37 Ways to Innovate – Idea 5: Go Green

 

This idea suggests that we can also design our products and services to go green.  That means to use more earthly-friendly or natural ingredients to be able to lessen  non-recyclable waste or by-product.  This attracts customers who are environmental conscious and would like to avail of the services that leaves non-recyclable wastes or carbon footprints.  Example of this is Facebook and Google who have claimed that they use energy-efficient computers to continuously serve the general public.

 This also attracts customers with sensitive needs and prefer to use products with natural ingredients.

This is same with the case of Body Shop who advocates and sells earth-friendly body care products.  Many customers buy from them because they believe that it uses natural ingredients and does not leave harmful environmental waste.

Cost-wise it may be pricier to produce in some cases but because of the Go Green advocacy certainly many customers will still buy your product and avail of your service even at a certain premium.

37 Ways to Innovate – Idea 4: Low Cost

This idea suggests making the service or product more affordable than the competitors by lowering the cost to produce the said product. It also suggests introducing new budget offers that can WOW or delight the customers.
But to make this really happen, marketing should work work closely with operations and logistics to come up with cost-effective production costs.

Operations should apply process improvement techniques such as Six Sigma for quality and innovation. Operations can also apply Value engineering (similar to service cost analysis) to come up with cost-efficient materials to create or deliver the product.

Logistics should aim for Just-in-time (JIT) service level to production operations by looking at how to make the supply chain more streamlined and low cost in order to deliver the needed materials with the right quantity, right quality at the right time.

37 Ways to Innovate – Idea 3: Co-Branding

This idea is about enriching your customer’s experience by tying it up with a product or service extension that comes from another business line or brand. This sort of completes the ‘experience’ when they are using or enjoying your product or service. A popular example is what we see in the fastfood chains where they offer budget meals that comes along with affordably priced softdrinks or juice drinks from a partnering brand. The “co-branding” that happens by combining the fastfood meal together with the drink from another brand completes the customers’ dining experience.

Co-branding works better if you complement your core product with the strength of the core product from another brand. So instead of the customers buying separately from your store and from the other brand’s store, we make it more convenient for the customers to just buy or avail the product in one place. Then both your business and your partnering product supplier also benefits from these extra sales coming from the co-branding.

37 Ways to Innovate – Idea 2 : Add a new experience

Your product or your service is just as good as any other product or service from a competitor.
But question is – how can you entice customers, old and new, to buy or do business with you?
Answer is to add a new experience dimension to the product or service so that customers can stop and enjoy it better.
In this kind of innovation, what we want to impart to the customers is the enjoyable memory when they used our products or when they availed our services.

Lesson Learned about Creative Confidence

Lesson of the Day: It takes courage and confidence to introduce a new way of doing things. Not all people are ready to embrace it and they don’t see all the mind effort that goes into this idea before it was actually introduced.

37 Ways to Innovate – Idea 1

One of the ways to innovate our systems, processes, products or services is to make it simpler for our customers’ use. What do they basically require? What are the basics that would delight them?
Tear down the complexities, hoola-baloohs and non-value adds.
Make it a streamlined simple clean and exciting experience for them to use or experience doing business with us or in using our products.

*echoed from the article of Marc Heleven (www.7ideas.net)

“I cannot empha…

“I cannot emphasize more than enough the importance of Excellence in whatever we do or provide to the customers. This is only possible through mastered (product or service) quality and never-ending innovation.”

Learning while on the go with Podcasts

Have you ever tried learning something new while on the go?

This is now possible with podcast software – Android or iphone/ipod.
You just need the link to download the tutorial videos or audio clips.

For Android users, try something like the Podkicker. For iOs, just use the Podcast software.

Good luck and continue learning!

“Find your spac…

“Find your space and time for Deep Thinking. That is where great innovative ideas come from” – TED Talk, “Why some good ideas never happen”

Paperless Processing

Do you know that you can have a Zero-paper processing system when you use a BPM Workflow tool?
Example is Bonitasoft BPM (www.bonitasoft.org)

Not only it becomes paperless but also processing becomes faster, error-free and risk-managed.