Thought Leadership in Innovation and Marketing Strategy
Winning Over the Global Teen Market
Understanding the fickle ways of teenagers is an age old challenge faced by parents and marketers alike. Global teens today have a very different outlook on life than the iconoclastic teens of the GenX generation. In fact, they are even quite different from the "I can do anything"
teens of the nineties. So how are marketers supposed to connect with these capricious adolescents? Download PDF
Grounding the Front End of Innovation in Business Strategy
How can a firm distinguish between blockbusters and money-pits in the front end of innovation? It is widely accepted that there is too much noise in the front end to link concepts in this stage to financial outcomes. But what if you could build a process that is linked to the drivers of financial outcomes rather than the financial outcomes themselves? Download PDF
Health and Wellness Perspective
Roughly 2/3 of Americans consider themselves to be in excellent or very good health and by traditional measures, the overall health in the U.S. continues a long-term trend of improvement. We’re living longer than ever before, with a record-high life expectancy of 77.9 years. Mortality rates for heart disease and cancer have significantly dropped thanks to new drugs and advances in medical technology. Moreover, scientific research is helping Americans get smarter about preventative health. Download PDF
The Unfuzzy Front End
As a business discipline, innovation is following a classic adoption curve - with Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. Each group is struggling with different aspects of institutionalizing innovation. This paper examines the challenges of the Early Majority and matches them with the best-practice solutions of Early Adopters, who are making front end unfuzzy. The paper describes five challenges and corresponding best practices using examples from several innovation leaders. Download PDF
Breakthrough Innovation
Concerned about maintaining its strong market position over time, AAA Mid-Atlantic sought a breakthrough innovation methodology to impact its bottom line. By partnering with Yankelovich to apply our approach, we were able to identify two specific concepts for immediate introduction. In addition the Innovation Roadmap we provided gave AAA a profit-generating blueprint as well as a structure for better tailoring its services and implementing future innovations. Download PDF