Innovation By Leeching – Two Examples from CES

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There are many ways to innovate. You can try to aim for the white space or the “blue oceans” (difficult), copy and enhance successful products (easier) or you can just leech on existing products and services (clever).

Fast Company wrote about this type of innovation on its blog post “Two CES Trends to Watch in 2010: Mullets and Prosthetics“.

Author Rob Tannen noticed two trends on the consumer electronics show:

  • sexification and personalization of dull electronics
  • add-on devices for popular platforms such as the iPhone (as a musician I really like the mini keyboard for the iphone :-) )

Just to say that you don’t need to be a genius to come up with new products and services. Look at what’s popular, see what’s missing, fill the gap and market the hell out of it.

Innovation Best Of – Best Innovation Articles of 2009

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The readers of the Business Strategy Innovation blog chose their list of the best innovation articles of 2009. Ideal material to get your creative juices flowing. I particularly liked “Innovation through the eyes of a child” and “21 Great Innovation Methods”.

Read the best innovation articles of 2009 here.

I particularly liked reading the work of Rosabeth Moss Kanter on HBR.

What are your favorite articles on innovation?

IT Savvy – What Executives need to know about IT to make the most of it

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Interesting book here from HBR press.
It Savvy - What Top Executives Must Know to go from pain to gain - it strategy book

This book details the practices, competencies, and leadership skills non-IT managers need to be successful in the digital economy. More specifically you will learn how to:

-Define your firm’s operating model-how IT can help you do business
-Revamp your IT funding model to support your operating model
-Build a digitized platform of business processes, IT systems, and data to execute on the model
-Determine IT decision rights
-Extract more business value from your IT assets

The ideal new year’s gift for your CEO’s :-)

Consumer Trends For 2010

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consumer trends 2010

Trendwatching released their report on the10 crucial consumer trends for 2010.

I personally believe that number 8 – “Tracking and alerting” will become a biggy. Think about it:

- tracking of fitness and disease status through mini apps & devices (iphone anyone?) with the right sensor technology

- create all kinds of triggers that will alert you when products reach a certain price, when promotions happen, …

- social media goes geo-location: where do your friends hang out?

Companies will be able to profit from this by getting customers to subscribe to their alerts and notify them of special deals.

Finally, the conditions are there for this type of augmented reality: proliferation of smart phones, vast communication possibilities, social media, …

You can read the rest of the trend report here.

What trend do you think will be big in 2010?

Innovation Trends That Became Mainstream in 2009

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A downward economy is always an innovation killer. Budgets for R&D are cut and defensive strategies are all around. Paradoxically, recession is also a breeding ground for new products and business models (Apple had one of its most profitable quarters ever in a recession).

The following innovation trends saw a significant level of adoption: open innovation, design thinking and trickle-up innovation.

Open innovation happens when a company involves customers, suppliers and other business partners in their R&D  process. This concept is clearly in line with the whole web 2.0 movement that is focused on user involvement and collaboration. A very interesting evolution.

Trickle-up innovation: products and services that are designed for the developing countries and are then introduced in the developed world (typically it is the other way around). This is sometimes referred to as the “good enough market”

Design thinking: basically this is about innovating with the user in mind. Design thinking is a human-centered approach about converting needs into demand.

Check out this business week article for more information.

So what do you think? What are most important innovation trends? What are the things that can spur innovation?

Measuring the business value of IT – Towards a new fincial model and metrics for IT

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Does IT matter? What’s thre strategic value of ICT? Pertinent questions that are difficult to answers unless companies introduce clear KPI’s to measure the business value of ICT instead of regarding it just as a cost center.

“IT has evolved dramatically since it became part of mainstream enterprise operations. However, IT financials remain largely stuck in a 1980’s view of controlling capital and operating expenditures. CIOs need a new model that reflects IT’s contribution to changing enterprise performance”.

For further reading see this recent post on the Gartner blog.

My holiday wishes for CIOs around the world