Innovation Can Be The Art of Recycling Ideas!!! – by Rodrigo B. Ferreira

Contrary to the common sense, the value of innovation may simply lie in the ability to improve on existing ideas. This post will discuss how innovation takes place in organizations and which mental paradigms still need to be broken.

The book The Innovator’s DNA explains that innovation skills have less to do with genetic gifts than to do with learnable discovery skills.
Interestingly, these skills (questioning, observing, networking, experimenting and associating) usually develop from the existing concepts in the minds of the individuals.
Innovators seem to improve or change concepts creating benefits that people value.

On the blog post titled Innovation Doesn’t Matter we read:

“The iPad wasn’t even the first tablet computer.”

 “Facebook wasn’t the first social network. Google wasn’t the first search engine. And Apple has invented nothing of breakthrough significance in its own right ever.”

“ […] a business that is very good at iterating on other’s genius will likely win you the title of innovator anyway.”

Generally, the innovative people or companies take ideas and use them as raw material for their innovation process through the discovery skills mentioned above, whether they are aware of such process or not.

From the blog post titled How process leads to the idea:

“Whether you are innovating with new products and services, tapping new technologies or shifting a brand and its image, corporate change and transformation of your business model is hard enough to manage if you have no model for managing the operations to support those innovations.”

Ideas are out there to be observed, used, tweaked, improved, associated, and this makes me wonder if the companies that secretly develop new product through research and development (R&D) are missing the external feedback. Obviously, there is a tradeoff between R&D and speed to market.

On the blog post For Successful Innovation, Sell Imperfect Products we read:

“Rather than making big upfront research and development investments in new ideas, these companies instead start with an MVP, or minimum viable product, […]  The concept behind the MVP is to find the fastest, most cost-effective way to build a salable product that delivers on your basic idea and induces a reaction from prospective buyers.”

 “Lowering product development costs is an important benefit of early market testing. Since more than 90 percent of new products fail the first time they’re launched, smart companies have discovered they can improve their success rate simply by testing an early version.”

Well, it sounds to me as if innovation and creativity are more similar to process improvement than to really having an idea and inventing the next big thing.

The reality is that companies should understand and focus on this iteration process, which is unique and generates great innovations!

Marketing from the customer perspective – by Rodrigo B. Ferreira

This post helps marketers understand how to focus on the brand experience to turn customers into advocates for the company and the brand.

Any customer should have a positive experience with the brand and the company from the need recognition phase and awareness of the brand to the desired advocacy (or at least to a positive purchase experience).

Thinking of the brand experience as a multi-step process that takes place all the way through the “Awareness to Advocacy” (A to A) scale helps marketers identify at which level a brand wants to communicate to the customer and how to do it more successfully. These 2 key elements become clear once we identify the point where the target customer is on the A to A scale.

Although not all customers will make through to the advocacy level, marketers should bear in mind that each individual customer may be persuaded to advance one more level by a well-crafted message.

The complexity of the A to A scale will vary as a function of two basic variables: The time and energy necessary to reach a purchase decision and the risk from a poor decision.

The more complex the decision which a customer needs to make, the more touchpoints will be required to take the customer through the different steps, but broadly speaking the steps will be:

•      Pre-Awareness or need identification (marketing can begin influencing from here)

•      Awareness of the brand

•      Gathering of information

•      Evaluation of options and reasons to believe

•      Purchase experience

•      Results (post purchase evaluation)

•      Loyalty

•      Advocacy

Each of these steps has the potential to take anything from minutes to years and each step may have a large number of sub-steps. It all depends on the nature of the product, service or solution in question and whether the customer is a person, a business or some other institution.

The messages to the customers should always emphasize the main benefits that the customers will achieve as they become loyal to the brand and even the brand “personality”. Finally, the touchpoints should be weaved together so that they make sense to the customers and lead them through the experiences along the A to A scale which will potentially take them to the advocacy level.

Steps to Implement an Innovation Culture – by Rodrigo B. Ferreira

In this post I am sharing my perspective on how to transform a company with a complacent attitude into a more innovative player in the market before it gets overtaken by the competition. This was inspired in a case analysis I made on a company during one of my MBA classes. I hope it’s useful and enjoyable reading for you!

Defining the areas for innovation:

I would identify which areas to tackle first in the corporate change process and in which order, if not in parallel, by looking at an in-depth SWOT analysis of my own company and of the main competitors. Those would be the most impactful areas for a company in the industry.

Identifying talent:

Next I would look deeper into those areas and conduct a survey to assess my company’s internal creativity potential. This assessment should be designed to highlight the potential talent for innovation that some individuals might have, which might be underutilized today. This would focus primarily on management of the previously defined areas.

Cultural change:

I would then lead personally a cultural change process by forming specific teams within each focus department making sure there were intrinsically creative people in each team. Such process wouldn’t radically change their work environment, since this could scare the managers instead of engaging them, but it would have a sense of urgency based in evidence that the company is at risk of being thrown out of the market if we don’t innovate.

I would involve managers in the solution by eliciting critical thinking and suggestions of how they see the company operating in the future to reach the success and growth necessary to keep us in business. They would have to come up with answers to questions like: How do competitors see us? What would take for a competitor to gain our entire market share? Which is our greatest weakness? If we don’t do something to change the situation, who will? Should we hire experts in creativity or should we teach our personnel to innovate?

Taking action:

Now, with the management buy in and their suggestions in my hands I could devise a plan to turn their departments into innovative environments. Maybe even have a contest to incentivize them to turn their work environment into a place that represents the new vision of innovation. Next I would give each manager the opportunity to try something new and give them more flexibility to define how to fulfill my new directions. They could begin by performing “question storming” sessions with their teams about their most urgent problems and other tasks related to observing and networking. In this phase I would mix people from different departments in each team, so that they would be exposed to different views on the business.

Conclusion:

These steps would create new environments, insights and philosophies that the managers would accept immediately because they saw the need for urgent change and were part of the creation of solutions. Also, their freedom to do things differently would motivate them intrinsically build on their loyalty to the company and their know-how and drive more competitive processes, products and brands.