Tag Archives: Customers

Are You Lying to Your Customers?

Are You Lying to Your Customers?

It seems like every company these days is trying to claim that they are innovative, trying to claim that they are customer-centric, trying to claim that their employees are important to them. But are they?

Can all this be true?

Or, are all of these companies lying to their customers, lying to their employees, and lying to their shareholders?

Many companies say that they are committed to innovation, but employees know the truth. If employees’ experience around the innovation efforts of the company (and its outcomes) isn’t consistent with the innovation messages being communicated, then not only will innovation participation and outcomes be low, but ongoing trust and loyalty will be further eroded in the organization.

Employees can see the Lucky Charms on your face when you say you’re committed to innovation publicly, but behind the scenes your actions demonstrate that you really are not.

And don’t be fooled, customers will start to see the Lucky Charms show up on your face, no matter how hard you try and convince them that the marshmallow goodness is not there.

If you aren’t going to define what innovation means to your company, if you aren’t going to create a common language of innovation, if you aren’t going to teach people new innovation skills and support innovation at all levels by making limited amounts of time and capital available to push their ideas forward, then don’t say you’re committed to innovation. You’ll tear the organization down instead of building it up.

Lying to CustomersIf customers don’t see you increasing your level of value creation, improving your level of value access, and doing a better job at value translation (see Innovation is All About Value), especially when compared to the competition, then they too will become disillusioned, frustrated, and start to look for other alternative solutions that deliver more value then all of your offerings.

Meanwhile, shareholders behave like customers on steroids. If you are being rewarded with an innovation premium by the market, you can’t be “all hat and no cattle” for very long, meaning you have to deliver compelling inventions on a repeated basis with a strong potential to become the innovations that drive the future growth of the company. This is hard to do once, let alone on a repeated basis. We will likely see Apple be the latest victim in the next twelve months.

Why? Because AAPL is at an all-time high based on the likely high percentage of people that are likely to upgrade from an iPhone 4 or 5s to an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. What about after that? Well, the smartphone industry is about to enter the same place that the PC industry hit a few years ago, when replacement cycles began to lengthen, reducing revenues, and forcing prices (and margins) lower. Simultaneously carriers will seek to extract more of the margin from the overall equation, and if Google/Motorola/Lenovo, Nokia and others start to bring $99 smartphones developed for India and other places to the richer economies that will in their next generation likely be “good enough” compared to the high end $699 handsets, more people will choose to wait longer between upgrades, or trade down with their next purchase, much as they did when $400 laptops started to become the rage.

So, what are we to learn from Apple’s pending share price collapse about the middle of next year?

Well, the first thing we will learn is that continuous innovation is hard. Now I’m not saying that Apple is going to go away, HP and Dell haven’t gone away, but Apple’s share price in Q2/Q3 2015 will struggle, they will face employee defections, and it will become more like Dell, HP and Microsoft than Facebook or Google. Not because those companies are any more or less innovative than any of the others, but because the growth paradigms are different and those companies are still in a different place on their growth curves.

We can also learn that continuous innovation requires consistency, commitment, the ability to recognize and prepare for the inevitable peaking of any growth curve, the organizational agility necessary to change as fast as the wants and needs of your customers and your environment, and the ability to understand what your customers will give you permission to do (so you know where to go next when your most profitable growth curve begins to peak).

You should see by now that continuous innovation is about far more than technological innovation, but instead requires not only continuous commitment, but also a continuous willingness and ability to change, and a continuous scanning of your environment using a Global Sensing Network.

Do you have one?

What is yours telling you about your company’s future?

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Think Like a Tech Company or Go Out of Business

Think Like a Tech Company or Go Out of Business

by Braden Kelley and Linda Bernardi

Even in 2014, there are business sectors who feel they are not ‘tech companies’. News flash: Whether you are a consumer products company, an insurance company, a hotel, or a pharmaceutical company, your business is a technology business. Why?

Technology is the link between any business and its customers. To say technology is not core to your business strategy, means you think customers are not the key to your business success. So, your business is a technology business whether you want it to be or not.

