I just finished Paul Allen Smethers and Alastair France's new book Five Myths of Consumer Behavior: Create Technology Products Consumers Will Love. It's been required reading at the office and for good reason. It's a superb book! Something every marketing student and product designer or engineer should pick up. [It also supports/echos some of what Jane ("the empathic economy"), Susan ("making customers happy") and Russell ("uncovering insights") touched on in their recent interviews here.]
At only 147 big-print pages it's a rather quick read but it packs a big punch and does a fine job at outlining core yet often overlooked consumer behaviour principles. In particular, Smethers articulately explains (in plain English) the various phases and stalling points of new product adoption, the barriers to initial use and proper usability, the different types of users and ...
What does a local pizza shop and retailers who insist on clamshell packaging have in common? They both are ignoring their customers.
In the first case the local pizza shop had a sign in the window that said, “Tables are for paying customers only.” Obviously, people are stopping into the restaurant, hanging out, and not buying much. I can see why the owner would put up the sign; the shop is in a strip mall that has no place to linger. So, it is conceivable that people would go into the shop and not order a full meal.
As for retailers, they insist on clamshell packaging because of its low cost and effectiveness. It works because you can see the product, it prevents pilferage, and it is relatively low cost. Yet the retailer’s insistence on clamshell packaging is responsible for 6,400 visits to the emergency room according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. So prevalent is the consumer sentiment about clamshell packaging that the industry calls it “wrap rage.”
In both instances, business is refusing to recognize the unmet consumer need that consumers would be willing to pay for. Is their something the pizza shop owner could do to capitalize on all the food traffic? How about offering a $4.00 cup of coffee? And the clamshell; couldn’t there be a way to easily open the product once it is out of the retail environment?
Having consumers interact with you product in unintended ways is a good thing because it opens doors to new ways of making money.
In fact that is exactly how Stanley came up with the Fubar. They noticed that the only thing that contractors were using hammers for was demolition because nail guns had made nailing obsolete.
I already have an Ultra-Mobile PC: It's called a Newton - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
I have an Apple Newton 2100. It still works. Maybe I should try to update it, and see if it'll work and play with my regular computers?
(tags: Apple software)
It&rsquos been two years since The Art of the Start hit the streets, and I&rsquom ready to write another book. I have some ideas, but I'd like to tap the &ldquowisdom of the crowd&rdquo in order to ensure that it appeals to &ldquothe long tail&rdquo in this &ldquoWeb 2.0&rdquo world. :-)
So...I&rsquove created a wiki for the book that&rsquos located here. The password for contributors is &ldquokickbutt&rdquo. I&rsquove used PBwiki. The syntax is that you enter an &ldquo!&rdquo at the start of a line to create a heading&mdashthat is, the book title or a descriptive phrase. Then you can explain your idea in the next line.
For example, this:
! Title: Venture Capital for the Clueless
An explanation for beginners of how to raise venture capital
will look like this:
Title: Venture Capital for the Clueless
An explanation for beginners of how to raise venture capital
I see that word is out of Brian Mulloy and Dmitry Dimov's new service, Swivel. Brian tipped it to me recently, and, as I told him, I like the idea of a "YouTube for data" immensely. This site is nothing if not a testament to the fun of playing in data tra
By spinning carbon nanotubes into yarn a fraction of the width of a human hair, researchers have developed artificial muscles that exert 100 times the force, per area, of natural muscle. This is according to Ray Baughman, director of the Nanotech Institut
From Steve Talbott's very stimulating essay "Where We Have Come To:"
During 1994-1995 I wrote a book suggesting that the emerging culture of the Internet was infected by a massive and potentially disastrous confusion between our full human capacities and the technical capabilities of the new digital machinery. It's not that the technical capabilities had nothing to do with us. Quite the opposite. The point was that they lived first of all within us: we had to conceive the computer and be capable of thinking like a computer before we could build one. And that's exactly where the danger lay. This thinking and the machine it spawned were extremely one-sided expressions of ourselves. If we continued investing our energies in such one-sidedness, allowing the rapid spread of digital machinery continually to reinforce our own imbalance, then (so I argued) we would eventually descend to the level of our machines without even realizing it. And we would mistake our own descent for a glorious ascent of the machine to a human and then a superhuman level.
The ultimate threat, I claimed in The Future Does Not Compute, was not the operation of the machine "out there" in the physical world, but rather the ongoing amplification and imperial aggrandizement of the machine within us. This is what makes the externalized technology so extremely dangerous.
Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, end of cyberspace, internet
Actually given its brevity, less a story than an anecdote from the Times Online:
After a lifetime of rowing in club boats, I recently started building my own. Before the internet, it was difficult to get information or plans for amateur construction. There was a show for small wooden boats in London and some further education colleges did courses, but most boatbuilders were on their own, learning from books and bitter experience.
The web has brought about a global amateur boat- building community. We have forums and newsgroups to discuss designs and construction methods online and to keep inspiration going by swapping stories of voyages.
Members log on from around the world, although the hobby seems to be concentrated mainly in the English-speaking countries and, for some unknown reason, Poland.
It is not just contact either. The web has revolutionised the supply of materials for boatbuilding. It is now possible to download plans and order materials electronically, instead of having to motor for miles to various chandleries. This year, for the first time, a meeting was held for amateurs to bring their boats, sail each other’s creations and exchange notes.
A brief scenario on the revival of localism in Britain in the coming decade, from Times Online:
Climate change will be one of the main drivers for change in the workplace over the next decade, restricting the freedom to travel and raising the cost of transporting goods.
Companies, especially global corporations, will have physical economies that are much more local, but with a superimposed knowledge economy that is free from the limitations of geography.
People will move to places that offer the facilities they need or aspire to. Having a good range of schools, shops and healthcare facilities within affordable range will become vital, leading to the resurgence of the old market towns as hubs for the local physical economy.
Each market town will have a specialisation to attract residents, such as a top theatre, a world-class sporting venue or an artists’ colony. This process is already emerging, with towns such as Ludlow becoming famous for its food, or Brighton for its night life.
Most market towns already have railway stations, which will become the preferred method of long-distance travel. Most are also historic centres of food production, which have been left high and dry by the supermarket revolution— but already the localisation process is starting with the rapid growth of farmers’ markets selling local produce. There are even signs that the headlong movement of manufacturing to the developing world may be about to reverse.
Jon Udell is leaving InfoWorld and joining Microsoft. He will join the same group (Channel 9) where Robert Scoble worked. I met Jon 5 years ago when I was at Groove Networks and Jon was writing for InfoWorld. Jon not only writes about technology, he is a very skilled software technologist.
Scoble says about Jon "Wow. I think it’s funny that Jon asked himself whether he’d be Microsoft’s new “Scoble.” Hell, I was trying to be as good as Jon Udell was (and I came up short — he’s a coder that can explain how to program to other people, and has far more influence among developers than I’ll ever hope to have).
Most people in the software development community know Jon Udell. He is a superstar writer and technologist. He has a different writing style than Scoble, no one can replace Scoble. However, Jon is a software coder who not only writes about it, he codes it, tests it, and digs down into feature/function comparisons better than anyone I know. Microsoft scored big getting Jon on the team! Congratulations to Jeff
In his Thinking Faster blog, Jeffrey Phillips recently tackled the issue of being wrong, and the fear it causes, can be a significant innovation killer within many organizations. Interestingly, he makes a connection between this fear and Six Sigma, which focuses on conformance to strict statistical norms.
Last summer I got involved in a big discusion at the Corante Innovative Marketing Conference about exactly where the responsibility should lie at companies for involving customers in innovation. Our consensus was in the marketing department. We are not the only ones – a new Forrester report on Customer-Driven Innovation concurs: “CMOs need to use their expertise in connecting with customers to lead the way in building bridges between customers and key parts of the organization.”
Customer-Driven Design and Development was prepared exclusively for the CMO Group at Forrester Research, so if you want the whole report, you’ll have to join the CMO group to buy it – however, you can get a 5- to 7-page summary report brief at this link.
The report includes six case studies of customer-driven design and development initiatives at various companies, as well as:
--Best practices --Information on common objections CMOs may run into at their companies and how to overcome these --Specific advice from 25 experts in this space, including both Gwen Ishmael and myself from Decision Analyst, who were interviewed as sources for the report. --Information on a variety of tactics such as ethnography. online communities and consumer brainstorming (which is, of course, one of the things we do) --An overview of 18 different vendors (including us!) who can help CMOs with customer-driven innovation initiatives
I have to offer kudoes to Cindy Commander on this report. She's presented a wealth of information and some thoughtful analysis, including a Customer-Driven Design Maturity Model. Essentially, this is an illustration of how organization progress in their engagement with customers in the co-creation process, from
Chuck Frey of Innovation Tools fame, also author of the Mind Mapping Software Weblog and the ebook Power Tips & Strategies for Mind Mapping Software, has a new ebook out on mindmapping software. This one's about choosing mindmapping software, called Mind Mapping Software: How to Select the Perfect Program for Your Needs. I have not read the book, but as someone who has tried to choose mindmapping software in the past, I wouldl welcome a guide as experienced as Chuck to point out the way.
