Sustaining your innovation process

How can you maintain your innovation process? Below are some suggestions to get you thinking – most should apply to most companies. Compiling the initial list is easy – doing it is the hard bit!

1. Establish the importance of innovation for your organisation and its role in the overall strategy
2. 100% commitment from management – support, encourage, demonstrate, walk the walk
3. Integrate innovation into organisation’s culture
4. Facilitate open communication at all levels – How is it working? What else could we be doing?
5. Establish practical metrics for performance: non-perfect is better than none at all
6. Recruit the right talent: open-minded, flexible, passionate, questioning, diverse backgrounds
7. Set up access to fresh perspectives: customers, stakeholders, non customers, etc
8. Provide creative thinking training for your people
9. Set up an idea management system to solicit, capture and evaluate ideas (my fave – jenni)
10. Involve your customers / consumers (open source collaboration)
11. Look at “best practice” in model companies (Nokia, Apple, etc) to devise your own “next practise”
12. Set up project teams that tap into your organisation’s diversity (can you use external resources?)
13. Give time and permission for experimentation and allow failures
14. Set up a slush fund for innovation
15. Consider skunkworks if size and nature of innovation will struggle within the parent organisation
16. Recognise (and reward?) people’s efforts
17. Work in cycles to maintain focus and the flexibility to review and refine
18. Innovate the innovation process: How could we do things differently?

Precise pricing

A recent report looked at how the opening price within an auction impacts on subsequent bids. It suggests that a rounded figure (£200) implies a lack of precision in the pricing and that a buyer is more willing to move away from this figure in bigger increments than if a precise figure is used (£198.50). Or indeed £202.50 if you’re a real businessman. The precise figure seems to be more believable as a “value anchor” for the item.

Obviously, in the high street retail environment we don’t (normally) try to negotiate a new price but there are lessons to be learnt when, for example, submitting a proposal/quote. A specific, precise figure will reduce the likelihood and extent of any negotiating down in the price.

I’ve always thought that the £9.99 type pricing so popular in shops was a legacy of the old cash-till days where owners chose those prices to reduce the opportunity for theft by shop assistants. Theory being that in order to give change to the buyer the till would have to be opened and correct figures inputted. If it was £10 the assistant could not input the money and the customer would be unaware and indeed unconcerned at what had occurred.

Nothing like being able to trust your employees!

Brilliant ad – simple and clever!

Watch it twice!

Where’s Wally? And when can we see him?

Interesting concept and great fun at the same time. A Canadian artist has drawn a 55ft image of Wally (Waldo if you’re North American) on a rooftop in Vancouver. It will be visible via Google Earth once Vancouver has next been passed over by Google’s imaging eqpt. You need to know the location and you need to wait for anything up to 3 years to find it.

All the details are at her Waldo blog.

I’m sure a Marketing Dept could adapt this concept and use the amazing service offered by Google Earth for other fun activities.

The I’s have it

We’re used to the 4P’s of the Marketing Mix ( or the 7 P’s if you wish) but it has always struck me that in the area of creative thinking and innovation it is the I’s that rule the roost.

Ideas (ideation), imagination, identification, insight, intuition, incubation, invention, impact, implementation, innovation,…

Pretty Pics

For a great way to look at multiple images download piclens. Available for all browsers and an increasing number of sites. A real treat for the eyeballs.

If you want an image that you can use legally within presentations then use the advanced search facility on flickr, check the Creative Commons-licensed content option and then use the piclens option to see all images at once.