I’m joining RevolutionCredit as Chief Scientist
A note on my new job. I’m joining the startup RevolutionCredit as Chief Scientist. In this role, I’ll work on developing the next generation of alternative credit scoring methodologies in the financial technology field. Applying behavioral science to both (i) identify underserved people with characteristics of creditworthiness; and (ii) nudge consumers toward better financial behaviors. The […]
Why Amazon wins | Innovate the core, innovate to transform
Take a look at your organization’s innovation projects. Are you strategically balancing your efforts between the core business and future growth areas? In advising companies about innovation, an area I stress is the value of consciously pursuing both little and BIG innovation. Often, companies pursuing innovation can be categorized as either: Seeking small innovations such as operational […]
16 metrics for tracking Collaborative Innovation performance
In a recent PwC survey, 61% of CEOs said innovation was a key priority for their company (pdf). The only surprising result there is that it wasn’t 100%. Innovation efforts come in a variety of forms: innovation and design labs, jobs-to-be-done analysis, corporate venturing, distributed employee experiments, open innovation, TRIZ, etc. In this post, I […]
How self-driving vehicles can fix the San Francisco housing crunch
In the San Francisco Bay Area, home prices have seen significant appreciation the last few years: Source: Paragon Real Estate Group In the Bay Area, skyrocketing home prices and rents have driven people out of the area. They look for homes in further-out suburbs and exurbs, extending their commutes to work. And the Bay Area leads the nation […]
Avoiding innovation errors through jobs-to-be-done analysis
The lean startup movement was developed to address an issue that bedeviled many entrepreneurs: how to introduce something new without blowing all your capital and time on the wrong offering. The premise is that someone has a vision for a new thing, and needs to iteratively test that vision (“fail fast”) to find product-market fit. It’s been […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Will customers adopt your innovation? Hope, fear and jobs-to-be-done
When will a customer decide your innovative product or service is worth adopting? It’s a question that marketers, strategists and others spend plenty of time thinking about. The factors are myriad and diverse. In this post, let’s examine two primary elements that influence both if an innovation will be adopted, and when it would happen: Decision weights assigned […]
When customers want a product roadmap, do this instead
Product roadmaps suck. There, I said it. <exhales> OK, let’s explain that. Roadmaps that are real, living documents representing what you will deliver…are awesome. But that may not be the case for you; it wasn’t for me. Instead, a product roadmap was at its core a sales document for a prospect call. A lot of effort, with […]
Decision flow for customer feature requests
If you manage a product or service in the business-to-business (B2B) market, customer requests for features will be a regular part of your work. Requests come in through the sales team, service reps, and senior management, as well as directly from customers themselves. It’s a disruptive insertion of new items for your agenda. That disruption […]
