Author Archives: Gary R Schirr

Limited Wisdom of Crowds?

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Gary R Schirr

Nicholas G. Carr wrote an excellent article, “The Ignorance of Crowds,” about the limitation of crowd-sourcing or open source software. He focuses on the experience of Linux and Wikipedia. The masses primarily serve as bug-fixers for Linux, whose development is closely managed … Continue reading →

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Social Media Marketing will Drive Product Innovation

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Gary R Schirr

How social media can advance innovation by facilitating customer and user cocreation. Continue reading →

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Group Ideation does not work…

Posted on April 6, 2010 by Gary R Schirr

 Group methods (compared to individual ideation): Produce significantly fewer ideas Generate ideas of lower average quality Produce fewer of the very best ideas, and In addition, groups are not effective at evaluating or ranking generated ideas. Add-on ideas building on … Continue reading →

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Ethnography and Product Innovation

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Gary R Schirr

 Does Ethnography make the front end of innovation less fuzzy? I have written several posts about the use of ethnography to gather good data from users. A recent article in the Journal of Product Innovation Management explores the topic in … Continue reading →

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Global Innovation Tournament at RU

Posted on November 25, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

The entrepreneurship area at Stanford sponsors the GIT annually. Radford decided to participate this year. I was on the committee to run the event and it was the best “service” function I am involved in — beats the daylights out … Continue reading →

Posted in Ideation | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

More on the UIC Center; Product Innovation

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

I have written about the UIC Innovation Center (sponsored by Motorola) and the multi-discipline (MBA-Design-Engineering) class on product innovation offered by the center before. “Housed in a former grocery store on the UIC campus, the center has flexible space, industrial … Continue reading →

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More Zombie Theory

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

In my previous post I talked of two theories/ideas that are popular in marketing despite having a preponderance of evidence that they are inneffective or untrue: Group brainstorming or focus groups for idea generation Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Several readers … Continue reading →

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UIC Innovation Center: NPD Education

Posted on August 25, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

A cross-discipline approach to innovation education A week ago Friday the UIC Innovation center held an open house and reception for academics attending the AMA Summer conference in Chicago. Al Page, professor of Marketing at the University of Illinois at … Continue reading →

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Zombie Theory

Posted on August 12, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

It is hard to totally disprove a theory or idea in social sciences — there is always some possibility that a different experimental design or a new sample will show that it works in certain circumstances. However, if we are scientists … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer Research Methods | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Cola Co-creation

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Gary R Schirr

Coca-cola has developed new dispensing machines that contain up to thirty flavors that can produce up to 100 different types of soda. The machines can be reset realtime and communicate so that coke can introduce a new soft drink and … Continue reading →

Posted in Co-creation or User collaboration, communication, Customer Research Methods, experiential innovation, Experiment, Internet effects, Process Innovation | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment