adipure.com

1.      Strategy

o        A clear statement that imagination and creativity are key components of the organisation’s goals and plans.

o        Clear linkages between the functional areas and the development and business strategies.

2.      Communications

o        Open and trusted communication in all directions.

3.      Resources

o        Recognised and enthusiastic leaders operating in key technology areas.

o        Continued investment in leading-edge facilities and staff.

o        Open and willing access to senior staff in the organisation.

o        Mentoring and coaching supported and accessible.

o        Mechanisms for staff to mingle and relax informally, allowing the exchange of ideas in a different environment and encouraging the development of wider relationships.

4.      Networks

o        Strong links and alliances between all parts of the organisation to achieve significant interaction.

o        Programs for the exchange and rotation of staff to aid in the fertilisation of new ideas.

5.      Values

o        Staff are supported.

o        Ethics is core to our interactions and our future.

o        Risk is accepted and managed.

o        Staff are respected and encouraged to accept responsibility for their decisions.

o        Individuals are encouraged to generate ideas.

o        Ideas are allowed time to germinate.

o        Time can be negotiated to pursue developmental activities or ideas.

o        The temptation to quickly counter any new idea is resisted.

6.      Recognition

o        There are appropriate awards, recognition and rewards for achievement.

o        Successes in ideas, contracts, promotions, and personal events are shared.

7.      History

o        Maintenance of the organisation’s corporate memory is by recognition of folklore and past champions.

Organisational knowledge, experience and skills are accessible to all, thus maximising opportunity by building upon previous work, stimulating ideas, utilising available talents and assisting in assembling the best teams.

1. Be customer focused
Identify your clients’ needs—both current and future. Predicting their future needs requires rare skills and judgment.The extent to which this must be achieved depends on how rapidly your market changes and where you want to position yourself in that market.

2.Capture new ideas
This should be systematic, not ad hoc. New ideas at the operational level are easily captured if good systems are in place. At the tactical and strategic level, success will often hinge on the effectiveness of your market intelligence.

3.Stay technically current
Whether via the Internet, technology sharing agreements or whatever, all companies that are world class have systems for staying current.

4.Look at old ideas in new ways
If innovation is about reinventing the organisation, then an attitude of continually questioning the status quo and seeking better ways of doing things is the key to process optimisation.

5.Fast track innovative concepts
Your competitors are trying to do things faster and better than you. Being first to market is a tremendous advantage. So let your competitors play catch up while you take market leadership. Highly innovative organisations have a sense of urgency—it is palpable.They realise that timeliness is critical. Your systems must identify the great ideas.

6.Reward staff for their creative input
All staff understand fairness. If you take their ideas and fail to reward them adequately they will stop giving you ideas.Then you’re a dead duck.

7.Facilitate rapid decision making.
Cumbersome organisation structures and obstructive or procrastinating middle management can so frustrate staff at lower levels that they stop being innovative.To them it’s like hitting your head on a brick wall . . . it feels better when you stop.

8.Tighten up project management
An obvious requirement if outcomes are to be achieved within a competitive timeframe.

9.Develop sound operational systems
After innovation occurs, the improvements must be captured within day-to-day operations. Systems are the road map of your business. ISO 9000 has a chequered history but if it is implemented correctly it is an excellent method for capturing innovative ideas.

10.Encourage strong leadership
Strong effective decision making that supports the team environment is the most important single requirement.

11.Develop a supportive organisational culture
Good leadership will create and encourage a culture that drives innovation. If you develop such a culture, you will achieve your goal of developing an innovative organisation, even if some of the other features listed above are not perfect.

Street level marketing (SLM) can be defined as:

The marketing activities undertaken by a member of a psychographic or lifestyle niche to further the adoption of an idea, innovation, goods or service, that is developed within the niche, to meet the specific needs or wants of the niche.

SLM represents an alternative movement in the application of marketing models. SLM operates from a different perspective to ‘textbook’ marketing in that it takes a bottom-up marketing focus— the marketing is driven by membership rather than observation of a target market. It focuses on intra-niche marketing. The objective of the entrepreneur or innovator is to meet the particular needs and wants of the group of which they are a member.

In contrast, contemporary marketing theory tends to focus on top-down implementation of marketing strategies—it is aided and guided by intrusive observational market research, capturing a single snapshot of a marketing environment and using that as the basis of a long-term marketing strategy. Understanding the true needs of the target market is inevitably limited by the sophistication and measurement effectiveness of the tools used. Further, attempts to identify niches and needs from an outsider perspective often result in failures due to a misunderstanding of who is actually a member of the target market. Despite the many advances in segmentation theory, the reality is that most traditional marketers still focus on demographics (for cost, measurement and convenience reasons) to define their target markets.

For example, it is often easier for a surfer who understands business to develop innovative surfing products, than for a business person trying to understand what new products surfers might respond to on the basis of traditional market research.

SLM relates to the marketing of niche-specific innovations that are developed by members of that niche to fill a need in their own market. Roughly translated, SLM is designed to assist entrepreneurial innovators who develop products to meet their own needs and those of their peers. Unlike the top-down intrusiveness of classic marketing techniques, SLM focuses on developing marketing strategies based on market immersion and self- observation. This gives the SLM marketer the opportunity to use a wide ranging tool-kit including ethnography, market orientation and their natural competitive advantage of street level credibility.

This is not to say that SLM is foolproof—the nature of the market immersion offered by SLM has its advantages, but does not replace the need for good business practices. Street credibility and innate market knowledge will not stop a poorly run business from failing any more than relationship marketing, guerilla marketing or the 4Ps (product, price, promotion and place) could have saved it.

Importantly, SLM is not simply ‘gut-feel’ marketing. It is the application of a coordinated and integrated approach to marketing strategy from a bottom-up and industry experience perspective.

Traditional market segmentation is based on hard data gained from often intrusive observational and measurement processes, or programs based on adjustments to products and promotional messages to identify with the market. By contrast, SLM strategies are developed from within the market. This is the fundamental point of differentiation between SLM and other marketing strategies—SLM marketers and SLM campaigns exist within the niche and are not imposed upon the niche by ‘outsiders’.

SLM’s intra-niche focus gives it an exclusivity of domain not found in other marketing techniques. This is because the SLM marketer is a member of their own target market and therefore more fully understands the needs of that market. In addition, intra- niche product development offers greater opportunity for marketer and consumers to share a common understanding, and co-develop a product that offers a valued solution to the market need.

Numerous inventions and innovations have arisen from members of a market figuring out solutions to their own problems and implementing them faster than a market research driven company could discover the problem and develop a solution. Most true innovations would never have emerged as a result of classic market research techniques. Breakthroughs often only occur after a specific incident in the innovator or entrepreneur’s life that highlights the need for a new way of doing things

Thinking about lunch, the vacationing businessman stared at the calm, blue sea. A small boat, laden with large yellow-fin tuna, docked near the pretty Mexican village. A lone fisherman jumped ashore.
“That’s a great catch,” said the tourist. “How long did it take you?” “Not so long,” replied the Mexican. “Why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” “That’s enough to keep the family provided for.” “What do you do with the rest of your time?” “Sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, have lunch, take a siesta with Maria, my wife. Stroll into the village each evening, sip wine, play guitar and cards with my amigos — a full and rich life, señor.”
“I think I could help you,” the visitor said, wrinkling his nose. “I’m a Harvard MBA and this is the advice you’d get at business school. Spend more time fishing, buy a bigger boat, make more money, then several boats until you’ve got a fleet. Don’t sell the catch to a middleman, sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You’d control the product, production, and distribution. You could then leave this small town behind, move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, perhaps eventually to New York City to run your expanding firm.”
“But señor, how long would this take?”
“Fifteen, twenty years.” “But what then, señor?” “That’s the best part,” the businessman laughed. “When the time is right, you could float on the stock market and make millions of dollars.”
“Hmm, millions you say. What then, señor?” “Then you could retire and go home. Move to a pretty village by the sea, sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, stroll to the village evenings, sip wine, and play guitar and cards with your friends.”

1.      Managers must be entrepreneurial Entrepreneurial attitudes, abilities and behaviours are critically important characteristics of the modern manager—they add value to the organisation for which he or she works.

2.      Entrepreneurs are made, not simply born

Managers can augment their entrepreneurial attitudes, abilities and behaviour by appropriate education, such as an MBA that includes the study of entrepreneurship, and by accumulating business experience.

3.      All business models become obsolete eventually

The advance of technology and changing customer circumstances means that new products, new services, and ways of doing business are inevitable—thus business models experience a life cycle and are ultimately made obsolete by the next generation of business models.

4.      Be the pioneer, rather than a follower

First-mover advantages put a high premium on being first with the new business model—thus it is important for your organisation to discover and implement successful new business models before others do so.

5.      Harness your employees’ ideas

Ideas for new products, services and business models can be discovered by anyone who is familiar with your industry—your employees are a rich source of such ideas.

6.      An entrepreneurial culture is imperative

To be able reliably to germinate and nurture creative new ideas from within your organisation requires the prior existence of an entrepreneurial culture that encourages and rewards the creation of new ideas that can be successfully commercialised.

