Enterprise Mobile Applications

It’s become a cliché to say that your mobile phone is the “remote control for your life.” Push a button and you can buy anything, order any service, or simply change the temperature in your living room. New services spring up every day to take advantage of the fact that there are now billions of people walking around with mini-computers in their pockets.

At work, it’s a different story. While music playlists might sit alongside important emails or documents, what people actually do with mobile devices at work is pretty much the same: email and calendar. Some might use a couple of consumer apps that have crossed over to the workplace, like Dropbox* or Evernote*. But almost no one uses apps at work in the addictive way they do at home.

That’s about to change, creating a huge opportunity for developers of mobile business applications. It’s happening now because of a confluence of factors that are finally creating a critical mass of modern mobile devices in the enterprise. These include:

Tablets as laptop replacements: We meet regularly with forward-thinking CIOs. In our recent roundtable discussions, we found that very few companies issue tablets to employees. That will change as tablets grow more powerful, data increasingly moves to the cloud, and core apps like Microsoft Office finally make their way onto the iPad. Laptops will be displaced at work as they are being at home.

All of this creates a massive opportunity to create new mobile-first enterprise apps, which take advantage of the fact that people use mobile devices differently from their laptops. The session times are shorter, the UI is vastly different, and the context in which they interact with devices is far more varied than sitting at a desk.

Mobile creeps into the crevices of life previously inaccessible to computers – it fills the “gap time” between meetings, waiting for something to print, or while standing in line to be served. Today, people use that time to browse Facebook, dismember fruit with Ninja weapons, or perhaps triage email. Tomorrow, they will use part of that time to get things done. Some obvious new use cases include capturing information quickly while on-the-go after a meeting, or submitting expense reports while waiting at a red-light. But there are many others which people have yet to imagine, as well as new data trails for individual workers and companies to analyze, so that they can become more productive.

As with any new area, there will be competition, not least from the incumbents. Companies like Salesforce and Workday have companion mobile apps to go with their browser-based products, and provide them to customers for free. If reviews in the AppStore are any guide, they will struggle to create compelling mobile experiences that are consistent with their core products.

Many opportunities remain untapped, with lots of scope to solve new pain points or reinvent existing core business applications. 

In many ways, mobile at work feels like the PC market before the Internet, or the web before social. Compared to existing yardsticks, it looks big and fast-growing; compared to what it will become, it’s small and just beginning to accelerate.

Brilyuhnt Problem Solvers

The internet is fickle. Attention spans are short, That means you've got to be compelling. And you've absolutely got to make something people actually want or they'll never stick around, let alone come back.

I encounter plenty of startup founders who have a great technology they've engineered and shoehorn that into a solution that they hope people will want. To me, this route is much harder than identifying a real problem first and then solving it as simply as possible.

Worse are the founders who aren't able to build anything yet and are simply brainstorming and drawing mock-ups in the vacuum of their own heads. Find your customers right now and talk to them. Are they just being polite? Bear in mind that most people don't like giving bad or honest feedback. That positive reinforcement about your idea doesn't mean a thing until someone actually pays you or until you see repeat, engaged visitors coming to your website.

So how do you make something that people actually want? Start with a real problem.

Obviously it should be a problem for you, but be sure it's also a problem for others. The thing is, sometimes people don't realize they have a problem. And often just telling them they have a problem will only elicit an "Oh, that's good enough for me." As the old cliché goes, we're creatures of habit. It's really hard to persuade someone to try your thing when the status quo is good enough. But put a better solution in front of the same person and suddenly the status quo looks repugnant.

This is precisely what happened with hotel- and flight-booking service hipmunk. Few people thought there was a problem with how they searched for flights. They took for granted that you had to sift through tons of terrible flights and hunt across a mess of tabs for the best itinerary. It wasn't until we launched and consumers saw our agony-free alternative that they realized how bad everything else was by comparison.

You've undoubtedly encountered products or services that have frustrated you. Keep a notepad or a tablet handy and write down whatever is upsetting you. There's a good chance you'll find a business in those notes.

