Business Innovation Empower Your Business with Bold Genius Business Ideas! "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." - Goethe "Be Bold and Mighty forces will come to your aid." -- Goethe The key to boldness in Business Innovation is to inspire yourself to think differently and out of the box. Today’s fast and uncertain markets require a new approach with bold genius business ideas. They demand innnovative business strategies and entrepreneurial management, which engage customers, who are real people, in more enlightened ways. Using network structures and smarter business models can outperform competitors and exceed expectations. To think differently and out of the box, one needs to start with asking all the right questions and researching all the answers they can. The Business Innovation Fix for the Economy There recently was an article in the St. Petersburg Fl. Times. The Business Section asked readers for ideas on: "How Would You Fix the Economy?" I think this guy is getting close to nailing it!.: _____ Dear Mr. President, Please find below my suggestion for fixing America 's economy. Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan. You can call it the "Patriotic Retirement Plan": There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations: 1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed. 2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered - Auto Industry fixed. 3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - Housing Crisis fixed. It can't get any easier than that!! P.S. If more money is needed, have all members in Congress pay their taxes... Mr. President, while you're at it, make Congress retire on Social Security and Medicare. I'll bet both programs would be fixed pronto! _____ We can apply business innovation to find a way to share all we have better between all. How do you decide which markets to focus on? Who are your best customers? Who are your real competitors? What sets you apart? How do you turn a brand into a compelling proposition to the marketplace? How do you make networks work best for you? What do most successful businesses do differently than the rest? They see the big picture by looking at and doing things differently. They connect the unconnected, challenge the conventional way of doing things, look for new opportunities, and are not afraid to try new ideas. They are inspired businesses, with a sense of “genius” about them. Finding and applying the ideas of “genius” to business requires us to start from a new perspective: from the future rather than today, and from outside of the box. It also requires us to interpret and apply these new perspectives more powerfully, seeing the bigger picture and making new connections to ensure that the radical part of ideas are not lost as they are put into practical application. The key to all business is to remember and focus first and foremost on its primary foundation. This foundation, no matter what market you are in, is your customer base. The fundamental key is to turn the consumers within your market reach into customers by focusing more management time and energy into carefully empathizing with and putting yourself in their shoes, so as to first and foremost understand them and their needs and wants in order to best provide them with what they most want and need. Without customers, we would not have any business at all, because business is essentually built upon the foundation of providing goods and services to that very foundation of real people who consume those goods and services. Thus, thinking outside of the box in bold and innovative ways in this day and age of one of the most challenging times in business in many years, is to return to this primary foundation of what all business is based upon by empathizing with and putting yourself in the shoes of customers in order to make them number one. Business: A business (also called firm or an enterprise) is a legally recognized organizational entity designed to provide goods and/or services to consumers or corporate entities such as governments, charities or other businesses. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies, most being privately owned and formed to earn profit to increase the wealth of owners. The owners and operators of a business have as one of their main objectives the receipt or generation of a financial return in exchange for work and acceptance of risk. Notable exceptions include cooperative businesses and state-owned enterprises. Socialistic systems involve either government, public, or worker ownership of most sizable businesses. The etymology of "business" relates to the state of being busy either as an individual or society as a whole, doing commercially viable and profitable work. The term "business" has at least three usages, depending on the scope — the singular usage (above) to mean a particular company or corporation, the generalized usage to refer to a particular market sector, such as "the music business" and compound forms such as agribusiness, or the broadest meaning to include all activity by the community of suppliers of goods and services. However, the exact definition of business, like much else in the philosophy of business, is a matter of debate. Business Studies, the study of the management of individuals to maintain collective productivity in order to accomplish particular creative and productive goals (usually to generate profit), is taught as an academic subject in many schools. Innovation: The term innovation may refer to both radical and incremental changes in thinking, in things, in processes or in services (Mckeown, 2008). Invention that gets out in to the world is innovation. In many fields, something new must be substantially different to be innovative, not an insignificant change, e.g., in the arts, economics, business and government policy. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value. The goal of innovation is positive change, to make someone or something better. Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy. Innovation is an important topic in the study of economics, business, technology, sociology, and engineering. Colloquially, the word "innovation" is often used as synonymous with the output of the process. Since innovation is also considered a major driver of the economy, the factors that lead to innovation are also considered to be critical to policy makers. In the organizational context, innovation may be linked to performance and growth through improvements in efficiency, productivity, quality, competitive positioning, market share, etc. All organizations can innovate, including for example hospitals, universities, and local governments. While innovation typically adds value, innovation may also have a negative or destructive effect as new developments clear away or change old organizational forms and practices. Organizations that do not innovate effectively may be destroyed by those that do. Hence innovation typically involves risk. A key challenge in innovation is maintaining a balance between process and product innovations where process innovations tend to involve a business model which may develop shareholder satisfaction through improved efficiencies while product innovations develop customer support however at the risk of costly R&D that can erode shareholder return Business Innovation and market outcome: Market outcome from innovation can be studied from different lenses. The industrial organizational approach of market characterization according to the degree of competitive pressure and the consequent modelling of firm behavior often using sophisticated game theoretic tools, while permitting mathematical modelling, has shifted the ground away from an intuitive understanding of markets. The earlier visual framework in economics, of market demand and supply along price and quantity dimensions, has given way to powerful mathematical models which though intellectually satisfying has led policy makers and managers groping for more intuitive and less theoretical analyses to which they can relate to at a practical level. Non quantifiable variables find little place in these models, and when they do, mathematical gymnastics (such as the use of different demand elasticities for differentiated products) embrace many of these qualitative variables, but in an intuitively unsatisfactory way. In the management (strategy) literature on the other hand, there is a vast array of relatively simple and intuitive models for both managers and consultants to choose from. Most of these models provide insights to the manager which help in crafting a strategic plan consistent with the desired aims. Indeed most strategy models are generally simple, wherein lie their virtue. In the process however, these models often fail to offer insights into situations beyond that for which they are designed, often due to the adoption of frameworks seldom analytical, seldom rigorous. The situational analyses of these models often tend to be descriptive and seldom robust and rarely present behavioral relationship between variables under study. From an academic point of view, there is often a divorce between industrial organisation theory and strategic management models. While many economists view management models as being too simplistic, strategic management consultants perceive academic economists as being too theoretical, and the analytical tools that they devise as too complex for managers to understand. Innovation literature while rich in typologies and descriptions of innovation dynamics is mostly technology focused. Most research on innovation has been devoted to the process (technological) of innovation, or has otherwise taken a how to (innovate) approach. The integrated innovation model of Soumodip Sarkar goes some way to providing the academic, the manager and the consultant an intuitive understanding of the innovation – market linkages in a simple yet rigorous framework in his book , Innovation, Market Archetypes and Outcome- An Integrated Framework. The integrated model presents a new framework for understanding firm and market dynamics, as it relates to innovation. The model is enriched by the different strands of literature – industrial organization, management and innovation. The integrated approach that allows the academic, the management consultant and the manager alike to understand where a product (or a single product firm) is located in an integrated innovation space, why it is so located and which then provides valuable clues as to what to do while designing strategy. The integration of the important determinant variables in one visual framework with a robust and an internally consistent theoretical basis is an important step towards devising comprehensive firm strategy. The integrated framework provides vital clues towards framing a what to guide for managers and consultants. Furthermore, the model permits metrics and consequently diagnostics of both the firm and the sector and this set of assessment tools provide a valuable guide for devising strategy. References Wikipedia.org