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Cell phones and the value chain
Your customers will change the way they use your products in ways you don’t currently anticipate. Do you remember when you got your first cell phone? I was living in Chicago when the city was selected for the first FCC trial of a cell-phone network in 1984, and I jumped at the chance to try […]
Gray wave and assisted living
So, how do you determine where you, as an individual or a business, will be in five years? You can’t say where exactly you’re going because you can’t predict what’s going to happen in the world. However, you can challenge yourself to change. In 2001 Apple’s sales figures were in decline. The company
Weak Signals
“Weak signals” are the equivalent of a canary in a coal mine. They are the unspoken needs and wants of your customers, and they are also the arrows pointing to what your customers are going to need and want in the future, even if they themselves don’t know it yet. If you pay attention to […]
The Permission to Innovate
Some people don’t believe that they can generate the ideas their companies need. A story from a few years ago, when HP acquired a small start-up, illustrates the reason behind this mind-set perfectly. As part of the process of introducing the new team to HP, I hosted a session and invited HP employe
Where are your future customers?
How will you identify and locate customers in five years? Every hot trend reaches a point I like to call the “Uncle Larry moment.” You know what I mean. It’s the juncture where one of your older relatives announces he’s taken up something that had seemed cutting edge, futuristic, and exciting up til
Ideas? Don’t give up on them
Once everyone is settled into the meeting, it’s time to share what you’ve discovered. I generally give a quick recap of our area of focus, not about the ideas yet. I start off by asking the participants to share their own list of the assumptions and rules that define how the industry and organizati
Group dynamics and ranking
Before we start ranking I want you to think about group dynamics for a second. Ideally you will have somewhere between five and ten people participating in your ideation group. These people will be drawn from all divisions of your company, including, but not limited to, engineering, marketing, and e
Beyond the Killer Idea
I’ve been able to succeed because I’ve generated a system that guides me past the obvious ideas and straight toward the killer idea. I also have the confidence to push for my ideas and make sure they get a chance to prove themselves. So, if you find yourself with a killer idea, but are lacking […]
Not Relying on Specialized Knowledge
What do you think your core value or skill is? If you are resting on an assumption that a deep-rooted and highly specialized knowledge or skill is enough to get you by, you are mistaken. Back in 1995 or so, I noticed a sliver of an ad, one column wide and two lines deep, on […]
Creating Innovations in Education
My objective for the workshop was to test the Killer Questions before handing them off to the Department of Education. Remember, the focus for the attendees of the workshop was how to create innovations in education to better prepare our students for the competitive workforce. I gave them the modifi