Today technology is how you market and sell your products, make your business more efficient, and most importantly, how you stay connected to your customers. Some companies mistake the importance of technology to mean that they need to open a twitter account and monitor social media, put in an ERP and CRM system, and revamp their web site. But the importance of technology in today’s business environment is more than that.

ERP and CRM are common tools, a requirement to remain competitive, and while social media and the internet are important to sales and marketing success, they are becoming yesterday’s news as customers develop deeper connections to their mobile devices. If you aren’t on their devices and interacting in a meaningful way with them there in real-time, you won’t stay connected to them in the long run.

Let’s look at the impact on a few different industries whose members tend not to see themselves as technology companies:

1. Fortune 100 consumer product goods (CPG) companies
2. Hotel Chains
3. Big Box Retailers

1. Fortune 100 CPG companies typically manufacture large quantities of consistent products and have visually pleasing (static) web pages for consumers. But they don’t use technology well enough to detect what the market wants before it knows it, often fail to personalize or customize products to customer needs, and usually lack the online networks that could help connect other customer product needs together into new potential product ideas that the company could co-create with their customers. Often connection means post mortem analytics on data collected in the past, or, analyzing previous customer interactions with static web pages. Creating authentic customer connections requires online and mobile technology these companies usually don’t possess. I don’t mean apps (which often are pretty much the same as a website), but new physical/online/mobile engagement models that inspire customers to stay connected to the company (and each other) in a dynamic, evolving community. Rethinking is needed here. The customer is not just a buyer but an influencer. If CPG companies want to sell that next bottle of $300 facial cream, they better consider delighting, and not just marketing to, their customer base.

2. AirBnB has proven to be a major disruptive force in the hotel and hospitality business, grabbing a massive foothold in a market that the Homeaway.com member companies created and should have dominated. Resistance to AirBnB is massive and lawsuits are abundant, but for a moment let’s go beyond the hype and explore the angst of traditional hotels. AirBnB created a highly connected, effective community of property owners and property renters. This bi-directional ecosystem can only thrive if they are both happy and satisfied. To experience what they’ve created, first go to a traditional hotel website (pictures of room, building, lobby) and then go to AirBnB and browse the hundreds of customer experiences their property owners offer. On the hotel site you’ll see they’ve created the mechanics of paying to rent a hotel room, while on AirBnB you’ll see that they’ve created both an ecosystem and an experience.

3. Big box retailers have done a poor job of seeing themselves as technology companies capable of fending off challenges from online-only retailers. Target made the mistake of seeing themselves as a retailer, not a technology business, and so they outsourced their ecommerce to Amazon in the beginning, only to regret doing so because Amazon was able to learn which 20% of their inventory drove 80% of their profits, and when.

Meanwhile, Costco and Walmart, despite being two of the most successful retailers in the world, have struggled to find success online because they can’t get beyond their brick and mortar heritage to see themselves as a technology business with an integrated online/offline ecosystem. Seriously, it is 2014, do we still need to get our Costco circulars in the mail? Nothing has changed about Costco’s interaction with its customers. Walmart exacerbated the disconnection between the two sides of their business by creating a separate online division and exiling it to Silicon Valley. Costco sells different products online than offline. The results of both of these approaches have been far from stellar.

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Technology Lowers Barriers to Entry

In the history of the world, it has never been easier to start and scale a business to a global footprint, not in a matter of decades or years, but in months. And it is not just the other companies in your industry and technology-driven startups that you have to worry about if you choose not to view yourself as a technology company and move as fast as they do. You have to worry about competition from established technology players like Google and Amazon too, because one day they (or people that used to work for them) might decide that your market is attractive enough to enter and come disrupt your industry. For example, Amazon has become a book publisher and a financial services company.

Technology Enables Experiences

Technology enables the creation of customer experiences. I am going to choose my insurance company based on my experience. At the end of the day if all prices are comparable, then how the businesses you interact with make you feel, and the connections you’ve built with them will matter more. Without an emphasis on using technology to make your business a social business, you will find your company displaced by others that do. You must lead your industry in identifying opportunities to use technology to get closer to your customers. The future of business will be all about delighting customers and making their experience more personal.

