Are you an Executive with an "Innovator's" DNA?

A great research topic from three prominent professors, who spent a rich professional academic life in analyzing innovation from business and human perspective; Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen

In December 2009 they have published the results of their research in a famous HBR article "HBR article "The innovator's DNA". 

Now they publish a book to master The innovator's DNA

It took them a six year study to uncover the origins of creative—and often disruptive—business strategies in particularly innovative companies. They studied the habits of 25 innovative entrepreneurs and surveyed more than 3,000 executives and 500 individuals who had started innovative companies or invented new products.

What does their research show? There are five discovery skills that distinguish the most innovative entrepreneurs from other executives:

Skill 1: Associating - the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields

Skill 2: Questioning - Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge common wisdom. Ask “Why?” and “Why not?” and “What if?”

Skill 3: Observing - Discovery-driven executives produce uncommon business ideas by scrutinizing common phenomena, particularly the behavior of potential customers.

Skill 4: Experimenting - Like scientists, innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots.

Skill 5: Networking - Unlike most executives—who network to access resources, to sell themselves or their companies, or to boost their careers—innovative entrepreneurs go out of their way to meet people with different kinds of ideas and perspectives to extend their own knowledge domains.

"...We were intrigued to learn that at most companies, top executives do not feel personally responsible for coming up with strategic innovations. Rather, they feel responsible for facilitating the innovation process. In stark contrast, senior executives of the most innovative companies—a mere 15% in our study—don’t delegate creative work. They do it themselves."

"...innovative entrepreneurs (who are also CEOs) spend 50% more time on these discovery activities than do CEOs with no track record for innovation..."

Listen to the recent HBR interview of Jeffrey H. Dyer, elaborating on the innovator's DNA.

Spotify, a threat to Apple ITunes coming from Sweden, not Silicon Valley

The Swedish online music Spotify announced its launch Thursday July 14th in the United States. 


A first foray outside Europe, after an agreement with U.S. music industry. "Spotify, the digital music service cherished by millions of Europeans will be available Thursday morning in the U.S. by invitation or subscription," said the Enteprise in a statement.

Combining free (Open) and paid (Premium, Unlimited) offers, Spotify counted in March more than 7 million users with 1 million paying customers in seven European countries: Sweden, Norway, France, Finland, United Kingdom, Spain and the Netherlands.

Founded in 2006, the Swedish service is a leading music services online in the world. Spotify is becoming one of the major threat for Apple ITunes music.

And most importantly it is proving that Silicon Valley-born services and business models are not a holy grail...

The amazing FALL of MySpace! Who's next?

MySpace, do you remember it yet? MySpace has invented Social networking when it was launched.
So many artists, entertainers, businesses have used it and even made a starting career thanks to MySpace.
In 2005, MySpace had almost 100 millions subscribers, FaceBook was nothing then.
Sold for more than 500 MUSD only 6 years ago. This week it did not exceed the 50 (fifty) MUSD!!

What a fall! What happened? Business analysts can argue with several strategy mistakes,
but I personally think that in this business nothing is taken for granted. Nothing can last for ever...
If a company does not disrupt itself, it will be definitely disrupted by someone else.
That is the rule of fast Internet business. And it should be written in stone!

So my question, who do you think will be the next one to fall? FaceBook, Google, others?

see also my post on Facebook vs. Google

What are the personality traits of Top Sales people?

Steve W. Martin presents in his recent HBR blog interesting findings from the results of personality tests he presented to high technology and business services salespeople as part of sales strategy workshops he has conducted. Below, I have summarized and copied the main key personality attributes of top salespeople and the impact of the trait on their selling style.

 .

1. Modesty. 91% of top salespeople had medium to high scores of modesty and humility.
Selling Style Impact: Team Orientation. top salespeople position the team. You dont have to be arrogant and selfish to be a top sales person

2. Conscientiousness. 85% percent of top salespeople had high levels of conscientiousness. Have a strong sense of duty.
Selling Style Impact: Account Control. Top salespeople take command of the sales cycle process.

3. Achievement Orientation. 84% of the top performers are fixated on achieving goals.
Selling Style Impact: Political Orientation.They strategize about the people they are selling to and how the products they're selling fit into the organization instead of focusing on the functionality of the products themselves.

4. Curiosity. 82% of top salespeople scored extremely high curiosity levels.
Selling Style Impact: Inquisitiveness. An active presence drives the salesperson to ask customers difficult questions.

5. Lack of Gregariousness. Top performers averaged 30% lower gregariousness than below average performers.

Selling Style Impact: Dominance. Dominance is the ability to gain the willing obedience of customers such that the salesperson's recommendations and advice are followed.

6. Lack of Discouragement. Less than 10% of top salespeople were classified as having high levels of discouragement.

Selling Style Impact: Competitiveness. Top performers are able to handle emotional disappointments, bounce back from losses.

7. Lack of Self-Consciousness. Less than 5% of top performers had high levels of self-consciousness.

Selling Style Impact: Aggressiveness. Top salespeople are comfortable fighting for their cause, action-oriented and unafraid.

