Innovation Excellence The World's Most Popular Innovation Web Site

What if you could empower every citizen with tools that will help your city, state or country innovate and change faster than the competition for a penny a person? Well, now it’s possible… A revolution is beginning, and the smart cities, states, countries, and even organizations, are arming themselves with the tools they need to win… The Change Planning Toolkit™ ...

Author’s Note: The opinions expressed in this article represent my views and my views alone. I do not work for or represent Amazon.com in any way. In 2005, I joined the ranks of a company called Amazon.com – a company that was, at that time, a retail underdog. Their stock price was laughable at $25/share (vs. nearly $1,000/share today), and ....

Even if your “Where to Play” (see last post) is not particularly unique, there are always ways to win. Case in point: corner coffee shops, so common they’re found in just about every town and city on the planet. Nothing at all special or unusual about that space. Who wins in that unremarkable market? Starbucks. Starbucks is the undisputed heavyweight ...

The greatest success comes from the ability to make choices about the most important thing of all. Leading a business requires sacrifice. There is no way around it. Anyone who’s been there knows about the long hours, the sleepless nights, and the myriad tradeoffs that have to be made. Add a family to that equation and you’re bound to be ...

Not that long ago, a somewhat mysterious cloud shrouded creativity on the work floor. Everybody seemed to have their own definition and understanding of the word. The connotation with more artistic professions or (applied) art forms was never far away. Designers, copywriters, architects, film makers, musicians, … yes, those by definition are creative professions and creativity belongs there. Of course.

Now, first of all, Kroger is a Cincinnati-based company not a Seattle-based company, so it is only natural that I should hear more about the things Amazon is experimenting with than those of Kroger, owners of a portfolio of grocery brands, including: Ralphs, Fred Meyer, QFC, Kroger, fry’s, Food4Less, King Soopers, Harris Teeter, and more. Amazon has been making a ...

This piece looks at the future between now and 2030, and predicts that the greatest need for innovation is going to be in green and smart construction in both residential and commercial construction. The article offers specific examples of current and future innovations in this area, with the goal of not only a cleaner environment, but better architectural designs in the future. 

One thing that all great expansion case studies have in common is that the brand defined their frame of reference to their own advantage. You can do this for your brand, too. Read on for an explanation, three notable case studies, and a downloadable eBook pdf.

  Patented innovations line shelves as shown in the patent library above, and over the years I’ve written a number of times about the increasingly recombinative nature of innovation.  This posits that new innovations are often a combination of existing innovations rather than truly novel ones.  A paper from a few years ago found that roughly 40% of all patents ...

Too often, companies are sold on a target price for their product. They want to charge somewhere between what the market is willing to pay and what’s necessary to turn a profit — sometimes at four to five times the manufacturing cost. It’s tempting to take shortcuts in manufacturing and material selection to make more money. But poor quality comes at a cost...