Technology is not just a tool, but central to everything you do in today’s always on, always connected digital age.

Here are ten ways that technology can help you become a more social business:

  1. Building Connections
  2. Developing Networks
  3. Global Sensing and Prediction
  4. Sharing Recommendations
  5. Creating Experiences
  6. Personalization
  7. Customization
  8. Co-Creation
  9. Crowdsourcing
  10. Open Innovation

To give you an example of what things will look like in the future, the forward thinking health insurance company will leverage the mobile device for virtual ID cards, drug interaction warnings, personal triage, mobile care, wellness, cost sharing calculations, FSA/HSA administration, diagnostics, and more.

Conclusion

In conclusion, no matter what business you are in, it is very dangerous not to see technology as a competitive differentiator and a core driver of your business. Instead, you must constantly look at how you can become more of a technology company in order to enable deeper customer connections and more meaningful experiences. Today if you don’t connect with, understand, delight and start predicting your customer’s needs/wants, you may not thrive in your industry and your competition and new entrants who do embrace technology will replace you.

This article is brought to you by Linda Bernardi and Braden Kelley. Collectively, we have over 30 years of experience working with large, global multi-disciplinary enterprises. We write this with care and passion as we want your enterprises to succeed. We would love to hear your thoughts.


Guest Collaborator:

Linda BernardiLinda Bernardi is a Technology Strategist, Investor, and Founder & CEO at StraTerra Partners, The Bernardi Leadership Institute and a Strategic Advisor at Cloudant Inc. She is also the Author of Provoke, Why the Global Culture of Disruption is the Only Hope for Innovation. Learn more here about Linda’s work on disrupting large enterprise analytics.

Please note the following licensing terms for Stikkee Situations cartoons:

1. BLOGS – Link back to https://bradenkelley.com/category/stikkees/ and you can embed them for free
2. PRESENTATIONS, please send $25 to me on PayPal by clicking the button 3. NEWSLETTERS & WEB SITES, please send me $50 on PayPal by clicking the button
License for presentations - $25
License for newsletters and web sites - $50

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Rise of the Social Business Architect

Rise of the Social Business Architect

Download the Rise of the Social Business Architect PDF

The world is changing and needs Social Business Architects. Gone is the epoch of the passive consumer, now customers want a say. At the same time, the quest for survival and growth is causing companies to stop looking at suppliers as someone to squeeze on price and instead as partners in innovation. And, employers are realizing that to maximize their success they need to attract and engage the best talent not just into internal talent pools, but external ones as well.

Social Business IntersectionsIt feels like you can’t go a day without hearing someone or some publication mention Facebook, Twitter or some other component of the social media universe. The fact is that social media has invaded the public consciousness and people are now more suspicious of someone who doesn’t have a social media presence than someone who does. People are starting to judge others based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profile they ever meet them, and expecting companies to answer the tweet they’ve sent them or the question they’ve posted on their Facebook wall within the day, the hour, the minute (believe me the expected pace of response is accelerating).

Social media has become so important and pervasive that it is beginning to co-opt the term ‘social business’ into its lexicon to describe an organization’s engagement with people outside of its borders across a variety of channels and for a variety of purposes. Social media is stealing the term ‘social business’ away from the social enterprise folks, and that’s okay – they can’t possibly use ‘social business’ and ‘social enterprise’ at the same time anyways.

The importance of ‘social business’ and social business design has grown as our technologies have matured from contact management to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, from bulletin boards to discussion forums, from static to dynamic html, from social networks to social media, and from media consumer to media producer. Ultimately ‘social business’ is the science of optimizing the intersection of people, process, and technology. If we look at ‘social business’ as the discipline managing that intersection and helping an organization focusing on how it engages with others and maximizes the value of its relationships, I’ve been working in social business for more than 15 years as what I like to call a Social Business Architect.

Social Business ConnectionsIn addition to facilitating and optimizing the group dynamics and interactions inside the organization, a Social Business Architect specializes in identifying the different parts of an organization that need to interact with groups of people outside the organization, how those parts of the organization should work together to communicate with people outside the organization, and helps to identify and implement communications solutions that connect the organization with the target groups so that a meaningful connection and conversation can be built, and then helps to manage the conversations and the information and learnings from their outcomes for the benefit of the organization.