Another starting point is to have an idea that very few people other than the founders can actually build. These technical feats provide a natural defense against competition. Remember, every hard problem you solve drops a massive obstacle in front of anyone who'd want to replicate you. Certain problems haven't been solved because none of the few people smart enough to do so have made it happen. Look at something like Google, which co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were technically capable of building at a time when not many people were. Back then, there were very few people smart enough to build their own search engine let alone imbue it with software that could crawl and rank the entire World Wide Web.

There's also a third route: think of an idea that is rooted in a perspective that everyone else is missing because they don't see the potential today.

Brilyuhnt Interaction

It doesn't matter where you are or what kind of business you're starting, you can learn to be a better entrepreneur by looking at what makes Silicon Valley tick. Even if you own a small neighborhood business, the ability to innovate, adapt and grow is crucial to keeping your company alive. What looks like a sustainable business one day can quickly become obsolete the next. I've seen this happen too many times over the years.

How do entrepreneurs in technology adapt? By staying flexible. That flexibility is maintained through a set of unwritten rules about how people interact with one another. These rules form an invisible social contract that supports entrepreneurs as they innovate and adjust to the ever-changing marketplace.

1. Trust and be trustworthy. I've noticed it often takes longer to forge new business relationships outside of Silicon Valley. In some places, newcomers are eyed with suspicion for years. In Silicon Valley, however, coffee shop meetings can turn into business partnerships the next day. High social barriers, whether caused by geography, networks, culture, language or distrust, can stifle relationships before they are born. The rate of innovation increases when people break down these barriers and create bridges of trust outside their normal circles. Doing so is crucial because innovation thrives when people contribute different ideas, backgrounds skills and networks.

2. Seek fairness, not advantage. I find that most people treat business as a zero-sum game, where one side wins and the other loses. Investors are often the worst at this. However, the most successful venture capitalists know they should treat their entrepreneurs fairly. Here's a lesson some people have a tough time learning: You can't innovate alone. You need partners to take on the journey with you. Wise business people have the humility to seek out long-term, positive-sum collaborations with others, and are willing to sacrifice some of their immediate self-interest for long-term gains.

3. Pay it forward. Take an up-and-comer to lunch. Introduce others to your network. Return phone calls. Become a mentor. You may think you're getting nothing back, but you are getting something of incredible value: a great reputation. You've become an expert, a go-to person, someone others know they can trust and, just as importantly, think of fondly. You also give yourself the opportunity to hear your own ideas aloud, creating the opportunity to assess whether they are still sound practices.

4. Open doors and listen. I once pitched a deal to another venture capitalist who spent most of the time typing a message on his phone. He missed a great opportunity. Listening is a key to building relationships and assessing needs. You don't want to be the one who blows off the next Mark Zuckerberg, nor do you want to be carrying on a monologue in your interactions. Ask questions and keep learning. Create an environment where diverse opinions and talents are valued and where newcomers don't remain strangers.

5. Experiment and iterate together  Create a workplace where there are no bad ideas, just early incarnations of good ones. Thomas Edison tested more than 2,000 materials before developing a functioning light bulb. Mistakes don't define you. They refine you. Don't let fear of failure stop you from trying something new or taking advice from others. If things don't work out right, adapt, reload and try again.

Microcontroller with a built-in GUI wants to let anyone hack anything using JavaScrip

The Arduino board has been the go-to out-of-the-box hacker project darling, but for some applications, its days are looking numbered. A new wave of microcontrollers that interpret JavaScript right on the chip are just getting ready to be hacked by makers everywhere.

Last week, Technical Machine announced the Tessel an extensible, Arduino shield-compatible chip that the startup plans to take to Kickstarter next month. But there’s already a JavaScript-on-a-chip on the crowdfunding platform: the Espruino which aims to make open-source microcontrollers easy enough for anyone to use.

The Espruino comes pre-installed with both a command line environment and a graphical interface. Just plug it into your computer via the built-in USB port or connect wirelessly through an optional Bluetooth module (which can be soldered to the underside) and start typing away in a normal terminal window or a custom-built Chrome web app, which has a graphical code editor for non-coders and kids. Coding feedback is instant: No flashing, resetting, or compiling is required for changes to take effect.

The team chose JavaScript because of its increasing popularity, interpreted rather than compiled nature, and its ability to incorporate code changes on the fly. With 256kb of flash memory built in, the Espruino can operate without being plugged into a computer, and a built-in SD card allows programmers to run larger standalone apps on the device. It’s not just the memory that’s extendable: The board comes with 44 GPIO pins and a surface-mounted prototype area where you can solder on your own additions.

