Category Archives: innovation
Displair Makes Midair Touch-Enabled Air
This is really fun to watch: Displair Makes Midair Touch-Enabled Air Holograms Mainstream – (product dev application anyone?) #innovation I’d say broadscale adoption of this and similar by 2014…especially in Retail and Healthcare sectors.
Reclaiming Marketing Innovation: The Modern CMO Imperative
We’re happy to announce the outcomes of our “summer project” – a study and perspective on the state of Innovation in and around Marketing. While it took us a while to release this report, we are extremely excited about it. We’ll be sharing our favorite quotes, insights and charts. We start by evaluating why people […]
115 Innovative Ideas for the Modern CMO (pretty version)
115 Innovation ideas for the modern CMO presents eight categories of concepts loving curated to incite creativity
Audi Gives Us A Different Kind of “Test Drive”
Imagine walking into an auto dealership that didn’t have any automobiles. Imagine sitting down in a black leather bucket seat, surrounded only by LED screens – but still somehow looking into a dashboard and out of a windshield. What if you could reach out, push a button and “start” the car, turn up the music, […]
The Modern CMO – Describing her competencies
Who is the Modern CMO? Well, you, we hope. As part of the development of our MKT_Innov8 Study, we developed a perspective on the competencies marketing innovation requires, but we also felt strongly that we needed some better definition of the competencies for the modern CMO as well. I first used the term the […]
Why Horizon Scanning is Important – and How to Start
So we need find them…designers, engineers, bloggers/journalists, academics, futurists, innovation labs, thinkers, tinkerers, tradesmen. To be practical, you can’t boil the internet ocean. Big data is crushing and you don’t have the time or interest in sorting it all out. So, the way you do this is by structuring 5 key keyword queries that represent not your current market but the markets/products/consumers next to it. Let me stress again – NOT your current business. The people who do customer service and community management will handle those. You keep adding or changing your wording a little bit until you start to find aha moments. You can, if you have a well articulated set of innovation initiatives, look to further down the horizon line using the same method.
Innovation in small cups: Dovely Tea
We often refer to innovation in its big, game changing approaches. However, we often fail, at the same time, to remember that innovation as a game changer starts by changing the nature of experience for a limited bunch of ultra committed individuals who meet on common ground. We see outcomes of innovation, not the small […]
Innovative Business Models: The New BOGO
Warby Parker, and their quirky name drawn from Kerouac, not only does the charitable thing well, they reinvent the shopping model. They make it easy for you to give them a chance. I uploaded a photo of me, head tilted and not directly centered, on which they managed to allow me to try on most of their recommended glasses. This allowed me to narrow my choices to 5 pairs – FREE OF CHARGE – which they will send to me and allow me to choose from. I will overnight them back – with a prepaid label to make it EASY – with my selection.
Innovation’s 20 Questions
At last, some simplicity around Innovation. I’ve seen and evaluated a lot of frameworks for delivering innovation in the organization. A lot of them are very pretty. They are lofty and fluffy. I wanted to take away all of that and give you something extremely practical and real. Normal language. No really big words. Just a set of radically simple questions to help you determine if something should qualify to receive the time and attention innovation deserves from your organization. (PS – there is a TL/DR graphic of the whole framework at the beginning of this long post)
Going Rogue: Innovators to Follow – Day 5; Mobile
It seems the connection we have to our devices is not just deep. At some times, it feels nearly irrational. And as anyone who has ever seen it, a bit hilarious (as evidenced by the site, Damnyouautocorrect.com – definitely NSFW). It’s a testament to how many needs those smartphones or tablets actually fulfill for us. So desperate is our need for continual access that we now have a sizable problem with texting and driving. And using them as phones is only a small part of what we do with them. We game on them, we read on them, we watch videos on them. They augment our reality, they link/tweet/friend/pin and share us, they connect all the dots in our lives.
As a response to this connection, mobile marches forward in driving progress across the marketplace. Biometrics/Health/Fitness – check. Banking/Payments/Invoicing – check. Shopping/Price Surfing/Comparison – check. It’s the tip of mobility iceberg. Technologies and social sharing abilities are constantly evolving, and having the ability to partake in them without being strapped to a conventional computer has had an amazing impact on our lives. You might have seen Best Buy’s innovation commercial (aired during the Super Bowl):
