Eureka Moments
Collaborating in the time of Coronavirus (with apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez*)
This past January I was at WeWork Labs to present to a group of maritime startups. Just before I stood up to speak, my sponsor Elizabeth Scallon casually mentioned that I would be presenting using a digital whiteboard – I should just mark up the board with comments,...
Maritime Blue Innovation Accelerator Makes a Big Splash
What do a marine biology program, an emergency physician practice, a technology to extract contaminants, a data and insights platform, a trucking app and online platform, a fishing gear recycling program, a least-cost ballast water treatment system, a white fish...
Are you letting your customers design their own products yet?
I subscribe to Trend Hunter’s newsletters and it’s always fascinating to read about what innovations they are finding through their community. One of the trends they have been writing about for a while is customization. Customization in this context means enabling...
Which innovation archetype are you? And how might that be holding you back?
A few months ago I treated myself to a day of innovation and attended the Seattle Future Festival, hosted by Trend Hunter. If you don’t already know about Trend Hunter, they are the world's largest, most popular trend community, with a global network of 200,000...
Amazon Go: The Experience of No
In Seattle in January 2018 Amazon opened their Amazon Go store to the public with the very enticing proposition: No lines. No checkout. Removing friction from the shopping process is a strategy that has driven much of Amazon’s online innovation (1-Click ordering,...
Mergers and Acquisitions May Be “Better Than Sex,” But Don’t Get Left Holding the Baby
Hal Conick wrote an enlightening and useful article, How Marketing Can Make Mergers and Acquisitions Easy, in which he referenced the AOL / Time Warner merger. According to Conick, Time Warner executive Ted Turner said the transaction was “better than sex.” We now...
The Importance of F*ucking Up: How Mistakes Lead to Better Innovation
I nearly laughed myself sick when I saw this invitation. According to the organizers, FuckUp Nights is the fastest growing global movement of entrepreneurial people who come together to publicly share failure stories. Thousands of people attend FuckUp Nights each...
A Framework for Finding the Right Startup Target
University of Washington Entrepreneur in Residence, Derek Streat, had a daughter who suffered from a rare medical condition. After spending thousands of hours researching her condition and finding it frustrating to have to sift through all the databases for the exact...
Should We Care About This? 10 Questions to Help Assess Macro Trends
In an earlier post, Tornado Sightings, I wrote about the importance of keeping an eye on macro trends. Macro trends are big social and economic shifts – technology, consumer demographics, culture, or historical turnings – that can reshape markets and create big new...
Amazon’s Whole Food Acquisition: 4 Amazon Strategies, 3 Resources, 3 Strategies for the Rest of Us
Food for thought in the grocery business Amazon has been in the news a lot lately, and rightly so. It’s fascinating to be sitting in their back yard where I get to see some of these innovations for myself. In early 2017 they announced an experiment with Amazon Go, a...
To Innovate Better, Try These 3 DIY Ideas to Immerse Yourself in Your Customers’ Lives
Conventional qualitative and quantitative research provides an excellent foundation for understanding consumer needs, but it’s also important to more viscerally understand what’s going on in consumers’ lives, how your products or services could work to help them live...
Tornado Sighting: 3 Ways to Use Macro Trends to Innovate More Successfully
In my last post, I talked about three “Periscopes” to help marketers rise above the day to day work to innovate more successfully. This time I thought it would be useful to talk about a best practice you can use when you do have a chance to step away from your daily...