Hard work vs genius

Would we have good music, art, or technology if people
didn't work hard for them?

It may sound cliché, but there's no such thing as a genius innovator. Edison, Ford, Einstein, Jobs, and many others brought about genially fresh ideas and they worked really hard. Edison tried hundreds of times before successfully designing a decent lightbulb, Ford was obsessed with cost savings, Einstein was considered inapt for mathematics as a child, and Jobs loved simplicity. What do these innovators from different eras have in common? They all had a strong vision but they all worked hard to achieve their goals.

95% of new products fail

You came upon something that's different or groundbreaking and you know it has tons of potential. You've done it before, introduced an awesome product without capturing your customers' attention. How do you achieve your product's potential when up to 95% of new products fail?

You don't fail enough!

Failure is an essential part of innovation. A successful company:

• must be hedge failure—many risks should result in a reward, but if every "risk" succeeds you are not pushing any boundaries. If every
• take risks—if you fail because you didn't take risks your clients fled to the competition or substitute products. If you don't innovate you become a dinosaur.
• should accept failure—this point is very important, not just because of best practices for innovation. If you don't accept failure, employees are often fearful for their jobs and could try to coverup mistakes until they blow up. If you accept that even the best employees will fail, you can manage their projects better.
• learn from its failed projects and review them.

Why hire innovators?

"You snooze, you lose." The two "most obvious" reasons a company innovates are to catch up to a changing industry and market and to gain the upper hand on competitors.

Are these reasons compelling enough for a company to  hire innovators? My biased opinion is no, they should use their internal talent, unless the company is large (economies of scale).

Social Innovation

It's valuable, rewarding, and selfless to do social innovation. Earlier this year, I participated in a social innovation workshop for an organization called Design for America (DFA). This organization teaches students several tools that can be used to improve a community and encourages them to build solutions.

People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it

If what I've told you about doing things for a compelling reason hasn't hit home, watch this video. "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."

It's humbling to say this, but that video is possibly the most important thing I've posted here. Hopefully we all let "why" drive our lives. More than "success," what you do and how you do it become indicative of something. What is success if not doing something significant on your lifetime?

Innovating for yourself!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! A non-business post for the holiday!

Lets talk about an exciting subject, innovating on your life for your own happiness. Unless you are OCD or extremely neurotic, odds are that a little bit of change is good for you.

Cool Self-Driving car concept.

Click on this very interesting link about a self-driving Prius concept. It will drive itself to and from the garage and feature other cool innovations only achievable with self-driving car. Share cool things you envision for a future where everyone has a car like this.

Is criticizing Apple heresy? I think not.

As you all know, the iPhone 4s was just an incremental improvement on the iPhone 4. Was Apple right in doing this and can they replicate this success forever?  Yes and no.

Apple has relied on a very successful formula. They've done it really well and washed, rinsed, and repeated it several times. Read past the jump for more details.

How do you innovate for value

Where does innovation add the most value?

Innovation that addresses an important problem or need adds the most value.

Identifying the importance of the problem that's being solved, if there's a sizable market for a solution, and whether the solution is good and marketable enough to be adopted. You'd be surprised how often that advice is NOT used by innovative companies.

Cotton Candy, turns any screen into a computer

The USB drive on the image is called Cotton Candy. It turns any screen into a computer, more specifically, into an Android station. You can output 1080p video and do anything you can do on the Android platform. It's got bluetooth (for mouse, keyboard, or tablet input) and wifi to access the interent. It's definitely a pretty cool innovation.

How can the makers of this device innov8on that? Well, that's not all that this blog is about; it's also about marrying marketing and execution to an innovation. How can they market this product successfully is a better question. Did they use S.M.A.R.T. design?

I don't know enough about the product and this blog isn't about speculation. Share your opinion; will Cotton Candy be a success?

S.M.A.R.T. design for S.T.U.P.I.D. users

This is a very interesting article about good design for users that are stressed, tired, untrained, passive, independent*, and/or distracted (S.T.U.P.I.D.).

