Transfer the Job – Get the Customer to do more

Online check-in for flights is a great innovation.  Instead of standing in line at the check-in desk I can select my seat and print my boarding card at the computer on my desk (or on my smart phone).  For me, the passenger, online check-in offers time saving, control and convenience.  For the airline it means [...]

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Every Business Problem is an Opportunity for Innovation

Very often a business problem turns into an opportunity for innovation.

A good example concerns Japan Railways East, one of the world’s largest rail carriers. During the 1980s they constructed a new high-speed railway line running north of Tokyo. This involved drilling a long tunnel under a huge mountain, Mount Tanigawa. Once the tunnel [...]

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10 Questions to Ask Yourself before you start Your Own Business

Paul Sloane

If you are a brilliant innovator or a budding entrepreneur then you are probably thinking right now about starting your own business and making a great success of your wonderful idea.  If you are then please read my list of 10 Questions to ask Yourself.

As a taster here are the first [...]

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How to innovate with Services – the Easyjet Approach

How can you innovate with your services? A good approach is subtraction and addition. To see an example we can look at the low cost airlines like Easyjet, Ryanair or Southwestern. First they looked at the traditional elements of an airline’s service model and subtracted all the inessentials. Easyjet subtracted:

Printed tickets Travel Agents Allocated seating [...]

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Does your Structure help or hinder Innovation?

The traditional top-down structure in organizations can be a powerful inhibitor to innovation. It is a reflection of a command and control style of leadership where orders are issued at the top and followed by the ranks. People lower down the organization who have great ideas can feel inhibited about promoting them. They feel it [...]

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Streamline your Innovation Approval Process

Try this exercise.  Draw a flow chart diagram of your organisation’s approval process for innovations. Pick an example for a theoretical new idea. Suppose it is a good idea to improve customers’ satisfaction that would involve significant spending and the co-operation of several departments. What levels of approval and authority would it need to see the light [...]

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Brush up your Brainstorming

I am in the process of making some tutorials on brainstorming.  Here are the first two:

Introduction to Brainstorming – the Principles

Two Advanced Methods – SCAMPER and Random Word

Each consists of slides and audio.  They will quickly help you to brush up your skills and to learn some highly effective tools to make your [...]

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How do you make a safety announcement interesting? With innovation.

Amusing, innovative and different.  Even non-passengers want to watch Air New Zealand’s pre-flight video

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Advice for leaders of SMEs – be agile

Many leaders of small firms focus on making their business work efficiently and on delivering high-quality customer service. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these objectives.  They are both essential aims. However, if they lead to rigidity and the exclusion of variation then they can undermine the key advantage that small businesses have over large [...]

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A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing

We had a packed meeting of the BQF Innovation  Unit today at which three authors who contributed to the new book, A Guide to Innovation and Crowdsourcing, spoke on the topic.  All delegates received a copy of the book.

I explained the concepts and showed the following sites as examples of OI or Crowdsourcing in [...]

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