Monthly Archives: March 2009

Innovating in a down economy

Posted on March 30, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

An innovation consulting firm lists five steps to success in NPD in a down economy. Three of them are: Understand your customers’ new values Manage your new product portfolio/pipeline for the long term Manufacturing (process?) is your best friend. To … Continue reading →

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Facebook doesn’t listen to customers

Posted on March 23, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

Is it best to ignore your customers? Innovation thought leaders such as von Hippel, Utterback and then Christensen, have written about the risks of listening to customers when trying to innovate. A fellow blogger defended Facebook’s policy to ignore users … Continue reading →

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Cross functional innovation teams

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

Cross functional development teams seems like a no-brainer: Having representatives from marketing, finance, operations, customer service, etc. involved early should speed the development process by allowing communication and coordination to be performed in parallel instead of linear fashion. Diversity of … Continue reading →

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Looking for a Cinderella?

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

March Madness: Take a look at Radford University One of the delights of every NCAA tournament is the little or little-known school that makes its way into the “sweet sixteen” or even the final eight. Even if I weren’t a … Continue reading →

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Deloitte on Financial Service Innovation

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

This 2005 article from Deloitte is interesting…(but it is so 2005–premeltdown). A great quote: “Product innovation gives less than three months competitive advantage. Process innovation gives at least 12 months competitive advantage.”                            – Sir John Bond, Chairman HSBC, 2001 http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/DTT_DR_GlitteringPrize_May2005.pdf

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Cocreation: the core competency of innovation

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

I generally don’t post PR puff pieces on my blogs, but this announced research joint venture between Babson College and Venkat Ramaswamy’s consulting firm sounds important for service innovation. Next Practices in Value Creation aims to “demonstrate how organizations can co-create innovation…  The research … Continue reading →

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Hotel Innovation in focus

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

Avoiding group think from focus groups It should not be a surprise to readers of this blog that innovators in hotel service find focus groups and surveys “unreliable” and suggest actually observing customers using the services instead: http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/events/roundtables/service.html

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