Gordon Williams, the Espruino’s creator, has already built working prototypes and lined up a manufacturer, but the Kickstarter will allow him to order the controllers in bulk and drive the price down (the reward-level price point is $30) along with documentation, tutorials, and improvements to the Chrome app that will make the visual programming interface even easier to use. If funded, the Espruino code and chip designs will be made open source, which Williams hopes will help cultivate a widespread community of makers like the one that made the Arduino a hacker sensation.

Web vs. TV

The worlds of advertising and product design are converging. CMOs are spending more on technology than CTOs. The web is more important than TV. Digital products and services are more important than messaging for customer engagement and brand creation. Two-way conversations between brands and consumers are more important than one-way, top-down campaigns. Results are measured by engagement instead of number of impressions.

Nike, with a record-high marketing budget of $2.4 billion in 2011, has dropped its spending on TV and print advertising in the U.S. by 40% in just three years. Instead, Nike is going where the customer is,  spending nearly $800 million on nontraditional advertising in 2010 and foregoing $100 million-plus sponsorships and traditional media buys to focus on online campaigns first.

In a 2013 survey by Econsultancy, 55% of marketers globally are planning on increasing their digital marketing budgets this year, with 39% of them planning on reallocating existing budgets toward digital channels.

This is a permanent shift, not a passing trend. Products and services must deliver value while telling engaging stories through a multitude of digital devices and within a network of multiple brands, services, and platforms. As a result, companies are experiencing new challenges of how to deepen customer engagement, grow revenue, and structure creative teams.

The upshot: Marketing and product teams need to work more closely. Copywriting and story teams must collaborate with user experience teams. Likewise, interaction and interface designers, rooted in human need and usability, need to work in integrated ways with marketing and advertising creatives.

Standing on the shoulders of The Boston Giants

Collaboration across disciplines is essential to remaining relevant, although it’s easy to think of marketing and product design as impossible to combine. The cultures between the two are often adversarial and usually sit on opposite sides of an organization. Yet, they aren’t so different.

In order to succeed and create great digital experiences for today and into the future, these principles remind us that advertising and product design teams need to work together to build brands, products, and services that are meaningful, relevant, and connect with customers. That presents new challenges, but, fortunately, we're offered some valuable guidance that can be adapted for the digital world.

Visibility

Companies that engage in PR are 30 percent more successful in getting early funding than those that don’t.

 Well-known VC's are getting into the PR game. Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia hiring in-house PR talent.

There is a simple reason startups and their financial backers are entering the PR arena: PR done right works. My B2B PR firm over the years has launched a number of startups and we’ve found that PR can truly make the difference in a startup’s obtaining new customers, growing revenues--and catching the ultimate brass ring--funding.

Don’t for a second, however, think that PR for startups is a slam dunk. The hard truth is that no one cares about the latest whiz bang product or service released by an unknown company unless it does something amazing. And to be honest, most new products or services are not going to knock your socks off. That is where public relations comes into play. A good PR person can properly position your product or service--or yourself for that matter--so that people care. Great PR--and yes there is such a thing--transforms a product or service into something meaningful.

Consider the term “Certified Pre-Owned Car.” I’m old enough to remember when the term didn’t exist. You simply bought a used car. It didn’t give you a lot of bragging rights. The car company geniuses who came up with the terminology “Certified Pre-Owned Car” turned the negative connotation of a used car into a positive. Suddenly, a used car had to meet certain standards and criteria. Better yet, it often came with a warranty. Of course, all those goodies are folded into the price of the car. But at least you received something solid for your money. And no worries if the car was a clunker. Meanwhile, you could take pride in your “like new” car.

Not only will it help you stand out but it will also help make it memorable and engaging. After all, you can be just another has-been company or you can Think Different.

Understanding Software Developers

Most companies divide their staff into "technology people" and "non-technology people." I think this divide creates real problems in the workplace: As technology becomes an inseparable part of business, not to mention daily life, everybody is now a "technology person." Key decisions at all levels of companies now involve software, which means that everyone needs to learn how to talk to engineers. And if you're going to talk to them, you should know how they think. You might even learn a thing or two.

