I am proud to announce the launch of Innovation Tutors – your home for high quality Innovation eLearning, which will be delivered by recognized innovation thought leaders that travel the world delivering innovation keynotes, public masterclasses and corporate workshops.
We are excited to announce our first two BETA eLearning offerings, which we are providing for FREE for a limited time:
And, we are proud to announce our partnership with the Global Innovation Management Institute (GIMI) to bring you the referenced BETA – Global Innovation Certification eLearning AND…
There will be more eLearning for the Global Innovation Certification coming soon:
— Level 1 – Associate
— Level 3 – Manager
–> CLICK here for your FREE eLearning for the Global Innovation Certification BETA <--
PLUS, we will be bringing you our own in depth eLearning offering to supplement the certification training or as a standalone to provide your employees with a strong understanding of innovation fundamentals. So watch for the following eLearning and DVD to appear soon:
— Innovation 101
So, please enjoy these introductory FREE Innovation eLearnings and watch for more extensive premium eLearning offerings coming soon!
Keep innovating!
P.S. If you have a need for an innovation keynote, public masterclass, or innovation workshop – Please Contact Us!
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If you are attending the conference in Santa Clara, CA and would like to connect while I am there (or are based in Silicon Valley and would like to meet up), then contact me so we can schedule a time.
Happy to discuss:
Your innovation program and your learnings for my future writings
Your innovation training needs
Your innovation certification needs
Your innovation keynote speaking needs
Or, just any innovation advisory needs you might have.
Every once in a while someone comes along and takes what most people believe is a mature category and finds a way to inject new life, new innovation into it.
What’s even more impressive in the case that I’m about to talk about is that a new entrant has found a way to innovate in a category where the dominant player is often held up by innovation consultants and innovation keynote speakers (like myself) as a company that has an innovative culture and working environment, plus an open innovation program worth looking at.
What established player am I speaking of?
Lego
And if you’re not aware of their open innovation program, it is called Lego Cuusoo.
So how could someone come in and realistically challenge Lego?
By coming in with a building toy approach that is both Lego compatible but while simultaneously introducing new design and building capabilities.
The main thing that this new competitor is bringing to bear to compete with the dominant Lego, is motion.
Think about what would happen if you smashed together the basic tenets of Lego with the basic tenets of Hasbro’s Transformers (more than meets the eye), and you’ll start to get an idea of what this new competitor is bringing to their crashing of the Lego party.
Who is this Lego competitor?
They are called Ionix Bricks.
They launched into the marketplace with a Saturday morning cartoon called Tenkai Knights on the Cartoon network.
Here is a video review of some of the initial robot characters, showing how they transform and can be configured and played with:
At first glance they look pretty fun!
Will they catch on and take some of the building toy market away from Lego?
What do you think?
Personally, I think that they have a chance of doing so, and if nothing else I think that Ionix Bricks and the Tenkai Knights are a good reminder that even in categories that people might think are pretty mature and the dominant player is unlikely to be disrupted, that isn’t necessarily the case.
And if you get bored with the pieces that come in any of the Tenkai Knights building sets?
Well, because they are compatible with Lego and other leading building sets, you can attach all kinds of crazy, random Lego pieces that you might already have from castle, space, or other kinds of sets.
Ionix Bricks are a good example of the “C” from SCAMPER – Combine – as they are exactly the kind of outcome you would expect if you combined Legos with Transformers. I wonder what kind of other crazy toys some young toy designer out there could come up with by combining Legos with something else.
In the meantime, I challenge you to keep challenging your own orthodoxies about what your product or service should look like, and how your industry should operate. You never know what kind of crazy new potential innovation you might come up with if you never take your product or service as perfected and keep challenging things at the edges.
What things about your product or service could you challenge? How could SCAMPER or other ideation tools help you?
I will be at the Back End of Innovation conference (November 18-20, 2013) in Silicon Valley. I hope you’ll join me!
One thing that I find fascinating about the innovation space is that when it comes to innovation is the outcomes of competition within an industry. I talk alot about it being about collecting and connecting the dots, and in any industry any company looking to survive and thrive, must continuously innovate and that means continuously collecting and connecting dots.
