InnovatorsDigest

Twitter-ate-to-Innovate: 6,000 People Join New Linkedin Group for Twitter Innovators

You can learn a lot about Twitter and Tweeting by joining one of the fastest growing Linkedin Groups.

Over 150 educational discussions have already been posted, including over 100 comments answering the question, "How might Twitter foster more creative and innovative thinking?"  To join the new Linkedin Twitter Innovators Group Click HERE.

Follow The Tweeter.  Gerald "Solutionman" Haman is just getting started with his 3 new Twitters. Click on each of the 3 links below, and select "follow" under the pictures to subscribe.
www.twitter.com/Solutionman
www.twitter.com/SolutionPeople
www.twitter.com/KnowBrainerTips

 

Top 25 LinkedIn Innovation Groups Grow Rapidly to Over 70,000 Innovators

How can you find and collaborate with more innovative people? Social network communities are increasingly popular. A recent search on LinkedIn revealed over 220 "innovators" groups and more than 1,300 "innovation" groups. LinkedIn members can belong to up to 50 groups, but it can be challenging to pick the right ones. The Innovation People group is one of the fastest growing LinkedIn groups. The Marketing & PR Innovators group has over 31,000 members, and the Green & Sustainability Innovators group has over 6,000 members. The newest group of Government & Political Innovators should be very popular.

View a list of Innovator's Digest's Top 25 Innovation Groups clicking HERE. Simply click on the link for each group to get more details and request to join. If your membership is approved, your LinkedIn profile will display the unique icon for the group.

Amazon.com Offers KnowBrainer Innovation Tool on Sale for 15% Discount

Over 100,000 people around the globe have the award-winning KnowBrainer and innovation tools created by Gerald "Solutionman" Haman. For the first time ever, Amazon.com is offering a significant discount on the latest version 4.0 of the KnowBrainer innovation tool.

Save 15% and order your KnowBrainer tools for only $83 (Save $15) by clicking HERE on Amazon.com. All purchasers can attend a free 60-minute Tool Training Webinar ($100 value) led by Solutionman or his certified KnowBrainer trainers. After placing your order, send an email to webinars@solutionpeople.com for your KnowBrainer Training Webinar invitation. Click HERE to read detailed background information on the KnowBrainer.

How to Create Innovation Evangelists: Authors Reveal Word-of-Mouth Marketing Secrets

In Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, authors Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba explain how to convert customers into influential and enthusiastic evangelists. The book outlines the framework for developing evangelism marketing strategies and programs. The ultimate goal is to create communities of influencers who drive sales or membership for your company or organization. Many companies have been effective at applying the book's "six basic tenets" to create evangelists for innovation and sales growth.

The book explains how IBM, Southwest Airlines, The Dallas Mavericks, and SolutionPeople have successfully built their customer base and created targeted marketing programs to involve their biggest fans. These programs have produced legions of unofficial salespeople and a cost-effective and powerful marketing force. McConnell & Huba interviewed SolutionPeople's Gerald Haman, clients, and spent several days at the Thinkubator, and wrote a book chapter entitled The High-Flying Solutionman that chronicles Haman's 20 years of growing his business through customer evangelism.

6 Tenets to Create Customer Evangelists
1. Customer plus-delta: Continuously gather customer feedback.
2. Napsterize knowledge: Share knowledge freely.
3. Build the buzz: Build word-of-mouth networks.
4. Create community: Encourage communities of customers to meet and share.
5. Make bite-size chunks: Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite.
6. Create a cause: Focus on making the world, or your industry, better.

Download a PDF of the entire chapter from the book on SolutionPeople’s applications of the Six Tenets by clicking HERE.
Order the book from Amazon.com by clicking HERE.

Affiliate-to-Innovate: 60,000 LinkedIn Innovators in Groups Can Use NEW Discussion Forums

 LinkedIn just released a valuable new feature that allows Group members to engage in discussions about innovation, creativity and other interesting topics. Articles from Innovator's Digest will be linked to some provocative questions in Group Discussion areas. 
Get ThinkedIn by joining in our innovation conversations via the LinkedIn Groups that now include over 60,000 innovative minds.