Software developers and designers are among the most productive workers in any office when things run smoothly, fixing problems and launching features at breakneck speed. But here's a dirty little secret: Developers are also the laziest people at your company, and that isn't a bad thing. Unlike most professions, where output is additive, a good engineer will actually eliminate lines of code from a product over time by finding easier ways to solve problems. Having the discipline to constantly throw out your own work in order to save time requires a specific kind of laziness unique to the technology and design fields.

New Hires

You can’t build and maintain a great culture without the right people. Just as important as evaluating technical skills and work ethic, it’s essential to identify if a candidate "fits" with your culture. Every new hire will either strengthen or weaken your culture, and when you’re building a vision-based company, there’s no middle ground.

Hiring for fit means having a clear understanding of what your values mean to your organization. Once you have a clear line on that, you simply create selection criteria and processes that vet the job candidate’s cultural fit. We assess fit by:

• Including filtering questions and tasks in the application process.
• Screening for values alignment by phone before the interview.
• Asking questions related to behavior and attitude during interviews.
• Creating interactions with potential peers before making an offer.

In addition to seeking out cultural fit, you have to find people who get fired up about your organization’s vision. You don’t want to bring in someone who isn’t excited about "your company’s why."

Train to the Vision

Although hiring the right people is probably the biggest driver of success when building a vision-based company, there’s more to do after the hiring is done. Most organizations miss the chance to really ingrain their culture in the minds of their new hires by limiting "orientation" to filling out paperwork and explaining company policies.

Effective leaders are going to take the time to put a strong on-boarding process in place. A few well-told stories can go a long way toward helping new hires learn and support your company’s vision. Here are a few tips for on-boarding: 

Connect them to teammates from various functions of your business. You want new hires to have multiple resources available to them as they learn the ropes.

Complacency is the enemy of vision, so on-boarding must be followed by reinforcement. As a baseline requirement, the purpose, values, and mission should be incorporated into one-on-ones with managers and into all meetings. I believe they need to be visible, which is why our employees have them at their desks and why we painted them on our walls. Your vision should be visible everywhere for easy reference and constant reinforcement.

And, don’t neglect to tie results--and rewards--directly to your vision by incorporating it into your formal review process. And, speaking of rewards, you must align all individual, team, and companywide rewards to your purpose, values, and mission. You want to consistently connect the dots between culture and results.

Fire to the Vision

Even the best hiring managers don’t get it right every time. Sometimes you end up with an employee who isn’t aligned with the vision. I’m not necessarily talking about poor performers, although a cultural misfit will likely also have a difficult time performing. I’m talking about people who are no longer connected to the purpose or whose behaviors have strayed from the core values.

The fastest way to destroy the health of your thriving culture is to ignore attitudes that aren’t aligned with your purpose and values. Employees that no longer support your culture cannot remain with the company.

It may seem excessive to let someone go because of a change in their attitudes and behaviors, especially if they are still able to produce exceptional results. After all, wouldn’t an employee who fit before still be a fit now? Not necessarily.

As an employer, you aren’t powerless against this change. Just as you have to feed a flame to keep it burning brightly, you have to regularly stoke your employees’ passion, their connection to the organization’s purpose, or it can fade away over time. And when that passion fades, you have big trouble. Employees who feel disconnected from the purpose can’t sustain a high level of engagement. They show up just to punch the clock. 

"Real" Interfacing

Employees are more productive when they interact face-to-face with their coworkers. Productivity is also affected by things as mundane as the location of coffee stations and the size of lunch tables (smaller is better).

Far more remarkable than these behavioral insights, though, is how they were achieved: By asking employees to strap on sensors that record every movement, meeting, and conversation that happens during the day. It’s a growing trend among companies like Bank of America and Steelcase, hoping to leverage the power of Big Data to make their offices leaner and more productive.
One anecdote describes how a pharmaceutical company asked a group of employees to don iPhone-sized sensors, which recorded things like how often they stood up, their conversational patterns, and where they took breaks. Employees, it should be noted, were allowed to opt-out (though the true cost of doing so was not clear). The data analysis, ultimately led to changes both in the design of the office and the structure of the workday.