A Social Business Architect keeps the organizations focused on the goals of its relationships with the outside, works with the organization’s technologists and other specialists in other departments to enable the necessary conversations to take place for the benefit of the organization.

From building Symantec’s first web-based multi-lingual technical support and customer service capabilities to working with the Windows Live team at Microsoft to building the world’s most popular innovation community centered around https://www.disruptorleague.com, I’ve seen the importance of finding the right intersection between primary connection points and sources of value for the community to establish itself, grow and thrive.

To build a successful community and attract talent to your organization you must try to identify as an organization what resources you already have (or could create) that will have some value to the community that you are trying to build. These sources of value to the community could be:

  1. Financial
  2. Informational
  3. Educational
  4. Social
  5. Or come from another store of value

You must give people a reason to want to connect with you and to stay close – and yes, hopefully contribute over time.

In addition to identifying the value that you can bring to the community you must also identify which connection points will multiply the attractive power of the sources of value you choose to focus on. There are three primary connection points to consider:

1. Passion – One of the ways that you can attract people to your community is to leverage the power of passion. Seek to identify what people are passionate about when it comes to your company or your products. Passion can be extremely contagious. Is there a way that you can inject the passion that people may have for your company or products into your community?

2. Purpose – Another connection point to consider is to tap into the power of purpose. Not all organizations are committed to serving a larger social purpose, but all can consider introducing elements of public outreach or philanthropy that the community can engage with and feel good about contributing to. Are you building walls to keep people out? Or are you creating something that people can feel a part of?

Social Business Attraction3. Fun – And don’t forget the power of fun. One of the ways of connecting people to your community is to have something fun for people to do. Recognize people for their participation in your community in fun and different ways to keep them interested and engaged, and have some fun reinforcing the ethos of the community.

And when you bring the right sources of value together with the right connection points that is when the magic of attraction and engagement happens and a community starts to grow its membership and participation. But we are not just seeking to build a community; we are looking to activate it as well (to get people engaged, contributing, discussing, connecting, etc.).

Social Business EngagementThis is where Social Business Architects prove their worth to the organization. They can use social media, digital communications, value analysis, and other collaborative tools to help organizations attract and engage customers, partners and employees to help the organization achieve its commercial goals. Whether the future direction of your social business architecture includes beginning collaborative innovation, increasing employee retention, building stronger partnerships, growing customer lifetime value, or another effort, be sure that you are involving the Social Business Architects in your organization to help set the right goals and find the right tools to ensure the effort’s success. Only then will you put your organization on the path it needs to be to transform itself from an internally focused product and service factory to a truly internally and externally focused and integrated social business capable of sustainable innovation, retention of the growing millennial work force, long-term customer relationships and loyalty, and true partnerships with its vendors and suppliers for mutual benefit.

Are you ready to architect a social business foundation under your organization?

Stay tuned for more on this topic in a white paper I am publishing with Innocentive very soon.

UPDATE: You can find all of my commissioned white papers here (including the Innocentive White Paper – “Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation”) or contact me to commission one for your company’s inbound or content marketing efforts here.

Download a PDF version of this article

Image credit: Ringling Bros.

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Innovator Lifetime Value

Innovator Lifetime ValueBy now, if you’re in marketing you’re probably familiar with the concept of customer lifetime value. Put simply, it’s the idea that a customer is worth to the organization not just the value of a single transaction, but the collection of all of the transactions that they might make during their relationship with you. And when speaking of customer lifetime value, we generally don’t talk about any single customer, but speak about their value in aggregate, averaging out the high value (many, many purchases) and low value customers (one or a few purchases).

The concept is usually linked to discussions of how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer and whether a particular advertising or marketing effort is worth undertaking.The concept has been even applied to non-profits (lifetime donor value) and even to social media ROI.

But what’s a good outside innovation partner worth?

As I was speaking with several of the innovation leaders at Intuit on their campus in Mountain View last year, it came to me that organizations should be seeking to build and strengthen relationships with their customers, suppliers, and other potential innovation partners in ways similar to their approach to traditional relationship marketing.

