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The Empty Whitecoat

Exploring co-creation, service-dominant logic, outcome-driven innovation, market learning and capability development. Written by Chris Lawer since 2003, MD Strategyn UK, The OMC Group and Cranfield School of Management

Increased Innovation Drives Success in RecessionNovember 19

Graham Hill, newest member of the Strategyn UK team, blogs an insightful and evidence-based piece on how customer-driven innovation can help firms to beat recession.

As we enter further into the recession, companies are making ever deeper cuts in their spending. Nothing is sacred. Head count is being decimated, marketing budgets are being slashed and innovation is being curtailed. This might seem to be a logical consequence of the recession, but is it?

A McKinsey Quarterly article on Learning to Love Recessions looked at how successful 1,000 US companies were over an 18 year period, including the 1990/1 recession. It highlights the fact that companies that successfully weathered the recession significantly increased their spending on sales, on innovation and on marketing in comparison to their less succesful peers. In innovation's case, they increased their spending to 22% more than their less successful peers. The payoff from these and related investments was a 25% greater market-to-book ratio for the successful companies in the post-recession period.

It seems reasonable to conclude that increased innovation drives success during a recession.

Read the full article here...

Amazon reviewers pen ironyNovember 15

These customer reviews of the classic Bic Crystal Ballpoint pen (Medium, Black) on Amazon are loaded with irony and very funny....

click here to read

Here's hoping that BIC heed the call and bring out a left-handed version .....

All UK train travellers are sheepNovember 1

Visit a major UK train station today and you will see hundreds of sheep on the platforms, up and down the escalators and milling about next to the ticket machines and coffee kiosks.  The stations are inundated with the white woolly new zealand beasts. You cant avoid them.

But these are no ordinary everyday run-of-the-mill sheep. No. These sheep - on posters and leaflets plastered all over our train stations (and now on 30 second TV ads) - are meant to symbolise the ordinary, every day, run-of-the-mill British train passenger who "follows the herd" and is too "dumb " to purchase their tickets in advance, in order to save money on their already-exorbitant train fares.

see tvad here : http://www.tellyads.com/show_movie.php?filename=TA7398

Part of a "campaign" by independent ticketing company The Trainline.com to persuade people to book tickets in advance online (and for them to pocket a £1 booking fee and a £2.50 Credit Card fee in the process), the whole thing smacks of superciliousness, smugness and overwhelming hubris.

British rail passengers have suffered long enough with high prices, complicated fare systems (now thankfully simplified - to a relative degree) and shamefully poor reliability. Now - to add insult to injury - we are all portrayed as dumb idiots unable to make smart choices for ourselves.

If brands wish to make our lives easier by signposting

Careers with Strategyn UKOctober 11

Looking for a career in a fast growing innovation consultancy? Wanting to shape future innovation best practice? Owing to a number of recent client wins, we welcome applications from talented individuals to join us in consultant and project / programme management positions. Strategyn UK will be relocating to Cranfield Innovation Centre in Bedfordshire from December 2008.

Outcome-Driven Innovation Consultant positions

Have you got what it takes to transform broken innovation practices and deliver breakthrough performance in global companies in all industry sectors? Do you have ...

• A strong track record of commercial impact in innovation or product development

• A desire to fix long-established broken innovation practices

• Experience gained either on the client-side, in a consultancy or as an independent

• An ability to communicate difficult concepts simply and with clarity are key - written, oral, virtually using tools such as Webex

• Experience of conducting and analysing user / customer interviews

• Superior client-relationship skills

• An ability to network and sell innovation services at events, conferences

• International languages preferred (especially German, Danish, Swedish)

We take great candidates whenever we find them. Is this you? If so,

An emerging market for market dataJuly 14

I enjoyed reading this piece in the New York Times about how mobile phone text services (from Reuters) are transforming agricultural markets in india by giving farmers more info on when to sell their goods at the right time in different markets - for higher prices and profits but at same time giving them means to lower consumer prices. At least some of the food crisis problem is due to a lack of transparency in pricing and ineffective / inefficient means to connect buyers and sellers. Simple technology like a pricing text service for farmers to help them find optimum prices can help reduce waste, speed goods to market, and lower costs for consumers. Its not just a questiion of increasing production capacity to meet growing demand.

Whether it is for a Wall Street trader or a farmer in India, the right information at the right time is a necessity for success.

For 157 years, since signing a contract in 1851 to supply stock prices from exchanges in Continental Europe to the London Stock Exchange, Reuters has served up numbers to the finance set. The International Herald Tribune has a partnership with Reuters, under which the two companies jointly publish the Business with Reuters section of the paper.

Now, Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is trying to provide analogous services to farmers in the developing world, where price information is stubbornly hard to compare. If successful, the program could become a model for economists an