Who is Your Favorite Innovator? The Best Innovator

Which of these ten best innovators have made a huge difference in your lives? Select your favorite innovator today!

Innovators include (by alphabetical order): Mukesh Ambani, Reliance; Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com; Richard Branson, Virgin Group; Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway; Larry Ellison, Oracle; Bill Gates, Microsoft; Steve Jobs, Apple; Barack Obama, U.S.A. President; Larry Page, Google; Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook . Voting is now open!

Who is your favorite innovator?

Share your thoughts and comments on why you chose your favorite innovator! All real comments will be published here.

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Apple Creates History with New iBooks Textbooks

"Apple announced iBooks 2 for iPad, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging, and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, full-screen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, and unrivaled navigation. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore, with most priced at $14.99 or less. And with the new iBooks Author, anyone with a Mac can create iBooks textbooks and publish them to Apple’s iBookstore. Starting today, iBooks 2 is available free from the App Store and iBooks Author is available free from the Mac App Store"

Textbooks they won’t want to put down. "A Multi-Touch textbook on iPad is a gorgeous, full-screen experience full of interactive diagrams, photos, and videos. No longer limited to static pictures to illustrate the text, now students can dive into an image with interactive captions, rotate a 3D object, or have the answer spring to life in a chapter review. They can flip through a book by simply sliding a finger along the bottom of the screen. Highlighting text, taking notes, searching for content, and finding definitions in the glossary are just as easy. And with all their books on a single iPad, students will have no problem carrying them wherever they go."

Bottomline:
The new iBooks Textbooks is an amazing innovation! I downloaded a couple of samples from the iBooks store, and also the awesome "Life on Earth". My kids and I were totally blown away by the quality of the textbooks, the interactivity and the overall experience! (about the only glitch was iBooks 2 hanging up when you launch the new textbook! But this problem seems to be intermittent.) Last year, when my son and I were driving to Los Angeles, I remember having a conversation with him in the car about how the next generation of eBooks should be interactive... when my son was in middle school, he was aspiring to be a writer (now he loves Physics). So, I was telling him that he should design eBooks that spring out from a reader, as if the story within becomes alive and real! For instance, while you are reading a paragraph, you can tap to make the whole story come to life! Wouldn't that be amazing! With the introduction of iBooks Textbooks, we are getting a whole lot closer!! These iBooks are interactive, intelligent and immersing! Would students learn more from these new iBooks? Would students gain more knowledge in a faster time? Would students with learning disability benefit further from these textbooks? Would teachers enjoy teaching through this new medium? Would iBooks textbooks fundamentally change how education is disseminated and consumed? Lots of intriguing questions will need to be answered in the coming year. Apple has the support of major education publishers. Apple iBooks Textbooks could become the new learning standard, and as history may note, usher in a new era of innovative education!

Reference

How Business Defines Innovation?

Which two aspects below most closely correspond to your personal definition of innovation?

• The implementation of new processes, products, organizational changes or marketing changes
• An environment/culture that embraces positive change, creativity and continuous improvement
• Research and development, new intellectual property (IP), and inventions
• Staying ahead in the market and being a market leader
• Solutions that benefit society and societal outcomes (including environmental outcomes)
• None of the aspects above is close to my personal definition of innovation

Selected references:

Leading eBook on Creativity and Innovation in Business

Creativity and Innovation Best Practices

Creativity and Innovation Case Studies

GE Innovation Barometer Survey Methodology
Conducted by StrategyOne, an independent research and consulting firm, between Oct 15 and Nov 15, 2011 in 22 markets
• Telephone survey of 2,800 senior business executives
• All respondents SVP-level or above, 30% c-suite level
• All respondents directly involved in the innovation strategy or process within their company
• Average company size is 1,500 employees, 20% of respondents belong to companies of more than 5,000 employees
• Average interview length: 16 minutes

Why Most Innovations Fail?

"Few businesses are any good at innovation. For all their brainstorming exercises and "open innovation" programs, they mostly just come up with reformulations of existing products, new pricing plans and basic updates--the same old things just a little cheaper, faster or better.

Businesses ask their "strategic customers" where to innovate and get little advice. Those customers are usually strategic only in that they are large, not because they have any particular market insight. They too just want more, better and cheaper, which are hardly recommendations for true innovation.