Click Below to Join Our Top 24 LinkedIn
Innovation Groups & Join the Discussions!

1. InnovationPeople Network Group
2. Marketing, PR, Word of Mouth & Buzz Innovators Group
3. Green & Sustainability Innovators Group
4. Sales & Selling Innovators Group
5. New Product & Service Innovators Group
6. Meeting & Event Design Professionals Group
7. Experience Economy "Pine & Gilmore" Innovators Group
8. Fundraising & Philanthropic Innovators Group
9. Learning & Education Innovators Group
10. HealthCare, Medical, Pharma & Biotech Group
11. Brand Innovators & Branding Leadership Group
12. Technology & Mobility Innovators Group
13. Communication Innovators Group
14. Innovation Idols Group
15. Futurists & Anticipatory Scientists Group
16. TRIZ Innovation Tool Group
17. Portfolio Magazine's ThinkTank Panelist Group
18. Leadership & Change Management Innovators Group
19. Chicagovators Group of Chicagoland Innovation Leaders
20. SolutionPeople Innovators Group
21. Thinkubator Creative Meeting Environment Innovators
22. David Allen's "Getting Things Done" Group
23. illumination.com Innovators Group
24. InnovatorsDigest.com Innovation Network

Do you want your free subscription to Innovator'sDigest? Click HERE to subscribe and receive innovation news that includes questions used for LinkedIn Innovation Group Discussions.

Brand-ate to Innovate: The Pepsi/Coke Challenge

The Pepsi Challenge was a marketing tour de force. It proved that in a blind taste test, most consumers prefer Pepsi. So why hasn’t that analytical proof pushed the needle in Pepsi’s favor? Read Montague, Director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, has shown the true power of branding on the brain.

Montague decided to repeat the Pepsi Challenge, but added a twist of technology. Using a non-invasive technique called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) he was able to reveal which parts of the brain are active in real time.

When Montague and his team gave a taste of an unnamed soda to his volunteers he found that more people preferred Pepsi. On the scan, images of the ventral putamen, one of the brain’s key reward centers, had a response that was five times stronger than for people who preferred Coke.

The surprise came when Read repeated the experiment. This time, telling volunteers which brand they were tasting. Nearly all the subjects then said they preferred the Coke. Moreover, different parts of the brain fired as well, especially the medial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with thinking and judging. The subject’s brains were proving that their experience of the Coke brand influenced their preferences.

The work of Montague and other studies proves that branding goes beyond images and memory recall. The medial prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain known to be involved in our sense of self. It fires in response to a stimulus -- an image, name or concept -- that resonates with who we are. Something clicks, and we are more likely to buy.

The science of neuro-marketing is now in its infancy. But what it has proved is that branding isn’t the latest marketing ploy, but a glimpse into how our brains are affected by smart messaging and marketing.

Marty Baker - President of Inotivity
Email Marty

46 Questions to Help Innovators Know What Customers Want

Every innovator should read Anthony Ulwick's book, What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services, because he makes it very easy to questionate-to-innovate. SolutionPeople purchased 50 copies of the book and made it required reading before an innovation facilitation for a consumer products company. The facilitation agenda was simple; we used innovative techniques and tools to answer the 46 questions addressed in the book! The facilitation was a huge success as we produced an Idea Bank with thousands of ideas and over 100 useful solutions.

Question Bank
(created from the Table of Contents in Ulwick's Book)

Formulating Innovation Strategy
1. Who Is the Target of Value Creation and How Should It Be Achieved?
2. What Types of Innovation Are Possible?
3. What Growth Options Should Be Considered?
4. Where in the Value Chain Should We Focus to Maximize Value Creation?
5. How Do We Handle Multiple Constituents with Potentially Conflicting Outcomes?

