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Trust the Customers, Not the Experts

Destination Innovation

After graduating he developed this idea and presented it to luggage companies who thought it was a toy. Similarly toy companies were not interested because they considered it to be luggage. He found a toy company which was prepared to act as licensee, but the company went bankrupt. Your company is currently worthless.”

Design 316
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Eating your own dog food

Idea to Value

So many leaders in companies have no idea what their own products are actually like. In 2006, the editor of IEEE Software recounted that in the 1970s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. But do you actually know what it is like using the product you are trying to sell?

Software 259
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Companies betting big on open innovation

hackerearth

[This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.” ( Henry Chesbrough, 2006 ). At lower risk and often lower costs, companies can use this strategic tool to explore new opportunities for growth.

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What impact does time pressure have on creativity?

Idea to Value

Diamonds are formed under pressure There are numerous examples of companies who allowed staff to take time to work on their own innovations and creative ideas. However, above moderate levels of stress, creativity quickly falls.

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Crowdsourced Innovation: Three Things I Learned

IdeaScale

Every company says they want to be “innovative” and some of them use “crowdsourcing” to do so. In simple terms, it means that a company has their employees and sometimes customers brainstorm new ways to make the company better, whether it is improving small processes or creating a whole new product.

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Can creativity training really improve your creativity?

Idea to Value

This is similar to the work I do with clients and companies to understand the science of creativity. See my services here for more information. His team found that this training improved creative performance in students by over 28%. We therefore never attempted to publish it.

Training 211
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Spotify, how a startup from Sweden changed the music industry

Articles from GroundControl

This blog is the first of a series of articles of famous companies and the search for their working business model. In 2006, Spotify was founded in Stockholm by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. The two men recognized a rising problem: illegally shared music. As a consequence, artists were earning less and less income. They […].