Tag Archives: innovation

December 19, 2014 · 11:11 am

Learning From Portmanteaus

Foodie Friday, and today we’ll start with a word that may be new to some of you: portmanteau. A portmanteau is a combination of the most recognizable parts of two words. We have many of them in the food world and use them to label a host of new things – utensils, dishes, even fruits. You probably use them all the time without knowing what they’re called.

Ever ordered a cheeseburger? Portmanteau – cheese and hamburger. Ever used a spork? A spoon and a fork. Cronuts, frappuccinos, Clamato, even Tex-Mex all qualify, as do pluots, tangelos, and turduckens. So stop petting your labradoodle (see what I did there?) and think about what those food creations can show us in the broader business sense.

Many of these things were evolutionary.  Adding cheese to a hamburger or putting some tines on a spoon (or was it enlarging and rounding the center of a fork?) was something I’d call part of a gradual change and more of an adaptation than an invention.  We do that a lot in business and it’s a smart way to address the ongoing needs of your current customer base.  The flip side of that is revolutionary change, something that’s entirely new and probably unexpected – the cronut falls into that category.  When we create revolutionary change we run the risk of alienating all of those who love what we’re doing but it’s probably the best way to attract a customer base that has ignored us thus far.  In my mind, great businesses do both types of change – evolutionary and revolutionary – because stasis isn’t an option and consumers are always looking for new and better.

Some food portmanteaus are just bad marketing.  The P’zone – a pizza calzone – is a freaking calzone and neither revolutionary nor evolutionary.  Tofurky (tofu and turkey)?  Really?  If you’re foregoing meat, why label a product as if it is the very thing the customer is avoiding?  That said, those things represent the notion that we constantly need to innovate.  The most successful companies often do nothing more than execute a new twist on an existing product or service better than their competitors.  It might be revolutionary, it might be evolutionary and it might be called a portmanteau.  I call it good business.  You?

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May 17, 2013 · 9:32 am

Smoked Salmon Vodka

For our Foodie Friday Fun this week, let’s start with a movie. Oh sure, there have been plenty of foodie movies over the years (Big Night is my favorite) but I want to start with the 1982 Michael Keaton classic Night Shift. I know – not really a foodie movie but in it Keaton offers up a food-oriented line that I thought of yesterday:

What if you mix the mayonnaise in the can, WITH the tunafish? Or… hold it! Chuck! I got it! Take LIVE tuna fish, and FEED ’em mayonnaise! Oh this is great.

What prompted the thought was someone mentioning that they’d recently tried smoked salmon vodka.  My immediate response probably mirrored yours: YECH!  Then I thought about it for a second.  How often have you gone to a nice wedding or similar function and there’s been chilled vodka put out alongside the platter of salmon?  The two really do go together when you step back and think about it.  Or take the idea of making doughnuts in a muffin tin.  They’re not muffins and they’re certainly not doughnuts  but is there a way to get the texture and flavor of a donut in the easier to make form of a muffin?  There is, and someone figured out exactly how.  Which is the business point.

Tuna and mayonnaise, salmon and vodka – normal combinations presented in a different way of thinking (I’d tweak the tuna notion a bit but he’s on the right track).  Often in business we’re presented with ideas that seem ridiculous on the first pass but when you stop thinking “bad idea” and start thinking “interesting notion – what does it need to be a great idea” you just might end up with a better mousetrap.

Pushing ourselves to think differently is the only way we grow our businesses   People get bored quickly these days and if you’re not innovating you get left behind.  While I’m not sure that smoked salmon vodka is going to be my drink of choice, the thinking behind it is very much what I like to order up.  You?

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December 5, 2012 · 10:23 am

Failure And Feedback

One topic that’s near and dear to me is innovation.

Innovation and Evaluation

(Photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg)

Throughout my time in business the issue of how to do or produce something in a new, better way has always been front and center.  That’s why when I read that the Economist Intelligence Unit had conducted a survey of senior executives to explore the characteristics of companies that are adept at promoting innovation, I checked it out.  You can read the entire study here.  The study was sponsored by the Oracle folks, and not surprisingly it found that most companies struggle with innovation. The report says it’s really hard  to keep coming up with new ideas, particularly ones that people will pay for.  I know what you’re thinking – any of us could have told them that without a lot of research!  It’s what follows that I find of interest.

It turns out that the most innovative companies not only permit failure, but welcome and harness it to come up with more successful ideas. Yet nearly half of the respondents to the survey  say their companies have no system in place that helps them learn from failures.   Highly innovative companies also actively gather feedback and ideas from everywhere they can. Fifty-four percent of the top innovators they surveyed said they pour over customer comments, whether gathered in direct interviews or on social networks, and scrutinize customer data for clues to effective future innovations. They recognize that collecting many ideas is the first step to identifying the great ones.

There’s quite a bit more in the study but those two points are of most interest.  How many of us can truthfully say we work in an environment where failure is welcomed much less have a system in place from which to learn from those failures?  Nearly half (49%) of the companies in the study said their company had no system to deal positively with failure. Among companies that do have such a system (38%), redeploying employees involved in a failed innovation from one business unit to another has been a successful strategy.  Contrast that with the reports we read each day of companies jettisoning employees or products rather than making a pivot of some sort.

We’ve touched on the notion of feedback quite often here on the screed.  I’m a believer that a company can never have enough and we ought to look at every opportunity to get it.  The study confirms this as a key to innovation.

Help your folks to be free to fail.  Encourage them to get feedback in great quantity and with increasing frequency.  Do so and you’re well down the road to innovation, which becomes more important each day.   Make sense?

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