How do we address this?

The cliffs note version is to make your design Simple, Memorable, "Accept Autopilot**," Recoverable, and Tested in real life situations.

The Proper Way to Brainstorm

Click on the image for some guidelines that will lead you to better brainstorming sessions:

There's a caveat—there is no "proper" way to brainstorm. These guidelines should be useful in most cases and you can use it to uncover the reasons why your organization can or can't brainstorm.


On a side note, thank you for supporting my efforts! My Blog has been up for 40 hours and has received over 80 views. Please comment on how I can improve and keep my efforts relevant to you.

Going BIG, a different way of generating ideas

Do big ideas need to go big? I learned about a company called BIG, the Big Idea Group, through my innovation class. I won't discuss the case study done in class, it's unethical to share information that's not free. I will tell you what Big does, how, and why it works.

The Lean Startup

Just recommending an article. Should be relevant to anyone interested in entrepreneurship and operations! It's an enjoyable read.

When Innovation Fails

Do you know Groupon? If you don't, they were the "fastest growing tech company ever." How can they have failed? They're pretty big, did they fail?

All of this is public data. Groupon was seemingly unstoppable from its inception, with a spectacular growth rate that didn't seem to slow down. On February, it more than slowed down, it decreased almost out of the blue. What happened?

They planned to do their initial public offering earlier this year and their value was, at one point, estimated at US$30 billion. They delayed their IPO twice in 2011, once when their growth was halted and another when they had to re-file using standard accounting. Using GAAP converted their huge profits into losses. They also revised an "error" of accounting for revenue where they estimated it twice as high as it actually is.

2 weeks ago, Groupon did its IPO at $20 a share for a market cap of $13 billion. Today, they closed at $24 a share for a $15 billion market cap. I won't be a naysayer or say something seems fishy in the way they've handled themselves. Instead, I'll talk about why. Why are they worth half as much as their estimated value a few months ago?

They're losing money. Over half a billion in losses and their costs seem to be accelerating. Economies of scale are supposed to bring a benefit but that doesn't seem to be the case. They're focused on consumers; people love deals and social networks and Groupon offers a chance to do those two things together. This seems to be similar to a company we all love (Amazon) that started out being unprofitable and focused on consumers but, there's a fundamental difference. Amazon delivered on its promises to its clients while Groupon is failing to do that.

Who's the client? Groupon's clients are businesses while Amazon's clients are the end consumer. Many of Groupon's clients haven't had the repeat business that was promised to them and even made losses when Groupon took 50% of their revenue. How could Groupon fail its clients? It attracts price-sensitive opportunistic consumers but their clients need repeat business to grow. Add the effect of copycats entering the market, not evolving their model enough, and not improving their operations. It all makes sense now.

How can Groupon correct this?

1. They must ensure their clients get enough value from what they pay Groupon. When that happens, their salesforce can shrink without affecting revenues because they'll get repeat clients.
2. Alter their pricing model. All businesses are not made equal; a business with excess capacity and mostly fixed costs (a hotel, spa, and others) is not the same as a coffee shop. One of them will get incremental profits even after paying 50% of the revenue that Groupon brings in.
3. Innov8 on and on and on. Copycats are less likely to ever catch up or take market share.
4. Improve operations. Figure out why your costs are growing faster than your revenues. That's unsustainable, scary, and won't make investors happy.

In short, my suggestion is to them is: Innov8 on (improve their value proposal in any way possible), to delight their client, and to figure out how to operate cheaper.

Google Wallet

What do you know about Google Wallet?

It's coupons, payments, and loyalty cards on your phone. It includes a "Google Offers" search engine to find new offers. It's currently in a testing phase and there's very limited availability, but it seems like a cool technology. You'd think Google has it all thought out because they've hired talented people; I'll show you a few opportunities they've missed to make a lot of money.