Reference: Steve W. Martin teaches sales strategy at the USC Marshall School of Business. His latest book on sales linguistics is Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology: How to Penetrate the C-level Executive Suite and Convince Company Leaders to Buy.

How To Make your message Stick and How to create a buzz?

Here are some tips to use in order to make your message stick.
You may be a corporate executive manager or an individual.
Make your message Simple. Make it Unexpected. Make it Concrete. Provide Credentials. Make it Emotional. Use Stories.
Make it S.U.C.C.E.S.S !!!

Below are seven principle to make a buzz in your organization or around you.

Simple - The first princile is simplicity. One of the most basic principles of cognitive psychology is that the channel capacity of human attention is somewhere around 7 +/- 2 bits of information.
Keep your ideas fairly simple!

Unexpected - The second principle is unexpected. Announcing that the end of the world is on May 13th. That’s unexpected.

Concrete - The third principle is concrete. “We only use ten percent of our brain”. That's concrete.

Credentialed - The forth principle is credentialed. All ideas, all stories, all legends, come with informational credentials. It may be in the form of specific details.

Emotional - Next principle is emotional.What makes legends successful? they have an emotional component.

Story - Next principle is story. We all remember every story that we have been told.
That's why storytelling is one of the most efficient tool component in marketing & Communication strategy.

That Sticks - The final principle is to use what sticks. Make your message simple. Make it unexpected. Make it concrete. Provide credentials. Make it emotional. Use stories.


Founder & CEO goRaiseFund.com

Who will win the battle: Google or Facebook?

The battle between the two giants of the Web has accelerated and is about to reveal a bloody fight.

Battle: Facebook vs. Google

At first glance, Facebook and Google look very similar: both created by students from a prestigious American university,  keeping a start-up spirit, leading the same battles for transparency and free internet, generating revenues by selling advertising.

Their model is however very different: To know the behavior of people, 

Google claims to help people in their professional, academic or private search, phone calls, web navigation, etc...

Facebook wants to help everyone to engage with others and for that, trying to become the standard system login, sharing links, comments from other sites as well.

Today, Google seems to prevail: The firm is valued $190 billion, that is 5 times more than Facebook.
But the dynamic is rather on the side of Facebook, peoples spend more time on Facebook than Google (average of 41 million minutes per month as against 40).

Data mining and qualitative superior data
A major difference appears to be though, in the quality of the data available to Facebook and Google
Facebook’s data allows it to do more than just guess what its customers might be interested in; the company’s data can help it know with greater certainty what its customers are really interested in.
If Google’s business has been built on choosing which Web pages are most likely to appeal to any given anonymous query, Facebook already knows, for the most part, which pages appeal to whom.
And this key difference could potentially give Facebook a tremendous advantage in search function.

So guess what could be the Facebook "killer app"...

Will Facebook go in this direction?
Will the developers community provide this to Facebook?

India, an emerging economy who hates girls!

7 millions of new born girls are left out, all alone, in the bushes of rural India.
Yes read well! 7 millions! and maybe even more?!!

Why on earth a country (and people) that is, desperately, positioning itself as one of the new economic power, - and, purportedly, member of the so-called BRICS countries- still does not tacle this serious, segregationist, gender-hatred, medieval tradition?

Why is having a boy is still considered a gold mine? Why kill a future Indira Gandhi?

The Times of India:
"Even as the world celebrated the Women's Day on Tuesday, a newborn girl child died after being abandoned by her parents. The girl was mercilessly thrown into bushes soon after the birth. She was found by a couple who got her admitted to hospital where she died after battling with life for almost 12 hours.
Kumar heard a child crying while he was on his routine morning walk at Shubham Vihar colony near Munshipulia. He found an innocent baby with umbilical cord lying amid thorny bushes without even a piece of cloth. Her body was full of insect bites. Kumar and his wife rushed the baby to Ram Manohar Lohiya Hospital where she was diagnosed with `hypothermia' (low temperature) and breathing problem. She was put in the intensive care unit (ICU) but despite best efforts of doctors, the baby did not survive for long."

The end was tragic.

Abandoning newborn girl child is becoming usual in India; if they are not abandoned in the bushes, they are -if lucky- abandoned in orphan houses.

Why Indians, Government and people, this "emerging" economic power does not act upon this horrible, segregationist plague?

Is Groupon Business Model profitable for Merchants? for Consumers?

Best known among voucher vendors is Chicago-based Groupon, a 2,5-year-old startup already touting a ten-digit valuation and, purportedly, recently rejecting a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google (should have they really?).

Groupon business model is illustrated below using Osterwalder’s canvas.

Groupon Business Model

Hundreds of websites offer discount schemes similar to that of Groupon.
Many studies, from both academics and business activists, have been conducted on the Groupon business model profitability for merchants and consumers. See references at the end of this post.
The results of the studies were not totally rosy to a certain category of merchants, and consumers.


Here is a summary of some of the concerns:

Consumers:

The discount vouchers service presents many intriguing questions: 

1. merchant goes bankrupt after issuing vouchers but before performing its service?
2. What happens if a merchant simply refuses to provide the promised service? 
3. Since vouchers entail prepayment of funds by consumers, do buyers enjoy the consumer protections many states provide for gift?
4. Must consumers using vouchers remit tax on merchants' ordinary menu prices, or is tax due only on the voucher-adjusted prices consumers actually pay?
5. What prevents consumers from printing multiple copies of a discount voucher and redeeming those copies repeatedly?

