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The other day I was talking with a Director of a service business in a B2B market.  They felt that they didn't need to focus on understanding their customers as much as a consumer products company.  It's their understanding that the decision...

There was an interesting article highlighted in Innovation Tools this week.  It's about Corporate Social Networks, and it brings up the role of Idea Brokers within a company. The article focused mostly on large companies, and how creating social...

A snippet in the Boston Globe yesterday posed an idea about why innovation is getting harder.   According to B. Jones, an economist, the frontier of knowledge is becoming more difficult to reach within an innovator's lifespan.  His analysis shows...

Most companies are concerned with protecting their Intellectual Property, and I wouldn't argue that this is a good idea.  However, I'm increasingly hearing the concern that companies are spending valuable resources protecting Intellectual Property that...

To finish expanding on the techniques used to uncover explicit and tacit motivations, let's talk about uncovering tacit motivations. As mentioned in the previous post, tacit motivations are those that consumers either cannot or do not tell you about directly.  As...

A couple of people have asked me to expand on the techniques used to uncover explicit and tacit motivations.  Let's start with explicit motivations. As mentioned in the previous post, explicit motivations are those that consumers can tell you about...

I find it useful to think about two types of consumer motivations; those that are explicit, and those that are tacit.  Motivations that are explicit are those that consumers can tell you about directly.  For example, if you want to improve your product...

This video "The Process" is a great illustration of Monday's post.  Thank you Katie for sending the link! http://www.todaysbigthing.com/2008/07/23 Enjoy!

This sounds really obvious.  Your company decides to develop a new product.  This new product will fill a real market need.  So of course all the activities that occur during the development phase exist to ensure that the new product will fulfill this...

Who is responsible for innovation in your organization, and how do they ensure that it happens in the right way for your company?  Not surprisingly, the answers to these questions vary greatly.  Here are some of the most common answers I've encountered:...