Having helped several clients with their relationship marketing strategies, it seems to me that there is no reason why the same principles can’t or shouldn’t be applied to your potential innovation partner community.

After all, as more and more companies begin to understand and engage in the practice of open innovation, then there will be an advantage accumulated by the organizations that do a good job of building strong and profitable relationships with the most passionate and prolific suppliers, customers, academics, etc. over those organizations that don’t.

What organization out there wouldn’t want to accumulate an innovation advantage, a growth advantage, a relationship advantage over their competitors?

But the real questions are of course:

  1. Do you have the required internal innovation capability built already to support open innovation?
  2. Are you engaging in open innovation already? Or are your competitors?
  3. What are you doing to build strong relationships with you potential innovation partners?
  4. Are you tasking skilled relationship marketers with creating and maintaining these conversations and building these relationships?

So, do you? Are you?

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A Creative Marriage Proposal

I found this video via @MeghanMBiro and @berget and I just had to share it.

It’s a wedding proposal from an actor in my hometown to his now bride to be, and is a great example of re-imagining a traditional activity in our society – the marriage proposal.

The things I love about it are not the actual creative execution but the principles exemplified by the experience:

  1. If you have a great product or service, people will be willing to help you sell it
  2. If it’s really good, they may go out of their way to help you sell it – or even do so without asking your permission
  3. Oregon fosters creativity 😉
  4. Focus on more than the transaction – Make magic!
  5. Skills can from other contexts can be valuable to the current challenge
  6. Have fun with everything you do and you’ll have better results 🙂
  7. Don’t just ask people to help, make it fun to help
  8. Give people something to talk about and feel the love spread 🙂
  9. Even if your customers or community do the sales pitch – YOU’VE GOT TO CLOSE

What magic are you making?

Are there boring transactional parts of your business that could use a little love and magic?

Don’t be afraid to invest in reducing the friction in your adoption process. You’ll improve the value access performance in your innovation equation:


Innovation Success (or even business success)
=
Value Creation
+
Value Access
+
Value Translation

For more, see Innovation is All About Value

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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The Code for Successful Innovation

The Code for Successful InnovationI had the opportunity to attend the Front End of Innovation a couple of years ago in Boston and of the three days of sessions, I have to say that unlike most people, my favorite session was that of Dr. Clotaire Rapaille. The author of “The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do”, Dr. Rapaille extolled the crowd with his thoughts on ‘codes’ and ‘imprints’.

For me this particular session was the one that most synchronized with how I view the front end of innovation. For me, the front end has nothing to do with ideas or managing ideas, but instead is all about uncovering the key insights to build your ideation on top of.

Now, there are lots of insights that you can build your ideation on top of to create potentially innovative ideas. Consumer insights is one of the building blocks and the one that Clotaire Rapaille has built his empire on. Dr. Rapaille’s core premise is that there is a ‘code’ for each product and service that drives its purchase and adoption. That ‘code’ in turn is driven by the ‘imprints’ that people make when they first understand what something is for the first time and the sensations and feelings they associate with it.

For example, kids don’t grow up drinking coffee, but they grow up smelling coffee from a very young age, most often in the home. So, most of us imprint coffee to the home and our mothers and have a stronger feeling about the smell of coffee than the taste. What does this mean for coffee sellers? Well, instead of focusing on the taste to drive sales (the logical response), they are more likely to have success by focusing on the smell and on creating images that make the product feel like home.

Taking the concept of ‘codes’ and ‘imprints’ further, Dr. Rapaille spoke about how he doesn’t trust what people say, and so he instead focuses on what people do. If you look back at the coffee example, our logical brain would tell us to prefer the coffee that tastes the best, but the reptilian brain will prefer the coffee that smells the best because of the strength of the imprinting. And according to Dr. Rapaille, the reptilian brain always wins.

To make his point, Dr. Rapaille talked about how we remember our dreams – because the cortex arrives late for work. Translation? Our logical brains (cortex) arrive after a decision has already been made by the reptilian brain or the emotional brain and so the logical brain gets put to work justifying the reptilian or emotional brain’s decision with logical reasons. How else would you explain the purchase of a Hummer after all?