Merchants:

merchants considering whether to offer discount vouchers, the most important question is the basic economics of the offer: Can providing large voucher discounts actually be profitable?

Voucher discounts are worthwhile if they predominantly attract new customers who regularly return, paying full price on future visits. But if vouchers prompt many long-time customers to use discounts, offering vouchers could reduce profits.
For most merchants, the effects of offering vouchers lie between these extremes: vouchers bring in some new customers, but also provide discounts to some regular customers

The findings of an academic study of Rice University from 2010, 
from 150 Groupon businesses in 19 cities 66% profitable; 32% unprofitable.

• Restaurants were the most unprofitable category, describing Groupon customers as "entitled," poor tippers, and definitely not repeat customers.
• Spas, on the other hand, were the most profitable
• 42% said they would not use Groupon again

The recommendations include: selective, partial offers, designed to link to repeat behaviour.

References:

http://www.blogs.ubc.ca/paulcubbon/

http://mashable.com/2010/08/19/gap-groupon/
Harvard Business School: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/11-063.pdf
http://primitus.com/blog/whats-the-secret-success-of-groupon/
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~dholakia/

Why Most Product Launches Fail?

An interesting HBR article from Joan Schneider and Julie Hall and interview.

40 ways to crash a new product launch:

Pre-Launch Phase

1. No market research on the product or the market has been done.

2. Most of the budget was used to create the product; little is left for launching, marketing, and selling it.

3. The product is interesting but lacks a precise market.

4. The product’s key differentiators and advantages are not easily articulated.

5. The product defines a new category, so consumers or customers will need considerable education before it can be sold.

6. The sales force doesn’t believe in the product and isn’t committed to selling it.

7. Because the target audience is unclear, the marketing campaign is unfocused.

8. Distribution takes longer than expected and lags behind the launch.

9. Sales channels are not educated about the product and thus slow to put it on shelves.

10. The product lacks formal independent testing to support claims.

11. The marketing campaign is developed in-house by the manufacturer and lacks objectivity.

12. The product is untested by consumers; only the company can assert its benefits.

13. The website is the primary place to order, but the product description is unclear and the site isn’t fully functional.

Launch Phase

14. The product is launched too hastily and doesn’t work reliably.

15. The launch is aimed at the wrong target audience.

16. Supplies of the product are insufficient to satisfy orders.

17. The product is launched too late for its key selling season.

18. The product doesn’t fit into any key selling season.

19. The manufacturer’s claims can’t be backed up.

20. A governing body (the FTC, the FDA) pulls the product, citing false claims.

21. The product is given a limited “trial at retail” but without public relations, marketing, or promotion to “turn” it.

22. The product is launched without influencers to promote its efficacy.

23. The launch budget is insufficient to “pull” the product off the shelf.

24. The product has no trained spokesperson to educate the media.

25. Management launches the marketing campaign before distribution is complete.

26. Management has promised the board and stockholders an instant hit without considering how much time is needed to educate consumers about the product.

27. The ad campaign is untested and ineffective.

28. The launch campaign depends solely on PR to sell the product.

29. The company spends the entire marketing/advertising budget at launch, so no funds are left to sustain the campaign.

30. Company executives underestimate the value of Twitter and Facebook.

31. Retailers are given no incentives to feature the product.

32. All marketing dollars go to advertising and public relations, none to social media.

33. Line extensions aren’t test-marketed as thoroughly as the original product, so they fail.

34. The product is launched to capitalize on a fad that soon fizzles.

35. The product design is unique but confuses consumers, who don’t understand how the product works.

36. The spokesperson is a bad fit with the product, creating a discordant message.

37. The product is priced too high for mass adoption.

38. Consumers are unclear about what demographic the product is geared toward.

39. The product is manufactured offshore; quality control issues result in negative consumer feedback and product returns.

40. The ad campaign is launched before the sales force is fully briefed, so customers know more than salespeople about the product.

JOIN The Stockholm Business Model Design and Innovation Circle!

You are welcome to join and become an active member of the newly created 
Stockholm Business Model Design and Innovation Circle.

Group description:


"The Stockholm Business Model Design and Innovation Circle is a group of academics and professionals from different industries driven by the passion to learn, to share and to debate on Business Model Innovation topics and how to create a better business.

Business Model Innovation is increasingly becoming a hot topic on every manager, leader and strategist table. Business models trumps technology, enables growth and create economic value.

Our ambition is to bring in together successful entrepreneurs and academics in order to create a space for game changers, visionaries and forward thinkers.

We will look at all aspects of ideas that create value for companies, customers and society.

How an idea can become a sustainable business? How an idea can create economic value for firms and society? How an idea can evolve to build up the 21st century capitalism?

Our guest speakers include entrepreneurs, academic and professionals.

We are convinced that being connected and sharing experiences and knowledge will benefit individuals, customers, companies and society."

Join here

Let's plan a first meeting soon!