Blogging about building an intellecual toolkit. http://ping.fm/kl7uP

Just peeked outside to see the Moon just a degree or North of Jupiter. Very pretty.

Efficiency and productivity are two different things.

More thinking about Toastmasters evaluations. Will be at Northstar Toastmaters this evening. http://ping.fm/1hVKF

Spectacular performance is always preced by unspectacular preparation.

Toastmasters Blog Article: What all Members Should Do at Meetings http://ping.fm/ecPuu

This week's book suggestion : Life's Greatest Lessons: 20 Things That Matter by Hal Urban http://ping.fm/BCjDq

@Home updating connections and connecting to more networks than I knew I had.

Key to Success

Successful speakers look for new audiences, not new material.

Successful merchants seek new customers for identical merchandise.

 

One key to success is to perfect your product, your service, or your message and find new people to provide it to. Even merchants that depend on repeat business depend more on product loyalty than innovation.

 

Brendon Burchard on How Experts Beat the Economy

1. Never lower your prices, just add value.
2. To add more value, ask the following questions:
1. What frustrates you most in your life / business right now?
2. What are you trying to achieve specifically this year?
3. What do you think it will take to double your business / happiness this year?
4. What have you tried already?
3. Get very personal in marketing. Put up a video or audio.
4. Increase the value of your campaign.
5. Deliver at home, right now, for a low starting cost.
6. Offer unbeatable guarantees to build trust.
7. Offer onues that drive people over the buying decision.

The Moon at Night

The past several nights have had mild weather, so I opened the bedroom window and set the blind so air could pass through. This gave me a view of the eastern sky over my neighbor's house as I lay in bed each night.  My erratic sleeping habits had me glancing through the blind. The first couple days, the nearly full Moon sent light pouring into the room, but each day the waning Moon grew thinner and reached the sweet spot later. How many astronomy professors have given how many students an observing assignment like this?

46 Questions to Help Innovators Know What Customers Want

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?

Tips to staying safe online

Be skeptical. Treat every social networking link with caution - especially the ones promising a link to a video. Guard your personal information. Use privacy settings to restrict who can see your sensitive information, or consider omitting all personal information from your profile. Choose passwords wisely. Use different passwords for each of your sites; select a randomized combination of numbers and letters. Have antivirus and antispyware protection. Even if you think you're not infected, scan your machine for dormant viruses with a free scan; and protect your PC with an Internet security suite that includes antivirus, antispyware, and firewall technologies. Always install updates. If you're already using antimalware software, be sure to install updates which include the latest malware definitions; do the same with updates to your operating system. Remain vigilant. Malware authors are continually writing new programs to avoid detection, so pay close attention to suspicious behavior.

In order to assure that you receive our emails, please add us to your address book: webroot@webroot-email.com

How We Know Things

Perkins Observatory does public programs most Friday nights. At the program September 4, 2009, one guest heard us sat that the Sun was about five billion years old and had about five billion more years to go. Then she asked "How do you know that?" This is one of those "onion" questions -- the answer has  many layers and most of them can make you cry. Let's explore a few.

 

At the most fundamental layer, we don't know that. We don't know anything and our definition of science says we will never know anything. In the same sense, logic can tell you an argument is valid but will never prove it is true. Let's put that aside and ask the question less rigorously. What leads us t believe what we accept as true?

 

In a mystery novel, detectives compare the story of each witness to the others and to evidence on hand. If the collected information isn't consistent, then something is wrong somewhere. In a similar way, scientists compare ideas and observations looking for inconsistencies. If none are found over time, the ideas slowly gain acceptance. Contradictions force ideas to be reconsidered. Let's look at various ways we estimate the life cycle of the Sun as an example.

 

If we view the Sun as an engine which fuels itself by converting hydrogen to helium, we can estimate both age and life expectancy by comparing available and consumed fuel. If a car has 7 gallons left in a 12 gallon tank and the last gallon allowed the car to travel 30 miles, we can estimate that the car was fueled about 150 miles ago and has about 210 miles before it will need refueling. When we compare hydrogen o helium in the Sun, we get the numbers usually offered.

 

We get the model of how fast stars turn hydrogen into helium by collecting data about many different stars. We don' have the patience to spend hundreds of years watching a tree go from seed to scrap, but if we look at many trees in a forest we can find representative samples of various ages. From that, we can test our model and see how individual trees ft into it. You do the same sort of thing when you estimate a person's age by comparing observations about them to people whose age you think you know. Since the Sun can't be older than the universe itself, we can use the same method to define an upper age limit.

 

Finally, we can check what we believe about the Sun to other things we believe to see if the stories compare to one another. Since life on Earth depends on many things including sunlight, we look to see if the history of life on Earth is younger than the age we give to the Sun. This is equivalent to detectives comparing one story to another. No one story has all the facts, but the stories will either support or contradict each other. Cosmology, physics, chemistry, biology and other branches of science each tell a story about the universe around us. Science compares or interpretations of each story to related stories before we accept something as true.

 

(c) 2009  by Jay Elkes Email: jayelkes@gmail.com  Twitter: @JayElkes http://www.linkedin.com/in/jayelkes