Innovation Excellence The World's Most Popular Innovation Web Site

Brand Essence (Part one of three) Like famous musicians, effective brands maintain a certain sway over those who come into contact with them, a sense of awe and authority that translates talent, focus, and hard work into an essence that communicates instantly. Let’s begin by defining the word “brand.” To start we will play the game “no.” I’ll ask several ...

“What are the metrics?” We get this question all the time from nervous managers, directors, and VPs who are struggling with the philosophical underpinnings of front-end innovation. They are eager to launch an innovation program, but want to be able to foresee the outcome before embarking on a journey of discovery.

Michael Graber looks at three elements of high-functioning team dynamics for the highly productive and invites you to look at how radically productive you want your culture to be?

It takes two factors to make innovation real at an organization: concepts and culture. Work on both at the same time and the rest will emerge as a by-product of the process. If you outsource your innovation efforts, you will end up with concepts that will not be accepted by your existing culture. Some concepts might be potent enough to ...

Almost everyday the Studio faces challenges that private label competitors impose upon our branded products clients. More and more private label brands are taking lessons out of the innovation and brand strategy playbooks and getting ahead of the once category-leading brand product.

Part Two of Two In Part One we explored how language and our relationship with words has limited the growth and development of organizations and human capacity. Now, we discover why expanding these things make a positive impact. An organization can only reach its potential when it both embraces new words and concepts and also actively adds new phrases to ...

Innovation is the most potent form of leadership development. You can’t outsource the important things. After working with more than 100 clients, we have noted one of the most critical factors in the success of an innovation project: if you outsource all of the work on your innovation projects, they will fail. It doesn’t matter if you use our humble ...

The life of an organization is defined and redefined by the language it chooses to use. More than any other factor, compliance around words conveys the values of a place where people work. Indeed, words are magic, carrying so much weight that they demand careful, conscious attention.

When we get called into a company it is often because a very expensive innovation effort failed. One of the huge global innovation firms was called in to create a new platform and what happens next is very much like a bad action movie—you know the story. No surprises. The company received breakthrough concepts but they don’t know what to do with them, ...

First off, you need to decide if you genuinely want to reboot a brand. Some people get so tethered to old ideas about the brand that there is resistance to rethink its meaning and potential. If you are serious about growth and see rebooting as the only path of salvation, read on.