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Why Bezos Was Surprised by the Kindle's Success - Newsweek.com
Amazon had an amazing year despite the bad economy. How did you do it?
Bezos: It is the basics. It is focusing on selection, low prices, and reliable, convenient, fast delivery. It's the cumulative effect of having this approach for 14 years. I always tell people, if we have a good quarter it's because of the work we did three, four, and five years ago. It's not because we did a good job this quarter.
How companies approach innovation
Executives certainly see innovation as an important driver of growth, with some 70 per cent of top managers saying it is one of their highest priorities.
In addition, more than three-quarters of survey respondents say the huge amount of media attention to innovation has, at the least, raised their companies' awareness of the importance of innovation. Nineteen per cent say the attention has caused them to make innovation the main focus.
That importance is borne out in some of the decisions made by top managers. A majority, for instance, say they routinely decide where to focus innovation efforts, where and how to commercialise, or who works on innovation. But top managers don't seem to think they have a lot of control over the innovation process as a whole.
For instance, less than a quarter of respondents indicate that innovation budgets or targets are decided at the top. Further, many top managers lack a structured approach to making innovation decisions: though 40 per cent say they rely on a solid fact base, almost as many, 37 per cent, say they depend on a consensus of their peers; only 21 per cent rely on intuition.
Amazon's New Video Streaming Service Will Disrupt The CDN Industry
While Amazon's CloudFront service for on-demand video never really disrupted any of the larger CDNs in the market, this latest announcement drastically changes things. While Amazon is not going to take any large customers away from the CDNs, think MLB or Hulu, Amazon does have the potential to take many of the mid-sized customers who spend between $3-5k a month on video.
Gary Hamel: Management’s Dirty Little Secret -- How to Increase Employee Engagement - Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 - WSJ
In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge. Success here is measured by profit per employee, adjusted for capital intensity. Apple’s profit per head is significantly higher than its major competitors, as is the company’s ratio of profits to net fixed assets.
10 Huge Successes Built On Second Ideas
It takes a lot of faith in an idea to start a company around it.
But for companies to succeed in the long run, their founders also need to be ready for those ideas to fail. They need to be ready to learn from those failures and adapt.
Micro-blogging vs Mega-blogging — Matt Mullenweg
Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.
Can Small Changes Save Your Business, and the Planet? - Andrew Winston - HarvardBusiness.org
When I talk about the incredible value in getting lean, of course I'm channeling Amory Lovins (and many other efficiency proponents). The big idea here is that there are not only low-hanging fruit, but fruit on the ground. Many companies that have aggressively pursued efficiency have found vast amounts of money waiting to be picked up, even if the large-scale savings result from adding up many small changes. For example, Wal-Mart improved the fuel efficiency of its entire fleet by over 25% in just a few years with a range of efforts — from new tires to aerodynamic improvements such as side 'wind skirts' to a larger investment in new auxiliary power systems that eliminate idling. (Note that all the improvements paid back in at most two years, the company's internal hurdle rate for investments.)
BankerVision: When small innovations are good
Initially, I disagreed with this. Doing small, incremental optimisation sounds rather like doing small, incremental innovation. But then I thought about the question of incremental vs. optimisation in the context of our own definition of innovation: innovation is anything except what we would have done as business as usual.
Optimisation, clearly, is business as usual. Innovation isn’t.
We Perform Best When No One Tells Us What To Do
According to Dan Pink (lawyer, speech writer, author, and career analyst), the way to get the best original ideas out of people is to cut back on restrictions and rules regarding output, and stop offering incentives for work produced. This may sound a little backwards, but science has shown that sometimes when we offer rewards for output or production, it effects the quality of the ideas or work as opposed to offering no incentive.
In his TED Global 2009 talk last month, Pink said, “There is a disconnect between what science knows and what business does.” And he adds, “Traditional notions of management work great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, self-direction works best.”
TheOpen100 - home
This wiki has been created to capture the top 100 open innovation companies and organisations globally. We've posted some of our favourite examples in the table below, from Adobe to Zopa, and given reasons why they qualify as successful open innovators. Please feel free to add to or edit this list, debate and discuss, and add any useful links where possible. Thanks.
