and others. Then they bring these items right to their clients’ workplace for employees to play with, ponder and be inspired to create the next new-to-the-world innovation.  In doing so, Inventables injects innovation technologies right into their clients’ culture so that employees can start thinking more creatively.  

I am honored to announce that Innovationedge is leading the charge for next year’s 7th International Conference of PDMA’s “CoDev 2008” in Scottsdale, Ariz.  I’ve been busy assembling a powerful steering committee to take our combined knowledge of collaborative innovation up a notch for next year’s event. Our goal is to help participants build and leverage an open innovation model while managing intellectual property (IP) around a core business strategy.  

I’m also delighted to tell you that I’ll be joined by renowned thought leaders and innovators from Microsoft, Boeing, Motorola and a host of others who are leveraging their own open innovation models to accelerate faster, better solutions.  In planning this conference around the growing range of open innovation options, I have a robust course schedule in the works. In addition to IP strategy, we’ll be diving into courses on Culture, Metrics, Investment vs. Return, Choosing the Right Partners and Organizational Networks. 

That said, I strongly encourage you to save the dates – January 21, 22 and 23 – for CoDev 2008. If you know anyone who would like to get on the mailing list to be notified about program updates and registration availability, sign up on the PDMA Web site. Of course, the earlier you register, the better your chances are of securing your spot in the pre-conference workshops and hotel of your choice.