We discovered a correlation between higher productivity and face-to-face interactions. It found that social activity dropped off significantly during lunch time, as many employees retreated to their desks to check emails, rather than chatting with one another.In response, the company decided to make its once-dingy cafeteria more inviting, improving the lighting and offering better food, to encourage workers to lunch together, instead of at their desks.
We also scaled back to a lone coffee station and water cooler for the sales and marketing group, forcing employees to huddle and mix. It set a 3 p.m. daily coffee break, both to prop up sagging energy levels and to boost social interactions.
In such studies, Sociometric Solutions and its clients say, workers typically get a report on their group’s overall interactions, with no names attached, though individuals get to see their own data.

Unsurprisingly, the story is riling up privacy watchdogs and garnering comparisons to Brave New World. But at the same time, many of us are willingly strapping on sensors that record any number of other activities, from sleeping to golf. Could the workplace have been far behind?
Furthermore, the ongoing debate over the merits of telecommuting--spurred by Marissa Mayer’s decision to end Yahoo!’s work-from-home policy earlier this month--could absolutely benefit from some cold, hard data collection. Companies like Sociometric could provide it. Assuming employees don’t rise up in spontaneous mutiny.

brilyuhnt foresight

When we think of “The Future,” we have a tendency to think in terms of technologies. Whether it’s something as silly as a flying car or as banal as a new iteration of a mobile tablet, our images of what tomorrow will bring have a strong material bias. For everyday folks, this isn’t terribly surprising; our sense of what’s futuristic—whether via advertising or science fiction stories—zeroes in on stuff: robots, space ships, holograms, and so forth.

But those of us who do futures work professionally have to live up to a higher standard. When we think about what impacts the spread of (say) self-driving cars or 3-D printers will have, we have to consider more than the technical details. We need to think about people: how we live, how we use (and make) our stuff, and how we’re changing. These dynamics won’t necessarily show up in the narrative, but you should always ask how your forecast would affect—and be affected by—them:

Demographics
Throughout the developed world, populations are getting (on balance) older and often more diverse. In the U.S., the Baby Boom is starting to hit retirement age in a big way, even as ethnic diversity is accelerating. How will this change your market? What kinds of interface or language changes will you need to make?

Power and Wealth
Another “third rail” dynamic, this includes the impact of economic inequality (both across and within nations), the existence of marginalized (but not necessarily powerless) communities, even the change from a primarily rural to a primarily urban planet. Will the subject of your forecast change economic and political balances? Could it be used to hack the status quo, or make it stronger?

Art
This may be a surprise, but art—from movies to music to comic books—is a rapidly changing measure of how people react to the world around them. How would your forecast be represented in artworks? How would your forecast change people’s relationships with the art they consume?
These aren’t the only possible forecast dynamics, but they give you a sense of what futurists look for when thinking about the future: context, breadth, and a chance to make explicit our assumptions about how the world is changing. We all have implicit models of what the future (or futures) could look like, and any set of scenarios we create builds on these models. By making the assumptions explicit, we have the opportunity to challenge them, expand them, and ultimately to give greater nuance and meaning to the forecasts and scenarios we create for broader consumption. That’s the basic rule of practical futurism: Create your forecasts like the future matters.

Scaling Time Brilliantly

Technology is changing relentlessly. It always has been, but the time scale is far more compressed these days. Faster development techniques (SDKs, APIs, Frameworks), massive low-investment distribution networks (iTunes, Google Play) and near-instant fabrication (Makerbot and more) have decreased the time it takes to travel from idea to functional product.
All this means that shifts can happen faster. We’re witnessing the collapse of decades-old constructs around us almost daily. But what we don’t realize is that technology consumers, not companies, are driving these revolutions based on their casual demands. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just that people often don’t understand how much power they have until everything’s changed around them. Sometimes the changes are so gradual, people don’t even recognize the technology revolutions they create.
Most of the time “the way it’s always been” needs to be disrupted, since it’s "super old school," by which I mean centralized and generally wildly inefficient. And if there’s anything people can’t stand in a 24-7, always-on society, it’s inefficiency.
We’re on the brink of busting up the status quo through a citizen-engineered revolution the likes of which we’ve never seen.