Lets evaluate how this makes money for Google and retailers, ignoring the other players for the sake of a more concise article.

It's a given that Google will roll this out on its Droids. It's a strong selling point for them. You get a cool phone and the ability to leave your wallet at home. Google makes its revenue from advertising and this will be a platform to target individuals; better, more effective advertising means more revenue for Google. 

They want to draw every retailer in, make their wallet ubiquitous in our lives. I don't know the specifics but, because they want many participants, it's not a bad assumption that they'll give retailers the option to analyze the data they generate for free; charging only if a retailer wants Google to do the analytics. Keep that last point in mind, I will use it to tell you how they can improve their service.

Retailers will save money because they will need to print less coupons and ads. Individuals can be targeted so you would expect the react better to ads; more revenue. Their outlet will appear on the Offers search engine, well targeted, and that should draw in even more customers. People that come into the store will almost always carry their "loyalty card" so data might be tracked more robustly. Compare that to the status quo. Do you carry your 15 loyalty cards with you at all times?.

That's Google Wallet. How can we innov8 on that?

The wallet limits itself to short distances. Google is not an expert on hardware or transmitters, but they just bought Motorola. A technology called RFID could be used in conjunction with what they've created, resulting in several synergies. It won't drain your battery either because RFID chips consume very little power.

What would be the benefits?

For Retailers:

• Track what percentage of time a customer spends on every area of a store; someone who spends a lot of time in an isle is looking for value or having a conversation
• Track if a customer responded to an ad or offer, even if they didn't make a purchase - it's an indicator that the ad was somewhat effective
• Urge service representatives to help clients that seems to be looking for something but can't find it
• An in-store solution that shows targeted purchase suggestions and offers just by standing nearby

For Google:

• Collecting more data than retailers can handle is an opportunity to sell an analytics service
• Target ads even more effectively; a person spent 20 minutes in the cereal section and selected the cheapest one, next time you can offer them an ad with the cheapest options; a person always spends 20 minutes in the videogame section of a store but never buys anything, push him over the edge with an offer

There are other possibilities with this but, Google must continue making many experiments with their wallet before rolling it out everywhere. There are several potential pitfalls:

• Too exclusive. Will retailers adopt and promote a technology that reaches <70% of the market? The tech could be licensed or given to other phone platforms. If it's "free", Google gets ad revenue and market penetration.
• Too shy. Another solution called ISIS is already out there. It's small, but companies in this segment have been known for explosive growth. 
• Too scary. Some partners might be afraid of giving Google too much power, it already controls the internet.
• Safety. Security is a main concern here and failing in this dimension will slow adoption to a crawl.
• Too personal. What would you think if your Wallet offered a gym subscription after you bought a larger size of pants? Would it freak you out if store employees call you by your name without ever meeting you?
• Too costly. What will it cost each player to get into this game? What parts of the technology will Google "gift", subsidize, sell at cost, and sell for profit?

I decided to start my blog with this technology because it's current, interesting, and has massive revenue potential. What are your thoughts?

Welcome to innov8 on

Hi,

Innovation is an ongoing process. This is innov8 on (innovate on), a blog on innovative businesses, products, and brands. It will update you on great things that are happening right now and give you, for free, an opinion on how to innov8 on top of them. You will also be treated into how and why innovations fail. Current and past cases will be analyzed to give you insight about important things in business.

I'm a Master of Engineering Management candidate at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. I took my fair share of courses from Tuck School of Business faculty including Innovation Management, Operations, and Marketing. I wanted to take these courses because you need great ideas, good execution, and a market for any successful venture.

I want to become an expert in this subject and I admire every company that makes something new or something better.

A fellow student who has taken many of the same courses as me, Karan Shah, will accompany me in supplying you with insights on innovation.

Thank you for reading our Blog!

Sincerely,

Mario Martínez
Creative, Curious, and Entrepreneurial Blogger

http://linkd.in/vfYb9q