Category: Innovation Examples & Lessons

Copy, Paste, Innovate

One of the most common operations performed on a computer is copy and paste. We copy a section of a webpage and paste it into a document. We take it for granted. We grab an idea from one place and put it to use in another. So why not use this method for your next product or service innovation? Henry FordHenry Ford did not invent the concept of the assembly line. He saw it in use in a meat packing... Read More--

Don’t Just Do Something Different; Do the Opposite!

Innovation means doing something different and what could be more different than the exact opposite? If your current plans and policies are not working then try doing the opposite. Linus Torvalds The policy of all major software companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, was to protect their intellectual property. Only a handful of loyal employees were allowed access to the full source code of major... Read More--

How Startrek inspired an Innovation – your Cell Phone

Captain Kirk Martin Cooper led the team at Motorola that developed the world’s first handheld mobile phone.  He was born in 1928.  He served in the US Navy before taking a degree in Electrical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).  In 1954 he joined Motorola and worked on pagers and then car phones using cellular technology.  At that stage the car phones were mobile only in... Read More--

How do you finance your innovative start-up company? Try crowdfunding.

Pebble Watch Pebble is a start-up company that makes customizable watches which display messages from your iPhone. In 2012 the company raised over £10m in capital from the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. And it did not just get cash; the company received 85,000 orders for its watches largely from the publicity it received on Kickstarter.  Crowdfunding is the hot new way to raise money from the crowd... Read More--

Minimize your way to Innovation

Between.us became a popular app which creates an intimate space for just two people.  It allows a couple to share their own private social network where they send each other sweet messages and exchange photos or songs.  In some ways it is like Facebook for couples.  It is a social network which has reduced the number of friends you can have down to one. We tend to think that our innovations should... Read More--

What makes Israel such a hotbed of Innovation?

What makes Israel so successful at business innovation particularly in the high-tech field?  Each year this tiny country of 7 million people attracts some $2 billion in venture capital funding – about as much as Germany and France combined.  When you adjust for population Israel leads the world in the number of high-tech start-ups and the size of the venture-capital industry.  The country... Read More--

How to reject opportunity; like turning down the Beatles.

The Fab Four We know that innovation involves taking risks.  Yet it often seems that the safe option is to turn down the risk.  However, turning down a risk is also a risk – the risk of losing an opportunity. Just to remind us of how big that risk is, here a list of some of the worst decisions in business history.  Many involve rejecting opportunities that turned out to be huge commercial... Read More--

Your first idea may be good but keep looking

Most managers like to be seen as decisive and they can quickly come up with an idea for tackling a problem.  Doing something is generally (but not always) a better option that doing nothing.  But the first answer we come up with is unlikely to be the best answer. A better approach is to take a little time to generate a long list of possible ideas and then evaluate them in order to select one or more... Read More--

Disrupt and cannibalize your business, before someone else does.

Giffgaff is a mobile phone company that seriously undercuts other service providers in the UK market.   The cost per minute on Giffgaff is 60% lower than the four main operators – O2, Orange, Vodafone and T-mobile.  Giffgaff also differs from conventional mobile phone operators in that the users of the service may participate in aspects of the company’s operation, e.g. sales, customer... Read More--

Deliberately Take a Different Point of View

Have you ever been in a wood that just looked like a random assortment of trees and then when you take a few steps to the side you see that all the trees are laid out in neat rows?  Sometimes we are standing in the wrong place to see an obvious answer. We have to deliberately take a different point of view and come at the problem from a new direction before we have a chance of creating a radical solution. Albert... Read More--