Facebook | Open Innovation in Google
Facebook group tracking Google open innovation topics
Thinking About Design Thinking
Other disciplines, I'm sure, do one or more of these at any given time. But I think it's the combination of these that people mean--or should mean--when using the phrase "design thinking."
What's Thwarting American Innovation? Too Much Science, Says Roger Martin | Design of the Times | Fast Company
The problem, says Martin, author of a new book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, is that corporations have pushed analytical thinking so far that it's unproductive. "No idea in the world has been proved in advance with inductive or deductive reasoning," he says.
Prototype - Six Sigma and Design Thinking - How 2 Methods Should Mix - NYTimes.com
Design thinking offers tools for exploring new markets and opportunities; Six Sigma skills can be applied to improve existing products. Companies that adhere strictly to one or the other risk failure. “The practices that make for success at one time can trap firms and contribute to their downfall at a later time,” says Bob Cole, a quality expert and professor emeritus at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Six Sigma and Design Thinking » Design Thinking
I don’t think that anymore. Having spent more time studying companies like Toyota I have realized that high quality (the goal of Six Sigma) is a great platform for new ideas (the goal of design thinking). Similarly, as Chuck Jones implies, Six Sigma can help new ideas get better faster. Having been involved in several first mover products at IDEO I can attest to the fact that very rarely is that first iteration the best possible product in terms of quality or functionality.
Internet Evolution - Dan Keldsen - It's Time to Replenish Online Innovation
RE Enterprise Innovation: yes. but carefully. so often innovation goes the way of the concept car. really cool at the Show, but the production model sort of looks like all the other models. problem is, that so much impactful innovation is lost by corporate execs either hedging, or generally softening the edges of everything new that comes along. Quite often that yields high volumes of marginal In-faux-vation. "Innovation" is a required word for Execs to speak, but almost no companies have a cultural of innovation such that True Innovation can come to light, be executed, and then leveraged. Real Innovation is very scary stuff to an Exec with alot to lose. Infauxvation has almost as much buzz value, and a fraction of the risk. Manage your Career, or Manage Innovation. Every Exec;s choice to make.
GET EMPLOYEES TO BRAINSTORM ONLINE - November 29, 2004
According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, almost half (45%) of lucrative ideas--whether breakthrough products or services, new uses for old ones, or ways to cut costs--come from employees. (Customers, suppliers, and competitors contribute the other half.)
An Effective Employee Suggestion Program Has a Multiplier Effect | WebProNews
Today, the Japan Railways (JR) East, the largest rail carrier in the world, continues to benefit from listening to their employees. For example, this rail carrier was cutting tunnels through Mount Tanigawa for a new bullet-train route. They hit water that caused problems for the construction efforts. The engineers developed plans to drain the water away. Construction crews started drinking the water and sharing how good the water tasted. A maintenance worker submitted a suggestion that the organization start bottling and marketing the water as premium mineral water.
His idea was accepted and the water now appears on the market under the brand name Oshimizu. The rail carrier has now installed vending machines in every one of its thousand stations and their advertisements emphasize the purity of the water that percolates through the snow-capped mountains picking up healthful amounts of minerals. The JR East Rail Company water is so popular that they now have entered the home delivery service of the water. Water sales recently exceeded $47M (Robinson & Stern, 1998). The idea came from a maintenance crew worker.
3 Engaging Platforms — Competing on Execution
I was a corporate innovator and, for me, it always started with a question. “Why are we manually entering all that information from system A into system B?” or “Why are we running this entire multi-billion business on a spreadsheet?” I wasn’t the only person to notice these things– what made me an “innovator” was that I was willing to arm wrestle the organization until I landed the solution. But this is not a foundation for a successful business execution culture. Companies need a way to nurture and develop the ideas that have legs. Spigit has figured out integrating game mechanics into social networking can help companies like AT&T, MedPlus and Pfizer lower the innovation barrier and create a garden of innovation, instead of a wresting match.
Eight ways to kill an idea : FLIRTing with the Crowds
Series of drawings, depicting different ways ideas suffer internally.
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