Innovation

Building a Culture of Innovation by Creating A Structure for Unstructured Innovation

The need for innovation has never been more acute for businesses than it is today. Every CEO of any sizable business is worrying about which startup from which garage is going to change the rules of their game and disrupt them. They are looking for ways to find (internally, within their organisation or externally, through acquisition/partnership/investments) innovations that can give them enough breathing space to grow their businesses and give their shareholders a good return on investment (and in the process make a lot of money for themselves :-)) However, what most organisations don’t get is that there is only one […]

Customer Engagement

Loyalty Programs and Building Loyalty

One of the biggest challenges that brands face today is to find and cultivate loyal customers. Most brands have some sort of loyalty programs to reward loyalty from their customers. Most of these loyalty programs that I am a part of, totally miss the point of loyalty itself. In general, the expectation from enterprise customers or consumers have significantly increased and they now expect brands to not just deliver great products and services but also acknowledge them as individuals and engage, excite and/or woo them to become loyal customers. Add to this, the fact that we are today also living […]

Ideas, Leadership

Giving Ourselves the Best Gift Ever Possible

I recently watched this video from Apostolos on the Design Collector Feed. Apart from being a visually stunning piece of work, the video also talks about a very important, if not the most important thing that each and everyone of us should never forget – to live in the moment and be fully present in the NOW. Before I go further, request you to take the 3 minutes and 47 seconds to watch and listen to the video first. Splendor of Existence from Apostolos Stefanopoulos on Vimeo. Its that time of the year, when we are either reflecting on what […]

Ideas, Innovation, transformation

Finding Our Centre Of Excellence

I read a post by Mitch Joel (one of my insanely awesome people) where he proposes a 7 step model to define what could be our centre of excellence. Please do read his post here. I wanted to do this exercise and the result is as below: The Tactic: My tactic of my primary output is content, just like Mitch himself. The Format: My format is text and audio. The Frequency: This is a place where i need to improve significantly. I have committed to myself that i will create content everyday in text and at least once a week in […]

Innovation

Intelligent Failure

I just came across this video where Rita McGrath shares her views on how to fail intelligently. First, do take some time and watch the short video below. She talks about the 4 different activities that constitute intelligent failure. How does success look like? I think she makes a great point here. One of the biggest challenge that I have seen in innovation projects is they have a big goal and know what success at the highest level looks like – successful product launch, getting the next round of funding, getting approval from the management to go into production, etc. […]