Innovation

Kantar Worldpanel predicts that 75% of growth for consumer products companies in the next decade will come through new product development. And yet, more than half of senior executives declare themselves unsatisfied with the financial returns of product innovation. Why? Because their innovation models don't determine where the growth is actually coming from. So, companies end up developing a product that tested well in market research only to...

Companies in commoditizing industries tend to follow one of two strategies: either they try to find new services to offer around the product or they compete on price. The one certain outcome of these two strategies, of course, is to accelerate the commoditization process itself. But, as an HBR article on this topic once pointed out, even commodities have customers. And where there are customers there can be...

Any five-year-old has no trouble turning an old blanket and a couple of chairs into an impenetrable fort. But as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ability to see an object for anything other than its original purpose. This is called Functional Fixedness and while you probably won't need to build a fort during your professional career, chances are you do suffer from...