Is Social Media getting a bad deal? I can’t speak for Marketing, but for Insights I’d say that we ignore Social Media at our peril. Here’s why. Continue reading »

Instead of lamenting low response rates we should learn to live with them (the reality is that even with time and money we could not drive response rates today that would have been considered acceptable 40 years ago anyway). We should also embrace the possibilities that new technologies offer. Continue reading »

The Groundswell, as Forrester calls it, is in full swing. Social technologies continue to change the fabric of our interactions, both personally and professionally. Three to five years ago, consumers’ use of social media was laying the groundwork for companies’ broader adoption of tools and technologies to not only interact with consumers but among internal teams and business units. Continue reading »

In 2000 a cabal of scientists and business leaders hatched a plot to use the power of evolution itself to change the world. Slowly expanding their influence and testing their technology based on advances in genetic and evolutionary computation, and the fast growing capabilities of the Internet to access the ‘collective mind’, they enacted their plan in stealth until finally emerging as a global powerhouse in 2011, an unstoppable force that is touching the lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Sound like the plot to a B-grade movie? Maybe, but it is also the (slightly dramatized) story of Affinnova. Continue reading »

The innovation funnel is a visual representation that people are familiar with when discussing how companies move from ideas to products. And it accurately reflects the narrowing of possibilities that occurs over time: Every crazy idea you can imagine makes it into the top of the funnel; as the ideas are analyzed, fewer and fewer move down the funnel. And only a select few exit the funnel and become products. But is the funnel the right shape for 21st-century innovation? Continue reading »

In order to manage the new product development (NPD) process, many companies today employ the model of an innovation funnel. In a time when we are awash in ideas and information – from internal resources to traditional market research, to social media data – marketers and product strategists are challenged to effectively and efficiently hone in on the best ideas. Continue reading »