My other blog…

This question was made to Doug Hall in an interview published in IEEE Spectrum magazine (August 2006 issue) and the answer, which I am quoting below, provides an interesting insight:

There are three laws of what I call marketing physics, three things that matter. The first is “overt benefit”, which, in a consumer’s word is “What’s in it for me?” The second is “real reasons to believe,” which translates to “Why should I believe you?” And the third is “dramatic difference,” or “Why should I care?” The classic mistake that engineers make is to talk about features, not benefits. Engineers will talk about the technology and assume that people will know why it’s important and believe that it works. But it doesn’t work that way. […]

These three laws make clear in a very short paragraph that successful innovation is about making products that are valuable for the users (buyers are interested in the benefits they are going to obtain and not in the great technologies that make these products possible) and to be profitable these products need to make a “dramatic difference” or leap in value (if they provide the same value as existing products, they are in for a bloody competition).

You can read the whole article in IEEE Spectrum online and find further articles by Doug Hall can be found in his web page.

After this long holiday hiatus, this blog is back with an announcement: From now on, and in spite of my statement in the very first entry, this blog will concentrate only on innovation related topics and it will be updated at least once a week, normally on weekends. Moreover, in the right hand column I have introduced a section called “Update Schedule”, so you can know when to come back for another (hopefully ) interesting post.

See you next week!

This short post is just to inform everybody that I’m taking a month off and that this blog will be back on September.

After reading David’s post regarding creativity, I have remembered a very interesting article I found some time ago called “The Six Myths of Creativity” written by Bill Breen. The six myths described in this article are:

1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types
2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator
3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity
4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs
5. Competition Beats Collaboration
6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization

I think the first one is the most important one, as everyone is born creative, it is just that we forget how to do it while growing up! Thus, creativity should be practiced and encouraged in organizations, as 200.000+ creativity-empowered employees of a corporation can come up with more and probably better ideas than 10 “supercreative” people.

I have read some interesting books on this subject so if anyone wants to hear about them, just leave me a comment and I will write about them in another post.

The word Innovation seems to be everywhere in these days: in the news, in the advertisement for nearly every product in the market and even in the tag lines of famous TV Series. Nevertheless, if I asked each one of you (hopefuly someone is reading this) what the meaning of innovation is, I would probably get as many definitions as readers.

For starters, I will provide two definitions of innovation provided by two different sources:

• In technology, an improvement to something already existing. (Encyclopædia Britannica)

• 1. The act of introducing something new. 2. Something newly introduced. (The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000)

Probably none of these definitions fit the idea of innovation you have in your heads, so before introducing more definitions, I would like to hear what the meaning of word innovation is for you.