cilinc.net » process

Excel or the story of innovation resistant reporting

maz — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:14:14 +0000

O’Bierne described the typical scenario that faces many accountants: every month they have to download data from a variety of databases (accounts, sales and so on); they then spend days copying, pasting, sorting, filtering and manually re-classifying data to get it into the shape they want. Then someone will want to see a different view, so for a set of accounts structured in 4-4-5 periods, one department might want to see reports by calendar month, while another wants 13 four-weekly periods. Or one consumer may want an analysis based around different groupings than the main chart of accounts. (via AccMan)

credit: QUANTIX

Meanwhile there are hundreds of data mining, data warehouse and flexible reporting tools but similar scenarios like the one described by O’Bierne happen probably every day in most companies. I also experience this in my job over and over again. In my special case it concerns especially HR figures and reports. To my mind the keywords to explain this phenomenon are flexibility and habit.

marketing on social networks

maz — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:13:32 +0000

The question is “how to increase revenue with the help of social networks?”. Or to cite the title of a Harvard Business School paper: “Do friends within a social network influence online buying behaviors of others in the group?”
The answer: Forget banners – make presents to the users!

credit: MasterNewMedia

Studies show that the click-through rate of ads on social networking sites is extremely low—simply because people don’t go to these sites to seek information about specific products. Therefore, the advertising-based business model has had only limited success on social networking sites.
If the purpose of advertising is to influence consumers’ purchases, our research shows that there is another way to influence their behavior. Imagine that Sony wants to promote its new digital camera. Sony can either advertise on Facebook and accept a very low click-through rate, or give away free cameras to several Facebook members (potentially at a lower cost than advertising) and generate a viral campaign. Our research shows that this viral campaign is possible.
Sunil Gupta, Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School

innovation crash course

maz — Thu, 22 May 2008 10:48:02 +0000

Idris Motee’s encouragement to contemplate the “big picture”:
Some people think that by throwing in a bunch of trend monkeys and brand parrots they can produce plenty of ideas. But the question is are you framing it the right way and solving the right problem? Many make the mistake of framing the problem too narrowly, either through a brand lens or capability considerations.

Here you’ll find a – at least to my mind – smart crash course for innovation:

| View | Upload your own

But don’t let you entice into taking this striking presentation as a stringent guideline to achieve innovation success! Allways consider Robert’s innovation rule # 6: Innovation is about breaking rules, so ignore any or all of the above.
This way we’ve reached one of the good old problems in thinking about innovation processes: How to regularize something that stands out due to deregulation … or is this assumption already wrong?

Collaborate!

maz — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:32:15 +0000

Professor Applegate’s appeal which I’ve cited in my last post is a kind of opener for a study published by Harvard researchers: Innovation through Global Collaboration: A New Source of Competitive Advantage
The executive summary of this article says: Collaboration is becoming a new and important source of competitive advantage. No longer is the creation and pursuit of new ideas the bastion of large, central R&D departments within vertically integrated organizations. Instead, innovations are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, selected according to their comparative advantages, and operating in a coordinated manner.

That this trend isn’t just the product of an academic study is – as if this would be necessary – being “proofed” by a recent article in the Business Week: IBM is reinventing the way it innovates. At one time the tech giant was a true believer in go-it-alone R&D. The feeling was that if a technology wasn’t invented by IBMers, it wasn’t as good. Now the computer pioneer realizes that no matter how big an organization is, more smart people are going to work outside its walls than inside. So it courts R&D partners aggressively. “We are the most innovative when we collaborate,” declares Chief Executive Samuel J. Palmisano.

turning disruption to business advantage

maz — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:41:27 +0000

Lynda M. Applegate, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, published an article called Jumpstarting Innovation: Using Disruption to Your Advantage.
Therein she lists guidelines [that] can help you leverage disruption to turn ideas into opportunities to create sustainable business advantage:

Listen toâ€”and learn fromâ€”the market
Expand your horizons
Identify potential disruptors that could be a source of opportunity
Select ideas for further evaluation
Turn promising ideas into opportunities
Implement to reduce risk and manage uncertainty
Collaborate!

Some more interesting thoughts and facts on this topic you’ll find in the book Radical Innovation by Richard Leifer.