InnovationCreation

The end of the year is here and I am, like many of you, looking at the cross over to 2009 and 2010. To help you refresh and upgrade, here are my interesting resource picks to help refresh (re-boot?) (upgrade?).

• Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher S. Penn and John Wall provide insight and usable tools for marketing in the connected digital world. Check out the The Twitter Power Guide eBook and an audio Q&A session from a Seth Godin presentation on his book Tribes.
• Chris Brogan. Chris has insight on the community and social media "space". Hire Chris!. Actually, he said you could hire him or read his blog and get the same info for free!
• Read E-Myth. Michael Gerber wrote about being in your business more than 20 years. Great practical reading and coaching for your business.
• Edward Tufte on design. Edward Tufte, well known professor on design, has a series of books and courses that provide insight on design. He also has a very resourceful forum on his web site; check out the recent conversations on election results/data.
• Trends, everyone wants to be on the front of trends. While by no means the best or first, TrendWatching.com has material that can help provide inspiration and tickle your deep thoughts on the coming future. Good tip: Know why you are tracking trends. "Trend spotting can be fun. Makes you feel in the now and in the know. But that alone is not necessarily going to make you or your company more money. The way we see it, in a nutshell, is that tracking consumer trends is one way (and there are many ways!) to gain inspiration, helping you dream up profitable new goods, services and experiences for (and with) your customers. So trend watching should ultimately lead to profitable innovation."
• Check out Springwise for new business ideas. Springwise scans the globe for the most promising business ventures, ideas and concepts that are ready for regional or international adaptation, expansion, partnering, investments or cooperation. They ferociously track more than 400 global offline and online business resources, as well as taking to the streets of world cities, digital cameras at hand.
• Folio...Find out what the world of the print media (magazine and newspaper) is doing. Yes, you will see info on layoffs and sell-offs in the print industry. But you will also see what those companies are trying to do. It was via Folio that I discovered the blog post by Jessica DaSilva, at the time an intern at the The Tampa Tribune. She wrote a post about the Tampa Tribune's shift in strategy and the message to the staff “People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” editor in chief Janet Coats said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

Have a Happy New Year!

Labels: business, culture, deep thought, design, environment, experience, new media, social media, startup, trends

In the past I have mentioned the need to practice brainstorming (The terrible word of "Brainstorming"). It is important to practice, like anything you do, otherwise you will loose skill or never learn any new ones.

So to really get in the habit you need to practice regularly. This means finding opportunities to practice generating (the brainstorming part) ideas. The opportunity can be everyday issues. I recommend finding something simple at first; don't overwhelm yourself with the major things yet ("Increase revenue by 50% in Q4"...:) Also, don't stress out. It is just practice... But do try to push yourself a bit every time you work through a problem/idea generation session.

Here are some working rules:

• State your issue or problem and be clear in the issue/problem statement.



• Number all your ideas as you capture them; this is good to help know where you are in the generation process (have I reached 100 ideas?) and it helps when refering to a specific idea.



• Aim for a specific number of ideas in a set amount of time, just to set a goal. It's like setting your marathon time goal; you need something to target.



• Do not evaluate the ideas as you capture them. Just capture them. Evaluation is a different activity.



• Build on captured ideas to create new ideas.

Fast Company has an article (Seven Secrets to Good Brainstorming) with the rules expanded a bit and with much better copy around why the rules are needed.

Ok, here is my first challenge.

Crumbs on the floor irritate me. It just bugs me. Some foods crumb (is crumb a verb?) more than others. Couscous is a major crumb generating food (by definition!). Those folks with any kids knows the truth about crumbs: kids are super crumb generators! My seven year old son somehow always misses eating over his plate and food crumbs hit the floor like steel to a magnet: fast. So my problem is personal (should I loosen up a bit?). To help define my problem a bit more: The crumbs bug me because I walk around the house in socks and crumbs that collect on my feet feels all wrong to me.

So the problem can be looked at several ways: How can I stop crumbs from happening, How can I prevent them from sticking to my feet, or how do I make the crumbs just "disappear"?

1. Just clean up the crumbs.



2. Serve crumb free food.



3. Have person who make the crumbs clean them up.



4. Have a crumb eating pet.



5. Have a floor with a grate in it to allow crumbs to fall through to the crumb pit.



6. Have vents on floor that suck up crumbs as they fall.



7. Let the crumbs fall on the floor and build up the floor to a solid footing.



8. Have another person clean up the crumbs to remove self from the annoyance.



9. Have a strong suction pull crumbs off the food as it is eaten.



10. Have a plate that has ability to make crumbs stick the the plate.



11. Have a built in sucker on the plate for the crumbs.



12. Buy a Roomba robot cleaner.



13. Have a device worn by person while eating food that sucks crumbs up as food enters mouth.



14. Put down a crumb matt to catch them all up.



15. The fork has the crumb sucking device build in.



16. Waiter comes by after each bite and cleans up (is this what crumb waiter is?).



17. Floor has ability to absorb the crumb due to some fluid / crumb dissolving agent; crumbs disappear when they hit floor.



18. The floor is a conveyor belt that whisks the crumbs away.



19. Slats in the floor rotate every few minutes to dump crumbs in to the crumb pit.



20. Electrostatic crumb attraction device grabs crumbs as they fall.



21. Crumbs are cleaned up with a special "crumb duster", sort of like a feather duster for crumbs.



22. I have special crumb vacuums in my "socks".



23. After reading this list I am sure a few of you have some ideas to pitch! Remember, don't evaluate, just get those ideas flowing.

After reading this list I am sure a few of you have some ideas to pitch! Remember, don't evaluate, just get those ideas flowing.

Labels: experience, ideas, innovation, innovation tool, practice

About three weeks ago Starbucks rolled out their "Get more of what you love with a Starbucks Card" campaign. Simple enough: register your Starbucks card and get free syrup and milk for your coffee. Since I tend to get soy mochas this meant saving 40 cents every cup. Easy sell for me.

So I immediately registered my card. That was easy.

But these last several weeks has been a poor experience for me. At every Starbucks since (about 8 to 10 times since registering), I have had to remind the barista about the program. Three times I did it after they rang it up, not realizing that the register card program does not go all the way to Starbucks point of sale system and "know" to not charge me for the soy milk... Each barista was very helpful and refunded the 40 cents, but the process took about 5 min because of the "refund to card" process.

After three times I started to advise the barista that I had a registered card before the sale. This confused several baristas as they did not know about the program. After I showed them the promotional material sitting on my side of the cash register, they had to figure out how to ring up the order then account for the soy milk being "free". This took several minutes and in some cases a manager/team lead had to assist. At least twice the barista gave up on the process, refunded the whole drink, and gave it to me on the house.

This is not an "Ah Ha" innovation but more of an incremental innovation. The design of the card campaign is not that revolutionary. Certainly it will capture more customer loyalty and data about people from the registration. And it offers real value over time to the customer at little cost.

However, this straight forward incremental innovation fails in the experience. I dread having to tell the barista about something they should already know. I feel irked that the technology of the card should already "know" my card is registered and make the transaction invisible. And for the baristas the experience is one of frustration as they try to live up to their mission ("Apply the highest standards of excellence to the purchasing, roasting and fresh delivery of our coffee.")

Innovation score

• concept: great
• design: good
• execution: so so
• experience: irk-some
  

Labels: coffee, design, experience, innovation, starbucks