Oliver Fritsch´s MarketingBlog

Chapter 2: Innovating
Are you looking for “tiebreakers” that give your customers a good reason to choose your product over a competitor’s product? As more and more services and products degenerate into commodities, your challenge will seldom be to come up with new ideas, but to select the few precious thoughts that will make a real difference for your customers - and your business. In this chapter we will show you how to develop new ideas, how to manage those ideas and, most importantly, how to test them quickly and inexpensively.

This was a difficult chapter to write for exactly the same reason. There are countless books on innovation out there, but I have not come across a single one that provides any useful advice for a small business or a small enterprise (called “SME´s” in Europe.) I guess that´s the reason why companies come to us when they need help in re-energizing or re-engineering their R&D and product development departments. All too often, a small business creates one great product that fulfills its role as a cash cow and then fall short of coming up with the next great idea. Consider 1-trick ponies such as Rubik’s cube / AOL´s Dial-up Service, or Skype. All of them struggle with the same question: what should be next?

How do you generate and collect new ideas systematically?
How do you evaluate them and pick the right ones to move on?
Download our full chapter for free here: http://www.hp.com/sbso/special/doityourself/ebook.html