Category: Innovation

Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Shift from Competing Organizations to Competing Networks

In the past few years, I have started seeing a definite trend that is shaping up and one that can have an immense impact on all of us and how we do business. There is more competition between networks of organizations competing with each other rather than individual organizations competing. This was prevalent in the B2B space in the IT industry, where software vendors would team up with hardware vendors and implementation partners and go to market together. They win the deal together or lose the deal together to a different network. Airlines around the world always had these networks […]

Innovation

Reframing Failure as Iteration Fosters More Innovation

One of the biggest hurdles in fostering a culture of innovation in an organization is the fear of failure.  This is one of the most critical aspects of a culture. The fear of failure creates a lot of additional hurdles in the innovation process.  No Breakthrough Innovation: The biggest impact on the innovation process that the fear of failure can have is that this almost ensures that there will be no breakthrough innovation coming out of the innovation process. Any breakthrough innovation requires at some stage for the team to decide to follow an insight/idea that is unconventional or against […]

Innovation

The Curious Case of Amazon Coins

Amazon Coins debuted among much fan fare in May this year and have mysteriously kept a very low profile since the high profile launch. I am not sure if this is a deliberate strategy on part of Amazon or is it that no one noticed its presence (or maybe absence) in the past few months. The only time that i heard about Amazon coins is when they launched a promotion to give out 20 free coins if one downloaded a certain set of apps. Really? Are these coins being used at all? If yes, how much is their usage? Or […]

Business Model, Ideas, Innovation, Marketing

Some Possibilities for Re-inventing Video Advertisements

One of the most sacred piece of consumer advertising in the past was the 6 second spot in Television. Advertisers qued up to buy the spots and display their advertisements. Ad agencies and spot buyers were in vogue as they were the levers that enabled brands in their quest for more consumers. All this is about to change and the advertising agencies are in for a disruption. This opinion of mine is based on the following trends that I see playing out in the markets: Despite having changed medium (Television to online streaming videos), video advertising did not change. They […]

Innovation, Leadership

Great Teams Are a Mix of Old and New

To add to this nice post, I think that the composition of consistently high performing teams is that they have a set of core team members who enjoy working with each other and have worked together for long periods of time thereby developing the ability to understand how each other thinks and depending upon the project, you add new people to the mix to get a breath of fresh thinking into the project. To take the analogy of the broadway or the movie business, you can see that most directors like to work with the same set of people when […]