Innovate with companion products

Imagine this scenario. You’ve spent years developing the perfect product. It’s designed to be the most durable, powerful and attractive of its kind. It will ensure your success. There’s only one problem. Days before launch while doing online research, you discover that your competition has also designed “the most durable, powerful and attractive product of its kind”. They’ve beat you to it. So, what do you do when your market is saturated and your competition seems to anticipate your every move? Or worse yet, they reverse engineer your design and introduce a cheaper knock off only months after your introduction.

One way to get a step on the competition is to think about your product as a system, rather than as a stand alone product. What if you could develop a tool that would make your product easier to install, remove, or use? Marketing a system, rather than just a product could let you leave the competition in the dust

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New School is Old School

There is no single definition or meaning when it comes to innovation in new product development. True, it’s exciting to come up with a never-before-seen-or-heard-of product, but is it not possible to get the same excitement from breathing new, and dare I say innovative, life in to an already existing thing? While the following article is about the entertainment industry, most thought leaders in the area of innovation advocate taking ideas from another country or industry and applying them to your business to help spark innovation. Here’s an opportunity to spark some innovative thinking about your business.

by Stephen Shapiro

I just finished reading a mindless crime novel – my favorite genre of book. The victim was the producer of an old television series who recently sold the rights to do a remake of the show.

Fans were outraged. Most were purists who liked the original version and would do anything to prevent the new show…including kill the producer.

The producer of the remake defended the decision to do a new version of an old show. He said…

“New school is old school. It’s too risky for the networks and for the audiences. People are much more comfortable with the familiar. Re-imagination is the new new.”

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The Brave New World of Open Innovation

by Paul Sloane

Many leading companies are now adopting open innovation (OI) as a way to drive their new product development. Companies such as Proctor and Gamble, IBM, LG Electronics, Kraft Foods, Reckitt Benckiser, Unilever and Kimberly-Clark are all enthusiastic advocates of this approach. So what does it entail? Open innovation replaces the vertical integration of innovation processes within one company with a network of collaborators working on innovation projects. The term was coined by Professor Henry Chesbrough who described it thus, ‘Open Innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas and internal and external paths to market, to advance their technology.’ Using outsiders can speed up processes, reduce costs, introduce more innovative ideas and reduce time to market. One of the examples that Chesbrough uses is the Hollywood Film Industry which has innovated for decades with a range of partnerships and alliances between studios, directors, actors, writers, agencies, independent product companies and specialist supplier. These concepts which helped create so many films are now being applied to mainstream product areas.

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