Sounds easy right? Well, it gets more complicated as culture gets involved. For example, another of Rapaille’s examples that was not shared at the event is how in the United States the code for a Jeep is ‘horse’ and so the headlights should be round instead of square because horses have round eyes, but in France the code for Jeep is ‘freedom’ because of the strength of WWII liberation imprints – meaning that the marketing strategy for Jeep in France is completely different than in the United States.

Because imprints happen in general at a very young age and given the reach of Dr. Rapaille’s work, you can see very quickly why so many organizations are marketing to children, even for products that are for adults – seemingly as a way to make sure that ‘imprints’ are made so that there is consumer demand to draw on in the future. Or is that conspiracy theory at work?

Dr. Rapaille at the Front End of Innovation also spoke about how when it comes to technology, people want to be amazed, people want the technology to be magical, and to use his favorite phrase – people want to say “wow!” For wow to happen in technology according to Dr. Rapaille, we must strive for simplicity – one magical step with no cables.

Meanwhile, in our organizations we must try and identify what our organization’s ‘code’ is and better leverage multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural teams to drive creativity, while also being careful not to change the code of the organization so much that people don’t recognize it, or trust in it. And finally to use one of Dr. Rapaille’s many generalizations, Americans love to try things (they learn that way), and they love the impossible, so don’t be afraid to ask them to do it.

When I distill all of what he had to say and what he has had to say other places, for me it boils down to one key insight about the limitations of innovation methodologies like:

  • Customer-led innovation
  • Needs-based innovation
  • Jobs-to-be-done

This insight is that the reason that asking customers what they want is problematic is because of the inconsistencies between imprints and intellect, between the reptilian brain and the logical brain, and between knowing and doing. Taken together this ties in nicely with something I have believed for a while now…

When it comes to driving adoption, it matters less what you say and more what you can get others to do. As marketers we are far too focused on trying to get people to ‘tell a friend’. We should be more focused on getting people to ‘show a friend’.

So, what is your code for successful innovation?

What do you want others to show?

Please think about it and let me know what you come up with in the comments.

For those of you who want to know more, check out this embedded via from PBS’ “The Persuaders” with Douglas Rushkoff:

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 9, 2012


“Innovation, I think, should be about the balance between discipline and play. If we put too much emphasis on discipline, we risk of losing ‘inner creativity’.”

– Eric Antariksa


“Just as managers and employees need goals to know what to focus on and to help them be successful, organizations need innovation goals too. Clear innovation goals, when combined with a clear innovation strategy and a single-minded innovation vision for the organization, will maximize the instinctual innovation that emerges from employees and the intellectual innovation that occurs on directed innovation projects.”

– Braden Kelley


“Customers are innovating behind your back. Turn around.”

– Jason Fried, 37 Signals
Submitted by Jason Williams


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 30, 2012


“Albert Einstein wrote, ‘Everybody is a genius! But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid!’
We are all capable of doing one thing better than any other person alive at this time in history!”

– Matthew Kelly


“In order for innovation to reliably happen at every level of the organization, it will be extremely useful for all members to have access to the voice of the customer.”

– Braden Kelley


“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

– J.K. Rowling


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 20, 2012


“The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you, and you don’t know how or why.”

– Albert Einstein


“To build a brand, you must start a conversation with your customers. Your customers have to know that you stand for something and that they can count on you to deliver upon your brand promise.”

– Braden Kelley


“Today you can buy knowledge by the pound – from consultants hawking best practice, from the staff you’ve just hired from your competitor, and from all those companies that hope you will outsource everything. Yet in the age of revolution it is not knowledge that produces new wealth, but insight – insight into opportunities for discontinuous innovation. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination. You must become your own seer.”

– Gary Hamel


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 18, 2012


“Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn.”

– From the movie ‘The International’


“Incremental innovations can often be explained to customers, but disruptive innovations often require you to educate them on how they will fit into their life.”

– Braden Kelley


“Acquire with the intention to retain, and retain with the intention to grow.”

– Lester Wunderman


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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