Capture Customer Inputs
6. Why Should Companies Gather Customer Requirements?
7. What Three Issues Plague the Requirements-Gathering Process?
8. What Types of Data Do Companies Commonly Collect from Customers?
9. What Customer Inputs Are Needed to Master the Innovation Process?
10. What Methods Should Companies Use to Obtain the Necessary Information?
11. How Do You Know Which of the Three Types of Inputs You Should Capture?

Identifying Opportunities
12. What Is an Opportunity?
13. What Three Common Mistakes Are Made in Prioritizing Opportunities?
14. How Should Companies Prioritize Opportunities?
15. How Do You Identify Underserved and Overserved Markets?
16. How Dos Value Migrate Over Time?
17. What Implications Does the Outcome-Driven Paradigm Have for Competitive Analysis?

Segmenting the Market
18. What Is the Purpose of Segmentation?
19. How Has the Practice of Segmentation Evolved?
20. Why Are Traditional Segmentation Methods Ineffective for Purposes of Innovation?
21. What Is Different About Outcome-Based Segmentation?
22. How Is Outcome-Based Segmentation Performed?
23. How Does Outcome-Based Segmentation Address Development and Marketing Challenges?
24. How Is Job-Based Segmentation Different, and When Should it Be Used?

Targeting Opportunities for Growth
25. What Is Different About Targeting for Innovation?
26. What Types of Broad-Market Opportunities Are Likely to Be Attractive?
27. What Segment-Specific Targeting Strategies Are Effective?
28. How Does a Targeting Strategy Result in a Unique and Valued Competitive Position?
29. Why Do Companies Fail to Target Key Opportunities?

Positioning Current Products
30. Why Does Messaging Often Fail to Tout a Product's True Value?
31. What Are the Prerequisites for an Effective Messaging Strategy?
32. What Messaging Will Be Most Effective?
33. Should a Company Message Along an Emotional or Functional Dimension?
34. How Does the Sales Force Have Immediate Impact on Revenue Generation?
35. What Is the Advantage of an Outcome-Based brand?

Prioritizing Projects in the Development Pipeline
36. What Issues Do Companies Face When Prioritizing Projects?
37. What Method Is Used to Identify the Winners and the Losers?
38. Which Efforts Should Get Top Priority?
39. What Other Factors Affect Project Prioritization?

Devising Breakthrough Concepts
40. Why Does Traditional Brainstorming Often Fail to Produce Breakthrough Ideas?
41. How Are Breakthrough Concepts Successfully Generated?
42. What Are the Mechanics Behind Focused Brainstorming?
43. Why Do Traditional Concept-Evaluation Methods Fail?
44. How Is the Customer Scorecard Used to Evaluate Product and Service Concepts?
45. How Are These Methods Applied in Practice?
46. What Is the Role of R&D in the Innovation Process?

Order Anthony Ulwick's book, What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services via Amazon.com

Pop The Question! 9 Questions to Make Creative Ideas POP!

Sam Horn's book, POP! Standout in Any Crowd, suggests innovators answer 9 simple questions called the W-9. You can use these 9 questions to plan to market, sell, promote or implement creative ideas:
W9 Pop Question Bank 
W1: What am I offering?
W2: What problem does my problem or offer solve?
W3: Why is it worth trying or buying?
W4: Who is my target audience?
W5: Who am I and what are my credentials?
W6: Who are my competitors and how am I different from them?
W7: What resistance or objections will people have to this?
W8: What is the purpose of my pitch?
W9: When, where, and how do I want to take people to action?

Do you want to see a real case example of the W-9 questions in action? Check out Innovation Tool of the Month Club to see how Horne's W-9 questions were used to design the website. Innovators Digest reads books and extrapolates to questionate, so readers can apply the author's wisdom. It was easy to extract questions from this book!

QUESTIONATE & Discuss in Our LinkedIn Group:
What are the questions you think MARKETING innovators should ask or think about to sell or promote creative ideas?
Join the Innovator's Digest Discussion on our Linkedin Group for Marketing & PR Innovators to share your questions and read others suggested questions.