Category: Strategy

• By defining Innovation, you draw your future (Part 1 of 3)
• By defining Innovation, you draw your future (Part 2 of 3)
• By defining Innovation, you draw your future (Part 3 of 3)

Innovation = Sales activity

This paradigm usually appears when a customer tells you that he “misses innovative proposals from you”. As you might have figured out, this is a Sales activity but not an Innovation one: Proposing something is selling, not innovating.

Anyway, we must question ourselves who is really innovating just in case we’ve successfully sold something innovative:

• We?

• By defining Innovation, you draw your future (Part 1 of 3)
• By defining Innovation, you draw your future (Part 2 of 3)
• By defining Innovation, you draw your future (Part 3 of 3)

Let’s spend some time on this last topic because it can have very dangerous effects.

There is nothing wrong with the intention of maintaining high price levels and significant markups. Innovations, as opposed to commodities, meet these characteristics. That’s the reason why everyone wants to position their offerings as Innovations to achieve these goals.…

• By defining Innovation, you draw your future (Part 1 of 3)
• By defining Innovation, you draw your future (Part 2 of 3)
• By defining Innovation, you draw your future (Part 3 of 3)

Over the past two years I’ve had the opportunity to meet many people over many different contexts, both professional and non professional, and degrees of personal involvement. One interesting aspect of these conversations was observing how different people address the problem of how to define Innovation and, more interestingly, how they avoid defining it even though they have to deal with it.…