Why is failure the norm? Defending and extending the business is what we've trained our business leaders and managers to be good at. They know how to remain close to "core" by staying "focused." They work on improving "operational excellence" and seek the "low cost position" while striving for "customer intimacy" with the biggest customers." - Adam Hartung

"While it's probably impossible to compute the exact percentage of business initiatives that fail, it is widely acknowledged that most do. After years of research and observation, it is clear that the same reasons for any change initiative failure tend to be the same culprits that make innovation initiatives fail. Here are the top ten reasons for innovation failure:

1. Not creating a culture that supports innovation
2. Not getting buy-in and ownership from business unit managers
3. Not having a widely understood, system-wide process
4. Not allocating resources to the process
5. Not tying projects to company strategy
6. Not spending enough time and energy on the fuzzy front-end
7. Not building sufficient diversity into the process
8. Not developing criteria and metrics in advance
9. Not training and coaching innovation teams
10. Not having an idea management system" - Joyce Wycoff

"We believe that innovations fail in the marketplace based on one or more of four key issues:
a. Ideas don't solve an important problem for a customer
b. Ideas take too long to get to market/Shifts in needs
c. Ideas underfunded or poorly launched
d. Ideas require too much work to adopt" - Jeffrey Phillips

"On the other hand, FAILURE is not an easy concept to accept.  Failure conjures up sweaty palms, racing heartbeats, and above all, the human condition of disappointment.  Knowing that we, as human beings, have a distinct aversion to failure, how can product teams capitalize on early failures to ensure new product success?  In this paper, we investigate three common causes of innovation failure and offer suggestions to enhance the probability of success for the development effort.

1. Lack of Strategy,
2. Lack of Risk-Taking, and
3. Company Culture."

"One reason for the lack of successful innovation and growth is the reality of the lifecycle"
"A company’s own historical success can be a major hurdle to new revenue streams" - John Kotter

Bottomline:

Most innovations fail. Most ideas die. Failures can be starting points for new innovations. But an organization needs to avoid the innovation blockers. Many a great innovators forget that successful innovations require great ideas plus execution.  And execution involves many go-to-market steps... transforming an idea into an amazing product or service that everyone wants now, getting the marketing and sales team ready to promote and sell the product, creating an external buzz for the new product through launch events and trade shows, getting the customers to buy and adopt the new product, making customers brand ambassadors so that they share products and stories in the marketplace, and winning against the competition. Sometimes great products fail because of inadequate marketing. Sometimes average products win because of successful marketing. When a business combines great innovative products with great marketing (aka Apple), watch out!

Also see: Why Startups Fail?

Startup Failure – Product Looking for Market

[A] What’s the “product looking for market”? 

Well, it’s a product or product idea that is put together backwards. Rather than starting out with the question, “what do people want”, it starts with what the entrepreneur may think what people may want and then just goes about building it. Once he builds it, then he tries to go to the market and looks for people who may be able to use it. That’s putting a cart before the horse. It is even worse when such product idea has no basis or relevance to entrepreneur’s past experience. Then it’s a complete science fiction.  Read more

[B] Why such approach to product building is wrong?

There are very few examples like Amazon that started out as a business plan and were executed like a business plan. Most startup ideas started as one thing and ended up as something else. This is mostly because when you work with innovation, by definition, you are working with an unknown. It’s an experiment where you are trying to find out if your hypothesis is true or not. You know some parts and rest is a mystery that you are trying to uncover. You may know many parts but you are trying to find out how they should come together to create something meaningful. Most such hypothesis will fail and so you want to go very methodical about testing such hypothesis. You have your time, resources, cash and reputation at stake and you want to be wise about it. Read more

References:

Why start-ups fail?

Author:

Tarang Shah

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Best Software Innovation of 2011 - Vote Now!

Which software made the biggest difference in 2011? We invite you to vote for the best software innovation of 2011!

Vote for the Best Software Innovation of 2011

Social Media Bootcamp - Orange County

What? Social Media Marketing Bootcamp workshop for small businesses, entrepreneurs, startups, owners and SMBs. Ogoing will help you become a social media expert, and share tools and best practices that will accelerate your sales. Ogoing, an exclusive small business social network, helps small businesses efficiently expand their local customer contacts through an easy to use social networking platform.

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* Ogoing CEO has presented at many business associations including Asian Business Association, SABAN, Irvine Chamber of Commerce, Indian-American Business Federation, UC Irvine, Rotary Club, Indian Medical Association, and many businesses.

Best Product Innovation of 2011 - Vote now!

What was the most innovative product of 2011? Which product made the most difference in our daily lives in 2011? We invite you to vote for the best product innovation of 2011!

Vote for the Best Product Innovation of 2011

You Voted! We had the voting open for 15 days! And the winner with 32% of the vote is:

Apple iPad 2 

Apple iPhone 4S was in 2nd place with 24% of the vote, and Amazon Kindle Fire rounded out the 3rd place with 11% of the vote!