clair075

As a marketer who was first an engineer, I am often guilty of larding up my marketing content with facts about features.  As we used to say at Texas Instruments, I can quote "feeds and speeds" all day long.  We can talk about faster processors or larger memories, more sophisticated storage devices and the ability to stream video at close to the speed of light.  And so on.  Marketers should get pilloried for this nonsense, because we are selling the steak and not the sizzle.  Marketers who talk about product features forget that people buy products to solve problems or to achieve some stature.  They buy the benefits, in other words.  I've often said that in the end few people care HOW something gets done as long as it gets done effectively. This marketing problem has now fully transitioned into an innovation problem.  The reason this is an analogous problem is because executives are moving through their organizations and talking to their boards abo...

One of my recent pet peeves is the proliferation of education options for innovation.  One of my alma maters offers a "certificate" for innovation management.  While I cannot comment on the course, it is taught by two professors with little private sector experience who haven't created a product. One of them is a psychology major, which I guess makes sense because innovation is often the product of new or unusual insights or perspectives.  You'll forgive me for a startling lack of enthusiasm about many of these "educational" offerings.  There are several reasons for my skepticism: Innovation is strange, unusual work, very different from what most people do day to day It doesn't require great insight or difficult tools, but does require working against considerable resistance in existing cultures and customer expectations You don't educate someone in "innovation", you educate them in a set of tools, expectations, perceptions and beliefs.  Th...

I've been puzzling this over the last few weeks, trying to wrap my head around the importance of innovation generally and the lack of real innovation delivery specifically.  What I mean is that everyone knows that innovation is vital to growth and future success, but very few new innovations are created. The vast majority of innovation effort and outcome is expended on me-too, so what incremental innovations that don't really change the user or the market. I think the main problem with innovation - real innovation, that is, the kind that creates disruptive new products or introduces new channels or business models - is that it requires change.  And there's little that corporate structures, cultures and executives fear more than change.  They don't like change that's thrust upon them, and they certainly don't like change that is created internally without an exceptionally good reason.  In fact one could argue that in many ways midsized and larger companies are co...