Hutch Carpenter
Strategic Consultant with HYPE Innovation, helping enterprises get more value from their innovation programs. Firm believer in the concept of jobs-to-be-done, which stresses the importance of understanding customers' wants and needs. Also sports a 2:57 marathon PR. Dad to two awesome kids.
Jobs-to-be-done | Three tests ALL ideas must pass
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill… they want a quarter-inch hole. Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School professor You’re awash in ideas. Ideally from running targeted campaigns, but you may be seeing them from other quarters as well. Great, then what? A key activity in the process of innovation is determining which of many […]
Consumer adoption of Bitcoin | A jobs-to-be-done analysis
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently did one of his tweetstorms on the topic of Bitcoin, a technology he avidly supports. In 25 tweets, he talked about criticisms people have of Bitcoin. Including this one (#18) about “use cases”: 18/The third critique I call the “innocent” one — “Are there enough sufficiently compelling uses cases for Bitcoin […]
Rate your company’s innovation culture
Culture. “Culture” is one of those terms. Hard to define, but you know it when you see it, right? I mean, we all understand what we’re talking about here, don’t we? I’d bet if you and I polled 10 people on the street, we’d get 10 different interpretations for culture. In the course of my work, […]
Radio Show Interview: Collaborative Innovation at Scale
The area of collaborative innovation is a natural extension of the social business movement. It’s the extension of social into purposeful collaboration, a term Alan Lepofsky uses to describe the evolution of the social business market. In the innovation-focused radio show, Women Who Innovate, host LeAnna Carey, innovation expert John Lewis and I talk about […]
Talk-n-Tweet | Collaborative Innovation at Scale
Previously, I’ve described Why Crowdsourcing Works. Crowdsourcing is a case where you get many people who don’t one another collaborating toward a defined outcome.To reiterate the principle points about the value of crowdsourcing: Diverse inputs drive superior solutions Cognitive diversity requires spanning gaps in social networks Simple enough, yet actually a rich field for work and […]
Harvesting Abundance in the Sharing Economy
The amateurs are coming! Are you ready? Over time, we have seen transitions in how goods and services are supplied to buyers. It used to be that you were limited to what you could buy in your local village. With the rise of industrialization and subsequent globalization, choices increased and costs went down. But inevitably, […]
Avoid these 3 mistakes when asking for employee ideas
Global advisory and research firm Ovum recently forecast 8% annual growth over the next five years for innovation management. Strong momentum, as organizations awake to the cognitive surplus their employees possess. Sadly, some companies launching employee innovation programs will inevitably find the going tough. They’ll launch their innovation initiative with great fanfare. They’ll give themselves the powerful […]
What if customers evaluated your company’s ideas?
At the 2014 HYPE Innovation Managers Forum in Bonn, I hosted a roundtable that looked at Involving Customers in the Innovation Process. There were over a dozen different corporations represented in the discussion. To spur the conversation, I mapped the points for customer involvement as: What customers want (jobs-to-be-done) ideas (open innovation) Feedback on options (collaborative design) As […]
Beyond Ideation: Four Fresh Ways to Generate Innovation
Innovation requires something new that changes the way in which an activity gets done. In this formulation, ideation is the processus maximus, the best way to get something new. It properly is the most frequent mode of innovation. It delivers results. But sometimes, it’s good to shake things up. Change up the routine to refresh the sources of […]
Consultant-Led Innovation
Finally, remember Innovation won’t come from plans or people outside your company – it will be found in the people you already have inside who understand your company’s strengths and its vulnerabilities. Steve Blank, Esade Business School Commencement Speech I think Steve Blank – well-respected thinker on innovation and entrepreneurship – has hit a key point […]
Keys to success with an innovation reward program
Cash, gift cards, electronics, extravagant trips…these are the rewards that make people innovate, no? Tee them up, announce their availability and let innovative minds go to work. When I say “rewards” and “innovation”, is that what springs to your mind? You’re not alone. It’s the default our minds run to. Maybe we’ve watched too many […]
The gamification framework for business innovation
Analyst Brian Burke recently reformulated Gartner’s definition of gamification. His objective was to sharpen the firm’s focus for gamification, with “digital” and “motivation” as key elements. Burke’s announcement shines a spotlight on the continued expansion of gamification in many aspects of life. While Gartner looks at gamification from a horizontal perspective, I wanted to go deeper […]
Gmail offers surprising innovation lessons for the Fortune 500
If you’re familiar with the story of Gmail, you know – for a fact – that it was a 20% time employee project by Paul Buchheit. A little bottom-up experimentation that grew into something big. Surprise! That story is wrong. It was a desire by Google, the company, to offer its own email. From Harry McCracken’s great piece How […]
Is it innovation or just an improvement? Does it matter?
On the LinkedIn Front End of Innovation group, I saw this post: Interesting (and heated) discussions @ Unleashing Innovation Summit in Amsterdam earlier in the month: Incremental innovation is NOT innovation – it’s just marketing. REAL innovation is breakthrough/transformational… Agree or not? I’ve seen this debate before. Attempts to finally, once-and-for-all establish just where improvement […]
How deep does crowdsourced problem-solving go?
On the recent post, Why crowdsourcing works, Michael Fruhling of BFS Innovations asked: A couple of related questions: for most current crowd sourced problem solving endeavors, how “deep” does the problem solving routinely go? And do the results meaningfully change if incentives are introduced? It was a good, thoughtful question. I answered it in the […]