1.  The higher-education lecture hall. Gone are the days where you pay tens of thousands of dollars to sit in a room with thousands of other people, only to be talked at. In-person classes at universities are adapting to become more interactive in format, rather than a really expensive place to fall asleep.
 With massively open online courses, welcome to the 21st century lecture hall. Your classmate might be logging in from Abu Dhabi, bringing an entirely new viewpoint to the conversation. Universities like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford have started offering courses for free online, breaking down walls and giving educational opportunity to everyone, regardless of zip code or what’s in your bank account.
2. The old way of designing and manufacturing physical stuff. By the time you had designed and prototyped a technical innovation in the past, chances are Apple would have already changed the shape of their iPhone (or connector or something). We needed more control and a way to innovate faster.
3. Our dependence on oil for energy. It takes a long, long time to break down something as longstanding, and with as many private sector and government interests, as the energy industry. But it’s happening, as people opt for more control over our energy dependence.
 Electric cars and charging stations are becoming more and more prominent in cities around the country. Soon, you won’t have to worry about how far you can make it without a charge, as plugs replace pumps nationwide.
4. Our payment infrastructure. We’re relying on incredibly out-of-date technology, as well as credit card companies that charge merchants the largest invisible tax on our economy: interchange. Every purchase you make with a credit card costs a merchant a fraction of that purchase, which up until now, they’ve just chalked up as a loss.
 Merchants are realizing that it shouldn’t cost money to move money. Instead of paying a tax for nothing in particular, merchants are exploring mobile payment platforms that offer some sort of real value beyond just the transaction (in the form of getting new customers in the door and keeping the ones they have). Consumers and merchants are experiencing the simple yet powerful benefit of saving money.
5. The digital divide. It used to be that rural areas simply didn’t have as good of access to the Internet as urban areas. That was a major problem. Luckily we don’t have to rely on the speed of broadband anymore to solve this problem.
 Mobile infrastructures are leveling the playing field, giving more equal access to the Internet in countries and areas of the United States that fell within the realm of the digitally divided. Add to this trend the much lower cost of mobile devices and tablets (versus a desktop or laptop device) and the opportunity to access technology becomes that much more possible.

So, what do you say? This year, let’s break down some new walls just because we can. After all, changing the status quo is the number one thing that gets engineers excited.

brilyuhnt design thinking

As a Search software business leader, you have the opportunity to make bold choices that keep you one step ahead of the market and make you indispensable to your customers. Innovative leaders, like the late Steve Jobs, do that by thinking like web and product designers.
"What a designer does is imagine the future," That's what's powerful about design thinking for a business leader."
A designer brings two essential perspectives to every problem: empathy and creativity. "To invent a future that doesn't exist, you really have to understand what people are doing today and completely reimagine it,".
You have to know your customers well enough to find the right problem and give yourself enough creative freedom to find the right solution.

1. Observe your customers in many contexts. If you want to innovate, skip the market research. "You can't innovate with market research; all you can do is incremental product improvements,".
Instead, really get to know your customers. Observe them at home, in the workplace, and on the go. "Think of yourself as an anthropologist,". You're looking for frustrations, processes that waste time, or work-arounds people have found to accommodate poor designs. Each is an opportunity for innovation.

2. Find the right problem. "Most of the time, people are solving the wrong problem,". To solve problems your customers can't articulate, you have to use all the data you found during observations.

3. Brainstorm hundreds of ideas. Once you identify the right problem, let your imagination run wild. "People tend to gravitate very quickly toward solutions,". "They start thinking of how services they already provide could be adapted and immediately truncate the brainstorm down to what is known."
Give your team the freedom to indulge every wild possibility. Include ideas that you have no idea how to implement, or that don't fit your company's current expertise. "In order to be successful, you might need to completely re-engineer your company,". That might be scary, but those who have the guts to do it will be the ones who solve the right problems and succeed.
4. Create and test easy prototypes. Take the ideas that seem most interesting and make easy samples to share with the people you observed. Mock services with screenshots, products with cardboard, and apps with post-it notes. "You want to show them stuff that's obviously not good or done so they can react more honestly,".
Designers call this "building to think," meaning that watching people engage with the prototype sparks even more creativity. "You give them something they've never seen before and they act in new ways,". "You start creating with them." When you do land on a final design, you'll be able to choose it with confidence.

