This is an excellent government customer service innovation from Singapore. If you need to go to a health clinic, it’s useful to know how long you need to wait. By giving customers this information, clinics can cut costs by smoothing out service demand peaks. … Read More
Logical frameworks are wonderful for shaping new ideas and explaining innovation to corporate sponsors, venture capitalists, bank managers and spouses. This article explains the seven questions you need to answer to test the potential of a new innovation. … Read More
A folding plug won the Brit Insurance Design Awards in the UK this week. As gadgets get smaller, Britain has the largest plug in the world. The traditional British plug was invented in 1946. Why did it take 64 years to invent a better one? More importantly, why didn’t any of the rest of us have that idea? … Read More
In March 1876, the New York Times trumpeted the birth of the home entertainment industry. It would be powered by the telephone. It (mostly) never happened. Exactly 134 years later Facebook became the most visited website in the USA, pulling in more visitors than Google. There’s a connection between these facts. We’re learning what the web is really for. … Read More
If we measured customer attention like Gross Domestic Product, we’d know we were in trouble. Advertising, promotion and information are locked in an inflationary spiral as too much data chases too few eyeballs. Per capita, ‘Gross Domestic Attention’ (let’s call it GDA) is falling off a cliff. Thinking about the SEO arms race, is making me get very clear that imagination is worth more than cash. … Read More
Government is a Seventeenth Century machine, with late Twentieth Century middleware operating in a sceptical Twenty-First Century environment. To solve its (our?) public expenditure challenge needs solutions that do more with less, and not less with less. Getting those solutions … Read More
Investing in customer insight but cutting customer contact makes no sense. Service teams have huge emotional investment in putting right the things that cause customers angst. They should be central to strategic product and service innovation. … Read More
In the rich world, we’re unlikely to solve our obesity epidemic any time soon. Weight gain will change the financial arithmetic of many products and services. Wise companies will innovate to develop propositions that meet the physical, social and identity needs of overweight consumers. … Read More
The iPhone is one of the least usable phones for sending text and email but gets the highest consumer satisfaction of any smartphone. Why? It’s designed around experience not features. … Read More
Premature genius is one of the most overlooked challenges of product development. To visualise the problem, think of a change curve. Launch too early and no amount of marketing and development spend will get you to take off. Launch too late and you may not catch up with competitors. … Read More