7.      Speed to market is critical

Speed to market with new products, services and business models is critical, so the organisation’s culture must also facilitate processes that rapidly screen for viability and support the implementation of the new technology.

8.      Adopt the Silicon Valley model

Organisations can learn from the ‘Silicon Valley’ model and adopt internal markets for ideas, funding and human resources that facilitate the implementation of new ideas.

9.      Manage the risks of innovation

The risk associated with new ventures can be minimised by staging investment in new ideas and adopting a portfolio of new projects without expecting each one to necessarily be successful.

10.  Be an entrepreneurial leader

Leadership is critical to the creation and maintenance of an entrepreneurial business culture—managers must develop entrepreneurial leadership skills and create a workplace where employees put their ‘heart’ into their work.

1.Draw a triangle
If you are stuck, draw a triangle to remind you to think of a third possibility.
2.Develop three responses for every new situation
For every new situation, ask your team to develop a business-as-usual, different and radical response.This will encourage left field, big ideas.
3.Have an idea break every day
Like a coffee break, take an idea break every day and use your creative thinking abilities. Go with a partner, have fun and really focus on a specific problem for a short intensive period. You will create some wonderful new ideas and come back refreshed.
4.Trust your own intuition
Flag to people that you are using your intuition by saying ‘my gut feel is that . . .’. Encourage others to do likewise. At the end of each meeting have a two-minute ‘gut-feel’ session. Ask every member what their intuition is telling them. If the group intuition is nervous then perhaps a decision should be revisited.
5.Follow your passion
What do you really feel passionate about? Chances are that if you feel passionate about something, you will enjoy it and be quite good at it. If you feel passionate about a topic or project at work, volunteer for it. You will naturally be more creative and work will be more enjoyable.
6.Think like a competitor
Imagine yourself as your competitor—ask yourself what new initiatives will be launched in the next 12 months? It is amazing how insightful you can be by adopting an outside-in approach rather than the more traditional inside-out approach.
7.Use more emotional language
Reframe your biggest challenges in more imaginative and emotional language: for example, ‘How can we create advertising that is talked about at dinner parties?’ If you stay with rational, business-type language you are more likely to get rational responses.
8.Be uncomfortable
Be more open to uncomfortable, challenging ideas.
9.Lead by example
If you are a leader, the quickest way to kill creativity is by your own actions. If you call for new ideas and then reject them without appropriate feedback, you will not receive many more ideas. Talk about the importance of ideas and innovation at every opportunity.
10.Test and retest
Find quicker, easier and cheaper ways to test a new process or product. Continue to test relentlessly

1. Be customer focused
Identify your clients’ needs—both current and future. Predicting their future needs requires rare skills and judgment.The extent to which this must be achieved depends on how rapidly your market changes and where you want to position yourself in that market.
2. Capture new ideas
This should be systematic, not ad hoc. New ideas at the operational level are easily captured if good systems are in place. At the tactical and strategic level, success will often hinge on the effectiveness of your market intelligence.
3. Stay technically current
Whether via the Internet, technology sharing agreements or whatever, all companies that are world class have systems for staying current.
4. Look at old ideas in new ways
If innovation is about reinventing the organisation, then an attitude of continually questioning the status quo and seeking better ways of doing things is the key to process optimisation.
5. Fast track innovative concepts
Your competitors are trying to do things faster and better than you. Being first to market is a tremendous advantage. So let your competitors play catch up while you take market leadership. Highly innovative organisations have a sense of urgency—it is palpable.They realise that timeliness is critical. Your systems must identify the great ideas.
6. Reward staff for their creative input
All staff understand fairness. If you take their ideas and fail to reward them adequately they will stop giving you ideas.Then you’re a dead duck.
7. Facilitate rapid decision making.
Cumbersome organisation structures and obstructive or procrastinating middle management can so frustrate staff at lower levels that they stop being innovative.To them it’s like hitting your head on a brick wall . . . it feels better when you stop.
8. Tighten up project management
An obvious requirement if outcomes are to be achieved within a competitive timeframe.
9. Develop sound operational systems
After innovation occurs, the improvements must be captured within day-to-day operations. Systems are the road map of your business. ISO 9000 has a chequered history but if it is implemented correctly it is an excellent method for capturing innovative ideas.
10. Encourage strong leadership
Strong effective decision making that supports the team environment is the most important single requirement.
11. Develop a supportive organisational culture
Good leadership will create and encourage a culture that drives innovation. If you develop such a culture, you will achieve your goal of developing an innovative organisation, even if some of the other features listed above are not perfect.