I was invited to participate in the new television reality series, Girl Starter, to mentor young women in launching their businesses. The show pairs eight “girls”, ranging in ages from 18 – 24, into 4 teams. Each team develops a new idea from scratch and goes through the process of planning it, validating it, and […]
Readers of this blog know that I am not a huge fan of failure. I think it is overrated and should be minimized. Instead, I like to view innovation through the lens of experimentation. But sometimes a failure in execution can be a way to impress customers. I wrote about some examples of bad situations […]
Here are the transcripts for the last two innovation minutes. Innovation Minute #26: Is your team playing with a full deck? Twenty years ago when I started getting actively involved in the world of innovation, I thought there were some people who were innovative, and then there was the rest of the people. What I […]
I was recently interviewed by Chuck Leddy for the National Center for the Middle Market. We discussed, as you may guess, what middle market companies need to do in order to innovate and why it is critical. In addition to a written article (where I answer 9 questions), the page also includes a much longer audio […]
Crowdsourcing has always been a popular method of problem solving. In a nutshell, crowdsourcing is when you ask a large group of people (the crowd) for their answers to a question. Polling and surveys are forms of crowdsourcing. Social media posts that ask for your opinion are another. And now companies are using this technique more and more […]
best practices = copying someone else = plagiarism Recently I discovered that someone wrote a 1,000 word article that included passages lifted straight from my book, “Best Practices are Stupid.” The examples were the same. The language was the same. The only original part to the article were the first two lines. After that it […]
Have you ever had a trip that felt more like you were a contestant on The Amazing Race? That was the case for me a few weeks back when I was scheduled to be the keynote speaker in Brazil at a marketing conference for 1,500 people. This turned out to be an adventure that looked […]
I was recently listening to an old-time radio broadcast and heard a commercial that ran back in 1959. It shared the story of how the Colt Revolver was invented. As it is told, when he was younger, Samuel Colt, was fascinated with gun powder and weapons. However, he was dissatisfied with the “one-shot” pistols that were […]
I was recently asked by a European magazine to provide my list of the most disruptive companies of 2015/2016. I thought about it and struggled to answer. For me, companies don’t disrupt; platforms, industries, and other macro forces do. Given that I provided my top 7 disruptive forces… Peer-to-peer – This is causing disruption to all […]
I’ve been talking/writing about the phygital movement for a while now. This is the blending of the physical and digital worlds. Be sure to read my recent article on the topic, “Let’s Get Phygital.” In the past, we were a physical world. We didn’t carry electronic devices everywhere. When we said we were connected, we were […]
