clair075

Thank the good folks at PWC for their latest survey of executives about innovation.  The new article, optimistically entitled " Unleashing the power of Innovation " was recently published and surveyed approximately 250 senior executives about innovation.  While interesting, there's not a lot "new" in the survey, and the authors give away the biggest challenge in the overview, by stating that: the problem is that while the eyes of the CEO are fixed on innovation, the body of the organisation may not be following. The ‘antibodies’ that inhibit innovation include a culture that sees it as separate from the mainstream operations of the business and is slow to commercialise new ideas.  And, the survey proves the authors are correct - or that the authors actually cared about what the executives said.  Over 57% of the executives referred to culture as one of the top three barriers for innovation. That's more than 13 percentage points over the second barrier, which ...

I've written before, both on this blog and on the blog I share with Paul Hobcraft about platforms and ecosystems about the need for seamless experiences.  Innovators often create technologies or products, which have interesting capabilities or features, but rarely do they think through the actual use of the products and understand how they fit in with other products, services, infrastructure, channels and data that exist in a customer's life.  These new products are often interesting but not "seamless" - customers encounter challenges when attempting to use these new solutions in their everyday settings. It's our stipulation that the future is about seamless experiences.  Will you be willing to adopt a flashy new technology or product if it causes you to have to figure out how to make it work with your other products and services?  If history is any guide, this description - willing to make a new technology work when it is possibly incomplete or ignores the exis...

Eating the seed corn is an old saying that at one time meant quite a lot, but probably has little import anymore.  When farming was about simply surviving from season to season, eating the seed corn literally meant eating the seeds of the future planting.  Each year farmers would save some seeds, or potatoes, or whatever they needed to plant for the coming spring.  If the winter was harsh enough, they might have to eat those plants or seed in order to survive.  Of course this left them weakened but alive, but when spring arrived they didn't have seeds to plant, and would have to either leave the land or borrow to buy seeds to plant a crop, simply driving an already weakened family further into debt, with the hope of a bumper crop to provide sustenance for the coming year, leaving enough aside to plan for future planting and the ability to pay off the borrowed seeds.  Eating the seed corn should be a last resort. Did Target eat its seed corn? I'm writing about "...