Motivating creativity

Your company is filled with creative employees. Some of them are easy to pinpoint and many others are brimming with untapped potential that can help your business thrive in an ever-changing market. Many companies unintentionally hinder creativity, so learning how to motivate creative employees can give you an advantage over your competition.

The way you treat creative employees has a snowball effect on the organization as a whole.
By creating a culture that inspires creativity, you can motivate employees from all areas of the company to offer more ideas. That diversity improves your idea pool and increases your chance of success.


1. Give feedback on new ideas. Generating new ideas takes time and effort, so employees need to know that their creativity is valued. "You're asking your employees to give you feedback and suggestions, "That needs to be a reciprocal road."
When you solicit creative ideas, establish a point person to give feedback on each of them. You can also crowd-source the process using an online voting and comment system, or have a live brainstorm. The more employees understand why their ideas did or did not work, the more motivated they will feel to offer ideas again.

2. Recognize and reward collaboration. Creativity is typically an iterative process, where one person says the initial idea and others jump in to improve it. The best teams build off each other, so they need to be motivated to work together.
"Prizes [or recognition] for the best idea often encourage competition instead of cooperation, This stifles creativity and upsets those whose contributions go unrecognized. Instead, acknowledge everyone involved. That way, you encourage future teamwork and fuel creativity.

3. Put creative work in context. When senior executives think about innovation, they think five or ten years out, while employees tend to focus on immediate improvements. That discord can lead employees to suggest ideas that get dismissed for being off target -- a missed opportunity that saps motivation.
When you solicit creative ideas, tell your team what you hope to accomplish. "Put people in a different mindset, "You might say, 'here's how the market seems to be changing, so what can we do now to put us in a good position five years from now?'” That specificity empowers creative employees to succeed.

4. Celebrate well-considered failures. Inspired ideas often fail, even when the idea is well vetted before it's released. "Being creative is risky," To motivate creativity, reward well thought out ideas, even when they lead to failure.
"Celebrate the effort and audacity to innovate," "That sends a message to employees that you're rewarding the mindset and the willingness to try to improve."
Plus, your company needs those failures -- they often provide valuable lessons that help you find success.

brilyuhnt collaboration

While it’s unlikely that focus groups can create an innovative idea, they can help evolve one--fine-tuning how it will be embraced and determining the feature set, price point, and physical embodiment of the core idea.
In my view, innovation is really a three-step process, and only in the last one are focus groups truly helpful.

Engage with people in a one-on-one context.

Rather than a focus group, we call this a “contextual focus.” It’s learning what people do in a particular context and the value that has in their life. The context may be their car, home, or job, and even in the life of significant others. In a sense, you could call this deconstructing the focus group. Rather than a group, you are using a focal point to better understand real people communicating valuable information in response to stimuli in their real lives. A focus point may also involve what cannot be seen but impacts people’s experience; that is, exploring the physics, chemistry, or economics of a problem; learning what dirt in a home really is and what removes it most effectively.

Come back to the table to make sense of what is uncovered in step one.

This is the time to ideate and figure out how to resolve problems and address unconscious needs; conceptualize unexpected but meaningful innovation while still embedding it in the familiar. During this stage, we rapidly prototype a lot of different ideas and test them in a controlled environment, looking to fail quickly if they don’t work, but learning from each failure. We call this the “focus filter.” By using the focus filter during early concept development, it allows us to “fail faster” in order to get the product to a stage in which we optimize it and take it to market.

Take it to a focus group.

Once you get closer to the real thing and have a truly innovative product, then you can go to a traditional focus group to help you figure out how to place and position it.

For innovation, we need to look for the outliers--the game-changing ideas that will truly transform their categories. To create successful products or services, we often look for and learn from the behaviors and aspirations of outliers--but we also need to create innovations that will be embraced by the many. After all, if we create something so revolutionary that only a small fraction of people buy and benefit by it, then we are not doing our job. Focus groups are about fine-tuning for mass appeal--about evolving the truly revolutionary ideas to the point where they will be embraced by the majority of consumers, while at the same time not losing the essential points of what made them innovative in the first place. For informing that evolution, focus groups serve a very useful and valuable purpose. Just don’t expect them to be where those revolutionary ideas originate.