These dots can be technology advances in different component technologies, these dots can be changing and emerging trends (demographic, psychological, sociological, societal, etc.), they can be changes in customer needs, or a whole host of other bits of interesting information that connect together to create new unique and differentiated customer insights to power the next round of potential innovations for a company.
And because all companies to survive and thrive must continue to innovate, that means that every single company within an industry is constantly collecting and connecting dots. Taken a bit further, all of the companies in the industry tend to structure themselves in similar ways, hire similar people and employ similar market research and new product development approaches. This means in many cases that they are collecting and connecting THE SAME DOTS.
What’s fascinating though is that in many cases even though all of the companies in the industry might be collecting and connecting the EXACT SAME DOTS (or very close to the same dots), they can arrive at very different interpretations of what connections are interesting and which potential insights they want to use to power their next round of potential innovations.
This was never more apparent than the difference in a couple of new product announcements that arrived in my inbox last week from Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Obviously these two companies are looking to gain the upper hand in the digital books and e-book reader battle to remain a leader (or at least relevant), and so it is fascinating to see the different connections they made.
Barnes & Noble was announcing a new Nook called the nook GlowLight. It is a low cost e-reader (about $119) that touts as its two main benefits:
A higher resolution display
A method of lighting that makes it easier to read in low light situations
Amazon meanwhile was announcing a new product called Kindle Matchbook. It is a new digital product offering that has two main benefits:
People buying printed books from Amazon can UPGRADE a qualifying book purchased back to 1995 with an ebook version for anywhere ranging from FREE to $2.99
About 10,000 titles from publishers including Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HarperCollins, Marvel and Wiley were eligible at launch
Both companies sell physical books. Both companies sell digital books. Both companies are constantly collecting and connecting dots that they believe will give them a leg up in the battle for sales supremacy, but yet their latest salvos in this battle have gone in completely different directions.
Which one will be more impactful?
Which one is harder to copy?
And what are your thoughts about how they could’ve gone in such wildly different directions in this latest battle in the ebook war?
I have my own thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours! 😉
Please sound off in the comments.
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The world of marketing and advertising used to be very simple. If you got a branding or marketing job with a company, you would inherit an agency that the person above you or before you had hired to work with the company to get your advertising and marketing campaigns developed and executed. After a few years if you worked in an agency you might go work for a company and manage an agency, or after a few years working in marketing or advertising for a company you might leave to go work for an agency, and this cycle might repeat several times over the course of your career.
In this simple environment, companies looked to their agencies to bring them innovations in marketing and/or advertising.
But this simple world of marketing and advertising is being disrupted and made more complex in the same way that many other industries are (think book publishing, book retailing, management consulting, etc.).
We live in an era where people have more places in which they can collect and share experiences, both on-line and off-line. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, hundreds of cable TV channels, hundreds of satellite radio channels, on-demand audio and video (both online and off), Pinterest, Instagram, meetups, unconferences, flash mobs, etc.
We live in an era where marketing and advertising work can be fulfilled not just via the company/agency partnership, but also via co-creation with customers, crowdsourcing, via crowdfunding, or utilizing cloud labor or crowd computing.
With the rise of the digital marketplace also came a plethora of new digital and social marketing and advertising agencies, many of which were snapped up by giants like WPP to infuse some new thinking and “innovation” into their traditional direct marketing and advertising execution methods.
But now, comes the news that Nissan (who has switched their slogan from “Innovation for All” to “Innovation that Excites”) has created their own Marketing Innovation Lab rather than just relying on their roster of agencies to bring them innovations. Nissan may not be the only company to do something similar, but it begs the question, where should marketing innovation come from?
Obviously Nissan doesn’t feel that they are getting enough innovation in their marketing efforts from their agencies, and it makes you wonder, shouldn’t it be the agencies not the companies who are looking to find and support upstart companies and apps with marketing and media potential?
Well, why should any company look to source innovation from any one place, even if it is marketing innovation?
I would say that every company looking to succeed at ANY type of innovation should be looking to collect dots to connect from as many sources as possible, including:
Agencies and Advisory Firms
Co-Creation with Customers
Crowdsourcing
Partners
Suppliers
Competitors
Adjacent Industries
Distant Industries
Market Research (ethnography, surveys, focus groups, trends, etc.)
Startups
… (insert your favorite here)
So, where will your next marketing innovation come from?
And, who are you working with from outside in order to bring innovation inside?
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