Sometimes what you expect from an innovative idea or a product isn’t always what you get. In fact sometimes you get the opposite end result from what you thought would happen. If you were around in the 1970’s when the computer revolution was beginning, you may remember all those who predicted that computers would soon…
December is a time when we often think about how we’ve been blessed, and how we’ve been challenged. However you celebrate the holiday season, I hope you are able to take some time to reflect and also to enjoy the people in your lives! This time of year you don’t need to look too hard…
What if you could add more than a half million new customers to your business EVERY DAY, for the next five years? Make that 548,000 new customers, to be precise. That’s what Procter & Gamble’s new chief executiveRobert McDonald says he’ll be doing for the company. He wants to do this by continually expanding P….
I want to take this opportunity to first thank everyone who has already registered for CoDev2010. I hope you’re all as excited as I am about the incredible agenda we’ve put together. What started as an informal gathering of a small group of pioneers has evolved into the longest running and most comprehensive source for…
Last week I was in Orlando for the Open Innovation Summit. I, along with several other speakers, talked about how innovation is often sparked by a burning platform. In other words, a crisis! The conference chair Michael Arndt wrote an article about it in his Businessweek blog titled Next Innovation Tools & Trends. I highly…
I’ve worked with a lot of companies big and small that have been struggling. They’re stymied by the challenges of this economy, and are looking for new ways to achieve growth and customer satisfaction. But there is hope. Their challenge is to change what the world needs rather than letting the world change them. That…
Open innovation’s secret: It takes a crisis: BusinessWeek.com NEXT Innovation Tools & Trends blog, December 3, 2009
One of my painful experiences in the pursuit of patents has been surprisingly close prior art. Even after serious and careful searching related to an invention that seems entirely new, one may later find that someone else pursued a very similar idea many years ago. Like the Good Book says, there is no truly novel…
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is seen as the busiest travel day of the year in the United States, and as I post this, millions of Americans are sitting in airports, train stations or in their cars waiting to get going on their Thanksgiving travel plans. About 38 million domestic travelers are expected to go somewhere…
It’s been a couple of months now since Starbucks launched its instant coffee, after spending years developing it and months preparing its employees to pitch the granules. The product is called Via, and comes in three-packs that go for $2.95. So has Via been an idea that will work? I haven’t had a chance to…