Del.icio.us is just about the coolest bookmarking app ever. Bookmark, tag, and share with the world, and your friends. A recently updated utility for Mac OS X's Spotlight desktop search engine, delimport, automatically indexes your del.icio.us account every half hour, so that your bookmarks show up in desktop search results. Hot!
I was reading Fast Company or Business 2.0 recently and came across this statement from an "expert" who went on to explain that innovation can't be put into a process or managed like a business process. If we assume that this statement is true, then innovation is difficult, costly and episodic at best, done mostly by wild-haired people in lab coats somewhere out of sight and out of mind. But, just for fun, let's break down the arguments and see if we can determine if this statement is true, or if it might be an overreach. Some will argue that you "can't manage innovation" because you'll limit creativity. Well, all innovation starts with some creative thought, no doubt. I don't advocate placing hard limits on creative thought, but at some point a good idea or creative thought needs to be converted into something we can do or use. Otherwise it is simply daydreaming. We need to distinguish between formalizing a process that manages an idea once it is created and placing limits on what or how people think - or how they create new ideas. Others will argue that you "can't manage innovation" because it really does not lend itself to process management the way a more transactional process (like purchasing for instance) does. While I will agree that there are nuances between a purely transactional process and what happens in innovation, at some point we can decide that an idea is valuable and should be managed and evaluated. If we have ideas but don't have some avenues for consideration, some rules or metrics for evaluation, and some defined process, then each idea will be considered, managed and evaluated based on whatever criteria are at hand. Most businesses shudder to think of inconsistency in any process - why should innovation be different? Others will argue that managing innovation is futile or difficult because innovation is not a "hard" science or process. It's almost like Brownian motion - if we ...
At this time of year, many people often reflect on the past year, including their successes, failures and lessons learned. Here is an opportunity to share what you have learned, and gain new insights from the experiences of other InnovationTools readers. What is the most important lesson you learned regarding innovation during 2006.
a commentary at the Journal of Neuroscience speculates on the future of research journals and peer-review:
Research studies appear on databases, not in journals First, I don't think that it makes any sense to continue with paper copies of research articles. Instead of the "quasi-legal" document that is the current scientific article, we should be moving to full data being available on the web together with the software that might have been used to manipulate the data, as well as multimedia presentations to back up the data. Research papers are primarily of interest to other researchers in the same area, and they usually don't need the introduction and certainly not the discussion, which mostly degenerates to hype anyway ... If an absence of peer review (or post-publication review, as I call it) is a step too far, then we should have an author (or rather funder) pays model. These fees could support a peer review mechanism, which should be open in that both authors and readers would know who was reviewing studies. It's ethically unacceptable that such important judgements should be made an unidentified judge. Like it or not, we live in a world where what is not transparent is deemed to be biased, corrupt, or incompetent until proved otherwise. Plus I believe that peer review should be a scientific discourse rather than an arbitrary judgment. This is far from radical: it's simply science returning to its roots when science was presented and discussed at meetings rather than published in journals.
Perhaps we will invent new forms of peer review by learning from innovations like
Pretty soon everyone on the planet will have an iPod. My buddy John Hawbaker of Clarity (part of Plantronics) pointed out this study to me. It&rsquos probably a good thing to read for iPod owners. I have significant hearing loss in one ear (not because of an iPod), and it&rsquos a pain in the ass, so I&rsquod like to help people avoid hearing loss if possible.
Cory D.F. Portnuff Au.D., Ph.D. Candidate Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences Dept University of Colorado Brian J. Fligor, Sc.D. Director of Diagnostic Audiology, Children&rsquos Hospital Boston Instructor in Otology and Laryngology, Harvard Medical School
Reminiscent of Gaping Void's novel concept of cartoons drawn on the back of business cards, indexed is a series of irreverent charts and graphs scribbled on index cards. These are seriously brilliant sketches, many of them representing peculiar and oddly accurate intersections. Nice work, Old Bag - whoever you are.
(Hat tip to Junkbop)
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Corante Innovation Hub
The Corante Innovation Hub is your starting point for keeping abreast of the best writing and thinking on innovation across the blogosphere and beyond. Here you'll find the field's most insightful observers and commentators tracking and reporting on its latest developments as well as weighing in on its future. For a full description of the Innovation Hub and the Corante Network in general, visit this page.
Click here for a full list of the Innovation Hub contributors. Your editors are Renee Hopkins Callahan and Paul Williams, about whom more here. We encourage you to provide ideas and suggestions as we work to make this hub and the extended network ever more useful - email us at hubfeedback@gmail.com.
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Jon Udell is leaving 
