The Big Game: What Corporations Are Learning About the Human Brain « The Situationist

As I stake out my position on the couch this evening – close enough to reach the pretzels and my beer, but with an optimal view of the TV – it will be nice to imagine that the spectacle about to unfold is a sporting event.It shouldn’t be too hard: after all, there on the screen will be the field, Brian Urlacher stretching out his quads, Peyton Manning tossing a football, referees in their freshly-starched zebra uniforms milling about.Yes, I’ll think to myself, this has all the makings of a football game. How foolish. The Super Bowl isn’t about sports; it’s about making money.And with 90 million or so viewers, there is a lot of money to be made. With CBS charging an estimated $2.6 million for each 30-second advertising spot, it’s no surprise that corporations don’t mess around with guessing what the most effective approach will be for selling their products.They call in the scientists.brain-on-advertising.jpg For the second year in a row, FKF Applied Research has partnered with the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, to “measure the effect of many of the Super Bowl ads by using fMRI technology.

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Big innovation needs ‘Big Data’ - FT.com

‘Big data’ is all the rage, and for good reason. Companies need to sort through tons of it to understand what products their customers really want, and what they will buy. After all, their future depends on it. Yet, in spite of vast amounts of market intelligence and virtually unlimited information, how well do companies really know their customer? In a world where, according to the Association of Product Management and product Marketing, more than 50 per cent of new technology products that enter the market fail, and roughly 75 per cent of consumer packaged goods and retail products fail to earn even $7.5m during their first year, we are clearly not doing a good job putting this data to work.

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The Yin and the Yang of Corporate Innovation - NYTimes.com

IN the hunt for innovation, that elusive path to economic growth and corporate prosperity, try a little jazz as an inspirational metaphor. Enlarge This Image In business as in jazz, the tension between training and improvisation can result in great new works, says John Kao, the innovation adviser (and pianist). That’s the message that John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments — who is also a jazz pianist — was to deliver in a performance and talk on Saturday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Jazz, Mr. Kao says, demonstrates some of the tensions in innovation, between training and discipline on one side and improvised creativity on the other. In business, as in jazz, the interaction of those two sides, the yin and the yang of innovation, fuels new ideas and products. The mixture varies by company. Mr. Kao points to the very different models of innovation represented by Google and Apple, two powerhouses of Silicon Valley, the world’s epicenter of corporate creativity.

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The Days of "Manager Knows Best" Are Ending - Harvard Business Review

To get a glimpse of what tomorrow's young global managers might be like as leaders, take a look at how today's young people think about communications. For one thing, they are devoted to connectivity. In a recent survey of more than 2,800 college students and young professionals in 14 countries, Cisco found that more than half said they could not live without the internet, and if forced to choose, two-thirds would opt to have an internet rather than a car. This intense desire to be connected leads to a demand for greater flexibility: Two out of five people said they'd accept a lower-paying job if the position offered greater flexibility on access to social media, the ability to work from where they chose, and choice on the mobile devices they could use on the job. Tomorrow's young managers will share these attitudes, and workplaces will inevitably become more flexible.

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5 Stupid Things Companies Do to Mess Up Their Innovation | Executive Street

Even after 20 years as an Innovation Management Consultant, I continue to be amazed at the failure rate of innovation. In fact, some studies suggest that as much as 80 percent of new product introductions fail. Maybe even more shocking is the fact that less than two percent of the 3,000 patents that are issued each week will ever reach market success. What’s interesting about all this is that most of the mistakes that cause these failures come from five basic screw-ups. The result is wasted time, wasted money, and, in some cases, wasted brand equity. So, what are these five mistakes?

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