Hutch Carpenter
September 7, 2015

Why Amazon Wins | Innovate the Core, Innovate to Transform

Take a look at your organization’s innovation projects. Are you strategically balancing your efforts between the core business and future growth areas?

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Hutch Carpenter, innovation, Amazon, organisational behaviour, innovation strategy
August 11, 2015

16 Metrics for Tracking Collaborative Innovation Performance

In a recent PwC survey, 61% of CEOs said innovation was a key priority for their company (pdf). The only surprising result there is that it wasn’t 100%. Innovation efforts come in a variety of forms: innovation and design labs, jobs-to-be-done analysis, corporate venturing, distributed employee experiments, open innovation, TRIZ, etc.

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Hutch Carpenter, innovation, collaboration, metrics, collaborative innovation
July 12, 2015

Avoiding Innovation Errors Through Jobs-to-be-done Analysis

The lean startup movement was developed to address an issue that bedevilled many entrepreneurs: how to introduce something new without blowing all your capital and time on the wrong offering. The premise is that someone has a vision for a new thing, and needs to iteratively test that vision (“fail fast”) to find product-market fit. It’s been a success as an innovation theory, and has penetrated the corporate world as well.

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Hutch Carpenter, innovation, customer needs, jobs-to-be-done, organisational behaviour
January 22, 2015

Consumer Adoption of Bitcoin | A Jobs-to-be-done Analysis

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently did one of his tweet storms on the topic of Bitcoin, a technology he avidly supports. In 25 tweets, he talked about criticisms people have of Bitcoin. Including this one (#18) about “use cases”: 

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Hutch Carpenter, Bitcoin, jobs-to-be-done, innovation
June 23, 2014

New MSI Blogger: Hutch Carpenter

Dear readers,
Keeping with our aim to bring you the best and brightest bloggers, today we'd like to introduce mr Hutch Carpenter. While his tagline is 'not actually a geek', Hutch has a deep tech background and extensive experience with software companies in the fields of innovation and product management.
 
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Hutch Carpenter, MSI; product management, innovation
June 23, 2014

Positive Deviance vs. Best Practices

Over time, I’ve seen people write disparagingly about the use of best practices in innovation. A recent example of this comes from Paul Martin in Say ‘Best Practice’ again, I dare you. As Paul notes:

For me the term ‘Best Practice’ conjures up images of a race toward uniform mediocrity, led by those who follow the crowd.

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Hutch Carpenter, best practices, innovation, crowdsourcing, deviance
April 30, 2014

How To Determine What Rewards Matter to Employees

In the field of enterprise innovation, rewards programs are a relatively common component. This is a response to the fact that participating in innovation often comes on top of an employee’s existing duties. Organizations want the cognitive diversity, they want novel ways of addressing needs, but they also need to satisfy customers and keep the lights on. Rewards programs are put in place to provide additional value from participating in the innovation efforts (on top of the intrinsic motivation to help solve a challenge).

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employee motivation, Hutch Carpenter, rewards
April 4, 2014

Is It Innovation or Just an Improvement? Does It Matter?

On the LinkedIn Front End of Innovation group, I saw this post:

Interesting (and heated) discussions @ Unleashing Innovation Summit in Amsterdam earlier in the month: Incremental innovation is NOT innovation – it’s just marketing. REAL innovation is breakthrough/transformational… Agree or not?

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Hutch Carpenter, innovation
March 4, 2014

Why Crowdsourcing Works

Crowdsourcing is a method of solving problems through the distributed contributions of multiple people. It’s used to address tough problems that happen everyday. Ideas for new opportunities. Ways to solve problems. Uncovering an existing approach that addresses your need.

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Hutch Carpenter, crowdsourcing, diversity
February 11, 2014

When Customers Want a Product Roadmap, Do This Instead

Product roadmaps suck.

There, I said it. <exhales>

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Hutch Carpenter, product design, B2C relationship, customer insights
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